The Palestinian leftist movement: between political reality and cultural heritage

The Palestinian leftist movement represented a revolutionary social phenomenon that laid the cornerstone of Palestinian resistance following the wide popular support it received from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Since that time, the popular support it had once enjoyed has diminished in favour of the political Islamic movements in the Palestinian community in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the civil society organizations that were supported by and subsequently succumbed to the terms of the donor states. This paper tackles the failure of the Palestinian left movement in generating a progressive resistance left culture, and it clarifies also the role and the impact of the Arab-Palestinian cultural heritage in the retardation of the Palestinian leftist movement. It seems evident today that the popularity the Palestinian leftist movement once enjoyed was related to a specific political era when leftist thinking and revolutionary ideology were generally popular. That being the case, the interim leftist thinking did not develop as the result of the leftist powers’ attempt to bring about societal change through the replacement of the existing social–and cultural structures with progressive revolutionary beliefs that met the political and social needs of the left.