The Death of the Stalinist Left in Palestine

Empty rhetoric has turned out to be the weapon not only of “Arab reactionary regimes;” it has been adopted by the Left itself. Stalin would have been happy to see his disciples at work in Palestine.

A Good Article
Randa Abu Naeem
Special to PalestineChronicle.com

"To understand the reasons behind the rapid deterioration of the Palestinian Left, especially following Hamas’ June 2007 take-over of the Gaza Strip, one needs to scrutinize the verbalized positions of its’ leaders. Interviews and media statements made by Abdul Rahim Malouh, Deputy Secretary General of the PFLP, following his release from Israeli prisons, indicates that the PFLP has chosen to support the right-wing within Fatah. Amazingly, this is also the position of the DFLP and the People’s Party, in spite of the pro-American agenda spouted and supported by Mahmoud Abbas and his cabal within Fatah.......

Palestinian feminist Majda Hasan calls it “Osloization.” That is, a combination of corruption, a selling-out of revolutionary principles and sloganeering. The ultimate goal of the current river of blood has become the establishment of a Palestinian state in any dimension, i.e. the two-state solution. The one state solution, as in the South African example, is, for the Palestinian Left, Utopia! They fail to explain how 5 million Palestinian refugees will return to the Israeli State of the Jews and an independent Palestinian state will be created at the same time. Nor do they outline how the PLO will be reformed to include the most popular organizations, i.e. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, while it is being hijacked by the same people who have been controlling it for more than 40 years and who are the allies of the left. They offer no proposal to end the current schism between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank other than a “return to the pre-June 2007 reality.” Nor do they show any resistance to the security coordination between the PA and the IOF in the West Bank.

If the Palestinian Left is unable to develop an alternative revolutionary program, and divorce itself from the fiction of the two-state solution, we will have to deal with the Fatah-Hamas dichotomy for a long time to come. The signs are not encouraging.

We seem to be moving towards the end of the Palestinian Left, if it is not already dead."