07.03.1996

Of bombs and liberals

In Israel/Palestine, the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas has used suicide bombers to kill more than 60 people over an eight-day period. The bombings are a display of individual and indiscriminate terror by a reactionary organisation, albeit one fighting another reactionary ideology, Zionism, which is supported by a fiercely oppressive state.

It is worth examining the response in The Guardian. On March 5 the newspaper said the bombings “left the peace process in bloody tatters”. Further on, it illustrated the dilemmas faced by bourgeois liberal opinion in relation to the Middle East. It published an appeal by the Israeli poet, Amos Oz, to a Palestinian friend.

The appeal was very much couched in terms of Zionism in its most ‘liberal’ form. Oz called on Yasser Arafat to be as brave as Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres have allegedly been. Oz said the Israelis had delivered their side of the peace bargain and the Palestinians had not. He also said the Palestinians had received more from the Israel of Peres and Rabin than they ever received from other Arabs, and that Israel was no longer controlling the lives of 85% of the Palestinians. He urged Palestinians to stand up to Hamas.

Oz left out the fact that it is not other Arabs who are responsible for the plight of the Palestinians, but the Zionist state, which has the whip-hand and can afford to let fall a few crumbs from the master’s table.

The same issue of The Guardian carried an article by Martin Woollacott which answers several of these points. He said the Israelis “ask too much of the world they helped create”. On the question of Arafat’s need to be brave, Woollacott said it was his capacity to be a wily procrastinator that had made his survival possible and enabled Israel to have dealings with him.

Woollacott added that the “efficient PLO military chiefs who could have taken the right decisions are no longer with us: Israel killed them years ago”. This illustrates the extent to which the Israelis have made a rod for their own backs.

The writer also said that confused Israeli policies towards Hamas played a part in the splits in that organisation, with parts of Hamas lurching towards yet more violent actions.

It is self-evident that liberals, however well-meaning, have no answers to the Middle East conflict. Communists have an answer, but a genuine Communist Party, capable of uniting the region’s workers against their reactionary leaders, is still a long way off.

John Craig