The memoirs of Ali Abumghasib

Ali Abumghasib knows little about the current intrigues of the Fateh movement or, perhaps, he is just not interested.

Although he has dedicated most of his life fighting within its ranks, he never saw his membership in Fateh as his defining identity. For him, it was, and will always remain, about Palestine and nothing else.

Now living in an old, rusty and tiny caravan somewhere in Gaza, Abumghasib has no money, no family, but also no regrets.

We spoke at length about his life. He wanted to share his story, and I wanted to understand what went wrong in what was once Palestine’s leading movement.

Now that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, who is also head of Fateh, is fighting an open and covert war to keep his party together, Fateh is facing yet another crisis.

The current struggle to inherit one of the two largest political movements in Palestine (the second being Hamas) promises to be dirty, especially since the old guard is losing its grip as a younger, more vibrant, generation is ready to step in and take over long overdue power.

A split within Fateh could mean the partial or total collapse of the PA, which is dominated by Fateh members.

When right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently ordered his government to prepare for the possible collapse of the PA, Fateh leaders immediately took notice, dismissing Netanyahu’s claims and asserting that everything is still under control.

But this is not the same Fateh that Abumghasib had fought for or, more precisely, fought within, because for the 65-year-old man with failing health and marks of torture that can be traced all over his body, Fateh was a mere platform that allowed him to fight Israel, with the promise that his struggle would take him, and a million other refugees, back to their villages and homes in Palestine.

Since he joined Fateh’s military bases in Jordan, in 1968, refugees have not returned; their numbers now exceed the 5 million mark.

Concurrently, Fateh morphed to become the PA, whose very survival is dependent on Israeli political support and the West’s financial handouts.

Abumghasib is a Palestinian bedouin, from the nomadic tribes that lived in the Bir Al Saba region in Palestine.

In 1948, his family lost everything. His father became a squatter on the land of some Gaza feudalist, herding a few sheep in a pitiful attempt to survive.

Ali, who was born in 1951, ran away from home just months after Israel occupied the Gaza Strip (and the rest of historic Palestine) in 1967, without even informing his parents of his decision.

The parents died as poor refugees in Deir Al Balah, in central Gaza, without ever going back to Palestine, without ever seeing Ali again, and without their pride.

This may seem like a typical refugee story, but it is far from that.

For, Abumghasib’s odyssey that followed was compelled not only by circumstances but also by choices that for the rest of us may seem extraordinary.

From Gaza, he sneaked through the “death zone” border area to Israel, then to the occupied West Bank, where he hid in the Hebron hills before being smuggled by a tribe that escaped the war to Jordan.

There, he joined Fateh and, only months later, enlisted in his first mission, code-named the “Green Belt”.

The daring operation represented the rise of Fateh, following the collapse of the Arab armies in the 1967 war.

But the sudden collapse of pan-Arabism, following the “Naksa” or “Setback” of 1967, ushered in the rise of Palestinian nationalism, led by Arafat, George Habash and others who took charge of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and began articulating a unique, unprecedented Palestinian discourse.

The new struggle for Palestine had shifted from seeing Palestine primarily as an Arab priority to one that was essentially Palestinian.

Although Arafat is often remembered for signing the Oslo Peace Accords with Israel, which led to the rupture of Palestinian unity and the breakdown of the entire national liberation project, Abumghasib remembers him as the man who managed to restore Palestinian hope after the defeat of 1967.

To assert the rise of the new war of liberation, a guerrilla warfare, by the logic of that period was a must, and Abumghasib fought many battles so that Fateh and the PLO could make it clear to Israel that sealing the fate of Palestinian refugees was far from over.

In the “Green Belt”, Abumghasib and 39 other fighters selected from four factions infiltrated Israel from the Jordanian border, killing several soldiers and capturing two in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners.

However, the real rise of Fateh was truly marked in Karameh Battle in 1968, in which the Jordanian army, together with various PLO factions, took part.

True, the Israelis destroyed most of the PLO camps at the Jordan border, but were driven out in what, unexpectedly, turned into an all-out war.

Abumghasib fought that war too and remembers how the morale of the fighters, despite their heavy losses, changed overnight.

Soon, however, the empowered PLO factions found themselves in another all-out war, this time against the Jordanian army.

The outcome was devastating, not just because it saw the death of thousands and the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, but the capture of Abumghasib himself.

Injured in the war, Ali was sentenced to death and was held in Al Jafr desert prison before he escaped to Syria.

There was, indeed, a time when Fateh and Hafez Assad’s regime got along just fine, but that was a short phase in what later became quite a tumultuous relationship between Fateh and the Assads throughout the years.

Abumghasib had fought since he was a teenager, and spent most of his life either in battle (as a member of Fateh) or in prison.

In all the Arab jails where he was held prisoner, he was a guest in Syrian dungeons the longest, staying a total of 10 years.

In his last prison stint he was held, along with 80 other people, in a four by four-metre prison cell. Following the Syrian uprising that turned into war, he was deported to Lebanon.

That was the same Lebanon where Abumghasib fought the Israelis, and also fought the Phalange Christians.

After the PLO left Jordan, Lebanon became the new battlefield. But Lebanon’s protracted conflicts made it an unsuitable host for the PLO.

In 1975, Fateh-led PLO factions were at the heart of Lebanon’s civil war, triggered partly by the Phalange massacre in Ein Al Rumaneh, where nearly 50 Palestinian children were ambushed and murdered.

The details of that dirty war are as fresh in Abumghasib’s memory as if it had happened recently. His anger is still palpable, as is his defence of the PLO conduct there.

Despite old age, failing health and the awful scars of bullets and torture marks, Abumghasib insists that if he were to have the chance again, he would fight the Israelis with the same enthusiasm as a young man.

In fact, when the Lebanese deported him to Egypt in 2014, and the Egyptians deported him to Gaza a few days later, he tried to volunteer with the Gaza resistance.

The young man respectfully declined.

Ali is handsome, but dishevelled, with a bushy beard, missing teeth and many wrinkles. When he walks, his left foot seems to drag behind him as if it were connected to his torso by mere skin.

Abumghasib may seem like a relic of a bygone era. 

But the fact is that he has remained committed to Fateh’s early revolutionary principles, where the fight was, in fact, for a homeland and not international handouts; for freedom, not false prestige; for national liberation, not useless titles.

Those involved in the current power struggle within Fateh are possibly unaware of who Abumghasib is and of the values that he stubbornly defends to this day.

It is important, though, that they take notice, before all is lost.

The writer, www.ramzybaroud.net, has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally syndicated columnist, a media consultant, author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include “Searching Jenin”, “The Second Palestinian Intifada” and “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story”. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.