26.07.2000

Democracy not Camp David

As we go to press, the talks between the West Bank-Gaza Palestinian authority and Israel at Camp David, overseen by the Clinton administration, have just broken down. After having, it seems, painfully reached agreement on a number of difficult issues, the question of Jerusalem proved the sticking point.

For both camps, Jerusalem is the crux. It is considered to be their rightful capital by both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and for either side to make concessions on this issue would be to offend major, possibly decisive elements of their own constituencies. Both Arafat and Barak risk being toppled by the repercussions.

On the other hand, clearly without a settlement of the Jerusalem issue the peace process is not viable. Arafat has threatened to unilaterally declare the foundation of an independent Palestinian state in September if agreement is not reached by then.

Clinton is still making great efforts to get some sort of compromise - and is accordingly putting considerable pressure on the parties to agree and thus hand his administration the credit for having 'solved' the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian question.

Barak reportedly offered a form of joint sovereignty over areas of east Jerusalem, to loud and threatening protests by the Israeli right, but Arafat did not believe he could sell such a deal to his desperately oppressed people. Opponents of the whole negotiation, such as the islamist Hamas, are breathing down his neck.

The Middle East question is one of the most complex and seemingly intractable national conflicts that exist in the world today. Israel, which has fought three major wars against its Arab neighbours, and maintained a decades-long dispossession of the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the territory it claims as its own, is the major regional power in the Middle East. Its enormous military and economic support from the United States has put it in a totally different league from its Arab neighbours.

Yet there are also limits to its power and more importantly the extent of American largesse, and the peace process is about redefining those limits, in order to consolidate Israel's position. Overcoming the perceived threats to Israel's 'security' that the peace process is supposedly aimed at solving is considered by the US ruling class to be an unnecessary drain on their funds - Israel feels threatened because it is a threat to others.

Israeli ruling circles are thus deeply split between the 'Labour' Zionists, whose American contacts and orientation produce a tendency to echo the US view, and the Zionist right, whose belligerence has been known to take the surreal form of a crusade for a biblical 'Greater Israel', incorporating territories internationally recognised as belonging to neighbouring Arab states.

So Israeli bourgeois politics in recent years has been noted for its bloody and vindictive feud-like character - Barak is only too aware that the last Israeli leader, Rabin, who attempted to play along with the US-inspired peace process and give up land to the Palestinians ended up the victim of an assassin, to his bourgeois opponents' thinly disguised glee. Rabin's rightwing successor, Netanyahu, the beneficiary of political assassination, basically spent the next few years thumbing his nose at the Americans and engaging in a charade of participation in 'peace' talks that amounted to thinly disguised sabotage of the whole project, until his administration collapsed under a welter of corruption allegations, laying the basis for Barak's renewal of Rabin's work.

Neither wing of the Israeli ruling class is at all interested in, or capable of, a genuine democratic solution to the national questions in the Middle East. The US-Rabin-Barak project is aimed rather at a pseudo-solution that will consolidate Israel's dominance as a regional power by ending popular Arab resistance to its depredations. At the heart of the very existence of the state of Israel there is an enormous historic injustice - the fact that the armed Jewish settlers who established the Israeli state in 1948 did so by the crushing and large-scale expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs who constituted the main actual indigenous population in that territory at the time.

Thus the negotiations around those territories - primarily the West Bank and Gaza strip, conquered by Israel in the 1967 war - even if all this territory were to be handed over to the Palestinian population tomorrow, do not address the whole problem or even the bulk of it.

It is this fact that gives Yasser Arafat's fledgling Palestinian government its lack of stability and legitimacy among the Palestinian masses, and means that ultra-reactionary anti-Israeli groupings such as Hamas are a constant danger to his regime. The accusation of collaboration and betrayal, of giving up on a still-living generation of Palestinian refugees who were driven out of present-day Israel in 1948, cannot but stick to Arafat, which is why his fledgling regime already has a dictatorial and oppressive character.

Despite this aspect of the question, however, history cannot be undone. Israel is now a consolidated nation-state, with a population of several million that cannot be simply dispersed to where it originally 'came from'. In many ways, given the history of the 20th century, the project of 'radical' Palestinian groups and their sympathisers in the western New Left, who deny any right of Israel to exist, are at best simply utopian, if not reactionary.

In truth, it is no more possible for the population of Israel to 'go back' than it is for the population of the United States to make way for the original inhabitant peoples of the American prairie. But whereas this kind of programme with regard to the United States or Australia would simply be irrational and utopian, in the case of Israel, given the circumstances of Israel's formation in the aftermath of the holocaust, and the potent anti-semitism of the 20th century in general, a project for the destruction of Israel and its people in order to 'return' the land to the Palestinian dispossessed can easily dovetail with that of the anti-semitic far right - Hitler cultists and the like. Indeed, the only circumstances in which one could envisage such a scenario taking place would be with the Arab states being armed by another major world power, with a far-right anti-semitic regime, in order to defeat Israel's own advanced military and economic power. But, given Israel's significant nuclear arsenal, such a scenario implies the destruction of the population of the entire region.

Obviously, this is not a scenario that socialists can support. Yet the burning democratic questions in this situation require solutions, the kind of solutions that only revolutionary socialism can provide. It is not enough, obviously, to do as some of the more programmatically 'orthodox' sections of the left do, and just call on Arab and Hebrew workers to unite in order to overthrow the Arab and Israeli ruling class and establish a socialist federation of the Middle East. While it would be excellent if they were to do this, don't hold your breath.

There are enormous barriers to such a thing in the consciousness of the Arab and Hebrew working class. In order to defuse hostility, it is necessary to advance a democratic solution to the real questions that produce such divisions.

Obviously, since the Palestinian population has been forcibly deprived of statehood and even land for many years, a Palestinian state is an elementary democratic requirement. There must be no watering down of sovereignty, no Israeli or American 'trusteeship' or dilution in any way of the political sovereignty of the state. All Israeli troops and armed settler groups must be required to leave the territory of the Palestinian state, immediately. The borders of the state must, as a minimum, contain all the territories that were annexed by Israel in 1967.

But this is only a minimum. In reality, the Palestinians are entitled to much more. For there to be real peace, there has to be justice. Israeli workers who are interested in living in a society that is not poisoned by chauvinism and reaction have a material interest in seeking a just resolution to the historic injustice perpetrated against the Palestinians. There are still many tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Palestinians alive today who were among those dispossessed and driven out in the catastrophe of 1948.

There must be some sort of historical restitution to these people: Israeli workers must demand that they be given massive compensation for their stolen land. The form which such compensation should take could vary - we should demand that Israel be prepared to give up more territory than she annexed in 1967 (i.e. territory in Israel proper) as one possibility, with a symbolic handing over of land, along with remuneration in money or kind to the Palestinian dispossessed, and state-funded resettlement of those current Israeli inhabitants not prepared to live in a Palestinian state.

On the other hand, another possibility is the institution of a 'law of return' for those Palestinians who were driven out of Israel in 1948, again with compensation from the Israeli state to these victims of forced population transfer.

These are only a few possibilities - there may be other means of righting a historic wrong. In all variants, there must be full civil rights and social equality for Jewish and Arab people living in both states. The principle involved is that Israeli workers must fight for justice for Palestinians in any way open to them.

There are a whole series of other demands that the workers' movement should take up: from the complete secularisation of both states to extensive economic aid from Israel to the Arab population of the entire region. This would ensure a levelling up of living standards, and hence the elimination of the kind of qualitatively different economic levels that lead to one group of workers being used as worst-paid labour.

Such demands, in Israel in particular, will be denounced as akin to treason by both Labour and rightwing Zionists.

However, they are in the interests of all progressive and working class forces in Israel, as well as the Palestinian people. They in fact point the way to a genuine solution to national injustice, as opposed to the current process, which relies on superior Israeli and American power to dictate a 'peace' that involves sweeping monstrous injustices under the carpet.