Defiance by Army Reservists Shakes Zionist Bunker

All Israeli Troops, Settlers Out of the Occupied Territories!

No to U.S./UN Imperialist Intervention!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 776, 8 March 2002.

MARCH 4—As European and United Nations emissaries embarked on yet another round of “shuttle diplomacy” in response to the latest “peace” proposal in the Near East, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon gave his reply in the language this mass murderer knows best. On February 28, he ordered his troops to invade Balata, the largest refugee camp on the West Bank, and another camp near the town of Jenin. The Gestapo-style raid began in the dead of night when American-made Apache helicopters knocked out electricity in Balata. At least 30 Palestinian refugees were killed and dozens of homes reduced to rubble.

Since the start of the current Intifada 17 months ago, Israeli occupation forces and their ultra-Zionist settler auxiliaries have slaughtered over 800 Palestinians, many of those children. Palestinian villages and camps in the Occupied Territories have been turned into virtual concentration camps, surrounded by military blockades, “strategic highways” and a network of despised army checkpoints where Palestinians are routinely humiliated and terrorized. Malnutrition is rampant as many Palestinians have been denied any access to a livelihood other than pitiful UN handouts. Palestinian Authority leader Yasir Arafat, despite his every attempt to conciliate the Zionist butchers and their American patrons, remains imprisoned in his Ramallah headquarters. Describing the plight of the Palestinian people, Columbia University professor Edward Said wrote in an article in Counterpunch (14 January):

“The result today is that the Palestinians are locked up in 220 ghettos controlled by the army; American-supplied Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, and F-16s mow down people, houses, olive groves and fields on a daily basis; schools and universities as well as businesses and civil institutions are totally disrupted; hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed and tens of thousands injured; Israel’s assassinations of Palestinian leaders continue; unemployment and poverty stand at about 50 per cent—and all this while [U.S. “peace” envoy] General Anthony Zinni drones on about Palestinian ‘violence’ to the wretched Arafat, who can’t even leave his office in Ramallah because he is imprisoned there by Israeli tanks, while his several tattered security forces scamper about trying to survive the destruction of their offices and barracks.”

We demand the immediate removal of all anti-Arab fortifications in the Occupied Territories—the settlements and the apartheid highway network. All Israeli troops, settlers out now! Defend the Palestinian people!

Cracks in the Zionist Bunker

The latest escalation in Zionist state terror came in response to a “peace” proposal by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who has offered a “normalization” in diplomatic relations between the Arab regimes and Israel in return for withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, which were seized by the Zionists in 1967. Abdullah’s plan intersects a deepening rift between the U.S. and its imperialist rivals in Europe. While the European powers and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan embraced the plan, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell initially dismissed it as a “minor development.” With Vice President Cheney preparing to visit Arab leaders in the region to try to strong-arm them into backing American plans for an invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Powell upgraded the plan to an “important step.”

The new diplomatic flurry also intersects a growing polarization within Israeli society. Until recently, the Zionist rulers’ murderous onslaught against the Palestinians had deepened a chauvinist consensus among the Hebrew-speaking population. The liberal Zionist “peace camp” had all but disappeared. The bourgeois Labor Party, with which Arafat hoped to cut a deal, is firmly ensconced in Sharon’s bloody “national unity” government; indeed Labor defense minister Eliezer is the architect of the assault on the West Bank refugee camps. But fissures in the Zionist fortress are now coming to the fore.

These fissures have been both reflected in and impelled by the defiant statement by more than 50 army reservists in January declaring their refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories: “We hereby declare that we shall not continue to fight this War of the Settlements. We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.” While hundreds of other soldiers have quietly refused to serve in the West Bank and Gaza over the past year and a half, this public statement of defiance by loyal, longtime officers and soldiers rocked the Zionist garrison.

Though the high command has suspended 48 reservists and imprisoned three, the number of signatories to the statement has surpassed 300 in the last five weeks. This comes on top of an earlier protest statement by more than 60 high school students declaring that they would refuse to take part in “confiscation of lands, arrests, executions without trial, destruction of houses, closure, torture and prevention of medical treatment.”

Remarkably, the “refuseniks” are supported by 26 percent of the Israeli public. Arie Arnon, a spokesman for the liberal Zionist Peace Now movement, declared: “There has never been such popular support for a movement of refusing to serve in the army or what the right-wing would call treason” (Al-Ahram Weekly, 21 February). On February 16, 14,000 demonstrated in Tel Aviv to demand, “Get out of the territories, get back to negotiations!”

The growing polarization extends right to the top of Israeli society. Exactly one year ago, a much-publicized conference of leading figures from the defense and political establishments called for mass expulsion of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. Now the Council for Peace and Security—a group of 1,000 reserve generals and senior officers and ex-officials from the Mossad and Shin Beth intelligence agencies—has announced a campaign for unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank, including the dismantling of most settlements.

What is animating such sentiment was captured by Nahum Barnea, a leading Israeli commentator and columnist for Yediot Ahranot: “After 17 months of intifada, we must admit that the Palestinians have not been broken. Despair has only steeled them. Economic and human distress has only pushed them to acts of madness.” While the Zionist rampage in the Occupied Territories continues unabated, the Palestinians have inflicted significant blows against Israeli troops and settlers.

What really shook the Zionist rulers was the destruction in February of a Merkava 3 tank by a handmade land mine. As the New York Times (16 February) noted: “The stark evidence that even the Israeli flagship tank—the Merkava 3, one of the toughest tanks in the world—was vulnerable to Palestinian weapons fanned fears today that Israeli forces were facing the same kind of punishing war of attrition in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that they fought so long in Lebanon.” It was in response to the 1982 invasion of Lebanon—under the command of the butcher Sharon—that the military “refusenik” organization Yesh Gvul (There Is a Limit) was first formed.

The recent cracks in Israeli society reflect a common perception that Sharon has delivered neither the peace nor the security he promised when he was elected last year. Since December, his approval rating has dropped from 70 percent to 42 percent. The Jerusalem Post (18 February), a right-wing government mouthpiece, wails that Israel’s “resolve” is cracking and a “chorus of defeatism can be heard in the land.” But Sharon’s latest provocations in the Occupied Territories, followed by a Cabinet decision to further intensify the war of terror against the Palestinians, underline that the Israeli government could well yet seek to implement a cataclysmic “peace of the graveyard.” When Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told the Knesset (parliament) that “we can’t just expel 3.5 million people from their homes,” a right-wing parliamentarian shot back, “Yes we can, yes we can.” A leading member of the Israeli Cabinet, Tourism Minister Benny Elom, is an open advocate of the forcible “transfer” of the Palestinian population out of the territories, a genocidal “final solution” supported by 35 percent of the Israeli population, according to a February 15 poll by the Israeli paper Ma’ariv.

Following a sniper attack on one of the hated checkpoints yesterday that killed seven soldiers and three settlers, a spokesman for the Aksa Martyrs Brigade said, “This is our new slogan now: Break the siege and remove the checkpoints.” The attacks against army checkpoints and bases and against the heavily armed settler auxiliaries are directed at the military forces of the oppressive Zionist occupation. In contrast, the suicide bombings of Israeli civilians at shopping malls and discos, carried out by Islamic groups like Hamas and the secular nationalist Aksa, are reprehensible and criminal from a proletarian standpoint. Such indiscriminate terror, deeming all Jews to be enemies, mirrors the anti-Arab chauvinism of the far more murderous Zionist rulers and serves to drive Hebrew-speaking workers into the arms of their capitalist exploiters. But while the Palestinian attacks on the Israeli army have helped fuel sentiment for a withdrawal, the Palestinians cannot prevail in a military conflict with the Zionist juggernaut.

At bottom, the military struggle of the Palestinian nationalists is aimed at pressuring the imperialists and the Arab bourgeoisies. Looking to the Arab regimes to aid the Palestinian cause is a suicidal strategy. The result of this strategy was seen in the 1970 “Black September” massacre of thousands of Palestinian fighters by the Jordanian monarchy. That the reactionary Saudi monarchy is now embraced by Arafat and others as a guardian of Palestinian national rights is a travesty. After the 1991 U.S.-led Gulf War, Saudi Arabia joined Kuwait in brutally expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinian (and Yemeni) laborers, and Palestinians are still excluded from entering Saudi Arabia. Only through the overthrow of not only the Israeli bourgeoisie but of the Jordanian monarchy and the other Arab ruling classes can the right of national self-determination for both the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew-speaking peoples and the many other peoples of the region be equitably realized. For a socialist federation of the Near East!

The fissures in the Zionist bunker pose opportunities for revolutionaries to drive a wedge between the Hebrew-speaking proletariat and its chauvinist exploiters. Adding to the growing war-weariness of the Hebrew-speaking population is the economic impact of the war against the Palestinians. As the conflict drags on without apparent end, the sharp losses in tourism and construction have begun to mean cuts in jobs and social services for Israeli workers, and there have been a number of strikes recently.

As revolutionary Marxists, we seek to smash the Zionist garrison state from within. As we wrote recently, “We have no illusions that it will be easy to shatter the intense anti-Arab chauvinism of the Hebrew-speaking working class. But it is the task of revolutionaries to utilize every opportunity, every strike, every action that pits the working class against the Zionist capitalist rulers to emphasize the necessity for joint struggle by the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew-speaking workers. In the course of such struggles will be forged the internationalist Trotskyist party which champions the national rights of the Palestinians as part of the fight to place the proletariat in power” (WV No. 771, 28 December 2001).

“Remember Sabra and Shatila —Don’t Trust the UN!”

The fight for proletarian state power throughout the Near East is the only road forward for the Palestinian people. The petty-bourgeois nationalists of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) see no other road than to beg the imperialists to pressure the Zionist butchers for “peace.” This is also the plea of the reformist and centrist left organizations in the West which, rejecting the possibility of proletarian revolution, cynically peddle the lie that their own bourgeoisies can bring national justice to the Palestinians.

Given the overt hostility of the Bush administration toward the Palestinians, and the even more foam-flecked support for Sharon by Democrats like Hillary Clinton, the reformist Workers World (10 January) in the U.S. limits itself to enthusing that support “has been growing dramatically” for “nationalist, left and Islamic Palestinian organizations”—which includes the anti-Semitic, anti-woman Islamic reactionaries of Hamas. It goes on to laud the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as “the largest Palestinian Marxist organization.” In fact, the PFLP is simply a petty-bourgeois nationalist group which has long relied on Syrian patronage and was notorious in the early 1970s for airline hijackings and other indiscriminate terror attacks. Like Arafat, PFLP leader Ahmad Saadat looks to the UN, as he said in an interview in Al-Hadat last year, to “force Israel to implement United Nations resolutions.”

In Europe, where the capitalist governments do strike a posture of opposing the Israeli onslaught against the Palestinians, the fake left explicitly appeals for imperialist intervention in the Near East. And nowhere is this more the case than in France, whose bourgeoisie is the most vocally critical of the U.S. A demonstration in Brussels on February 27 and a previous one in Paris on December 19, both promoted by the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), were centered on the call, “For an international peace and protection force!” This has long been the position of the LCR. In November 2000, it called for “a political fight directed at the European Union and the French government so that they respond positively to the pressing demands of the Palestinian national movement” (Rouge, 7 December 2000).

Lutte Ouvrière (LO) strikes a different pose, writing in its journal Lutte de Classe (January/February 2002), “The only possible perspective is a real coexistence, a fraternal cooperation between the peoples. But for this the only solution is to put an end to the imperialist presence in the region and to the oppression not only by Israel but by all the states and possessing classes in the region, who in various degrees are the agents of imperialism.” LO’s talk of “anti-imperialism” isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Last year, LO signed on to an appeal to France and the European Union (EU) to intervene in the Near East, and LO mobilized its forces for the pro-imperialist demonstration in December. Meanwhile, the anarchists of Courant Alternatif (February 2002), notwithstanding their profession of opposition to all state powers, join in the chorus of appeals for an “international protection force in the Occupied Territories.” Such appeals parallel calls by Arafat and Arab bourgeois regimes for a United Nations “peacekeeping” force in the Occupied Territories.

Intervening into a protest organized by Palestinian and Maghrebin (North African) organizations in Paris on March 2, a contingent of the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League, marched under a banner reading, “Defend the Palestinian People! French/UN/U.S. Troops Hands Off the Near East!” Our slogans were directly counterposed to calls from the podium for imperialist economic sanctions against Israel. Many Arab youth, in their desperation over the plight of the Palestinians, see no alternative to imperialist intervention. Nonetheless, particularly striking a chord among many of the protesters was an LTF sign reading, “Remember Sabra and Shatila—Don’t Trust the UN!”

In 1982, faced with constant Israeli bombing raids over Beirut, Arafat begged for imperialist intervention to protect Palestinian refugees and PLO fighters in Lebanon. U.S., French and Italian “peacekeeping” troops moved into Lebanon to disarm the PLO militants, overseeing the transfer of many to Tunisia. With the PLO fighters gone, in September 1982 Israeli troops surrounded the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut, and then Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon let loose the fascistic Lebanese Christian militias for a 36-hour orgy of killing, rape and torture. More than 2,000 people—mainly women, children and the elderly—were slaughtered, shot at close range. Now Sharon complains that he was not able to kill Arafat as well at the time.

The hypocrisy of the French bourgeoisie’s more sympathetic posture toward the Palestinian Arabs is exposed not only by France’s history of brutal colonial subjugation and torture in Algeria but by the racist persecution of the large Arab minority in France today. The government of Socialist Party premier Lionel Jospin seized on the U.S.-declared “war on terror” after September 11 to reinstate the dreaded Vigipirate campaign of police roundups of immigrants and youth of North African origin. Yet LO remains silent when it comes to anti-Maghrebin Vigipirate terror. Notably, with the exception of the LCR and the anarchist CNT, the bulk of the French left boycotted the March 2 demonstration organized by Maghrebin and immigrant groups.

As one of the LTF placards on March 2 declared, “The Fight Against French Imperialism Abroad Means Class Struggle at Home.” Maghrebin workers form a key component of the multiethnic industrial proletariat in France. At an LTF public meeting in Paris the week before the demonstration, our speaker stressed: “A protest strike against Vigipirate and the repression against the Arab population in France would do more for the Palestinian cause than 10,000 people in Brussels.”

Near East: Cockpit for Interimperialist Rivalry

The LCR, among other left groups, calls for European delegations of civilian observers in the Occupied Territories. While some idealistic youth might see this as a way to deter Israeli army terror, in fact such “moral witness” tactics are aimed at securing imperialist “peacekeeping” intervention. In a similar vein, groups like the U.S. International Socialist Organization and the British Workers Power push for a consumer boycott of Israeli exports or “divestment” of Israeli stocks. Such impotent appeals to Western consumers are at bottom a ruse for pressuring the imperialists to impose economic sanctions, which is the only way “divestment” can be realized. All such approaches are premised on portraying the Western imperialist powers as enforcers of democracy and justice, behind which lies a direct capitulation by the fake left to the imperialist appetites of their own bourgeoisies.

The attempt of the French and other EU governments to put themselves forward as “peacemakers” and wrest some influence from the U.S. among the Arab states reflects a longstanding conflict of interest between American and European capitalism: the economics of world oil. The world oil market is dominated by American companies like Exxon-Mobil, which effectively control Saudi Arabia, while the core countries of the EU—Germany and France—are not major producers or distributors of oil.

The Europeans have significant trade with and investment in Iran, and the French have been negotiating for several years to invest in the Iraqi oil fields but cannot do so as long as the U.S. maintains the embargo. The furor provoked in Europe by Bush’s talk of an “axis of evil” including Iraq and Iran is an expression of these particular conflicts in the Near East. More broadly, the European imperialists are frustrated that Washington’s overwhelming military superiority impedes them from pursuing their own ambitions.

In calling for the Jospin government to intervene in the Near East, groups like the LCR line up behind the French bourgeoisie in its growing competition with the U.S. and other imperialist powers. French imperialism is intent on regaining its former sphere of influence in the region, where it had been the colonial overlord of Syria and Lebanon (not to mention much of North Africa). U.S. opposition to the 1956 Anglo-French invasion of Egypt aimed at reconquering the Suez Canal—carried out in alliance with the Zionist state—signaled the decline of French and British influence and the ascendancy of American imperialism in the Near East. The EU is already the largest trading partner for Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. But, as Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel put it, “The EU does not want to play an economic role only, but also a political one” (Al-Ahram Weekly, 14 February).

The European and American imperialists, as well as the Arab bourgeois regimes, are utterly opposed to a genuine realization of Palestinian national rights. The Saudi proposal currently embraced by the EU would offer, at best, the kind of bantustan-style mini-state envisioned by the U.S.-sponsored 1993 Oslo accord between Israel and the PLO. While headlining its editorial on the accord “Toward a ‘Bantustan’,” the LCR enthused over “a new dynamic” and called it the “first stage of a process that could radically change the situation” (Inprecor, October 1993). Its sister section in Israel went further, demanding that the Israeli government follow through with “the exact implementation of the agreements” (The Other Front, 5 September 1994). The “dynamic” hailed by the LCR has proven to be one of ever more suffocating imprisonment of the Palestinians in an Israeli-dominated ghetto.

As we warned at the time, far from offering even the most deformed expression of self-determination, Arafat’s deal placed “the PLO’s seal on the national oppression of the long-suffering Palestinian Arab masses” (“Israel-PLO Deal for Palestinian Ghetto,” WV No. 583, 10 September 1993). At best, the “two-state solution” being pushed by the imperialists, the “left” Zionists and Arab nationalists would mean an impoverished Palestinian statelet under the stranglehold of the Zionist state and with no viable economy. Moreover, it would permanently consign the millions of Palestinian refugees to the camps in Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere where they now languish.

The answer to the plight of the Palestinian people lies not in petty-bourgeois nationalism but in an internationalist proletarian perspective. The Palestinians, spread throughout the Near East, suffer national oppression not just in the Occupied Territories but within Israel itself as well as in Jordan and Lebanon, which have large Palestinian concentrations. National and social liberation will only come through workers revolutions against all the capitalist regimes of the region and the creation of a socialist federation of the Near East. The Hebrew-speaking proletariat must be broken from the reactionary chauvinism of the Israeli rulers and won to the defense of the oppressed Palestinians, and the Palestinians and other Arab workers must be broken from petty-bourgeois nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. If the Zionist madmen are not to ultimately unleash their nuclear arsenal and engulf the whole region in a holocaust, the Hebrew-speaking proletariat must join with Arab workers in sweeping away the entire rotten edifice of capitalist class rule in the Near East.