Published in 2020 by Jewish-Israeli scholar and author, Tamir Sorek, The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad tells the social and political life of an extremely important ’48 Palestinian (or what some may call Palestinian citizen of Israel) figure, a leading member of the Communist Party of Israel (also known as Maki in Hebrew), poet, Mayor of Nazareth, and Knesset member.
Since the Mandate period and the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinian question has not been solved. Tawfiq Zayyad, a Palestinian Communist, sought to answer that question during his lifetime
The book begins with a general overview of Zayyad’s childhood and upbringing in British Mandate Palestine. It touches on his gifted poetry talents prior to his entry into politics, his fight for the national identity of Palestinians within Israel and for their national rights, and his bout with his Communist politics engaging popular national sentiment among the Palestinian liberation movement as well as his identity as a Muslim but marrying a Christian woman and living a secular lifestyle.
Sorek also contextualizes how Communist politics came to be in Israel/Palestine (pre-1948) and how it developed specifically in the Nazareth region.
The Arabization of the original Palestinian Communist Party began in the late 1920s following the 1929 riots (the al-Buraq uprising) and under pressure from the Communist International (Comintern) after largely being a party of Jewish immigrants influenced by the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union. After the Great Revolt of 1936, the party’s credibility and popularity grew as it played an active role in the Arab uprising against the British, demanding independence and the end of Jewish immigration and land purchases.
The Great Revolt and the emergence of Marxism in Palestine influenced a young Zayyad, especially since his home in Nazareth was raided by the British occupation as a child.
World War II also brought heavy industry and development to the region, which brought developments of class consciousness among the Palestinian workers. Nazareth, where Zayyad’s family was located, was the center of a strong labor movement during the Mandate period. Around this period, the Palestinian Communist Party split along national lines, with most Arab members forming the National League for Liberation.
During the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) in 1948, which led to the establishment of the State of Israel and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, the city of Nazareth largely kept its population. Nazareth was drawn to be part of a future Palestinian state, according to the United Nations partition plan of 1947.
Thousands of Palestinians who were violently expelled from their villages throughout historic Palestine settled in Nazareth and increased the population. The military occupier of the region did not follow orders to expel Palestinians from Nazareth, which is why Nazareth remains an Arab stronghold to this day.
The Palestinian Communist Party and National Liberation League became the Communist Party of Israel (CPI). The party supported the partition plan (mainly because of Soviet Union support) and recognized the newly founded state as the national homeland of the Jewish-Israeli people. The party, which Zayyad would eventually become a major leader of, attracted Palestinians due to its defense of the Arab people in Israel. It demanded the return of Palestinian refugees who were expelled in 1948 and opposed the dominant Israeli position in foreign and domestic affairs, a position it continues to hold to this day.
The CPI had early success in the state’s formative years. In the Arab-majority city of Nazareth, the Communists held majority seats on the city council, with Zayyad elected in 1954. They became a major opposition bloc for the next twenty years, speaking out against the martial law in Israel and against the further occupation of Palestinian lands.
Due to his Palestinian national identity and Communist affiliation, Zayyad faced fierce political repression and had many bouts in Israeli prisons, where he endured torturous conditions like many Palestinian prisoners do to this day.
After the Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Palestinians developed a new sense of national pride. With the founding of the United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria, the Nasserist forces began developing a sharp anti-communist position, pitting the Communists against the anti-imperialist Nasserist forces. This confrontation led to the CPI losing seats in the Knesset and performing poorly in the Nazareth municipal elections.
In the early 1960s, Zayyad was sent by the Communist Party to study in the Soviet Union to prepare to become a party official. Upon his return from Moscow, the CPI split along factional lines—a Zionist one, which continued to use the CPI name, and a faction recognizing the national oppression of the Palestinians, now calling itself Rakah. Within a decade, the Zionist faction would dissolve, and Rakah, with its Arab majority, would continue.
It was during this period that Rakah had an intense internal debate about Arab revolutionary culture within Israel, which was being expressed primarily by Zayyad’s poetry. His poetry was respected among Palestinians in Israel and those in refugee camps in Lebanon, East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Syria.
With the new conditions after the 1967 war, leading to the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula, the majority of the Palestinian people were now under Israeli rule.
To this day, Palestinians in Israel are treated as second or third-class citizens in comparison to Jewish Israelis and still have difficulties in finding employment and purchasing land, suffer from internal displacement and fragmentation, and experience political repression.
Israeli society was and is rife with contradictions, deeming itself a “Jewish state” which erases 20% of its Palestinian population and “Judaizes” the land which it occupies in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and creates smaller and smaller Palestinian enclaves that are under constant attack by fascist Israeli settlers.
Also in the 60s was the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964. The early Arab nationalism of the PLO differed with the political positions of Rakah, but Zayyah sympathized with the Palestinian national movement. While the CPI argued for Israel’s right to exist as a state, Zayyad tried bridging the gap between the PLO and CPI. This recognition of Israel as a state created uneasiness among Palestinian refugees. The CPI also distanced itself from armed struggle from Palestinians within Israel.
Zayyad used his role as a member of the Israeli parliament to fight for Palestinian national rights, and particularly for his hometown in Nazareth, which was severely underfunded by the Israeli government, and the CPI was undermined in the municipal elections.
In 1975, he was elected as Mayor as part of the Nazareth Democratic Front, which was supported by the PLO and the leaders of Gaza and Ramallah in the occupied territories. During Zayyad’s tenure as Mayor, Nazareth improved its conditions in education and infrastructure. At the same time, the Israeli government tried punishing the majority Arab population for continuing to support Zayyad and the Front. It was during this time that the CPI enjoyed support from the majority of Palestinians in Israel.
The question of land expropriation and theft has been a central question of the Palestinian national liberation movement since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Even within the State of Israel (i.e., within the “Green Line”), the confiscation of private Arab lands took place.
The success and popularity of Tawfiq Zayyad’s victories in the Knesset and municipal elections in Nazareth prompted CPI to export this method to other localities throughout Israel. The initial goal of the broader parliamentary front was to urge Arab-Jewish joint lists for elections. The CPI built an alliance with the Black Panther Party, which included Jewish immigrants from North Africa and Middle Eastern countries (mostly Mizrahi Jews). In 1977, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DFPE or Hadash in Hebrew) was formed, which included the Black Panthers, noncommunist Arab mayors, and the Israeli Socialist Left.
With the 1980s came more Israeli aggression towards the PLO and its neighbors, which led to the 1982 war in Lebanon and the First Intifada in 1987, and also the rise of new Arab parties within Israel. The PLO, at this time, also adopted language supporting the two-state solution, as supported by the DFPE. Zayyad was criticized for taking this position of supporting two states (an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel) but responded to the criticism by presenting the solution as a pragmatic compromise, painful but necessary, given the balance of power between Palestinians and Zionism.
The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Islamist politics came into conflict with Zayyad and the Israeli Communists, particularly in the aftermath of the party’s conflict with the Progressive List for Peace (PLP).
Zayyad himself became weary of the rise of religious extremism among Jewish Israelis and worldwide. This became much more rapid after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The Islamic Movement won seats on the Nazareth municipal council and shared governing power with the Communists from 1988-1994. Zayyad, as Nazareth Mayor, regularly undermined and rejected the Islamist separatist demands for religious education, separate recreational sports teams, gendered policies, and religious holidays. He spent the last years of his life as a sharp critic of Islamists and the Islamic Movement within Israel.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Zayyad still held a sense of optimism. In the early 1990s, after the end of the first Intifada, a serious Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation process occurred that aligned with the Communist policy of the “two-state solution.”
This position early on set the party apart from Arab nationalists and the mainstream Palestinian national liberation movement for many years. The traditional party line of the time was also to blame “reactionary Arab regimes” for invading Palestine in 1948 and serving imperial interests, which did not lead to the establishment of two states based on the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan.
In this same period, the DFPE coalition, which included the Black Panthers, had been broken. Zayyad and others began working on a joint list for peace to change the balance of forces in the Knesset, which meant building a united front including the Zionist Left in Israel. Major political developments began to take place with the adoption of the two-state solution among the PLO and some sections of the Zionist Left, including the Yitzhak Rabin-led Labor Party.
In 1992, the central goal of the DFPE was to block the Likud and extreme right within Israel from forming a government. The DFPE played a role in orchestrating votes to block Likud and to have Labor concede to some of their demands, which included the promotion of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.
Forming an informal and temporary alliance with Rabin and the Labor government held historic significance for Palestinians within Israel. In 1948, Rabin was a high-ranking officer who signed a command to expel tens of thousands of Palestinians from the Ramla and Lydda area. During the 1967 Naksa, Rabin was the IDF chief of staff who imposed the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Rabin was also the Israeli prime minister during Land Day in 1976. He was also the defense minister during the war on Lebanon in the 1980s and also suppressed the first Intifada.
Zayyad spoke on this historic coalition, saying, “Today, more than ever, the political developments at both the local and global level are evidence of a historical victory of the party and its plan for solving the problem in the region based on the principle of the right of self-determination and national sovereignty in two independent states, Israeli and Palestinian, one aside the other. Therefore, ‘the stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone,’ and the plan that everyone rejected has become today the basis for the solution.”
In 1993, secret negotiations began to take place among Israeli and PLO representatives in Norway, which eventually led to what is now known as the Oslo Accords.
Celebrations were held among a significant number of Palestinians in Israel and among the Palestinians within the CPI. The Oslo Accords were officially signed in September 1993. Zayyad, in support of the reconciliation process, depicted opposition leader (and now Israeli Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu as “Bibi Hamasiyahu” (in reference to Hamas, who rejected the agreement).
Zayyad also noted four issues that the Accords did not resolve: the status of Jerusalem, which should be divided into two capital cities that maintained peaceful cooperation; the Palestinian refugees, for whom any solution should be based on their right to return to their homeland; the right of the Palestinian People to a state, which Israel should recognize; and borders, which should be along the 1967 line.
Following the peace accords, several instances happened that undermined it. In 1994, an American-Israeli massacred a large number of Palestinian Muslims in Hebron (influenced by fascist American-Israeli Meir Kahane). This led to a larger wave of terrorism and violence, including suicide bombings. In May of 1994, Israel withdrew its military from the majority of the Gaza Strip and the city of Jericho as part of the peace agreement, and the Palestinian Authority was established.
The Palestinian Authority was founded as an interim self-government body with limited autonomy in defined domains, and it was supposed to function until the final agreement was signed, within five years. One of the most significant symbols of the time was the return of PLO leader Yasser Arafat to Palestine as the chairman of the new Palestinian Authority. After his arrival, Zayyad led a DFPE delegation to Gaza to meet Arafat. He then planned on welcoming and participating in Arafat’s return to Jericho in the West Bank. Unfortunately, on Zayyad’s return to Jerusalem from Jericho, he was involved in a head-on car collision and died.
Since Zayyad died in 1994, the two-state solution has become a slogan that various actors have adopted to denote different—and sometimes contradictory—political visions. This is why it is essential to clarify Zayyad’s interpretation of the term. He did not see it as a formula aimed at separating Israelis and Palestinians, an interpretation that gained momentum among Zionist centrist politicians only after Zayyad’s death.
Zayyad and his party considered the two-state solution an attractive formula because it was supposed to solve the tension between Palestinian national identification and Israeli citizenship.
The Oslo Accords were ultimately a failure, which may partially be attributed to Zayyad’s untimely death and the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin. The peace process eventually collapsed, and the Likud Party, which Hadash and the Communists had previously blocked, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, ultimately took power. At the time of writing this summary and review, the Israeli government, backed by United States imperialism, is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, murdering over 60,000 Palestinian civilians, bombing southern Lebanon and Syria, and continuing to confiscate lands in the West Bank in preparation to fully annex it.
At this stage, it is up to the people’s and democratic movements within the United States and world imperialism to defeat the Israeli genocide policy by forcing a military arms embargo. Labor and democratic movements within Israel are also crucial in shifting the balance of forces and defeating the fascist and expansionist Netanyahu policy.
If Zayyad were still alive today, he would be leading the charge in building a mass coalition to defeat the genocidal policy and remove the fascist governing coalition from power.
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