Mustafa al-Zabri (Abu Ali Mustafa)

Mustafa al-Zabri was born on 14 May 1938 in the town of Arraba in the Jenin district, into a family of modest means. His parents were Anisa and Ali al-Zabri, a farmer in Arraba who had previously worked as a blacksmith in the railways and at the port of Haifa. It is believed that Ali al-Zabri joined the armed group of the leader Izzedin al-Qassam and took part in the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936. Mustafa al-Zabri and his wife, Khitam Saleh, had five children: two boys (Hani and Fadi) and three girls (Hala, Hind, and Haifa).

Zabri’s youngest brother, Taysir, was a former leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and former First Secretary of the central committee of the Jordanian People’s Democratic Party, known by its Arabic acronym Hashd (mass mobilization).

Zabri received his primary education in his hometown. He then moved to Amman in 1950 with some members of his family. Because the family was going through difficult financial circumstances, he was unable to complete his secondary education there and was forced instead to work. He worked as a messenger at the Jordanian Bank for Reconstruction and Development, in a carpentry workshop, a glasswares shop, a cardboard factory, and in other low-level jobs. His sense of social belonging to the working class played a profound role in shaping his personality, his conduct, and his way of thinking, giving him an instinctive sense of the issues and concerns of those who had to toil hard to make a living.

In 1955, Zabri joined the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) after becoming acquainted with some of its members through his membership in the Arab Nationalist Club, which held social, cultural, and sporting activites in Amman. He participated in the struggles of the Jordanian nationalist movement against the Baghdad Pact, to abolish the British-Jordanian Treaty of Alliance, and to Arabize the Jordanian army leadership and expel all British commanding officers.

Zabri was arrested in April 1957 for his political positions and sentenced to five years imprisonment, which he served in al-Jafr prison in the desert. After his release at the end of 1961, he resumed his activities in the ANM. He created student cells as well as cells for government employees and farmers. As a result, his party responsibilities grew, and he was put in charge of the movement in the northern section of the West Bank.

On 23 July 1964, Zabri married Khitam Saleh. The couple moved to the city of Jenin, where he opened an agricultural supplies store. Subsequently, he turned this shop into an inexpensive popular restaurant that served hummus, falafel, and foul (stewed fava beans).

In the summer of 1964, the ANM leadership decided to establish a Palestine chapter called Iqlim Filastin (the Palestine Region). The leadership of this group set up a committee to supervise the organization of underground cells that would be trained to use and stock weapons. Zabri was on this committee. In 1965, he took a secret military training course at the Anshas army camp in the Egyptian countryside in which participants were trained in guerrilla resistance warfare. After completing this course, he returned to Jenin to lead the movement's activities. He was re-arrested in autumn 1966, the same year that the ANM’s armed wing, Shabab al-Thaʾr (Revenge Youth), was created.

​​After spending three months in military prison in al-Zarqa [northern Jordan], Zabri was released along with several other comrades. After the June 1967 war, he and some of his comrades in the ANM made contact with George Habash and Wadi Haddad with the aim of restarting their activity and building the foundation for armed struggle. In December 1967, he took part in the founding of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and in leading its activities in the recently occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Along with some comrades, he clandestinely entered the West Bank to rebuild the organization and plant cells of fighters, but the Israeli occupation authorities were able to apprehend most of them. He managed to evade arrest and escape to Jordan, from where he continued to direct the PFLP’s military activity in the West Bank and was also involved in leading its activity within Jordan.

When the armed Palestinian resistance in Jordan ended in July 1971, Zabri, now better known by his nom de guerre Abu Ali Mustafa, secretly left Jordan for Lebanon. In 1972, during the PFLP’s third congress, he was elected deputy to Secretary-General Dr. George Habash, a position he continued to hold until 2000.

In Lebanon, Zabri helped lead the PFLP’s militant struggle, especially during the resistance to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut. During that time, he was subjected to several assassination attempts by Israel, the most notable of which happened in the Cola neighborhood in West Beirut, where he resided. A car rigged with explosives was parked beneath his apartment building, but the vigilance of his security detail helped foil the plot.

Zabri left Lebanon for Syria at the end of August 1982, along with a host of leaders and cadre members in the Palestinian resistance. He headed the PFLP delegation in the talks held by the Democratic Alliance in Aden [South Yemen] and Algiers in 1984 with the Fatah movement. These talks aimed to reunify the PLO, following the internal split that had taken place within the movement and the disagreement within the PLO upon the withdrawal from Lebanon.

Zabri held several positions in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He was a member of the Palestine National Council (PNC) from 1968 onwards. He was also a member of the Central Council and the Executive Committee from 1987 to 1991.

Like the PFLP, Zabri was a staunch opponent of the Oslo Accords in 1993 that led to the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (PA) in 1994. However, despite his differences with the PLO leadership that signed those accords with Israel, he continued to emphasize the importance of the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and as their authoritative political entity, whose role had to be revitalized in order to reunite the Palestinian people.

He also stressed the importance of continuing dialogue with Fatah on the basis of a shared national political program. In an interview in 1999, he was asked about the basis on which this national dialogue would take place:

The PFLP believes that the immediate and urgent task for the Palestinian people's struggle currently is to make the national program a reality, even though this program does not fully realize all the goals of the Palestinian people. What is our precise position? We believe that it is our right to establish a fully sovereign, independent Palestinian state on the occupied Palestinian land, even if it is within the 1967 borders. We are not opposed to that, on the condition that this state has full sovereignty and provided that it should not constitute an end point that will conclusively determine the future of the Palestinian political process as per the slogan “two states for two peoples.” Nor should this state mean an admission on our part that this is our share of the land, while the rest—Palestinian occupied in 1948—belongs to Israel. Why is this? Because there is a core point, rather, a fundamental pillar in the Palestinian national program that acts as a bridge between the interim and the strategic goals; I mean the right of return of Palestinian refugees to the homes they were expelled from, as stipulated by UN Resolution 194. This is a question that will not be resolved even by the proclamation of a sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 territories.

The PFLP leadership was determined to revive the organization’s activity in the homeland. On 30 September 1999, after thirty-two years of living in exile, Zabri decided to return to his homeland, following in the footsteps of other Palestinian leaders who had returned after the PA was established. Upon his return, he made his famous statement that incensed the Israeli occupiers: “We have returned, not in order to make deals, but to resist.”

In response to a question posed to him by the editor-in-chief of al-Quds newspaper, Ibrahim Milhem, about the circumstances surrounding his return to the homeland (a return enabled by an agreement he had rejected), Zabri replied:

There is no doubt that this is not the kind of return hoped for by any Palestinian. Nevertheless, we must not forget that Palestine belongs to the Palestinian people, and that we are the ones who have the right to be on this land. As for agreements and their outcomes, there has been much debate back and forth, and much water has flowed under the bridge of Palestinian politics. We consider the return of any Palestinian—whether an ordinary citizen, a party cadre or a leader—to be a gain for the Palestinian struggle. Similarly, we regard the 1.2 million Palestinians living in the dakhel [interior, i.e. the Israeli held territory in 1948] to be Palestinian. Even if some of them carry Israeli passports, they are a part of the Palestinian people; it should not be their duty to absolve themselves by discarding their passports and leaving Israel. And I will continue to fight against the Oslo Accords, despite my return to Palestine [on their basis], for this is a conditional return and therefore not a genuine return.

Regarding his assessment of the role of Palestinians living outside of the homeland after his own return to Palestine, he answered:

Given that one half of the Palestinian people is still outside of Palestine, the kharej [exterior] continues to occupy a crucial place in our convictions and our program. We cannot look at the present or envision the future unless the Palestinian people within the homeland and in the diaspora are politically united. This is what drives us to consider our people as one integral whole, regardless of whether they are inside the homeland or in the diaspora.

At the PFLP’s sixth national congress, held in Damascus in July 2000, Zabri was elected as Secretary-General, thus succeeding Habash, who had announced his resignation.

Zabri then came to play a prominent leadership role in the Second Intifada (also called the al-Aqsa Intifada), which broke out on 28 September 2000. Israel subsequently accused him of masterminding several bombings in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and near Lydda [Ben Gurion] Airport during 2000 and 2001. On the morning of 27 August 2001, Israeli Apache helicopters targeted him for assassination while he was in his office in al-Bira.

In a communiqué issued the same day, the PFLP announced: “In grief, we announce to our Palestinian people in their masses, to the greater Arab-Islamic nation to which we belong, as well to all the forces of liberation, democracy and peace, the martyrdom of the great, pan-Arab patriot, militant and leader Mustafa al-Zabri, Abu Ali Mustafa.” Zabri’s wife said, “His blood will not be shed in vain, and it was indeed his wish that he be martyred in Palestine.” She added, “He is not our loss alone . . . his loss is the loss of the entire Palestinian people.” His eldest son, Hani, said that his father “knew he was targeted and expected to be assassinated ever since he entered the Palestinian territories in September 1999.”

The assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa resonated widely in the regions where there was a Palestinian community. The PFLP vowed revenge and retaliation; subsequently, on 17 October 2001, a PFLP squad assassinated the far-right Israeli Minister of Tourism, Rehavam Ze'evi, in Jerusalem.

Zabri was an exceptional leader and was known for his modest and frugal lifestyle. He possessed a personality that had a unifying effect on people that brought them together. His clarity of speech and transparency of character attracted many major figures in the Palestinian national liberation struggle of varying ideological backgrounds to cluster around him. Before his assassination, he worked diligently to unify all Palestinian leftist and democratic forces within a comprehensive framework. Regarding this aspect of Zabri’s life and work in the struggle, his younger brother, Taysir al-Zabri, said of him: “Abu Ali Mustafa was martyred while engaged in the struggle for the unity of Palestinian forces overall, and the unity of Palestinian democratic forces specifically. He was a member of the joint leadership committee of the group for national and democratic action in Palestine that was working towards establishing a single unified democratic nationalist bloc within the country.”

 In his essay “Salaam, Abu Ali: The Honorable Palestinian Who Was Not Deceived by Any Guidebook,” Faisal Darraj writes of Zabri’s distinctive leadership qualities:

He was a leader imposed by no one, nor did he impose himself upon anyone to anoint him as a leader; it was his down-to-earth, tolerant nature, the way he conducted himself with humility, as well as his sense of composure and his intellectual sophistication that made him a leader; all these were qualities that made others regard him as a leader worthy of respect. If the ethos of our age—whether in the specifically Palestinian context or the broader Arab one—has produced people who can only understand leadership in terms of ceremonies, bodyguards, an arrogant tone of speech, pomposity and a profusion of hollow titles, then Abu Ali chose to be something else; he wanted to be the one who restored meaning to words and reconnected the signifier to the signified, since to him, leadership was not only capability, but also behavior, courage, and simplicity. Abu Ali wanted to be that leader who remains a soldier. He wanted to be that honorable teacher who himself remains forever a student, the kind of student whose brilliance outshines, a student capable of being an instructor, a pedagogue and a leader, but without becoming closed-off in his ways, and without believing that becoming a leader means becoming larger than life.

In his essay on Zabri, “The Poor Peasant and the Well-Off Physician,” Saqr Abu Fakhr described him in these terms and then added :

Abu Ali Mustafa, with his friendly smile, was not descended from those wealthy aʿyaan [feudal notables], but rather came from a pedigree of peasants who had just enough to get by. Perhaps this is why he was known for being so down-to-earth, so humble, and for keeping his distance from the spotlight and the media’s glare, except rarely. He belonged to the second generation of the ANM that followed the movement’s founding fathers, but when it comes to the Palestinian struggle for national liberation, he may himself be considered to be one of its pioneers, especially in the arena of fidaʾi activity.

The Yasser Arafat Foundation produced a documentary film about Zabri called The Committed Leader in 2024, in commemoration of his birth anniversary. The Ramallah municipality named one of the public squares in al-Tira neighborhood after him, and the Gaza City municipality named Street No. 10, in the southwest of the city, after him as well.

Following his martyrdom, Zabri was succeeded as Secretary-General of the PFLP by Ahmad Sa‘adat (Abu Ghassan), who was arrested in 2006 and has languished in Israeli jails ever since.

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