21.04.2004

For self-determination and national rights

Iraq and Palestine: linked struggles for liberation

From Iraq to the West Bank to Gaza, the alliance between US imperialism and Israel, with Tony Blair’s Britain in tow, is inflicting massive suffering on tens of millions of Arabs, who are subjected to imperialist and Zionist tyranny.

George Bush’s speech last week, at a joint press conference with Ariel Sharon, was just another episode in the decades-long strategic collaboration between Israel and the United States. Bush welcomed the Israeli butcher’s latest plan for open bantustanisation and annexation of Palestinian land, but, whether through deliberate, conscious provocation or sheer blundering ineptitude, tore away something of the veil of hypocrisy that often masks the real relations between Israel and its Washington quartermaster - he gave his approval to Sharon’s annexation of large sections of the West Bank because these were “realities” that could not be changed, and self-evidently should not be.

Bush’s blunt statement of US imperialist policy produced outrage across the Arab world, and some considerable disquiet among America’s European imperialist ‘partners’. UN secretary general Annan politely demurred; Tony Blair tried to put a brave face on it, even as the rug of the ‘road map’ was pulled from under his feet. However fake and duplicitous it was, he could point to this ‘peace plan’ as something he and Bush had ‘done’ for the Palestinians - a supposed gain won by Blair as a quid pro quo for helping Bush invade Iraq. Now this fig leaf, which promised a puppet Palestinian state with a supposedly ‘viable’ territory, has been yanked away.

After receiving this boost from Bush, Sharon hurried home to oversee the murder of Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, the new leader of Hamas and successor to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Yassin was the founder and original spiritual leader of Hamas who was himself murdered a few weeks ago by Sharon. Another incredible provocation that will have - and indeed is consciously intended to have - predictable results with more suicide bombings in Israel. Such is the level of political closeness between the Bush administration and Sharon that it is entirely conceivable that the murder of al-Rantissi was sanctioned by the US president. The Bush administration backs to the hilt Sharon’s claim that negotiations with the Palestinians are impossible because there is supposedly no-one to negotiate with.

But of course the Zionist rulers like it that way, which is why they deliberately undermined Arafat, despite his demonstrated willingness to bargain away Palestinian national aspirations in the Oslo accords of the early 1990s. Arafat’s subservience before Israel, even as the growth of Zionist settlements continued to expand during the Oslo period, led that great Palestinian democrat, the late Edward W Said, to compare his Palestine Authority to the regime of Vichy, serving Israel the way that Nazi puppet regime served Hitler’s occupation of France. But that does not stop Sharon’s government openly threatening to murder Arafat the way it murdered Yassin and Rantissi. The Zionist rulers’ appetites for creating yet more Palestinian victims have more than a whiff of Hitlerism about them.

Given the increasing identification of Iraqis, who have now begun to engage in genuinely mass struggles against the US-UK occupation, with the Palestinian struggle as akin to their own, Bush’s open endorsement of Zionist expansionism can only pour petrol on the flames of pan-Arab anger and revolt. In Palestine, the relationship of forces is not good for the Palestinians. But in Iraq the potential is evidently there for more and more powerful mass revolts to inflict major defeats on the occupying forces. If these two Middle East hot spots start to feed off each other in the way they appear to, things could get very hot indeed for US imperialism and its allies in the region.

And indeed they already are getting hot. Such is the power of the uprising, coming on top of the shock defeat of the Spanish government in March over the terrorist blowback from its invasion of Iraq, that it is gratifying to note the accelerating political disintegration of Bush’s coalition. Spanish troops are now apparently to be withdrawn from Iraq within two weeks. And smaller states are beginning to sense which way the wind is blowing: already Honduras is pulling out its tiny, token force. Others are likely to follow.

The Arab masses, quite rightly, will not passively tolerate imperialist tyranny, or that of its Zionist client-state. From Sharon, this tyranny currently takes the form of a systematic attempt, by repeated provocations and massacres, and the assassination of Palestinian leaders and militants, to provoke more suicide bombings and thus deepen a cycle of Israeli atrocity and Arab counter-atrocity. With Israel holding the whip-hand militarily, the obvious point of all this is to establish the political preconditions for the creation of a Greater Israel - using the opportunity of Bush’s ‘war against terrorism’ to push things to the point where it becomes possible for Sharon to inflict another Naqba (catastrophe) on the Palestinians of the West Bank in particular. Gaza is meanwhile to be turned into a sealed-off prison camp: Sharon proposes to evacuate Israeli settlers and withdraw his ground forces, only in order to dominate this impoverished and hellish rump territory with his air power.

Greater Israel does not necessarily require the Gaza strip, but it does need large sections of the West Bank - thus the evident drive to make Palestinian life in the remaining sections of this land, which will be chopped up like a piece of Swiss cheese, more and more unliveable. In fact, as the Zionist rulers are perfectly well aware, it is the intolerable conditions of occupation that explain why many young Palestinians are prepared to sacrifice their lives as suicide bombers. One important and conscious aim of the ‘separation wall’ is to exacerbate that unliveability: the Greater Israel exponents want more suicide bombings in Israel: they want to be able to crank up more and more the propaganda that simply equates ‘Palestinian’ with ‘terrorist’, in order to create a climate of opinion internationally where they can politically get away with the mass expulsion of the Palestinians from all ‘Judea and Samaria’, to use the phrase of Israeli expansionists.

However, the jihadist ideology of Hamas, its disastrous, indefensible and counterproductive ‘tactic’ of suicide bombings of Israeli civilians, only helps Sharon in this endeavour. In its original manifestations, Hamas received help and encouragement from the Israeli state as a means to undermine the secular and nationalist Palestinian left. Hamas is still being manipulated by the Israelis, but in a different, more subtle and insidious way. Indeed the assassination of its leaders is the ultimate form of manipulation. Since the Israeli leadership already knows what the result of such assassinations will be, they can be viewed as something akin to lighting the blue touchpaper and retiring to watch the resulting conflagration - with Israeli civilians amongst the victims.

Hamas, politically helpless against this manipulative tactic, reacts like a puppet on a string in playing the role of Sharon’s useful terrorist enemy. Thus while communists condemn and protest against the murder of Hamas’s leaders, which is a monstrous example of national oppression, we also propagate the necessity of a break from the despairing ideology of jihad and martyrdom, which only helps lay the basis for Sharon’s new Naqba.

It is worth noting, however, that despite considerable overlap in terms of consciousness between the Israel/Palestine situation and the war in Iraq, there are also some real differences, of major political importance, between them. Though the conflicts are interrelated, and the behaviour of coalition troops in Iraq is more and reminiscent of Israeli brutality and arrogance, nevertheless the democratic questions posed are not the same.

The Palestinian national question is a complex problem involving a conflict of two nations, both now irreversibly entrenched in the region. Israel, despite its origins in a colonial-settler movement sui generis - a persecuted people in Europe seeking a reactionary and illusory escape - is not a colonial power, but now a national formation indigenous to the Middle East, that cannot be simply defeated and driven out in a democratic struggle. The coalition occupiers of Iraq, on the other hand, can and should be driven out of the region - the only solution completely consistent with democracy.

There are national tensions in Iraq, of course. Tragically, the oppressed Kurdish population, ground down by repression and mass murder under Saddam Hussein, have for the moment seemingly largely embraced the coalition occupiers as ‘liberators’. The Kurdish region of Iraq must have autonomy within any future liberated Iraq, and must also have the right of self-determination up to and including the right to a separate state. Given the history of oppression of Kurds at the hands of the Ba’athist regime, not to mention in other neighbouring states such as Ba’athist Syria and shia islamist Iran, there is little room for illusion in a democratic resolution of this national question through some sudden acceptance of Kurdish national rights by Arab nationalists or clerics. The left must therefore champion those rights - indeed in order to gain mass influence and simultaneously counter the influence of chauvinistic and reactionary elements in the movement against neo-colonial rule, the left must urgently take up precisely such democratic questions.

In the Israel-Palestine conflict, a democratic accommodation between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, including a mutual recognition of each other’s national rights, must ultimately be reached. The alternative to this is a barbaric solution involving potentially the wiping out of one or the other peoples (or conceivably even both, if Israel’s nuclear capacity were ever to be used). The precondition for any real solution to this national question is the breaking of the mass of Israeli workers from Zionism, something that is made all the more difficult by the ‘Masada complex’ the Zionists quite consciously promote among Israelis - the idea that they are in an encircled fortress and, if they relaxed their guard, would be overrun and massacred. Such things as suicide bombings do not exactly hinder the inculcation of this consciousness among the Israeli population.

The outbreak of a genuine war of national liberation in Iraq, in a sense, opens up a wider perspective for the left regarding the Palestinian question. We are of course only at the beginning of this struggle, and at this point the influence of clerical and reactionary elements in Iraq is considerable. It does not have to stay that way, however, and in the event of the clerics losing control - conceivable if the Iraqi left could reorient itself correctly - these struggles could interlace in a creative manner. A genuinely democratic, working class solution to the Kurdish question in Iraq, a question that has enormous regional and indeed worldwide resonance as a historic struggle against oppression, could play a major role in undermining the influence of Masada-like reaction in Israel - which rests in part on a manufactured view of the Arab masses as a ferociously anti-democratic horde. Interacting with a radicalisation of the Arab workers and fellahin in a democratic (as opposed to a narrowly national or Arab-communal) direction, a revolutionary war of liberation in Iraq that wins over the Kurdish masses in such a democratic manner could have an enormous and positive impact in changing the current reactionary configuration paralysing the interlocked peoples of Israel and Palestine, and in opening up new perspectives.

Of course, these are at present only possibilities, and require major changes to the consciousness of masses of people in more than one country just to come onto the agenda. But it is in situations like this - when the masses start to move and major reactionary world powers come unstuck - that it becomes possible for communists, organised in a party with a genuinely democratic and socialist programme, to begin to win leadership.