15.05.2002

Two states for two peoples

Elementary democracy demands that the Palestinian people, so many of whom have been brutally dispossessed of their homeland over the past half century, and who have been cast into extreme poverty, should be accorded the right to determine their own future, the right to a decent standard of life and the prospect of economic development and social progress. In this concrete case, this means nothing less than the establishment of a Palestinian state, including the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, along with other territory where the Palestinians constitute a majority, and massive reparations and financial aid from the oppressor Israeli state, to give back to the Palestinians the dignity so brutally stolen from them. All Israel's tanks, helicopter gunships and bulldozers have not been able to suppress the desire for freedom of the Palestinian people - nor can it do so. And indeed, the impact of the Palestinian struggle is once again polarising Israeli society, and revealing it to be far from united behind the butcher, Sharon. Hundreds of Israeli military reservists have refused to fight Sharon's dirty war in the occupied territories. And recently the leftist/liberal Peace Now movement has undergone a dramatic revival. On Sunday May 12 up to 100,000 marched in Tel Aviv - this in a country of six-seven million - under the slogan 'Two states for two peoples'. This principled demand for Palestinian statehood is directly counterposed to the increasingly rabid denunciations coming from the Israeli right against the very idea of a Palestinian state. Such mass mobilisations have not been seen since Begin/Sharon's bloody Lebanon invasion in 1982. The potential is evidently there, given a correct strategy and tactics by the Palestinian liberation movement, for a real alliance to be forged with progressive Israelis, in particular the working class, to undermine the hold of Zionist reaction and make real strides both towards a democratic resolution of the national question, and a progressive, ultimately socialist, future for both peoples. Yet political problems are damaging the Palestinian struggle - much of its energy has been misdirected. The Palestinian people have been driven to the depths of despair by the failure of their existing nationalist leadership to find a means to bring to an end the Israeli occupation. The root cause of this failure is the politics of nationalism itself - which cannot conceive of national liberation coming through an alliance with the Arab and Hebrew-speaking proletariats of the entire Middle East region; it cannot conceive of the overthrow of the chauvinist Israeli rulers and the reactionary Arab rulers by their own working classes, of a mass struggle for democratic gains and a genuine unity of the peoples. Instead, the Palestinian leadership has over decades tried manoeuvre after manoeuvre, with the region's rulers, and the superpowers themselves, being enlisted to supposedly 'help' the cause of the Palestinians. The result has been repeated bloody disasters - from 1967, when the military pretensions of Egypt, Syria and Jordan went down to Israel and another bout of expansionism, to massacre by the Hashemite King Hussein of Jordan in September 1970. From 1982 in Lebanon to looking to Clinton's USA for salvation. From pandering to Colin Powell and George Bush to the ascendancy of Ariel Sharon and Jenin. The acceptance by the Palestinian leadership of the Oslo accord, which provided for a circumscribed Palestinian bantustan (puppet state) in carefully parcelled up and isolated packets of territory - according to the Israeli organisation B'Tselem, the settlers have effectively grabbed 42% of the West Bank - ended up driving sections of the masses to embrace the reactionary islamic fanatics of Hamas. The result has been yet more setbacks for the Palestinian struggle. Communists and progressive anti-imperialists must speak plainly about such reactionary influences: the fact is that Hamas has an apocalyptic strategy that, far from taking forward the struggle, is actually playing into the hands of Sharon and those to his right. Hamas, which has a programme of driving out or killing every jew from the territory of Israel/Palestine, does not remotely have the means to carry this out. However, its suicide bombings - wholesale attacks on those sections of the Israeli population accessible to it - only deepen the chauvinism of Israeli society, create a deeper insecurity among the jewish population, and thereby feed popular support for bloody actions against the Palestinians. It is no accident that during the heyday of secular Palestinian nationalism, in the 1970s, Hamas was funded by Mossad as a means to undermine the secular, more leftist nationalists with religious obscurantism. Now, despite its 'radical' aura as seemingly the only force that has been able to hurt the Israelis with its suicide attacks, Hamas is still playing the role of de facto agent of the Israeli far right. Every such attack on jewish civilians helps to isolate defenders of Palestinian rights in Israeli society, and strengthens the hand of those whose aim is a 'final solution' of the Palestinian problem - the wholesale expulsion and/or massacre of the Arab population in the West Bank and Gaza, and possibly even of the remaining Arab minority in Israel itself. Indeed, that is Hamas's idea - the calculation being that such an event would in turn provoke a terrible revenge against 'the jews'. The aggravation of the situation in the Middle East, Sharon's massacre in Jenin, the punishment occupation of many other towns on the West Bank - all these have brought into the open tensions over the Middle East among the imperialists themselves. The current rightwing US administration has portrayed the war of Sharon's Israel against the Palestinians as very much of the same ilk as its own 'war against terrorism': that is, a war against unscrupulous and bloodthirsty enemies who simply aim to indiscriminately kill as many people as possible in allegedly senseless attacks. The European Union ruling classes, on the other hand - heading an economic but not a military superpower - are more inclined to try to seek some sort of compromise solution. However, the European ruling classes' influence with the Israelis is much less than that of the US, for a whole slew of historical reasons (as well as the simple fact that US, not European, aid plays the major role in maintaining Israel's military and economic supremacy over its Arab neighbours). Thus the condemnations of Sharon emanating from European capitals during 'Operation Defensive Shield' was to be contrasted with the bald statement by Dick Armey, the leader of the Republican majority in the US House of Representatives, in favour of the wholesale expulsion of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and thereby the creation of eretz Yisrael (greater Israel). While this individual does not speak for the US, the reason that the Bush administration appears weak and contradictory in its policy initiatives is not primarily due to the obvious venality of the president himself, but rather to its political divisions: those around Colin Powell favouring a more 'European'-type engagement with the Palestinian question; others preferring a more straightforward solidarity with the 'anti-terrorism' of Sharon and those further to his right. In the end, however, the imperialists - whatever their vacillation and divisions about means - want this problem resolved. But, contrary to the belief - held by the Socialist Workers Party and much of the economistic left - that Israel is simply a puppet of US imperialism, Zionist hard-liners such as Sharon have shown themselves quite willing to tell the USA where to get off when it tries to moderate the worst of the Israeli excesses. The main reason for Bush's recent 'concern' is the fear that Sharon's belligerence is making it more politically difficult for the US to execute its 'war against terrorism', including a possible attack on Iraq: otherwise Bush would be quite happy to see the Palestinian Authority crushed. The Zionist right, however, is more concerned about the Palestine Authority than Saddam Hussein, as evidenced by the crushing blow dealt to Sharon by his fellow Likud politicos at his party's central committee this weekend. Led by Netanyahu - former prime minister and now aspiring to replace Sharon - the Likud right passed a resolution explicitly denouncing and ruling out for all time a Palestinian state. Echoing the economistic British left and Hamas, who cry: 'Palestine - no Israel', Likud demands bluntly: 'Israel - no Palestine'. Of course, Sharon very much agrees with this formulation, as his actions show - however, realpolitik dictates a certain level of diplomatic hypocrisy, particularly when the interests of his allies in the Bush administration are at stake. As communists, we seek a political solution to the national conflict and hatreds that poison Arab and jewish working people against each other, and threaten to plunge the entire region into a barbarism that would make the slaughter at Jenin pale in comparison. But the political solution we seek cannot come about as a result of a deal hatched by the imperialists, the bloody Israeli ruling class and the reactionary Arab states. It must come from below. Israeli workers must be broken from Zionism and won to fight for genuine Palestinian self-determination, for a real and viable Palestinian state. Palestinians must be broken from narrow nationalism (and in some cases, the reactionary pan-islamism of Hamas) to also recognise the rights of the Israeli jewish nation. Though Israel has no right to oppress the Arab population, to deny its right to exist, as do many Arab nationalists and, unfortunately, much of the left in pursuit of the immediate goal of a united 'secular' state incorporating both peoples, is paradoxically to work against their ultimate unification and merger. Such unification can only grow out of the dissipation of national hatreds and suspicions. Any denial of the right of either nation to its own existence reinforces the fear or feeling of oppression and thereby aggravates national sentiment as an elementary reflex. That is why not only Likud and the Israeli right, but Hamas and the pro-nationalist left, are a block on progress. Unification of the working class, ultimately, through mutual national recognition and a common class struggle for socialism, is the only road to real peace for the peoples of the Middle East. Ian Donovan Justice for Palestine National demonstration, Saturday May 18. Assemble 12 noon, Hyde Park. Rally in Trafalgar Square.