18.06.2003

Bush road map to wider conflict

Imperialism's plans for a glorified bantustan offer nothing to the besieged Palestinians writes Ian Donovan

Bush’s so-called ‘road map’ to peace in the Middle East is beginning to look as though it could be the catalyst for a much deeper and more dangerous conflict.

The escalation of violence and rhetoric in the past couple of weeks has revealed a certain degree of American impotence when dealing with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict on the ground. Ironically it was the drive to implement the ‘road map’ itself that produced this. In particular, an orchestrated attempt by the US client prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Abu Mazen, to declare the intifada at an end was met by a predictable nationalist response. Not only from the islamist Hamas and Islamic Jihad organisations, but also from the secular Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which derives from a wing of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.

Their joint attack on an Israeli military checkpoint last week was a defensible act of armed struggle against a purely military target - part of a brutal occupying force. The response it met, however, was typical of the Israeli government’s murderous mentality with regard to acts of Palestinian ‘insubordination’: a rocket attack on the car of Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, which failed to kill the target, but instead killed a bodyguard, a passer-by and her young child, and injured many more. Rantissi is considered a leader of the Hamas political wing, not one of the military figures the Israelis have targeted in the past.

The reaction from Hamas, again, was predictable: a suicide bus-bombing in Jerusalem that killed 17 and wounded around 100 others. The bus-bombing was followed by a whole series of further Israeli rocket attacks, both on individual Hamas militants and more generally on Gaza city itself. In all at least 22 Palestinians were killed, including six Hamas militants. Sharon’s government now says it has declared war on Hamas “without restrictions”, even threatening to assassinate spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who has previously been off limits. In turn Hamas threatens to “blow up the Zionist entity”.

Considering that the Sharon government had just, with great fanfare, signed up to Bush’s ‘road map’ - with its series of stages, supposedly culminating in the emergence of a ‘provisional’ Palestinian state in around two years time - the attack on Rantissi could only have been intended to provoke a new round of killing.

Even the Bush administration expressed its unease at the course of events, and came closer to outright condemnation of an Israeli military action than it has ever done. Certainly, things are not going according to plan. The US gave its backing to Abu Mazen as a leader supposedly ‘untainted by terror’ in a bid to push aside Arafat, the historic figurehead of the Palestinian struggle. Their intention is to put in place a regime that would be able to control the occupied territories and repress the rejectionist Palestinian armed groups, both islamist and secular.

But Abu Mazen has predictably found it just as impossible to do this as Arafat previously did. Indeed Abu Mazen has much less popular support than Arafat ever has had. He is seen not as a symbol of the national struggle, but as simply a stooge of the United States. Whereas the rejectionists have deep roots among the Palestinian masses, who know from their own experience that when the Americans and Israelis talk of peace, more terror, more settlers, more mass expulsions of Palestinians from their homelands are on the way. There is just no way the even more US-friendly Palestinian misleadership under Abu Mazen can deliver an end to ‘terror’: ie, resistance to Israeli occupation, domination and overlordship.

In order for Palestinians to feel able to embrace any sort of real peace with Israel, there has to be real hope of a massive improvement in Palestinian conditions with regard to their rights as a people. This must include: the right of the hundreds of thousands of refugees exiled from historic Palestine to return, if they so wish, to live a decent life in the land of their birth and origin as equals with others who have claim to the land; and the right of security of the existing Palestinian people in the territories to be free of the threats of the fascistic settlers and their ultimately genocidal project of driving out the Arab population to make way for a Greater Israel.

The ‘road map’, for all its fine words, does not come anywhere near meeting any of this, not least because its initiator is not in any sense a disinterested force. Rather, the US is the main oppressor of the Arab peoples in the Middle East, the sponsor of Israeli expansionism for decades. Not in words but in deeds, in terms of the massive American subsidies of both Israel’s military machine and its economy that have been in place since Israel made its utility as an American ally clear in the 1967 war.

This decades-long reward for occupation and ethnic cleansing is the reality - no wonder few Arabs on the ground now believe the American rhetoric about a Palestinian state. Indeed, given the history of American-backed so-called Middle East ‘peace plans’, Abu Mazen’s call for an end to the Al Aqsa (second) intifada was itself a provocation, and was almost bound to lead to some kind of nationalist initiative in response.

Look at the history of the first intifada. When Palestinians, in particular the youth, rose up against the daily brutality of Israeli occupation in 1987, their rebellion quickly gained enormous sympathy around the world. Suicide bombings, which later became the symbol of despair at seemingly unending oppression, were unknown. Instead we had Palestinian stones ranged against heavily armed, deeply antagonistic and racist Israeli troops. Even such supposed ‘peacemakers’ as the late but unlamented Yitzhak Rabin were heard to call for “force, might and beatings”.

But politically Israel was on the defensive. The prestige of the intifada was on a par with that of the anti-apartheid struggle that was concurrently coming to a head in the black townships in South Africa. Politically, the Shamir-led Likud-Labour coalition was seen internationally as a big loser in terms of the worldwide impact of the uprising, which created the political space for first Bush the elder and then Clinton to step in, bringing it to an end as part of the initiation of the Oslo accord in partnership with Rabin’s freshly elected Labour government.

What was the result? The fact is that the end of the first intifada, and the beginning of the Oslo process, marked the most productive period for the establishment of Israeli settlements in the whole history of the occupation. Far from their winding down, along with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the territories, as had been promised, in fact settlements began to mushroom. Indeed, this was the period when the tactic of the suicide bomb began to be used - at first sporadically in the mid-1990s, as a means to hit back against the continuing attack on the Arab inhabitants of the territories by gangs of Israeli settlers.

As Israeli reaction and settlement activity intensified in the late 90s, suicide bombings of Israeli civilians came to be seen by large sections of the Palestinian population as the only way to hit back against Israel for the continued and accelerating theft of Palestinian land and living space. The fact that such methods of retribution against the population of Israel, as opposed to its ruling establishment, became so widely accepted was a measure of extreme Palestinian desperation in a situation where class-based methods of struggle had seemingly fallen off the agenda in the aftermath of the collapse of Stalinism.

This time around then, Abu Mazen’s call to end the intifada prior to any Israeli withdrawal is seen by many as a surrender to Sharon and the settlers. Something that could even result in his own political death warrant.

While suicide terrorism is in some ways understandable, it nevertheless is ruinous from the point of view of any progressive solution to the national conflict. Its dominance is a barometer of despair and the symbol of the absence of any strategy that can actually win anything positive for Palestinians.

It merely acts as one component of a vicious circle of reaction - the more it is successful in making the Israeli civilian population fear for their very lives every time they get on a bus or go to a bar or café, the greater is the desire for retribution among ordinary Israelis.

The Bush ‘road map’ formally commits US imperialism to promote a Palestinian state. However, there are numerous obstacles to the realisation of such an entity, which in any case is intended to be a puppet regime of the US - fundamentally the kind of pseudo-independent regime that the Americans intend to impose on Iraq.

It will also inevitably be highly circumscribed. Probably the Abu Mazen Palestinian state would not even comprise the whole of the occupied territories, and certainly not enjoy the massive economic reparations that are a precondition for any real justice for the Palestinians. And if it was realised, it would be a glorified bantustan, which the Palestinian masses must and surely will reject.

This cynical manipulation of Palestinian aspirations by the imperialists and Zionists has enormously strengthened pan-islamist nationalism in the form of Hamas. Even more so than the older forms of rejectionist Palestinian nationalism, this seeks ‘justice’ for the Palestinians by reversing the terms of oppression - subjugating or even expelling the Israeli Jewish population as their ‘solution’ to the Palestinian national question.

But the only viable solutions are those based on consistent democracy and a class-struggle perspective. The alternative road of Hamas, symbiotically interacting with the Israeli far right, is actually likely to create the conditions for another naqba - the mass expulsion of Palestinians.

The conduct of Sharon in continuing assassinations of Palestinians despite verbal acceptance of the ‘road map’ may well signify that the Zionist right is playing for time, seeking to bring about the conditions where his ‘final solution’ becomes possible. Indeed, even elements of Bush’s Republican Party have publicly advocated such a mass expulsion of Palestinians from the territories - and large elements of the US christian-Zionist right object to any Palestinian state in principle.

The only progressive solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict lies in both peoples being won to defend each other’s right to self-determination. That fight, led by working class forces, for two equal, genuinely secular and democratic states, as a step towards a melding of the peoples of historic Palestine into a genuinely binational entity, is the only perspective that points the way to a progressive outcome in the Middle East - an outcome whose logic points beyond capitalism.