We leftists can start with the left. We should talk much more about the Jabha Shabbiye li-Tahrir Falastin, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, because at this point of intense destruction, the PFLP is present and puts up resistance to the best of its ability. This is not a left in government – this is a left that fights from the position of the most extreme powerlessness and exposure to the most overwhelmingly powerful forces of destruction, and precisely for this reason it deserves special respect and appreciation. When in early November 2024, the occupation carried out a sweep of abductions in the West Bank and Lebanon, the mission specifically targeted the Front and arrested more than 60 of its militants – an index of the threat it is perceived to pose.
The Front has offered martyrs on every Palestinian frontline of Toufan al-Aqsa. Consider the following tiny sample of examples. Abed Tahani, a comrade of the Front, journalist, founder of the independent media network Taqadomy (‘Progressive’) was killed in Jabaliya alongside his brother Abdelfattah, fighter in the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, ten days after October 7. As the Front wrote in a tribute to Abed Tahani: ‘Abed banged on the walls of the tank, as did Gaza’s resistance on October 7’. That phrase banging on the walls of the tank is a reference to Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun. I have argued previously in Salvage that this image paints the most striking picture of resistance in a world on fire.
Suleiman Abdul Karim al-Ahmed, a field commander of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades on the northern battlefield, was martyred a year after October 7 on the border with Palestine while resisting the invasion of Lebanon. Mohammed Abdel Aaal, head of security for the Front, a novelist, organiser, military operative, was assassinated in Beirut in autumn 2024. He was singled out for his role in building cells of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades in the West Bank – when I visited Beirut in April, his brother Marwan, leader of the PFLP in Beirut, could still receive me openly in party offices in mukhayam Mar Elias; he has since been forced underground but he sent out a communique mourning his martyred brother:
The heart gets lost in the chaos of war. Even the evening news for the whole family is about war – the destruction of homes, missile strikes, the levelling of neighbourhoods, the burning of refugee tents. We cannot remove war from our lives. We didn’t learn its arts; rather, it imposes itself on our daily lives and teaches us its lessons, so that we may survive erasure and extermination, and remain alive for the name that Palestine deserves.
Continuing the resistance against all this destruction is now an affirmation of the very possibility of life itself. Abdaljawad Omar, who has become a major interpreter of the resistance in this moment and who appears in this issue of Salvage, recently captured the point in an interview with Jewish Currents: ‘resistance is less about achieving a specific endpoint and more about affirming a presence, a refusal to be erased’.
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