Palestine's 100 Years War: How Our Militant Past Predicts Our Future

Palestine’s 100 Years War

The Past Rarely Predicts the Future, Except in the Middle East

 

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” — Ernest Hemingway, 1946

 

For as long as I can remember my region has been at war. Everyone alive today can attest to the veracity of such a statement. We cheer the men at arms as they go off to fight, we condemn the failure to find a peaceful solution, we admire the fighter, we condemn the terrorist. We are the same people, the great mass of seated spectators, they whom we cheer and condemn, are also the same, the same breed of angry and desperate men and who can blame them, their lives have been hell.

 

Searching the vast archives of the internet for one of my own, a distant cousin who was one of those angry desperate men, I found an article dated March 22, 1973, in the El Paso Herald-Post titled “Middle East prediction: the worst is yet to come”. It was earie and uncomfortable seeing my last name attached to a violent man, a Palestinian commando who had by then “gone on many missions” by his own admission. 

 

Fatah commandos marching in Beirut

 

 

Hanna Bathish was one of thousands who were a product of their time. Evicted from his homeland at six. Raised in a refugee camp, seeing his parents now impoverished refugees grow old, a good student, a qualified architect who couldn’t find anyone to hire him in Lebanon because he was Palestinian. It’s little wonder he decided to join what was at the time one of the most efficient militant Palestinian movements, Al Saiqa, or the Vanguard for the Popular Liberation War - Lightning Forces.

 

The name conjures up images of storm troopers in steal helmets with WWII era submachineguns. It was in fact a proxy organization for the Syrian regime and after a stint in the Syrian army, it was only natural that Hanna would be one of the organization’s leading members. At the time of the interview he held the rank of captain and was identified by the reporter as Al Saiqa spokesperson. Later on Hanna would rise to deputy head of the organization, such as it was. Sadly, when Al Saiqa’s operational and political usefulness diminished so did the Syrian regime’s interest and support.

 

While the article was written from a decidedly western perspective with the usual finger wagging condemnation of commando operations at the time, which included aircraft hijacking and assassinations, the piece does raise many questions on the role of insurgency movements in the liberation process without an equally strong political process to accompany it.

 

The writer of the article aptly compares the Palestinian struggle with the plight of Greek mythological figure Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder uphill only to have it roll back down and to repeat this action for eternity as punishment. In many ways, sons and daughters of Palestine have long felt like this character of Greek myth, except each time the boulder travels further downhill, doubling the distance we have to roll it up again!

 

The writer of the article makes a decent effort to describe Hanna both his character and his physicality. I never met him personally, but my late cousin and my late father knew him well. From the article you got the impression he was a true believer in his particular ideology, a bit melodramatic, but that’s probably part of the show put on for the foreigner. Certainly, Hanna was a violent man, he had no problem killing, or at least that’s what the article said of him. I only know what I heard from family. I also know that during the Lebanese civil war, my father was briefly detained by the phalangists because of his last name and relation to Hanna. I also know that Hanna was instrumental in arranging the evacuation of Tal El Zaatar refugee camp during the Lebanese civil war, but that his organization was also responsible for many atrocities as well.

 

While certainly a contentious and complex figure, Hanna’s story was only part of the reason I decided to blog about this article. The other reason the article intrigued me is how it succinctly laid out the fate of militant movements using guerrilla tactics. The pressure that each operation needs to be more spectacular and more outlandish than the last so the movement may keep grabbing headlines and world attention. And while the commandos had succeeded in grabbing world attention and focusing it on the Palestinian cause, as Hamas has done today in fact, that attention was always fleeting and certainly nowhere near as effective as real political muscle, the kind of muscle and political capital Israel had at the time and was constantly building up.

 

Up to the day the US decided not to ship 2,000 pound bombs to Israel, and only send 500 pound bombs, that political capital Israel built up hadn’t diminished one jot, certainly nothing men of violence did then or since helped diminish it, if anything they helped increase it!

 

And that brings us back to a recent Tweet on ‘X’ I wrote: what is the end game? Right here in this miserable land of perpetual war, what is the end game, how will we end this? How will it end? Can insurgents, no matter how well armed and effective defeat an enemy like Israel? History can answer that question better than I can.

 

Link to the article mentioned above:  https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/798456525/