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Palestinian fedayeen

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Palestinian fedayeen (from the Arabic fidā'ī, plural fidā'īyun, فدائيون: meaning, "freedom fighter(s)" or "self-sacrificers") is a term used to refer to fedayeen (i.e. militants or guerrillas) from among the Palestinian people. Considered "freedom fighters" by most Palestinians, most Israelis consider them "terrorists".

The Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements defines fedayeen as "Palestinian resistance fighters" and they have been considered symbols of the Palestinian national movement. Drawing inspiration from guerrilla movements in Vietnam, China, and Latin America, the fedayeen have always been portrayed in a vanguard role. Beverly Milton-Edwards describes them as "modern revolutionaries fighting for national liberation, not religious salvation," and distinguishes them from mujahaddin (i.e. "fighters of the jihad for God").

Emergence of the fedayeen

The first attacks by Palestinian fedayeen were launched by Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, living in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. While the Palestinian fedayeen were generally supported by those governments, in some cases they came into conflict with them.

According to Orna Almog, the very first attack by Palestinian fedayeen was launched by refugee fighters from Syrian territory in 1951, though the majority of the attacks between 1951 and 1953 were launched by refugees from Jordanian territory. These early fedayeen attacks were incursions on a limited scale. Yeshoshfat Harkabi, former head of Israeli military intelligence, stated that these early attacks were often motivated by economic reasons, with Palestinians crossing the border into Israel to, for example, harvest crops in their former villages. Fedayeen operations on a larger scale began to be mounted from 1954 onwards from Egyptian territory.

In 1953, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion created Unit 101 to retaliate against the fedayeen. Its commander was Major Ariel Sharon. Cross-border operations were conducted in both Egypt and Jordan, "in order to 'teach' the Arab leaders that the Israeli government saw them as responsible for these activities, even if they had not directly conducted them." Moshe Dayan felt that retaliatory action by Israel was the only way to convince Arab countries that for the safety of their own citizens, they should work to stop fedayeen infiltrations. Said Dayan, "We are not able to protect every man, but we can prove that the price for Jewish blood is high."

The Jewish Agency for Israel reports that between 1951 and 1956, 400 Israelis were killed and 900 wounded in fedayeen attacks. Dozens of these attacks are today cited by the Israeli government as "Major Arab Terrorist Attacks against Israelis prior to the 1967 Six-Day War". According to the Jewish Virtual Library, while the attacks violated the 1949 Armistice Agreements prohibiting hostilities by paramilitary forces, it was Israel that was condemned by the United Nations Security Council for its counterattacks.

Involvement of President Nasser and Egyptian intelligence

According to Martin Gilbert, who defines the fedayeen as "Palestinian terrorist groups", towards the end of 1954, the Egyptian government supervised the formal establishment of these groups in Gaza and the northeastern Sinai. Lela Gilbert in The Jerusalem Post writes that General Mustafa Hafez, appointed by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918 - 1970) to command Egyptian army intelligence, was the one who founded the Palestinian fedayeen units in Egypt "to launch terrorist raids across Israel's southern border."

The Jewish Virtual Library illustrates the adoption of this new tactic by quoting an excerpt of a speech delivered by President Nasser on 31 August 1955:

Egypt has decided to dispatch her heroes, the disciples of Pharaoh and the sons of Islam and they will cleanse the land of Palestine....There will be no peace on Israel's border because we demand vengeance, and vengeance is Israel's death.

Acording to the Anti-Defamation League, 260 Israeli citizens were killed or wounded by the fedayeen in 1955. Benny Morris writes that the calculated acts of fedayeen terror, supported by the Arab countries, eventually contributed to the outbreak of the Sinai Campaign.

From the 1960s until the first intifada

During the mid and late 1960s, a number of independent Palestinian fedyaeen groups emerged who sought to bring about "the liberation of all Palestine through a Palestinian armed struggle." According to Jamal R. Nasser, the very first incursion by this set of fedayeen fighters took place on 1 January 1965 when a Palestinian commando infiltrated Israel to plant explosives that destroyed a section of pipeline designed to divert water from the Jordan River into Israel.

Fedayeen groups began joining the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), beginning in 1968. While the PLO was the "unifying framework" under which these groups operated, each fedayeen organization had its own leader and armed forces and retained autonomy in operations. Of the dozen or so fedayeen groups under the framework of the PLO, the most important were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) headed by George Habash), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) headed by Nawaf Hawatmeh), the PFLP-General Command headed by Ahmed Jibril, As-Sa'iqa (affiliated with Syria), and the Arab Liberation Front (formerly controlled from Baghdad).

West Bank

In the late 1960s, attempts were made to organize fedayeen resistance cells in the West Bank. The mobilization that did occur was based to a large extent in the refugee population of the West Bank. The stony and empty terrain of the West Bank mountains made the fedayeen easy to spot and this, coupled with a harsh regime of collective punishment deployed by Israeli forces against the families of fighters, resulted in the fedayeen being pushed out of the West Bank altogether within a few months. Arafat reportedly escaped arrest in Ramallah by jumping out a window as Israeli police came in the front door. Having been pushed out of the West Bank and prevented from operating in Syria and Egypt, the fedayeen concentrated on Jordan.

Jordan

After the influx of a second wave of Palestinian refugees from the 1967 war, fedayeen bases in Jordan began to proliferate and there were increased fedayeen attacks on Israel. Fedayeen fighters launched ineffective bazooka-shelling attacks on Israeli targets across the Jordan River and "brisk and indiscriminate" Israeli retaliations destroyed Jordanian villages, farms and installations, causing 100,000 people to flee the Jordan Valley eastward. According to Milton-Edwards and Hinchcliffe, the increasing ferocity of Israeli reprisals conducted against Jordanians, and not Palestinians, for the fedayeen raids into Israel became a growing cause of concern for the Jordanian authorities.

The Battle of Karameh in 1968 turned the Palestinian fedayeen into "daring heroes of the Arab world". Though the fedayeen lost the battle against Israeli forces at the Jordanian village of Karameh, they did inflict much heavier casualties on Israel than had been expected. Thus, Karameh became what Rashid Khalidi has termed the "foundation myth" of the Palestinian commando movement, whereby "failure against overwhelming odds brilliantly narrated as as heroic triumph."

The confidence of the Palestinian fedayeen had been bolstered by the battle of Karameh, recruitment increased, and the ruling Hashemite authorities in Jordan were alarmed by the activities of the PLO who had established a "state within a state", providing military training and social welfare services to the Palestinian population while bypassing the Jordanian authorities. Palestinian criticism of the poor performance of the Arab Legion, the King's army, was an insult to both the King and the regime. Further, many Palestinian fedayeen groups of the radical left, such as the PFLP, "called for the overthrow of the Arab monarchies, including the Hashemite regime in Jordan, arguing that this was an essential first step toward the liberation of Palestine."

In the first week of September in 1970, PFLP forces highjacked three airplanes (British, Swiss and German) at Dawson's field in Jordan. The airplanes were evaucated and destroyed on the tarmac, and the three European governments were forced to free PFLP militants that had been held in European jails to secure the release of their citizens.

On 16 September 1970, King Hussein ordered his troops to strike at and eliminate the fedayeen network in Jordan. Syrian troops intervened to support the fedayeen but were turned back by Jordanian armour. Thousands were killed in the initial battle which came to known as Black September, and thousands more in the security crackdown that followed, and by the summer of 1971, the Palestinian fedayeen network in Jordan had been effectively dismantled with most of the fighters setting up base in southern Lebanon instead.

The French writer Jean Genet who visited Palestinian fedayeen at their bases in Jordan between 1970 and 1972, "memorialized what he perceived to be their bravery, idealism, flexibility of identity, and heroism" in his novel Prisoner of Love (1986).

Gaza Strip

The emergence of a fedayeen movement in the Gaza Strip was catalyzed by Israel's occupation of the territory during the 1967 war. Palestinian fedayeen from Gaza "waged a mini-war" against Israel for three years before the movement was crushed by the Israeli military in 1971 under the orders of then Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon.

Palestinians in Gaza were proud of their role in establishing a fedayeen movement there when no such movement existed in the West Bank at the time. The fighters were housed in refugee camps or hid in the citrus groves of wealthy Gazan landowners, carrying out raids against Israeli soldiers from these sites.

The most active of the fedayeen groups in Gaza was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who enjoyed instant popularity among the secularised, socialist population who had come of age during Egyptian President Nasser's rule of Gaza. The emergence of armed struggle as the liberation strategy for the Gaza Strip reflected larger ideological changes within the Palestinian national movement toward political violence. This armed struggle was conceived of in secular terms with exhortations to take up arms not as part of a jihad, but in order to "free the oppressed from the Zionist colonial regime." The "radical left" dominated the political scene, and the overarching slogan of the time was, "We will liberate Palestine first, then the rest of the Arab world."

During Israel's 1971 military campaign to contain or control the fedayeen, an estimated 15,000 suspected fighters were rounded up and deported to detention camps in Abu Zneima and Abu Rudeis in the Sinai. Tens of homes were demolished by Israeli forces, rendering hundreds of people homeless. According to Milton-Edwards, "This security policy successfully instilled terror in the camps and wiped out the fedayeen bases." It is also paved the way for the rise of the Islamic movement, which began organizing as early as 1969-1970, led by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

Lebanon

On 3 November 1969, the Lebanese government signed the Cairo agreement which granted Palestinians the right to launch attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon in coordination with the Lebanese army. After the expulsion of the Palestinian fedayeen from Jordan and a series of Israeli raids on Lebanon, the Lebanese government granted the PLO the right to defend Palestinian refugee camps there and to possess heavy weaponry. After the outbreak of 1975 Lebanese civil war, the PLO increasingly began to act once again as a "state within a state". Israel invaded southern Lebanon in the 1978 Israel-Lebanon conflict, occupying a 20 kilometer wide area there to put an end to Palestinian attacks on Israel, but fedayeen missile attacks on villages in northern Israel continued.

Israeli armoured artillery and infantry forces, supported by air force and naval units again entered Lebanon on 6 June 1982 in an operation code-named "Peace for Galilee", encountering "fierce resistance" from the Palestinian fedayeen there. Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon and its siege and constant shelling of the capital Beirut in the 1982 Lebanon War, eventually forced the Palestinian fedayeen to accept an internationally brokered agreement that moved them out of Lebanon to different places in the Arab world. The headquarters of the PLO was moved out of Lebanon to Tunis at this time.

During a 2 September 1982 press conference at the United Nations, Yasser Arafat stated that, "Jesus Christ was the first Palestinian fedayeen who carried his sword along the path on which the Palestinians today carry their cross."

The first intifada onwards

During the first intifada, armed violence on the part of Palestinians was kept to a minimum, in favor of mass demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience. However, the issue of the role of armed struggle did not die out altogether. Those Palestinian groups affiliated with the PLO and based outside of historic Palestine, such as rebels within Fateh and the PFLP-GC, used the lack of fedayeen operations as their main weapon of criticism against the PLO leadership at the time. The PFLP and DFLP even made a few abortive attempts at fedayeen operations inside Israel. According to Jamal Raji Nassar and Roger Heacock, "

at least parts of the Palestinian left sacrificed all to the golden calf of armed struggle when measuring the degree of revolutionary commitment by the number of fedayeen operations, instead of focusing on the positions of power they doubtless held inside the Occupied Territories and which were major assests in struggles over a particular political line."

During the first intifada, but particularly after the signing of the Oslo Accords, the fedayeen steadily lost ground to the emerging forces of the mujahaddin, represented initially and most prominently by Hamas. The fedayeen lost their position as a political force and the secular nationalist movement that had represented the first generation of the Palestinian resistance became instead a symbolic, cultural force that was seen by some as having failed in its duties.

Philosophical grounding and objectives

The objectives of the fedayeen were articulated in the statements and literature they produced, which were consistent with reference to the aim of destroying Zionism. In 1970, the stated aim of establishing Palestine as "a secular, democratic, nonsectarian state" was for some fedayeen groups "merely a slogan for assuaging world opinion," while others strove "to give the concept meaningful content." Prior to 1974, the fedayeen position was that any Jew who renounced Zionism could remain in the Palestinian state to be created. After 1974, the issue became less clear and there were suggestions that only those Jews who were in Palestine prior to "the Zionist invasion", alternatively placed at 1947 or 1917, would be able to remain.

In The Intifada:Its Impact on Israel, the Arab World, and the Superpowers, Bard O'Neill writes that the fedayeen attempted to study and borrow from all of the revolutionary models available, but that their publications and statements show a particular affinity for the Cuban, Algerian, Vietnamese, and Chinese experiences.

See also

References

  1. Mohammed El-Nawawy (2002). The Israeli-Egyptian Peace Process in the Reporting of Western Journalists. Inc NetLibrary. p. 49. ISBN 1567505457.
  2. Tony Rea and John Wright (1993). The Arab-Israeli Conflict. Oxford University Press. p. 43. ISBN 019917170X.
  3. Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic (2005). The Design of Dissent. Rockport Publishers. ISBN 1592531172.
  4. Edmund Jan Osmanczyk (2002). Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements. Taylor & Francis. p. 702. ISBN 0415939216.
  5. ^ Beverley Milton-Edwards (1996). Islamic Politics in Palestine. I.B.Tauris. pp. 94–95. ISBN 1860644759.
  6. While the fallen soldiers of both mujahaddin and fedayeen are called shahid (i.e. "martyrs") by Palestinians, Milton nevertheless contends that it would be political and religious blasphemy to call the "leftist fighters" of the fedayeen, mujahaddin.
  7. Howard Sachar, History of Israel, p. 450. cited at "Fedayeen Raids 1951 -1956". Jewish Agency for Israel.
  8. ^ Orna Almog (2003). Britain, Israel, and the United States, 1955-1958: Beyond Suez. Routledge. p. 20. ISBN 0714652466.
  9. "Map". Jewish Agency for Israel.
  10. "Major terror attacks". Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
  11. "Palestinian Terror". Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
  12. "Fedayeen". Jewish Virtual Library.
  13. Martin Gilbert (2005). The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Routledge. ISBN 0415359015.
  14. Lela Gilbert (October 23, 2007). "An 'infidel' in Israel". The Jerusalem Post. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  15. "Fedayeen". Jewish Virtual Library.
  16. "Record". Anti-Defamation League.
  17. Benny Morris (1993). Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198292627.
  18. "What happened during the period of the fedayeen attacks on Israel in the 1950s?". palestinefacts.org.
  19. Tareq Y. Ismael (2005). The Communist Movement In The Arab World. Routledge. p. 76. ISBN 041534851X.
  20. ^ Jamal R. Nassar (2005). Globalization and Terrorism: The Migration of Dreams and Nightmares. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 50. ISBN 074252504X.
  21. ^ Alain Gresh and Dominique Vidal (2004). The New A-Z of the Middle East. I.B.Tauris. ISBN 1860643264.
  22. Helena Lindholm Schulz and Juliane Hammer (2003). The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland. Routledge. p. 68. ISBN 0415268206.
  23. ^ Musa S. Braizat (1998). The Jordanian-Palestinian Relationship: The Bankruptcy of the Confederal Idea. British Academic Press. p. 138. ISBN 1860642918.
  24. ^ Beverley Milton-Edwards and Peter Hinchcliffe (2001). Jordan: A Hashemite Legacy. Routledge. pp. 46–48. ISBN 0415267269.
  25. ^ Helena Lindholm Schulz and Juliane Hammer (2003). The Palestinian Diaspora: Formation of Identities and Politics of Homeland. Routledge. p. 120. ISBN 0415268206.
  26. Cheryl Rubenberg (2003). The Palestinians: In Search of a Just Peace. Lynne Rienner Publishers. p. 40. ISBN 1588262251.
  27. ^ Antonio Tanca (1993). Foreign Armed Intervention in Internal Conflict. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. p. 178. ISBN 0792324269.
  28. Bat Ye'or (1985). The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam. Fairleigh Dickinson Univeristy Press. p. 145. ISBN 0838632629.
  29. ^ Jamal Raji Nassar and Roger Heacock (1990). Intifada: Palestine at the Crossroads. Praeger/Greenwood. pp. 221–222. ISBN 027593411X.
  30. ^ François Burgat (2003). Face to Face With Political Islam. I.B.Tauris. p. 117. ISBN 1860642136.
  31. ^ Robert Owen Freedman; et al. (1991). The Intifada: Its Impact on Israel, the Arab World, and the Superpowers. University Press of Florida. pp. 64–66. ISBN 0813010403. {{cite book}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)

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