Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, has declared a state of emergency and “dismissed” the three month old “unity government” of prime minister Ismail Haniya of Hamas. His action comes after seven days in which some 110 people died in fighting in Gaza between the Hamas militia and forces loyal to the President. When the Preventative Security building and the intelligence service headquarters in Gaza City finally fell to Hamas virtually the entire Gaza Strip was in its control.
So in essence the Palestinian territories have been divided with Hamas in control in Gaza and Fatah still holding the West Bank. Hamas has a powerful militia, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, with around 15,000 members. In the West Bank Mahmoud Abbas has a much greater force including his 5,000 Presidential Guards, which the USA has given $43m to help train and arm, plus the 30,000 National Security Forces and a similar number of police and Preventive Security personnel. In addition the semi-independent Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, several thousand strong, works with the security services.
Fatah forces responded to defeat in Gaza by purging Hamas forces in the West Bank. Captured Fatah fighters have been summarily shot in Gaza. Clearly this bloody conflict is a cause of deep despair for many Palestinians and their supporters in the region and worldwide. Clearly too it is a cause for rejoicing in the Zionist and imperialist camp. Their policy of refusing to recognise a Hamas government despite its internationally validated election victory and carrying out a cruel collective punishment on the entire Palestinian people by cutting off all aid, has finally borne fruit.
It has to be said that the reason for the conflict is also the disastrously wrong policy of both wings of the Palestinian leadership. In the case of Fatah this extends to a treacherous collusion with imperialism and Zionism and their Arab accomplices, the Saudi, Jordanian and Egyptian regimes. But the political Islamist policies of Hamas make it impossible, despite its continued armed resistance to Israel, for it to win over a large part of the Palestinian popular masses – especially the secular, Christian and non-‘fundamentalist’ Muslim elements.
This is despite their electoral victory last year, which was a vote for rejection of the peace deal on offer from Israel and the USA, accepted by Abbas and Fatah, not a vote for a Hamas “Islamic state”. And indeed there is no reason why the majority of Palestinians should have to endure clerical totalitarianism as the price of continued resistance to Israel.
There is a terrible crisis of leadership in the Palestinian national movement. Bourgeois nationalism (Fatah) has shown itself to be a leadership of capitulation. But Hamas, whilst still resisting arms in hand, has shown it cannot unite the Palestinian people behind this resistance. There can be no doubt that the Hamas regime in Gaza and the Strip’s entire population will become the target of even worse Imperialist and Zionist blockade and repression. Whatever our differences with Hamas, it is the duty of the pro-Palestine movement worldwide to call for an end to this blockade and these attacks.
The breakdown of the Palestinian unity government and the turn towards open warfare between Hamas and Fatah is the natural result of the failed “two-state solution” in the only form Israel and its American sponsor will allow – isolated “Bantustans”, hemmed in by the Apartheid Wall. The withdrawal from the Gaza strip by Israel in 2005, ostensibly to allow the Palestinians more room for self-government, in fact has allowed the Israelis to use it as a lever to crack open the Palestinian resistance and turn it in on itself.
Hamas is the largest political party in the Gaza strip, finding a massive base of support amongst the inhabitants of the overcrowded slums and refugee camps, but the security apparatus was controlled by Fatah, the formerly dominant faction of the Palestinian resistance, despised for its economic and political corruption and its open role as agents of the US and Israel.
The seizure of complete control in the Gaza Strip is seen by Hamas as simply exercising the governmental power it is entitled to as a result of the Palestinian elections of January 2006. But in fact Hamas entered a carefully prepared trap when it agreed to govern within the frame work of a ‘state’ under the control of imperialism, Zionism and its Palestinian agents, Fatah resolutely refused to hand the Hamas-led government any control over the official security apparatus. In Gaza, Fatah charged Mohammed Dahlan, who acted as a warlord with his own personal army of ‘security personnel,’ with responsibility for keeping the population in line, and ensuring that the “peace process” of capitulation to Israel is carried out.
Israel is thus moving closer and closer to its ultimate goal of isolating the militants in Gaza and building a huge wall around three disconnected blocks of the West Bank, annexing all the good land and leaving the Palestinians with these ”Bantustans”. This ‘state’ will be an overcrowded, non-contiguous series of cantons, most with poor quality land, robbed of most of its water resources, criss-crossed by Israeli military roads and dotted with militarised settlements. It will be susceptible to constant military incursions by the Israeli Defence Force. It will be economically unviable and reliant on international aid to scratch out an existence.
In short this is a long term genocidal attempt to destroy the Palestinian people as a national community with any independent political expression (a state). Why do the Zionists continue with this racist settler policy? Quite simply because for all the US-sponsored and funded settlement, the Jewish population scarcely remains a majority in Palestine as a whole. The Palestinians still make up nearly half the population in the territory of Mandate Palestine. The Jewish population of Israel is 5,313,000 and the Palestinians some 5,218.000, (3.9 million on the West Bank and Gaza and 1.318 million within pre-1967 Israel). Then there are the 4,520,000 Palestinian refugees in adjacent Arab states – Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The Zionist state can only survive by ensuring not only the displacement of these people but the continued, unceasing expropriation of their territory.
Immediately after Hamas won the January 2006 elections, it offered to form a broad coalition government with Fatah, under Abbas’ Presidency. But the USA violently objected, Israel proclaimed any government with Hamas in it to be a terrorist regime. Israel went on to kidnap 64 Palestinian members of parliament including 8 cabinet ministers and 22 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. The USA also supported Israel in blocking Palestinian tax revenues and itself cut all aid. The European Union, the principal donor to the Palestinians, cut off its assistance – $600 million dollars a year. Israel blocked the payment of more than 50 million dollars a year in customs duties it collects on behalf of the Palestinian occupied territories and is supposed to deliver to the Palestinian government. The West knows full well that by cutting the economic aid to the Palestinian government they were leaving 140,000 employees without a salary to feed their families. 23 per cent of the population are dependent on these salaries. The United Nations reported that 65 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza and 48 per cent of those the West Bank were already living below the poverty level. Yet a spokesman of the Israeli armed forces described the blockade as “putting the Palestinians on a diet”.
Last but not least Abbas was encouraged to wage a war in Gaza against Hamas. After all this, to describe Hamas takeover as a coup d’état is a cynical joke. It is the US, Israel and their stooge Abbas, have been waging a prolonged a coup d’état against the democratic choice of the Palestinian people.
The complicity in supporting the carve-up of Palestine falls ultimately on the heads of the Fatah leaders. From the Oslo Accords onwards they accepted Israel’s “right to exist’, i.e. the legitimacy of its 1948 seizure of Palestinian lands and the ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants. They tacitly abandoned the six million Palestinians living as refugees with no way of returning to their homeland. Their sell out of the Intifada and corrupt misrule of the Palestinian territories eventually turned a majority of the Palestinian electorate against them and towards the radical Islamist group Hamas. The tension between the old order of Fatah with its hands firmly on the security forces, and the newly elected government of Hamas, presented an opportunity for the Zionists and the American and European Imperialists to intervene to compromise Fatah even more and hopefully crush Hamas.
Certainly the escalation of the fighting plays straight into the hands of the US imperialists and their ally Israel, but who is principally to blame? The US has been training an elite group of Fatah security called Force 17 in ‘counter terrorism’ and urban warfare, primarily aimed at ‘internal security’. Their aim has been to foment a civil war in the Gaza strip and West Bank, backing the moderate Fatah wing, hoping it can crush Hamas as the political and military leaders of the Palestinian resistance. The Fatah leadership, after years in power over the Palestinian people, can do nothing without it and will sell themselves to the highest bidder to get it back again. Who is the highest bidder? The answer is obvious.
The contempt with which the Israelis, backed up by USA and the European Union, treats the fragile Palestinian political structures, is proof that no two state solution can work. Alongside a powerful nuclear-armed Israel, in receipt of over $3 billion a year from the US government plus huge donations from private sources, no disarmed and fragmented Palestinian state could survive as more than an outdoor concentration camp.
The minute the Palestinians elected a government (dominated by Hamas) in January 2006 that the Israelis disapproved of, all pretence at supporting democracy went out the window. Hamas’ triumph led to Israel denouncing it as a terrorist government. This of course was not new. They characterised Yasser Arafat ‘s regime as such, to the very end, despite his painful and repeated capitulations. Indeed it was their excuse for imprisoning him in his “presidential compound”, bombarding all but his office to rubble, effectively hounding him to his grave.
All the previous facts have not taken place in a vacuum; they have been preceded by almost six years of intensification of the conflict. About 4000 Palestinians have been murdered in attacks by the Israeli army of occupation (and the illegal settlers). Israel has also taken approximately 10,000 prisoners, has destroyed approximately 8,000 houses, has illegally confiscated 250,000 dunams (a dunam is equivalent to thousand square meters) of Palestinian land and has uprooted more than one million citrus and olive trees.
The collapse of the government and the slide into civil war will either give Israel the opportunity to re-occupy Gaza, or the “international community” (US and EU and their Arab League stooges, the excuse they need to send in “peace keepers”. Already Italy, which sent a large force to Lebanon under the Prodi government, has said they are favourable to playing a similar role in Gaza. A divided Palestinian movement presiding over rapidly shrinking territories and occupied not by the Israeli Defence Force but by European and/or Arab League troops would set the Intifada and the struggle for freedom back for decades. Nevertheless it is unlikely that Israel would allow in forces that might have difficulty in carrying out sufficiently bloody a repression.
The political tensions within Israel itself are growing, in the aftermath of the debacle in Lebanon the right wing is openly pushing for bloodshed in Gaza. Parties like Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu have called for an Israeli invasion of the Gaza strip to smash Hamas. The current struggle in Palestine must be seen in the context of the rest of the Middle East. The increased fighting in Lebanon between the Lebanese army and sections of the Palestinian refugee militias and the continued sectarian bloodletting in Iraq point – whoever the direct agents – points to the classical colonialist divide and rule strategy of the imperialists and their local agents.
Palestinians must look beyond the narrow politics of the bourgeois nationalists or the political Islamists. Neither has been able to organise a mass resistance across the region against Israel and a struggle for a just solution to the land question and refugee problem. A working class party must be built, one that can unite workers and the poor of all nationalists, languages and religious communities, right across the region in a revolutionary struggle against Israel. To do this starts from the position that no nationality, language or religious group will find itself either privileged or oppressed. This is the essence of working class internationalism. It is possible because although the working class supports every oppressed people’s struggle for liberation, it has no fatherland and will have none until it takes power itself.
The Israeli state must be smashed and replaced with a workers’ state, the Arab workers can lead this struggle, but in doing so they must seek at all times to promote and support class struggle within Israel itself, to turn the poor, the unemployed, the low paid Israeli workers against their own capitalists. Class struggle can create a schism in the Zionist project, but in the end only the mass action of the Arab working class can hope to defeat it.
Last but not least the international movement of solidarity must oppose all attempts to blockade or invade Gaza, to send an “international peacekeeping force” and must expose the plots and plans of imperialism and its Zionist agents.