The Struggle for Palestine
By Lance Selfa
International Socialist Review, Spring 1998
When the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel agreed to
limited "autonomy" for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in
1993, most Palestinians were willing to give the "peace process" a
chance. But more than four years after the signing of the original
Oslo Accords, the more than 2 million Palestinians living in the
occupied territories can feel that their conditions have worsened.
What is more, they see the Palestinian Authority as a corrupt and
repressive regime, and that Arafat has succeeded only in making
himself Israel’s cop.
Meanwhile, Israel continues to repress the Palestinians and to
steal their land. In 1997, Israeli death squads terrorized
Palestinians to drive them from areas designated for Israeli
settlers. According to one report:
Mohamad Abad al-Aziz Hilu, 57 years old and the father of
10 children, was murdered . . . by an Israeli undercover squad
known as Mistaravim, an elite, dangerous, trigger-happy,
secret group of soldiers who dress like Palestinians,
infiltrate their towns and kill people with almost total
impunity. When Mr. Hilu and several other villagers discovered
the squad in their village of Hizme, the three undercover
agents fired at the men, wounding four of them in the legs,
including Mr. Hilu, who they then grabbed and forced to the
ground. One soldier sat on the back of Hilu's neck while another beat him
on the head with a radio transmitter, according to testimony. Hilu was taken
to a hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.Later, an Israeli army
spokesperson announced that Hilu had been shot and killed 'by accident.'
. . . Now Mr. Hilu's widow finds herself not only
alone with 10 children, but also facing house demolition
orders. Israeli authorities plan to tear down her shack-like
home and run her off the land where she and her children tend
their sheep, their only source of income.. . .[Earlier]
near the settlement of Susiya, outside Hebron, bulldozers
destroyed the 100-year-old home of Mohamad Abdel Rashid, the
foundation of which was built on caves used by shepherds from
the time of the Romans. Such construction is common in the
area. "About 100 soldiers plowed down our homes, then pushed the
rubble into the cave so we would have nowhere to go. But
we're not leaving, I'll sleep under the stars
before I will leave here," said Abdel Rashid who, along
with neighbors who suffered the same plight, now is living in a
tent. They were warned by Israeli soldiers on several occasions
not to clean out the rubble and return to the shelter of the
caves.
". . .It reeks of ethnic cleansing. They're making it
clear that as long as they have the power to enforce it, only
Jews can live on this land," said Abdel Rashid's son
Wahid, who is the local schoolteacher.
These terrible conditions contrast to the lives of a small number
of Palestinians - most of them Arafat loyalists - who have gotten
rich under the PA. To take one example, 27 "private" and "public"
monopolies control the import into Gaza of fuel and basic
foodstuffs.
Controlled by a handful of PA officials with particularly
close ties to Israel’s security and business
establishments, the political purpose behind the monopolies is
to generate revenues for the bureaucracy and so consolidate the
PA’s rule in the autonomous areas. But the economic impact
[on Gazans] has been disastrous, with the monopolies
causing spiraling price rises, destroying local firms and
creating a lawless climate that serves as a major disincentive
to private investment.This class divide in the Palestinian movement has always existed.
For most of the 11 years before signing the Oslo Accords, the PLO
leadership administered the organization’s affairs in Tunis, far
from the daily repression of the Israeli occupation in Palestine.
When the mass Palestinian uprising (the intifada) began in
1987, young fighters denounced the likes of Arafat as "Cadillac
revolutionaries," more accustomed to high-stakes diplomacy that to
fighting the Israelis up close.
From its formation under the sponsorship of Arab states in 1964,
the PLO maintained a policy of "non-interference" in the affairs of
the Arab states. Over the years, the PLO relied on one Arab regime
after another - and faced betrayal from each Arab state. In 1970,
King Hussein expelled PLO fighters from Jordan. In 1976, Syria sided
with the Lebanese right and against the Palestinians when it
intervened in the Lebanese civil war. In 1991, the Gulf states
conducted pogroms against Palestinian guest workers to punish the PLO
for supporting Iraq in the Gulf War against the West.
With each defeat, the PLO narrowed its demands. From 1964 to 1974,
it fought for the liberation of all of Palestine. From 1974 onward -
after the Black September rout in Jordan - it backed the idea of a
"ministate" coexisting with Israel. Its 1993 acceptance of the Oslo
Accords marked a retreat from the previous "two-state" position.
The PLO never sought to connect the Palestinian struggle to the
only force powerful enough to break the hold of imperialism and
Zionism on the area: the working classes of Egypt, Jordan, Syria,
Iraq and Lebanon. By divorcing the fight for national liberation from
workers’ and peasants’ struggles, the PLO’s
nationalist politics led it to the dead end of Oslo. Forced to choose
between the interests of the majority of Palestinians (including
Palestinian refugees, whose right to return to their homeland
isn’t even recognized in the "peace" process) and their desire
to run a Palestinian "statelet," PLO leaders chose the Palestinian
Authority (PA).
The failure of secular nationalist politics has created an opening
for Islamist organizations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to
gain influence in the Palestinian movement. Hamas and Islamic
Jihad clearly have reactionary politics. In that sense, the
growing influence of Islamism among Palestinians—whose main
organizations in general are secular and
left-oriented—represents a real backward step. But for all their
backwardness, they at least are seen as fighting the Israelis. Since
the right-wing Netanyahu government took over in Israel in 1996,
Islamist influence has grown. Arafat acknowledged the growing
Islamist influence when he embraced two Islamist leaders in August
1997.
In the short term, the prospects for Palestinians seem bleak. But
every time in the past 50 years that the Palestinian movement has
suffered a defeat which its enemies said would consign it to "the
dustbin of history," it has come back. After Israel routed the PLO
from Lebanon in 1982, the Arab regimes began to distance themselves
from support for the Palestinian cause—even expressing support
for a long-time U.S.-Israeli scheme for joint Jordanian-Israeli
control over the occupied territories. But the intifada pushed
the Palestinian issue back to the forefront of world politics. It
also raised the cost of the occupation to Israel.
Breaking out of the current dead end will take nothing less than a
new intifada throughout the region. A movement that stresses
class, rather than national solidarity, will be crucial. Any
intifada-like uprising in the occupied territories or the
"autonomous" regions under PA control will confront not only the
Israeli forces, but PA security forces. An uprising against the
"peace process" will be a de facto uprising against the PA
whose entire legitimacy is invested in continuing negotiations with
Israel. The success of a movement will require appeals to Palestinian
security forces to join the movement—to "turn the guns around"
as they did, briefly, in September 1996.
Only a region-wide challenge to the stability of the "state
system" the U.S. and Israel prop up in the Middle East will shift
fortunes for the Palestinians. Challenging the Arab ruling classes,
which desire to be full collaborators with Israel in imperialist
domination of the region, will shift the balance of forces in the
region. And the only force which can shake the foundations of the
Arab states is the Arab working classes. The U.S. moved to impose the
"peace process," in part, because it feared repeats on a bigger scale
of the intifada-inspired unrest which shook regimes from
Algeria to Jordan in 1987 to 1991.
A new movement for Palestinian liberation would have to jettison
the entire tradition on which the PLO and many of its secular
nationalist critics embrace. A new strategy would have to place
emphasis on building class solidarity between Palestinian and other
Arab workers. Such a strategy would be based on connecting
workers’ struggle in the region to the fight for a secular,
democratic state of Palestine. There will be no peace in the Middle
East until there is a secular democratic state in all of Palestine in
which Jews and Arabs can live as equals.
- Maureen Meehan, "Israel Carries Out Massive House Demolitions
Throughout the West Bank," Washington Report on Middle East
Affairs, April/May 1997, pp. 6-7.
- Middle East International, June 27, 1997, p. 4
