Israeli forces took over six major West Bank towns and cities during the two week assault – Ramallah, Qalqiliya, Jenin, Tulkarem, Bethlehem, Nablus and Hebron – and arrested more than 4,000 Palestinians. Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah was the first to be hit and he remained isolated there surrounded by Israeli troops.
Jenin refugee camp took the full force of the Zionist murder machine. Some of its 15,000 refugees were forced out before bulldozers cleared tank paths through crowded lanes, crushing many in the collapsed buildings. For days helicopter gunships rained down missiles on the camp. Jenin paid the price for being a proud centre of the Palestinian intifada.
The roots of this second intifada lay in Arafat’s disastrous decision to co-sign the Oslo declaration of principles in 1993 with Israel and the subsequent detailed agreements (e.g. Cairo 1994) which set out the range of the PNA’s powers and security commitments made to Israel.
At Oslo Arafat agreed to legitimise Israel’s redeployment of its occupying troops to those parts of the West Bank and Gaza that allowed it to defend Jewish settlements and secure the natural resources and roads that enabled them to function.
Around 59 per cent of the West Bank is officially under Israeli civil and security control. Another 23 per cent was placed under Palestinian civil control, but Israeli security control. Barely 18 per cent was ceded to the territory governed by the Palestinian National Authority.
In return for this and recognition of the PLO Arafat recognised the state of Israel. The fate of settlements and East Jerusalem were left for further negotiations during the “interim period”. The negotiations on the “final settlement” were meant to be concluded in 1996 but were repeatedly delayed as one crisis after another erupted. In July 2000 attempts at a final settlement between PLO and Prime Minister Barak under Clinton’s pressure failed because of Israel’s intransigence on settlements and the status of Jerusalem.
In September 2000 all the contradictions of the post-Oslo peace process exploded. The manifest determination of all wings of Zionism to deny the Palestinians a meaningful independent state and substitute for this a series of disconnected, encircled bantustans finally led to a second intifada.
At the centre of this explosion lay the settlements, an ongoing and growing negation of the Palestinian’s right to self-determination, a fact recognised even by US Senator George Mitchell’s report in May 2001 when he recommended the Israeli government freeze all settlement activity because of their provocative character and oppressive results.
On September 11 last year the intifada was nearly one year old and was locked into a war of attrition. After September 11 George Bush gave Sharon the green light for a more brutal repression of the intifada in the name of the war against terrorism. US intervention was thereafter confined to securing a unilateral ceasefire by the PLO/PNA and to exert pressure on Arafat to arrest and crush the non-Fatah resistance fighters (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP). The resistance movement responded by greater use of suicide bombs inside Israel, more daring raids on Jewish settlements and finally more effective attacks on the occupying Israeli army.
The intifada thus proved stronger than Sharon’s reputation and determination; his one appeal to all of Israel’s Jews – that he could bring them security through use of force – has proving utterly illusory. His poll ratings plummeted from 80 per cent last summer to 45 per cent in March.
He has lost support on all sides. In the last weeks of March the Jewish population inside Israel was polarised like never before. The anti-occupation movement of reservists mushroomed. Since September 2000 almost a thousand soldiers and potential draftees have now told the army officials that they will not take part in the occupation.
An unprecedented 15,000 strong peace demonstration took place in Tel Aviv on 2 March, followed by a small – but again the largest to date – demo (3,000) in Jerusalem on 8 March calling for an end to the current wave of Israeli invasions. On the other side 50,000 demonstrated calling for the overthrow of the PNA and the “removal” of Yasser Arafat from Palestine.
Sharon decided to lean more heavily upon the right-wing forces in his Cabinet. In late February Sharon went far beyond the assassination of “suspected” activists and bombing of targeted PNA or PLO/Hamas buildings that had characterised Israel’s bloody oppression of the Palestinians legitimate resistance since the intifada began in September 2000. He broadened it out to a full frontal attack upon Palestinian civilians in the refugees camps, which form the organising centre and mass base of support for the intifada.
After a week of mass murder and mayhem the US called on Israel to withdraw, but refused to act when Sharon ignored the appeal. Fearful that the mass demonstrations throughout the Middle East would make any anti-Iraq coalition in the region impossible, the White House feigned to intervene. The main result of Powell’s visit to the region was to extract a denunciation of suicide bombings from Arafat.
What does Sharon aim to achieve? Sharon aims to press home his attack by seeking a conference of “moderate Arab leaders” without Arafat to agree to a settlement on Sharon’s terms. These would be effectively pre-Oslo terms with a post-Arafat layer of PLO leaders. On the Palestinian side it wold entail renouncing the refugee’s right to return, concede more “security zones” for the IDF and the presence of settlements into perpetuity. In other words a UN backed “state” without sovereignty over the air, borders or much of the interior of PNA controlled lands.
The murderous repression and the diplomatic initiatives are related and form a unified whole. It is very reminiscent of the first months of 1993. From February through May that year Israel embarked on the bloodiest repression of the first intifada in the wake of successful Hamas operations; more were killed than at any time since 1967.
Thousands of Palestinians were detained, hundreds expelled to Lebanon, the Gaza sealed off. Yet at exactly the same time secret negotiations started in Norway between Israel and Palestinians that led to the Oslo accords in September 1993.
The logic of Operation Defensive Shield suggests the next move is for the destruction of the PNA and the resumption of full control of the West Bank and Gaza. This would involve the defeat and disarming of 30,000 PNA fighters and the permanent garrisoning of the West Bank and Gaza again. Many on the far right in Sharon’s government press for this and even for the expulsion of Palestinians out of the West Bank.
But such a move is opposed by a majority of the Israeli army high command and intelligence service. The army is already wracked by a growing movement of reservists who refuse to be deployed to the killing fields of the West Bank to carry our orders to murder children and unarmed demonstrators. The army knows it would face a civil war in the ranks if it tried to force reservists to permanently re-occupy the whole of the West Bank and take responsibility for its administration.
The Bush administration knows that destroying the PNA and Arafat would spell the end for any attempt to get the Middle East Arab ruing class to sign up to his impending attack upon Iraq. In turn the Arab ruling governments know that an all-out war to crush the PNA would ignite their own peoples.
Just as the Madrid conference in 1991 (the precursor to the Oslo accords) was a “reward” to the local Arab states for their support for the USA in the Gulf war against Iraq, so the support for the Saudi plan and the UN resolution is a bribe aimed at compliance with the coming attack on Iraq.
But what kind of “peace” can be imposed on a defeated PLO and PNA? Under his leadership Yasser Arafat has brought the Palestinian people to the brink of catastrophe. The mix of guerrilla struggle, bourgeois diplomacy, corrupt patronage and brutal repression of opponents has ensured that Arafat’s “leadership” over the Palestinian people has resulted in his complete failure to secure self-determination for them.
Any “peace deal” that does not remove settlements from the Gaza strip and large parts of the West Bank will simply guarantee further explosions. Any attempt by Arafat to legitimise their existence and growth in any “final settlement” which recognises a Palestinian “state” would probably cause civil war among Palestinians.
The Saudi peace plan has the implicit backing of Bush and the Gulf states. Its attraction to Israel lies in ending its economic and diplomatic isolation from the region and holds out the prospect of rich contracts to rescue its flailing economy in the medium to long term.
The PLO have welcomed the UN and Saudi proposals. But they are as much of a trap as Oslo was. If the Saudi plan is committed to full withdrawal of Israel to pre-1967 borders, including the dismantling of settlements (or placing them under Palestinian jurisdiction) then it is doomed since Israel will not countenance it.
If this is “negotiable” in return for the present (or slightly enlarged) set of discontinuous PNA bantustans being labelled “a state” by the “international community” and Israel, and this state cannot allow refugees to return home, then it is a recipe for future intifadas and civil war.
Two states living in harmony and justice is a chimera. What we have now is, de facto, the two states solution that is compatible with the existence of the state of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state. The only just solution must encompass equal citizenship rights for Jews and Arabs and the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their land of origin. This means a state in which Jews and Arabs are equal, not a state that defines itself specifically as “Jewish” or “Arab”.
Otherwise the continued existence of an Israeli-Jewish state, even alongside a Palestinian state, would depend on the maintenance of racist citizenship laws and the exclusion of millions of Palestinians from the territory. Far from providing the basis for a lasting peace, this could only condemn the region to further cycles of repression and war.
The destruction of the Zionist character of the present state of Israel is the only basis upon which a future just settlement to the present conflict can be built. Without it there can be no right of Palestinian’s to return, without it there can be no end to the cancer of settlements within the body of Palestine. The opposite is also true: relinquishing the demand for the removal of settlements, (and hence the withdrawal of Israeli troops) and for the right of Palestinians to return can only confirm the exclusionist, anti-democratic character of Israel.
Only a socialist secular republic of the whole of Palestine – which has rights for all and privileges for none, based on the unity of the Jewish and Arab working class and small farmers, the nationalisation of land and the expropriation of big business and finance – can bring peace and justice to Palestine. Without justice there can be no peace.