Defend the Palestinian People!

Zionist Butchers Strike Gaza

Israel Out of the Occupied Territories! U.S. Out of Iraq!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 834, 15 October 2004.

OCTOBER 12—In a murderous rampage paralleling that in Jenin two years ago, Israel’s rulers have slaughtered some one hundred Palestinian men, women and children in the densely populated and impoverished Gaza Strip in less than two weeks. The targets of the Israeli offensive: a kindergarten serving about 500 of the children of Jabaliya refugee camp, bulldozed to the ground; stores serving Palestinian workers, demolished; swaths of orchards, farmland, water wells and greenhouses, destroyed; roads, power lines and possibly hundreds of homes, leveled. One teenage girl was shot in the head as she baked bread with her mother, another as she swept the floor in front of her door. Nine small children were wounded when an Israeli shell careened into the house where families had assembled them for safety, while a deaf-mute man was shot and killed when he tried to look out his window.

The pretext for the latest round of Zionist mass murder—“Operation Days of Penitence”—is the killing of four Israelis by makeshift rockets fired from Gaza. The bitter reality of Sharon’s promise to evacuate Gaza has been an increasing number of Palestinians killed. Surrounded by the desert, the sea and an electrified fence, Gaza resembles a giant concentration camp where over 1.4 million Palestinians languish in destitution. It is symptomatic of how frequent the Israeli mass killings of Palestinians have become that there is barely a pretense of condemnation by the “international community” and virtually no protest on the streets, either in the Near East or elsewhere. The situation cries out for labor-centered protest internationally against the Zionist murder machine. Defend the Palestinians! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the Occupied Territories!

In the midst of the Israeli terror operation, on October 7 three bombing attacks at Sinai vacation resorts near Egypt’s border with Israel killed at least 33 and wounded some 150 people, mostly vacationing Israelis. Whoever carried out these bombings, these were criminal acts of indiscriminate terror: the enemy of the Palestinians is not the Hebrew-speaking people, but the Israeli capitalist rulers whose tanks are firing into their homes. Indiscriminate attacks on innocent Israeli citizens are not only abhorrent, but serve to ideologically drive the Hebrew-speaking population toward its own ruling class.

Though the Zionist butchers have the whip hand, the Near East provides ample evidence of the genocidal logic of all nationalism. What drives the bloody cycle of Zionist slaughter and Palestinian defiance and despair is the root cause of this conflict: two peoples lay claim to the same land. There can be no equitable resolution to the conflicting national claims of the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew-speaking peoples under capitalism. The Zionist state was created through the expulsion of some 700,000 Arabs in 1948—“The Catastrophe” (Al Naqba), commemorated to this day by Palestinians.

The current invasion of Gaza takes place against the backdrop of growing support within Israel for the forcible expulsion of all Palestinians from “Greater Israel.” A New York Times (10 October) article quotes a doctor treating the wounded at a Gaza hospital: “The catastrophe of 1948 will not be repeated. We say, ‘We will die here, but we will not leave here’.” The only way to ultimately prevent yet more catastrophes on the scale of 1948—and to realize the national rights of the Palestinians without denying those of the Hebrew-speaking people—lies in workers revolutions to smash all the capitalist regimes in the region.

Those who look to seemingly more “realistic” solutions like the United Nations—which on this occasion as on countless others considered and, after a U.S. veto, rejected a call to halt the Zionist offensive—only ignore the horrific lessons of the history of the Near East. The UN is an assembly of the imperialist powers and their semicolonial victims. It was the UN that presided over the establishment of the state of Israel at the expense of the dispossessed Palestinian people in 1948. Countless imperialist-inspired “peace plans” since, far from opening up any vista of liberation for the Palestinians, have served only to deepen their subjugation under the Zionist jackboot.

Down With the U.S. Occupation of Iraq!

As their Israeli junior partners carry out a murderous assault on the population of Gaza, the U.S. imperialists, assisted by their puppet Iraqi army, storm and bomb cities and regions across Iraq. Najaf has been pummeled; it is now described as largely in ruins. U.S. forces have also been carrying out virtually nightly bombing raids in Falluja, home to about 350,000 people. The U.S. forces have retaken Samarra, a city of about 250,000 people north of Baghdad, killing at least 150 people and wounding unknown numbers.

With this military offensive, the Bush administration is clearly intent on displaying, not least to the American populace which will be casting votes for president in less than a month, that Iraq is under control and striding toward “democratic” elections in January. But as one resident of Samarra, whose wife and two children were killed by the U.S. invaders, said bitterly: “I’ve lost my entire family. Why should I trust this government? Why should I vote at all?” (New York Times, 11 October).

Bush’s glib assurances to the contrary, nothing can conceal the fact that Iraq is on fire, and that the U.S. offensive is only throwing oil on the flames. Each area “stabilized” by the U.S. has insurgent counterparts in cities and towns across the country, and can itself re-erupt in fighting at any time.

To the extent that the various Shi’ite and Sunni militias, which seem to be engaged in most of the fighting, aim their blows against the occupation, we take their side against U.S. imperialism. However, it must be understood that these mutually hostile clerical forces are deeply reactionary; are murderously opposed to women’s rights and those of other peoples like the Kurds; and are utterly opposed to the most basic conception of human progress. Among the near-infinite crimes of U.S. imperialism must be added the fact that it has turned Iraq—the cradle of human civilization and a country that was until recently among the most secular in the Near East—into an inferno where women have been driven in fear back into their homes and nearly every day innocent citizens from various countries perish in suicide- or car-bombings or are beheaded in the name of god.

In desperation over the absence of any class struggle against the imperialist occupation—either in Iraq or in the U.S.—some look to the “Iraqi resistance” as the only way to drive out the U.S. imperialists. Such illusions are reinforced by a host of reformist left groups in the U.S. and Europe, who prettify the Sunni and Shi’ite religious gangs as “anti-imperialist.” In fact, as we have warned: “In the absence of working-class struggle in Iraq and internationally against the occupation, the victory of one or another of the reactionary clerical forces is more likely to come about through an alliance with U.S. imperialism” (WV No. 830, 6 August). Typically, Shi’ite leader Moktada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has twice staged a rebellion against the occupation forces in Najaf, is now again dealing with the U.S. for a place in a future neocolonial puppet government.

Political support to the Islamist (or bourgeois nationalist) forces in Iraq is counterposed to the only real perspective for liberating Iraq and the rest of the Near East from the yoke of imperialist domination—socialist revolution. In neighboring Iran, for example, there is a young and powerful proletariat, chafing under the suffocating grip of a reactionary and increasingly discredited Islamic theocracy. A socialist revolution in Iran would be a direct blow for the emancipation of women and national and religious minorities in that prison house of peoples. It would also open up the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of the entire region, offering a vista of proletarian internationalism even to the seemingly intractable national divide in Israel/Palestine. But it is patently obvious that to mobilize the masses of Iran (or those of the Arab countries) on the road of social revolution requires an intransigent opposition to Islamic fundamentalism as well as Western imperialism. Leninist vanguard parties must be built in opposition to all manner of bourgeois nationalism and religious fundamentalism.

As Iraq burns and Bush’s Republican Party tries to prove that stability is gaining hold, the Democrats are working frantically to prove that their candidate, John Kerry, would better “finish the job” in Iraq. The Democrats and Republicans step up their sparring with each other every four years, each hoping to demonstrate that theirs is the party that will best represent the “American people.” This year, notwithstanding the mostly leaden performance of the Kerry-Edwards campaign, there is more intense fervor than usual to defeat the Republicans, which is hardly surprising: the Bush cabal is a truly frightening administration that has antagonized the U.S.’s erstwhile imperialist allies through its god-invoking crusade in Iraq and created a lot of genuine loathing at home.

The fact is there is no significant difference in policy between these parties over Iraq—only a difference of opinion as to tactics. And when it comes to U.S. support to Zionist Israel, there aren’t even tactical differences. Both Democrats and Republicans agree on the need for U.S. imperialist control over the Near East and its oil spigot.

More fundamentally, the U.S. is a class-divided society in which the interests of working people are counterposed to those of the capitalist rulers. The ruling class derives its fabulous wealth from the exploitation of the working people at home and imperialist plunder abroad. The capitalists have two major parties—the Democrats and Republicans—each committed to maintaining imperialism for them. We need a revolutionary workers party that fights to sweep away the imperialist system that breeds poverty, racism and war.

Oslo “Peace” Accord Paved Way to Ghetto

In the most immediate sense, the desperate situation the Palestinians face today is the result of the 1993 Oslo “peace” accords brokered by U.S. Democratic president Clinton between Israel and Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In the years since, the number of settlers, many of them heavily armed ultra-Zionist fanatics, has doubled. The Palestinians have been partitioned into ghettos to which exit and entry is entirely controlled by Israeli troops: farmers are unable to reach their land, families are split apart and the population is cut off from jobs, hospitals, schools and even water.

Today, the entire West Bank is dotted with military outposts and fortified settlements, crisscrossed by the “bypass roads” that are off-limits to Palestinians. The construction of a 600-mile-long wall completes the segregation of the Palestinian West Bank population, while placing large chunks of Palestinian land under Israeli control. Last month, the mayor of Jerusalem presented plans, praised by the Israeli interior ministry, to declare Wadi Joz, an Arab neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, as “zoned for Jewish population” (Ha’aretz, 24 September).

Palestinian unemployment is now two-thirds in some areas, and more than half the children are malnourished. Incomes have fallen by more than half to $900 a year—compared with an average of nearly $17,000 for Israelis. One of Sharon’s cabinet ministers last year expressed the longstanding Zionist dream that through brutal suppression, the Palestinians will just get out: “Make their life so bitter that they will transfer themselves willingly.”

Today, the illusion of a negotiated settlement for a Palestinian state, or even the vague “autonomy” promised by Oslo, is dead and buried. Even Sharon’s promise to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from the tiny Gaza Strip is simply a cynical cover for all but formal annexation of much of the West Bank. One of Sharon’s top advisers, Dov Weisglass, said recently: “What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns.... Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with authority and permission. All with a [U.S.] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress” (Ha’aretz, 8 October).

For Arab/Hebrew Workers Revolution!

We defend the Palestinians in their just struggle against the Zionist occupation. However, as long as the conflict remains one of nation against nation, the Palestinians can only lose out to the far wealthier, heavily armed (including with nukes) and more technologically advanced Zionist state. This realization has led to growing despair among the Palestinian population. Particularly since Oslo, as Palestinians have increasingly come to see the PLO as politically bankrupt, increasing numbers, including youth and even women, are turning to the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements. On the other hand, some Palestinian spokesmen are abandoning even talk of Palestinian self-determination. In an op-ed piece printed in the New York Times (4 October), PLO legal adviser Michael Tarazi wrote:

“After years of negotiations, coupled with incessant building of settlements and now the construction of the wall, Palestinians finally understand that Israel is offering ‘independence’ on a reservation stripped of water and arable soil, economically dependent on Israel and even lacking the right to self-defense. As a result, many Palestinians are contemplating whether the quest for equal statehood should now be superseded by a struggle for equal citizenship. In other words, a one-state solution in which citizens of all faiths and ethnicities live together as equals.”

Such is the logical outcome of the political bankruptcy of Palestinian nationalism. In 1964, the Palestinian National Covenant declared that only “Jews who were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.” Following the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, the PLO adopted the “democratic secular state” line—a Palestinian state in which Jews would presumably have equal rights. This was not only utopian; it also denied the national rights of the Hebrew population, treating them instead as a religious minority. Then in the mid 1970s, the PLO adopted the call for a “mini-state” in the Occupied Territories. In the early 1990s came Oslo, where Arafat’s PLO and the Palestinian Authority would get to police isolated Palestinian cantons for Israel’s rulers. Now Tarazi is renouncing the national rights of the Palestinians outright.

Tarazi is calling for what amounts to a “Greater Israel” in which the 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would join the “Israeli Arabs” who are currently third-class citizens of Israel. Tarazi paints this as a struggle for equality akin to the black struggle in South Africa and asserts, “The struggle against South African apartheid proves the battle can be won.”

The fall of apartheid was an important victory for the oppressed black masses of South Africa, as it provided formal equality and the right to vote. But it is hardly liberation; what exists in South Africa today is neo-apartheid, where a black government lords it over the black population—whose standard of living has not changed in the last decade—for a tiny white capitalist class. But even that can never happen in Israel—no way will a predominantly Arab Palestinian government rule for a Zionist capitalist class. Similarities between South Africa and Israel/Palestine are purely superficial; the differences between them are far greater.

Tarazi writes that Israel “wants Palestinian land but not the Palestinians who live on that land.” Despite the hideous injustices, oppression and subjugation suffered by the black masses in South Africa, the white rulers could not even conceive of driving them off the land because it would mean driving off their labor force: the enormously higher standard of living experienced by most of the white population was based on the superexploitation of black labor. The opposite is the case in Israel/Palestine. From the beginning of their colonial enterprise, the Zionist rulers have made it a point not to rely on Arab labor, and to instead build up a Hebrew proletariat.

For decades after the 1967 war, Israel used Palestinian laborers from the Occupied Territories for the most unskilled and lowest-paid work. But as noted in a compelling article in New Left Review (September-October 2004) by Tel Aviv University professor Yoav Peled: “With the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, however, the economic benefits of the Occupation—a cheap and reliable labour force and captive market—began to be outweighed by its costs.” The hundreds of thousands of Palestinian laborers who used to find work in Israel have for the most part been replaced by over 250,000 foreign workers imported into the country from Asia and East Europe. Whereas South African apartheid was premised on the exploitation of black labor by the white minority, the Zionist state was founded on the expulsion of the Palestinians, not the exploitation of their labor.

The Palestinian nationalists have tried nearly everything to beat back the Israeli garrison state: from fighting to negotiating to appealing to the UN and Western imperialists, to now pathetically begging to simply be allowed to exist—and it has all been and will all be futile. So long as the national axis is emphasized, the situation will always be bleak and hopeless. But if the class axis is emphasized, there is at least a realistic chance at an equitable resolution.

Like all capitalist societies, Israel is divided along class lines and rent by political fissures: the same ruling class that sends tanks into Gaza also sends out its police to attack Israeli strikers and political demonstrators; court-martials the growing numbers of young people in the draft army who are refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories; and shoots Israeli youth who protest the building of the wall.

The Peled article makes vividly clear that the Israeli bourgeoisie’s war against the Palestinians is being carried out simultaneously with a war against the Hebrew working class. A powerful nationwide general strike on September 21—the third general strike since April 2003—paralyzed the country for 30 hours as the Histadrut, Israel’s labor federation, demanded payment for municipal workers, many of them Arab, who had not been paid for months. On October 1 Arabs called a strike to commemorate the police massacre of 13 people in an Arab village in Israel during the protests that erupted in October 2000 in solidarity with the uprising in the Occupied Territories. And now another general strike is posed, as many workers are still not paid their wages.

It is the task of socialists in the Near East to use every fissure, every strike, every opportunity to widen the gap between Israel’s workers and rulers, to convince the Israeli proletariat that it is in its interests to defend the Palestinians and to oppose the Zionist ruling class. We have no illusions that this will be an easy task; it will likely take some historic event, like the victory of social revolution in another country in the Near East extending a hand of proletarian internationalism to the Israeli working class, to jolt the Hebrew proletariat from its ties with the Zionist rulers. Indeed, the Israeli proletariat is largely made up of Sephardic (Near Eastern and North African) Jews who are on the one hand treated as second-class citizens while on the other expressing the most chauvinist attitudes toward Palestinian Arabs. But to write off the Israeli working class as potential allies of the struggle for Palestinian national rights is to write off the struggle for Palestinian national rights.

National self-determination for the Palestinian people—who also constitute the majority of Jordan’s population—cannot be resolved within the borders of Israel/Palestine. Nor can there be justice for the Palestinians within the framework of capitalist rule. On the contrary, the system of private property and private ownership of the means of production necessarily contains within it the components of nationalism and religion, which make impossible the settlement of the conflicting national claims of the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew populations. Only through a socialist federation of the Near East can the right of national self-determination for these peoples and the many other peoples of the region—including the Kurds, the largest nation without a state—be equitably realized. This necessarily calls for the leadership of internationalist Marxist workers parties, sections of a reforged Fourth International. There is no other way.