Palestinian Liberation Army
The Palestinian Liberation Army (جيش التحرير الفلسطيني Jaish at-tahrir al-filastini , Palestine Liberation Army , PLA for short) was founded in 1964 as the military arm of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) to fightagainst Israel . It was never under the effective control of the PLO, but was subordinate to the respective host countries.
The PLA was established immediately after the PLO was founded in 1964. There were initially three brigades:
The PLA soldiers were Palestinian refugees who were doing their military service there, which they would otherwise have had to do in the armies of the host countries. Formally, they were under the command of the PLO, but in fact none of the host countries renounced the control of these brigades .
At their heyday, the PLA consisted of eight brigades with a total of 12,000 uniformed soldiers. They were armed with small arms , mortars, rocket launchers, armored transport vehicles, and T-34 tanks. The PLA never appeared as a separate force of the PLO, but was deployed in battalion strength as a kind of auxiliary force of the respective governments.
In 1968 the Popular Liberation Forces were set up within the PLA to carry out commando actions against the Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip , which had been occupied by Israel the previous year. Otherwise, the PLA abstained from such underground activities and was seen more as a kind of parade troop.
Syria, in particular, made use of its PLA units when it sent them to Jordan in hastily repainted tanks in 1970 to take part in Black September . However, under international pressure and threats to intervene from Israel and the USA , they had to be withdrawn.
Likewise, the PLA was used by Syria in the Lebanese civil war. They even served as a proxy force for the fight against the PLO. It is true that the PLA proved extremely unreliable in fighting other Palestinians, and mass desertions resulted.
In the 1982 Lebanon War , the PLA was largely dismantled as a fighting force. Its fighters went to Tunis with the PLO after being evacuated from Beirut during a US-backed ceasefire.
The Egyptian PLA was also involved in Lebanon in 1976 after Yasser Arafat approached Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in an attempt to improve relations that had been established through Sadat's peace efforts with Israel. However, the Egyptian units never had the meaning of the fully deployed Syrian PLA.
The PLA soldiers later became the core of the National Guard of the Palestinian Authority (PNA) under the Oslo Accords of 1993 when they were allowed to step on Palestinian soil to serve as the PNA's security forces .
The Syrian PLA still exists. It works in close cooperation with the Syrian-controlled al-Sa'iqa faction of the PLO. However, the importance of both forces has decreased. It is still planned that the Palestinian refugees in Syria do their military service in the PLA. In fact, the Syrian PLA is integrated into the Syrian army . Nevertheless, it operates as an independent entity and sometimes organizes pro-government rallies to celebrate the Syrian government's commitment to the Palestinian cause.
literature
- Hillel Frisch: The Palestinian Military: Between Militias and Armies , 2008, Routledge, ISBN 978-0415395328