01.11.2001
Terrorist state
As the US and Britain wage their ?anti-terrorist? war against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and al -Que?da, their attempts to build a ?broad? alliance including ?moderate? Arab and muslim states behind them are being massively inconvenienced and damaged by one of their key allies. Israel, under the shaky coalition regime of the rightwing anti-Arab chauvinist Ariel Sharon, is completely out of step with US strategy at this point in time.
Indeed, it appears that Sharon, conscious that the Americans have in the past been quite prepared to undermine hard-line Israeli governments that obstruct their efforts (as the administration of Bush?s father did to the rightwing Yitzhak Shamir government over the Gulf War a decade ago), would like an all-out conflict with Yasser Arafat?s Palestinian Authority in the semi-autonomous West Bank and Gaza bantustans.
Sharon is seeking to exploit any and every incident that can serve as an excuse for an escalation. His gamble is that if war breaks out, the US will be forced to choose sides with Israel regardless. However, this is distinctly against the interests of the Bush administration at the moment, and Sharon also faces the potential danger of a bloc to remove him between the Americans (with their enormous clout, given their massive funding of Israel) and his own foreign minister, the Nobel laureate and eminent Labour ?dove?, Shimon Peres.
Sharon?s government has visibly failed to deliver the hoped for ?security? he promised the Israeli population when he came to power, and despite the climate of hatred, fear and reaction that is pervasive among Israelis, his coalition has begun to disintegrate. Thus Israel?s behaviour at the present time is one of extreme vacillation - between the most incredible military brutality and provocation in incursions into the Palestinian entity, followed a few days later by withdrawals under political pressure ? until the next brutal military incursion.
The systematic ?targeted killings? (assassination, in plain language) of Palestinian militants, both islamic fundamentalist and secular, by the Israeli military, seem designed to provoke retaliatory assassinations and indeed more suicide bombings by the fundamentalists. They certainly managed the first when the Israelis killed Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the secularist and leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The resulting retaliation, the shooting to death of the far-right Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi by PFLP militants, produced a sickening howl of hypocritical ?moral? outrage from this government.
Indeed, though socialists are opposed to what we call acts of individual terror, we distinguish between form and content. This killing was carried out by an individual but was an integral part of a drawn out national struggle. And, of course, Zeevi was a virulent hater of Arabs, and one of the key agitators for more and more ethnic cleansing ?settlements? of Israeli-occupied Arab land. He had compared Arabs in Israel to a ?cancer?, called the Palestinian people ?lice? - amongst other epithets - and baldly advocated the forcible expulsion of the entire Arab population from the West Bank and Gaza.
Basically, he was a fascistic thug who richly deserved his fate, in the manner of such similar monsters as the Israeli fascist, Meir Kahane, to the Serb nationalist warlord and mass ?ethnic cleanser?, Arkan. Indeed, it is pretty close to the truth to say that if Zeevi was Israel?s aspiring Arkan, Sharon, whose hands drip with the blood of the thousands of Palestinian old men, women and children who were massacred by Lebanese Falangist killers under his de facto command in 1982, is Israel?s aspiring Milosevic.
The indulgence shown to Israel by the US is, of course, the cause of outrage across the entire Arab and muslim world. A running sore that the US has generally been prepared to tolerate. Entirely understandably, these peoples look at the fulminations of the US against ?terrorists? and ?rogue states? that allegedly threaten the life and limb of the entire world, and immediately their thoughts turn to Israel.
Israel, after all, is a state that within the last few decades has instigated bloody wars with all of its immediate neighbours, as well as engaging in actions further afield that would be considered ?terrorist? if carried out by anyone else. In 1981 Israel?s armed forces brazenly bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq. Its secret services have engaged in bombings and assassinations as far away as Tunis. At the time of the 1967 war its armed forces even deliberately attacked and sunk an American warship that the Israeli military felt had seen too much of some of its bloodier deeds. Israel brazenly defies United Nations resolutions calling for it to hand back the West Bank and Gaza, which it occupied in 1967. The Jewish state has a nuclear arsenal that as long ago as 1986 was estimated by a conscientious Israeli dissident, Mordechai Vanunu, to comprise at least 200 atomic bombs (Vanunu himself was another victim of Israeli state terrorism - he was brazenly kidnapped on Italian soil and smuggled to Israel after being lured to Italy from Britain by a Mossad agent).
Israel is a key ally of the United States, and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. However, at the moment, as at the time of the Gulf War of 1991, the actions of its government are a liability for its American sponsors. What is more, the current war, which grew out of the attack on the World Trade Center by islamic fundamentalists on September 11, is much more dangerous for the US than the war in 1991. Their adversaries are fundamentalists who - with considerable US aid - not only inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Soviet Union in the 1980s but even more importantly have a potential ideological following among hundreds of millions of alienated and impoverished muslims that the likes of Saddam Hussein could never hope to match. Not to mention, of course, the proven capacity to carry off enormously damaging military/terrorist attacks in the US itself. In this situation the US is in desperate need of allies in the muslim world to counter the political influence of the fundamentalists.
Thus, while the US will not abandon Israel, it is even more inclined to bring pressure to bear - including, almost inevitably, the destabilisation of Sharon?s regime - if it does not get the cooperation it expects. Every Israeli atrocity against the Palestinians, every belligerent action by Sharon, is to George W Bush a political provocation which undermines the ?anti-terrorist? coalition. Bush?s rebuff to Sharon after he accused the US of ?appeasing? the Arabs in the manner of Chamberlain et al was illustrative. And every time the Israeli right hysterically try to equate the alleged ?terrorism? of Arafat with the terrorism of bin Laden, the Americans and British imperialists more and more explicit advocate a ?viable? Palestinian state. A sure sign that they would like to see the back of Sharon, whose very name is like a red rag to a bull to the peoples of the muslim world.
For revolutionary socialists and communists in the imperialist countries, of course, the main enemy as at home. The labour movement must seek to take advantage of all the political problems the war is likely to engender for our class enemies. Our aim must be to restore and advance the independent working class interests. But this should not and cannot be seen in narrow national terms. The class struggle is international.
Hence in the name of independent working class politics we seek a progressive solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict. An integral part of this is the fight for a Palestinian state and at the same time a recognition of the right to statehood and continued existence of the Israeli Jewish nation. Without that there cannot be an equitable democratic settlement. In this respect, the falling out, however temporary it may prove to be, between the imperialists and their long-time Israeli ally may well prove to be an opportunity for revolutionary socialists and communists in the Middle East to regroup around a genuinely democratic, working class agenda.
Ian Donovan