Today, amid Israel's genocidal war in Gaza, and all the dangerous and even more dangerous future scenarios that are circulating, any talk of a political solution for the Palestinian question seems like extremely far-fetched wishful thinking. However, a history of why a political solution is so far-fetched also seems far-fetched, or it seems to only account for Israel’s role in making it so. Israel certainly has played a role in this regard, with its intransigence and brutality, albeit to fluctuating degrees depending on the actions of the Arabs, with both parties’ actions mutually shaping the other’s.
However, moments of Israeli resistance to peace and a political solution are understandable. In a sense, this intransigence, though morally and politically reprehensible, is natural, as such a solution would strip Israel of territories that it occupies and hand them back to their rightful owners. As for the history of Arab intransigence, which is rarely spoken of, it has been censored, and many agree it should remain that way.
It may be useful to recall, amid this artificially made amnesia, a chapter of history brimming with blood and tragedies that have befallen, among others, cadres of the Palestinian national movement.
With the adoption of the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) Ten-Point Program in the mid-1970s, Yasser Arafat began to recognize a fundamental fact of the conflict: garnering a broad segment of Israeli society’s support for the Palestinian cause is a necessary prerequisite for making national gains. It is precisely at this stage that Sabri al-Banna (more commonly known by his nom de guerre “Abu Nidal”), who had defected from the Fatah, established his terrorist organization “Fatah – Revolutionary Council.” Banna was funded and supported by a revolving door of military regimes; with the rulers of Iraq, Syria, and Libya intermittently patronizing his activities, he gained a reputation for being a “hired gun.” Nonetheless, al-Banna's choice of targets remained consistent: Fatah leaders, particularly those engaging in talks with Israelis supportive of Palestinian rights, and those open to influential global forces, particularly those who left a mark on the Western public. Remarkably, Banna and his backers’ consistent choice of targets went hand in hand with the terrorist actions that these very regimes took against each other through this same Banna.
In 1978, the “Revolutionary Council” assassinated Saeed Hammami, a Palestinian National Council member since 1969 who had been PLO’s representative in London. Hammami sought to build bridges with Israelis and Westerners and develop a strategy for establishing a Palestinian state through negotiations. To this end, he became the first Palestinian official to meet with an Israeli counterpart, Uri Avnery, who later became a peace advocate and wrote a book about his slain interlocutor.
That same year, 1978, Abu Nidal assassinated Ezzedine Kalak, who had become the PLO’s representative in Paris after replacing Mahmoud Hamshari following the latter’s assassination by Israel’s Mossad. Kalak, who had previously been the head of the Palestinian Students' Union in France, was famous for having convinced the Spanish government to establish a PLO office in Madrid, as well as his initiative to familiarize Europeans with Palestine through old Ottoman and British stamps bearing the name “Palestine.” Kalak also sought to fortify ties with French filmmakers after establishing a Palestinian cinema section in the PLO’s office in Paris.
The fact is that the mission Hammami and Kalak had been pursuing was not an easy one, as they had to confront the ugly impressions that the 1972 Munich terrorist attack had left in Europe.
In 1983, Banna’s victim was Issam Sartawi. Sartawi was Yasser Arafat's foreign affairs advisor, the PLO’s representative in Lisbon, Portugal. Since 1976, he had been engaging with Israelis who recognized the Palestinian people's right to self-determination. Through the Socialist International, he forged a strong relationship with Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who also had close ties with the Israeli Labor Party stemming from their shared commitment to social democracy.
Of course, these three crimes are not an exhaustive list of his criminal acts, which could not be crammed into an entire newspaper. However, the shallow, pervasive discourse that absolves the three regimes- Iraq (Saddam), Libya (Gaddafi), and Syria (Hafez)- of responsibility for the bloodshed in Palestinian should not lead us to turn the page on this chapter and others like it. These regimes, as should be reiterated tirelessly, laid the foundations, through murder and criminality, for the political deadlock that led to the events of October 7, the current war, and the second Nakba that is unfolding as a result. Our failure to recognize the strong link between military coups and their regimes in the Levant on the one hand, and Palestinian suffering (whose perpetuation and deepening is sought) on the other, could well be among our greatest political and intellectual failures.
These regimes were the ones who founded the approach of hindering a solution to the Palestinian cause and assassinating Palestinians who sought such a solution. This approach was perpetuated with improved efficiency, and assassinations on a broader scale, by the Khomeini regime in Iran, as can be seen in Gaza today. This is due to the fact, as has been repeated many times, that the Palestinian cause is nearly the sole source of legitimacy for these two types of regimes that all share a lack of legitimacy.
