Palestine: no return to the Oslo process
In two months of heroic resistance to Israeli missiles and bullets more than 250, mainly young, Palestinians have died fighting to expel Zionist forces occupying their homeland.
Despite the Palestinians having justice and courage on their side the international labour movement has been woeful in its response. Taking their cue from the US and EU governments, the official leaders of social democracy and the trade unions in the west have done nothing to condemn Israel’s violence.
The influence of Zionism in the labour movement is pervasive. The naive belief exists among many that Israel, with all its “imperfections”, is a ”safe haven” for the world’s Jews and that their homeland is under constant threat of attack from anti-semitic Arab neighbours. This is nonsense.
Israel was formed in 1948, with the support of the US, by ethnic cleansing against Palestine’s Arab population. It had an Arab population which had lived there for centuries – a Jewish state in Palestine could only exist by expelling them or discriminating against them. Some 750,000 Arabs were driven off their land by the fear of massacres.
Soon the Jewish 33 per cent of the population came to control 75 per cent of the territory.
The racist “Law of Return” allowed Jews from anywhere in the world to come to Israel and become citizens, while discriminating against the Arab minority.
Meanwhile the Palestinians lived as refugees in the Arab states, as second-class citizens in Israel, or as subjects of repressive Arab regimes in the parts of Palestine not captured by Israel (the West bank and Gaza Strip). Palestinians have never accepted their fate and despite the overwhelming superiority of Israel’s military might they keep fighting back.
American imperialism supported Israel because it needed it to act as its watchdog in the Middle East: to protect the oil for the West and prevent the Arab masses overthrowing their corrupt pro-Western governments.
The blame for the latest uprising (intifada) lies with Israel’s government and specifically the Prime Minister Ehoud Barak. Under his two year rule negotiations stalled while seizures of Arab land for more Israeli settlements multiplied.
The number of settlement building projects increased 90 per cent in one year. And the provocative actions of the armed Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories (having doubled to 200,000 in eight years) became intolerable.
The collapse of the "final status" negotiations, between Israel and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, occurred when the Palestinians refused to sign up to an agreement which offered them a joke of an "independent state": without Jerusalem, surrounded by Israeli army posts and settlements and with no right of return for the estimated three to five million Palestinian refugees in exile.
A deliberate provocation by right-wing butcher and Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon in visiting a holy Muslim shrine in late September was the detonator.
For the first month or so of the new uprising Israel responded with more and more force. Stones were met with bullets and rubber bullets, rifle fire met with rockets, the bombing of whole West Bank districts and the assassination of PLO leaders.
But the predictable consequence of crushing unarmed mass demonstrations of youth is to force Fatah militia and Hamas into adopting other tactics. They have now started to blow up civilian targets inside Israel. Israel have run out of military options to crush the intifada, even if they can move it off the streets.
It is this context that both the USA and Russia have stepped up their attempt at “mediation”. This really means that the Palestinians must stop their resistance and go back into negotiations. They are putting pressure on Arafat to co-operate with Israel to quash forces inside his own movement that will not agree to a ceasefire – and he has done so.
Putting a lid on the latest intifada will solve nothing. The underlying cause of Palestinian violence is the theft of their land, the denial of their national rights and the constant belligerent expansion of Jewish settlements.
The repeated collapse of the peace process shows that the search for a “two-state” solution is a farce. For as long as there exists a specifically Jewish state in Palestine, maintaining its Jewish majority with racist immigration laws, the Palestinians will continue to be an oppressed nation.
The Palestinian state in this scenario will be desperately poor and dependent on Israel, its rulers acting as Israel’s police against their own people.
The only just and long-lasting solution is not separating Arabs and Jews into states, but a single bi-national secular and socialist state in the whole of historic Palestine, something which demands the destruction of a Zionist state based on privileges for one part of the population at the expense of another.
- Victory to the intifada!
- Israeli army out of the Occupied Territories! An end to all Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza!
- End the Zionist blockade of the Occupied Territories. Stop the assassinations, release prisoners held by Israel!
- For international aid to the Palestinians under siege!
- No return to the Oslo Peace Process! For the genuine right to self-determination for the Palestinians, one that recognises the right of return of the Palestinian Diaspora!
- For a secular workers' republic of Palestine!
Palestine: solidarity with the intifada!
Palestine: the shape of Israel's "final settlement"
Palestine: casualties of the propaganda war
Israel: history of an oppressor settler state
Palestinian Nationalism and the PLO
[LRCI 1988]