Poster of Palestinian martyr Abu Ali Mustafa. Photo: Samidoun.
By Samidoun – Aug 27, 2024
Today, August 27, 2024, we mark the 23rd anniversary of the assassination of Palestinian revolutionary and national leader Abu Ali Mustafa by Zionist occupation forces, using US-made and US-provided missiles fired from a helicopter, in a bloody illustration of the alliance of Zionism and imperialism that is amplified today in the genocidal Zionist assault on Gaza, armed with US-made and US-sponsored weaponry. The General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Ali Mustafa was targeted in his office in occupied Al-Bireh, Palestine, as part of the systematic mechanism of assassination that continues to characterize the attacks on the leading martyrs: Ismail Haniyeh, Fouad Shukr, Saleh al-Arouri, and so many others. Abu Ali Mustafa has become a symbol of resistance, Palestinian unity, and confrontation of the occupation. He is known for his famous words when entering Palestine: “We return to resist, not to compromise.”
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network salutes Abu Ali Mustafa: a popular, revolutionary leader of the Palestinian liberation movement who remained committed to the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinian people, and the liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea, until his last moment. He continued his work, even though he knew that he was targeted, because he was determined to never abandon the cause of the people, resisting and struggling in the Al-Aqsa Intifada and developing the struggle after the devastation of Oslo.
Pan-Arab struggler of the Palestinian working class
Abu Ali Mustafa was a son of the Palestinian popular classes, born in 1938 in Arraba, Jenin, Palestine. He left school in the third grade and worked as a boy in the factories of Haifa before and during the Nakba and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. At the age of 17, he joined the Arab Nationalist Movement founded by Dr. George Habash (al-Hakim), Wadie Haddad, Abu Maher al-Yamani (himself a labour leader), Basil al-Kubaisi, Ahmad al-Khatib, Hani al-Hindi, and their comrades and played a leading role in the ANM of the 1950s and 1960s.
He was committed to the vision of pan-Arab liberation and resistance to Zionism and confronted the imperialist-aligned Jordanian regime, which banned political parties and acted to defend the interests of imperialism in the region at the expense of the Palestinian people and the Arab people as a whole. He was arrested and sentenced by a Jordanian military court for his organizing and spent 5 years behind Jordanian bars. Throughout his life, he was committed to the liberation of the prisoners from Zionist, imperialist, and reactionary regimes’ prisons, recognizing the use of imprisonment as a tool of colonial control aimed to target the liberation movement.
Developing the Palestinian revolution
Abu Ali was finally released from Jordanian prison in 1961 and was responsible for the northern district of the West Bank of Palestine before he joined with his comrades in establishing the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, following al-Naksa, in 1967. The PFLP reshaped the Arab Nationalist Movement along Marxist-Leninist lines for the mobilization of Palestinian, Arab, and international forces toward the defeat of Zionism, reactionary forces, and imperialism.
In the context of this struggle, Abu Ali Mustafa played a key role from the earliest days in developing the PFLP and in developing the Palestinian liberation movement. He was always active behind the scenes and did not seek the spotlight; thus, he was well-placed to establish the underground organizations of the Front. In 1965, he attended the Egyptian military course for officers at the Anshas school and then dedicated the skills he acquired to building the Palestinian military resistance. He led some of the earliest guerilla patrols to cross the Jordan river into the West Bank, working to coordinate resistance activities throughout occupied Palestine without being detected.
He struggled throughout years of exile in the resistance, from the battles in Jordan against the attacks of imperialist-backed monarchy to the Palestinian camps of Lebanon. He became the military leader of the Front in Jordan until 1971 and commanded its forces before leaving for Lebanon in July 1971. In 1972, he became the deputy general secretary of the PFLP, a position he served in for many years while continuing his work of building its organizations and military capacity.
Throughout his life, he was renowned for his caring, humbleness, and sincerity. He loved his family, spoke with the people, and integrated the experiences and ideas of the Palestinian popular classes to further deepen his leadership and action.
Returning to resist, not to compromise
He returned to the occupied West Bank of Palestine in 1999—to his place of birth, Arraba, Jenin. He expressed clearly that his return to Palestine was accompanied by a very clear commitment to resistance and liberation, including, particularly, the armed resistance. In 2000, at the sixth congress of the PFLP, Abu Ali Mustafa was elected general secretary of the Front. His presence as a principled national leader in occupied Palestine was not a concession to the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo framework but served as a challenge to the so-called “peace process”—and this is why he was targeted for assassination. Over 50,000 Palestinians marched in his funeral in central Ramallah.
As a response to the targeted assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, the PFLP elected its general secretary Ahmad Sa’adat—today imprisoned in Zionist jails and one of the leadership figures of the imprisoned Palestinian resistance, alongside Abdullah Barghouthi, Marwan Barghouthi, Ibrahim Hamed, Abbas al-Sayyed, Hassan Salameh, and over 9,500 Palestinian prisoners—and targeted the notoriously racist Zionist tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi several weeks later, on October 17. Of course, Ze’evi was widely known and notorious for his demands for the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The successful assassination of Ze’evi sent a clear message from the Palestinian resistance–that the Israeli assassination policy would not be tolerated and that an assassination of Palestinian leaders would be met with an equal response. This project remains critical today as Hezbollah responds to the assassination of Fouad Shukr (Sayyed Mohsen) and as the entire alliance of resistance forces in the region awaits the coming response to the Zionist assaults on Yemen, the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, and the ongoing Zionist/imperialist genocide in Gaza.
Confronting, resisting, and defeating the assassination policy
The assassination policy of the Zionist project has always been part of a comprehensive project of elimination targeting the leaders, organizers, and revolutionary voices of the Palestinian pople and their liberation movement. Abu Ali Mustafa’s name is joined with that of Fathi Shiqaqi, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin Abu Jihad, Kamal ‘Udwan, Mohammed Yousef al-Najjar, Kamal Nasser, Wadie Haddad, Ghassan Kanafani, Mohammed Boudia, Basil al-Araj, Imad Mughniyyeh, Samir Kuntar, Saleh al-Arouri, Ismail Haniyeh, and many more. This assassination policy includes the attacks on the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, from Ibrahim al-Rai, killed under torture, to the systematic denial of medical care to Sheikh Khader Adnan, martyred after 86 days of hunger strike, to Walid Daqqah, killed behind bars through the policy of “slow killing” through medical neglect. This policy has become particularly and vividly institutionalized in the post-October 7 era of the Al-Aqsa Flood, as the Zionist regime targets prisoners for starvation and brutality inside its colonial prisons, as well as in the notorious concentration camp of Sde Teiman, where Palestinians abducted from Gaza are subjected to the most severe forms of torture, abuse, sexual assault, starvation, and murder.
The heroic Al-Aqsa Flood changed the world and has exposed the horrors of Zionism and imperialism to all, as the brave resistance fighters chart new epics of confrontation on a daily basis. Perhaps never before have Abu Ali Mustafa’s words, “No to zionism, no to surrender….we are fighting an enemy that has attacked humanity,” rung more clearly and truly. From the heart of Gaza, the red triangle of the resistance fighters has become the international symbol of resistance and steadfastness, making clear that it is possible and indeed inevitable to defeat such a vicious, colonial, and anti-human enemy. From Yemen to Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, to Iran and beyond, the resistance front is more unified than ever, confronting the unified forces of the Zionist regime and its imperialist backers, with the United States at the forefront, alongside Germany, France, Britain, Canada, and fellow imperialist forces.
From the response to the assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa on October 17, 2001, to the battles of the Unity of the Fields and the Revenge of the Free, to the great and glorious Al-Aqsa Flood, to the battle against the genocidal Zionist regime, it is quite clear that the Palestinian resistance will not relent under the assassination policy. They have never killed the resistance and will never succeed in doing so; instead, the Palestinian people, their revolution and their resistance, brings forth new leaders and fighters at the forefront of struggle, until return and liberation—a liberation that, despite the devastation, the war crimes, the genocidal rampages of the Zionist regime and its imperialist co-conspirators, is closer than ever before.
Abu Ali Mustafa was known throughout his life as an organizer and a builder of organizations. Thus, it is appropriate that many institutions have been named to honor him after his martyrdom, from schools and sports clubs to the armed wing of the Popular Front, which continues to fight today as part of the armed resistance to genocide in Gaza, reflecting his wide-ranging legacy in the Palestinian liberation struggle.
This legacy lives on in the Palestinian, Arab, and international revolutionary organizations and movements and the people, always his compass, who continue to struggle for the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea, for the return of the refugees, for the defeat of Zionism, for the uprooting of imperialism from the region and the world. These strugglers lead and fight so heroically from behind bars, under siege and in exile, despite all the internal and external difficulties that are being imposed upon them, confronting the forces of imperialism, Zionism, and Arab reaction, as Abu Ali Mustafa did throughout his life.
He said: “We are all targets as soon as we start mobilizing. We do our best to avoid their weapons but we live under the brutal Zionist occupation of our lands, and their army is only a few meters away from us…We have a job to do, and nothing will stop us.”
The legacy of Abu Ali Mustafa must inspire us all to action: to support the prisoners in their struggle, to fight back against imperialism, to organize to bring an end to the assassination policy, and to confront the genocidal Zionist regime and its imperialist partners and sponsors everywhere: to march, to take direct action, to organize for their defeat. Most fundamentally, Abu Ali Mustafa, a truly revolutionary Palestinian national leader, firmly upheld the Palestinian and Arab resistance, making clear that the people say “No” to normalization and negotiations, their eyes fixed on return and liberation.
When we act and organize on the path of Abu Ali Mustafa and his fellow resistance leaders targeted for assassination and imprisonment, from Basil al-Kubaisi and Ghassan Kanafani to Fathi Shiqaqi, Fouad Shokr, and Ismail Haniyeh, we make clear that the assassination policy will never succeed in defeating the Palestinian people and the Palestinian, Arab, and international liberation movement. This anniversary is not merely a historical occasion but a call to action at an urgent moment for the Palestinian liberation movement, a call to to act together with the Palestinian people and their resistance, to stand with the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, to confront the genocidaires with our growing movement everywhere, and to realize the vision of Abu Ali Mustafa and of the Palestinian people. It is a call for victory and for the liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.
(Samidoun)
