Since the death of PLO leader and Palestine Authority leader Yasser Arafat last November, political and diplomatic events have moved swiftly. On 9 January Abu Mazen was elected President of the PA in a popular vote inside the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Early in February a formal ceasefire between the PLO and Israel was announced at a summit between Abu Mazen and Israel’s Prime Minster Ariel Sharon at Sharm al-Sheik.
The ceasefire conditions on the Palestinian side include a halt to attacks on Israeli civilians, settlers and army by Palestinians, and a commitment by Abu Mazen’s new administration to crack down on “extremists” in Hamas and Islamic Jihad. For his part, Sharon agreed to suspend targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants by Israel, withdraw IDF forces from five West Bank towns, ease border movement between Gaza and Egypt, and release hundreds of the 7,000 Palestinians in Israel’s jails.
But why is this happening now, fours years after the start of the Palestinian uprising (intifada), after 3,000 Palestinian deaths?
The timing is a result of three factors. First, the re-election of George Bush in the USA in November allowed for a new diplomatic initiative in the Middle East to try and stabilise the running sore of the Palestine-Israel conflict. On the military and diplomatic defensive in Iraq and having inflamed Muslim and Arab opinion in the entire region after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the second Bush administration desperately needs to be seen to working towards producing a settlement that gives the Palestinians some form of independent state for which they have been striving for nearly 40 years.
Secondly, Israel has an interest in securing a period of relative calm while it undertakes its withdrawal from the Gaza strip and consolidation of its grip on the West Bank by means of the completion of the “separation wall” which divides Israel from the West Bank. In late February Sharon’s cabinet agreed to pull out all Jewish 7000 settlers from the 17 settlements in the Gaza strip (as well four settlements in the northern West Bank – all by 20 July. The same meeting agreed the route of the separation wall south of Jerusalem, underlining Israel’s determination to annex whole swathes of the West Bank and permanently swallow up its 120 Jewish settlements and 230,000 settlers into Israel proper.
An Israeli withdrawal from Gaza while under fire from Hamas and other fighters would be a major propaganda blow to Sharon, allowing the Palestinians to portray the Gaza withdrawal as a victory for armed resistance. In fact Israel has decided that there is little by way of resources (water, land, minerals) to be had by holding onto the Gaza Strip and it is best left as an open prison, formally under the “control” of the PA and Hamas but with no sovereignty over its borders, airspace or even internal security forces.The removal of “refusnik” settlers may produce unsightly scenes but they will all be handsomely compensated and relocated into entrenched West Bank settlements.
Thirdly, the death of Arafat and the election of Abu Mazen as his successor give both Bush and Sharon an opportunity to tilt the PA towards a more compliant and pro-imperialist stance. Abu Mazen was and is a public opponent of the intifada. He has taken steps to overcome the fractured, warring and corrupt Palestinian security services – loyal only to Arafat’s patronage. Under the new control of Nasser Youssef as interior minister the security services are in the process of being unified, purged and directed more and more to the prevention of attacks on Israel by Hamas and Islamic Jihad rather than the defence of Palestinians from attack by the IDF. The CIA and Shin Bet (Israel’s secret service) will have a greater role than before in “assisting” this process and “professionalising” the embryonic repressive apparatus of the Palestinian mini-state.
The London summit this month hosted by Blair and Condoleezza Rice for Israel and Abu Mazen had little else on its agenda but how to get the PA to crack down on forces that refuse to respect the ceasefire – especially relevant coming days after the 25 February suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, the first since last November.
In this context socialists cannot welcome the ceasefire, renouncing as it does the right of Palestinians to defend themselves against brutal and ongoing attacks by the IDF. During the weeks of the ceasefire, Israeli violations (e.g. killing of young stone-throwers) have been common. In addition, the ceasefire entirely serves the political interests of Sharon and Bush and has not a hope in hell of being used to advance the main goals of the intifada.
And this is the poison chalice in the hands of Abu Mazen. He remains committed publicly to the three fundamental planks of the PLO and PA policy: a sovereign and independent Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders, free of Jewish settlers; the release of all Palestinian prisoners; right of return of all those Palestinians who have been expelled from their homes and land during and since 1948; and the recognition of East Jerusalem as he capital of the Palestinian state.
Meanwhile Bush – while rhetorically on record as favouring an independent Palestinian state within contiguous territory – has made it very clear that he backs Sharon’s stance that the West Bank settlements in the main are “here to stay", thus making Sharon very happy and such a Palestinian state impossible. Likewise Sharon has re-iterated time and again that the Jerusalem “will remain united and Jewish” and that those prisoners “with blood on their hands” can expect to serve out their sentences.
So the ceasefire, even if it lasts until the Gaza “disengagement", will not lead smoothly on to a “final status” agreement on the nature of a Palestinian state. And the ceasefire may well not last. In the June-August ceasefire of 2003 (when Abu Mazen was briefly Prime Minster under Arafat) the Israelis demanded as a precondition that the PA waged war on Hams and closed it down – a provocative and unrealisable call for Abu Mazen to ignite a civil war. Israel provocations reached a crescendo in August with the killing of a moderate Hamas political leader, Ismail Abu Shanab, forcing Hamas to abandon the ceasefire. But whatever the short term fate of the ceasefire Palestinian hopes for a just two state solution to their aspirations for self-determination will founder on the nature of the Zionist project itself. As a state specifically for Jews, with privileges for its Jewish citizens and second class status for the 18 per cent of its population who are Arab, Israel can be neither democratic nor at peace with a Palestinian neighbour.
To keep the Jewish character of the Zionist state intact when demographic trends ensure an Arab majority inside the territory under Israel’s control in 20 or so years, demands two things: first a desperate attempt to tempt the Jewish diaspora to come to live there – already foundering badly after ten years of hoovering up Russian and East European Jews. Secondly, it means further repression of Arabs in Israel. Already the voices of those who seek to make ethnic cleansing an acceptable facet of domestic policy are gaining more and more of a hearing. Why not drive them out into other countries like Jordan, Egypt or the Gaza Strip?
And of course the swelling numbers of Jews need somewhere to live and the only places they can go are to land occupied by another people- Palestinians in the West Bank. In short, Israel is a settler expansionist state and until its Zionist foundations are destroyed and replaced by a bi-national secular state peace and justice cannot be combined in Palestine-Israel. But since this cannot be done – given competing historic claims over land and resources, there can be no solution based on capitalist private property. Only a socialist state based on the expropriation of land and key industries under the control of the working class can underpin a state with no privileges for any religious o ethnic groups and democratic rights for all.