Jacobin Radio

Dig: Thawra Ep. 14 - The Palestinian Revolution

Featuring Abdel Razzaq Takriti, this is the FOURTEENTH episode of Thawra (Revolution), our series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century. Today’s installment covers the rise of the Palestinian Revolution and then its explosion after the Arab defeat in the June War of 1967 with Israel. Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation and Palestine, and other factions launched an armed guerrilla struggle against Israel, engaging the Palestinian people in a full-scale mobilization for their liberation. Also: Ba'athists Aḥmad Ḥasan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein seized power in Iraq, as did Muammar Gaddafi’s Free Officers in Libya.

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Duration:: 2h 48m
Broadcast on:: 07 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners to support us at patreon.com and by Verso Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles perfect for dig listeners like you. One that you might like is "Happy Apocalypse" by Jean-Baptiste Francis. We tend to think of ourselves as the first generation to consider the impact that humanity has had on the environment. But the trend of being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. In "Happy Apocalypse" historian Jean-Baptiste Francis plunges us into 18th and 19th century controversies around factories, machines, vaccines, and railways. He demonstrates how risk was managed to facilitate industrialization, how safety norms were invented to secure capital, and how objections were overcome to establish technological modernity. "Happy Apocalypse" dissects the moral dispositions, forms of power, and subtle twists of reality that started us down the road toward the abyss. Listeners can buy "Happy Apocalypse" directly from VersoBooks.com and save 40% at checkout using the discount code DIG. That's D-I-G. Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jakob and Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. This is the 14th episode of Thawora, the DIG series on 20th century Arab politics with historian Adele Rezaktikriti. Thawora is Arabic for "revolution." It's a word that contains historical multitudes, diverse political radicalisms and revolts that have swept across Arab lands over the past century. Perhaps the Palestinian Revolution began when Fatah mounted its first armed attack against the Israeli settler state, the first Intillaka, or first launch, on January 1, 1965. Or maybe it began with Fatah's founding in 1959, after which it quickly became the strongest of dozens of clandestine Palestinian political organizations that were forming. For some, its origins could be traced to the movement of Arab nationalists' reconnaissance operations in 1963. The foundations of the revolution were laid as early as the Palestinian Great Revolt of 1936, really all the way back to the very first acts of resistance to British colonialism and its Zionist settler project. For Abid, the Palestinian Revolution is less a singular event, something concentrated in the overthrow of a particular regime, and more a process whereby popular forces develop capacities to install a new order. Whenever it was that the revolution started, the process it signals was shifting and accelerating from the mid-1960s onwards in the twilight of progressive Pan-Arab nationalist governments. This episode is the first of the very final episodes of Fatah, and it charts the rise of the Palestinian Revolution. Our story begins in 1964, when Arab states led by Egypt's Gamal-Abdul-Nasser and Palestinian lawyer and diplomat Akman Shukari formed the Palestine Liberation Organization. The final episode of this sequence and of the entire series will end in 1982, when Israeli forces invaded Beirut, and when the PLO withdrew from there, under severe external and internal pressure. The key moment in today's installment, the story we're telling in this episode, is the June War of 1967, also known as the Six-Day War. Israel launched a surprise attack with U.S. support and then defeated the combined Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Zionist forces conquered the Sinai from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and, most devastatingly, that 22% of historic Palestine that had remained free of Israeli control since 1948, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. The Arab defeat in the June War was a terrible blow to Arab nationalist and anti-imperialist politics and caused a crisis for Nasser, who resigned and only continued as president after massive demonstrations broke out across Egypt demanding his return. For Palestinians, it meant that everything was now lost to the Zionist project. The event became known as the Naksa, or Setback, a brutal sequel to the Nakhba, or catastrophe, of 1948. But the Arab defeat also set off the Palestinian revolution as a full-scale mobilization of Palestinian society against the Zionist project. For FATA, that constituted the Second Intilaka, or Second Launch. As this broad regional Arab nationalist front led by Nasser was forced into retreat, independent Palestinian formations took the lead. A new moment of FATAI-armed guerrillas became the vanguard. The humiliation of Arab states gave FATA unprecedented prestige and momentum. Fadei were recruited in huge numbers, and suddenly, they had far more room to maneuver in frontline states like Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, states that had previously cracked down harshly on cross-border attacks against Israel. And FATA wasn't alone. The explosion of the Palestinian revolution after the 1967 defeat prompted the movement of Arab nationalists, alongside two smaller groups, to found the left wing popular front for the liberation of Palestine. The PFLP would, for a long time, remain the second most influential faction behind FATA. It was a wing of the movement that was explicitly socialist, in which retained a view that Palestinian liberation would in significant part run through the Arab capitals, especially of countries bordering Palestine. This was part of a much bigger shake up in the movement of Arab nationalists, something we discussed in our last episode on revolutionary Arabia. In the wake of 1967, the movement of Arab nationalists ceased to exist as a pan-Arab organization, breaking off into national formations along the lines of the PFLP. South Yemen's national liberation front, Dofar's popular front for the liberation of the occupied Arabian Gulf, and the organization of Lebanese socialists. Syrian Baathists also formed their own Palestinian organization, Asaika. Later, after Assad came to power in Syria, it would become a tool of his regime. A split from the PFLP produced the popular democratic front for the liberation of Palestine, ultimately renamed the democratic front for the liberation of Palestine, or DFLP. The young generation of PFLP leaders who founded the DFLP began as left-wing critics of the movement of Arab nationalists and the PFLP's older leadership generation. That older leadership generation almost executed these younger left-wing dissidents. They only survived and went on to form the DFLP, thanks to the intervention of FATA. As we've explored an extraordinary depth over all of these episodes, 20th century revolutionary and radical Arab politics were fixated on how to free the region from constant imperialist assaults, most particularly imperialism's most malevolent expression in the Middle East, the Zionist settler colonial project, and during the Palestinian Revolution, almost every political and ideological thread that we followed throughout this series emerged as a faction of the liberation movement. Plenty of internal conflict would follow, but overall, the Palestinian Revolution did a far better job than most in building a form of unified strength out of ideological diversity and difference. The aftershock of 1967 was felt far from the newly occupied territories, the defeat had impacts everywhere in the Arab world, including by helping to make it possible for Ba'athists in Iraq to, in 1968, overthrow the nationalist regime that had governed there since 1963. This coup brought Akmar Hassan Obakar and Saddam Hussein to power. It inaugurated a regime that would, for better and for worse, intervene in the Palestinian Revolution. And it would also come to mark a very sad ending for a once idealistic Ba'athist project in Iraq. That same year, as we discuss in this episode, the Arab world's last Nasser-inspired free officers coup took power in Libya, led by Moammar Qaddafi. Qaddafi, to put it mildly, would not prove himself worthy of Nasser's legacy. Finally, we tell the story of how Fata and rival Palestinian factions took over the Palestine Liberation Organization between 1967 and 1969, making it an umbrella organization for a multi-tendency armed national liberation struggle that would demand that it be recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Next episode, we'll cover the Palestinian defeat at the hands of the Jordanian military in 1970, events known as Black September. We'll probably get all the way through the October war, known in Arabic as the Ramadan War, and in Hebrew as the Yom Kippur War of 1973. We extensively covered the 1959 Foundation of Fata and other aspects of earlier Palestinian history in previous episodes, if you have not listened yet. And if you love Thawada, and if you love the dig because what other podcast would do something like take half a year off from regularly scheduled programming to make Thawada, please contribute what you can at patreon.com/thedig. This is a political education project, and it's profoundly important to us. We make it free to everyone regardless of your ability to pay because we want everyone possible to listen. But this only works because those of you listeners who can afford to contribute voluntarily do so, please contribute now at patreon.com/thedig. We do have gifts to mail you depending on where you live and how much you contribute, and we send all contributors our wonderful newsletter. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/thedig. Okay, here's Abdul Razakh Takhriti, who teaches history at Rice University. A scholar of Arab and Palestinian revolutionary movements, he's the author of monsoon revolution, Republicans, sultans, and empires in Oman, and the co-author of the Palestinian Revolution Digital Humanities website. It's an incredible resource that really will be back online very soon. Really, the website is almost ready to go. Stay tuned. We will let you know when that happens. Let's start in 1964 with the foundation of the P-L-O, and the organization, the P-L-O was founded to be, and we're going to get into this a lot more later. It was rather different at the beginning from the organization a later became. This organization dominated by FATA and by figures like Asura Arafat, but we'll get to that later. Let's start at the beginning. Why did Arab heads of state come together to form the P-L-O? And where did individual and organized Palestinians fit into an organization dedicated to Palestinian liberation, but at this point, an organization that was in fact run by Arab states, this guy who we've discussed before, Akman Shukari, a Palestinian who had served as Saudi ambassador to the UN. He was made the first chairman of the P-L-O, but he was not calling the shots on his own. What sort of organized power did Palestinians exercise within a P-L-O that was still operating according to this more naturalist Arab nationalist principle rather than the sort of principle that would guide a national liberation movement? In other words, what sort of organization was the P-L-O and its founding and how was it founded in that way? Daniel, I'm not sure I would describe the founding of the P-L-O in the way that you did, even though, by the way, the way you did reflects the prevailing general description in both Arabic and English writings. But if you go into the primary research and if you look at the history of the foundation of the P-L-O, you will find that, yes, there was heavy involvement on the part of Jamal Abdullah Abdullah in particular in allowing for such a thing to happen, but at the same time, there was a great deal of initiative exhibited by the founder of the P-L-O, Ahmadis Shukliari, in organizing the Palestinian ranks and mobilizing them towards founding such a structure. So the context is very important to bear in mind here. First, you had the collapse of the United Arab Republic, which we've discussed in previous episodes. It caused a major strategic crisis in the region. If anybody was under the illusion that you were going to end up within Israel surrounded by a powerful state that controlled its southwestern and northeastern boundaries, then that went out of the window. That was no longer the case. And in fact, after the collapse of the United Arab Republic in one of his discussions with Palestinians, Jamal Abdullah bin Nasser made a very important statement in which he said that there is no plan to liberate Palestine on the part of any Arab leader. And if any Arab leader is claiming to have such a plan, they are lying. And this sent major shockwaves in Palestinian circles in general. Now, of course, as we've seen also in previous episodes, there had been a period of clandestine mobilization that took place in the late 1950s and that produced a very large number of underground Palestinian political movements that were trying to find a way forward. We're trying to answer a question that was posed by one of Fatah's founders in the 1950s. Adir Abdul Karim used to always say to his youth circles, who will bell the cat? You know, everybody knows what needs to be done, but who will bell the cat? And you know, this is in reference to a fable from Khalilah Waddimnam, the old book of fables. So, the situation demanded a major transformation in the Palestinian political arena, not the least, because there had also been a new development, which is the death of Ahmad al-Miyat al-Bakhih Pasha. He had led the all Palestine government, which was established in 1948, and which was supposed to represent the Palestinian people, which was supposed to declare, in fact, a Palestinian state during the Nakaba. As we know, there was an Israeli state declared by the Zionist militias in 1948. And when Palestinians tried to declare a similar state to all Palestine government, they only received backing from Egypt and a few other states, but they got blocked by Jordan primarily, which had designs on the eastern part of Palestine, the West Bank. So, in this kind of arena, we had a situation where the main figure that had represented the all Palestine government had passed away. The all Palestine government had an official office in Cairo. It was supposed to officially represent the Palestinian people, as far as Egyptian authorities were concerned. But after the death of Ahmad al-Miyat al-Bakhih Pasha, there was a vacuum. And the vacuum had existed even during his lifetime, to be honest, because the all Palestine government was never made active. Now, Nasser came to a realization. He read the regional map. He saw that unless there is representation given to the Palestinian people in the international arena, the burden will be solely carried by the Arab states when it comes to dealing with this question. And these states were disunited around it. In fact, they were disunited around a lot of issues, for reasons that we've described extensively, they were disunited around the question of monarchy and republic. They had major disagreements on whether they were going to ally with the West, or they were going to be an unallying. They had disagreements over capitalism and socialism. They had many disagreements. So Palestine, of course, was an arena in which all of these dynamics were to play out. So Nasser was quite innovative when he thought, "Look, I have a special opportunity now. There is a major crisis afflicting the region." And that crisis is the Israeli state wanting to divert the waters of the river Jordan for its national carrier project. And this was coinciding with major suspicions that the Israeli state was coming close to developing nuclear capacity. So if you have your settler colonial neighbor acquiring nuclear weapons, and also diverting major water resources in a region that is afflicted with water scarcity, then that's a very serious matter. And Nasser used, especially the water question, to invite the heads of major Arab states, of the Arab states, basically the members of the Arab League to became the first Arab summit. And during that summit, you know, he invited Ahmad de Chocolire to attend. So that was Nasser's motivation. Where did Palestinian leadership fit into it? In particular, who was Ahmad Shukari? How did he occupy this role? And then also, how did various Palestinian leaders respond to this move to formalize the PLO, the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, which was still led by the former grandmuftee of Jerusalem, Hajimina Hosseini. In exile from Beirut, he was intensely critical. How did other groups, like Fatah, founded in 1959, and the movement of Arab nationalists? How did they respond? If we look at the map, first of all, you had the muftee was, of course, the leader of the Palestinian national current, and was prominently there in Palestine up until the Nakba. But after the Nakba, he lost a lot of capacity for leadership, not the least because the regional Arab states did not want him to continue to lead the Palestinian political scene, but also because his basis of support got undermined as he no longer was able to access Palestine. Of course, he had been in exile for a long time, but he still had operatives during the years of the '40s and the late '30s in Palestine. After the Nakba situation got very weak, his power base was lost to his main enemy, the King of Jordan, King Abdullah, his main competitor. So he ends up being in exile. He has some political credit because he was the old leader, but he lost a lot of popularity, lost a lot of networks, he lost a lot of ability to influence the situation on the ground, especially amongst the youth who held the old leadership responsible for the collapse of Palestine and its loss during the Nakba. So the muftee was there, he's a figure that's there, he's an important figure in terms of the old capital he had, but he had no new capital to expand. Therefore, usually, he could play a role in terms of making noise, but he could not effectively intervene in the arena. You had some youth that like to connect themselves to him in some ways for gaining some kind of moral authority of sorts, and that tended to be the case actually with the original founders of Fater. Yes, and Arafat Abdu Ammar used to visit the muftee regularly. And Arafat was a relative of the muftee? Arafat used to like to pretend that he is. He was not a relative of the muftee, but from his mother's side, Arafat has a connection to the scholarly families of Jerusalem, because his mother comes from the household family, so he did live in Jerusalem for a while, in his uncle's, you know, in his mother's relatives' house and sneer the muftee's area. So, you know, it's like 10 steps removed, but he was very keen on connecting himself with the muftee, and sometimes he'd use the muftee comes from the Hoseini family, of course, and sometimes he'd claim associations with that, and it's a bit far-fetched. You know, he is not a relative of the muftee, but he used to like to present that, and that tells us something, because it tells us that he was very keen to have this kind of pedigree, and to associate with an older tradition that did mean something in a previous era. In a sense, as he was trying to find a new, you know, horizon, revolutionary horizon, he was trying to connect with an older leadership. Now, not everybody was doing that. A lot of the, for example, left-wing formations in the Palestinian arena, they used to distance themselves from the muftee, even though their parents were connected to him, the muftee is one side of the equation. But then you had also the people that came from the era of the muftee, but were not in the leadership, and in fact, they were in the opposition to the against the muftee, like an amateur chukteri was one of them. Ahama de chukteri was born in 1908. He was born to a very important political figure, Assad de chukteri, who was the muftee of the fourth Ottoman army, and quite close to the committee and union and progress leaders. So he was one of the main grandis in Acre and Akka, his father abandons him at an early age, but abandons his mother. He had married a Turkish woman when he was in exile in Anatolia, given one of these exile situations with an official position. You know, the CUP used to do all sorts of things, and he married a Turkish woman, had the son from her, but then when he went back home to Palestine, his first wife told him that he must divorce this woman and they had a whole battle. So Chukteri ends up growing up in Tulkarim, which is relatively smaller town, in poverty with his mother, and she dies when he's young. You know, he only sees his father when he's eight years old. And the reason why I'm mentioning these stories, we have to understand these characters as human figures. He comes from a very prominent family, but he lived a very poor child, and he felt neglect, and he grew up in a situation where he needed to prove himself. And that became clear because after his mom died, he ends up moving to his father's house in Acre, when this was still under the Ottoman administration, of course, still when his father was a big figure, and faces a lot of adversity from his stepmom. Eventually, you know, like he ends up spending a lot of career competing, of his career competing with his father in a way, like it's a very complex, a double dynamic, but he becomes a distinguished lawyer. Over the course of this period, he's also attacking the official leadership of the Palestinian struggle at the time, which is the Mufti. Nevertheless, throughout this time, he acquires strong skills in oratory, he's a great orator. And how it's located this day is very well known to be a great orator in classical Arabic. He has that eloquence that accompanies that. So he'll give like long speeches, but they're spoken and very fine in the effective language of that sword. He's also very fluent in English. And actually, for a while, he spends time as a representative of the Arab office, he sets it up in Washington, DC. So this is somebody who is slightly different than the usual portfolio in internal Palestinian politics. He came out of training in the British legal tradition. He had to, you know, carry out court cases in Palestine, in Jerusalem, in English, with the British administration. So he had this exposure to the diplomatic arena. Now, after the Nakabah happens, he ends up entering the diplomatic service in Syria. He serves Syrians. He goes to the Bandon conference, not representing Palestine, actually, he's representing these Arab countries. And then the Saudis, you know, he becomes their representative, but he keeps the Palestinian principles. So he, as Ahmad Shukhayi plays a big role, even as a Saudi representative in the UN, in promoting Algerian independence and the Moroccan independence in Tunisia, you know, he represents the Maghrebite issues strongly. And he talks about this in his memoirs. He says, you know, we're worried that there would be erasure in these places because of colonialism, that they would lose their identity and culture and language, and they would just be completely dead, the Arab eyes and the race. So there was that sense, but also the experience that he gained in that period. Now, the big episode that brings him close to Nasser, it happens over Yemen, when Nasser and Faisal clash over Yemen, and the Saudis asked their representative in the UN, which is Ahmad Shukhayiri, to go and denounce the Egyptian aggression in Yemen, or what they call that, and to get some kind of resolution out of that. So he completely ignores them, then in fact, like starts making moves to the country, like, you know, suggesting, you know, that Nasser is a good guy and so on. So that, of course, means that Faisal kicks him out, but also Nasser finds him a wonderful new addition to his diplomatic endeavors. So they established a stronger relationship over that. And that's why he gets invited as a Palestinian representative. How did this all come together to form the PLO with Shukhayiri at its head, but also at this time, still very much Arab heads of state principally Nasser as sort of important powers behind the organization? Shukhayiri gets, you know, attends the first Arab summit. And he manages to essentially take the discussion in a direction that not many people wanted and to run with it. So, you know, the summit was supposed to discuss the responses to the diversion of the Jordan waters and the security implications and so on. And essentially, he pushes the heads of state that are attending to agree to the formation of a body representing the Palestinian people. And he gets a very formula around that. Now, what he does, you know, and it was supposed to be like, he was supposed to investigate the possibility and report to them, you know, like explore. He takes that as a mandate, actually, to form and found the organization. So he goes and starts a series, initiates a series of contacts and meetings with Palestinians from different walks of life. Some of what he does is very traditional. So he reaches out to the big grandis and fancy families from the prominent backgrounds and so on. He does a survey of the different cities and towns, different representatives of them, of course, in exile and in the West Bank and Gaza. But that's the focus primarily. However, he's also visiting different locations of Palestinian exile and asking different committees, the formation of committees to discuss with them a future conference in which Palestinians would gather and discuss diplomatic representation and national representation. So, you know, in some countries where Palestinians were very well organized, what happened was you had committees formed and then you had an actual set of elections that resulted in the nomination of delegates to be sent to this conference that Chocheri was announcing that he was going to hold. Okay, so that conference became, by the way, the first Palestinian National Council declared itself as such, which meant that it became the parliament of the Palestinian people in exile. So in Kuwait, for example, they did elections. They were very well organized. It was a coherent community. It was a community that could operate fairly freely. So they were able to have a very efficient mechanism. Other places Chocheri selected names. He also met with some of the political underground parties and these were mostly younger people. There's a generational dimension to it. And they were also mostly people that either belong to the middle classes, lower middle classes, or working classes. So they were not from the prominent big families like Chocheri's own family. What ended up happening is that they were not as well represented in the overall formula and eventual formula that he created when he held the first past the National Council in Jerusalem. So the PLO initially took what you would call a conservative approach to representation. However, it was an approach to representation that tried to cover the regional scope of Palestine and the geographic scope of it. And we're talking here historic Palestine, of course, is primarily areas that were now under Israeli rule after '48. What is referred to in the West as Israeli state at the stage and what was referred to by Palestinians at the stage as the occupied territories. Because the occupied territories then were the territories occupied in 1948, not '67 as was to be the case later on. So Chocheri goes for the geographic breadth, but the class composition is still primarily upper class. That leads some people to criticize him in the left. But also there's critique over what he was trying to do and its connection to the Arab states. So he, for example, holds the first Palestinian National Council in Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem, which is under Jordanian rule at the stage. And King Hussein insists that he come and open the proceedings. Now, of course, King Hussein never wanted a meeting like this to happen in the first place. He was very suspicious of that because traditionally it was the Jordanian state that rejected attempts at creating any self-representation for the Palestinian people because that would then undermine his claim on the West Bank. But because of Nasser pushing for this, because of the Arab summit authorizing the exploration of founding a representative structure of this kind, he ends up having to authorize and allow for the meeting to happen. And he wanted to be at the heart of it. So this involvement of Arab states made some of the underground Palestinian movements suspicious and wary. The other thing they were worried about was what they saw as a bureaucratic set of structures that were coming out of that. However, at the same time, and I mean, I really want people to focus on this point, the foundation of the PLO, that conference being held in Jerusalem at that time was seen as a moment of hope as well. Because there was inaction in the Palestinian arena now for 16 years before that. Since 1948, there had not been real genuine representation. So people jumped at the opportunity to be represented in that way. The PLO operated something called the Palestine Liberation Army, which stationed regular troops in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. How was the PLA established? And what sort of army was it? So one of the most important things that Soherei did was that after he held this National Council, which led essentially to him having now a parliament representing the Palestinian people, he created out of it an executive committee, and he created out of it different bodies that were supposed to have different tasks related to them. So they created a structure for what they call the Palestine Liberation Organization. They then imagined it to have a popular liberation army, as you mentioned, which would be the arm of liberation, and which would include different Palestinians from across the region. However, that army had to be coordinated with the local Arab states. Because the PLO was operating, you remember, as an officially authorized body by the Arab League. And that was its point of strength, but also its point of weakness. Its main strength was that you have this big authorization. These are the entirety of the states of the region are saying, we're backing this. And as you know, and in the international arena, it's all about recognition. So if you have a bunch of states saying, we recognize a certain body as having a certain representative capacity, that's a big deal, especially for people like the Palestinian people who are not only suffering from being refugees, but who are also suffering from being stateless. Remember, not all refugees are stateless, Daniel. For example, Syrian refugees today are refugees, but they're not stateless. They still have Syrian passports, they have a Syrian state. Palestinians did not have that. So Shokari's big move at this stage was to come and say, okay, let's create an army anyways. And let's coordinate it with these states that have authorized the creation of this body. And he gets authorization from the second Arab Summit for the supplying and financing of this army. And then they hold basically a series of negotiations with different states to host units of it. And essentially, the formula was there will be troops in Syria, they will come under a certain arrangement with the Syrian army. Palestinians will be recruited to these troops, but the training, the liaising, and the overall management of this would be closely watched by the Syrian military, because the concern of this, of the Arab states at the time was that these troops would not work against them, remember, and would not work against their official policy. Same thing for the other countries in the region, Iraq, and at its own setup, they were under Egypt, under Jordan, you had different units. Jordan was, of course, the last to agree to that. And that came much later, who had better, but you had different formations. They were all, by the way, named after all battles of Islamic liberation. So there, and that was basically the mobilisation, a trick that was pursued by Ashukrari. He liked the classical tradition, and he used these very classical kind of references. Anyways, these formations end up taking place, but they're constrained. And we have now, in the Palestinian military arena, as a result of the emergence of this army, a difference between guerrilla movements that were created by the clandestine political parties and the official armed units, which were sponsored by the PLA in agreement with the Arab states. We talked about the foundation of FATA in 1959 during a previous episode, and it was in 1965, that FATA first launched its armed operations, which initially focused on incursions from frontline states into the territory that Israel had conquered in 1948. What did FATA look like between 1959 and the '67 war, as an organisation, and starting in 1965, in terms of its military operations? So, FATA, in its early foundation years, was focused, as we've mentioned before, on the idea of initiating armed struggle. That was their main obsession. Remember, we talked about it before. Abu Ahmad actually says, he keeps on saying, we need to have an Algerian revolution, equivalent to that in Palestine. So, he spends the whole of this period, from the late 50s, until 1965, trying to convince people to follow that pathway. Of course, he's not alone in this, there are others that are committed to this idea. The big debate in FATA was, when will we be ready to launch this revolution? And that causes, by the way, big splits eventually. So, on the one hand, you have Yasser Arafat who wants it yesterday, not tomorrow. He's very pushy, he's very aggressive about it, he's willing to do anything to make it happen. He's contacting all these people, preparing all these units in different places. He has some people that are very loyal to him, to follow him on this line. His closest collaborators were people like Abu Jihad, but also, there were others that were very involved with him on the military front. And they include figures that are not that well known in the West. Mandoor said them, for example, Abu Sabri, others like that. These were very involved, released in this early period, trying to initiate some form of military action. Now, they make a very good use, let's say, in the mid 60s, of several related phenomena. One is the development in Algeria, of a current under Mohammed Ghadar that is sympathetic to them. And that pushes for some Fatah representation in Algeria. And that leads to Algeria adopting a line that is amenable to Fatah and that allows it to train people. So, the first, by the way, a series of Fatah trainings happen in the Saoirseal military academy in Algeria as a result of this. And this happens under Bumidian, by the way, not under Ben Bela. So, after Bumidian does his coup, especially, it intensifies... And as a quick aside, I think at the time, the Bumidian coup against Ben Bela was initially seen as perhaps a move into the Western camp against the revolutionary Arab politics, but that's not exactly how it turned out at all. Well, I mean, it's a complicated story because it depends which angle are you looking at it from. The Palestinian angle is very particular for Algeria. Ben Bela was held back by the fact that he had a strong relationship with Nasser. So, he would not mess around with the Palestinian file because that's Nasser. That's next to Egypt. It's not next to Algeria. He's not going to go and encourage armed actions in Palestine until that's dealt with. But Bumidian allows for a greater... He's clashing with Nasser. So, he doesn't mind at all. But also, there's general sympathy in Algeria towards initiating armed struggle. It's not an idea that would be unpopular in Algeria. Now, at the same time, you have a situation in Syria that also creates an environment that is amenable for further action. By the way, when I speak of further action, I'm not just talking about the first operation that took place on January 1, 1965. That's not the issue here. That's just an initiation of a wave of actions between then and 1967. So, we're not just referring to what is known in Feta literature as the first entelach or referring to everything that took place between it and the 1967 war. What allowed for Feta actions to take place in that period was that you had certain figures within the Syrian military and the Syrian political leadership that were sympathetic to the idea of initiating Palestinian guerrilla operations, either with Syrian support or from Syrian, even from Syrian territory in some cases. So, to understand that context, again, we have to reflect on the competition between Nasser and Syria at this stage, and we've looked at it extensively in our episodes on Syria. Because you had this period, you've had a situation where the bath is trying to prove its credentials, its radical credentials. And the problem that they're facing is that there's a lot of players in the arena at this stage. And by the way, a lot of the splits that later happen in the Palestinian arena, people always ask, "Why are there so many different parties? And how do I understand them?" They come out of that environment because initially, Feta is the first to announce action. A lot of people then that were preparing for action but hadn't taken the first step have to then deal with it. And that kind of shapes the geography of different Palestinian guerrilla movements at this stage. Let's turn to the 1967 Arab War with Israel. We just can't overstate the devastating impact of this defeat on the frontline states that waged it. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, a huge defeat in just six days of fighting after an Israeli surprise attack. It was, in particular, a humiliation for Nasser. And the defeat also, also, of course, meant Israel's conquest of the last remaining territory of historic Palestine, the Jordanian annexed West Bank and East Jerusalem and an Egyptian administered Gaza. This is when the so-called occupied territories, as many people know them today, were first occupied even though, as we discussed earlier, as listeners know well by this point, all of Palestine today is occupied territory, including those territories first occupied in '48. But this defeat obviously then had these enormous consequences for the million-plus Palestinian suddenly thrust under Israeli rule and also for the Palestinian liberation struggle, for the PLO and for Feta and for a number of other groups that would emerge. But before we get to that, before we get to the Palestinian revolution, lay out the bigger picture. What did it look like, this crushing defeat of Arab armies across the frontline states and across the entire Arab world? What were its consequences for the general balance of power between Israel and Arab states and also for this larger Cold War balance of power that these regional fights, as we've talked about this whole series, that these regional fights have always, have for a long time at this point, been embedded within. Yeah, so Daniel, when it comes to '67, first let's start with some of the mythology around it. The big myth is that Israel has been threatened by all these Arab states that were wanted to go and destroy it. They were going to throw all the Jewish population into the sea and they were on this genocidal intentions and therefore it had to practice self-defense and it launched what they call a preemptive strike. So this preemptive strike, this course is a total myth. We now know from the documents that are available to us. Among serious historians, there's consensus on this, that there was no threat coming from Egypt. There are reasons for that because Nasser did not feel ready, not because Egypt couldn't conceivably want to threaten such a state. If Nasser had a great big army that was ready with great offensive weapons, he would have loved to undertake what in Arabic would have been seen as a liberation of Palestine. FYI, he had no intentions to throw any Jews into the sea. There's no evidence to that whatsoever. Nasser was not a bloodthirsty, crazy man that way. It was many things but that's not one of them. There's all sorts of mythology around this but he did not have anyways the military capacity or the desire to do the things that they were claiming that he was intending to do. What he had however was a desire to deal with the immediate crises that he was facing. The Israelis were engaging in a process of escalation throughout 1967 and they were claiming to be dealing with the border infiltrations and the operations that were being done by passing guerrilla movements and they were putting a lot of pressure on Syria threatening it. At the same time they were putting pressure on Jordan threatening it. They had historically and even just before the war engaged in multiple aggressions including massacring villagers in multiple places. What that was doing was it was raising popular temperature in the surrounding Arab states and demands for action and demands for security and so on and at the same time because of the competition between the bath and Nasser especially the bath in Syria. They again wanted to show that they're more radical than now and they're better than Nasser so they were claiming that they engage in a radio warfare with them. Where is Nasser the great leader of the Arab nation as we're being attacked by Israeli forces? What is he doing, settling around doing nothing? So he needs to find a deterrence move around the Israelis. The deterrence formula he wants to establish it and he wants to also shut down the Arab claims that he's inactive, especially coming from Syria. And to do that he goes and does something relating to territories of his in which he had lost much of his sovereignty in many ways after 56. Since the tripartite aggression. Since the tripartite aggression he has a problem which is that Egypt cannot exercise its full sovereignty over Sinai and the Straits of Tehran and the shipping lines that lead to the Red Sea. Part of the withdrawal agreement in 56 was that there would be international troops in the area and that the Israelis were demanding also freedom of shipping there. So he does a move of withdrawing the UN troops and then he does a move where he parades like Egyptian army units entering instead of them and so on like in a big media show almost. That by the way everybody knows there's no possibility or intention or to invade with such a force because by the way if you want to mobilize invade you don't do it that way. Anyway it's not a performative thing. You do a very carefully secretive, very organized kind of campaign. In any case it's clear for us looking at things in hindsight that he did not expect the sort of response that he got out of that. He thought that he's going to be engaging in a well established game of deterrence. When we see these games playing out all the time look at the northern border of Palestine today the one would love it on. There is a deterrence game being played between Hezbollah and the Israeli state. They bomb one village, they bomb the Israeli bomb another, they burn a forest, the Israelis burn two. But at what point does that go into a full-scale war? The usual rules of these games is that they don't. Until one party decides that the situation is amenable for them to engage in a full-scale war. Nasser did not believe that the two superpowers would have any interest in allowing for a major war to take place or in allowing for the status quo to change. Johnson was giving a green light for the Israelis to go and change the rules of the game and go and strike against each. Johnson is basically changing US policy in a major way here because the US policy was not for Israelis to go and acquire new territories and defeat all the surrounding Arab states and do all the things that they did. But he allowed it and he essentially authorized it. In the same way that US policy was not annexation of Jerusalem but Trump allowed it, the same way that US policy at least in theory was not genocide and Gaza, but now here we go. There was green light given to it. Historical contingency can sometimes produce major changes in policy that are done by these figures and they get no pushback around it and they get away with it. That's exactly what happened now. You had a situation for a few weeks, a global mobilization, "Oh, Israel is under threat. Israel is going to listen to that." The Israelis were playing that to create an atmosphere that would allow for war and then they strike with this green light that they were given. And of course they strike with Western weaponry that they're given because they're given a very good air force, excellent weapons and without them they would not be able to do all what they did in 1967. And they wipe out the Arab air forces gaining immediate air superiority, which is decisive for the war. It's purely an air force war. That's why it was a quick war. There was no real war because what happened was, and this tells you about the actual Egyptian intentions. The Egyptian planes were as normal just lying there in the airports and the Israelis just came and bombed the whole other time. Now, later on this becomes a big scandal in Egypt and a big question arises. Did Nasser know that they were not being protected or sheltered? Why didn't he hold the people responsible? Of course, Nasser said, "I had nothing to do with this. This was Abdul Haqima Ahmed, my second man and my strong man in the army, who was of course part of the free officers." And Nasser was not, again, we talked about this in the first episode. Nasser always had to deal with the bigger arrangement around them, this bigger committee around the free officers, including Abdul Haqima Ahmed, who was very popular in the Egyptian army. So, there's big debates around this. Did Yemen play a big role? Did it distract the Egyptian army from focusing on defensive measures and, you know, including around the air force and everything else? All of this, these are the big questions of the time. But what this brings us to is that it created the devastating defeat for the Arab armies, but more importantly, it led to the occupation of vast swaths of Arab land. So, you had a huge part of Egypt occupied in Sinai. You had huge parts of Syria to this day occupied very important parts of Syria. The Golan Heights is Julan. You know, this is very strategic area. And there are big issues by the big questions around that. Julan should not have been easy to occupy. It's, you know, there's only a few passes around it. They've been heavily barricaded since 1948. It's high land. So, it should have been, you know, it should have been defended to the very end. But the Syrian army did not do so well and got confused. And there was major problems with that. Other areas connected, others like fell unnecessarily. So, there were big questions. And the mask that meant to this day, by the way, because the Israelis occupied the Julan. It's occupied Syrian territory. They can threaten Damascus directly. It's within firing range. It's a very strategic point. So, you know, all of these Arab states lost their tree. But the Palestinians also lost whatever was left of Palestine. And that's even more important. So, East Jerusalem, which contains all the holy sites. The West Bank concludes the major cities of Palestine that were left in the central El Plateau region. Nablus, Jerusalem, Hebron, plus, of course, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and other Jeanine, and Turkarem, and other cities. These fall under Israeli control. They were previously under Jordanian control. Gaza, Gaza Strip, a small territory with a very large passing population. Remember, the entirety of the southern part of Palestine was distilled into it. It falls under Israeli settler colonial control, under direct military occupation. And what that means is that the people in these territories have no passports, no rights, no civil, political, or national rights. Nothing. They are under the whims and the whip of the Israeli authorities. So, the big question for groups like Fatah and other guerrilla groups at the time was what is to be done with this. Now, on the Arab level, there's a discursive change going on and also a change of political focus. If the issue before 1967 was the liberation of the occupied territories in 1948, that was the big issue. That was what everybody was discussing, or at least the return of the refugees to these areas. Now, the conversation was, what are we going to do about the territories that were occupied in 1967? Each Arab state had a surrounding Palestine, had lost something, and they had a direct interest now in recovering it. These are their own territories. You know, put the policy in territories on the side. These are their own territories that they lost now. They have big stakes in this game now. They have land to liberate for themselves. Now, besides that, you have another dimension, which is on the Palestinian end, you have now the loss of the rest of Palestine. So, people want to liberate that too. And it's a part of Palestine in which there are very few settler colonists. There are no settler colonists in it at that stage. So, there is a question of, okay, what are we going to do with this part that has fallen now under an administration that does not recognize the right? So, it's inhabitants, and that will place them in a situation of direct confrontation with them. So, that becomes an open question. Internationally, the war ends with a Security Council Resolution 242, which deals specifically with that part that got occupied in '67, but deals with it through a vague formulation. It calls for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the territories. But what is clear is that there was now a situation where the discussion now is also shifting even in the international arena towards discussing 67 territories rather than the broader territories. Because there had been lands occupied before, even under international law, by the way, which was skewed against Palestinians, as you remember, in the 1940s, you know, it was skewed against all colonized peoples in 1940s, not just Palestinians. They're under the partition plan. The Israeli state got way more than it should have. So, there were lands that were occupied even by that definition. Now, discussion suddenly becomes restricted to 1967. It's a normalizing the 48 territories. Obviously, not for Palestinians and their allies and for Airmeny Arabs, but on the international level, particularly in the West, it has that effect. In the West, but also, and quite significantly for the Soviet Union, they're talking about that because it always pushed the two-state solution line. So, they're talking, "Okay, now, what needs to happen is it really would roll for these territories and and Arab state there." But that's the focus is on that. Now, this is where it was so important to have Palestinian representation. This is where the PLO becomes of such crucial importance, because all these conversations are happening without reference to Palestinians. And had there not been a PLO created in '64, we would not have had a conversation that included Palestinians later on. If you're not represented in the international arena, you will be erased. And this becomes a big aspect of the Palestinian struggle later on. This is really occupation of the remaining territory of historic Palestine was a disaster, obviously, known as the Naksa, the setback that followed the Nakhba or the catastrophe of 1948. But it had a set of contradictory impacts. It also gave FATA and other Palestinian guerrilla organizations the opportunity to fight Israel not just from exile in neighboring frontline states, but instead directly from under Israeli rule. What sort of contradictory impacts did this expansion of the occupation to the entirety of historic Palestine? On the one hand, the humiliating loss for Arab states and leaders on the other, what impact did all of this have on FATA and more generally on the armed national liberation struggle such that it added up to the inauguration of this massively important era in Palestinian history, the Palestinian revolution? So one of the byproducts of the '67 war was that it weakened the regional states surrounding Palestine. In particular, Jordan. This is very important to note because that meant, you know, remember, between '65 and '67, you had FATA trying to carry out operations from Jordan. And a few other, you know, formations were trying to do the same towards the Israeli state, but also they were trying to use the West Bank, which was under Jordanian rule to do these operations. What was their main obstacle that Jordanian army? Because it would not allow them to actually establish safe bases. It would not allow them to carry out their operations freely. They would actually be chased by this army. And of course, Jordanian army has reasons to do that. You know, it wants to continue the status quo because it is worried that the Israelis would come and attack Jordan. And that would result in a war that they could not control and in which Jordan would be the weaker party. So they have their own reasons. But from a Palestinian perspective, what that meant also is that there was a constant deferment of deferral of liberation. And they were like, okay, at what point will we be able to liberate if that's the logic? And again, this was a period when people are inspired by Vietnam, they're thinking about, you know, we need to have some kind of annoy for the Arabs, okay? Liberated territory from which to fight for the total liberation of the homeland. Yes. And that becomes the vision for Jordan in certain radical Palestinian circles actually after 67. Actually, people speak of that, like, and particularly the democratic front from the liberation of Palestine, they use the slogan, you know, man needs to become the Hanoi of the Arabs, you know, there is all of that going on. Now, in any case, 67 has the impact of transforming passing internal politics, because you have this opportunity, first of all, of a weakened state in Jordan. And which means that you might be able to organize now operations through there. And these operations could possibly allow you to infiltrate both the territories that Israeli state had before the 67, but also the 1967 territories themselves, and so that you could launch an armed revolution from there. In fact, this language was referred to as the Second Intellaco, the second launch. It's so 67. You know, yes, Arafat, as usual, his main skill was detecting a political opening, okay? And as we mentioned, militarily, it wasn't always the best executed, there were, when you rush into these things, it can create many problems. But in any case, he saw the political need and he went ahead and did it. And he was quite brave about it. He went actually smuggled himself into the West Bank and started, you know, doing different units. There were others that were involved in that work at the time, they established different clandestine units in different parts of the West Bank. You know, a lot of these units were centered in the north western hills in the West Bank region, which can allow for better cover and so on. You know, like this region has area caves, has a few hills, it's like a good place to fight and to store weapons. But also, you know, he was operating in different cities. So there was a collection of weapons, creating different cells. All of this kind of work was going on at the stage. And it was receiving support, especially the Algerians actually were crucial in this. They forced the Syrians to resume supporting Fateh, and the Syrians needed them because the Algerians had money that was important for Syrian reconstruction and rearmament after the war. So, you know, you have a bunch of factors that facilitate, again, this process. What's the problem on the West Bank front? Is that Israelis figure out these cells fairly quickly, and the infiltrator. So you have, like, then a wave of campaign of rest and suppression. And it essentially leads to the crushing of the first attempt at the second entelach. And work would resume thereafter from the occupied territories. But it's much, you know, it took a while to achieve that kind of level of military underground type of work. It became of a different nature, came primarily popular mobilization. There was also military work done in Gaza later on, especially in the early 70s, the beautiful Pea had what was called as Guevara, Gaza experience. There was this guy, as what he was referred to as Guevara, Gaza because he was, you know, organizing all these clandestine movements and revolutionary activities in Gaza in the early 70s. But what you had was a situation, though, where overall, total revolution did not erupt in the West Bank and Gaza because it was suppressed. However, after the initial abortion of operations in the West Bank, what you had was the attempt to establish military bases across the Jordan Valley in the areas of Jordan bordering the Israeli state and the West and the occupied West Bank. And that effort was more successful because the Jordanian state did not have the full capacity to prevent it, but also because in the Jordanian army, after the humiliation of 67, many of the officers were actually sympathetic to the idea of young people mobilizing and joining these fidelity units, these command units that would carry out the work from surrounding areas to Palestine. So the idea of a liberation war, a popular liberation war became quite established at this stage. And the 67, what it allowed for was the emergence of the dream, essentially the translation of aspects of the dream that Palestinian revolutionaries in the late 50s and early 60s had, which was a dream of a fully mobilized Palestinian population towards a battle of liberation and return. And this was their concept of what revolution was. By the way, it's very interesting. Sometimes in common parlance, we understand the revolution is the overthrow of an order. It's the moment in which an order is overthrown. Whereas in these settings, especially in anti-colonial settings, it's usually the process of fighting an existing order is what's referred to as a revolution. And what makes it the revolution is that it's a longstanding commitment that is actually based and rooted in a full mobilization or near full mobilization of a colonized population. So that was the aspiration of groups like further in the early 60s. But they managed the 67 war and is debilitating defeat. And the fact that you had new 250,000 new refugees coming out of the West Bank, the fact that you had all these horrible Israeli acts of aggression there and destruction and so on. All of that meant that the mobilization of the people became a much greater possibility. And actually, you had these groups that were clandestine come to the surface now. But you also had new groups emerging that were committing themselves to armed struggle in the colonized world in those years. The act of engaging in a people's revolutionary war was seen as revolution. So it's a process. So the terminology, by the way, when we refer to Vietnam and the United States, they call it the Vietnam War. And you know, in Palestine, we call it the Vietnamese Revolution. And we called it that even before the last American soldier left Vietnamese soil. And before the first American soldiers arrived when it was against the French. We're calling it that from the days when the French were being fought in Vietnam. So it's a long standing. So it's both an idea. It's an entity. It's a process. The Algerian Revolution was referred to as a nuclear revolution before the Vienna courts were signed and the French troops were forced out in '62. That's a certain usage. South Africa is a South African revolution to this day in Palestinian literature and Arab literature. It's not referred to as such in the English literature, as far as I know it's usually, you know, struggle against apartheid, the road to democracy. You know, there are different terms that are used in relation to it in Anglo settings, but not in Palestine called South Africa. I mean, I know that people in South Africa call it that too in revolutionary organizations there. So that's where the concept comes from. Now, one interesting thing that happens after '67 is every Palestinian ideological major movement adopts an armed struggle outlook at this stage. And that brings a total transformation also of the way this revolution is approached. So Fatah is no longer the only party in town. I'm Aziz Rana and you're listening to The Dig, a great place for analysis about where we are, how we got here, and what can be done. It's my favorite podcast and you can support it at patreon.com. 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Learn more about Love in the Time of Self Publishing at Princeton.Press/Love. That's Princeton.Press/Love. Fatah for a long time would continue to dominate the Palestinian national liberation movement, but the Arab defeat in '67 and the Palestinian revolution that that defeat unleashed prompted a lot of rival guerrilla organizations to emerge, perhaps most importantly the popular front for the liberation of Palestine or PFLP, which was founded in large part by the movement of Arab nationalists. It was a merger of the movement's national front for the liberation of Palestine with two other organization, Heroes of the Return and the Palestinian Liberation Front, which was tied to a Palestinian officer in the Syrian army named Ahmed Jibreel. This is a really important and interesting moment because listeners will recall that Fatah was founded in 1959 in a sense as a repudiation of the movement of Arab nationalists, which at the time was a very nocerist organization that sought to liberate Palestine through building Arab unity. By contrast, Fatah asserted that what Palestinians needed was a proper national liberation movement of their own, something like in Algeria. But as we discussed in the last episode on Southern Arabia, the movement had been moving toward a third-worldist, leftist revolutionary position, a turn that really rapidly accelerated after the '67 war, and it had huge impacts in Southern Arabia and throughout the entire movement of Arab nationalists and very much in Palestine. What was the significance of the foundation of the PFLP, both for the Palestinian national movement and for the movement of Arab nationalists, and how did its formation come about? Right. As you mentioned, the PFLP came out of, first of all, the movement of Arab nationalists deciding that it needed to enter the arena of armed struggle now that the '67 war had happened. Now, of course, the PFLP had existing lineages. I mean, there is a lineage to it. It didn't just come out of the blue. The movement of Arab nationalists had created different initiatives, even during the early '60s, in which they carried out reconnaissance work, for example. So there were training people on military engagement. They were sending people on reconnaissance operations. However, they were not engaging in officially declared armed struggle. And that becomes a major issue in a PFLP history later on, because they tried to assert that, look, for the claims that they started their evolution in '65. Well, we were doing operations even before that. We even lost people before that. But these people took the credit first. It's not exactly true. Their politics was not oriented, and that's the bit that matters, towards carrying out armed struggle. They were preparing, and they were waiting for the right moment that would be authorized by Nasser for them to do that. So this is the real context to the story. Now, '67 happens, and they're like, we made a mistake. And they do a critique actually of the Arab regimes and their performance in the '67 war. Of course, like we've discussed, in the case of the Farr and South Yemen, we mentioned that the mover of multinationals had to reevaluate its entire policy after this. One thing that happens is you have radical elements being able to push the movement to essentially disband as a movement, but establish local branches that were to operate in each of the respective arenas that it used to operate in before. So really, there's no longer a movable Arab nationalist per se after the war. What you have is it's different local branches operate under different headings. Now, in the case of Palestine, they had an organization, a military organization, a commando unit organization, that they referred to as Shaba Betar. And this organization made a move to unite with other structures that were operating in the arena, that had some experience of armed struggle, that had, in a way, a military capacity, but that were not further. And one of these organizations, as you mentioned, was Apal in Aouda in Heroes of Return. This organization was connected to the Palestine Liberation Army, and an officer called Wajihil Madani in the Palestine Liberation Army was behind its creation. And his interest was to initiate a structure that had greater flexibility than the PLA. Remember, the PLA is connected to Arab armies. It cannot go and carry out operations as it wishes. However, if members of the PLA had received military training through this officially sanctioned structure, wanted to do operations, they would carry it out through this body, and they might even be able to secure some weapons and equipment from the PLA in a clandestine manner through it. So there was an effort to unify with this group. Then you had also another group join in, which was led by a guy called Ahmad Jibri. You mentioned him. He was a Syrian Army, former Syrian Army officer. But of course, he's a Palestinian. He was born in the Palestinian village of Yasur near Yafa, left in the Nakaba in 1948, ends up in Damascus, and develops very strong relationships with a lot of Bathis, a lot of military figures, a lot of political figures in Syria, partly through training in the military academy. He also develops a good knowledge of certain military techniques that are relevant to this type of struggle, including use of explosions and equipment of that sort. So he was an explosive expert as well. He had gained good experience. This alliance produced problems for the movement of multinationals. Because this guy Ahmad Jibri, in particular, liked leadership, liked to be a leader, he had a good military experience, but he did not have a political orientation. And he had been active in something called the Palestinian Liberation Front, which he had established. There were lots of PLFs, by the way, and there were other PLFs around, and we don't have the time to talk about them, but this one had a very military focus, but also had proximity to the Syrian authorities. And that became a long-standing feature of it and of its leader. The crucial decision of the movement of nationalists to cooperate with these figures was based on military capacity calculations. But later on, they found out that this working formula was no longer possible. Nevertheless, out of the merger of these different groupings, a front came about and it became the popular front for the liberation of Palestine. So this is where the front name comes from. Soon, a set of contradictions happen within this front that lead to multiple splits. And these splits add to the acronyms in the Palestinian arena, but that's one big tradition, in addition to the Fatah tradition that exists. Another tradition I should note, Daniel, and it's often gets omitted from the discussion, is that the Balthus formed their own, you know, it's not just the movement of internationalists that have their own formations. The Balthus formed Saikra, and initially, by the way, that it has some level of flexibility and independence in some ways. Because it's founded by figures that do have some weight. It's a Jordanian, an ex-Jordanian, high-ranking Jordanian army officer, Dafi al-Jamaani, that leads it in initial phases and plays a big role in it. He later gets arrested by Hafiz al-Assad in 1970 as part of the Balthus purge that he carried out. And for many years, he ends up languishing in Assad's prisons. Anyways, and you have another Balthus formation, which is the Arab Liberation Front, and that's closer to the Iraqi Balth. And as listeners will recall, the Iraqi Balthus and Syrian Balthus, I mean, they're just so many splits and divisions among the Balthus. Right. Now, the Arab Liberation Front, though, is weaker in the Palestinian arena. It's drawing primarily on Arab caters from other Arab countries that were joining the Balthus area. Nevertheless, it does exist, and it has its presence. So you have these different formations coming in, and you can already tell from these little stories we're telling now that the complex regional geopolitics end up being reflected now in the Palestinian arena. Every major state has an interest in having a Palestinian guerrilla formation connected to it, or an every major political ideology wants to display this capacity at having a guerrilla movement connected to it. The communist Avon, who traditionally did not believe in armed struggle, partly because of their pro-Soviet orientation, they even have a big internal fight. And a section of them, of course, spans an armed wing called the Ansar groupings. They develop a set of divisions over this, and we can talk about that some other time. But this reality of 67 produces a total ideological transformation, but a state of heightened mobilization on the part of all the major political players on the ground. The PFLP, however, is especially important in this period, because it becomes the second force in the Palestinian arena. I mean, for the next 20 years or so, it is the major competitor to Fatih, although Fatih is much larger, but it still has to contend with the presence of a strong organization, likely PFLP, which comes as a major competitor. And significantly, this is the moment when the PFLP enters as an organization that adopts Marxism and Marxism-Leninism as its guiding ideology. And that's a very interesting phenomena, because as we know from previous episodes, within the movement of Arab nationalists, that's a new innovation. Of course, you had Cader's demanding that transformation from the early '60s onwards, but the traditional leadership is resisting them. And George Habeszt, of course, the founder, he admits this later on in multiple interviews and writings and so on. He says, "Look, I first encountered Marx when I was arrested by the Syrian authorities. I was lying in the Syrian jail in 1968. That's when I discovered Marx. He never read Marx before." And so he had to undergo a Marxist re-education in a way in line with the rest of his movement. His younger Cader's, of course, had read Marxist's writings before he did. And they were now all about people's liberation war. So they were going through this major phase in which they're fascinated by the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences, and they're also referencing Cuba and some of their publications later on. They even talk about North Korea. I don't think they knew just how not North Korea was going to turn out to be. But at that stage, there were interesting references to all these international experiences. As you alluded to a few moments ago, the PFLP, like the movement of Arab nationalists, from which it emerged, was driven by internal dissent. And this was compounded, of course, by the popular front nature initially of the PFLP, which included these two other guerrilla organizations that the movement felt like a needed for further military capacity that they brought to the table, that the movement did not, at that point, have. And there were two key splits that happened very soon after the PFLP's formation. First, Musini Brahim and Nayef Awatma, two younger generation leaders who we've discussed before, who had a few years in the past called for entirely dissolving the movement into Nazarism. They now asserted that Nazarism's petite bourgeois characteristics had made it unable to defeat Zionism, and they instead called for a more radical socialist direction. And what happens next is that Ibrahim goes on to become a key leader on the Lebanese left, which is something that we'll get into in our next episode. Awatma, in 1968, splits from the PFLP to form the popular democratic front for the liberation of Palestine, later renamed the democratic front for the liberation of Palestine. And then Awatma Jabril, that Syrian army officer, splits off to form the PFLP general command, which became a Syrian proxy in the Palestinian national movement. And as an aside here in my research, I'm sure you know this very well, but was news to me, Jabril decades later, during the Syrian civil war, went on to lead defenses of Assad, Assad's forces around Palestinian camps in Damascus. Anyhow, what are the reasons behind and implications of these two splits from the PFLP? The two splits are actually interrelated. So Awatma Jabril was a major military force in the stage in the PFLP. That was supposed to be his role. He was supposed to play a key role in the military side. And he made a major, became clear, was a major strategic blunder. Essentially, in 1968, he refused to commit PFLP forces to the Battle of Karame. And they lost a lot of creds in the Palestinian arena because of that. So that's one one one dimension. And more importantly, ideologically, Arman Jabril was traditional generic nationalists, not a radical character at all. And without much ideology. In fact, I think he was quite opposed to too much ideology. He always emphasized that he's a man of action, a man of work, a man of military applied orientation. He was witnessing he had come to the PFLP because he thought that the movement of Arab nationalists could they give him something, Nasser's support. So, you know, in the same way that the PFLP came to him for a reason, they thought this is somebody with military experience. And he had some added value for us. He had come to them with an expectation of some added value. Except, of course, they were at that moment in a situation where they were clashing with Nasser because they were undergoing this ideological transformation. And they were making these statements that were very critical of all of the Arab regional order that had been led by Nasser prior to 1967. And Nasser had been arresting and imprisoning their South Yemeni allies from the National Liberation Front in Cairo. Well, that had happened. They managed to, they dealt with that, you know, they compartmentalized that. And they, you know, that traditional movement of Arab nationalist leadership picked the side of Nasser over their comrades in that instance, which created problems for them with their comrades, you know, for a while, temporarily. I mean, later on, they recovered them. Those habits continue to be respected in South Yemen later on. But like, at that moment, there was tension. So you have, you have, you have these issues brewing at this stage. So this guy, I mean, he really comes in and he's observing this and he's like, well, I wanted something from these guys. I'm not getting get in the same way. It's obvious that they don't have this major backing from the leading Arab state. In fact, the weird thing that was taking place now was that that backing was seemed to be increasingly heading towards Fatah. And that's a major shift. You know, it's Yasser Arafat that suddenly becomes the darling of Nasser. And this is a new transformation because before Fatah was the enemy number one for Nasser and for the Egyptians in the Palestinian arena. So all of this plays a role. Now, of course, Ahmad Jabril had his own experience with splits before. He liked splits. He had a split with Fatah before. He had united with Fatah at an earlier stage in his career. And when he found that he was not going to be the leader and when he had different issues with Fatah, you know, there were many different issues between him and them. He ended up splitting. So he had a long-standing beef with Yasser Arafat from an earlier era. But now he developed a new beef with George Habash in this new era. So what was also augmenting these issues was that these people that came from outside of the movement of urban nationalists and were suddenly in this formula where the movement dominates, you know, in this front, the PFLP. I mean, yes, there are these partners, but they're really the junior partners. Ahmad Jabril makes these ridiculous claims about him having a huge organization from the early '60s. You know, he even appeared on Al Jazeera, the new famous interview in the early 2000s, making all sorts of grandiose claims. What we had were huge, just largest women's organization, and we had the biggest student, whatever, and we had this and that. The reality was that his organization, the Passal Liberation Front, that he had commanded, was fairly small. It had some members, it had some formations, but it was of this size. It did have good grounding in certain military areas. So he comes in and he's a junior partner in terms of size, and he's surrounded by all these movement around nationalist people, which is a big movement, a truly big movement, with lots of branches, with accumulated experience, with an ideology. It's a big world. So they have multiple organs as well, like it's not just the military show. What he finds in these organs is that there's a big conflict going on between Naif Hawatmeh and other figures associated with them. People like Yasser Abedrabbo and others that are unhappy with the traditional leaders. And then on the level of the traditional leadership, Wadiya Hadad in particular, who is a Habbat's old comrade from the days of university. They come from the same town. They are physicians. They come from the same church environment. They come from... There's so much in common between these two. By the way, Wadiya Hadad was a charming figure. He's a lovable figure. So Habbat has this loyalty to him, and Hadad is really clashing with these leftists. He thinks they're all fluff. They just talk, talk, talk. They don't act. He was a man of action. And that's why, by the way, he becomes ahead of what's called the PFLP external operations. These are the people that go and carry out airplane hijackings and all of that. We can talk about it later. But that's Wadiya Hadad for you. He was the guy doing prison break plans in Jaffar prison in the 1950s. He was the guy that was doing all of these. He's a man of action. Now, there's a splash that happens between him and Habbat. After Wadiya Hadad does a brave and spectacular prison break operation that releases George Habbat's from Syria. Syria had imprisoned George Habbat. You know, the Baptist, they never liked the movement or unnecessary people. So when they had an opportunity, they caught him, they put him in jail and locked him up. But he had the luck of having a very strong operational conspiratorial mind like that of Wadiya Hadad who goes and breaks him out of Syrian prison in this amazing prison break. Somebody should do a movie about it. It's insane. We don't have time to go into details, but it was a spectacular operation. It gets him out. Then George Habbat comes around to the scene and he's like, "What the hell is going on?" These people are on Naif Habbat, and all of these people, and they're talking like left now, and they're saying that this is the right-wing leadership that is full of rubbish, and we need to challenge it. What they do is they signal a shift to the left, this traditional leadership. They announced a commitment to Marxism-Leninism. But the younger katers don't believe them. This is the second generation, the Habbat mess, and the Yasser Abu Dhabi, so they don't believe them, but also they clash with them. And eventually, things deteriorate to an extent where in 1969, the more hardcore nationalist wing in the PFLP that was unhappy with the Marxist-Leninist shift was actually getting ready to kill, essentially execute a large number of the so-called leftist wing, and the wing that announced itself to be the left, that was promoting Maoist ideas and the revolutionary ideas that we spoke about earlier, and they had encircled them, captured their weapons, and a man had put them in a, essentially, they imprisoned them. And of course, who saves this left-wing group that had been imprisoned by the nationalist and almost got executed? Take a guess, Daniel. Akhman Jabril? No, okay, let me try again. George Shabash? Absolutely not. Yasser Arafat? Absolutely. Through Abu Yad. So Abu Yad, that's why the DFLP, they had a good relationship with Abu Yad later on. Abu Yad was heading the kind of fat-to-heck equivalent to military intelligence. It goes around, and he sees the situation, and I'm sure with consultation, of course, with Yasser Arafat, we don't have direct proof, but almost definitely. They're like, great opportunity. Our main competitor is having this internal turmoil between the nationalists and the Marxists, and we're going to save the Marxists from liquidation. And by doing so, they'll always have competing parties. But the less cynical version of the story, that's, of course, the P.F. always emphasizes that side in the writing of the history. They're like, yeah, looking at Abu Maric, created our competitors, and it was to undermine us and the unity of the movement. And we could have kept the unity of the movement, and we got rid of these elements that were causing us a headache. But the other way of looking at it also is that, and I actually do believe in this on the less cynical side. I do believe that there is, of course, always an opportunistic in this, but at the same time, Abu Ammar did not want, Arafat did not want, to set a major bloody precedent in internal Palestinian guerrilla fighting circles. There had been precedent in other struggles before, precedents like that and other struggles before. Now, Algeria, for example, the F.L.N. had liquidated large parts of competing groups in their effort to consolidate. That never got practiced in the Palestinian revolution. And I think this is very important for people to know. There had been some cases here and there, especially by the way, by Ahmad Jabril. He went and detonated a whole building in 1976 to deal with his split in his own party and killed an entire big building in Beirut with the explosives. It's very sad incident in Palestinian history. Or the Abu Nidal organization, which was basically an Iraqi proxy. You know, and Ahmad Jabril, of course, was Syrian proxy at the time and these guys were occupied. So you do have people engaging in that with Abu Nidal, it was assassinations. But on the whole, amongst the mainstream groups, the major constituent parties of the Palestinian revolution, you did not have that bloody patent. The PFLP almost did it. Lucky for them, in my view, and for the Palestinian revolution, it did not happen. At the time. After that incident, of course, you have the cementing of the creation of a split between the Marxists and the nationalists within the PFLP. And what that leads to is the emergence of a new body led by Naif Hawatme under the title, the democratic popular front for the liberation of Palestine. So he adds the word democratic popular front, because he's saying, we are the democratic wing of it. The old nationalists, old guard nationalists are not democratic. We're the democratic wing. And then, you know, later on, of course, people, it becomes too confusing, and, you know, that by the United States, it's too long. And eventually, they change the name to the democratic front only. So the democratic front for the racial Palestine. That's how it becomes a DFLP. That takes place in in 69, of course, as a result of these incidents taking place and enjoy them. It's it's fun that allows them, though, to have, you know, the political backing to be able to do this. And initially, the military protection, as we mentioned, because they could have just been killed. Beginning in 1968, the the PFLP for a time adopted plain hijacking as a major part of their strategy. Ultimately, that would play a key role in raising tensions with the Jordanian monarchy to to a boiling point, playing a role in laying the groundwork for the ugly violence of Black September in 1970. But but we'll get to Black September a little later. For now, just explain the basic contours of the PFLP hijacking campaign. What was its scale purpose and impact? And how was it received across the Palestinian national movement in terms of its theory of revolutionary change? So the theory here, really, the mastermind behind this line within the PFLP was a formation with the Hadda. And as we mentioned, he's a man of action. He is looking around after 67, he's saying, look, this whole Western world is disgusting. They haven't just created 48. They haven't just colonized Palestine. Now they're they're they're after 67. They're even normalizing Israel, even more and more. The passing people are getting erased more and more. So he was saying, look, we pass in people need to be put back on the map and they need to gain international attention. And this is a mode of thinking, by the way, that we see a recurring here and there in different liberation struggles. As a result of the amount of erasure and eradication, you have sometimes the emergence of patterns of thought and action that seek big spectacles as an avenue for that. And sometimes big spectacles that do involve actions like playing hijackers. So when he had that looks and he says, okay, once a bigger spectacle than a hijacking a plane, every news organ will have to cover it, every state will have to talk about it. They'll need to go into immediate negotiations with PFLP over it. It will allow for also reaching this enemy directly. Because when you're hijacking their planes or when you're hijacking planes connected to them, and later on, of course, they hijack other planes of companies that fly there and so on. But with demands, they do different things for the risk struggles, such as, for example, release of prisoners. That was a big demand usually connected to hijacking. Then you can put the cause on the map, you can remove the erasure of the cause. Suddenly, the name Palestine will have to go back into the discussion. That was the theory. Now, of course, you had critics to that theory. The main critics inside the PFLP were actually the leftist wing, the live Hawat Mewin, they said that this is adventurism. There were others that were kind of trying to decide how to think about it. George Habash went along with it for a while. Later on, he changed his mind around it when he found out that it's causing too much trouble. But different people were trying to judge it in different ways. Now, normally, in the West, it's judged from a more or less extent point. That's usually what do the poor victims on a plane have to do with this? There are innocent civilians and so on. In the meantime, the PFLP was sending a different message. They were saying that our revolution is our moral compass. Actually, that was a famous speech by George Habash, too, some of the hijacked people. They would say, "We're not here to harm you. We're just going to make a spectacle of this whole thing. We're going to destroy a plane. We'll exchange you for prisoners, for whatever." But it creates a very difficult situation. On the one hand, a lot of people in the PFLP thought, "This is yielding fruit," because they raised the banner of chasing the enemy everywhere. That was the official political line under which these operations took place. But at the same time, and as the people that were saying this is adventurism and not political were saying, this was producing negative publicity for the Palestinian revolution. It was maybe not yielding the political results that some people would have liked to have yielded. That becomes the big debate around that particular tactic in that era. Zionism, of course, is a settler colonial project fundamentally about ethnically cleansing Palestine's indigenous people from the land. And yet, and yet, revealingly, so much of the dominant discourse around the so-called Israel-Palestine conflict, it's long been fixated on whether Palestinians will accept Jews' presence on their land, whether or not Palestinians have a genocidal orientation towards Jewish settlers. And it turns out, I think we've returned to a few times during that history, that has everything upside down. And in fact, a fantastic sort of colonial projection that we've seen historically from Algeria to South Africa. In Palestine, various Palestinian factions have taken different positions on this issue. But overwhelmingly, it has been Palestinians who have called for Jewish Arab coexistence, the coexistence of settlers and natives in Palestine. And it was in '68 that Fatah began to pivot towards framing Palestinian national liberation as entailing a secular democratic state for everyone. Jews included in historic Palestine. And if I have it right, it was the DFLP that was particularly interested in thinking through the place of Jewish settlers in a liberated democratic Palestine and also in relating to the Jewish left in Israel and around the world. How during this period did Palestinians debate and formulate theories of what a liberated Palestine would look like? So you had actually much of the conversation was taking place within Fatah, the significant conversation, because that's the biggest movement, the biggest party. And it actually does adopt a single democratic secular state program at a certain point out of the '68 process that you're referring to. So we have a situation where there is, first of all, a major conference hosted in Egypt in that period. And the Palestinians are represented in it. Fatah comes to it in particular. Abu'i'ad is there and Nabil Shah is there. These are two major Fatah figures. Nabil Shah, by the way, is very fluent in English, but also is very familiar with the Western world. He had the PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, he had participated in the civil rights movement in the United States, is from Gaza, but it comes from an experience of great exposure to different parts of the world. So he's in that conference and you have Abu'i'ad also, who's exploring the political waters, the conference was chaired by and what I said that. The conference was attended by European delegates from different movements, including quite a few Jewish communists and left his figures from Europe. And a big debate ensued because it was, you know, they were asking, okay, what, you know, they were saying they know that what happened in '67 was a big mistake. What about, what will happen then to the settlers that had come to the land and so on? What will happen to the Jews that exist on the land now? You know, they came as settler colonists, but they're there. And that actually, immediately, there was this response from Nabil Shah, but authorized by Abu'i'ad, it was, of course, the second person in Fatah, or the third person. I mean, it was part of the big triumvirate that was leading for that at the time. And the main orientation that he had authorized was, actually, we'll all live together in a secular and democratic space. And, you know, there's a big debate in Fatah circles on, it was that the moment that started, the democratic set, the secular state program, or was there another moment? There is another story from a leading Fatah figure at the time, who's happens to also be a good friend, Muhammad al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum al-Bum. He was representing Fatah and France. And they were having similar conversations in France. He would go to all these literary salons and so on. He had been sent, by the way, by the Algerians. They told, yes and out of fact, you guys need their representative in Europe. You can't just not have representative in Europe. So they selected them. He had been fed to representative in Algeria. They're like, "Bumidian told Arafat, I'm going to send Robert Batim, I'm with a Maison to France, will send them with an FLN representative, he'll introduce him to the entire FLN network there." And the first question that he was asked there was, "What are you going to do with the Salons?" Now, according to, I did an interview with him around this, actually both with them and with Nabi al-Sath, with the other encounter in Cairo. And both our major figures in growing up, this program on the Fatah. And so in my interview with him, he told me what I discovered is that we didn't have a political program around this. What we had was a dream of return and liberation. We had a will to do that and pursue that dream. And we had a set of strategies and tactics around it. But we didn't have a political program that would clearly articulate our policy towards the secular calmness. And that meant that this propaganda that we're just crazy, bloodthirsty people, that when I go and eradicate everybody there, was prevailing. Because there is no counter to that and there is no clear vision being proposed. So he says that he played a big role in pushing for that. So it's coming from multiple angles, but it's coming from conversations like that. And as Palestinians grapple with this, within Fatah and elsewhere, of course, within the left, like in DFLP, because that is a major leftist conversation ever. What are you going to do with settler colonial populations? Is a question that the left has posed and it has solutions for it. The leftist stance, traditionally, is you never advocate for eradicating anybody, even if they came under the umbrella of a horrific settler colonial project. You don't do it in South Africa, you don't do it in Zimbabwe, you don't even do it in the Americas. But what you do is you strive to create a reality of equality, of a different future, basically. And the democratic secular state became the formula for them. A major, major early milestone for the Palestinian armed struggle and for Fatah in particular took place in March 1968 in the town of Karama, Jordan. When Israeli forces attacking guerrilla positions there, suffered major losses inflicted by Fatah troops. And according to the reading, I did correct me if I'm wrong, more importantly, by Jordanian artillery, but it was a massive propaganda victory for Fatah and prompted a huge rush of new recruits, King Hussein, even of Jordan. At that time, famously said, we are all Medellin now, which is remarkable because Hussein's relationship with Palestinian guerrillas dramatically deteriorates in the coming months and years. But we'll get to that later. Explain the significance of the Battle of Karama and what it revealed about this early stage of the Palestinian Revolution and its trajectory. So as we mentioned earlier, after 1967, you have Fatah, the PFLP, other guerrilla formations, the Saika, they're all establishing bases in the Jordan Valley. The idea was that they were going to carry out operations now to liberate Palestine from there. If the previous attempts to liberate Palestine came from inside Palestine, from the West Bank towards 1948 areas now, it became centered on the Arab countries bordering Palestine, particularly Jordan, because it has a long 400 plus kilometer border with the Israeli state. Now, the town of Karama is in the Jordan Valley. It is primarily composed of Palestinian refugees, although, of course, it is in an area that has a strong East Banker, Jordanian tribal presence. There you have big Jordanian tribes on Dwan and others. There are the dominant forces there. So, and they, all of these, the social makeup there, was very much geared towards revolution. Everybody was upset over '67. There had been long-standing mobilization in these areas, even before, including in Karama camp. Now, Karama became particularly large hub for Fidai work, for the guerrilla action, for these liberation movements. And it became increasingly clear, rumors were beginning to spread that the Israelis were planning an attack on the town of Karama. So, this produces a set of discussions in the Palestinian local arena. Fatah, which was led by Yasser Arafat, has a discussion, an internal one. And they have even town hall meetings, even around this, at this stage. There's big conversations happening, you know. But Arafat, at his mindset, by the way, at this stage, he's like, we're going to fight. If they come, we're not going to withdraw. We're going to fight, no matter what. Because this is a moment where you need to fight, even if you're going to lose people. You need to show that there was an Arab force that did not withdraw, given the fact that all Arab forces withdrew in '67. And the victory will come out of not withdrawing and fighting. That's his conception of victory with this. So, that's one line that gets taken. On the other hand, you have Ahmad Jabril. He is heading the PFLP. And unlike Arafat, who is using a political measure for victory, and is thinking about this in purely political terms, Ahmad Jabril applies military logic. And the rest, of course, of the PFLP, including movement of Arab national figures, follow him on that. They're like, it does not make sense for guerrilla groups to stay stationary when you have a classical army attacking them. A formal army attacking them that has far superior equipments, air power, artillery, and so on. So, they're like, and they're right, by the way, by purely military logic. They're right. You know, if you're a guerrilla movement, you withdraw when there's a major offensive on the part of a military. You know, and in the meantime, you have a third force that was operating there, which is the PLA. They had a set of troops stationed there, and they actually decide not to withdraw. They remain, and they fight and they contribute. But the main core that's actually inside the town, and not on the outskirts, the PLA was on the outskirts, inside the town, it was fighter fighters. And, you know, I interviewed some of the few survivors that were left. Like, there's a guy that later becomes the governor of Bitla. I'm very fascinating character, because this guy looks like a Hollywood star. And, you know, there's a picture, a very famous picture of him. We have it on the front of the PLC Arab Lushion website, which I'm excited to announce will be launched now. It's finally up online. You know, there's a famous picture of him hanging out with Hamad Ali and the both tall, big, like, you know, strong, whatever. Good looking, whatever, man. So, you know, and this guy, though, was basically his name Salah Tam, and he was there. Very few survived, by the way, okay? And when you talk to the people there, they're like, we knew that we were going to die. That's it. Like, there was no way. But you're ready for it, and we're going to put up a fight. And indeed, they lost a hundred people in this, you know, from the Fidai side, from the Fidai side, which is a lot of fighters for them in this, in one battle like that. But they were able to put up a fight. Now, a crucial rule in this battle is played also by the Jordanian military units, especially the artillery units, that were stationed on the hills overlooking the Jordan Valley. And I think the geography is difficult to explain to people here, but for those that don't know what the Jordan Valley is, you have the river Jordan, it's in the lowest point of earth. It ends up like Karam is right next to that river, but it's minus 370 meters below sea level, okay? That's why the Dead Sea, you know, it flows into that. The incredible geography. But you have around it these high mountains on both sides. On the one hand, the top of the huge like mountain on the left side, you have Jerusalem, and the other side, you have Amman. And essentially, the Jordanian troops are stationed on one side, and they have artillery positioned there. Because if there is an Israeli attack that will ever be mounted on the on the east bank of the Jordan, i.e. on Jordan proper, and on the capital Amman, we'd have to go through that. So the head of the Jordanian army at the time was a man sympathetic to the Fidein. His name was Mashor Hadith al-Jazi, and he makes a decision on the spot to go and actually bombard the Israeli troops as they were attacking the Fidein units. And you know, there's a big debate in Jordan. Of course, later on, the King of Hussein claims that he authorized the decision and he gave the real light, but others don't believe that at all. They actually say it's Mashor Hadith al-Jazi. It took the initiative. This general comes and says, I'm, you know, he actually rejects orders to not attack Israeli forces and bombards. A reason why I'm un-dwelling on this, Daniel, is that there's a big debate on who won Karame, because Karame becomes so important at this stage. Yasser Arafat, he comes in and he capitalizes on it in a big way. He says, Fatah won Karame, you know, because they managed to, eventually the Israelis have to withdraw. They don't actually fight the territory. They cause a lot of damage, but they lose a lot of equipment and it gets, you know, some of their tanks and so on, gets paraded in a man, the damaged vehicles, it gets shown to the whole world. And a big media, you know, event is set around that and it gets covered widely in the press world. Why? You know, it's a big deal. And out of what, you know, uses that completely, invests this credit immediately. He's like, you know, we did it through determination, through not withdrawing, through fighting, to the very end, and so on. And immediately, Fatah expands. They get like 15,000 recruits, I mean, according to Abu Yadd, like, as members, it's like, in a few days, we get like 15,000 people like wanting to join up. Like, it's like, and of course, the numbers grow. Like, it's a huge amount. So people, everybody wants to join Fatah all of a sudden. They don't even have the capacity to absorb these people. And they start like really, really, really expanding exponentially at this stage, but also they anchor this principle that the Israeli army is possible to defeat. And the only way to defeat it is through organizing the guerrilla organizations that can carry out the work that the classical armies refuse to do. The revolution in Dofar was also a social revolution that transformed Dofari society, including very much the place of women in Dofari society. What sort of impact did the Palestinian revolution, and particularly this pivotal battle in Karama, have on the social aspects of the Palestinian revolution of women's place in Palestinian society and in the struggle, in particular? So Daniel, if the 1950s was a period of great expansion of women joining political parties, and we've alluded to that before, the ideological parties, especially through the schools, the high schools, and the teachers' training colleges, there was a massive expansion of women's involvement in politics in the '50s, the '60s, especially after the Battle of Karama, late '60s. So the involvement of women increasingly in armed struggle, that's one aspect of what happens. So, and it starts with modest beginnings, but it expands substantially over the next few years in the age of the Palestinian revolution. So you have a fascinating figure who responds to Karama at this stage, and she becomes the leader of the Fatah women's tonsim at this stage, which is Maisayr, a dear friend of mine, who passed away recently, and she was an incredible poet, and thinker, and writer, but also revolutionary. She had formerly been in the bath, started off briefly as a communist and joined the bath, and then many years later joined Fatah after Karama. So, in '67, she had gone through a deep depression, she had been banging ahead on the walls, that kind of thing, like being like, "What the hell?" And then when the Fatah started operating, she was like, "I want to join this." But all the major women's groups at the time were engaged in logistical work and in supply and support work. So, you know, they were suing clothes for the fighters, or providing medical aid and things like that, and she does respect that. I mean, I had long chats with her about this over the years. She respected that a lot, but in reality, she was like, "I don't enjoy that work. I hate suing. I hate cooking. I hate whatever. I want to be a fighter." So, eventually, actually, she does join, and she starts pushing alongside some other women who took a different approach to the traditional one and wanted to join as well. They began to push for training and starting women's involvement in Fatah work. And, of course, they complain many years later. I mean, a lot of them complained to me that, initially, they put a man in charge of them. Fatah Khadriu called Khadriu as well-known, left this together with him, Fatah. He comes also from Bath, his background. So, more socially open, let's say, than some of the ones that came from a Muslim brotherhood background at that stage. People like him, men like him, were actually interested in promoting this phenomenon. But still, the women were like, you know, the best they could do is put a man in charge, like it sucks. But it was a start. So, they started with 20 women, and they started training, but then expanded, expanded. Eventually, you started getting both. A greater activation of the main union of women, which had been founded as part of the PLO. One of the big achievements of the PLO in its mobilizational aspect was not just the creation of the PLA, but the creation also, or the diplomatic representative offices, but also the creation of popular organizations, but they called popular organizations and unions. So, there was a union for students, a union for women. The women's union was very strong, and the student's union was very strong, general union, and the workers' union, of course, was very strong. So, the women's union grew exponentially during this period. At the same time, women's arms struggle grew substantially in this period. And then you add also the emergence of local women's committees within the different parties, and I'll give you an example of Fate, similar things were happening in the PFLP. Iconic figures like Leila Khaled. Of course, yeah, and there were many others that you don't hear about, you know, but yes, Leila Khaled was the most famous, of course. This phenomenon, and of course, the DFLP has many women, Leila Khaled produces at this stage. That grows substantially after Khaled. That's another byproduct. Now, on the social level in Jordan, the transformations initially were not felt immediately, because the Jordanian experience under armed struggle organizations was three years. It was from '67 to 1970, maximum '71, you know, with the exit from Jerusalem. Whereas it really takes a deeper form in Lebanon, and in the Palestinian refugee camps there, the women's organizations started to have major impact, social impact there. I mean, in Jordan, they did also, they started many different programs. A lot of, they were dealing with a lot of issues. They were borrowing from different struggles. For example, you know, there was a man in one of the refugee camps that was known to be beating up his wife, and the women heard of that, by the same as women's union, unit like office decided that they're going to go and catch him, because they had heard that in the Vietnamese movement, the women would go and catch such a man and threaten him with the women punishing him in front of everybody. So they told him they'll do the same here, and he got scared to stop doing that. So you had incidents like that that were challenging different practices, of course, in feminist ways. But the depth of the experience in Lebanon, the revolution there lasted much longer, of course, and that allows for a deeper engagement on the social level. Let's turn to two major coups that took place in Arab countries during this period. First, in Iraq, then in Libya, both of which had important impacts on the Palestinian revolution. But let's start with, with Iraq, where we've spent a lot of time throughout this series. In 1968, the Baath Party took power in a coup led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakar and Saddam Hussein. We've extensively covered all the background to this period in prior episodes, but debriefly recap here. The Iraqi government led by Abdul Karim Qasim took power in a 1958 revolution that overthrew the British-aligned Hashimite monarchy. Qasim was then overthrown by a nationalist Baathist alliance coup in February 1963, which was followed by a brutal Baathist purge of Qasim's communist allies. But then, in November 1963, the nationalists turned on the Baathists and purged them. How did Baathists manage to seize power and to do so decisively in 1968? And then, what impact did the new Baathist regime, one that would last until the U.S. invasion in 2003? What impact did that have on the future of Iraq and on the region as a whole and in particular, on the Palestinian revolution? We cannot underestimate the impact of a major political change happening in a state like Iraq on the region as a whole, but also the Palestinian revolution and the Palestinian people. So, this coup took place after the '67 war. Post-67, you're bound to get major regional changes, Daniel, because this was another major defeat. It's a defeat that shook the regional map, but also it's a defeat that affected the old center of radical power in the region that has developed and rose to prominence throughout the 1950s, the center in being Cairo. So, the Baathists in Iraq saw this as an opportunity. They had the necessary strength in the army to carry it out. They were able to carry it out with a relatively smooth and bloodless outcome, although they engaged in a few spectacles of violence afterwards that showed trials and so on, that were geared to presenting to the world an image of radical response to '67. In terms of Iraq's orientation, what was important about this coup is that it initiated a greater attempt to cultivate on the long run closer relationships with the Soviet Union. So, that was one dimension of what was taking place after '68. But also, Iraq was entering into a set of arrangements where it was re-evaluating its entire regional position. Clearly, it was not working closely with Egypt at the stage. The Arab, the Salaam Arab government, was initially close to that direction. Of course, you know, the Rahman continued, you know, in along similar lines, but this was signaling some break from that. Not a complete one. It wasn't like total open hostility along the older lines that were initiated by Hadi Qayim Qasim, but it was a shift of sorts here. There was a competition with Syria that was bound to come out of this because this is a bath that was carrying out an action in another big country. It had taken over government in Iraq at a time when the old leadership of the bath in Syria was marginalized by the events in that country. And by a series of bathists, takeovers from the military wing. And this is the '66 bath military wing coup against the bath civilian leadership that brings Sala Jadid to power, just to orient listeners. Correct. And accumulated events that led to that were described by Manifarazaz, of course, as the bitter experience. That's what we call the East from the old leadership. You know, so there was that feeling on the part of the old leadership. So the new bathists were trying to signal well in Iraq, the new people that came to power, which are, you know, I said, but also his cousin Saddam Hussein behind the scenes was was now a major operator. You know, both of them were trying to signal that, look, we're the real bath. We honor the tradition of the old bath. We're bringing in this this leadership. So there was a general atmosphere regionally that that changed certain relationships between Iraq and Syria, Iraq and Egypt, but also between Iraq and the Soviet Union. There was a reshuffling taking place as a result of this, this, this coup. Now later on, of course, this had major precautions on the internal Iraq scene that we could talk about, you know, extensively. But one byproduct on the long run is that you had the consolidation of Saddam Hussein's power gradually throughout this, this period. He, he manages to insert himself and to acquire control over the main security organs and intelligence organs, which, of course, is where the power lies in a setting like this. So, and whoever takes control over these organs can determine overall policy in the long run. So, Saddam was increasingly emerging as the strong man in Iraq until, you know, by the close of the decade of the 1970s, he became the only man in Iraq and started. So that that initiates a total process that has its own logic. Well, we've got to see in perspective. And you cannot say that Iraq who changed the map in this school did not transform everything about Palestine, but it was going to play a role in the events of Black September and we'll, we'll get to that when we talk about it. The second coup was the Arab world's last nasser-inspired free officer coup, which takes place in 1969, when free officers overthrow the Libyan monarchy. What led these free officers led by Moamar Gaddafi? What led them to pull off this coup in the way that they did? And what was the coup's significance for the Arab world and for the Palestinian Revolution in particular? So, with Libya, we need to look at the background to this, you know, socially, there was a serious story behind this, this, this coup. You had a country that is very large geographically. Libya is a vast state, you know, by Arab and African standards. It's one of the biggest. It has an enormous Mediterranean coast and, you know, it has, it has fertile areas and of course a very large desert as well. But the main factor that transforms Libya landscape is that in 1959, you have enormous wealth beginning to pour in because, you know, Libya becomes a major energy producer. And the population is relatively small, despite the vast size and despite these major resources. Nevertheless, under monarchical rule, which was firmly allied to the West and flourishing under Western control, there was no clear national project that was able to consolidate the state in an effective way. And the development efforts were rather limited. Libya has diverse regions. There are two big, you know, regional blocks there. You can argue three, at least, you know, when it comes to the coastal areas. One is centered around the big city of Benrazi. And that's in the east, the other one is centered around Tripoli. There are areas in the center that also matter. And of course, there are areas in the south and the desert. If you wanted to have a functioning national formula, you needed to consolidate all of these regions. You also needed to account for tribal diversity, kinship networks do matter in that setting, and they're part of the story. It would have required a very strong and active nation building project, a national identity project. And that was rather weak in this period. Now, amongst the army, you had a great deal of discontent building up. And certainly, the '67 war did not help from an archical perspective on this front. There was a feeling of alienation from government in relation to its alignment with the Western dominant powers at a time when you had a very strong narcissist current, you know, certainly, you know, up till the '67 war. So the Libyan army, like other armies in the region, ended up having free officers formation operating within it. And this formation, in a way, could be seen as both a reflection of the failure of a nation-building program under monarchical auspices that would produce loyalty to the monarch, as well as failure of a more comprehensive development policy that could serve such a program. So this, coupled with the ideological dimension and the resentment towards imperialist alignment can explain why this phenomenon happened. Now, at the heart of this was an officer named Muammar Khadafi, who later on kept on emphasizing that, you know, I'm not the president of this project. You know, he was kept on signaling that, you know, this is a broader popular movement of sorts. He assumed the title, the brother leader of the revolution rather than president or so on. He did not like that set of titles. Although in the long run, by the way, he got into this fanciful idea of being the king of kings of Africa that was, he later styled himself that. So in a different phase of his life, he got all the monarchs of the African continent to meet, and obviously he financially contributed to that and did a fanciful ceremony in which he was announced as that. But initially, you know, it was trying to signal that this is an egalitarian project. This is very important for people to know when they're thinking of this from a radical perspective. Initially, Khadafi is not a fan of communism. He is very much a nationalist, a fan seeing himself following on the footsteps of G'amal Abdan Nasser, confronting imperialism and so on. And, you know, one of the statements that Khadafi was most proud of is that initially when he made this move, Nasser said famously, "I see in you my youth," he addressed him in that. Like, you know, I'm sure Nasser, by the way, the method that he later on would have retracted that statement because they are very different characters. Khadafi is much more whimsical and he has a more random pattern. Although, of course, it's not the character or the world leader that, you know, sometimes you read about in the West, there are explanations for people like that. But he did have a very set of problematic policies, and he was definitely somebody who engaged in different aspects of consolidation of power that had, you know, that led to the trials of freedoms and to arbitrary arrests and the loss of many political and civil rights in Libya in the long run. From a Palestinian perspective, what this meant was the fall of a state that was regionally aligned to the West, the main development that occurred as a result of this, is that on the long run, this became a source of resource mobilization and funding for various Palestinian groups at various moments. More often than not, these groups were ones that had to demonstrate some form of loyalty to Khadafi. They did not tend to be, by the way, the main group, which is Fatah, you know, often Khadafi, you know, he supported a wide range of groups over the course of his long career, but one of the biggest beneficiaries actually was a group that we alluded to earlier in the episode, which was Ahmad Jibreel's split from the popular front, you know, Ahmad Jibreel after the experiences of the popular front in 1968, and Karame, and so on. He, you know, as he was observing the internal struggles that were happening with the movement of nationalist, he ends up forming a split called the the popular front liberation Palestine General Command, the PFLBGC, which became closely aligned with the Syrians, actually, but received a good amount of funding and weapons from Khadafi, including some very advanced weapons, relatively speaking, you know, there was surface-to-air missiles and so on, during the siege of Beirut, that would became very beneficial, but the PFLBGC had more weapons that it could use at that stage. So Khadafi became a center for resource mobilization, but it was very whimsical. He was promoting a strange ideology that our listeners might want to Google, an ideology that he called, "Nadriyal al-Aemiyya 33rd world theory," not referring to the third world. It's the third theory, basically, the third international theory, you know, so, and that outlook of his, he was saying basically that you have capitalism, you have communism, and then you have the third world theory that he was coming up with, and it was articulated in the green book, of course, which he authored that includes many different reflections on various subjects, some of them quite strange, like, for example, the chapter on the social question relating to women starts by asserting that man is male and woman is female, but then, like, it goes on to say that they are equal, but there's differences because women get periods of men, like, it's like, that's the kind of, and actually, by the way, this is, I'm kind of saying it, verbatim, that's literally, so, but on a more serious note, he did fancy himself as initiating some forms of socialism, and there were some interesting policies that had a progressive bent to them, but it never went, like, fully really socialist, like, he thought he was doing popular committees model, for example, and he would do things like housing, some progressive housing policies, like, he'd say, like, okay, you can't evict somebody, they'll have a house, there were things, elements like that, but there was always another twist to it that never made it fully, you know, progressive when it comes to the social, outcomes. There are some echoes of early bothisms, attempt to find a third way between a purely bourgeois nationalism and communism or socialism. Can I be honest with you, well, I should be honest with you, obviously, and the listeners, I could never take the green book as seriously as anything written by any other, by political parties in the suite. In my assessment as a historian, there's no clear logic, and Gaddafi is thinking, it is what you could call, like, a milkshake approach to political theory. It is not a real political theory, like, it's just like, let's just put a bunch of ingredients in there, mix it up, and a lot of it had to do with him signaling that he's an intellectual, like, it's a form of political literature, somebody should write about this, like, a book about that kind of political literature, the great leader type of political literature, you know, later on, Turkmen Pashi comes up with stuff like that, others, you know, and it's different than, let's say, great leader literature that operated within a Marxist context, because you had that in Albania, around the Enver-Hudja, for example, or you had that in North Korea, but that kind of literature, although it's narcissistic and it's strange, it still has enough of a connectivity to Marxist theory, because there is an actual, you know, tradition in which it could be anchored at some level, despite, you know, eccentricity of the author, or, but with Gaddafi, and, you know, I think not enough has been done on intellectual history on that kind of phenomenon, I think somebody should, it's not going to be me, by the way, but I don't think it would be right to put it on the same footing as genuine attempts in established movements like the Bath to find the sense of praxis. The other thing that is to be remembered here is that this is very much an individual intellectual model. It is not based on a movement having internal debates within it and trying to find the pathway. So, and that's always very different. In 1969, the PLO underwent a really dramatic transformation, becoming a Palestinian-led national liberation organization made up of the Palestinian factions led by the largest and most powerful faction, FATA. How did FATA end up taking control of the PLO and why was it that FATA took over the PLO, not by themselves, which they may have had the strength to do, but instead, by bringing a large number of rival Palestinian factions with them? Yes. So, after '67, there was in the '67 war, there was a crisis that took place between Ahmad al-Shukhari and Gamal al-Abd al-Nasa. And the crisis had to do with the response to the war. I mean, the region was undergoing a set of transformations that were clear. The PLO was not ready for these transformations. Before 1967, Egyptians needed a Palestinian body that would be representative and that could contribute to the stability of the regional order that they were trying to build around Egypt's priorities. So, which meant that they needed a Palestinian body that would not, for example, instigate armed operations in the here and now. But that could have a representative capacity and maybe build long-term military capacity that could be utilized later. And the PLO was perfect for that. And it was perfect for that. That was precisely the reason why the PLO was critiqued at the time. It was critiqued as a set of bureaucracies that are connected to the Arab regimes. Maybe that was unfair, but that was a critique that people, in fact, and other underground clandestine movements were making in relation to it. Now, once the '67 war happened, Nasser as a crisis, first of all, the classical armies were not able to defend not only what was left of Palestine, but even their own regional borders in relation to the Israeli state. So, a bit of guerrilla action or a lot of it in this context was not in contradiction with the overall policy that Nasser was trying to promote. And that guerrilla action was going to happen anyways. Nasser understood that. It became clear it was going to take forms that were impossible to control, even if he wanted to control them. Because the overall state structure in the region that could repress Palestinian guerrilla groups that had existed before had been weakened at least temporarily. So, there was a vacuum that allowed for a flourishing ecosystem to develop around Palestinian armed struggle. So, the solution for Nasser was, "I need to find a way to have a PLO that unites the old guerrilla groups, which had operated underground in the past, with the existing structure that was more bureaucratic that came about under Sukhari. And in the meantime, internally within the Palestinian arena, there was a lot of movement against Sukhari's leadership because they were saying, "Well, the PLO did not do its job here adequately. It basically needs to be revolutionized." And there needs to be a connection between the guerrilla movements now, they need to take charge because they're the ones that are going to liberate Palestine. Talk will not liberate Palestine. And a lot of the critics now that was directed at Sukhari was actually focusing on his main point of pride, which was his eloquence, and his usage of classical Arabic in his speeches. So, a lot of the attacks on him at the time were like, "Well, he keeps making these very fancy speeches and ornate language while actually not engaging in real fighting. In the meantime, the Fidai movements are putting their lives at risk on the field." So, it was a compelling set of arguments. Anyways, there were also internal problems inside the PLO itself and inside the PLO executive committee. There were major contradictions. We can go into the micro dynamics. I will talk about them, by the way, in the book that I'm writing now, I talk about them extensively. But listeners do not need to know about this right now. It's too much. But the honest truth is there was the 67th created such pain and confusion and a sense of a need for a new beginning that these people in the executive committee were also saying, "Look, we need to incorporate the guerrilla movements into the formula, and we need to rethink what the PLO is." Now, let me tell Mr. Arafat is trying to intervene. And he now has the credit of being the biggest movement that has armed operations on the ground. And after Karama, his credits even go up, up, up, up. That was his most brilliant political intervention in the Palestinian political arena. He went to seize the moment, and he knew how to make his movement the number one movement in the arena, because he seized the initiative immediately. And he invested the stock he got out of the Karama battle in major ways, politically. Now, he also played it smart, because he knew that there's a regional arena around him. And that the Palestinian arena was not going to be emptied out of formations that will be connected to other regional states. But also, the Palestinian arena will continue to have ideological divisions, particularly between the two biggest wings of the movement, which are fatter and the movement of Arab nationalists. So, his approach to this was, "Okay, we'll enter the PLO and we'll reshape the PLO as an organization effectively representing the fighting forces on the ground," which is a criteria that meant that you had to have, by the way, to be a member now of the PLO. You had to have some fighting capacity on the ground, you had to have a guerrilla movement on the ground, you had to have a Finay presence. This is a new rule that gets introduced in this moment. And it also meant that essentially, the PLO becomes an organization representing the entirety of these fighting forces on the ground. And to understand this in abstract terms, the PLO now was drawing on what they call revolutionary legitimacy. If in its initial phase, it drew upon regional legitimacy, as in their Arab states came and it was legitimate because they authorized its formation, and they said, "We recognize this representative body." This new phase in the PLO's life was saying, the legitimacy will not be derived now politically from the recognition of Arab states. It will be derived from the fact that the structure represents those groups that are active and engaged in armed struggle on the ground and in revolutionary struggle on the ground. And this is a significant transformation that tells you something also about the political moment, about how important and how popular the idea of revolutionary struggle became now, Fidai's struggle. I mean, you mentioned earlier Daniel King Hussein's reference after Karame. You know, he said that we are all Fidai in. He was also calling himself the first Fidai, you know, Fidai because they have that thing in these settings in Jordan. They call him the first sportsman and the first, you know, so reality, Fidai, you know, it signaled that even the king who was in contradiction structurally with these movements had to yield to this notion because of the popularity of him. So, what Mar does, or yes Arfath is on the guard, of course. He engages in building a coalition then that would initiate this process. And so he reaches out to those groupings that did not belong to his competitors, you know, because he needs partners in this. And eventually he carries out this process with the support of the Bathys and Sayaka with a collection of smaller movements, you know, they initiate the initial transformation of the PLO. Later on, and this becomes a big aspect of the next phase of the PLO's history, the question of the absorption of the PFLP becomes a big internal question on the agenda. And there was a lot of, you know, ebbs and flows in there. Sometimes a PL, a PFLP would be like we're sending delegates, but we're freezing our membership, okay. And other times it'd be like, yeah, we're fully participating. So it became a constant process. But what was the main characteristic of the process from 1969 onwards is that yes, Arfath was able to implement there a situation where Fata was the party that had the greatest amount of seeds because it was the biggest, but also it could draw upon independence, it could draw upon also in the passing national council. But in the executive committee and the higher, you know, ranks of the executive side of the PLO there requires party formation or movement formation to be represented in it, he was drawing on a coalition of forces. That was the 14th episode of Flowera, the Diggs series on 20th century Arab politics with Abdel Rezaktukriti, who teaches history at Rice University, a scholar of Arab and Palestinian revolutionary movements. He's the author of Republicans, sultans and empires in Oman, and the co-author of the Palestinian Revolution Digital Humanities website, a really amazing resource that will be back online really, really soon. Stay tuned, we will announce it here. Thank you for listening to The Dig from Jakob and Magazine. As Marx once said after noting that, revolutions are the locomotives of history. While other podcasts have only interpreted the world in various ways, our point is to change it. We're posting new episodes every week. The Dig was produced by Alex Lewis, our associate producer is Jackson Roach, music by Jeffrey Brodsky. Our communications coordinator is Sylvia Atwood. Our senior advisors are Theoreo Frankos and Ben Maby. Check out our vast archives and newsletters at TheDigRadio.com. Follow us on Twitter and also now Instagram at TheDigRadio and find us wherever you get podcasts and subscribe to this podcast. If it's on iTunes or wherever, also please leave us a great review. Those reviews help introduce us to new listeners. So does telling your friends, please make propaganda for us. And do find us at patreon.com and make a monthly or annual contribution to keep this operation up and running strong. Even a few bucks is huge.