The thousands of leaked documents ("The Palestinian Papers") relating to
the negotiations between the representatives of the Palestinian Authority and
Israel over the past few years blows out of the water any remaining credibility
that the so-called ‘peace process’ might have had.
The thousands of leaked documents ("The Palestinian Papers") relating to
the negotiations between the representatives of the Palestinian Authority and
Israel over the past few years blows out of the water any remaining credibility
that the so-called ‘peace process’ might have had. It shows the complete
intransigence of the representatives of Israeli capitalism and the USA, but
above all it shows how much the Palestinian representatives, and by implication
their leaders within Fatah and the PLO, are out of touch with ordinary
Palestinians. It will enormously strengthen the hand of Hamas and other groups
opposed to Fatah in the Palestinian areas.
In their grovelling attempt to curry favour
with the USA and Europe, the Palestinian negotiators have secretly tabled
offers that have included virtual full Israeli control of East Jerusalem, the
abandonment of the right of return of Palestinian refugees and the acceptance
of most Jewish settlements – all of which are publicly opposed by these same
Palestinian ‘leaders’.
Writing in The Independent, Robert Fisk has described the documents
as being “as damning as the Balfour Declaration.”
“The Palestinian ‘Authority’”, he says, “– one has to put this word in quotation marks – was
prepared, and is prepared to give up the "right of return" of perhaps
seven million refugees to what is now Israel for a "state" that may
be only 10 per cent (at most) of British mandate Palestine.” (Jan 26).
The so-called Palestinian Papers, released to
the Arabic news network Al Jazeera and copied to the The Guardian in the UK, show how the Palestinian representatives offered the most
humiliating concessions to Israel time after time, yet without the Israel or
the USA making the slightest concession in return.
Settlements
Since the capture of the West Bank in 1967,
Israel has continued to build settlements, so much so that in the last twenty
years the number of Israelis living in settlements has risen from a quarter to
half a million. Most of these are on land confiscated from Palestinian owners
as a result of the bulldozing of Arab houses, villages, orchards and farms. For
two generations Israel has been creating ‘facts on the ground’, a calculated
policy aimed at making a settlement of Palestinian national aspirations increasingly
unlikely.
The West Bank may be nominally run by the Palestinian
Authority (PA) but it is effectively still controlled by Israel. It is dotted
with hundreds of Israeli settlements from large new- towns to small ‘illegal’ outposts,
tolerated and protected by the Israeli military. The region is criss-crossed
with new roads for use by the settlers only. Scores of Israeli military road
blocks, taken down, moved or re-established at will, preventing the free
movement of Palestinians and Palestinian farm produce.
The Palestinian Authority is really a complete
fiction. It only has the “authority” to administer local government functions
in the large population centres like Ramallah, Hebron, Jenin and Nablus, cities
which the Israelis are reluctant and probably unable to control themselves. The effective land area controlled by the Palestinian Authority on
the West Bank is less than a quarter of the
total land area.
The only reason the PA is tolerated at all by
the representatives of Israel is because it is a means of keeping the radicalism
of the Palestinian people in check. In the last elections to the Palestinian
assembly, in January 2006, Fatah, the main component of the PLO, was trounced,
winning only 45 out of 120 seats, against 75 won by Hamas. As Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent,
at the time, “The Palestinians didn’t vote for Hamas because they wanted an
Islamic republic – which is how Hamas’s bloody victory will be represented –
but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas’s Fatah and the
rotten nature of the Palestinian Authority.”
Mahmoud Abbas, is the Palestinian leader, as Robert Fisk pointed
out, “who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word
‘occupation’”. He is the ‘moderate’ leader trusted by the US and the EU leaders
because he “wears and tie and goes to the White House”.
Immediately after the election, with the connivance
of Fatah, Israel, the USA, Britain and other European capitalist states declared
Hamas to be a ‘terrorist’ organisation and following a serious of swinging
boycotts and sanctions, its control was effectively limited to Gaza. The PA has
actively suppressed Palestinian opponents of Fatah in the West Bank are
subjected to the same restrictions and oppression as they would be if they
attempted open political agitation in Israel itself.
Even before the elections that rejected Fatah
so decisively, it was openly acknowledged that the British government has
played a leading role in the building up of the police apparatus of the
Authority, but the Palestinian Papers now reveal for the first time the
intimate connections between the security machinery of the PA, Israel and
Britain. There are details of a plan drawn up by the British MI6 in 2004 and passed over to the PA security
chief. This plan was largely implemented and included the internment of
oppositionists, the closure of radio stations and a tighter control of imams
and mosques in the PA-controlled areas.
The British plan recommended “the detention of
key middle-ranking officers” of Hamas and other opposition groups and added,
“We could also explore the temporary internment of leading Hamas and PIJ
(Palestinian Islamic Jihad) figures, making sure they were well-treated, with
EU funding.”
This is all the more disgraceful, given the
fact that these policies were conducted under a “Labour” government whose
foreign minister David Milliband, almost became the new leader of the party
after the election. In drawing up a balance-sheet of the failures of the Labour
government, Labour Party members need to ask of David Milliband and his
supporters in the party how these policies were ever carried through in the
first place.
Meetings
Meetings between representative of the Israel
and the PA are even recorded as discussing the assassination of Palestinian
leaders. In 2005 a meeting was
held between Israel’s then defence minister Shaul Mofaz and the PA’s interior
minister, Nasser Youssef. Referring to Hassan al-Madhoun, a leader of the
al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade (which is linked to Fatah), Mofez asked, “We know his
address…why don’t you kill him?” Rather than express outrage at the suggestion,
Youssef claimed the PA didn’t have the capacity to do it. “…our capabilities
are limited…” Months later, the Israelis assassinated al-Madhoun.
According to the papers, the PLO’s chief spokesman
in the talks told a US official in 2009 that “we have had to kill Palestinians
to establish one authority, one gun and the rule of law…we have even killed our
own people to maintain order and the rule of law.” The response of US security
chiefs to the Palestinian security forces is understandable. “The (Palestinian)
intelligence guys are good,” they reported. “The Israelis like them.”
On the West Bank, today, therefore, it is the losers of the election who effectively control the
Palestinian Authority and the so-called negotiations. Of course the
representatives of capitalism wouldn’t have it any other way. According to the
leaked documents, the Obama administration, following the previous policy of
Bush, has made it clear that it “will not allow any change of Palestinian
leadership in the West Bank.”
This is hardly surprising, since the current
PLO leadership of Mahmoud Abbas is closely tied to the leaders of capitalism.
To the ordinary Palestinian workers the Palestinian leadership is characterised
by the curtailment of democratic rights, the outright suppression of political
opponents and above all by corruption.
One of the leaders of the negotiations, Ahmed
Qureia, is a banker and the PA minister of economy, trade and industry. He was
the subject of a recent controversy when it was reported that his family’s
company had imported cement from Egypt…for the construction of the Israeli
so-called ‘security’ wall that cut across so much Palestinian land.
Israeli negotiators have apparently floated the
idea of some Arab villages within the Israeli border being ‘exchanged’ so that
they would become a part of the Palestinian Authority. Even the Palestinian
negotiators understood that this would not be popular…”Absolutely not,” they
replied, “All Arabs in Israel will be against us.”
Questions
The question that needs to be asked is why
would Israeli Arabs be so
violently opposed to being transferred to the government of the Palestinian
Authority? The answer is a crushing indictment of the leadership of Fatah and
the PLO in the West Bank – because despite the limitations on their rights
within Israel itself, the 1.3 million Israeli Arabs still havegreater democratic freedoms than they would
have under the Palestinian Authority.
As bad as the situation is for Palestinians in
the West Bank, it is a hundred times worse in Gaza. The Gaza Strip is like a
huge prison, only 4 miles by 18 miles, restricted on all sides by the military
of Egypt and Israel. The area was bombed to rubble in 2008 and is everyday
subject to fresh military incursions, bomb strikes or assaults by Israeli
soldiers and snipers. The leaks show, incidentally, that the PA leadership were
tipped off before the Israeli attack on Gaza, although even they must have been
taken aback by the ferocity of the relentless bombings and the scale of the
slaughter.
Marxists in the British labour
movement have for decades been critical of the pro-capitalism and pro-western
stance of the PLO/Fatah leadership. While the ultra-left sects of the fringes
of the movement called for the “unconditional support” for the PLO as the “sole
legitimate representation of the Palestinian people” it was the Marxists who
condemned their open collaboration with the most reactionary Arab regimes and
with imperialism.
This slavish support of
reactionary Arab regimes (in return for massive financial support to the PLO
apparatus) cost the Palestinians huge political capital and lost opportunities.
Even today, even given the slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza three years
ago, it is likely that it has been Arab armies rather than the Israelis who have been responsible for more
Palestinian casualties, in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt.
A former PLO representative, Karma Nabulsi,
commented on the content of the leaked documents in The Guardian (Jan 26), referring to “a small group of men who have polluted the
Palestinian public sphere with their private activities are now, finally,
exposed.” The indignation is entirely justified, but the policy of the PLO and
its leading party Fatah, is not new. It has been unchanged for decades and has
led the Palestinian people from one disaster to another. The pursuit of the
so-called ‘peace-talks’ is only one more disastrous policy that follows a long
series of disastrous policies.
Now the PLO leadership is looking at another
tactic – aiming to get ‘official recognition’ for the quasi-state on the West
Bank in the hope of stacking up a large number of even a majority in the
general assembly of the UN. Some countries in Latin America and elsewhere have
given official recognition. But even if the PLO managed to stack up a large
number of supporters in the UN, it would not make the slightest difference
on the ground in Palestine.
For their part, the representatives of
capitalism are happy to keep the PLO locked in talks, even if they go nowhere.
In the piece in The Guardian mentioned
above, Karma Nabulsi, condemned the role of the US and Britain “in creating a
security Bantustan”. It now seems that the British ruling class were so
determined to lock the PLO into negotiations that they even subsidised the
administrative back-up of the Palestinian team. Their “negotiating support
unit” (NSU) has been heavily funded by the British government via the right
wing think-tank, The Adam Smith Institute. It appears that the leaks to Al
Jazeera and The Guardian have happened because Palestinian staff had
become so disillusioned with the craven and unproductive manner of their
‘leaders’ negotiation.
What is also apparent from the leaked documents
is that the offers of concession from the Palestinians evoked virtually no
response from the Israelis. The documents have confirmed what Marxists have
argued for years, that from the point of view of Israeli capitalism, there is
no solution to the question of Palestinian national freedoms. For the
foreseeable future, the only policy of Israel will have is one of crisis
management, alongside a creeping annexation of the West Bank.
Radical
The Israeli ruling class cannot allow a radical
Palestinian state on its doorstep, even one that made big concessions on land,
on Jerusalem and on the settlements. The Palestinian negotiation team have
accepted that the state they would have expected to come of any agreement would
not be a state in the normal meaning of the word. The chief negotiator, Saeb
Erekat, apparently told US special representative Mitchell, “They (the
Palestinians) won’t have an army, air force or navy”. But it is not a limited
state apparatus that Israeli capitalism fears – it is the possibility of the
hopes and aspirations of millions of Palestinians being expressed in the election of a radical government, one that would appeal to Israeli Arabs and to
Israeli workers in general.
The mass of Palestinians will want an
independent state to carry through genuine reforms in their interests. The only
‘state’ Israeli capitalism can accept is one that keep the lid on Palestinian
aspirations, by the suppression of democratic rights if necessary…and that is
precisely what they already have. The USA, Europe and Israel have actively sought to arm and train the
Palestinian Authority’s military arm as a means of suppressing opposition.
On the basis of capitalism in Israel and a
pro-capitalism policy in the West Bank, there is no possibility of a solution
to the problem of Palestinian emancipation. There is no possibility, in other
words, of a national emancipation,
without a social emancipation
in the same movement. Nowhere is this impasse more evident than in relation to
the question of the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.
The descendents of those refugees who fled or
were expelled from Palestine in 1948, in the war that established the state of
Israel, now number more than seven million. Their ‘right of return’ is a demand
that the Palestinian movement has always supported. But nowhere in the official
policy of the PLO raise the question of how the ‘return’ would be managed. Since 1948,
Israel has changed enormously. As long as the right of return is presented to
Jewish workers as a threat to their position, or even their very presence in
Israel, then the mass of Israelis will not accept the right of return. Even Abu
Abbas, the leader of the PLO has stated that “it is illogical to ask Israel to
take 5 million, or indeed 1 million. That would mean the end of Israel.” The leaks show that PLO negotiators put
forward as few as 10,000 returnees.
Many of the more than seven million
Palestinians outside of Israel/Palestine, in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, still
live in temporary camps and depend on UN aid to get by. High unemployment, discrimination
in favour of ‘indigenous’ Arabs and political oppression have characterised
their lives for decades. For the PLO leadership to abandon what has been a
historic demand means condemning these Palestinians continued hopeless and
despair. But the question of their return is a dead-letter as long as it is
posed as an “us or them” issue to Israeli Jews.
For Jewish workers, the whole strategy of the
Israeli ruling class is a trap. The official propaganda that runs on security,
security and more security in fact only offers unending war instability, and, moreover, greater and
greater economic sacrifices to pay for it. Yet the fear of the destruction of
Israel and the perceived threat to their own rights and even their very
existence the key factors that bind Jewish workers to the state.
A socialist programme, adopted by the mass of
the Palestinian people, and winning support among Jewish workers in Israel,
would completely and utterly transform the political horizon. If the
organisation of the productive resources of Israel/Palestine were organised on
a socialist basis, with the banks, industry, the land and agri-business owned
and managed by the mass of the population, it could provide for the first time
for a huge development of productive potential. It could provide enough for the
provision of living standards, not only for the current population of Israel,
the West Bank and Gaza, but also for the incorporation and assimilation of the
descendents of the refugees of 1948.
For decades, the last thing the PLO leadership has
wanted has been a mass movement of the Palestinian people. In that they have been in complete accord
with their political and financial backers in the various Arab leaderships and
in the western states. The first intifada in December 1987 was a genuine mass
movement. It took the Palestinian leadership by surprise and even though it was
inchoate, disorganised and without a clear political programme, it had a huge
effect in the whole Arab world and among Israeli workers. Since that time the
main preoccupation of the PLO ‘leadership’ has been to prevent a repeat.
As Karma Nabulsi wrote, about the PLO
leadership, “It is now on record that they have betrayed, lied and cheated us
of basic rights, while simultaneously claiming they deserved the trust of the
Palestinian people.” The comment to add is that this is not new. It did not
commence with and is not restricted to the ‘peace’ talks.
The whole question of Palestine/Israel is in an enormous impasse. The
peace-talks have always been a dead end and will be seen for what they are.
Whether the struggle for a two-state solution is continued or whether
Palestinians themselves will now raise the question of unitary secular state of
Israel-Palestine remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: the only political
programme that can break the impasse is a socialist one. That would mean a mass
movement of Palestinian workers, linking their linking their national and
democratic aspirations to a programme of social revolution and appealing not
only to other Arab workers in the region, but to Jewish workers in Israel.
