Social and Class issues underly the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy

Social and Class issues underly
the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy

The war triggered off by the Israeli State against the towns and cities of the West Bank is showing ever more clearly its anti-proletarian agenda, and is more similar to the conflict in Lebanon than previous wars. We see systematic destruction of the Palestinian civil infrastructure and the physical elimination of militant members of its political organisations; civilians subject to random arrests and searches; bulldozers forcing their way through mounds of wrecked hovels in the refugee camps, but the army’s main intention is not so much to pursue its declared aim of the “War on terrorism” but rather to repress the region’s proletarian masses and force them into submission. Just as in Sabra and Chatila twenty years ago, what we have witnessed in Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron are not episodes in a war between States, but rather a civil war against the working class. And it is only proletarians, incidentally, in stark contrast to the cowardly and corrupt forces of “Palestinian Autonomy”, who have been able to slow up the advance of the much more powerful Israeli troops and even inflict casualties.

That the aim of the enterprise is not “combating terrorism” we can deduce from the almost daily attacks that still continue to terrorise the inhabitants of the Israeli cities, even though the West bank and Gaza is encircled by a ruthlessly enforced security cordon.

Let us retrace our steps a bit.

The Oslo Agreement was very advantageous to the Israeli bourgeoisie, and satisfied it as regards its territorial, economic, social and economic demands and indeed left it with very little more to wish for. This agreement, accepted by the timid and corrupt Palestinian bourgeoisie, provided for the creation of a puppet State, an out and out “Bantustan”, where it promised to confine its own proletariat, for use on the spot or in Israel as cheap labour.

The bourgeois National Palestinian Authority, equipped with a strong repressive apparatus supplied and trained by the Israelis and Americans, took on the job of maintaining order in exchange for being able to carry on its business affairs in Israel’s shadow. The deal would also ensure a fair share of the easy profits to the Arabic countries and to Europe, all of whom have been interested in dividing up and maintaining control over this highly strategically important region for the last fifty years; keeping the peace by keeping the Palestinians (and the Israelis) as perpetual war hostages.

The defence of the Oslo Agreement has been taken to ridiculous lengths by the Palestinian leadership, whose submissive collaboration with the Israeli bourgeoisie and its State is now complete. The Palestinian police and secret services have collaborated fully with the Israeli police and secret services and with the secret services of the United States by providing information damaging not only to their current opponents, but also to the most combative proletarian groups: that is when they haven’t succeeded in repressing them themselves, or machine-gunning them down in the streets. And it wouldn’t be long before the leaders of the Palestinian trade-unions became a subject of interest to their own “autonomous” police force.

Even on the economic front, collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian employers is close: “Beyond the links formalised in the Agreement – writes N.Pacadou in Le Monde diplomatique in March 2001 – the reality of the economic dependence of the Palestinian territories on the Jewish State maintains networks of interests that unite the neighbouring “military-commercial complex” of the Palestinian National Authority to Israeli officials, without whom the monopoly on imports of raw materials enjoyed by the Palestinian public societies wouldn’t be exercised” . The article continues: “The initial ambiguity about what constitutes autonomy thus condemns the Palestinian Authority to an impossible task: to carry forward the national struggle by collaborating with the occupiers”.

The reason for the failure of the Oslo Agreement is that the Palestinian machinery of repression hasn’t been up to the police duties assigned to it by international capitalism, and nor could it be.

Knowing this full well, the Israeli State, as well as it being in its own interests, has never ceased pursuing its expansionist policies, planting new colonies, expropriating land and water, and opposing any argument for the return of the millions of refugees still living in camps dispersed throughout the Middle-East.

In the light of the tragedy of these last few weeks, Arafat has been accused of turning down the peace agreement offered to him by the Barak government in 1999 and as therefore responsible for its failure and the consequent ruin of the Palestinian people. But that isn’t so. The crafty old fox, the living symbol of failed Palestinian irredentism, was evidently willing to sign that agreement but was prevented from making such an out and out capitulation by the rallying of the disinherited masses i.e. the ones who would have to pay for it, as had happened so many times before, with their blood, sweat and tears.

In an interview in the December 23rd edition of Le Monde, Ami Ayalon, head of the Israeli internal security services from 1996 to 2000 – someone who knows his enemy – had two interesting things to say on the subject: “Their’s (the Palestinians) is not folly but hopeless desperation (…) Contrary to what we are having hammered into our heads, Yasser Arafat neither prepared nor triggered off the Intifada. The explosion against Israel was a spontaneous response to lack of hope regarding the ending of the occupation”. It was the disinherited of Palestine, those on starvation wages, those who live in hovels and tumbledown houses, trapped within the refugee camps and who have no hope of a better life who spontaneously took to the streets and opposed not only the armoured artillery and aeroplanes of the Israeli army with stones and the odd gun, but also the very well paid Palestinian police. This second Intifada is characterised by its class content, by its struggle against the corrupt Palestinian government, the police, corrupt trade-unions, the increasingly demanding employers; a class oppression that comes on top of and unites with the Israeli State’s military oppression, making life increasingly difficult, hard and unsustainable. The Intifada therefore continues, despite the mass arrests and “targeted executions” of the most combative militants, eliminated by the Israeli army on the basis of lists provided by the Palestinian Authority.

This extremely tense situation has enabled the extremist Islamic parties to carve out a role; enjoying the financial backing of bourgeois States in the East and South certainly, but also probably a few in the West as well. To push adolescents towards self-destruction isn’t difficult, especially if they’ve grown up surrounded by so much humiliation and injustice. But Terrorism against the civilian population of Israel is a suicidal policy which is counter-productive most of all for the “Palestinian cause”. Our view of the conflict, based on class, sees this terrorism as performing a function which complements that of government, and in fact is necessary to it: keeping the two peoples separate by blinding the Israeli population with terror – something not so difficult to obtain given the Jewish past. This terrorism has turned out to be so useful, and so “convenient” in its timing, that it can hardly fail to cross our minds that maybe the secret services of both sides have been involved; if not directly, at least insofar as they haven’t done much to prevent it happening. Only the massacres of civilians has justified the increasingly brutal military interventions against the Palestinian population; only through those massacres have Jews reached a stage where once more they are prepared to lay down their lives in war.

To understand such a situation we need of course also to take into account what is happening in the capitalist economy at both global and local levels. The economic crisis has been putting the squeeze on Israeli industry, signalling the end of the Israeli “economic miracle” which was based mainly on leading-edge industries, computers, electronics, telecommunications and research. The world economic recession of the past year has now bitten in deeper still.

The same necessary military response to the economic crisis which constrained the capitalists in the United States to find an enemy and trigger off the war in Afghanistan (which they are threatening to extend to the Middle East with an attack on Iraq) has pushed the powerful military-industrial machinery of Israel to launch its “total war” against the Palestinian territories, even in the absence of any strategic or “national” requirements.

The Israeli State though is not diplomatically isolated in this war, despite the propaganda machine depicting it otherwise: the United States are on Israel’s side, as are Russia and Europe; indeed it is very much in the interests of these major commercial partners of Tel Aviv, despite all the clamour, to gain ground in the area at Washington’s expense. Everybody, fine words aside, is in agreement with Sharon: before any negotiations start the “job must be finished”, hundreds of proletarians will have to end up in the communal graves in the suburbs, their neighbourhoods devastated, their organisations destroyed.

The Palestinian proletariat is on its own. And the Israeli proletariat is on its own, both sacrificial victims being slowly strangled by a huge chain of capitalist interests and machinations which have the entire world in its grip; Bush, Putin and Solana etc are doing the strangling just as much as Sharon, Peres, Mubarak and Arafat and co.

Much of this was realised by those Israeli reservists who publicly refused to go and humiliate and kill their class brothers in the Palestinian territories. It is a sign of the crumbling of that unity of all classes that in Israel, as everywhere else, constitutes the basis of stability for the bourgeois dictatorship. It is highly instructive and significant that this stand taken by the reservists, even though weak and lacking a clear class perspective, has been the only concrete act of solidarity which the Palestinian proletariat has received. A people that oppresses another people will never be free. The proletariat in Israel will never be able to emancipate itself unless alongside the Proletariat of Palestine and the neighbouring countries.

The demonstrations which have taken place in the main Middle Eastern cities in solidarity with Palestine certainly show how serious the situation is at a social level, but as long as the proletariat in the Middle East lacks a political class perspective, indignation will quickly be channelled in directions which are nationalist, conservative, “irredentist”, religious if not outright pro-governmental. The exploited masses are told that their enemy is in Israel when the enemy is in their own countries, amongst the dominant classes linked to bloodsucking imperialism, who for decades have used pro-Palestinian rhetoric to keep themselves in power. These various bourgeoisies are just as responsible as the State of Israel for the inhuman conditions suffered by the Palestinians, and are fully paid up members of the international alliance which is crippling workers throughout the world.