Vol 4 No 3 | Oct-Dec 2024
Leila Khaled & The Struggle for Liberation
Story by Radhika Singh | Art by Samita Chatterjee
One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter
Many freedom fighters in pre-Independence India were considered terrorists by British Imperialists – for example, Khudiram Bose, Bhagat Singh and Sri Aurobindo, the ‘revolutionary Sannyasi’. Even Nelson Mandela, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, was on the US Terror Watchlist until 2008. “Choose peace rather than confrontation,” Mandela advised; however, “if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence.” A similar attitude underpinned the revolts of enslaved people led by Toussaint Louverture in Haiti and Nat Turner in the United States, as well as the Jewish resistance to Nazi Germany during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Leila Khaled
Leila Khaled became a freedom fighter as a child, when she was made a refugee from her own land. At age 23 she found her political home in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and has served in various leadership posts over her lifetime. This comic is largely based on Leila’s autobiography, My People Shall Live, which she drafted in close collaboration with her brilliant comrade Ghassan Kanafani. Kanafani was also instrumental in detailing the political vision of the PFLP before he was martyred in 1972. As such, Leila’s vision is guided by that of the PFLP.
The PFLP ideology
The PFLP approaches the process of revolution as a science. In order to achieve economic and political liberation, the first step is to properly identify the enemy. While the primary enemy facing the Palestinian people is clearly the Zionist occupation, this serves as a base for a greater enemy: that of global imperialism, led by the United States. Imperialism rests on “robbing the riches of the underdeveloped countries… to accumulate immense profits… increasing capital at the expense of the people’s poverty, deprivation and wretchedness.” Any national liberation movement that aims at freeing the land and its people must face this imperialist menace.
Around the world, the US has orchestrated the neutralisation of revolutionary movements through defence treaties, puppet governments, cultural propaganda and extractive economic policies. When these neo-colonialist techniques fail, they revert to military force and invasion. How can the subjugated peoples of the world prevail against such an imperialism – with its “technological superiority, its production and economic capabilities, its long experience in colonizing and exploiting peoples”? The PFLP lays out a pathway that begins with guerrilla warfare and develops into a protracted people’s liberation war, in alliance with revolutionary, anti-imperialist forces around the world.
While all members of society can play a role in revolutionary action, it is the working classes who must lead for they are the ones “daily suffering the oppressive exploitation process exercised by world imperialism and its allies.” The interests of the upper classes, on the other hand, are linked with those of the imperialist market; their wealth relies on the subjugation of the impoverished masses. They are thus inherently compromised and also conservative, “rejecting change and opposing the course of history, while the lower classes are revolutionary, seeking change and pushing history along its upward dialectical course.”
Ultimately, the success of this movement depends on a self-critical and evolving political consciousness, the systematic organization of the ‘will and aspirations’ of the people, and an organic connection with revolutionary forces at all levels. “Revolutionary political thought is not an abstract idea… or intellectual hobby for the educated,” argues the PFLP. Rather, it delivers a clear, scientific perspective of the battle and its dimensions in order for the people to converge around a strategy as a united force.
And with heroic determination engendered in it by years of oppression, humiliation, wretchedness and exploitation exercised by Israel and imperialism on our land, the revolutionary army will be able to triumph over the enemy’s superiority.
The above distillation of PFLP’s vision is taken from their Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, published in 1969.
In October 2023, with her people facing a genocide, Leila spoke about occupation as an act of terrorism and the right to resist.
Additional Resources
Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation by Sarah Irving
A brief history of the conflict in Palestine in maps and charts by Al Jazeera
Palestine by comics journalist Joe Sacco
Letters from Rachel Corrie, killed by an Israeli bulldozer while defending a Palestinian home
Stop This Slaughter in Palestine, a speech by Arundhati Roy
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Israeli historian Ilan Pappé
The Question of Palestine by Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said