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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 168 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 168, October 1993.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Middle East ‘peace’ deal changes nothing. Its high talk about ‘coexistence and mutual dignity’ hides the reality: the racist state of Israel is still in control of Palestine, most of whose five million people remain scattered across the Middle East as refugees. Only Israel benefits from ‘autonomy’ in Gaza and Jericho, where Yasser Arafat becomes a Palestinian policeman who aims to crush resistance the Israeli army could not destroy.
Some Palestinians have celebrated the deal – an expression of their desperation and hope for a future free of relentless Israeli repression. Many have backed Arafat as the man with the money, for the Washington treaty has been followed by promises of massive Western aid, starting with a World Bank development plan. Its pledge of $3 billion over ten years is a drop in the ocean of poverty that dominates the camps of Gaza, but already even this is in doubt.
Gaza and the West Bank will continue to function as Arab bantustans, supplying cheap labour for Israel and acting as the largest market for Israeli consumer products. This exploitation is reflected in the grotesque inequality between Israelis and Palestinians of the Occupied Territories: in the West Bank average income is currently less than a fifth of that received by Israelis; in Gaza it is less than an eighth.
‘Peace’ will leave Israeli settlements untouched. In Gaza, Jewish settlers make up 0.4 percent of the area’s population but occupy, on average, less than 0.0006 of an acre, making Gaza the most densely populated area in the world.
In the West Bank, for which even ‘autonomy’ is no more than a vague proposal, construction of Israeli settlements has accelerated under Rabin’s Labour government and some 60 percent of land is now under Israeli control.
At home the Israeli government has spelt out that the treaty is a defeat for the Palestinians. It maintains that ‘autonomy’ in Gaza is a means of easing Israel’s biggest problem – policing a rebellious Palestinian population that has been moving under the influence of Islamic activism. (Jericho, a West Bank town of only 15,000 people, has been chosen for the relative passivity of its population and added to help Arafat sell the deal.)
Israeli leaders hope the treaty will allow new agreements with the Arab regimes, bringing ‘normalisation’ and an end to trade boycotts and withholding of economic aid, especially from Europe. They believe that in the long run these changes will help Israel’s integration into the regional economy as a centre for manufacturing and services.
This prospect does not disturb Yasser Arafat. Since the 1950s he and other leaders of Al Fatah have worked for the establishment of what they call a Palestinian ‘entity’ – a statelet within which Palestinian businessmen like themselves could conduct ‘national’ affairs on the same basis as other Arab regimes.
By the early 1970s Fatah had abandoned any idea of liberating the whole of Palestine and was committed to the idea of a ‘ministate’ in the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip – just 21 percent of Palestinian territory. A tiny portion of this area is now enough to guarantee Arafat’s signature on the Washington treaty.
The PLO leader would have preferred more land but his extreme weakness has allowed Israel to dictate terms. This feebleness is the result of two interrelated developments – the movement’s financial collapse and Palestinians’ perception that the PLO is politically bankrupt.
Arafat has always insisted that the struggle for Palestinian liberation would never threaten Arab regimes. For 25 years this guarantee of good conduct brought billions of dollars from Gulf rulers, buying influence for Fatah throughout the Palestinian diaspora and in the Occupied Territories. This has been especially important during the two great explosions of Palestinian mass activity: that in the late 1960s, when Saudi Arabia first began to fund Fatah, and 20 years later when the Intifada, or uprising, challenged Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel met the Intifada with brute force while Arafat did his best to suffocate the uprising by seizing control of rank and file committees which emerged to run economic and political life in the Territories. A generation of angry, disillusioned Palestinian youth has since rejected PLO accommodation to the Zionist state, turning to the more defiant rhetoric of Islamic movements such as Hamas and Jihad.
As his political base collapsed Arafat discovered that the Gulf regimes were also deserting him. Funds began to dry up, not only because of PLO opposition to Western intervention in Kuwait in 1991, but as a result of the problems of Arab capitalism in general. A falling oil price has left even Saudi Arabia in difficulty – the $80 billion of foreign reserves its rulers boasted in the late 1980s has fallen to $6 billion today. When the Gulf rulers started to turn off the tap, Arafat’s PLO apparatus – which needs $30 million to $40 million a month – went into a tailspin.
By this year Arafat was weaker than at any time since the formation of Fatah in 1959, happy to accept a ‘peace’ offer enforced on Israel’s terms.
Arafat maintains that his ‘autonomous’ zones are a Palestinian state in embryo. On this basis he has started recruiting for an ‘administration’, of which the most important part is a 25,000 strong Palestinian police force which must first control the camps of Gaza. Israel relishes the prospect of Palestinian fighting Palestinian – a Zionist version of south Africa’s ‘black on black’ conflict.
Far from being a first step to a Palestinian state, the treaty is a move by Israel to install a puppet administration whose survival depends upon its ability to crush Palestinian resistance. This complements US aims in the region. Clinton, the most pro-Israeli president ever, has been quick to round up Arab leaders in support of Arafat, emphasising that they too face opposition from Islamic movements for whom Palestine is an important mobilising issue.
The Washington treaty is not a historic peace deal but it does mark a key moment for Palestinian activists, who are facing the biggest challenge for a generation. Some sections of the Islamic movement will probably continue to grow, even though organisations such as Hamas, which has its own connections to the Gulf regimes, are always open to compromise and may strike a deal with Arafat. At the same time, secular nationalists are looking for a more radical solution – a development which parallels changes in Arab states where the collapse of nationalism and of Stalinist Communism has encouraged the Islamic movement but also allowed the emergence of an embryonic revolutionary left.
As economic and political crises deepen, there is a growing audience for those who argue that only independent working class struggle can bring real change.
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