Red Star Over Palestine: Intifada

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🗓️ 31 May 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

For many years, Palestine had one of the strongest left-wing movements in the Arab world, represented by prominent figures such as Emile Habibi, Leila Khaled, and Ghassan Kanafani. At the beginning of the First Intifada in the 1980s, Palestinian left groups were still the main challengers to the hegemony of Fatah, although the Left has lost much of its influence in the period since then.

Red Star Over Palestine: Histories of the Palestinian Left is a six-part series from Long Reads exploring radical movements and progressive organizations of the region. We examine the experience of Palestinian communism and the left-wing currents inside the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization. We also look at the outsized impact of the Left on Palestinian cultural life.

Our fifth episode focuses on the period from the First Intifada, arguably the high-point of the Palestinian left-wing movement, to the Oslo Accords.

Red Star Over Palestine is hosted by Daniel Finn and produced by Conor Gillies. Music provided by Fadi Tabbal.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Daniel Finn, on the Features Editor for Jacobin, and I host the Long Reeds
0:08.5	podcast for Jacobin Radio.
0:11.4	This is the fifth episode of a series called Red Star Over Palestine, History to the Palestinian Left.
0:19.3	We ended our last episode with the Israeli attack on Beirut in
0:23.6	1982. The PLO agreed to withdraw its forces from the city after a US diplomat promised that
0:31.2	Palestinian civilians would be safeguarded. But Israeli troops moved in shortly afterwards
0:36.5	to supervise a massacre of several thousand people in the refugee camps by their Lebanese allies.
0:42.3	Today in the camps of Sabra and Shatilla, a large plot of unmarked graves, bears witness to those who died in the massacre.
0:49.3	This report comes from ITN.
0:51.3	After the initial shock, the Palestinians are terrified of more killings.
0:56.0	Men, women and children fled Shatila this morning, after reports the right-wing Christian
1:00.6	militia, the Falange, who've been blamed for the killings, had moved armed men back into
1:05.6	their area.
1:07.0	At Sabra, they dug out 150 more bodies today.
1:10.4	Red Cross workers say there will be many others.
1:12.6	They say that the killers have gone to great lengths to bury the evidence of what happened.
1:16.6	Hysterical women who survived the massacre have refused to leave, and their wailings have not stopped since the shootings.
1:23.6	Many of the victims are said by the Red Cross to have been buried in mass graves, but there are conflicting reports about the extent of mutilations to some of the corpses.
1:32.3	The Israelis said yesterday that they had ordered a major withdrawal of their forces from the refugee camps,
1:38.3	leaving the work to the relief organisations, the civil defence and the Lebanese army.
1:43.3	But after the reports today that the Falange were in the Shatilla camp once more,
1:47.7	Israeli tanks moved back into the Palestinian areas to support Lebanese army units.
	...

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