The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

The Popular Front had turned left in 1968 by declaration, and for a wing of its cadres a declaration was not enough. Nayef Hawatmeh — born in 1938 in al-Salt in Transjordan to a Christian Bedouin family of the Hawatmeh clan, a graduate in psychology and philosophy and a veteran of the Arab Nationalist Movement’s left wing in Jordan, Iraq and South Yemen — argued that the PFLP’s leadership remained petit-bourgeois in composition and nationalist in method, and that its emphasis on spectacular armed action came at the cost of political work among workers, peasants and refugees. In February 1969, as the PFLP’s second congress adopted its Maoist-inflected Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, Hawatmeh and his supporters declared that it was impossible for “a petit-bourgeois group to turn into a Marxist-Leninist one” by fiat, and broke away. The new organisation was announced on 22 February 1969 as the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; it dropped “Popular” from its name in 1974.

Its distinctiveness was never mainly military. The Democratic Front was the most theoretically Marxist of the major Palestinian organisations and the most invested in mass organisation: unions, women’s committees, student blocs, agricultural relief and health committees, a publishing programme, and the weekly al-Hurriyya, which for two decades was one of the most serious political journals in Arabic. It was closer to Moscow than the PFLP was, and it argued consistently that the Palestinian revolution had to be embedded in a broad Arab democratic movement rather than substituted for one. Two of its early political interventions had large consequences. It was the DFLP that pressed hardest inside the PLO for the formula of a secular democratic state for Muslims, Christians and Jews in the whole of Palestine, which the PLO adopted at the end of the 1960s and which replaced older and cruder slogans. And it was the DFLP, from 1973, that first argued publicly for what became the two-state position: that the PLO should aim to establish a “national authority” on any part of Palestinian territory from which the occupation withdrew. That formulation went into the Ten Point Programme adopted by the twelfth Palestine National Council in June 1974 — the document that split the PLO and drove the PFLP out of the Executive Committee — and it is the seed of everything from Algiers in 1988 to Oslo.

The record includes what that same year produced militarily. On 15 May 1974 a DFLP unit crossed from Lebanon and seized a school at Ma’alot in northern Israel where students from Safed were staying overnight, demanding the release of prisoners; when Israeli forces stormed the building, twenty-five hostages were killed, twenty-two of them teenage schoolchildren, along with the three attackers. Israel’s retaliatory air strikes on refugee camps and villages in southern Lebanon over the following days killed dozens. The DFLP also fought in the Jordanian civil war of 1970–71, in the Lebanese civil war from 1975, and in the resistance to the 1982 Israeli invasion; and it was a founding member of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising in the First Intifada, in which its cadres in the West Bank were among the most effective organisers of the popular committees.

The Front rejected the Oslo Accords in 1993. Its second-in-command Yasser Abd Rabbo did not, and left in 1993 to found the Palestinian Democratic Union — FIDA — which joined the Palestinian Authority and which Abd Rabbo served as a minister; he later co-authored the unofficial Geneva Initiative of 2003. The rump DFLP under Hawatmeh, headquartered in Damascus, remained in the PLO and opposed the Authority’s course from inside, while participating in the 2006 legislative elections on a joint list with other leftists that won two seats. In 1999 Hawatmeh publicly shook hands with Israel’s President Ezer Weizman at King Hussein’s funeral in Amman, causing a storm in his own ranks; he has not been permitted to return to the occupied territories.

The DFLP today is a small organisation with a disproportionate intellectual legacy. Its armed wing, the National Resistance Brigades, operates in Gaza; its student and women’s structures persist in the West Bank; its founder, in his late eighties, still leads it from exile in Damascus, one of the last surviving figures of the generation that made the Palestinian revolution. Its central claim on history is the awkward one: the party that broke away in the name of stricter Marxism was the first to say out loud that Palestinians would have to accept a state on part of Palestine.

Sources

• Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine — Wikipedia
• The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – PFLP (on the February 1969 split) — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Nayef Hawatmeh — Wikipedia
• PLO Interim Program (the Ten-Point Program), 12th PNC, Cairo, June 1974 — palquest
• Ma’alot massacre — Wikipedia