Palestine: Gaza massacres aim to destroy resistance before pull-out
20 May 2004


Palestinians in the Gaza strip hit back in spectacular fashion at the Israeli army for killing two prominent Hamas leaders last month. By ambushing and killing a dozen Israeli soldiers in two separate incidents the militants inflicted their heaviest casualties on the IDF for years.

But Israel will have its pound of flesh. Successive raids into Gaza's refugee camps in mid-May have destroyed dozens of homes and killed dozens of civilians, many of them children. Then the butchers topped it all on 19 May by using gunships against an unarmed mass civilian demonstration - killing many more.

Meanwhile weazle words of "regret" for this "overreaction" from the US and UK go alongside complete failure to offer practical help for the Palestinians in th eface of this Zionist butchery.

This onslaught follows the rejection by the majority of the Likud party memberhship in a referendum on Sharon's proposed pull-out from the Gaza, followed by the biggest demonstration seen for years by the peace movement (100,000) demanding an immediate pull-out. Israeli society is highly polarised.

Despite losing a Likud Party referendum on his Gaza pull-out plans Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon still intends to press ahead with withdrawal, even if it will take more time to steer it past domestic opposition.

This plan naturally is not a gift to the Palestinians. On 17 April, three weeks after the cold-blooded assassination of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, Israel killed his successor Abdul Aziz Rantisi as he drove his car in Gaza. This should be taken as a sign of what Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon meant when he promoted his Gaza "disengagement plan" to his Likud party as a punishment, and not a reward, for the Palestinians.

In fact, despite the official welcome given to the planned Gaza pull-out by those, like Tony Blair, who still pay lip-service to the now-dead "Road Map For Peace", there were no Palestinian celebrations of the impending Israeli withdrawal, such as those that greeted Arafat's triumphal entry into Gaza following the 1993 Oslo accords. They have little to celebrate.

Israel's redeployment from the world's biggest open-air prison will serve merely to consolidate its grip on the West Bank. The Gaza Strip, surrounded by electric fences and sniper-posts, will be cut off from the outside world, its fragile economy dependent on the whims of Israel's periodic border closures, its unemployed workforce unable to travel to find jobs. It has been announced that Gaza residents under the age of 35 will be forbidden from leaving under any circumstances, even in humanitarian cases.

The 7,500 Jewish settlers, who controlled two-thirds of a tiny sliver of land that they shared with more than a million Palestinians, will be amply compensated with the expansion of the West Bank settlements. Israel will abdicate any responsibility for Gaza's worsening humanitarian crisis to a bankrupt Palestinian Authority.

Nor will the withdrawal mean any lessening of the violence of the occupation. Sharon has indicated that Israel will feel free to use greater force than at present in response to Palestinian "terrorism" coming from Gaza, as the Palestinians will no longer be able to use the excuse that they are being occupied. A Gaza controlled from the outside by fences, remote-control bombs and Apache attack helicopters will serve as a model for the Palestinian ghettos being created in the West Bank.

There are, however, two flies in the ointment of Sharon's plan. One is the likely opposition to a withdrawal from Gaza from within his ruling Likud party and its right wing coalition allies, and the more extreme of the Jewish settlers in Gaza. This Sharon has tried to neutralise by posing tough on security issues and killing the Hamas leaders. Moreover, he will press ahead with his disengagement plan regardless of the results of a referendum of Likud party members on the issue, and will probably find accomplices in the Israeli Labor Party if he does so.

The other potential problem was arranging the acquiescence of the "international community" - i.e. the United States - to his annexation of Palestinian land. Here, however, Sharon has had a stroke of good luck. His visit to Washington on 15 April saw US President George W Bush endorsing his plan for "unilateral disengagement", even to the point of denying the Palestinian refugees' "right of return" to the lands in pre-1967 Israel from which they were expelled. Bush went so far as to state that "in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return" to the 1967 borders.

In other words, Bush has endorsed the illegal settlements, giving Israel the right to claim at least the major settlements in any future "final status" talks. This has earned him condemnation in the Arab world. It has angered and weakened America's Arab allies, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

While the pro-Zionist positions of the "neo-conservative" hawks in the Bush administration are well known, it is difficult not to see this provocative turn in the context of America's increasing isolation over its occupation of Iraq, and its consequent increased dependence on its Israeli ally. This isolation extends to Bush's junior partner-in-crime, Tony Blair, who gave his own endorsement of the Bush-Sharon position at a joint press conference with George Bush the following day.

The Palestinians will doubtless continue in their resistance to the occupation and their rejection of "solutions" designed to frustrate their national self-determination. However, the failure of an intifada now in its fourth year to dislodge the occupation, and the evident physical weakness of the armed Palestinian resistance following the wave of Israeli assassinations poses the question of what form this resistance needs to take to achieve victory.

The strategy of a purely military resistance conducted by small armed groups without the active involvement of the masses has reached its natural limits. The targeting of Israeli civilians, in particular, has done the Palestinians more harm than good, damaging their much-needed international sympathy, while allowing Sharon to rein Israel's Jews into a reactionary bloc obsessed with the need to protect "Israel's security". Israel can speak the language of force much better than the unarmed and occupied Palestinian people, no matter how many would-be martyrs are willing to volunteer their lives in such an unequal struggle.

What Israel cannot do is control, indefinitely, four million people who reject its rule. Nor can the Israeli state indefinitely suppress the dissent of its own citizens to an occupation that has proved costly both in terms of lives lost and the plummeting living standards of an Israeli economy hit hard by the Palestinian uprising. The best weapon that the Palestinians have is a mass resistance that makes Sharon's plans for land theft and ghetto walls impossible to realise. Such a resistance can intersect with the consciousness of those Israeli Jews who a tired of the conflict.

If every town or village whose lands are to be expropriated to build the Apartheid wall can present the bulldozers with mass demonstrations of people willing to stand and resist the destruction of their homes, then no-one will be able to present their actions as anything less than legitimate self-defence. The role of the armed organisations in any programme of mass resistance will be to protect the mass actions from the lethal force Israel will inevitably unleash.

That Israel has managed to get away with such violence in the past is due in no small part to the blank cheque written by its imperialist backers. The global solidarity of the workers, youth and progressive intellectuals in the imperialist countries is therefore vital to the success of the Palestinian resistance. We should take every opportunity to expose Israel's crimes, and to prevent our governments from continuing their complicity with them. We should call for an end to all aid and arms sales to Israel; workers should refuse to handle military goods destined for the Zionist state.

The Palestinians can also call upon the solidarity of the workers and peasants of the surrounding Arab countries. Following the invasion of Iraq, however, the Arab regimes have become even more reticent in their support for the Palestinians.

The struggle for Palestine is therefore inseparable from the struggle to unseat the Arab dictatorships, and therefore from the struggle for social revolution in the Middle East. Such a revolution, by offering a vision of a Middle East in which foreign, imperialist and domestic exploiters have no place, will be able to offer all national grouping, like the Kurds and even the Israelis, their own "place in the sun". In this way, it can also begin to undermine the poisonous unity of the Israeli Jewish workers with their own exploiters against the Palestinians.

In place of an imperialist "Road Map For Peace" or racist "disengagement" we therefore counterpose a road map for permanent revolution and the unity of all the oppressed and exploited against imperialism, capitalism, and its local agents.

Now read: more articles on the intifada