All Israeli Troops, Settlers Out of Occupied Territories!
Israeli Wall Seals Palestinian Ghettos
Defend the Palestinian People!
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 819, 6 February 2004.
FEBRUARY 3—Palestinian children in Qalqilya play in the shadow of a three-story-high concrete wall as Israeli soldiers train guns on them from guard towers. A despairing family at a checkpoint pleads with Zionist troops to be allowed to take a pregnant woman to a hospital, only to be turned back. Palestinian construction workers under Israeli military guard, sickened by the job they are forced to accept in order to feed their families, construct the wall segregating the Palestinian quarters of East Jerusalem from the rest of the city. Such are the images today of the West Bank under lockdown. The Palestinian population is being imprisoned behind a barrier of huge concrete walls, electrified fences, trenches and razor wire. It is a wall that divides families, separates farmers from their land and cuts off the population from jobs, hospitals, schools and even water.
The path of the wall, which is projected to be over 600 miles long, snakes deep into the West Bank to envelop Zionist settlements and steal Palestinian land. In the west, the wall already juts up to 13 kilometers beyond the "Green Line," the border between Israel and the West Bank, securing Israeli control of much of the best Palestinian farmland. It also includes on the Israeli side the water wells of the Western Aquifer, the second-largest water resource in the region after the Jordan River. According to a 24 January article by Seumas Milne in the London Guardian, when complete, the wall will enclose about 57 percent of the West Bank. Movement between the two Palestinian ghettos being created by the wall will be nearly impossible.
As a result of the closures, the Palestinian economy is frozen as laborers cannot get to jobs, farmers can only sell crops locally and unhindered trade is impossible. Palestinian unemployment is a staggering two-thirds in some areas, and more than half the children suffer from malnutrition. Incomes have fallen by more than half to $900 a year—compared with an average of nearly $17,000 for Israelis.
Qalqilya, the first town to be hermetically sealed off by the wall, reveals what other communities will face as the wall tightens around the West Bank. Penned in on all four sides, Qalqilya is today accessible only through a checkpoint nearly a mile to its east. Fully 85 percent of Qalqilya's land has been lost as the Israeli military, despite denials, prevents farmers from tending their fields. A third of Qalqilya's shops have closed, and more than 4,000 residents have already given up and left for good. It's not just Qalqilya's residents who are walled in, but the Palestinian villagers from nearby towns and villages are now walled out of the metropolitan center they depended on for everything, from basic services to shops and medical care.
The wall is but the latest grotesque step in the long, bloody history of Zionist colonization and provocation, which are aimed at forcibly driving out the Palestinian population. "Ethnic cleansing" is the logic of all strands of Zionism, from the "Labor" Zionists who founded the state of Israel to the rightist fanatics who inhabit Sharon's government. The Zionists encouraged emigration to Palestine on the racist premise that it was a "land without people for a people without land." They forcibly drove out over 700,000 Palestinians in what they called the 1948 "War of Independence," what the Palestinians call "The Catastrophe" (Al Naqba). And they forcibly drove out thousands more after their victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
It's a measure of the degeneration and desperation of the situation that policies like the forcible transfer of the Palestinian population, which used to be openly advocated only by the right-wing Zionist fringe, are now common currency. Correspondingly, as the bourgeois-nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is proven to be politically bankrupt, increasing numbers of Palestinian youth and even women are turning to the reactionary Islamic fundamentalism of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Marxists oppose nationalist irredentism, which only offers the prospect of reversing the terms of oppression. The only solution to two peoples laying claim to the same sliver of land requires breaking out of the capitalist, nationalist framework. The only salvation for the Palestinians—and the Hebrew-speaking Jewish population—lies in proletarian revolution and a socialist federation of the Near East. We have no illusions that winning the Hebrew-speaking working class to this perspective will be easy or quick. Yet social and class fissures do exist in Israel and it is the duty of revolutionaries to exploit every contradiction in order to win the Israeli proletariat away from the Zionist rulers.
There is a restive working class in Israel today which has recently engaged in large strike actions. Last spring, the country was paralyzed by a general strike by public workers against finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu's legislation imposing huge wage cuts and layoffs in order to finance the ultra-Zionist settlements in the Occupied Territories and the costs of military repression of the Palestinians. The cost of the Zionist garrison state is literally coming out of the hides of the country's working poor, both Hebrew-speaking and the second-class citizens of the state of Israel, the "Israeli Arabs." If the Israeli Jewish proletariat is to pursue its class interests against its own bourgeoisie, Marxists must win it to consciously champion the defense of the Palestinian people.
In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we warned that Israel might use the cover of war to "transfer" all Palestinians out of the Occupied Territories. Instead, the wall and the intolerable economic hardships and repression are choking the life out of Palestinian areas. As one of Sharon's cabinet ministers suggested last year, "Make their life so bitter that they will transfer themselves willingly." The Zionists shoot to kill not only Palestinians who breach the wall's checkpoints, but now Israeli youth as well who are moved to protest this atrocity.
Oslo "Peace" Accord Paved Way to Ghetto
The wall—Sharon calls it "unilateral disengagement"—is the ultimate expression of the "unilateral separation" that the Zionist "peace camp," represented by the likes of Meretz spokesman Yossi Sarid, has long championed. It is also the fruit of the 1993 Oslo "peace" accords that created the Palestinian Authority. At the time we wrote, in an article headlined "Israel-PLO Deal for Palestinian Ghetto," that this deal "does not offer even the most deformed expression of self-determination" and instead "would place the PLO's seal on the national oppression of the long-suffering Palestinian Arab masses" (WV No. 583, 10 September 1993). An academic study by Harvard University research scholar Sara Roy, "Ending the Palestinian Economy" (Middle East Policy, 1 December 2002), described the formation of the Palestinian ghettos:
"The fragmentation of Palestinian land into geographically noncontiguous areas or cantons, with exit and entry tightly monitored and controlled by Israel, was a reality directly imposed on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank by the terms of the Oslo peace agreements. It is not well known that the division of the Palestinian territories was first carried out in the Gaza Strip in October 1993, just one month after the Declaration of Principles —the first Oslo document—was signed on the White House lawn....
"By December 1999, the Gaza Strip had been divided into three cantons and the West Bank into 227, the majority of which were no larger than two square kilometers in size. While Palestinians maintained control over many of the cantons and were promised authority over more if not most, Israel maintained jurisdiction over the land areas in between the cantons, which in effect gave Israel control over all the land and its disposition.... The logical and intended consequence of territorial cantonization was separation and isolation, greatly facilitated by closure policy. In fact, although closure was imposed prior to the implementation of the Oslo agreements, these agreements institutionalized and formalized closure as a policy measure."
Following the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, the problem for the Zionists was how to ensure control over the land and resources of these areas while avoiding integration into the Zionist state of the millions of Palestinians living there. The consensus among the Zionist political parties was that the Palestinians should be given some minimal voice in their own affairs while final control of the land, resources and economy remained in the hands of Israel. The first of a series of plans to realize this objective was put together by General Yigal Allon, the deputy prime minister for the Labor Party. Allon proposed to establish a string of settlements in the Jordan Valley, in the Judean desert and around East Jerusalem as a preliminary step leading to formal annexation by Israel. Altogether, the plan envisaged establishing some sort of Palestinian entity in about 50 percent of the West Bank while Israel annexed East Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, the Hebron Hills in the south of the West Bank and the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
When Likud came to power in 1977, the Allon Plan was supplemented by the Sharon Plan, which called for a new belt of settlements to be built along the western side of the West Bank. The massive settlement expansion envisaged by Sharon was carried out starting in 1992 by a new Labor government under Yitzhak Rabin, which offered settlers large economic incentives. From the signing of the Oslo "peace" accords in September 1993 to the end of 2000, the number of settlers in the West Bank increased by 90 percent. Rabin, expanding on an idea originally proposed by Allon and Sharon, introduced the network of "bypass roads" that reinforced the isolation of West Bank cities. The 1995 Oslo II agreement outlawed Palestinian construction within 55 yards of either side of these roads, rendering hundreds of Palestinian houses vulnerable to demolition. The map of the wall being constructed in the West Bank corresponds, almost to the square mile, to earlier maps drawn up by Allon and Sharon.
Today, the entire West Bank is dotted with military outposts and fortified settlements, crisscrossed by "bypass roads" that are off-limits to Palestinians. The Zionists have implemented "collective guilt," imposing restrictions, razing buildings and launching military assaults against entire communities in retaliation for attacks against Israeli civilians or soldiers. Zionist settlers, who number over 400,000 (including East Jerusalem), freely rampage throughout the Occupied Territories, stealing land and murdering Palestinians by the dozens. A Zionist settler in Gaza told the New York Times (15 January): "In Jerusalem, when you see an Arab you don't know whether he's with you or against you, but here if you see an Arab you know he's dangerous and you shoot him." Defense of the Palestinians must begin with the demand for the immediate removal of all anti-Arab fortifications in the Occupied Territories—the walls, the troops, the settlements and the apartheid highway network.
Fissures Within the Zionist Fortress
The construction of the wall in the West Bank takes place as some in the Israeli establishment and Washington are starting to feel that the Sharon government's unbridled repression against the Palestinians and refusal to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority may not be in the Zionist state's best interests. When some prominent Israeli and Palestinian politicians negotiated an unofficial "peace plan" in Geneva in December, an implicit condemnation of Israeli government policy, the gesture was hailed by U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and even by U.S. deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a Zionist hardliner. As Justice Minister Tommy Lapid, of the Shinui Party, Sharon's main coalition partner, put it last month: "We could become the South Africa of today, and there is the danger that we could be subject to international boycotts" (London Independent, 6 January).
There is also growing unease in the armed forces and security apparatus, including among elite Zionist troops and top officers. In late September, 27 Air Force reserve pilots signed a letter saying they refused to carry out air strikes against civilian areas. The following month, the Israeli army chief of staff criticized the restrictions on Palestinians. On November 14, four former heads of the sinister domestic security agency, Shin Bet, from both the Labor Party and Sharon's Likud, came out against the government's policy in the Occupied Territories, with several explicitly criticizing the wall. On December 28, 13 reservists of the elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit sent a letter to Sharon seconding the pilots' refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories. Altogether, in the past three years, more than one thousand Israelis have refused to serve in the armed forces in the Occupied Territories. Last month, five of them were court-martialed, the first time this has happened in 20 years.
On February 2, Sharon announced a plan to remove nearly all Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip because they are a "security burden" and a cause of "continuous friction." When Sharon proposed last week to dismantle four isolated settlements in the northern West Bank—representing less than one-half of 1 percent of the total number of settlers—in exchange for an agreement to keep all the others, the deal was vetoed by leaders of the fascistic settler movement.
Part of what is behind the Zionists' brutal imprisonment of the Palestinians in unlivable ghettos is what is referred to as the "demographics" problem, a euphemism meaning that the birth rate of Palestinians, including Israeli Arabs, far outstrips that of Israeli Jews. In explaining what might be behind Sharon's proposal for the Gaza settlements, the New York Times (3 February) wrote, "Some members of Likud argue that Israel must draw borders in a way to part with as many Arabs—but as little land—as possible." Seeking to exploit the "demographic" problem as a way to pressure the Zionists, Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qurei warned last month that "Israel's continued policy of building the wall means that talk about a Palestinian state makes no sense" and threatened that "if this Israeli policy continues, we are going to come back to the option of a single, bi-national democratic state" (Agence France-Presse, 9 January). Thomas Friedman, a staunch supporter of Israel, explained in the New York Times (14 September 2003) what that meant:
"Rather than create the outlines of a two-state solution, this wall will kill that idea for Palestinians, and drive them, over time, to demand instead a one-state solution—where they and the Jews would have equal rights in one state. And since by 2010 there will be more Palestinian Arabs than Jews living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza combined, this transformation of the Palestinian cause will be very problematic for Israel. If American Jews think it's hard to defend Israel today on college campuses, imagine what it will be like when their kids have to argue against the principle of one man, one vote."
Under capitalism, Israel will never be transformed into a binational democracy in which Jews and Arabs live together on the basis of political equality, and both Friedman and Qurei know it. The Zionist state is a racist, exclusivist state, predicated on the expulsion, "transfer" or "displacement" of the Palestinian people. As we have warned in the past, the Zionist rulers are entirely capable of carrying out massacres of the Palestinians on a truly genocidal scale. It is vitally necessary for the working class, in the U.S. and internationally, to take up the call: Defend the Palestinian people!
Capitalist Divestment Is No Solution
The question of how to defend the Palestinians was debated at a January 24 workshop on "The Apartheid Wall and Its Effects on Palestinian Society" at the National Conference on Organized Resistance in Washington, D.C. The workshop was led by members of SUSTAIN, an organization whose full name expresses the campaign which is its primary activity: Stop U.S. Tax-Funded Aid to Israel Now. SUSTAIN also sponsors a campaign to get universities to divest their holdings in the Caterpillar Corporation in order to force it to stop selling Israel the bulldozers which are used to demolish Palestinian homes.
A Spartacist speaker at the workshop noted that just as the bourgeoisies of Europe and America closed their borders to the Jews in the 1930s, today they close their eyes to the plight of the Palestinians. This was particularly evident when shamefully even many leftists in the Iraq antiwar movement often dropped any mention of the Palestinians to tailor their protests to appeal to the Democrats. In contrast, Spartacist contingents in those marches consciously made prominent our demands: "Defend the Palestinians! Israel out of the Occupied Territories!"
Our speaker noted that we are opposed to the U.S. government funding the army of the Zionist state, but our starting point is seeking to mobilize workers against their "own" capitalist rulers. She recalled the 1991-92 Caterpillar strike, a critical class battle that was sold out by the UAW union bureaucracy in favor of a "consumer boycott" not very different from the "corporate campaign" today proposed by SUSTAIN. Divestment schemes and calls for capitalist boycotts foster illusions that union-busting corporations like Caterpillar, or even the blood-drenched U.S. imperialist government, could somehow become the agents for social justice through campaigns of moral suasion. In contrast, we fight to mobilize the labor movement in defense of the Palestinian people and against its class enemy at home, the rapacious U.S. ruling class.
In individual discussions after the workshop, SUSTAIN members insisted that it was necessary to drop defense of the Palestinians in the antiwar movement because "nothing should detract from the main struggle to defeat George Bush." But the Democrats have historically been, if anything, closer allies of the Zionists than the Republicans. It was President John Kennedy who initiated the close alliance with Israel, breaking the longstanding U.S. embargo on supplying major weapons to Tel Aviv while turning a blind eye to Israel's development of nuclear weapons. Following Israel's victory in the 1967 war and conquest of the Occupied Territories, Democratic president Lyndon Johnson showered Israel with political, economic and military support, making the U.S. Israel's major supplier of sophisticated weaponry (see Amos Elon, "A Very Special Relationship," New York Review of Books, 15 January).
The main problem with strategies such as those put forward by SUSTAIN, which seek to pressure the U.S. bourgeoisie to pressure Israel, is that they are premised on the idea that U.S. imperialism, the main force for reaction in the world today, is in some way superior to the Zionists. Ironically, the organizations pushing for the U.S. to pressure Israel inadvertently mimic the outlook of the Zionist "neocons" who promote U.S. intervention around the globe in the interest of "democracy." Tell that to the Iraqi people suffering under the boot of U.S. military occupation!
Proletarian Revolution Is the Only Solution
Sharon claims that the wall in the West Bank serves to stop "Palestinian terrorism." The Sharon regime is using Palestinian suicide attacks, which have killed hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians, as a pretext for even bloodier attacks on the Palestinians by the Zionist war machine. The suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, which are entirely criminal from the viewpoint of the international proletariat, serve to further drive the Hebrew-speaking population into the arms of the Zionist rulers.
Last fall, in an article in the New York Review of Books (23 October 2003), New York University professor Tony Judt described the situation as he saw it:
"The two-state solution—the core of the Oslo process and the present ‘road map' —is probably already doomed.... The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Sharon's cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state."
When Judt suggested that the "desirable outcome" might be a binational Israeli state, he provoked an uproar, as prominent Zionist intellectuals accused him of hating Jews, "pandering to genocide" and being "party to preparations for a final solution."
This clash between intellectuals in the realm of ideas reflects the material fact that there is no solution to the oppression of the Palestinian masses within the framework of capitalism, which is based on the nation-state and national aggrandizement. The Palestinians and the Hebrew-speaking people of Israel represent a case of interpenetrated peoples, two populations with competing claims to the same territory. Under capitalism, such conflicts can only be resolved through the suppression of one people by another through forced assimilation, forced population transfers ("ethnic cleansing") or outright genocide.
The only road to national and social liberation in the Near East is the mobilization of the proletariat on the basis of revolutionary internationalism to sweep away all the oppressive capitalist regimes in the region in the fight for a socialist federation of the Near East. To break the Hebrew proletariat from Zionist chauvinism will likely require an enormous shake-up in the region, such as the victory of socialist revolution in one of the other Near Eastern states. However, if the Zionist madmen are not to ultimately unleash their nuclear arsenal and engulf the whole of the region in a holocaust, the Hebrew proletariat must join with Arab workers in sweeping away the entire rotting edifice of capitalist class rule in the Near East. Only then can the right of national self-determination for both the Hebrew and Palestinian people be assured. What is required above all is the construction of internationalist workers parties, sections of a reforged Fourth International, in opposition to Zionism, Arab nationalism and all variants of religious fundamentalism. Defend the Palestinian people! For a socialist federation of the Near East!