Weekly Worker 496 Thursday September 18 2003

Two nations - two states

Threat to murder Arafat exposes ‘road map’ fraud

George Bush’s so-called ‘road map to peace’ has effectively collapsed, once again taking the Middle East to the brink. Brazenly the Israeli government threatens to expel elected Palestinian president Yasser Arafat from the occupied West Bank. Indeed, Sharon’s deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told Israeli radio last weekend that killing Arafat was “one of the options” the Israeli government was discussing as a response to yet another cycle of assassinations and suicide bombings. Such an action would be a complete negation of any Israeli pretence to respect any Palestinian rights, and would be genocidal in its implications. It would portend a bloodbath on a scale as yet unwitnessed.

It is not clear at this point that the Israeli government will go through with the expulsion, however: since it was mooted both the Americans and the EU have made noises indicating displeasure at such a prospect. But actions speak louder than words: on September 16 the United States vetoed a Syrian-sponsored UN security council resolution forbidding Arafat’s expulsion or anything worse. France and Russia voted in favour, along with nine others; Britain and Germany abstained.

Of course, the US routinely vetoes resolutions critical of Israel; and the Israelis equally routinely ignore those tepid resolutions the US does occasionally deign to allow - though, given the precarious situation of the US in Iraq at the moment, such an Israeli action would be quite inconvenient for Bush right now. But Sharon has made it clear already that he is quite prepared to tell even the US itself to go to hell over matters he considers to be his government’s prerogative. So it is a real possibility that some new cycle of assassinations and suicide attacks could trigger off an Israeli expulsion of Arafat. Such an action would mean the end of the Palestinian authority in any credible form.

Attempts, probably forlorn, are underway from the Palestinian side to get some kind of negotiations running again: Arafat has appointed a new ‘prime minister’ for the Palestinian Authority to replace the hapless Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), Bush’s chosen Palestinian interlocutor. The new incumbent, Ahmed Qureia, popularly known as Abu Ala, is historically a key ally of the Palestinian president, and is expected to follow a much more cautious policy regarding negotiations with the Israelis than his craven predecessor, who was accurately perceived as being an outrageous American stooge, a would-be Hamid Karzai of the Palestinian authority.

Despite his grovelling before Bush and Sharon after the Iraq invasion - seemingly an opportune moment for the US to ‘remake’ the Middle East - Abu Mazen was treated with contempt. Lackeys usually are.

According to Hanan Ashrawi, a well known Palestinian MP and negotiator, “The Americans set up Abu Mazen for a fall. Abu Mazen thought he would build his legitimacy through concrete progress on the road map and he thought the Americans would get the Israelis to deliver on the road map, but the Israeli government is anti-peace and the Americans aren’t serious” (The Guardian September 9). Another Palestinian, leading Fatah member Hatern Abdul Khader, was more blunt: “If we resurrected Mother Teresa from her grave and asked her to be prime minister she would reach a dead end dealing with Sharon” (ibid).

Thus the absurdity of those, such as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, who have given more than a smidgen of ‘critical support’ to Bush’s stillborn ‘road map’ is exposed - as short-sighted and cretinous opportunism. The whole assumption underlying such people’s support for Bush’s plan (and indeed of the plan itself) was that it would coast through because of the entirely new situation in the Middle East that would allegedly come about through Bush’s occupation of Iraq. Given it is now clear that, in the words of Bush’s wannabe nemesis Wesley Clark, the US has stepped on a “hornets’ nest” in Iraq, what price those idiot leftists who thought that progressive and working class forces could hitch a ride to a settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict on Bush’s coat tails?

The Sharon regime is fundamentally opposed to any two-state resolution of the Israel-Palestine question. In fact it is clearly looking to create the political conditions where it can ‘resolve’ the question of the occupied territories by the mass expulsion of Arabs and the outright annexation of all the lands of ‘Judea and Samaria’, as it calls them, into the territory of Eretz Yisrael (Greater Israel). This indeed is the programme of a whole wing, if not necessarily a majority, of the ruling class - certainly of the most determined and politically power-hungry element that has dominated Israeli governments for the bulk of the last two and a half decades. The US-brokered peace deal with Egypt freed Zionist hands to deal with the Palestinian question on their own terms.

Even the supposedly ‘land for peace’ Labour element of the Israeli ruling class - which has in the past claimed to stand for some kind of Palestinian statehood, and indeed signed agreements that led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority under the premiership of Rabin - has proven completely unable or unwilling to confront the advocates of Eretz Yisrael. Under the Oslo accord, and under Labour prime ministers from Rabin to Peres to Barak, the seizure of more and more Palestinian land by settlers continued and often increased, as eloquent Palestinian critics of the ‘peace process’ such as Edward Said have extensively documented. The bourgeois programme of even the most committed Labourite ‘land for peace’ types means that, faced by suicide bombers and the mass resistance of the Palestinians, let alone joint mobilisations of Arab and Israeli workers, they instantly sue for peace with their rightwing opponents.

The Zionist constitution and the whole oppressive apparatus of the Israeli state needs to be overturned - but not from without, by means of a reconquest of territory, as many misguided leftists, despairing Arab nationalists and islamists forlornly dream. Rather, it has to be swept away primarily from within, by a united Israeli and Arab working class. What is needed is a programme whose starting point is consistent democracy for both peoples: the recognition that by whatever reactionary historical means two peoples, both with a real national consciousness, have come into existence and whose existence has therefore become a material factor that cannot be ignored or brushed aside.

The paradox of the situation is that in order to live together in the region, Israeli and Palestinian workers in particular have to be won to defend the right of the other nation to exist within its own democratic and secular state. Such a mutual recognition is, of course, vehemently opposed by influential political forces on both sides - on the one hand, the Zionist state, which has in reality denied the right of national existence to the Palestinians by outright military means since 1948, and with a redoubled force since 1967; on the other, various nationalist and islamist Palestinian groups which deny Israel’s rights as a nation in a programmatic and rhetorical sense, as a form of symbolic revenge for the crimes of dispossession and diaspora.

The bulk of the onus, however, since ‘their’ state is a monstrous oppressor, must be on the Israeli workers, whose job it is to fight for a fully independent Palestinian state, as equal as is politically possible in terms of resources, along with the right of those Palestinian refugees driven out of what is now Israel in 1948 and after to return to their land of origin. Those who do not wish to return to territories now largely inhabited by Israelis must be compensated for their decades of suffering and dispossession - the productive capacity of a democratic, secular Israel, particularly one shaped by the collective working class action, would find good and progressive use in bringing about a dramatic uplifting of Palestinian living standards.

It may well be, of course, that the very experience of fighting for these reciprocal rights, in a future revolutionary situation, would so dissipate the national antagonisms between Arabs and Israelis that the idea of a border between them would become a felt anachronism. In such a favourable scenario, the actual existence of two states would be something so transient as to be unnoticeable - an agitational/programmatic concept that in serving its purpose outlives its usefulness simultaneously with its realisation. There are, though, many less favourable, more drawn out scenarios that are equally possible to envisage.

In any case, there is no workable alternative means of struggling for the overcoming of the national hatreds that poison the Middle East today - the Israelis, together with their national consciousness, will not go away, any more than will the national aspirations of the Palestinian people. Necessarily that requires a programme for two states for two nations, fought for by class-struggle means from below. This is the only road to peace and justice in the territory of historic Palestine.

Ian Donovan

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