The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions

Abstract

From the Series EditorThere was a time when the political imagination of Palestinians revolved tightly around "factions" such as Fateh, PFLP, and DFLP. So much so, that it was impossible to disentangle the personal from the political. Relationships-familial, local, economic, romantic, and so on-always mediated politics and the politics of factions coursed through these relationships like an electrical current. I recall as a faculty member at Birzeit University in the early 1980s that almost every student, staff, teacher, or administrator-whether they wanted to or not, or whether it was true or not-was identified as affiliated (maḥsūb), formally or informally, to one faction or another. Far more often than not, these markers were based not on activism or ideological position, but on that person's interactions with family, friends, colleagues, lovers, and enemies. Inversely, factions were incubators for the production and reproduction of social relations that formed them in the first place; or so it seemed at that time.Among the population of the Palestinian territories conquered by Israel in 1967 (West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza), this hyper-political condition deepened and culminated in the first Intifada (1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993), then was almost immediately eviscerated by the imposition of a new political order based on the Oslo Accords. In Lebanon, the fall of the factions came a decade earlier with the 1982 Israeli invasion, which expelled the PLO and destroyed most of its political, social, economic, and cultural institutions. Young men with Kalashnikovs who had long dominated public spaces in the refugee camps faded away and the organizations they belonged to turned into pitiful shadows of their former selves. The end of the armed struggle (thawra) phase of the Palestinian national movement also meant, or so it seemed at that time, the end of the PLO factions that embodied it. Henceforth, nary a kind word could be heard about the factions in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon. 2 Chapter 1or "Hamas declared that"). Factions are mostly examined through an analysis of party literature, the writings of party founders, and interviews with the leadership (e.g., Abu-Amr 1994; Broning 2013;Y. Sayigh 1997). In other words, they focus on the intentions, actions and words of the leadership and chart the founding, histories, ideologies, regional and international alliances, funding sources, and evolution of the factions throughout the years (