Before the Nakba
The Arab Nationalist Movement
حركة القوميين العرب
- Founded
- 1951 — Beirut (American University of Beirut)
- Founders
- George Habash · Wadie Haddad · Hani al-Hindi · Ahmad al-Khatib · Hamid al-Juburi
- Ideology
- Arab nationalismArab unityNasserismanti-imperialismlater Marxism-Leninism
In July 1948 a medical student walked out of Lydda with tens of thousands of others under Israeli guns, in what survivors call the death march to Ramallah. His name was George Habash; he was a Greek Orthodox Palestinian from a merchant family, twenty-two years old, and he had come home from the American University of Beirut to find his city emptied and his sister dead. He went back to Beirut and finished first in his class in medicine in 1951. The war had produced a generation of such students across the Arab world — Palestinians who had lost everything, Syrians, Iraqis, Kuwaitis, Jordanians — and it had produced, at the same university, Constantin Zurayk’s 1948 book Ma’na al-Nakba (“The Meaning of the Disaster”), which gave the catastrophe its name and argued that Arab defeat was the symptom of Arab backwardness and disunity. The students took the diagnosis literally.
Around 1951 Habash, his friend and fellow physician Wadie Haddad, the Syrian Hani al-Hindi and the Kuwaiti Ahmad al-Khatib formed the nucleus of what became Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-Arab — the Movement of Arab Nationalists. Their premise, in the slogan of the time, was that Arab unity is the road to the liberation of Palestine: the Arab world had to be unified, purged of the monarchies and of British and French influence, and industrialised before Palestine could be recovered. It was in this period that Habash and Haddad opened a clinic and a school in the refugee camps at Amman and worked in them without pay. From 1954 the movement published al-Ra’i (“The Opinion”) in Beirut; from the mid-1950s it aligned itself with Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose nationalisation of the Suez Canal and survival of the tripartite invasion in 1956 made him the movement’s pole star. The ANM built branches across the Arab east — in Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon and the Gulf — and it always contained both a Palestinian section and a pan-Arab leadership uneasy with it.
That tension defined the movement’s second decade. Younger cadres, above all the Jordanian-born Nayef Hawatmeh and the Palestinian Ahmad al-Yamani, pressed the leadership leftwards, arguing that Arab unity under existing regimes was a mirage and that the movement needed a class analysis and a party of the working class. The Palestine Section pushed in a different direction: it wanted to fight. From the early 1960s it was quietly sending members to military colleges in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Its first operations were launched in late 1964, and it lost its first fighter, Khalid Abu Aysha, on 12 November 1964. The operations were deliberately kept small and unpublicised so as not to drag Cairo and Damascus into a war they were not ready for, under the formula, as the section put it, of “more than zero and less than entanglement.”
The Six-Day War of June 1967 destroyed the premise on which the whole movement rested. Nasser’s air force was annihilated on the ground; the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan were occupied; the Arab states were revealed as incapable of liberating anything. The ANM’s executive committee decided that the Palestine Section should move to armed struggle, and in the autumn its fighters went into Gaza as the Vanguard of Popular Resistance and into the West Bank under a central field command in Ramallah headed by Mustafa al-Zabri, later known as Abu Ali Mustafa. On 11 December 1967 three commando groups — the Heroes of Return, the Revenge Youth, and Ahmad Jibril’s Palestinian Liberation Front — merged and announced the founding of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The parent movement did not survive its own children. Through 1968 and 1969 the ANM broke into its national fragments, most of them turning Marxist-Leninist: the PFLP and then Hawatmeh’s Democratic Front in Palestine, the People’s Democratic Union in Lebanon, the National Liberation Front in South Yemen, which came to power in Aden in 1967, and successor parties in Kuwait, Iraq and the Gulf. By the early 1970s the ANM as such had ceased to exist. Its slogan had been inverted along the way — Fatah’s counter-formula, that the liberation of Palestine is the road to Arab unity, won the argument — but almost every figure of the Palestinian left for the next forty years, from Habash and Kanafani to Hawatmeh and Leila Khaled, had come up through it.