Palestine: Colonization and Revolution in the Arab World, Part 1

Editorial Note: The following is the first part of an interview with AISC member Patrick Higgins by the French-language magazine QG Décolonial.

QG Décolonial: Your dissertation begins in 1945, right after Hiroshima. Why this moment? What does that nuclear explosion reveal, in your view, about the new face of imperialism?

Patrick Higgins: I began at the moment of Hiroshima because that was a topic prominently and frequently discussed in relation to the United States in the Palestinian newspapers of the late 1940s, such as Al-Difa’, Filastin, Al-Wahda, Al-Sha’ab, Al-Ghadd, Al-Ittihad, and others. Some of these newspapers operated autonomously while others maintained formal political affiliations, such as Al-Ghadd and Al-Ittihad which maintained links to the Palestine Communist Party and a Party offshoot, the National Liberation League in Palestine. I had zero intention or premonition to pursue the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a subject of analysis; I tried to allow these Palestinian writers, journalists, activists and scientists, to serve as my guide in that respect. Oftentimes during this research, I also consulted US and UN sources either to see if I could corroborate events I found mentioned in the Arabic sources, or to understand the subjective thinking behind the imperial side, the counterrevolution. Moving through the Arabic archives was a different kind of process, full of surprises: I was studying my “own” society and history, so to speak, through “another” language and society, geographically distant from my location and historically distant from our time period. As a result, I learned a lot about the United States empire that might not be otherwise available in US-based or English-language sources. Part of my task as a researcher was to maintain an open mind and allow myself to be surprised.

Starting my timeline in the late 1940s, I expected to find mention of the Anglo-American Committee and other preliminary commissions responsible for the Nakba. I did not expect to find such dwelling on the subject of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in a way it makes sense that this was the event that really caught Palestinian intellectuals’ attention at the end of the Second World War, more so than the war’s conclusion per se. The atomic bombings signified a new scale of death-from-above, destroying entire cities in single swift maneuvers. It was well understood across the Palestinian spectrum of thought that the era of British global rule was coming to an end and a new US-led epoch and world order was coming into view. Consequently, the "Palestinian question” would fall ultimately into the hands of the Americans. Did Hiroshima and Nagasaki provide any clues as to how they would handle the issue? The Palestinian Communists, with their direct links to Moscow, naturally despised Japanese Imperialism, as they did German and Italian Fascism for that matter, but what kind of “liberation” were the Americans really offering in light of the atomic bombings, especially for small nations? The Americans’ solution for Palestine might not have been a literal nuclear bombing, but it entailed wholesale societal destruction nonetheless. The Nakba became, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a founding moment of the US empire, showing that the new hegemon commanded a variety of means by which to destroy societies: atomic bombs as well as armed proxy militias such as the Zionist gangs unleashed in Palestine.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stayed with Palestinians down the generations, long after the parties at the center of Palestinian political life changed. Issue 184 of the Popular Front’s Al-Hadaf, published June 1, 1973, ran an article about Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris Peace negotiations with North Vietnam; the headline declared that the United States was “betting on the results of destroying the [Vietnamese] environment and society.” The article began with a history lesson about the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan, and the aftereffects for the general populations in terms of cancer and tuberculosis, causing “malignant tumors and harm, not only in the children of the victims, but also in [their] grandchildren.” Behind the text, as watermarked original artwork, appeared the image of a mushroom cloud and the phrase, in English, “Hiroshima, 1945.” The point was simple: this is how the United States pursues its objectives. The echoes in Gaza today are unmissable.

QGD: You speak of a “transmission” of empire, from Britain to the United States. Would you say that Zionism served as a thread linking the two?

PH: Yes! That is exactly the idea I meant to convey, so I thank you for your articulation. The Zionist project enabled both the British and US empires, during two very different periods of world history, to outsource some of the costs of primitive accumulation and militarization in West Asia via the World Zionist Movement. By 1948, before the formal establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist project in Palestine had already been pumped with capital from various sources throughout Western Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, over the course of decades: the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish National Fund, the Jewish Colonial Trust, the Anglo-Palestine Bank, Edmond de Rothschild’s Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. The British Mandate authorities did its part and helped this process along, issuing explorations tenders for figures such as the Russian Zionist mining engineer Moshe Novomeysky, who collaborated with British engineers like Major Thomas Gregory Tulloch to form a consortium that would eventually become the Palestine Potash Company, which, after the creation of Israel, transformed into the Dead Sea Works, supplying the Israeli cosmetics and fertilizer industries. The Board of Directors and marketing department was based in London, and its profiteers included non-Jewish British figures; by 1929, its directors were US-based Zionists, Felix Warburg and Bernard Flexner. There was tension in British politics over the empire’s relationship to the Zionist project, but this is a good example of how by the 1920s the Zionist movement was organically integrated with British and US accumulation in the Arab region. So, when the United States was in a financial and military position to supersede the British empire at the end of World War Two, the Yishuv–the pre-1948 Zionist colonies on which Israel expanded–had already been buttressed by elite technical expertise. The US, with its strategic need to build an anti-Soviet security perimeter around the Mediterranean Sea amid its own finite resources, was not going to divest from or dismantle the industrial and military infrastructure that already existed at this crossing point between Asia, Africa, and Europe. That is what the UN partition decision, spearheaded by the United States, was really about; the 1948 War, the Nakba, the “refugee crisis”–these were risks the postwar United States empire was ultimately willing to take to oppose the creation of a unified Arab nationalist Palestine. The colonization of Palestine and creation of Israel were essential to the making of the US as we know it, and given the seriousness of the crisis which Palestinian rebellion now imposes on the empire, the decision to support Zionism might yet unmake it.

QGD: Could we say that Palestine served as a laboratory for counter-revolutionary strategy by the United States?

PH: Palestine became an important conduit for the development of counterrevolutionary programs, which means that some techniques were exported from Palestine and others imported into it. First of all, the Zionist movement provided a strong template for how to train and recruit what we now call “death squads.” Especially after the Biltmore Conference of 1942, the Zionist movement increasingly used and viewed the United States as its primary base of operations, its headquarters, as opposed to Great Britain and Russia, which had served as their main bases organization and fundraising in the previous half century. Important Zionist leaders like Chaim Weizmann turned their attention away from Britain to lobby US politicians requesting support for the “Jewish commonwealth” in Palestine. As the Palestinian newspaper Al-Sha’ab reported, Zionist organizations bought advertising space in US newspapers propagandizing against Arabs, stressing the need for arms to be sent to Palestine for “Jewish self-defense,” and openly recruited Jewish youth from the US to join the Haganah. The Al-Sha’ab editors, like many Palestinian journalists of the 1940s, read US newspapers closely and cited a New York Post report discussing arms shipments from US docks into the hands of Zionist militias in Palestine.

These kind of logistical networks bear some resemblance to the activities of other subsequent US-based recruiting networks for right-wing militias, such as the Afghan Services Bureau’s operation at Al-Kifah Refugee Center on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where young Muslims were encouraged to become US-friendly mujahadin fighting and bleeding the Soviet Red Army. The cases of the Contras in Nicaragua and “Brigade 2506” of the Bay of Pigs invasion are also instructive in this regard. In each instance, US authorities allow for, and even encourage, embrace, and facilitate, the martial activities of émigré organizations to enable the attritional destruction of some official enemy: Arab nationalism in Palestine and, more recently, Syria, and Communism in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

More widely known today are the innovations Israel made in the restriction of movement which were later transported to the “US-Mexico border.” In the 1960s, Israel developed metal fences with electronic sensors to stop the free movement of Palestinian so-called “infiltrators” and feda’yin. These ecologically noxious barriers, in addition to dividing peoples and tearing up Bedouin communities, deeply disrupted desert wildlife. Today, after decades of US investment into Israeli border surveillance leading to ground sensors, drones, remote-controlled machine guns, facial recognition systems, and even armed robots, we see similar assaults in communities and despoliation of the environment in southwestern North America, where 160 foot surveillance towers, designed and constructed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems, wreak havoc on Hia Ced O’odham and Tohono O’odham communities. A precise accounting usually reveals that the transmission route of these technologies was circular, often starting with the United States Department of Defense, then exported to Israel for refinement, and finally imported back to the United States. Israel’s genocidal facial recognition programs and AI-run kill list generators are really advancements on the Phoenix Program from the US’s counterrevolutionary war on Vietnam–the Pentagon’s computerized assassination and torture sprees. Israel has long been an essential node in the US empire’s supply chain of counterinsurgency; most of what is “produced” there begins with US seed investment, and very little of the US’s repertoire today has not at some point been routed through Israel.

The combined resources of the World Zionist Movement provided the United States with an existing infrastructure around which to build its regional order in West Asia. The relationship did not end there, but only expanded and deepened. The World Zionist Movement continues to play a key role for the outsourcing of the US empire’s time, investment, and, through its operating base of Israel, land as well. All of these resources are being directed towards solving the empire’s main problem, people: how to incapacitate, warehouse, and kill them when they become too restive. As Ali Kadri has taught us, once people are deemed superfluous to accumulation, their very lives are converted into a source of accumulation.

QGD: You insist that the Palestinian revolution studied the American empire as an object of knowledge. How is this an original contribution to anti-imperialist theory?

PH: First, I want to comment on the phrase “the Palestinian revolution,” in order to make clear where my own thinking and methodology has been going on this question; something towards which I hinted throughout my dissertation, but which remained at times opaque throughout the text, leading to a possible conceptual confusion. My project began as an examination of Palestinian perspectives on US imperialism; my way of approaching this question was to search through Palestinian newspapers, the documents of Palestinian revolutionary organizations, and the memoirs of individual Palestinian revolutionaries. When I moved forward in time from the 1940s, and moved deeper into Palestinian revolutionary life, I found that the definition of “Palestinian”–ethnically, nationally, and politically–became increasingly ambiguous in the context of a lived revolution which, in both terms of geography and personnel, blended seamlessly into revolutions in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq.

To trace the origins of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), I turned to the writings of Hani Al-Hindi, Mohsen Ibrahim, and Basil Al-Kubaisi, a Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi, respectively, who helped to found, or were involved with, the PFLP’s predecessor organization, the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN), whose physical terrain and theoretical scope encompassed the entirety of the Arab region from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. During the 1950s, the cadres of that organization pledged allegiance to Pan Arab unification projects; to understand these initiatives, I consulted the writings and speeches of Egyptians such as Gamal Abdel Nasser and Mohammad Heikel. A sizable number of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) cadres were politically educated and trained as organizers in the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, another party whose vision was region-wide. I am still discovering more materials from the “high period” of the Palestinian revolution in the 1970s, from organizations such as Al-Saiqa and the Arab Liberation Front, groups which were as much as products of revolutions in Syria and Iraq, respectively, as of Palestine. In light of this array of sources, I want to thank a mentor of mine, Dr. Nathan Citino, who, while serving on my dissertation committee, forthrightly challenged me: do I intend to write more narrowly about Palestinian refugees’ ideas about US imperialism or do I intend to write more broadly about the confrontation between US imperialism and revolutionary Arabism? I believe I now have a clear answer to this question, and it is the latter.

I understand this might seem like a pedantic point to make, a scholastic indulgence even, but I believe it holds real significance to how we conceptualize the history of the Palestinian cause and how we theorize and strategize around it for the present and future. It also has bearing on your question about understanding Palestinian contributions to anti-imperialist theory. Allow me to explain. The most common conceptualization of the “Palestinian revolution” begins with the first feda’i operation in 1965 of Al-’Asifa, the military wing of Fateh. The revolution gained its vanguard position in the Arab region after the June 1967 War, breaking with the “progressive Arab regimes” to form a self-reliant path among Palestinians, followed by the notable moment of acceleration at the Battle of Karameh in 1968. Thus, after the failures of Arab armies in the late 1960s, the Palestinian revolution finally came to life. I believe this is a chronology and reading we have inherited, often unconsciously, from Fateh. The feday’in movement did grow after 1967, but it is the political decision to subordinate the quest for Pan Arab unification that I now resist. The Palestinian left, many of whose leaders came out of the struggle of the 1950s for a unified secular Pan Arab socialist state–George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh (a “Jordanian” for what that term is worth) both came out of MAN–objected to Fateh’s narrower “Palestinianization” of the Arab cause. The Oslo Accords have shown that a so-called “independent Palestinian state” without a wider Arab revolution and unification is more like a statelet at most, and will lead to little more than a collection of cornered Bantustans.

Unlike in Palestine, Arab revolutionary movements in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria seized, to varying degrees, the mantle of state power, forming connections to the Palestinian liberation movement that were productive as well as tense. We have to think more dialectically about this type of relationship, between the national liberation movement which achieved state power and the national liberation movement which lacks it. The Chinese revolution could not have succeeded without Soviet support; neither the Korean nor Vietnamese revolution could have succeeded without both Soviet and Chinese support. Behind every courageous guerrilla war, there lies a supportive state power. Throughout the US-Vietnam War, the Soviet Union provided North Vietnam with missiles, radar equipment, phalanxes of technical advisors, the list goes on. We must distinguish self-reliance, a noble and necessary impulse, from self-sufficiency, which is impossible, at least in the purest sense of the term. How does all of this apply to your question about knowledge production? A fair amount of knowledge of which the feda’yin made use was in some way made possible by the Arab state republics. For example, the first Al-’Asifa operation in 1965 attempted to sabotage Israel’s National Water Carrier. By the time of that operation, the Arab League (Egyptian-led at the time) had long since commissioned studies, dating as far back as the early 1950s, verifying, with the aid of technical experts and engineers, the exact water loss of the Arab countries in cubic meters to Israel under the terms of US-led irrigation projects. Through movement newspapers, MAN spread the conclusions about these studies to the rank-and-file organizer and the man and woman in the Arab street.

For many Arab revolutionary intellectuals, including those working on behalf of the Palestine Research Center (PRC), knowledge itself might not have equaled power, but knowledge could arm and guide a successful attempt to seize power. The PRC–which supported the work of intellectuals such as Mohammed Al-Majzoub, Atef Suleiman, Joseph Mugghayzil, and Tahsin Bashir–provided a template for knowledge production radically different from that of the Western bourgeois university. These researchers used theory to guide their search for answers to eminently practical questions facing the cause of Palestinian liberation and return. They engaged in ruthless critique of US media such as The New York Times, which they viewed as the chief agenda-setter for discourse in the United States; they issued sociological studies of Arab, Jewish, and Christian communities in the US in order to understand how they might be moved or persuaded; and they mapped out Arab diaspora media networks in the US in order to coordinate messaging and share information. They translated key critiques of world political economy, with an emphasis on those Anglophone socialist economists who theorized about the role of militarism in reproducing global inequality, such as Harry Magdoff and Monthly Review magazine.

Party intellectuals operated much the same way–not as individual thinkers on exclusively personal quests for truth, but as loyal cadres using their talents to pursue the questions confronting the collectives to which they belonged. Ghassan Kanafani and Basil Al-Kubaisi, both of whom were PFLP members, navigated the simultaneous responsibilities of external propaganda and internal line struggle. As a historian, Kubaisi recorded the history of the Party: much of what we know and remember about the legacy of MAN is the result of his intellectual labor. His engagement with Western universities was to use its resources for the goals of the Party, which kept him moored always in a Third World national liberation movement. Kanafani’s work on the logistics of Anglo-American imperialism–see his article, now translated into English, “The Secret Alliance Between Saudi Arabia and Israel”–might not have been possible to write on the clock at bourgeois universities in the West. This comment is not intended to dismiss the importance of intellectuals to revolutionary organization everywhere, including in the West, but to orient it towards something bigger than individual careers.

We owe most of what we know about the workings and effects of US imperialism on the knowledge producing apparatuses of the national liberation movements. Palestine is distinguished, alongside Korea, for being chiefly victimized by the US empire in the post-World War Two period, and not by the British, Portuguese, or French. To continue this kind of work, more urgent than ever, we have to acknowledge and attempt to overcome this structural problem where the bourgeois university ties up scholars’ time and resources in pursuits (e.g., CV padding at politically disengaged conferences) that have little or nothing to do with addressing the most urgent questions of our time, those as simple as: what is US imperialism? How does it work and how do we defeat it?