The Palestinian People's Party

Palestinian communism is older than Palestinian nationalism as an organised force, and it has the most complicated history of any current here. It began in 1919 in Jaffa as the Socialist Workers’ Party, founded chiefly by left-wing Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire, and became the Palestine Communist Party in 1923, admitted to the Communist International the following year. From the mid-1920s the Comintern pressed it to “Arabise” — to recruit Arab workers and peasants and to treat the Zionist project as a form of colonisation rather than a national movement. Arab cadres came forward: Najati Sidqi of Jerusalem, who studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow and later fought in the Spanish Civil War, broadcasting to the Muslim conscripts in Franco’s army; Ridwan al-Hilu, known as Musa, a Jaffa worker who became the party’s Arab secretary in 1934. The party organised the earliest Arab trade unions in Haifa and Jaffa and produced Palestine’s first Marxist analysis of land dispossession.

The national question broke it. The party’s Arab and Jewish members could not agree on the 1936–39 revolt, and the dissolution of the Jewish Section in December 1939 formalised a split that never healed. In 1943 the Arab communists left to form the National Liberation League in Palestine, publishing al-Ittihad in Haifa under Emile Touma. In 1947 the League and the party accepted the UN partition resolution, following the Soviet Union’s position — the only Palestinian political formation to do so, a decision for which it was denounced across the Arab world and which its own members argued about for decades afterwards. After 1948 the fragments went their separate ways: Arab communists inside Israel joined what became Rakah and then the Israeli Communist Party, of which the Nazareth poet Tawfiq Ziad was a Knesset member and mayor; those in the West Bank formed the Jordanian Communist Party’s Palestine organisation; those in Gaza worked under Egyptian administration, and were jailed by both Egypt and Jordan.

Under occupation after 1967 the communists made a choice that set them apart from every armed faction: they argued that in the occupied territories the decisive struggle was civil, not military. While the guerrilla organisations operated from Jordan and Lebanon, communist cadres stayed inside and built institutions — the trade union federation, the voluntary work committees that paved village roads and planted trees in the 1970s, the agricultural and medical relief committees, the women’s work committees, the student blocs at Birzeit and Bethlehem, and the Palestinian Federation of Trade Unions. They were also, from 1973, part of the Palestinian National Front, the internal coalition that swept the West Bank municipal elections of April 1976. They paid for it with mass detention and deportation without ever having taken up arms.

In February 1982 the West Bank and Gaza organisations formally reconstituted themselves as the Palestinian Communist Party, and the PLO admitted the party to the Palestine National Council in 1987. When the First Intifada broke out that December, the infrastructure the communists had spent fifteen years building was the uprising’s skeleton: the popular committees, the strike discipline, the underground schooling during the school closures, the alternative economy of home gardens and cooperatives. The Palestine Communist Party joined the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising in March 1988 alongside Fatah, the PFLP and the DFLP, and co-signed its communiqués. In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the party renamed itself the Palestinian People’s Party.

Since then it has been a small party with a long shadow. It supported the Madrid process, opposed the Oslo Accords’ security and economic annexes while accepting a negotiated two-state outcome, joined the Palestinian Authority’s cabinets at times and criticised its authoritarianism sharply at others; its secretary-general Bassam al-Salhi ran for president in 2005 and sits on the PLO Executive Committee. Its practical legacy is visible in an unlikely place — the Palestinian NGO sector in health, agriculture and women’s rights, much of which grew directly out of the communist relief committees of the 1970s and 1980s, and several of whose organisations Israel designated as terrorist entities in October 2021, a designation contested by European governments and by the UN human rights office. A century after Jaffa, the party’s founding wager — that Palestinians would need institutions, unions and a civil society at least as much as they would need guns — is not the least defensible position anyone in this archive has taken.

Sources

• The Palestine Communist Party — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• The Palestinian Communist Movement — palquest
• Palestinian People’s Party — Wikipedia
• Palestinian Communist Party — Wikipedia
• Communiqués of the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising — Wikipedia