The foundation of Israel in 1947-1948 occurred at the beginning of the Cold War, an era marked by rising nationalism and the division of the globe between the two main imperialist powers, the USSR and the United States.
In 1956 when Britain, France and Israel went to war with Egypt over control of the Suez Canal, the U.S. forced its allies to back down. The U.S. could afford to challenge French and British dominance in the region because it knew that their influence was waning. At the same time, the U.S. wanted to assert its dominance in the region, so it became allies with the reactionary Arab regimes (in this case Egypt) as well as Israel. Yet this became increasingly difficult with the rising wave of Arab nationalism which had overthrown pro-Western regimes in Iraq and in Yemen.
The tide of regional nationalism also brought to power Mossadegh in Iran, who nationalized the country's oil fields. The US could not allow these challenges to its hegemony go unanswered.
The 1967 war, in which Israel single-handedly beat Egypt, Syria and Jordan in six days (hence the name "Six Day War"), proved Israel's value to U.S. interests in the region. A 1958 National Security Council document declared that the "logical corollary" of opposition to radical Arab nationalism "would be to support Israel as the only strong pro-West power left in the Near East." Between 1967 and 1972, US aid to Israel jumped from $6.4 billion per year to $9.2 billion per year. The US also loaned money to Israel, and the US Congress even allowed the Pentagon to ship weapons to Israel without the expectation of payment! House Speaker John McCormack noted in 1971 that "Great Britain, at the height of its struggle with Hitler, never received such a blank check".{17} Thus, the US role in the Middle East and in the conflict with the Palestinians cannot be overstated.
During the 1967 war, Israel seized the parts of Palestine it hadn't conquered, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (otherwise known as the Occupied Territories). In the West Bank, 55 percent of the land and 70 percent of the water were seized and placed into the hands of Jewish settlers who constituted only a tiny fraction of the population. In Gaza, 2,200 settlers were given more than 40 percent of the land while 500,000 were confined to crowded camps and slums.{18} Ethnic cleansing by any other name, including Zionism, is still ethnic cleansing.
The Palestinian refugees and the descendents of the refugees from both the 1948 and 1967 wars have never been compensated and have never been allowed the right to return to their own homeland. The dispossession of the Palestinians is the key to understanding the never-ending "peace process", the Oslo Accords and the current crisis.
The "peace process" was initiated by the Nixon administration and has been continued by every U.S. President thereafter. In 1979, Egypt became the first Arab state to recognize Israel. The U.S. gained a new Arab ally for the sum of $3.5 billion in aid to Egypt (which continues to this day). The end of hostilities allowed Egypt to devote more capital for economic development instead of spending massive sums to keep its military mobilized for combat with the most dangerous power in the region. It allowed Israel to unleash an assault on its real enemies: the Palestinians.
In an attempt to drive the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) out of its headquarters in Lebanon, Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon, ironically dubbed "Operation Peace in Galilee", in 1981. Israel's aim was two-fold: to drive out the PLO and to set up a puppet government to keep them out. Within the first 6 weeks of war, 19,000 civilians were killed and 30,000 were maimed. Under protection of an Israeli occupation force, its minority allies in the Christian neo-fascist Phalange massacred more than 2,000 Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Chatila camps in an attempt to destroy the PLO's social base.{19}
In 1987, the most serious threat to the Jewish state since its founding emerged: the Intifada. The Intifada was the first mass uprising of the Palestinians since they were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in 1948. Centered mainly in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it helped destroy the network of Palestinian collaborators that Israel relied upon to rule the Occupied Territories. Instead, Israel had to rely on direct military force to keep these areas under control. At the uprising's height, 180,000 Israeli troops occupied the territories. But the arrival of more than 525,000 Jewish immigrants from the former USSR created a huge demand for jobs, housing, schools and social spending. Israel could no longer afford to rule the areas by force, since its military budget ate anywhere between a third and half of the state's budget. Israel decided to cut its costs by giving the Palestinians the job. As Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin explained in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot:
I prefer the Palestinians to cope with the problem of
enforcing order in Gaza. The Palestinians will be better
at it than we were because they will allow no appeals to
the Supreme Court and will prevent the [Israeli]
Association for Civil Rights from criticizing the
conditions there... They will rule their by their own
methods, freeing - and this is the most important - the
Israeli Army soldiers from having to do what they will
have to do.{20}
The result of this new approach was the Oslo agreement in 1993. It came in the wake of the Gulf War which was a crushing victory for U.S. imperialism. With the last gasps of the USSR, the US became the unchallenged imperial power in the Middle East; as such, the Arab states scrambled to get on good terms with the US. The PLO supported Iraq during the war, which isolated it from the Arab states who were kow-towing to US power. The Arab states responded to this by expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinian guest workers. They also, along with the USSR (which was in the process of collapsing), cut off all aid to the PLO. In 1993, the Palestinians were never in a weaker position and the U.S. was never in a stronger one.
The US and Israel gambled that this situation would make Arafat sufficiently pliable, allowing them to subcontract the job of "enforcing order in Gaza" to him and his Fatah wing of the PLO. The gamble paid off. In exchange for renouncing "terrorism" (i.e. rebellion), the US and Israel recognized him as the chief bargaining agent for the Palestinians. The Palestinians received municipal authority over Gaza, Jericho, and a handful of other villages on the West Bank. Yet all of the fundamental issues, the occupation, the status of Jerusalem, the status of the refugees, would be settled in later negotiations! Naseer Aruri observed:
For the first time in history, the Palestinian leadership
endorsed a settlement which kept the Israeli occupation
intact on the premise that all the outstanding issues would
be subject to negotiations during a period of three to five
years hence.{21}
The success of these negotiations depended on "both parties" to follow through on their promises - promises Israel had no intent of fulfilling, promises that the U.S. had no intent of making Israel fulfill. When Benjamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister in 1996, his government refused to re-deploy troops from Hebron as Israel had agreed to do earlier. A band of 400 fanatical Jewish settlers provided the excuse for Israel's continued occupation of Hebron, a Palestinian city of more than 200,000. Israel used the time and the situation to rewrite the terms of the Oslo agreement. The re-deployment was split into two phases, only one of which Netanyahu carried out. In addition, Israel violated the Geneva Convention's bar on settling territory under military occupation by continuing to build settlements in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem for a total of 400,000 Jewish settlers. Why did Israel do this? To create "facts on the ground", to justify the further militarization of the Occupied Territories.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) created by the Oslo agreement, over the objections of most of the groups within the PLO, has presided over a situation that has become progressively worse for the majority of Palestinians. Within the PA, a small number of Arafat loyalists have repressed their political opponents and made themselves rich. 27 public and private monopolies control the import into Gaza of fuel and basic foodstuffs. Controlled by a handful of PA officials who have close ties to the Israeli military and business establishments, these monopolies have generated revenue for the PA bureaucracy and have helped consolidate its rule. But these monopolies have caused spiraling prices and destroyed local firms. Living standards in PA-controlled areas have dropped by one-third from where they were under direct Israeli occupation! Israel has the power to close its borders with the West Bank and Gaza, which would cut off Palestinians from their low-paid jobs in Israel. The PA can do nothing to stop them. Of the nearly 120,000 Palestinians who commuted into Israel for work before Oslo, more than half have lost their jobs. Nearly one in three Palestinians living in PA areas is unemployed. Forty percent of Gaza residents and 12 percent of West Bank residents live in poverty.{22} This was the fuel for the flames of the new Intifada.
The PA is essentially a bantustan government, similar to the Homeland governments of South Africa. In South Africa, blacks were citizens of Homelands, which were considered independent nation-states. Through this mechanism, the black majority of the population was denied the democratic rights that the white citizens of South Africa enjoyed. The difference in the distribution of power, political, economic and social, between the PA and Israel is astounding. The PA has municipal power and can jail Palestinians (there are 35 prisons in Gaza alone){23} but Israel retains the final say in all important matters and retains the right to intervene militarily when it feels its interests are being "threatened." It is up to Israel to deal with the settlers, which the Israeli army does by protecting them instead of arresting them. Settlers have organized pogroms against Palestinians, and the PA is absolutely powerless to stop them since they are citizens of the Jewish state and therefore fall under Israeli sovereignty. Israel can close its borders, imposing de facto sanctions on the bantustan-state and its people. The Palestinian state under the control of the PA is crisscrossed and checkered by roads, roadblocks, settlements and military installations controlled by Israel - it looks more like a piece of Swiss cheese (The holes being the PA controlled municipalities) than a state.{24} As if all this were not enough, Israel also controls all of the major resources. Israel's chief negotiator at the second Oslo negotiations, Shimon Peres, pointed out:
The deal kept the following in Israeli hands: 73 percent
of the lands of the territories, 97 percent of security and
80 percent of the water...{25}
The state of Israel, from its founding, has been nothing but an apartheid state. It has consistently attacked, killed and oppressed the Palestinians in the longest running military occupation of the 20th century. The "peace process" has never been about justice for the Palestinians; rather, it is a sham, a cover, for the US and Israel to legitimize their dispossession. The "two-state" solution will never work because it merely allows the stronger power, the Jewish state, to dominate the smaller power, the Palestinian state. All this being said, the question, "can there be peace?" has not been answered.
Without justice, without equality, there can be no peace. Instead of the question, "can there be peace?" we must ask "how can the Palestinians win justice? How can the Palestinians win equality?"
The model of South Africa is useful insofar as we speak of the character of the state of Israel and its relation to the PA. This model becomes useless beyond that point because in South Africa the black working class was absolutely crucial in the overthrow of apartheid.
Israel's slogan has always been, "Jewish land, Jewish labor, Jewish produce" and so it has created a Jewish working class that is loyal to the Jewish state and U.S. imperialism. The Jewish working class identifies its interests with that of Israel and its U.S. sponsor because it enjoys Western European-style living standards, thanks to the massive arms subsidies and economic aid that Israel receives from the U.S. Any challenge by Jewish workers to the Jewish state is highly unlikely, and it would easily be crushed on the grounds of "national security".
The Palestinian working class is very weak, politically, economically and as a social force in Israel. Every time there is an increase in the level of struggle, Israel simply closes its borders, effectively putting an economic blockade on the Palestinians. The battle to win equality and justice requires a force outside of Israel and Palestine. No matter how many rocks the Palestinians throw at Israeli tanks or how many of their children are martyred slingshots in hand, they alone cannot defeat the tanks or the helicopters of the state of Israel. The two forces in the region that pose any significant threat to U.S. imperialism and its Israeli watchdog are the neighboring Arab states and the masses who live in those states.
The regimes surrounding Israel are reactionary; some of them are sheikdoms, like Saudi Arabia. They have betrayed the Palestinian cause again and again when it was in their interests to do so. In 1970, King Hussein expelled PLO fighters from Jordan. In 1976, Syria sided with the Lebanese right and against the Palestinians when it intervened in the Lebanese civil war. In 1991, the Gulf states expelled their Palestinian workers to show the U.S. how loyal they were to U.S. imperialism.{26} With each defeat, the PLO lowered its demands. From 1964 to 1974 it fought for the liberation of all of Palestine and a democratic secular state for both Jews and Arabs (the only workable solution). After the 1974 Black September rout in Jordan, it backed the idea of a "ministate" coexisting with Israel. The acceptance of the Oslo Accords in 1993 marked an even further retreat. Clearly the Palestinians cannot under any circumstances rely on the Arab states for support of any kind.
The PLO has never connected their struggle with the only force that can break the hold of Zionism and imperialism in region: the working classes of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon. By divorcing their struggle against oppression from the struggle of the Arab masses against their respective rulers, they've run into the dead end of their nationalist politics at Oslo. This isolation, this dead end, forced them to choose between the interests of the dispossessed Palestinians (whose interests lie with the workers and peasants of the region) and the desire to "get something", to run a tiny statelet.
Fundamentalist organizations have profited from the bankruptcy of the Palestinian secular left. Their politics are backward and reactionary; they blame all Jews for the Palestinians' problems and support individual terrorism (bus bombings and the like) and guerilla warfare as the means to win Palestinian liberation. However, for all their backwardness, they are seen as organizations that are serious about fighting Israel and Palestinian oppression. This is why they have so many followers.
A new strategy for the Palestinian struggle will have to take on Arafat's role as a traitor; this new strategy will require new leadership, free of his betrayals and vacillations. A key component to this new strategy must be an uncompromising stance against anti-Semitism; the Palestinian movement must point out the fact that Jews living in Israel are forced to live in armed encampments (the settlements) and the fact that Jews are probably safer anywhere else in the world than in Israel. Combating anti-Semitism
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Map of the Oslo Agreement
- Lance Selfa, "Israel, US Watchdog", International Socialist Review #4., p. 17.
- Gasper, op. cit., p. 27.
- Selfa, op. cit. p. 20.
- Selfa, op. cit., p. 22.
- Selfa, "Standing up to Goliath", International Socialist Review #15, p. 16.
- Selfa, op. cit., p. 17-18. The poverty line for West Bank residents is probably drastically lower than Israel's.
- Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, p. 65.
- See map attached to this report.
- Selfa, op. cit., p. 16.
- Ahmed Shawki, "The Struggle for Palestine," International Socialist Review #4, p. 21.