The history of Palestine is also a history of resistance. Since the threat of Zionism emerged in the Land of Palestine, there has never been a single Palestinian freedom fighter group that has failed to resist.
Since Britain issued the Balfour Declaration supporting the establishment of a separate state for the Jewish people in Palestine in 1917, waves of Jewish immigrants began to arrive in Palestine. This arrival raised concerns among the native Arabs of Palestine who also dreamed of a similar state in their homeland.
The first protests and resistance against the British colonialists who were then controlling Palestine and against Jewish immigrants began to be recorded in 1918. In March 1920, there was a clash between Arabs opposing Zionism and Jewish immigrants in Jerusalem. This incident killed five Jews and four Arabs.
After the riots, British control over the Arabs was tightened and accompanied by discrimination. This added to the spirit of resistance among the Palestinians which peaked in August 1929. That year, riots occurred that killed hundreds of Jews and Arabs.
The British inquiry concluded that the riots were sparked by a Jewish demonstration at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on 15 August 1929. The action raised concerns among Palestinians about “their political and national aspirations and fears for their economic future, and among Arabs fears of Jewish immigrants not only as a threat to their livelihood but also as future rulers”.
Following the riots, the name of the Syrian cleric Izzuddin al-Qassam who was living in Palestine at that time emerged. In 1930, he formed the first Palestinian resistance group, namely the Kafful Aswad group, aka the Black Hand. The group was formed to face the Jewish terrorist group, Haganah, which often carried out the expulsion of Arab residents in villages in Palestine.
Al-Qassam was later killed by the British colonialists following the death of a policeman in 1935. Al-Qassam’s struggle coincided with resistance through demonstrations called for by Sheikh Amin al-Husseini, a cleric from Gaza. Because of his resistance, Sheikh Husseini was hunted by the British and was forced to flee to Germany.
In the 1940s, according to historian Ilan Pappe, the Zionist group in Palestine began planning an ethnic cleansing of the Arab population that they called the Daleth Plan. Terror groups such as the Haganah and Irgun attacked Arab villages, carrying out persecution and intimidation and killings to drive out the Arabs.
The Palestinian resistance weakened by colonialism was unable to withstand the wave of expulsions that culminated in a mass exodus in 1948, when the state of Israel was declared. As many as 700 thousand Palestinians were forcibly expelled in an event known in Palestine as the Nakba. The Arab nations’ defense of Palestine at that time was crushed by Israeli troops who were better trained and had more sophisticated weapons.
As the Palestinians were displaced, resistance was carried out by loose guerrilla groups called Fidayin from refugee camps in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Cross-border attacks on Israel were carried out sporadically. These Fidayin guerrillas imitated guerrilla movements in colonized countries and were mostly left-wing. They rejected Zionism and dreamed of a secular and democratic Palestinian state without privileging any ethnicity or religion.
In 1959, a group of pro-independence Palestinian diaspora formed the Fatah group, a reverse acronym of the Arabic for the National Movement for the Independence of Palestine. Palestinian nationalist Yasser Arafat was appointed as its leader. At the same time, a Palestinian Christian, George Habash founded the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) was also present at that time.
Together with a number of other movements, they were later united in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Throughout the 1960s to the 1980s, they carried out attacks from outside Israel, especially from Lebanon. In 1982, Israel carried out an attack to eradicate the PLO in Lebanon, which caused many casualties. In the late 1980s, the PLO tried the diplomatic route by holding peace talks with Israel.