Those who thought that the dismantling of the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005 by Sharon was a sign that the Israelis were willing to make sacrifices on behalf of the Peace Process must be scratching their heads by now. The supposed peace process which in reality was merely an attempt to maintain the status quo of a powerful Israeli state and a weak Palestinian ‘authority’ has solved nothing for the ordinary Palestinians still living in misery and poverty in the region.
The capture of an Israeli soldier by the community and political party organised Popular Resistance Committees has led to the Israeli government invading the southern tip of the Gaza strip, bombing the only power station that provides essential electricity to Gaza city. The closing of the borders and the continued reliance of businesses on generators have led to severe shortages of fuel. The sewage pumping stations have fallen silent and most Gaza residents have been left without power.
The Israelis have carried out indiscriminate artillery fire that has already killed many Palestinian civilians. As Dr El-Farra, a community activist in Gaza said on the US radio show Democracy Now! “There’s no balance of power between the Israeli army and the militia or the resistance movement here in Gaza. Israeli knows that very well. So what’s happening in Gaza now is collective punishment. I don’t understand, why to destroy the infrastructure? Why to deprive the population from the electricity? It is collective punishment. This will not bring the soldier back.”
The Palestinians demands were not impossible to meet; even as far as Israel was concerned. The groups that abducted him initially demanded the release of all women and child prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel refused, then abducted and incarcerated many Hamas MP’s and government ministers in retaliation. The Palestinians demanded the release of 1,000 political prisoners, and in reply the Israelis have prepared an invasion. A rocket attack on the Israeli city of Ashkelon, which injured no one, led to the Israelis launching a ‘wider military offensive’ as this paper went to press. We can expect to see Palestinian casualties
The overall aim of the Israeli government is to undermine the democratically elected militant Islamist Hamas government in Palestine. The Israelis are using the abduction of one IDF soldier as the excuse they need to launch an invasion of Palestine in order to destroy the ability of Hamas and other groups launch rocket attacks into south Israel. As Israeli President Olmert explained to Haaretz newspaper, they wanted “…to create a new equation – freeing the abducted soldier in return for lessening the pressure on the Palestinians”.
The Palestinians are caught between a rock and a hard place. Whatever they do the Israelis can respond with increasing force and violence against the population. They can do this because the worldwide consensus amongst the ruling powers is that Israel has to be able to ‘defend itself’. The oppression of the Palestinians is, as far as the Imperialists in Washington and Brussels is concerned, an unfortunate by-product of this political reality. Tony White, the White House spokesperson said “Israel has the right to defend itself and the lives of its citizens.”
What future?
The existence of Israel is the fact on the ground that will always deny the Palestinians any kind of viable statehood. Israeli has the most powerful army in the Middle East, backed to the hilt by the world’s only super power, the USA. Its Zionist ideology dreams of creating a greater Israel, one that can only come about by the slow ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the creation of an Apartheid wall in the West Bank, designed to annex most of the land to Israel.
Workers Power believes that organisations like the PLO and Hamas cannot wage a consistent struggle for the liberation of Palestine. They are nationalists that are based on the middle classes; they have no working class solution to the situation, instead relying on the armed guerilla wing to act as leverage in bourgeois negotiations. It is a strategy that Sin Fein pursued in Ireland and the ANC carried out in South Africa. It leads to the guerilla movement’s political wing in government caught between its supposed radical past and it new role as a conciliator with the imperialists. Hamas may have got into power on a hard-line anti-Israel position and an anti-corruption ticket, but soon it will be forced to back down on its more radical positions and will inevitably be embroiled in corruption scandals of its own. Where can the Palestinians turn next?
A socialist solution
If the bourgeois nationalism of Fatah and the PLO and the Islamic fundamentalism of Hamas have led to failure then what is the way out? Socailists believe that only the mass activity of the working class and popular masses can bring about real social change. The negotiations with the UN and other power brokers are a diversion, because these institutions in the final analysis support Israel.
Only the working class of the region alongside the oppressed Palestinians can fight an open revolutionary struggle that really challenges Israel’s power, breaking it up from within and destroying the Zionist state. As long as Israel continues to exist and be supported by the imperialist powers then all of the democracy and ‘reforms’ in Palestine have a Damocles sword hanging over them – the continued threat of Israel’s military might that could invade at any time.
A two-state solution, which is what effectively exists now, can never provide the peace and stability that the Palestinians want. Over 6 million Palestinian refugees, some of them now fourth generation, live in camps dotted around the middle east, in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and as part of a Diaspora community of Palestinians all over the world.
They are the legacy of the creation of Israel in 1947, which resulted in ethnic cleansing and a mass exodus of Palestinians from the land that the UN unilaterally gave to the Israelis. Any strategy for peace that does not take into account the unresolved refugee issue will always fail, as the refugee camps give birth to new generations of fighters, willing to sacrifice their life for a homeland they have never known.
The League for the Fifth International demands;
• The immediate release of all Palestinian political prisoners being held by the Israeli government
• The unconditional withdrawal of all Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip and West Bank
• A mass movement that can bring down the apartheid wall in the West Bank
• The right of return of all Palestinian refugees
• For a revolutionary party which can fight for a socialist one-state solution.