Workers Vanguard No. 853	2 September 2005

Israeli Troops, Settlers Out of All the Occupied Territories!

Zionists Quit Gaza Ghetto

For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

AUGUST 28—On August 4, just before Ariel Sharon’s evacuation of settlers from Gaza, an ultra-chauvinist settler supporter opened fire on a busload of Arabs in northern Israel, killing four and wounding several others. Two weeks later, a settler in the West Bank went on a bloody rampage, murdering four Palestinians there. In the past week, Israeli forces carried out another massacre in the West Bank refugee camp of Tulkarm, killing a total of five people alleged to be Palestinian militants. Gaza remains enclosed by an electrified fence, and the West Bank is carved up by a ghetto wall and criss-crossed by military checkpoints and militarized Jewish-only highways. Hunger, disease, misery and hopelessness plague the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories. This is the true face of Zionist Israel’s vaunted “disengagement.”

The road to today has been one of decades of Zionist land theft abetted by the perfidy of the nationalist leaders of the Palestinian people. In 1971, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) declared itself opposed to accepting a Palestinian state on anything other than all the area known as Israel and the Occupied Territories. Three years later, the PLO came out for a West Bank “mini-state,” which was posed as a transitional step toward a “democratic, secular Palestine.” In 1988, the PLO explicitly accepted the existence of the inherently exclusivist Zionist state, and in 1993 the PLO and Israel signed a U.S.-brokered agreement, the Oslo Accords, in which the PLO agreed to police the Occupied Territories on behalf of the Zionist rulers in exchange for Palestinian “autonomy.”

Today, the government of Ariel Sharon, the butcher of the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982, has determined that Israeli national interests are best served by withdrawing approximately 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip—an area about the size of the New York City borough of Queens—and four settlements in the West Bank. This is being done as vastly more numerous settlements are built in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by devouring ever more Palestinian land. Once again demonstrating the bankruptcy of petty-bourgeois nationalism, today the Palestinian Authority talks of “building our country” in Gaza: a tiny, dusty parcel of land that will still confine 1.3 million impoverished Palestinians, encircled and under the thumb of the Israeli military. Sharon’s vice prime minister, Ehud Olmert, emphasized that the Israeli military would now be better situated to police that desolate ghetto. After quoting Olmert that the pullout “will not reduce the capability of the Israeli security forces to respond,” the New York Times (11 August) commented, “Without Israeli settlers in Gaza, [Olmert] suggested, the army could strike even harder.”

The removal of the Gaza settlers by Sharon, implementing a policy earlier proposed by the Labor Party, was touted as a step forward for the oppressed Palestinians not only by imperialist spokesmen but by leftist cheerleaders for the so-called Palestinian “resistance.” The Workers World Party (WWP), the pseudo-socialist organization that initiated the ANSWER antiwar coalition, hails the “victory of the steadfast Palestinian resistance” for “the fact that Israel is forced to withdraw” (Workers World, 18 August). The WWP enthuses: “The mood of continuing resistance in Gaza is visible in signs there that read: ‘Today Gaza, tomorrow Jerusalem and the West Bank,’ and ‘Resistance wins—let’s go on!’” Having earlier promoted more left-wing, secular variants of Arab nationalism, WWP now cheers a “resistance” dominated by the anti-woman, anti-Semitic Islamic reactionaries of Hamas.

Newspapers and TV depicted weeping settler families and reluctant Israeli soldiers, juxtaposed with scenes of jubilant, flag-waving Palestinians. Palestinians undoubtedly relish the departure of the hated settlers from Gaza after 38 years. However, they are not as euphoric as one might conclude from the Western capitalist media (and the likes of Workers World). A 12-year-old boy said that his hope for the future is “to go upstairs”: the Israeli army took over the upper two floors of his home five years ago. An old woman stated, with what the reporter described as “the language of diminished expectations”: “God willing, we hope for the best, for us and them. We only ask the United Nations and UNRWA [UN refugee agency] to build us a sewage line” (Middle East Report Online, 19 May).

It is necessary to demand the complete, unconditional withdrawal of all Israeli troops and settlers from all of the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, as well as the immediate removal of all anti-Arab fortifications—including the military checkpoints, the walls and fences and the apartheid highway network. WWP and the Palestinian nationalists notwithstanding, it is totally fatuous to believe that the current “disengagement” from Gaza will lead to a Palestinian state including the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Sharon made this clear by embarking on a massive new settlement construction program in the West Bank at the same time that the Gaza evacuation was under way.

Even were the Palestinians able to achieve a statelet on these territories—economically unviable and under Israeli suzerainty—this would hardly be a realization of Palestinian self-determination. Genuine self-determination for the Palestinian people is impossible without the dismantling of both the Zionist state of Israel, whose very existence is premised on the oppression of the Palestinian people, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, whose population is about 60 percent Palestinian.

Unlike various “leftist” enthusiasts for Arab nationalism, we have always insisted that national emancipation for the Palestinians must not come at the expense of the right to national existence of the Hebrew-speaking people. Given the interpenetration of the Hebrew-speaking and Palestinian Arab populations—two peoples laying claim to the same territory—the only just resolution to the national question lies in the revolutionary overthrow of all the bourgeois regimes in the region. Only through the creation of a planned economy in a socialist federation of the Near East can conflicting claims over land and water be equitably resolved and all languages, religions and cultures be placed on an equal footing.

The Israeli pullout from Gaza and a handful of West Bank settlements is a caricature of the “Gaza-Jericho first” deal that was the first step of the 1993 Oslo “peace” accords, which created the Palestinian Authority. In an article headlined “Israel-PLO Deal for Palestinian Ghetto,” we wrote that this deal “does not offer even the most deformed expression of self-determination” and “would place the PLO’s seal on the national oppression of the long-suffering Palestinian Arab masses” (WV No. 583, 10 September 1993). We added:

“This grotesque bargain over the subjugated Palestinian people marks a watershed in the Near East. By its act, the PLO has invited fundamentalist reactionaries like Hamas to pose as the only fighters against the Zionist occupation. Petty-bourgeois Arab nationalism has been shown to be the bankrupt and impotent dead end that it always was.”

Implemented by the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin, this deal led directly to the doubling of the settler population in the Occupied Territories in subsequent years. The Palestinians who had earlier managed to eke out a living as low-wage laborers in Israeli construction and agriculture were now largely confined to their segregated villages and squalid refugee camps and cut off from their livelihoods, replaced by migrant labor from East Europe and Southeast Asia. A population that had once been among the most educated and cosmopolitan in the Near East is today increasingly under the sway of Islamic reaction. Whereas the first Intifada in the late 1980s gave rise to a plethora of women’s organizations that challenged traditional values, Palestinian women are now, especially in Gaza, increasingly forced to wear the veil and many have been murdered in “honor” killings.

Today, Hamas is maneuvering to gain maximum political capital for itself as the Fatah movement of Mahmoud Abbas, Yasir Arafat’s successor, grows increasingly discredited and despised. Over the past year, Hamas candidates won an estimated 60 percent of all seats in local government elections in Gaza and the West Bank, and in the West Bank town of Qalqilya, Hamas’ slate took all 15 positions, which was seen as “a protest not only against Fatah’s history of mismanagement but also against Fatah’s powerlessness to prevent the encirclement of the town on all sides by Israel’s wall” (Middle East Report Online, 21 August). Hamas also intends to run in legislative elections projected for next January.

The suicide bombings carried out by such groups as Hamas against innocent Israeli civilians—as opposed to attacks on the Israeli military and their armed settler auxiliaries—are criminal acts of terror that serve only to seal any fissures in Israeli society. The starting point for those fighting for social justice and national emancipation for the oppressed Palestinians must be that Israel, like the neighboring Arab countries, is a capitalist society with a class divide between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The proletariat includes not only European-derived Ashkenazi Jews but the more downtrodden Near Eastern Sephardic Jews and a deeply oppressed Palestinian Arab minority.

The inherently oppressive Zionist state must and can only be swept away from within, through a proletarian revolution uniting Palestinian and Hebrew-speaking workers against the common class enemy. For this to come about will likely require the prior victory of socialist revolution elsewhere, under the banner of proletarian internationalism. But if the Hebrew working class is to fight for its own liberation from capitalist exploitation, it must champion the national rights of the Palestinian people. In turn, the Arab working masses will not be won to a perspective of proletarian revolution if they are not broken from Arab nationalism and anti-Semitism. What is crucially necessary is the forging of revolutionary Marxist parties throughout the Near East, tempered through the most uncompromising struggle not only against fundamentalist reaction of all religious stripes but also even the most secular or “progressive” brand of nationalism. There is no other way. Defend the Palestinian people! For a socialist federation of the Near East!