Remembering Abu Ammar

Suneet Chopra

THE first time I met Yasser Arafat, the president of Palestine, was in 1968 in Amman. He was to become the head of the PLO a year later. The al Fatah, whose leader he was, was barely nine years old. I was then a young man in my mid-twenties and he was in his late thirties. We had flown in from London with a delegation of European students, many of them activists of the student upsurge of 1967. There were three of us from India. Maya Alva, the daughter of the speaker of the Indian Parliament, Violet Alva, my sister Madhu Prasad and I.

What had `prompted us to go and see things for ourselves was the fact that Indians had always been sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, as both the Palestinians and the Indians had fought British occupation for decades and had to contend with religious bigotry they used systematically to divide people fighting for their liberation. So we were naturally suspicious of imperialist propaganda that presented the Palestinian movement as anti-Semitic, or presenting the pro-imperialist religious bigots, the Zionists, as the sole representatives of the Jews – just as they would like to present the RSS and the Sangh Parivar as the sole representatives of the Hindus or the Muslim League of Muslims.

ZIONISM – THE MAIN OBSTACLE

Our visit to Jordan, where we stayed in camps in the Zarqa region and on the outskirts of Amman, spending a month with the guerillas and in the refugee camps of al Gaza, al Baqa’a and al Wahdat, all of them subject to brutal genocidal attacks by Jordan in 1969-70, taught us that the imperialist propaganda was not only false but was motivated to dividing the people and destroying the hope of liberating themselves from the rapacious clutches of an imperialism making a long-term bid to seize the oil-rich region and exploit its people. And Zionism, with its policy of fanning religious riots that drove the people of Palestine, who were Muslim and Christian, out of their lands and handing them over to colonists who were themselves victims of fascist oppression and imperialist discrimination, was its most pernicious instrument to prevent the liberation of the Arab people that had begun with the overthrow of the Ottoman empire in World War I. Palestine had been part of this empire, and with Iraq, had been handed over to Britain as also the present day Namibia. And just as Britain used the savage instrument of apartheid to dispossess mineral rich Southern African peoples, so it used Zionism in Palestine. Indeed like apartheid, Zionism too is doomed to fail, but it has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives only because of British and US attempts to push back history and their greed for the oil wealth of the Arab people.

Yasser Arafat taught us these lessons sitting on a low stone wall in a vineyard outside Amman with his Kalshnikov resting on his knees. He clearly differentiated between Jews and Zionists, and saw a future Palestine of Muslims, Christains and Jews with its capital in Jerusalem. He was also clear that Palestinians who had been forcibly and murderously evicted from their homes would return to them, for it was they who had developed the ‘fertile crescent’ with their hard labour for centuries and not the Israeli settlers who merely took over their already developed land and extended its development to meet their needs. Even this development would have been far greater had Zionist violence not created conditions in which vast amounts of wealth were frittered away in the name of security. Zionism was the main obstacle to progress in West Asia and its use of its oil wealth for the betterment of its people.

We were welcomed by the people living in miserable conditions in the refugee camps and were struck by the determination of a dispossessed peasantry to get their land back. And in Yasser Arafat they had got a leader who was approachable, concerned and single-minded enough to win over the confidence of the peasants of Palestine. Other sections then came together around them to buttress the unity of the people as a whole.

The concern for the people was visible everywhere. Already there was an efficient medical service, the Red Crescent, the food and educational needs of the camps were being looked after and powerful mass organisations of students, youth, women and the trade unions had come into existence. They were motivated primarily by concern for the people and for the quality of their lives. Yasser Arafat, over the years, became the main symbol of this concern, When I look back, from hindsight I can see how similar comrade P Sundarayya was to him, a leader of the armed struggle who distilled that experience to build the most powerful Left force within the framework of a bourgeois landlord state. In other ways Arafat was like Nelson Mandela, and their problems were very similar.

In the first period I met him, Arafat was the leader of the armed struggle. He had learnt a lot from his experience as a student revolutionary at the age of 17 during the mass uprising of 1936, and later as a fighter in the 1948 war. He was clear that Zionism could not be fought under the leadership of Arab regimes who were seeking compromises with imperialism rather than driving it out of their region. Only a powerful, independent Palestinian liberation movement, capable of confronting Zionism physically, could do that. Arafat succeeded in demonstrating this during the battle of al Karameh in March 1968, where al Fatah fighters inflicted heavy losses on the Israelis and forced them to retreat. It was in this period of the high tide of struggle  that I met Abu Ammar for the first time. I had not joined the CPI(M) still, but the experience of mass participation in the Palestinian struggle definitely influenced this decision.

Our next meeting was ten years later at the eleventh world festival of youth and students in Havana, where I addressed a rally in Havana  Harbour  in solidarity with the struggle of Palestine on behalf of India. I was a member of the CPI(M) and of the central committee of the SFI by that time. Comrade Arafat was there as the head of the PLO. I remember spelling out the experience of the struggle, including the battle of al Karmeh. And at the end of the speech he draped a red Kafieh on my shoulders. I still have that head dress with me. It is one of my most prized possessions.

The next time we met was in Libya in 1984, when he had been forced into exile. This was a period of which he said. “We are entering a dark tunnel.” It was the period when he was in exile in Tunis, but what was remarkable was that his demeanour had not changed. He was not a man to be easily elated or easily depressed. And when I told him I was one of the students of the delegation of 1968, he laughingly turned to the general secretary of one of the Arab communist parties, saying,  “See what I always tell you! All my boys will end up with you one day.”

Having met him off and on for over three decades in very different circumstances, I realise how he was a man who was able to take stock of a situation with a sharpness few can equal. And it was his selfless dedication to the cause of an independent, sovereign Palestine that allowed him to find allies in the most unlikely circles.

I remember him replying to a particularly thorny question about his alliances from a very sectarian European activist,  “I know not everyone will remain with us till the end. But I am prepared to take anyone who is prepared to walk one step with me. I am prepared to take him along that one step. If you do not put together all the strength needed to take the first step, you will never take the second.” But he was not blind to the dangers of such forces behind him. He used to say: “If someone tries to stab me in the back, I will turn around and slap him and then carry on with my objective.”

Indeed, it is to his credit that he was able to do just that till the end. It is amazing how he had to counter almost every Arab regime on the way, and he did it without rancour. This allowed him to create a Palestinian Authority under the very skin of the Zionist state. And his resistance during the three and a half year siege Israel subjected him to was characteristic of him. It reflected his total dedication to the struggle to create an independent sovereign Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem. True, he is buried in Ramalla, but the momentum he unleashed will bring his body to Jerusalem one day. The strategy of the gun and the olive branch will succeed.

There will never be another Abu Ammar. But there will be those, who, inspired by his determination to struggle until victory, will take their first step where he took his last. The struggle against Zionism will end like the one against apartheid, with the victory of the Palestinian people. That day, not just Palestinians, but anti-imperialist fighters all over the world will feel a sense of fulfillment that one task at least is over. But if we are true to the spirit of Abu Ammar, other struggles will take its place until injustice, exploitation and oppression are ended on a global scale and a new world order is established.