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Palestine under siege

On 28 February, Israeli tanks invaded Balata refugee camp in Nablus. This was swiftly followed by similar attacks on Tulkarem Nur al Shams, Jenin, Aaza, Aida and Deheisha, Arrob, Khan Younis, Rafah and Jabalya refugee camps.

In the first two weeks of last month 163 Palestinians were killed after Prime Minster Sharon proclaimed a “new” stated policy of “hitting Palestinians hard [until it is] very painful. We must cause them losses, victims, so that they feel the heavy price”.

These victims were on top of the more than 1,000 Palestinians killed and more than 18,000 injured since the intifada began.

In the final week of March the Palestinians responded with further suicide bombs, killing forty-one people in seven incidents. Israel then launched “Operation Defensive Shield” on 29 March – in fact a full-scale invasion of areas controlled by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).

Its aim has been to crush the Palestinian militias and terrorise the civilian population. Israeli forces took over six major West Bank towns and cities – Ramallah, Qalqiliya, Jenin, Tulkarem, Bethlehem, Nablus and Hebron – and have arrested more than 1,100 Palestinians. Jericho remained the last island of Palestinian control in the West Bank. Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah was the first to be hit and he remained isolated there surrounded by Israeli troops.

Sharon’s policy shift in late February transcended the assassination of “suspected” activists and bombing of targeted PNA or PLO/Hamas buildings that had characterised Israel’s bloody oppression of the Palestinians legitimate resistance. It has been broadened to a full frontal attack upon Palestinian civilians in the refugees camps, which form the organising centre and mass base of support for the intifada.

But the first half of March also witnessed a flurry of diplomatic activity: the return of Anthony Zinni as Bush’s envoy to the Middle East, a Saudi “peace plan” which proposes to swap “normalisation” of relations with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Territories; Sharon even conceded the possibility of negotiations without a ceasefire. A UN security Council resolution – with US backing – for the first time backed the idea of a Palestinian state.

The murderous repression and the diplomatic initiatives are related and form a unified whole. It is very reminiscent of the first months of 1993. From February through May that year Israel embarked on the bloodiest repression of the first intifada in the wake of successful Hamas operations; more were killed than at any time since 1967.

Thousands of Palestinians were detained, hundreds expelled to Lebanon, the Gaza sealed off. Yet at exactly the same time secret negotiations started in Norway between Israel and Palestinians that led to the Oslo accords in September 1993.

In short, the brutal repression by the Zionist state is an attempt to strengthen its negotiating position ahead of any resumed talks on a political settlement by destroying the infrastructure of resistance and the use of mass detentions as a bargaining chip.

Ceasefire

On September 11 last year the intifada was nearly one year old and was locked into a war of attrition. After 11 September George Bush gave Sharon the green light for a more brutal repression of the intifada in the name of the war against terrorism. US intervention was thereafter confined to securing a unilateral ceasefire by the PLO/PNA and to exert pressure on Arafat to arrest and crush the non-Fatah resistance fighters (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP). The resistance movement responded by greater use of suicide bombs inside Israel, more daring raids on Jewish settlements and finally more effective attacks on the occupying Israeli army.

The intifada thus proved stronger than Sharon’s reputation and determination; his one attraction to Israel’s Jews – that he could bring them security through use of force – has proved utterly illusory. His poll ratings plummeted from 80 per cent last summer to 45 per cent in March.

He has lost support on all sides. In the last two weeks we have seen the Jewish population inside Israel polarised like never before. The anti-occupation movement of reservists has mushroomed in the last month. Since September 2000 almost a thousand soldiers and potential draftees have now told the army officials that they will not take part in the occupation.

An unprecedented 15,000 strong peace demonstration took place in Tel Aviv on 2 March, followed by a small – but again the largest to date – demonstration (3,000) in Jerusalem on 8 March calling for an end to the current wave of Israeli invasions. On the other side 50,000 demonstrated calling for the overthrow of the PNA and the “removal” of Yasser Arafat from Palestine.

The logic of Operation Defensive Shield suggests the next move is for the destruction of the PNA and the resumption of full control of the West Bank and Gaza. This would involve the defeat and disarming of 30,000 PNA fighters and the permanent garrisoning of the West Bank and Gaza again. Many on the far right in Sharon’s government press for this and even for the expulsion of Palestinians out of the West Bank.

But such a move is opposed by a majority of the Israeli army high command and intelligence service. The army is already wracked by a growing movement of reservists who refuse to be deployed to the killing fields of the West Bank to carry our orders to murder children and unarmed demonstrators. The army knows it would face a civil war in the ranks if it tried to force reservists to permanently re-occupy the whole of the West Bank and take responsibility for administration of the territories.

Having sanctioned the Israeli invasion in March and having seen most of its war aims achieved within a week, Bush stepped in on 4 April to announce that Secretary of State Colin Powell was to return to the region. His mission is to rescue a much weakened Arafat from the rubble of Ramallah and force him to sign up to a new “peace deal” that gives Israel what it wants and breaks the objections of the PLO to the deal that was on offer before the intifada began.

The Bush administration knows that destroying the PNA and Arafat would spell the end for any attempt to get the Middle East Arab ruling class to sign up to his impending attack upon Iraq. In turn the Arab ruling governments know that an all-out war to crush the PNA would ignite their own peoples.

Just as the Madrid conference in 1991 (the precursor to the Oslo accords) was a “reward” to the local Arab states for their support for the USA in the Gulf war against Iraq, so the support for the Saudi plan and the UN resolution is a bribe aimed at compliance with the coming attack on Iraq.

But what kind of “peace” can be imposed on a defeated PLO and PNA? Under his leadership Yasser Arafat has brought the Palestinian people to the brink of catastrophe. The mix of guerrilla struggle, bourgeois diplomacy, corrupt patronage and brutal repression of opponents has ensured that Arafat’s “leadership” over the Palestinian people has resulted in his complete failure to secure self-determination for them.

The roots of the second intifada lay in his disastrous decision to co-sign the Oslo declaration of principles in 1993 with Israel and the subsequent detailed agreements (such as Cairo 1994) which set out the range of the PNA’s powers and security commitments made to Israel.

At Oslo Arafat agreed to legitimise Israel’s redeployment of its occupying troops to those parts of the West Bank and Gaza that allowed it to defend Jewish settlements and secure the natural resources and roads that enabled them to function.

Around 59 per cent of the West Bank is officially under Israeli civil and security control. Another 23 per cent was placed under Palestinian civil control, but Israeli security control. Barely 18 per cent was ceded to the territory governed by the Palestinian National Authority.

In return for this and recognition of the PLO Arafat recognised the state of Israel. The fate of settlements and East Jerusalem were left for further negotiations during the “interim period”. The negotiations on the “final settlement” were meant to be concluded in 1996 but were repeatedly delayed as one crisis after another erupted. In July 2000 attempts at a final settlement between PLO and Prime Minister Barak under Clinton’s pressure failed because of Israel’s intransigence on settlements and the status of Jerusalem.

In September 2000 all the contradictions of the post-Oslo peace process exploded. The manifest determination of all wings of Zionism to deny the Palestinians a meaningful independent state and substitute for this a series of disconnected, encircled bantustans finally led to a second intifada. At the centre of this explosion lay the settlements, an ongoing and growing negation of the Palestinian’s right to self-determination, a fact recognised even by US Senator George Mitchell’s report in May 2001 when he recommended the Israeli government freeze all settlement activity because of their provocative character and oppressive results.

Settlements are integral to Zionism because Jewish immigration is at the heart of the Zionist state. Israel has only been able to sustain its colonial project by drawing in a constant supply of Jews from around the world.

Any “peace deal” that does not remove settlements from the Gaza strip and large parts of the West Bank will simply guarantee further explosions. Any attempt by Arafat to legitimise their existence and growth in any “final settlement” which recognises a Palestinian “state” would probably cause civil war among Palestinians.

Isolation

The Saudi peace plan has the implicit backing of Bush and the Gulf states. Its attraction to Israel lies in ending its economic and diplomatic isolation from the region and holds out the prospect of rich contracts to rescue its flailing economy in the medium to long term.

The PLO have welcomed the UN and Saudi proposals. But they are as much of a trap as Oslo was. If the Saudi plan is committed to full withdrawal of Israel to pre-1967 borders, including the dismantling of settlements (or placing them under Palestinian jurisdiction) then it is doomed since Israel will not countenance it.

If this is “negotiable” in return for the present (or slightly enlarged) set of PNA bantustans being labelled “a state” by the international community and Israel, and this state cannot allow refugees to return home, then it is a recipe for future intifadas and civil war.

Two states living in harmony and justice is a chimera. What we have now is, de facto, the two states solution that is compatible with the existence of the state of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state. The only just solution must encompass equal citizenship rights for Jews and Arabs and the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their land of origin. This means a state in which Jews and Arabs are equal, not a state that defines itself specifically as “Jewish” or “Arab”.

Otherwise the continued existence of an Israeli-Jewish state, even alongside a Palestinian state, would depend on the maintenance of racist citizenship laws and the exclusion of millions of Palestinians from the territory. Far from providing the basis for a lasting peace, this could only condemn the region to further cycles of repression and war.

The destruction of the Zionist character of the present state of Israel is the only basis upon which a future just settlement to the present conflict can be built. Without it there can be no right of Palestinian’s to return, without it there can be no end to the cancer of settlements within the body of Palestine. The opposite is also true: relinquishing the demand for the removal of settlements, (and hence the withdrawal of Israeli troops) and for the right of Palestinians to return can only confirm the exclusionist, anti-democratic character of Israel.

Only a socialist secular republic of the whole of Palestine – which has rights for all and privileges for none, based on the unity of the Jewish and Arab working class and small farmers, the nationalisation of land and the expropriation of big business and finance – can bring peace and justice to Palestine. Without justice there can be no peace.

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