Communist Party of Palestine
The Communist Party of Palestine (Arabic: الحزب الشيوعي الفلسطيني al-ḥizb ash-shuyū‘ī al-falasṭīnī) is one of the oldest continuously active political parties in Palestine, founded in 1914. Since 1971, the Communist Party of Palestine has officially supported the ruling Palestinian Regional Branch of the Ba'ath Party as part of the National Progressive Front coalition holding seats in the Palestine Arab Congress.
History[edit | edit source]
The Communist Party of Palestine was established on 19 July after the start of the First World War. Under the wartime Ottoman authorities, the party was banned and hundreds of its members imprisoned. During this period until the end of the war in 1918, the Communist Party served as one of the premier organizations coordinating armed resistance to Ottoman authorities, as well as civil resistance to such campaigns as confiscation of property allegedly in support of the war effort and conscription of Palestinians into the Ottoman military. Unlike other local nationalist factions resisting Ottoman authority during World War I, however, the Communist Party upheld a policy of neutrality concerning the parties to the conflict, expressly stating the antipathy of Palestinian workers and peasants to British or allied rule as an alternative. In fact, the party went so far as refusing any physical or financial support from the Allies even in direct support of Palestinian liberation. During the Arab Revolt against Ottoman authorities in Palestine in the final year of the war, the Arab uprising was encouraged by the British who promised Palestinian independence following Ottoman capitulation, with the Communist Party of Palestine's militias the only forces to reject this offer, citing imperialist opportunism and its track record of broken promises. Following the war, the Palestinian communists' position was vindicated, and the British promised exposed for the lies they were, when Palestine was placed under the authority of a British-controlled "mandate" (for all purposes a colonial regime) supervised nominally by the fledgling League of Nations, in place of the independence guaranteed to the people of Palestine in exchange for their cooperation with the Allies against the Ottomans.
Under the British mandate, the Communist Party of Palestine was also illegal, although not subject to the same level of physical repression as that visited upon the party by Ottoman authorities during the war. Nonetheless, several dozens of the party's senior members were arrested over the course of the mandate's three decades-long existence, many of whom were convicted of conspiracy against the mandatory administration and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. The outbreak of the Second World War in late 1939 caused a shift in policy of communist parties around the globe, calling on governing and oppositional communist parties to form the broadest possible fronts with all leftist, petty-bourgeois and even bourgeois parties in opposition to fascism; this change of tactic was taken up by the Communist Party of Palestine with firm resolve. Following the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in mid-1941, which unexpectedly saw Britain allied with the Soviets, the Communist Party of Palestine was legalized, and experienced a significant increase in membership near the end of the Second World War.
