Israel Out of the Occupied Territories!

Imperialists, Zionists Starve Palestinians

Since the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas took office in March, a U.S.-led international imperialist boycott has been starving the Palestinians for the “crime” of exercising the “democracy” that George Bush trumpets he is bringing to the Near East. In response to Hamas’ electoral victory in January, the Israeli government has cut off the monthly transfer of some $55 million in taxes and other fees it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. For their part, the United States imperialists have suspended the transfer of millions of dollars in annual aid to the already impoverished Palestinians. Also suspending aid are the European Union (EU) imperialists, whose posture as “peacemakers” in the Near East has been replaced by a drive to punish the Palestinians for electing Hamas. Meanwhile, the Arab bourgeois regimes, supposed “friends” of the Palestinians, have abandoned the Palestinian masses to starvation—even the paltry $70 million promised by the obscenely wealthy oil sheikdoms of Saudi Arabia and Qatar has yet to find its way to the Occupied Territories.

As Israeli journalist Amira Hass put it in Ha’aretz (21 April): “Every day another country announces that it is canceling the economic aid that over the past five years has become the Palestinian nation’s oxygen.” Although “humanitarian” aid has recently been allowed, the infrastructure to administer it is in collapse. The United Nations predicts that 70 percent of Palestinians will be jobless by the end of the year, and one UN representative warned, “Many families are being forced to reduce their number of meals to just one a day.” Already, more than half of Palestinian children suffer from malnutrition.

“I don’t know how we’re going to cope…. Before, we were in crisis management, now we are in disaster management,” reports the director of Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital. Patients have already perished for lack of medicine. There are dwindling anesthetics for surgery, and cancer patients are sent home to die. A massive public health crisis, including the spectre of cholera, looms as garbage piles up and sewage systems collapse. Even before the January elections, the Karni crossing—the main checkpoint for transporting all commercial goods and medicines into Gaza from Israel and for exporting goods out of Gaza—had been (and still is) closed more than half the time.

The all-sided pounding of the Palestinians in the wake of Hamas’ electoral victory must be put in the broader context of imperialist machinations in the region. As it maintains its occupation of Iraq, the U.S. threatens Iran with sanctions and attack if it proceeds with its nuclear program, while annually giving Israel, armed with over 200 nuclear weapons, billions in military and financial aid. Israel has announced it will participate fully for the first time in NATO naval exercises in the Black Sea, “as part of preparations for a possible showdown with Iran,” as Reuters (29 May) put it. Defend the Palestinian people! Israeli troops, settlers out of all the Occupied Territories! Down with U.S. aid to Israel! U.S. out of Iraq—hands off Iran! Down with the U.S./EU/Israeli starvation embargo against the Palestinians!

With Hamas in office, the war against the Palestinians has now been made synonymous with the “war on terror.” The day before recently elected Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert addressed a joint session of Congress, receiving no less than 16 standing ovations, the U.S. House overwhelmingly passed the “Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006,” which called for an international boycott of the Palestinians. Olmert earned his spurs in 1996 when, as the Likud mayor of Jerusalem, he oversaw the massacre of at least 62 Palestinians and the wounding of hundreds more who were demonstrating against the opening of an ancient tunnel under a wall of the Al Aksa mosque in the heart of Arab East Jerusalem (see “Zionist Bloodbath,” WV No. 653, 11 October 1996).

Indeed, as Olmert spoke of “peace” before Congress on May 24, Israeli troops invaded downtown Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, in broad daylight, killing four and injuring some 70 people. On May 30, the Israeli military killed four more Palestinians in its first deep military incursion into Gaza since last summer’s exit. Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza has in fact allowed the Zionist rulers to more effectively tighten their grip around this congested bit of land and the 1.3 million Palestinians trapped in it.

The election of Hamas is bad news for women, Christians and secular Palestinians. It is also a gift to Israel’s rulers, who have used it to pursue their policies without the pretense of “negotiations.” Upon his election, Olmert declared that Israel’s permanent borders would be unilaterally set by 2010. Kadima, which Olmert currently leads, was founded by now comatose ex-prime minister Ariel Sharon—the man responsible for the slaughter of some 2,000 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982—working in collaboration with longtime Labor Party leader Shimon Peres. Kadima adopted the line of Labor Zionism that it was necessary to carve up the Occupied Territories (as opposed to annexing them entirely) in order to ensure that Israel maintain a Jewish majority. Today, Kadima is in coalition with the thoroughly bourgeois Labor Party, whose head, Amir Peretz, is the Minister of Defense. An example of the racist and exclusivist nature of the Zionist state can be seen in the Israeli High Court decision in May upholding a law that denies Palestinians from the Occupied Territories who are married to Israeli citizens the right to live in Israel with their spouses.

Hamas’ victory has also been used by the Zionist rulers to further their strategy of divide and rule—of fomenting (if not directly provoking) warfare among Palestinian factions. The turf warfare between Fatah and Hamas supporters is exacerbated by the quest for sinecures in the Palestinian Authority’s multitudinous security services—overwhelmingly dominated by Fatah supporters—which were set up by the 1993 Oslo “peace” accords for the purpose of policing the ghettoized Palestinians for Israel. In the 1980s, Israel promoted Hamas as a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) (see “U.S./Israel Tighten Screws on Palestinians,” WV No. 864, 17 February). Now, Israel has announced that it will allow a shipment of arms to the personal guard of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, supposedly to protect him against threats by Hamas supporters.

The ostensible reason for the starvation embargo against the Palestinians is that Hamas refuses to recognize the state of Israel or renounce suicide bombings. The first is a bogus pretext given that Hamas has no means to do anything about Israel’s existence and has in fact repeatedly sought negotiations with Israel since the elections. But now, as part of the pressure on Hamas, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas is cynically planning a referendum in the Occupied Territories because of Hamas’ refusal to accept a document that essentially endorsed the PLO’s “mini-state” program—i.e., a two-state “solution,” with a Palestinian statelet in the West Bank and Gaza.

As for suicide bombings, indiscriminate terror against Israeli civilians is a crime from the standpoint of the proletariat. However, the terrorism of Hamas and others pales in comparison to the daily state terror perpetrated by the most militarily powerful regime in the region against a largely defenseless people. Israel has made the slaughter of Palestinians, including children, a regular occurrence.

The situation of the Palestinian masses is desperate. The fundamental basis of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is that two interpenetrated peoples lay claim to the same piece of land. Under capitalism, the exercise of self-determination by one will necessarily be at the expense of the other. The key to the national liberation of the Palestinians lies in the overthrow of capitalist rule in Israel through Arab-Hebrew workers revolution and throughout the region. Only in this way can the right of return for the millions of Palestinian refugees throughout the Near East be exercised. Any other “solution” will only deepen and intensify the Palestinians’ oppression.

When the PLO nationalists became isolated after the 1991-92 collapse of the Soviet Union, which had provided the PLO with financial and political aid, they accepted the Oslo accords, which did not “offer even the most deformed expression of self-determination,” as we wrote in “Israel-PLO Deal for Palestinian Ghetto” (WV No. 583, 10 September 1993). We warned: “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.”

Under Oslo, the number of settlers mushroomed to nearly half a million, and the Zionists continued creating “facts on the ground,” building the apartheid wall in the West Bank, an electric fence around Gaza and hundreds of military checkpoints. The growth of reactionary, anti-woman and anti-Semitic outfits like Hamas has also been one of the bitter fruits of Oslo and the PLO’s political bankruptcy.

Most significantly, under Oslo, the Palestinians became marginalized from Israel’s economy as the Israeli capitalists increasingly resorted to the use of migrant labor from Asia and elsewhere to replace the Palestinians. This has meant even greater poverty for the Palestinians, while making it easier for the Zionists to intensify the isolation of the Occupied Territories. With the growth of unemployment, hunger and destitution, many Palestinians face the prospect of starving or leaving—i.e., “ethnic cleansing” by attrition.

The fight for proletarian rule in the Near East requires a struggle to break the Hebrew proletariat from the grip of Zionist chauvinism and win them to the defense of the Palestinian people—an enormous task that will likely first require the victory of socialist revolution in one or another of the surrounding countries. Nonetheless, Israeli society is divided along class and national lines—including over one million horribly oppressed Palestinian Arab “citizens” of the state. There are also occasional but real expressions of sympathy with the plight of the Palestinians—such as the June 3 demonstration of some 2,000 Jews and Arabs in Tel Aviv against the occupation and the economic embargo. In turn, the Palestinians must also be broken from petty-bourgeois nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. What is essential is the forging of Leninist-Trotskyist parties throughout the Near East to lead the struggle for the national and social liberation for all the peoples of the region through the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East.