Phil Marfleet’s new book Palestine, imperialism and the struggle for freedom is a must read for everyone who’s taken action for Palestine. He spoke to Socialist Worker’s Arthur Townend about why
How has the question of Palestinian liberation changed since 7 October 2023?
There’s been an enormous increase in awareness around the situation for Palestinians. At the start of this century, for the first time there was talk of “Global Palestine”. Since 7 October, this has become much more general for several reasons.
First is the savagery of the Israeli assault on Gaza, which has prompted shock, enormous anger and solidarity with the Palestinians worldwide.
The movement in solidarity with the Palestinians must be one of the greatest mass movements of the 21st century at a global level.
Secondly, the sense of anger and disgust at the complicity of the leaders of Israel’s Western allies. The United States, Britain and various European states continue to provide the Israelis with arms and support. The third factor is the recognition of Palestinian steadfastness and fortitude.
The events of the last 18 months have led to a much greater understanding over what the Palestinians have had to deal with over the course of 70 years.
There’s a recognition of Palestinian resistance, not merely of the armed struggle, but the resistance of everyday life. This infuriates Israel because it signals that the Palestinians have not been removed from their historic homeland—they are still undefeated.
You explore how imperialism has shaped the Middle East and Israel and how that continues today.
The roots of the Palestinian predicament lie in the policies of British colonialism in the early years of the 20th century.
For the British, Palestine was a key base in the Middle East. Particularly after the First World War, the Allied states had become almost entirely dependent on oil from the Middle East.
The British were determined not merely to hang on to those resources in the areas in which they had control, but to extend their influence.
After the Balfour Declaration in 1917 the British mobilised all their experiences as an imperial power—in India, Africa, Australia and elsewhere—to subordinate the Palestinians.
So the Zionist settler movement learned an enormous amount from the British. There is this “sophisticated”, but declining, imperial power, and Israel emerges in this context, learning methods of control.
The British colonial administration in Palestine becomes a type of school of repression for the leaders of the Zionist movement.
As the institutions of the Zionist settler movement develop, they mobilise the strategies and techniques of Britain as a colonial power, which are of course extremely repressive and violent.
For example, during the great Palestinian Intifada of 1936-39, the British arrested over half a million Palestinians. It amounted to almost 40 per cent of the entire population of Palestine arrested at one time or another.
At the same time, the British were arming and training key components of Zionist militias.
After the Second World War, Palestinians find themselves in different imperial environments.
British colonialism had exhausted itself, so amid Britain’s retreat from Palestine the world is shaped by the two major imperial powers, the US and the Soviet Union.
The US was determined to shape a “New World Order”. For that, it had to control the world’s key energy resources, which were found in the Gulf.
Now it’s not true that the Americans supported Israel from day one. They saw the rise of the Arab national movement across the region, and they were not certain that an alliance with Israel would serve them best. But it wasn’t long before the US was persuaded that Israel could act as a stable, loyal ally in an important region.
In places like Egypt and Iraq, radical nationalism came to the fore, so by the 1960s Israel was the safest bet for the US. Particularly after the Six Day War in 1967, the US poured arms and money into Israel. And since then, Israel has become integral to the American perspective of controlling energy resources in the Middle East.
Today, the US has become self-sufficient in oil and gas. But it is focused on the Middle East because China depends on the Gulf for its energy resources.
So due to inter-imperialist rivalry with China, the US remains determined to dominate the Gulf and the wider Middle East.
The book references Sumud, the Palestinian idea of steadfastness. How does that idea shape Palestinian identity today?
I don’t think the Palestinian experience is unique. Ever since there’s been colonialism, there has been mass resistance.
Resistance to British, to French, to other colonialisms has been extremely persistent.
Under British rule in Ireland, resistance went on for two, three hundred years until Ireland achieved independence. In India, there was at least a century of highly organised resistance before India won independence from British rule.
In Vietnam, resistance to first the French and then the Americans and their allies went on for decades.
But what gives the Palestinians special importance is that they have not only been resisting a single imperialist power or colonial occupation.
Since the foundation of Israel, the Palestinians have resisted an array of imperial powers, willing to support Israel’s techniques of modern warfare. This makes the Palestinian experience unique.
They’ve resisted invasions of Palestinian camps in places like Lebanon, in Syria, and of course in Gaza which used to be part of sovereign Egypt. They’ve had to cope with all manner of Israeli offensives backed by various Western forces.
Through all this, Palestinians have maintained a coherent level of resistance.
This has involved appeals to Arab governments, to international organisations such as the United Nations. It’s involved guerrilla warfare.
But increasingly, it’s involved a type of everyday resistance which is embedded in the lives of people.
Particularly in the West Bank and Gaza, simply being present and maintaining the basics of everyday life is a key element of what the Palestinians call steadfastness—Sumud.
The ability of Palestinians to keep the basic structures of their society intact is infuriating for the Israelis.
It is particularly infuriating for the leaders of extreme Zionism, including Benjamin Netanyahu and those of his ministers associated with settlements.
Through this, Palestinian persistence has been based around the idea of Exist, Resist, Return. And Sumud is embedded in that idea of resistance.
It has become a very important part of being Palestinian and remains an important part of Palestinian struggle.
You say the history of Israel is portrayed as a “miracle” with “the effect of concealing traumatic events”. What is the effect of uncovering the history of events such as the Nakba?
Quite a lot of Israeli literature talks about 1948, the Nakba, as being a miraculous development.
This story of miracles relies on the idea that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians packed up their belongings and left their homes and their lands.
This idea of miracles is a key element in the perpetuation of myths, actual falsehoods, about 1948.
The reality is that the Nakba was a sustained, violent, and purposeful attempt at ethnic cleansing to remove the Palestinian population.
After the Nakba, the mass displacement and atomisation of Palestinians meant it was a long time before Palestinian researchers and others were able to reflect meaningfully on what happened.
In 1948, Zionist militias seized key cultural resources of Palestinian society, libraries, archives, the resources of schools and colleges.
The Zionists eradicated the documentation that could demonstrate the existence of a meaningful Palestinian society before 1948.
It was a very long time before Palestinian researchers were able to collect Palestinian oral histories.
They looked at what had actually happened before and during the Nakba. Far from the miracle of Palestinians disappearing from the scene, there had been this systematic, calculated and extremely violent assault on Palestinian society.
This assault pushed Palestinians across the borders of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.
You trace the development of Palestinian resistance, from the general strike and guerrilla strategies to Hamas. What are the lessons for today?
One of the key purposes of the book is to make accessible the history of Palestinian resistance. We shouldn’t see the Palestinian struggle as an isolated one.
The Arab regimes have been complicit in the repression of the Palestinians. A key feature of Palestinian resistance has been the way it has stimulated movements of resistance throughout other Arab states.
Perhaps the most important example is in neighbouring Egypt. Time and again the Palestinian struggle has stirred resistance against the various pro-Western dictatorships in Egypt.
Activists in Egypt maintain that it was Palestinian struggles that built their own confidence to resist in Egypt from the 1990s onwards, particularly against Hosni Mubarak’s regime. The Mubarak regime was critical to Western influence in the region.
One of the key achievements of Palestinian resistance is the build-up of solidarity in Egypt between 2000-10. The revolutionary upheaval in Egypt in 2011, which overthrew Mubarak, was intimately related to the Palestinian intifadas.
So we shouldn’t separate Palestinian resistance from mass struggles in other parts of the Arab world. Mass struggles and revolutionary upheavals in the Arab world are of crucial importance to the struggle for liberation.
And global solidarity is also vitally important. One of the developments in the last 20 years has been the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) which comes from the Palestinians themselves.
And Palestinians have learned from the experience of the solidarity movement against apartheid South Africa. This movement has become increasingly important, and it’s something that all of us can get behind.
But the liberation of Palestine depends above all on revolutionary movements in the Arab states like those the Palestinian intifadas have helped to inspire.
As we saw in 2011, struggles for social justice in states such as Egypt mobilise millions of workers with the power to remove regimes complicit in supporting Israel.
They also provide an example to all the people of the region of direct democracy—the alternative to dictatorships and to Israel’s military occupation.
Republished from Socialist Worker UK
