Palestine: US hopes to bury Palestinian hopes alongside Arafat
15 November 2004


Yasser Arafat is dead and buried. And the USA and Israel hope too that Palestinians&Mac226; hopes for a viable and democratic state lie buried also. All efforts will be made by the Zionists and their allies between now and the January elections for a new leader of the Palestine Authority to bring about an even more pliant leader of the Palestinians.

Arafat&Mac226;s personal history is intimately entwined with that of the modern Palestinian national liberation struggle, as its most visible face and at times it most potent symbol. Arafat began his political career as a student activist, rising to the leadership of the Union of Palestinian Students in Egypt between 1952 and 1956. Alongside his future long-time associates, Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, he was also involved in the activities of the Palestinian fedayeen (guerrillas), who carried out raids on Israel from their base in the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. Following his graduation with an engineering degree, he served in the Egyptian armed forces during the Suez Crisis of 1956.

However, Arafat's experience of Egyptian president Nasser&Mac226;s political repression and his attempts to reign in the fedayeen, combined with their isolation as a result of Nasser's enhanced prestige following the Suez events, forced Arafat and his co-thinkers to abandon political activity in Egypt. They subsequently emigrated to Kuwait, where they founded the newspaper Filastinuna (Our Palestine&Mac226;) as the organ of the Palestinian Liberation Movement, better known by is reversed Arabic acronym Fatah ("victory" or "conquest" in Arabic, and the name of a surah from the Qur&Mac226;an).

Fatah&Mac226;s political perspective, which marked it out as different from its competitors for Palestinian support, was its insistence on a solely Palestinian leadership of and involvement in the struggle to liberate Palestine, coupled with its emphasis upon the armed struggle. They drew the conclusion from the betrayals of 1948 that only the Palestinians could be entrusted with the Palestinian struggle, with the Arab states playing a purely supportive role.

In the heyday of Nasserism and pan-Arabism, this parochially Palestinian nationalism remained very much a minority current. However, the perspective behind it was not entirely new. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, in his time, had clashed with the pan-Arab ambitions of the ruling Hashemite dynasties of Iraq and Transjordan. These ambitions led, in the latter case, to King Abdallah&Mac226;s abandonment of the Palestinians in 1948 in the interests of creating a Hashemite-dominated "Greater Syria", the first step to which was to be a tacitly negotiated carve-up of palestine with the Zionists followed by the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank.

Husseini&Mac226;s position expressed the interests of the Palestinian merchant and land-owning classes, fearful of social revolution, on the one hand, and of the predatory designs of their "Arab brothers&Mac226; on the other. Arafat&Mac226;s parallel position, transplanted to the conditions of the 1950s and 1960s, expressed the interests of a Palestinian bourgeoisie, displaced across several Arab states, dependent upon the goodwill and tolerance of the ruling elite in each, and lacking a territorial base from which to exploit "their own&Mac226; workers – that is, a bourgeoisie unable to display all the characteristics of leadership of a modern bourgeois nation.

Similarly, Fatah's lack of any definite social programme, at a time when most popular movements in the Arab world professed an adherence to some variant of Soviet or Nasserist-inspired "socialism", and its (official) refusal to involve itself in intra-Arab politics or in the "internal affairs&Mac226; of the Arab states, was designed to placate the same Palestinian capitalists about the nature of the "revolution" that Fatah asked them to support, while reassuring the reactionary Arab oil monarchies that were their hosts and sponsors that the "Palestinian Revolution" would remain within Palestine&Mac226;s borders.

It is therefore no accident that Arafat&Mac226;s first base was in Kuwait, where up to a quarter of the population were of Palestinian origin, and where Palestinian capitalists played a key role in transforming the sheikdom from an isolated backwater to the modern industrial age of oil production and international trade. Nor was it an accident that a future base would be the Lebanese capital, Beirut, the home of Arab finance-capital in which Palestinian capitalists played a disproportionate, if subordinate, role.

Fatah officially began its "armed struggle" on 1 January 1965, with a series of ineffectual raids into Israel from Syrian and Jordanian territory. However, the defeat and humiliation of the Arab armies in the Six-Day War of June 1967, bringing with it the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, demolished the juggernaut of Nasserism and pan-Arabism, and appeared to vindicate Fatah's programme of Palestinian self-reliance. Henceforth, Arafat's competitors would have to emulate his movement or risk political irrelevance, as Habash's ANM did, renaming itself the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and embarking on a series of spectacular airplane hijackings.

The Palestinian Liberation Organistaion (PLO), established by the Arab regimes as a vehicle for controlling the Palestinians, was taken over by the Fatah guerrillas and became a magnet for political and mass organisations of all types. It gained recognition from the Arab states and many Third World countries as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people", and seemed poised to become what the National Liberation Front (FLN) had been for the Algerian independence struggle against France.

Arafat clashed with Jordan, Syria and Egypt in the 1970s and 1980s as each of these states in turn felt that Arafat's movement posed threats to their own interests. In the 1980s Arafat increased his efforts to bring about a negotiated "two-state" solution, to be brokered by the diplomatic pressure of the US and the European imperialist powers upon Israel to recognise and negotiate with the PLO.

However, these efforts repeatedly foundered on the US and Israeli insistence that the PLO "renounce terrorism" (that is, cease to defend acts of Palestinian resistance); on the determination of the Arab regimes (especially Jordan and Egypt) to negotiate peace with Israel over the Palestinians&Mac226; heads; and on the exiled PLO's decreasing ability to direct popular resistance in the Occupied Territories, rendering it an irrelevance in international terms in a way that the Algerian FLN had not been.

The Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, that broke out in December 1987 therefore took Arafat and his Tunis bureaucracy by surprise, and was initially interpreted as a possible threat to the PLO's leadership of the Palestinians. However, Arafat quickly moved to use it to strengthen his diplomatic hand, squandering the energy of a people awakened to political life in the interests of a historic compromise with Israel and its US imperialist sponsor. Following the decimation of Iraq by the US-led Coalition in 1991, and on the back of the slow strangulation of the Intifada, a weakened PLO was finally able to negotiate the disastrous 1993 Oslo accords.

The Oslo accords have proved to be both a defeat and a betrayal for the Palestinians. Without any commitment from Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the PLO agreed to recognise the Israeli state, to abandon or put off indefinitely such key issues as the return of the 1948 refugees, and even to leave till "final status" talks the status of any future Palestinian entity, its borders and powers, and even its ability to control its airspace, water, natural resources, and economic policy.

In return, Israel granted the PLO the status of a negotiating partner, and allowed it to take on the burden of municipal administration of a bankrupted Palestinian society, while saddling the newly-created Palestinian Authority (PA) with the obligation of "suppressing terror"and "protecting Israel's security". In the meantime, Israel exploited the breathing-space granted by the cessation of mass Palestinian resistance to embark upon an unprecedented programme of land-grabbing and settlement-building.

Arafat returned triumphally to Gaza as the leader of a national liberation movement claiming a hollow "victory" in the form of an ongoing "peace process" with its people's historic oppressors. Meanwhile, dissidents filled the PA's prisons as the PA did the dirty work of policing Israel's occupation for it, and the reactionary-Islamist Hamas movement mushroomed on the back of Palestinian discontent. Israeli premier Ehud Barak&Mac226;s attempt to deliver a final humiliation to the Palestinians with his "generous offers" at final status talks at Camp David, followed by Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque, lit the fuse of simmering resentment. A second Palestinian intifada broke out in September 2000, with it reducing Arafat to the level of a powerless figurehead.

On Arafat's death George Bush could barely disguise his satisfaction at the removal of a further obstacle to a strengthened Israel. For them, Arafat's crimes are what we should regard as his redeeming features – that he chose to lead an oppressed nation into struggle, that he did not play by their one-sided rules in conducting that struggle, and that he remains a symbol, albeit a flawed symbol, of that struggle. They blame Arafat for the fact that the Palestinians will not meekly bow their heads and accept defeat.

Conversely, the bourgeois liberal current who cheered the Oslo accords as a victory for pragmatism over extremism, who believed that the "peace process&Mac226; would lead inexorably to a Palestinian state, and who fantasise about European imperialism's ability (with or without Britain) to further the cause of "peace and progress&Mac226; will hark on about Arafat's irreplaceability, and the threat of instability arising from the absence of an obvious successor for Palestinian leadership. To them, Arafat's redeeming features are what we should regard as his betrayals.

They will be right, however, in one respect only: on Arafat's irreplaceability. Arafat's remarkable record of political survival, despite a history of defeats, failures and betrayals, is in itself evidence of a rare degree of adaptability. This adaptability shows itself in a unique ability to manoeuvre, to play off against each other the different classes of Palestinian society; the different PLO factions; the PLO against the Islamists; the radical and conservative Arab regimes; and of course Israel, the US and the European imperialist countries. Like a chameleon, he has been able to change his colours as and when the situation demanded, and in the process has become one of the most diversely-interpreted politicians in history.

Other leaders, like the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, may prove better at leading and enthusing a movement against Israeli occupation – without, it must be said, any great difference of political outlook. Warlords in the making, like the rival security chiefs Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan, may prove more adept at stifling and suppressing Palestinian dissent on behalf of the same Israeli occupation. Others still, like Palestinian premier Ahmad Qurei and his hapless predecessor Mahmoud Abbas, may be more acceptable faces to Israel and US imperialism for negotiating a further sell-out of their people's rights. But only Yasser Arafat could combine all of these roles into a coherent whole. In that sense he is truly irreplaceable.

Now read: more articles on the intifada