The following text is a translation of the forum delivered in Paris, France by our comrades of Lutte Ouvrière on 25 November 2023
It’s impossible to know how many have fallen victim to this war so far: more than 14,000 dead [publisher’s note: by 20 December 2023, almost 20,000] according to the Palestinian Health Minister and tens of thousands of wounded with nowhere to be treated. For weeks now, the two million inhabitants of Gaza have been totally under siege, deprived of food, medication and fuel to power generators. Without electricity, hospitals cannot function, telephone and internet connections are down. Gaza is completely cut off from the rest of the world and starvation threatens. The fear of epidemics is the only reason the Israeli government has allowed a slow trickle of fuel trucks to enter Gaza.
For 75 years, Israeli governments have pursued the same policy of terror against the Palestinians, a policy that goes with land dispossession and denial of basic rights. The present scenes of war and mass exodus, with thousands of Palestinians fleeing the bombs, are reminders of many other such scenes in the past. The State of Israel was founded on that policy. And, since its army cannot break the Palestinian revolt, it has to carry out regular military operations and bloodshed, as it is currently doing in Gaza. Hamas has countered this State terror with a policy that follows the same logic as that of the Israeli leaders, only with a lot fewer resources. On October 7, by indiscriminately killing men, women and children, Hamas commandos attacked a population that they considered collectively responsible for their government’s decisions. The Hamas leaders not only showed contempt for the lives of Israeli civilians, but also for the lives of their own people because they knew perfectly well that they were exposing them to retaliation from the Israeli army.
The Israeli state can achieve its mass killings in Gaza because it benefi ts from the complicity of the leaders of the major Western powers, notably the United States. Neither Biden nor Macron has spoken of barbarity or terrorism. Those terms are reserved for Hamas. To convey the image of leaders seeking to appease , they are content to call on Israel to show more moderation, but they do nothing to force it to do so.
If the leaders of the United States have never really acted to put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict, it is because they actually have an interest in its permanence. The tense situation makes Israel their loyal agent, the policeman they need in this region to defend their interests, so interested are they, in its oil wealth and strategic position.
These continual wars, drowning the region in blood, are not the result of some ancestral hatred between Jews and Arabs. They are the product of a long history of manoeuvres by imperialist powers, which have deliberately set peoples against one another and created the conditions for a permanent state of war, to ensure their domination over the Middle East. This began at the beginning of the 20th century, at the time of the First World War, and continues today.
How imperialist powers divided up the Middle East
Before 1914, the land now occupied by Palestinians and Israelis was part of the vast Ottoman Empire which, at the height of its power, stretched from the Arab peninsula to the Balkans and encompassed most of the Middle East. The absence of internal borders encouraged much mixing of populations. For centuries, Jews, (mainly Muslim) Arabs, a large Christian minority, Druze and many other peoples and faiths lived side-by-side in relative peace.
At the start of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire had begun to decline both economically and politically. When the First World War broke out in 1914, and it sided with Germany side, British and French leaders saw this as an opportunity to chop the old empire up and share out its remains. In March 1916, this led to the signing of the Sykes-Picot agreement, named after its British and French negotiators. The zone comprising present-day Lebanon and Syria were to belong to France, and the British would be accorded control over present-day Iraq and Jordan. As for Palestine, uncertain about what choice to make, they decided it would be placed under international control.
The agreement was supposed to remain secret but, because it was signed in Moscow under the Tsar’s patronage – he had hoped to pick up a few crumbs – Russian diplomats had a copy and it was made public by the Bolsheviks when they came to power in October 1917. Publishing the agreement was a revolutionary act. By not adhering to the methods of diplomatic secrecy, they revealed the true war aims of the imperialist powers and the tactics they used to deceive workers and oppressed nationalities alike.
During this period, there was a great deal of imperialist manoeuvring around the world, particularly in this part of it. At the very moment when British leaders were making an agreement with French diplomats on how they would divide up the Ottoman Empire, they promised the region to the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein, a representative of the powerful Arab Hashemite family. Claiming to want to “liberate the Arabs from the Turkish yoke”, the British leaders committed to creating a large kingdom that would encompass the majority of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces. They helped Hussein to build an army, supplied him with weapons and one of those British leaders, going by the name of Lawrence of Arabia, was prepared to to risk his own life for this, by participating in camel-back fi ghting.
Concurrently however, they also promised Palestine to the small Zionist movement present in Europe at the time, but which had little importance in the region. However, British diplomats knew exactly what they were doing.
The Zionist movement
Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist of Jewish origin, was the founder of Zionism. He was well-integrated into Austrian society and didn’t particularly claim to be Jewish until he had to cover the Dreyfus affair in 1896. The mass anti-Semitic demonstrations he saw at the time plus the fact that it was happening in France – supposedly one of the most advanced, enlightened countries in Europe – led him to think that the only way for Jews to escape from antisemitism would be for them to have their own state, “a Jewish state”. This was the title of a political work he then wrote, which became the programme of the World Zionist Organization, founded in 1897.
This nationalist movement had to solve a problem that stemmed from the fact that Jews were scattered across the world: so where should a Jewish state be built? Palestine was the land which, according to the Bible, had been promised by “God” to the Jews. It was mentioned early on in the movement.
But because the majority of Zionists were not particularly religious, much like Herzl himself, other countries such as Argentina and Uganda were considered. A congress fi nally settled the question in 1903 by choosing Palestine. Zionists could thus at least claim biblical tradition.
At a time when the world was divided among a few great colonial powers, Herzl tried to gain the support of one of them. He spent the end of his life meeting ministers and heads of state, extolling the way in which the Zionist movement could serve their interests. The future Jewish state in Palestine could, he wrote, be “part of Europe’s bulwark against Asia, an outpost of civilization opposing barbarism”.
From the very beginning, Zionism appeared as a colonial project. All the more so because Palestine was not “a land without a people for a people without a land” as the Zionists claimed. It had long been inhabited by Arab populations. To solve this problem, Herzl, with his typical colonialist outlook, envisaged the possibility of “transferring” populations, i. e. ethnic cleansing in today’s language. The Zionist organisation quickly acquired the means to begin to take over the land. It set up a Jewish National Fund to collect donations for the purchase of land in Palestine for Jewish settlement. These plots were bought from absentee landlords living in cities far from the deprived countryside, and Arab peasants were squeezed out without any say in the matter. This kind of colonisation was bound to arouse the hostility of the local population, who soon realized that the Zionist movement posed a threat.
In 1914, the 80,000 Jews present in Palestine were a very small minority out of a total of 750,000 mostly Palestinian Arab people living there. Until the First World War, British leaders had shown no particular sympathy for Zionism, nor had they done anything to encourage it. Their attitude changed when, during the confl ict, they realized that they could make use of the movement.
On November 2, 1917, the Secretary of State for the Foreign Offi ce, Lord Balfour, addressed a letter to a representative of the Zionist movement, Lord Rothschild, in which he conveyed a “declaration of sympathy with the Jewish Zionist aspirations” and stated: “Her Majesty’s Government is favourable to the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
With this “Balfour Declaration”, as it came to be known, British diplomats were promising Palestine a second time over, knowing full well that they were stirring up confl ict between Jews and Arabs. But they intended to play on these opposing interests, which they themselves were helping to create, to better impose their control over the region. They were already past masters at this, having put the method into practice in many of their colonies.
The post-war division of the Middle East
At the end of the war, with the dismantling of the defeated Ottoman Empire on the agenda, Arab leaders were hopeful that the promises made to themwould be kept. The Allies intended otherwise. In the aftermath of a war during which the right of peoples to self-determination had been discussed, it was no longer possible to use an overtly colonial vocabulary. The League of Nations, a forerunner of the UN created after the First World War, therefore decided that France and the United Kingdom would be granted “mandates” over the region, a hypocritical formula designed to present the establishment of a protectorate regime as benevolent aid. Syria would be separated from Lebanon, and both would be placed under French trusteeship, while Iraq and Palestine were placed under British mandate, a clause providing specifi cally for the application of the Balfour Declaration.
Imposing this on the Arab leaders, who felt cheated, was another matter. In July 1920, French troops bombed and occupied Damascus. Riots broke out in Palestine and Iraq. By way of consolation, and to calm things down a little, the British rulers installed Faisal, one of the sons of Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, on the throne of an Iraqi kingdom, and placed his brother Abdallah at the head of Transjordan (which today corresponds to Jordan).
The imperialist powers rejected the creation of a great Arab kingdom (as promised) since they would have found it more diffi cult to control. They imposed instead, a division of the Middle East and drew borders according to their diplomatic and military calculations and with complete disregard for the aspirations of the peoples. Those borders are still those of today’s states.
Palestine under British mandate
Palestine thus came under British Mandate. A predominantly British administration was set up, headed by a Governor General. It accepted that the Jews of Palestine should set up their own institutions, with an executive council appointed by an assembly that was elected by all those who had registered as Jews. In 1929, a Jewish Agency, set up by the World Zionist Organization, played the role of de facto government for the Palestinian Jewish population.
The Arab populations never obtained equivalent institutions. This was how the British administration deliberately exacerbated opposition between Jews and Arabs so that it could act as indispensable arbiter.
It was under these conditions that a Jewish society began to emerge, completely cut off from the Arab society. Coming mainly from Eastern Europe, especially the Russian Empire, where there was a strong labour movement, activists professing to be socialists were its main architects.
But their socialism applied only to Jews, totally excluding the Arab populations. The way in which the kibbutz, a collective form of farming, was developed is a case in point. Within the kibbutz, an egalitarian spirit was supposed to reign, embodying a socialist ideal. There were no wages, everything was shared. But the real aim was to conquer the country.
Kibbutzim were set up on land purchased from absentee landlords, driving out the Arab peasants who lived there.
In 1920, these “socialist Zionist” organisations created a trade union, the Histadrut (General Confederation of Jewish Workers in Eretz Israel). The Histadrut grew rapidly: by 1923, it organised almost half of Palestine’s Jewish wage-earners, rising to 70% of them by 1927. But the Histadrut was more than just a trade union. In fact, its real aim was to organise an exclusively Jewish economy, capable of doing without the Arab population, and or even ousting them. The Histadrut organised a health insurance fund, canteens, labour exchanges, a buying and selling cooperative, a construction company and even a bank. But all these organisations were reserved exclusively for
Jews. They had to learn Hebrew, the language of the Bible that had fallen into disuse and that the Zionists wanted to impose as the language of the new Jewish nation that these so-called socialists wanted to create.
The Histadrut organised pickets to oppose the employment of Arab workers in companies run by Jews who didn’t understand the need to develop “Jewish labour”, the main watchword of the movement. In addition to the pickets, it also organized a militia, the Haganah (“defense” in Hebrew). More than a trade union, the Histadrut was in fact the embryo of a state apparatus. Arabs had no place in this society.
In 1930, the vast majority of “socialist Zionist” movements united to form the Labour Party, Mapai, headed by David Ben-Gurion, who had also been the leader of the Histadrut since its foundation. Mapai quickly gained control of Jewish institutions in Palestine and in 1935 Ben-Gurion became chairman of the Jewish Agency.
Among the currents that emerged from the socialist movement, the only organisation to break with Zionism and attempt to reach out to the Arab masses was the Palestinian Communist Party. Founded in 1920, it was the fi rst communist party in the Middle East. It remained weak and never exceeded a thousand members. Its members had to operate in a diffi cult context, as a gulf of hatred began to open up between Jews and Arabs. The majority of its activists were Jewish, and faced hostility from Zionists in their own communities. They were also subjected to particularly harsh repression by the British authorities, were often arrested and sometimes arbitrarily expelled from Palestine.
The policy of the Communist Party sought to unite Jewish and Arab workers in a single organisation and in a common struggle against British colonialism and the Arab feudal classes. Was such a policy possible? Certainly, the militants who tried to implement it did not lack courage. But the policy that the Stalinist Communist International forced them to follow.
The Great Arab Revolt of 1936
From 1936 onwards, rising tensions led to very real popular uprisings by the Arab masses. The Great Arab Revolt, as it came to be known, began in April 1936 with clashes between Jews and Arabs. A strike movement by Arab workers began to spread, spurred on by local committees. Their leaders demanded an end to Jewish immigration, as well as the election of a representative assembly.
Challenging the British occupation, the movement had an anti-colonial character, but it also expressed the social revolt of the Arab working classes against misery, against living conditions that had worsened with the economic crisis since the early 1930s. In the countryside, peasants took up arms and formed militias to attack Jewish settlements, but also large Arab landowners. These landowners put pressure on them and grabbed a large part of every harvest through the rents they charged to their sharecroppers, or through the debts the peasants contracted and were unable to repay.
The privileged classes had many reasons to feel threatened by this explosive popular revolt. From the very start of the movement, an Arab High Committee was formed to try and take over the leadership. It brought together all the Palestinian nationalist parties, each linked to a different family of notables. At its head was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a title that made him the highest religious authority. He himself came from one of the most powerful families of notables, the Husseinis. By calling for a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, the High Committee’s aim was to limit mobilisation to the fi ght against the Jewish presence. This would be less of a social threat to the privileged Arab classes. It also played a moderating role by calling in October for an end to the general strike. But the revolt continued, taking on an insurrectional form.
To overcome the Arab revolt, Mandate authorities had to deploy a contingent of 30,000 soldiers in Palestine. They waged a war of terror. More than 20,000 homes of insurgent families were blown up. Part of the old Arab town of Jaffa was destroyed and villages were razed to the ground. Planes were used to bomb insurgent-held areas. Nearly 50,000 Palestinians were arrested and rounded up in fourteen detention camps, and many, including members of the Arab High Committee, were deported to British colonial possessions, particularly the Seychelles. The number of Palestinians killed, wounded or exiled totalled 10% of the population.
While Palestinian leaders were keen to present the Arab revolt as a struggle against the Jews, Zionist organizations adopted the same nationalist logic and helped the British repress the Arab population. The Haganah received weapons. Jewish militiamen were trained in combat techniques by the British army, and even integrated into units specially formed to carry out commando operations. This collaboration was so extensive that, by 1939, the Mandatory Police numbered almost 21,000 Jews, i. e. 5% of the Jewish population present in Palestine.
Could this period of uprising have seen Jews and Arabs converge in a common struggle against the British colonial presence? In any case, the from the late 1920s onwards was far removed from the internationalism that would have been needed to overcome the obstacles they faced. The Communist Party was forced to adopt an opportunist course, fi rst towards Arab nationalism, then towards Zionism, from the moment the USSR sought an alliance with Britain. These policies varied according to the diplomatic interests of the leaders of the Stalinist bureaucracy. They led to the departure of many militants and, a number of times, to splits between the Arab and Jewish sectors of the party. The policies pursued by the Zionist organisations and the leaders of the Arab revolt did not permit such a thing. This period was an important stage in the evolution that led the two peoples into confronting each other, a trap from which they were never to escape.
The Second World War and its consequences
British leaders showed no gratitude to the Zionists for their help against the Arab uprising. As the Second World War approached, they sought to pacify the Arab nationalists to avoid them giving their support to Germany.
Accordingly, in 1939, the British authorities published a new White Paper in which, for the fi rst time, they declared their intention to “create the conditions which will enable the independent Palestine state to be established within a period of ten years”. In the same paper, they also affi rmed their intention to severely limit Jewish immigration and land purchases by Zionists. With the outbreak of war, the measures restricting immigration, far from being eased, were further tightened. In September 1939, the Mandate authorities decided to ban refugees from “enemy countries” or “enemy occupied countries” from entering Palestine. This was aimed at German and Polish Jews, precisely those most in need of refuge! This was remarkably cynical, but the British were not the only ones to adopt such an attitude. At the same time, all western countries, including the USA, adopted measures to restrict immigration, affecting both Jews and all opponents of Nazism desperately seeking asylum.
When we speak of capitalism’s responsibility in the tragedies of today, we must remember that it was the crisis of this system that plunged humanity into the horror of the Second World War and led to the barbarity of the extermination camps where six million Jews died. We also need to remember the attitude of the Allies in the aftermath of World War Two. More than 100,000 survivors of the extermination camps refused to return to the countries where they had lived before the war, due to the particularly virulent antisemitism. Named “displaced persons” by the Allies, they found themselves in refugee camps, waiting for a country willing to accept them. But obtaining an entry visa wasn’t much easier than it had been before the war. Between 1945 and 1948, the United States allowed only 25,000 European Jews to enter its territory. In this context, it’s easy to understand why, having survived the extermination camps, tens of thousands of Jews now hoped to fi nd in Palestine a place to rebuild their lives.
For decades, Zionism had remained an ultra-minority movement among European Jews who, in general, had no intention of settling in an impoverished region where they were not welcome. It took the barbarity of Nazi ersecution and extermination camps for tens of thousands of Jews to turn, in desperation, to Zionist organizations. These organizations promised them that the only way to avoid reliving such horrors was to create a Jewish state that would protect them.
It was a legitimate aspiration. But there was no need for it to be done against the Arab populations, by robbing them of their land and their right to live in Palestine, a right which was even more legitimate because of their long-standing presence. In fact, there was room in the Palestinian territories for the two peoples to live in harmony, provided this was done with respect for each other’s rights. This could, again, have been the occasion for a joint struggle against British colonialism, which had just shown that it cared as little about the fate of the Jews as it did about the fate of the Arabs. But the Zionist organisations’ policy was a continuation of the policy they had pursued during the Mandate years and at the time of the Arab revolt in the 1930s. Thanks to the thousands of immigrants arriving from Europe, the Zionist movements found the troops they needed to impose the creation of a Jewish state against British imperialism, but also against the Arab populations.
In the aftermath of the war, British leaders still intended to stay in Palestine. They increased their military presence to 100,000 soldiers and tried to prevent the arrival of Jews. The Zionists responded by setting up clandestine networks to transport Jews from Europe to Palestine. Those arrested were placed in camps on the island of Cyprus before being sent back to Europe.
Zionist organisations took military action against the British army – what we would today call terrorist action – without which the state of Israel would not have been created. The Haganah was a veritable army, which the British had helped to train militarily. An extreme right-wing organisation, the Irgun, kidnapped British soldiers, killed them and rigged their corpses with explosives, in order to claim even more victims. It even went so far as to blow up the King David Hotel, the headquarters of the British forces. The head of its military wing was Menachem Begin, later to become Prime Minister of Israel. The leaders of the Zionist organizations also relied on their own diplomatic action, seeking in particular, the support of the United States. Faced with this pressure and unable to put an end to the unrest in Palestine, the British government resigned itself to withdrawing its troops, leaving the region’s fate in the hands of the UN.
The birth of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians
On November 29, 1947, the UN voted on a partition plan for Palestine, providing for the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state, the fi rst outline of a two-state solution. The Jews, who represented only a third of the population and occupied just over 10% of Palestinian territory, were granted control over 55% of Palestine. The plan was voted for not only by the United States, but also by the Soviet Union, the two superpowers sharing the same desire to reduce British infl uence in the Middle East.
The Arab states opposed any idea of partition and rejected the plan, which greatly benefi ted the Jewish populations. The leaders of the Jewish Agency, on the other hand, declared their acceptance of the UN plan. But, in reality, they had no intention of accepting the proposed borders and planned to occupy as much territory as possible. They also aimed to drive out as many Arabs as possible, so that Jews would form the majority in the future Jewish state. To carry out this ethnic cleansing, the Daleth plan was carefully drawn up. Its implementation began in December 1947, before the British had even left. In April 1948, Zionist militias began carrying out full-scale military campaigns, systematically blowing up villages along certain routes, such as between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Two hundred Arab villages were thus emptied of their population. Irgun militiamen massacred 254 inhabitants of the village of Deir Yasin, killing men, women and children. Their aim was to terrorize the Palestinian Arabs into fl eeing as soon as the Haganah militiamen arrived. Cities such as Haifa, Tiberias, Jaffa and Acre lost over 90% of their Arab inhabitants.
On May 14, 1948, a few hours before the departure of the British troops, and ignoring the transition period provided for in the UN plan, Ben-Gurion proclaimed the birth of the State of Israel. The very next day, the armies of several Arab states entered Palestine. The fi rst Arab-Israeli war began. Arab armies were defeated everywhere. They lacked the experience, morale and determination of the troops mobilized by the nascent State of Israel. Their numbers were even smaller, with a maximum of 25,000 soldiers, compared with an Israeli army that, by the end of May 1948, had amassed 35,000, rising to 100,000 by the end of December 1948. And on top of this, the Israeli army benefi ted from the delivery of modern arms and equipment from Czechoslovakia, a concrete expression of Soviet support, which counted for a great deal against the under-equipped Arab armies.
After the signing of a series of armistices, the war ended in July 1949, but no subsequent peace agreement was signed. In the face of public opinion, the Arab heads of state were not keen to offi cially recognize the existence of Israel. They continued to declare themselves in favour of an independent Arab Palestine, but in reality, they could live with the new situation. They divided up the territories which, according to the UN plan, were to constitute the Palestinian state. King Abdallah of Transjordan annexed the West Bank. Egypt, for its part, took control of the Gaza Strip, establishing an administration there, but without offi cially integrating it into its borders. Nothing remained of the Arab state that the UN had voted to create.
At the end of the war, the State of Israel controlled 78% of the territory of former Palestine and West Jerusalem. More than 700,000 Palestinians had been expelled from their lands, in what Palestinians call the Nakba (the Catastrophe). Some 370 Palestinian villages were given Israeli names to erase all traces of the previous inhabitants. The expelled Palestinians found refuge in neighbouring countries. By 1950, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria were home to almost 300,000 Palestinian refugees in 35 camps.
At fi rst, these camps were an endless succession of large tents. As the prospect of a return became more remote, the tents were gradually replaced by permanent structures. These camps still exist today, constituting actual small towns with thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of inhabitants. The Jenin camp, in the West Bank, is home to over 15,000 people. The largest is Ain al-Hilweh, in Lebanon, home to over 54,000 registered refugees, but very likely more than 100,000 in reality.
Israel: religion, segregation, racism...
Between 1948 and 1951, the new Israeli state welcomed over 550,000 immigrants. The first came from Europe - they were called Ashkenazi Jews. They were followed by Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, the Sephardic Jews (today, the term Mizrahi Jews is used). But the Jews who came from Arab countries were held in no better regard than the Arabs of Israel. They were Jews, and that makes a difference, compared with the Palestinian Arabs – more on that later - but they were to constitute the poorest strata of Israeli society, occupying the lowest-skilled, lowest-paid blue-collar jobs.
The Labour Party leaders of Israel had in fact created a state like any other, with its own social classes and based on exploitation. They claimed to be socialists, but did not build a socialist society. They were not even capable of founding a secular republic resembling those that existed in the most highly-developed countries. The ruling Labour Party actually created a state in which religion played a central role.
Seeking the support of rabbis and clerics, Labour Prime Minister Ben- Gurion abandoned the idea of giving Israel a constitution because, for the Jewish clerics, the only reference text possible was the Bible! Ben-Gurion did not limit himself to this symbolic decision. He gave the clerics considerable powers, leaving birth and death registers, marriages, divorces and all family matters to the rabbinical courts. As a result, mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews are still not possible in Israel. The only recourse is to marry abroad, with the result that children are considered “illegitimate”. Divorce is not recognised either, and only a husband has the right to break the marriage by repudiating his wife. Even today, couples who do not agree at all with these outdated practices are forced to resort to them in order to separate; and for this too, they must go before a rabbi to justify themselves...
Since 1948, rabbis have been the ones to regulate all social life. The weekly day of rest is Saturday because it’s the Sabbath, when, according to religious requirements, no activity is possible. And to this day, the extremely religious continue to fi ght for everything in Israel to shut down on the Sabbath: transport, cinema, etc. The education system is made up of a network of secular schools, but there is another network of religious schools and yet another one of ultra-Orthodox schools. All these schools benefi t from state funding, and in all schools, including secular ones, religious classes have been made compulsory.
No Jew can avoid dealing with religious institutions, but the thorny problem of determining who is a Jew has yet to be resolved... This is all the more important given that, under the Law of Return passed in 1950, any Jew born in Paris, New York or elsewhere who wishes to live in Israel - to make Aliyah, a term taken from religious vocabulary and used by Zionists - can acquire Israeli citizenship and thus obtain more rights than Palestinians who have lived there for several generations... So who determines who is a Jew, if not the rabbis! And as there are a lot of rabbis, including a chief rabbi for the Ashkenazi Jews and another for the Sephardic Jews, the debates can last long time... Ethiopian Jews had to wait until 1975 for their “Jewishness” to be offi cially recognized! However, as black people, they are subject to racism and the same discrimination as Arabs and other African immigrants. A country that sets out to distinguish between Jews and non-Jews, especially in a war situation, is inevitably plagued by racism.
The Arabs who had not fl ed when Israel was created, remained under a military status until 1966. This status made them dependent on a military governor, to whom they had to apply for travel passes, and who could also confi scate their property and land. Once this special regime came to an end, Palestinian Arabs still could not enjoy the same rights as Jews. The law in fact distinguishes between different nationalities (Jews, Druze, Circassians, Christians, Arabs... ) among Israeli citizens. Different rights are granted to them and only Jews are considered to be full citizens. Considered potential enemies from within, Israeli Arabs are also barred from military service and are thus denied access to certain benefi ts.
Yes, in the theocratic sense, Israel is a Jewish state where religion plays as important a role as it does in Saudi Arabia, with every aspect of segregation that this entails. But the Saudi regime was created by heads of Bedouin families who had always claimed to be Muslim, whereas the Israeli state was created by militants who claimed to be socialists, many of whom were atheists. However, its Labour leaders were fi rst and foremost nationalists, who chose to ally themselves with the most reactionary forces, thus strengthening the religious currents of the right and far right, which would later be able to oust them from power and to play an increasingly important role.
Israel becomes imperialism’s police force in the Middle East
Labour leaders also consciously chose to become imperialism’s police force in the region, in order to gain support against the Arab states.
Following the Second World War, there was popular discontent throughout the Middle East against imperialism and the regimes linked to it. In 1951, King Abdullah of Transjordan, called out for having annexed the West Bank, was assassinated by a Palestinian. In Egypt, in 1952, the pro-British monarchy was overthrown by a group of nationalist offi cers. Among them was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the man who eventually became head of the new regime. In July 1956, he nationalised the Suez Canal, previously controlled by France and the United Kingdom. The news was greeted with enthusiasm by the Egyptian people.
The British and French leaders, the Conservative Antony Eden and the Socialist Guy Mollet, decided to organise a military intervention to regain control of the canal or even overthrow Nasser. To this end, they received offers of service from Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. Fearing for its safety, Israel launched an offensive against Egypt on October 29 1956. Its troops crossed the Sinai desert and raced towards the canal. Under the pretext of arbitration, a Franco-English expeditionary force parachuted into the canal zone on November 5. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, and Operation Musketeer, as it was called, looked as if it would be a success... but the very next day, it was clear that the three musketeers had encountered a problem and lost! In fact, the American and Soviet superpowers reacted immediately, demanding, one after the other, an end to the military intervention. The French and British governments were obliged to comply with their injunctions and withdraw their soldiers.
American imperialism wanted to demonstrate to its allies, who were also its rivals, that from then on, it would be the one to decide the fate of both the region and the governments in power there.
Apparently, Ben-Gurion hoped to keep the conquered territories. This time round, it wasn’t possible. The Israeli army withdrew its troops and Egypt regained possession of the Sinai desert. Defeated militarily, Nasser nevertheless emerged politically strengthened from this showdown. In the eyes of the Arab masses, it made him the champion of the struggle against imperialist domination and he enjoyed high popularity in the years that followed. Nasser was a nationalist leader who sought to loosen the grip f imperialism for the sole purpose of serving the interests of the Egyptian ruling classes. Other regimes in the Arab world, notably Syria and Iraq, tried to follow suit. In the face of this and after the Suez experience, the leaders in Washington were convinced that they could use Israel to defend their interests against the Arab states. The Israeli government had demonstrated that it was ready and that it was capable of mobilising its population in a war against an Arab state by presenting it as necessary to Israel’s survival. It took another few years for American leaders to verify Israel’s ability to play the role of a police force for the imperialist order in the region and to decide to give it their unconditional support.
The decisive and defi nitive turning point, at least up until now, came in June 1967. The Israeli army took advantage of one of its regular episodes of tension with Syria and Egypt to launch a lightning offensive, winning a crushing victory in less than a week, which is why it was named the Six-Day War. Backed by strong American support, the Israeli state was then able to adopt a particularly uncompromising attitude towards the Arab states, deciding to retain control of the conquered territory.
East Jerusalem was annexed and the reunited city became Israel’s capital. The Golan Heights, on the border with Syria, were occupied before being annexed a few years later, in 1981. The other occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza, were not annexed. Offi cially, Israeli leaders claimed they wanted to use them as leverage for future peace negotiations. But they had an additional problem. Over 300,000 Palestinians fl ed to Jordan, especially those whose villages or refugee camps had been destroyed. The majority of the inhabitants, i. e. more than one million people, of the territories conquered in 1967, chose to remain, unlike those in 1948. Annexing these territories would therefore have greatly increased the proportion of non-Jewish citizens in Israel, which was totally unacceptable to the Israeli government.
An administration of the Occupied Territories was set up under Israeli military command. The Labour governments of the day soon began to encourage the creation of Jewish settlements to reinforce and secure their presence. In the following years, this settlement policy was to play a considerable role in the increasingly right-wing evolution of Israeli society as a whole, as we shall see later.
The Arab states discredited, the Palestinians revolt
The Six-Day War also had many political consequences for the Palestinians. It brought Nasser and all Arab heads of state into serious disrepute among the labouring masses of the Middle East. This was particularly true in the young Palestinian generation who had grown up in the camps after 1948.
These young people, like everyone in their families, had experienced very diffi cult living conditions, but they were able to benefi t from education and basic training. In fact, the UN had set up UNRWA, a special agency for Palestinian refugees, which had opened schools in all the camps. As a result, the school enrolment rate for Palestinians was the highest in the Middle East, even though they were treated as pariahs in whichever country they lived. Not only were these schools secular but they were also co-educational, which was exceptional for the time.
These men and women were deprived of any future prospects, trapped in refugee camps, but they received an education that made them acutely aware of their situation and understand its causes.
All the conditions needed to forge a generation of rebels, even revolutionaries, were met. Tens of thousands of young Palestinians joined the struggle, determined to fi ght and risk their lives. They wanted to fight for their rights as Palestinians, but many also wanted a revolution that would encompass the entire Arab world. Becoming fedayeen, as they were known (“fi ghters ready to sacrifi ce themselves”), they joined Palestinian organisations and the armed militias these had formed.
All the Palestinian movements were grouped together within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), formed in 1964. Initially, the PLO emanated from the Arab states, particularly Egypt. But after the 1967 defeat which demonstrated the military failure of the Arab states, certain Palestinian groups decided to lead armed struggles themselves with their own resources.
They formed commandos that entered Israel to carry out attacks. In March 1968, fedayeen from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement were able to defeat Israeli forces who outnumbered them and had launched an attack on the Jordanian village of Karameh. The Battle of Karameh gave Fatah a special aura, strengthening its infl uence within the PLO to such an extent that Arafat succeeded in taking over its leadership in 1969.
When the Arab masses looked at the Palestinians they saw the example set by the fedayeen and admired their courage. The Palestinians were sowing the seeds of revolution in a period of turmoil and rising protest. Their leadership may not have actively sought it but the Palestinians awakened the hopes of those in the Arab world who were exploited and who recognized themselves in the Palestinians’ struggle. In the 1970s, the Palestinians had reached a position from which they could have become the vanguard of a revolution with the objective of putting an end to imperialism’s stranglehold over the region. And if it had spread throughout the Middle East, it could have swept away the Arab ruling classes and their dictatorial and corrupt regimes.
Because the Palestinians were scattered over numerous countries, they could have given impetus to this. To do so would have required an organisation with the will to lead the Arab masses with such a program. But the PLO’s policy had nothing to do with making the most of this revolutionary potential, quite the opposite.
Arafat was a fi ghter who led the military operations at Karameh. But he was fi rst and foremost a petty-bourgeois nationalist and the armed struggle he advocated was not intended to overthrow imperialism, or even to change the social and political order of the Middle East. He limited his objective to creating a state that would represent the Palestinian bourgeoisie among other Arab bourgeoisies. A state with its own fl ag, its own administrative and military apparatus, that would exist within the framework of the imperialist order and its state borders.
The PLO demanded the creation of this state over the entire territory occupied by Israel, agreeing only to allow room, according to the movement’s charter, for Jews “who had lived normally in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion”. How far back in time? And what would become of the others? By refusing to recognise the right of the Jews now living in Palestine to their own national existence, the Palestinian leaders were helping to strengthen the Israeli governments’ own reactionary nationalism, which claimed that the Palestinians wanted to “throw the Jews into the sea” and presented their war policy as the only possible response to such a threat.
Moreover, Arafat called for an armed struggle that consisted of organising attacks on Israeli soldiers, bombings, machine-gunning buses and hostagetaking, sometimes in schools. These actions could only serve to reinforce the Israeli population’s refl ex of national unity behind its government. But this was not Arafat’s concern, since he knew that Palestinian commandos would not be enough to defeat the Israeli army. By organising armed action, he sought recognition from the Arab states and to gain their diplomatic support on the international stage. And beyond that, he sought the recognition of major world powers as he wanted to bring them to accept the creation of a Palestinian state.
There was another political reason behind the actions carried out by the commandos. The fact that they were clandestine due to Israeli repression made it possible to justify setting up a military apparatus far from the control of the Palestinian masses. This aspect was of no little importance in the eyes of Arafat who was thus laying the foundations for a future state apparatus that would be capable of ruling – and, if necessary, repressing – its own population.
It is true that within the PLO, certain organisations claimed to be Marxist – the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) of George Habash, and the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) of Nayef Hawatmeh, a splinter group from the PFLP. But despite claiming to be Marxist, neither of these groups considered that workers had a role to play as a class in their struggle and especially not a leading role. They stuck solely to the struggle against Israel, contributing to the escalation in the organisation of high-profi le attacks and hostage-taking. For example, the PFLP created a unit specialized in hijacking airplanes. It may have seemed more radical, but it proposed no policy that really differed from that of Arafat’s Fatah and it, too, was trying to make a place for itself in the diplomatic game by seeking the support of Arab states.
The Black September Massacre
The Arab states turned out to be enemies capable of being just as ferocious against the Palestinians as the Israeli state. They were wary of the fedayeen who belonged to organisations and militias that local authorities had no control over and that did not hesitate to stand up to them. The Palestinian fedayeen acted independently and did not necessarily follow the policies of the PLO leaders and even though the PLO sought alliance with the Arab states, the Palestinian fedayeen represented a threat that Arab leaders sought to reduce by all means.
The fi rst time this happened was in Jordan, where Palestinians made up half the population. Some had even come to occupy positions of responsibility within the state apparatus. There were 40,000 fedayeen in the Palestinian militias and they openly defi ed the Jordanian authorities against whom they behaved increasingly like an independent, even competing power. Palestinian militants had no reason to respect King Hussein of Jordan, the heir to the Hashemite family whose power was conferred by the British, and whose regime was based on feudal structures.
Determined to dismantle the fedayeen organisations, Hussein launched his army against the Palestinian camps on September 12, 1970, using tanks and aircraft. Despite the Jordanian army’s military superiority, it took several days to overcome the resistance of the fedayeen. But they had been left to their own devices by the PLO leadership, which wanted to gain time. The Jordanian army disarmed the Palestinian fi ghters and carried out massacres to encourage as many of them as possible to fl ee to another country. In all, more than 5,000 people were killed.
These “Black September” massacres, as they came to be known, did not prevent Arafat from taking part, on September 27, in a “reconciliation” meeting organised by Nasser on the eve of his death. While fi ghting was still going on, Arafat spectacularly shook hands with Hussein, as if it had all been a simple misunderstanding, paid for by thousands of deaths on the Palestinian side. By this gesture and by his attitude during these events, Arafat wanted to demonstrate to all the Arab heads of state that he was reliable, responsible leader and that he had no intention of jeopardizing their power, whatever the price to be paid for his movement.
The majority of Palestinian fi ghters in Jordan took refuge in Lebanon, and the PLO, driven out of Jordan, set up its headquarters in the capital, Beirut. It was in this country that another decisive act in the fedayeen movement took place.
Palestinians at the heart of Lebanon’s civil war
Lebanon was known as the “Switzerland of the Middle East” because a bourgeoisie, mainly consisting of Maronite Christians, enjoyed brazen prosperity. But thousands of men and women lived in shanty towns on the outskirts of Beirut, in conditions that were no better than those of the Palestinian camps.
As a result, the political and social situation in Lebanon was, for the majority of its population, in no way comparable to that in peaceful Switzerland. The Palestinians found themselves at the heart of the civil war that broke out in 1975. In its early stages, it pitted the most reactionary faction of the privileged Christian strata, the Phalangists of the far-right militias, against the poorest masses, including the Palestinians. Even though the latter were involved, Arafat refused to take up the fi ght politically. In June 1975, he declared that the “real battlefi eld” was in Palestine, and that what was happening in Lebanon was “a marginal battle that would divert [the Palestinian revolution] from its true path”.
Despite all of Arafat’s efforts, Lebanon became a battleground for the PLO, because it could not stand aside, a battleground where the PLO became associated with a coalition of so-called “Palestinian-progressive” forces, a battleground where it had to fi ght an Arab state, Syria, which had hitherto appeared to be among those most committed to the Palestinian cause. When the Syrian army entered Lebanon in June 1976, it lent its support to the far-right Christian militias at a time when they seemed to be in diffi culty, preventing the predominance of the Palestinians and their allies. Syrian leaders sought to ensure that their own interests prevailed in Lebanon. But by playing the role of gendarme guaranteeing regional stability and capable of keeping the Palestinians under control, Syria also showed the imperialist powers it was a responsible and necessary interlocutor.
Following Syria, it was Israel that fi nished destroying the PLO forces in Lebanon. From 1978 onwards, the Israeli army began to make incursions into Lebanon, occupying the south of the country. In June 1982, more than 100,000 Israeli soldiers launch d a major offensive that took them as far as Beirut. The declared aim was to completely destroy the PLO’s military capabilities. The Lebanese capital was besieged and bombarded day and night. Following an agreement reached under the patronage of an American emissary, Arafat managed to leave Beirut and found refuge in Tunis. But there was nothing left of the PLO’s military strength in Lebanon: 15,000 fedayeen were evacuated, but had to agree to disarmament, before being dispersed throughout the Middle East.
Once the fi ghters had left and the Palestinians were no longer in a position to defend themselves, far-right Christian militias entered the Sabra and Shatila camps on the outskirts of Beirut and carried out massacres that lasted two days, from September 16 to 18, 1982. This took place with the complicity of the Israeli military, who allowed the Christian militiamen to cross their lines and even lit the camps at night so that the massacres could continue. The Palestinians counted over 3,000 victims, most of them women and children.
The Israeli government was led at the time by Begin, the former Irgun terrorist, and his Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, who gained the nickname, “the butcher of Beirut”. They succeeded in expelling PLO fi ghters from Lebanon. As a result, they paved the way for the fundamentalist Islamist movement Hezbollah (Party of God). Created in 1982, this fundamentalist, ultra-reactionary, anti-communist party, which assassinated militants who opposed it, gained increasing popularity by waging a guerrilla war against the presence of Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. The Israeli army was fi nally forced to evacuate southern Lebanon in May 2000, after 22 years of occupation. Since then, Hezbollah has established itself on the Israeli border and become one of the main parties in Lebanon.
This series of defeats and massacres had considerably weakened the PLO. But the leaders of the major world powers had no wish to see it disappear. In 1974, Arafat was even granted an observer seat at the UN, and was able to address the General Assembly. For Western heads of state, Arafat was a responsible interlocutor who had to be kept in reserve in case he was needed to stop a Palestinian uprising. Which is exactly what happened at the end of the 1980s when the intifada broke out in the territories occupied by Israel.
The 1987 intifada and its consequences
During the fi rst twenty years of Israeli occupation, the West Bank and Gaza did not experience any major uprisings. Although the territories were not annexed, they were integrated into the Israeli economy. Palestinians easily obtained work permits that allowed them to travel to Israel and take up the lowest-paid jobs in construction, catering, factories and farms. But to obtain a work permit, you had to go through the military administration, as you did for any other administrative procedure. The Israeli army claimed it was practicing a humane occupation, but there’s no such thing as a humane occupation that respects people! Palestinians had to endure arbitrary treatment and constant humiliation. Those suspected of sympathy for the PLO were persecuted, along with their families. The Israeli army used blackmail to force some to collaborate and denounce other Palestinians, sometimes even within their own families. Thousands of Palestinians were arrested, arbitrarily detained, beaten and tortured. Adopting a common practice of the British occupation forces during the Mandate period, the Israeli army systematically blew up the homes of PLO militants, depriving whole families of housing.
This oppressive situation eventually led to an explosion of anger throughout the Occupied Territories, particularly among young people. The fi rst Intifada (uprising in Arabic), as the revolt came to be known, began in December 1987. Every day for months, young Palestinians, often under the age of 15, confronted the Israeli army with slingshots as their only weapons. It became known as the “war of the stones”. The Israeli Minister of Defense, the Labour Party’s Itzhak Rabin, instructed his troops to “break the bones” of the stone-throwers.
But this repression, which resulted in thousands of deaths, further fuelled Palestinian anger and hatred. It was the Israeli army that became worn down and demoralised. Young soldiers performing their military service were less and less able to understand why they were being turned into torturers. Some oldiers even decided to stop serving in the Occupied Territories. These “refuseniks”, as they were called, were often sentenced to prison.
This development led the Israeli leadership to change its attitude towards the Palestinian organisations, with whom it entered into negotiations, something it had totally refused to do until then. On September 13 1993, under the auspices of US President Clinton, Arafat and the Labour Party’s Rabin who had become Prime Minister after winning the elections a year earlier, signed the fi rst Oslo agreement, named after the Norwegian capital where most of the negotiations had taken place.
The Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority
The text provided for the establishment of a Palestinian Authority on autonomous zones and a timetable for negotiations leading to the creation of a Palestinian state within the borders of the West Bank and Gaza. This was a resurrection of the Arab state of 1947 that had never seen the light of day. In September 1995, the Oslo II agreement defi ned the status of the West Bank which was divided into three zones. Only zones A and B were managed by the Palestinian Authority, while the third zone, representing over 60% of the West Bank territories, including all the settlements, remained under the control of the Israeli army.
After years of occupation and humiliation, Palestinian expectations were high and they felt they had won a victory. But the Israeli leaders were certainly wary of that feeling. They would continue to control the situation and continue to show that the balance of power was still in their favour. No sooner were the agreements with the PLO signed, than Rabin organised the fi rst closures of the Occupied Territories, cutting off the West Bank and Gaza from the rest of the world, and prohibiting Palestinians from entering Israel.
This fi rm attitude towards the Palestinians was also intended as a gesture to the Israeli right and far right. The latter engaged in hate campaigns against Rabin, calling for his assassination. One of them fi nally succeeded in 1995. Yet Rabin had never been a “dove”, as the more moderate Israeli leaders were called. He had always been a “hawk”, in other words, a proponent of the hard line, of intransigence towards the Palestinians. But the mere fact that he had recognised the PLO as an interlocutor, made him a man to be shot, quite literally, in the eyes of the nationalist far right.
Did Israeli leaders really consider going so far as to recognise a genuine Palestinian state? Given their attitude during the seven-year period from 1993 to 2000, this is doubtful. There was talk of a so-called “peace process” because, unlike in the previous period, Israeli emissaries agreed to meet PLO representatives at successive summits, but there was nothing to show for it. Because the intifada put Israeli leaders in a diffi cult position, they had been forced to concede an embryonic state to the Palestinians through the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, with its headquarters in Ramallah on the West Bank, its administration and, above all, its police force. Of the 135,000 civil servants that the Palestinian Authority fi nally totalled, half worked in the various security services. This police force quickly gained the reputation of being worse than the Israeli army with whom it collaborated to repress militants who stirred things up too much. From this point of view, the Israeli leaders had achieved their goal. None of Rabin’s successors after 1995 wanted to extend this very limited autonomy, which turned part of the Palestinian population into guardians of order and auxiliaries of the Israeli army.
During the period of the so-called peace process, the living conditions and repression of the majority of the population in the Occupied Territories only worsened and the creation of settlements never ceased. The West Bank was referred to as a “leopard-skin” territory, due to the fragmentation caused by the presence of Jewish settlements, which could never come under Palestinian control.
Even though the Palestinian Authority was a phantom, and not offi cially recognised as a state in its own right, it served the interests of a privileged few within its limited means. There were those who could profi t from patronage and civil servants in a position to obtain bribes. There were even some real members of the bourgeoisie, descendants of the old families of Palestinian notables, who, living in the Gulf States, got their hands on the import-export companies that sprang up after 1995. The Palestinian Authority had its ‘new rich,’ its ‘new nabobs,’ as they were called, while the majority of the Palestinian population was unemployed and living conditions were worsening. Among Palestinians, the disappointment was as strong as the expectations were high and it brought Fatah into disrepute. The Islamist Hamas organisation thus grew, also benefi ting from the fact that it had never agreed to recognise the Oslo Accords.
From the Muslim Brotherhood to the birth of Hamas
The founding members of Hamas came from the Muslim Brotherhood, which emerged in Egypt before the Second World War. When they set up an Islamist association in Gaza in 1970, the Israeli occupation authorities allowed them to develop their activities in order to diminish the infl uence of the PLO. They were able to open places of prayer, which were also social centres, with dispensaries, sports halls and meal distribution that benefi ted the inhabitants of the refugee camps. In 1978, the Israeli administration authorised the creation of an Islamic university in Gaza, which trained thousands of Islamist militants over the years. In the 1980s, to assert their control over the population, the Muslim Brotherhood engaged in intimidation campaigns against “unbelievers”, those who drank alcohol or openly displayed atheism. The Israeli administration turned a blind eye, as it was delighted to see PLO militants attacked by the Islamists, who took no action against the Israeli occupation.
But with the outbreak of the fi rst intifada, the Muslim Brotherhood realised that, if they wished to retain infl uence, they could no longer confine themselves to religious propaganda, even if this meant losing the relative immunity they had previously enjoyed. In December 1987, they created Hamas (acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement). They transformed their association into a party clearly committed to fi ghting the Israeli occupation and openly calling for the creation of a Palestinian state, based on Islamic law.
In 1993, Hamas broke away from the PLO by expressing its opposition to the Oslo Accords. But its infl uence remained limited in those years, when the majority of Palestinians were still welcoming the creation of the Palestinian Authority. This changed with the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000.
The second intifada
The second intifada was not a spontaneous outburst of anger as the fi rst had been. . Many of the most outraged young people joined Hamas and other Islamist organizations that had opposed the Oslo Accords, such as Islamic Jihad, which also stemmed from the Muslim Brotherhood. The actions they were suggested included committing suicide attacks with the aim of killing as many people as possible, by blowing themselves up in public places, such as on buses. This desperate form of struggle was particularly sterile. But the Islamist organisations were trying to give themselves an image as fi ghters, and thus increase their infl uence among the Palestinians.
The increase in suicide bombings created a sense of terror among Israelis and fuelled hatred of the Palestinians. Right-wing leader Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister in February 2001, building on these feelings and presenting himself as the man who would bring security by stepping up repression against the Palestinians.
Reverting to the policy of Israeli governments prior to the Oslo Accords, he refused all contact with the PLO and launched a ferocious crackdown. The Israeli army deployed tanks in the West Bank, bombed Palestinian towns and even bulldozed entire neighbourhoods. The headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, where Arafat was based, was besieged for two years, at times having no water or electricity.
Sharon had no intention of annexing the entire West Bank. He began building a wall, dubbed “the separation barrier” by the Israeli authorities, which he claimed would put an end to terrorist attacks by separating Israelis and Palestinians once and for all. Its demarcation allowed for 65 Israeli settlements to be included on the Israeli side, along with 11,000 Palestinians and the also vast majority of East Jerusalem’s 250,000 Palestinians.
Continuing the occupation of Gaza was becoming too diffi cult and costly. Sharon announced a plan for unilateral disengagement, without discussing its implementation with the Palestinian Authority.
The Israeli army left Gaza and its Jewish settlements were dismantled. Sharon did not hesitate to send in the army to dislodge the settlers who refused to leave. In August 2005, to justify his decision, he declared on Israeli television: “We cannot hold onto Gaza forever. More than a million Palestinians live there […] in uniquely crowded conditions in refugee camps […] with no hope on the horizon”. Well aware of the situation of the Gaza inhabitants, Sharon knew that he was taking the risk of paving the way to power for the Islamists of Hamas. It was probably even part of his calculation,
as it was a way of weakening the PLO. In any case, the Israeli state kept control of Gaza’s border crossings, airspace and sea, transforming a territory just over 12 km wide and 42 km long into a vast prison to which it held the keys.
Gaza: a population under Israeli blockade and Hamas dictatorship
At the end of the second intifada, a violent struggle for power, accompanied by armed clashes, pitted the discredited Fatah against Hamas. With the help of its police force and the support of Israel, Fatah managed to hold on to power in the West Bank. When Arafat died in 2004, his successor as President of the Palestinian Authority was Mahmoud Abbas, leader of Fatah. But he is a president who, in reality, controls little outside Ramallah, his “capital”.
With its superior forces, Hamas succeeded in taking power in Gaza in 2007 and completely eliminating Fatah. It controls a small state apparatus, with 40,000 offi cially registered civil servants. A signifi cant proportion, as in the West Bank, belongs to the armed militias that impose their dictatorship on Gazans and enforce the moral order of the Islamists.
The strengthening of Islamist organizations and their reactionary ideas among the Palestinian population represents a considerable setback in every respect. The PLO brought together secular, even socialist organizations, as we have seen, and within them there were no religious distinctions between militants, despite the fact that Christians represent 15% of the Palestinian population living in Israel. The weight acquired by Islamism is a setback for women, many of whom, thanks to their education and participation in the political struggle, had acquired a place on an equal footing with men within Palestinian organizations.
But above all, the Gazans have had to endure the terrorist policies of Israel’s rulers. At times, they have subjected the Gaza Strip to an almost total blockade. Lack of fuel to power generators led to regular power cuts, which also deprived the inhabitants of drinking water, as water desalination plants were no longer able to operate. For over ten years, the majority of Gaza’s inhabitants survived exclusively on food aid distributed by humanitarian organisations.
The Gazans have also suffered from the military operations and bombardments that have followed one another over the last 15 years. Each time, Israeli leaders claim to want to weaken Hamas. But because of the permanent state of war, they have enabled Hamas to consolidate its power and silence all dissent. It is with the consent of Israeli leaders that Qatar and Iran have been able to send funds to Hamas so that it could pay its civil servants.
Allowing Hamas to remain in power in Gaza was a way to weaken the Palestinian Authority. For Israeli leaders, it was a continuation of the policy that led them to encourage the development of Islamist groups to counter the PLO in the 1970s.
The Palestinian population has paid a heavy price for this cynical calculation. But the Israeli Jewish population has also paid the price because the strengthening of Hamas and other Islamist groups has caused a similar political shift in Israel, with the growing infl uence of the nationalist and religious far right.
Netanyahu increasingly hostage to the far right
The current head of the Israeli government, Benjamin Netanyahu, has managed, with a few interludes, to hold on to the post of Prime Minister since 2009, breaking the record for longevity previously held by Ben-Gurion. But to do so, he has had to fi nd support on the far-right, which he has helped to strengthen and on which he has become increasingly dependent.
In order to retain a majority in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) after the November 2022 elections, Netanyahu had to form a coalition government with ultra-nationalist and religious right-wing parties. Many in Israel refer to the latter as the Jewish version of Hamas.
The largest of these, the Religious Zionism party, increased their vote from 4% to 10% in the legislative elections to become the third political force. Its leader, Bezalel Smotrich, a supporter of Jewish settlement development in the West Bank and himself a resident of a settlement, became Finance Minister. What’s more, a ministry was created especially for him, within the Ministry of Defence, to enable him to support the creation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
He claims to support the annexation of Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank, into a Greater Israel. He makes no secret of his racism, declaring it unacceptable that his wife give birth next to an Arab woman. And to complete the picture, he calls himself a “homophobic fascist”.
The leader of the far-right Jewish party, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has taken over as head of a National Security super ministry. In the past, this Jewish settlement activist, who himself lives in a West Bank settlement, has been convicted of incitement to racial hatred and supporting Jewish terrorist organisations. He claims to support the transfer of part of Israeli’s Arab population to neighbouring countries.
In the coalition agreement concluded with these parties, Netanyahu explicitly pledged to promote a “policy whereby sovereignty will be applied to Judea and Samaria”. So, without using the term, Netanyahu’s government intends to implement a policy of de facto annexation.
There are currently 151 settlements in the West Bank, home to 475,000 Israelis. Last May, Smotrich announced his intention to double their number to one million settlers. To this must be added the 230,000 inhabitants of the settlements built around East Jerusalem. Of Israel’s 7 million Jews, settlers now account for around 10%, a considerable numerical weight that gives them a strong voice in political life.
Almost always set up on hillsides so as to dominate the surrounding areas where Palestinians live, these settlements eventually became veritable cities, some with tens of thousands of inhabitants. To make their voices heard, they grouped together and set up administrative structures, which fi nally gained offi cial recognition, to express their demands to the public authorities, to organise the implementation of projects and to manage the budgets allocated to them.
For decades, settlers have been creating new settlements without waiting for offi cial government authorisation, driving Palestinians off their land, repeatedly attacking them and terrorizing them with pogroms. They then demand that these settlements be connected to the electricity grid and motorways. All Israeli governments, whatever their political stripe, have almost always backed down in the face of settler pressure.
Faced with this policy, the situation became explosive in the West Bank, where angry demonstrations by Palestinians greatly increased during 2022. The Israeli authorities responded with increasingly violent repression.
And then there are the particularly high numbers of arrests. According to the Israeli Prison Service, on November 1, there were almost 7,000 Palestinians in detention, and over 10,000 according to Palestinian organisations. More than 2,000 of them are held under administrative detention, which can be arbitrarily extended without limit.
In Israel itself, the situation has become increasingly explosive. For a long time, Israel prided itself in having granted political rights and opportunities for social advancement to the nearly 2 million Israeli Arabs who make up 20% of its population. They make up almost half the staff – doctors, nurses and employees – in health establishments. But, in reality, they have remained second-class citizens in a state that has made their status increasingly clear to them in recent years.
In towns that have remained “mixed”, where Jews and Arabs live, the authorities have brought in settlers from the West Bank, granting them housing and subsidies to maintain a Jewish majority among the inhabitants. Anger has built up among Palestinians, even in Israeli cities. Violent riots even broke out there for the fi rst time since the creation of Israel when, in May 2021, there was a new bombing campaign in Gaza. They were followed by the lynching of Palestinians and destruction of stores and places of worship organized by far-right groups, sometimes with the support of the police. Since October 7, the far-right militias have increased in number, armed by National Security Minister, Ben Gvir.
A permanent state of war and its consequences
Netanyahu’s policy towards the Palestinians is basically in line with that of his predecessors over the past 75 years. This boils down to making the population believe that all it takes to guarantee Israel’s security is to be able to use force and to have the strongest, most modern army.
The state of Israel has been able to develop the most powerful army in the Middle East, based on its ability to mobilise its population. We saw how, after October 7, the State was able to mobilize over 350,000 soldiers in record time. But this means that Israelis have to live armed and ready to fi ght. The army, considered as “the people’s army”, occupies a central place in Israeli life. Conscripts are obliged to do military service – 24 months for women and 32 months for men – and many spend one month a year in the reserves. Thus a large part of society is permeated with the values of the army. The infl uence acquired by the extreme right is also a consequence of the regimentation of individuals.
Israel can only meet the cost of maintaining its military apparatus with American aid. It amounts to 4 billion dollars per year, the highest amount granted to a US ally. In spite of the high level of aid, the Israeli state is nevertheless obliged to devote a large part of its own budget to military costs – buying missiles and ammunition, and not forgetting the three submarines ordered from Germany last year. Faced with such expenditure, the Israeli state has to economise without reducing its funding for the colonisation of the West Bank. This has led to a severe reduction of the social protection system in the past years. As a result, Israel has become one of the developed countries with the highest poverty rates. According to an offi cial report, 20% of the Israeli population lives below the poverty line. The Israeli population is paying a heavy price for the colonial and militaristic policies of its governments. And part of the population is aware of it.
The demonstrations that took place in Israel’s main cities every Saturday for the fi rst 9 months of the year showed that a signifi cant proportion of the population no longer felt comfortable with the policies of their government. The demonstrators were opposed to a draft reform of the judicial system drawn up by Netanyahu in order to keep the promises he made to his far-right provided for a reduction in the powers of the Supreme Court. This institution has often been seen as a relative counterweight, notably for its opposition to the creation of certain settlements or to certain religious movements.
Part of the population was concerned about the government’s desire to increase its power through this reform, all the more so, because of the weight of the extreme right within the government. There was every reason to expect attacks on the rights of women, homosexuals and on public freedoms in general.
Among those who started the demonstrations were a number of prominent fi gures, including former ministers, ex-heads of the security services and retired generals… This explains why the organisers of this mobilisation set political limits which went no further than the slogan “defense of democracy”. As far as they were concerned, the mobilisation was limited to weakening Netanyahu, as some of his rivals hoped to use it to come to power. There was no question of going any further, and certainly not of questioning the policy towards the Palestinians. But the demonstrations did express the hostility of a section of the population to the settlers, their organisations and the changes they were imposing on Israeli society.
After the Hamas attacks on October 7, the situation changed completely. The desire to challenge the government gave way to the feeling that it was necessary to close ranks in support. A cabinet of national unity has been formed: it includes Benny Gantz, former Chief of Staff and one of the leading fi gures in Netanyahu’s opposition. The government remains in place but, as long as military operations continue, the war cabinet will run the country. Thanks to Hamas and its attacks, Netanyahu can wage war on the Palestinians while benefi ting from the popular support he had previously lost. The Palestinian and Jewish populations are going to pay dearly and for many years, for the consequences of this latest bloodbath.
All workers and people exploited in the Middle East must fight!
Breaking this endless chain of wars will require a split from the policies that have led the two peoples into a dead end.
On several occasions in recent years, a section of the Israeli population has expressed its concern and its desire to leave this vicious circle of war behind. It did so against its government during the Lebanon war, after the Sabra and Shatila massacres and, more recently, against Netanyahu and his far-right government. At present, despite the state of war, support for Netanyahu is not unanimous.
There is room in the region for both peoples to live and coexist in peace. This is certainly what the majority of them wants. But this can only happen on condition that each of the peoples is recognised as having equal rights and national existence, starting with the Palestinians, who have been oppressed for 75 years. The Zionist program of imposing a Jewish state on Arab populations has led to a terrible impasse. Considered by Zionists to be the only way to protect Jews from persecution, the Israeli state has led Jews to build a system of oppression and apartheid which guarantees them no security, and in which they themselves fear for their freedoms.
As for the Jews in the rest of the world, they have not been better protected from anti-Semitism since the creation of Israel. This is evident in the current abusive blame of all Jews for the policies of an Israeli government that many of them disagree with.
It must be stated again: the Jews from Israel and all over the world will not be at peace nor will they be secure as long as the Palestinians are oppressed and the policy of colonisation continues! A people that oppresses another cannot be free. For the Palestinians, limiting the struggle to demanding the creation of a Palestinian state has led them into an impasse. Within the imperialist system, the Palestinian Authority can be nothing more than what it is today. We’ve seen how it could enable a minority of bourgeois to get richer but, on the other hand, it couldn’t meet the needs and interests of the poorest Palestinian masses, those living in refugee camps in the villages of the West Bank and Gaza. And what about those living in camps in Lebanon and Jordan who are demanding the right to return, and in any case the right to live elsewhere than in refugee camps. To all these people, a Palestinian state reduced to the limits of the West Bank and Gaza would have nothing to offer! Not even an end to national oppression, since the creation of such a state would not put an end to the Israeli government’s policy of domination and military aggression.
As revolutionary communists, we recognise the right of every people, Palestinian and Jewish alike, to their own existence, in the form they choose. But, within the framework of imperialism, of the divisions and borders it has imposed on the peoples of the region and of the oppression under which they are all kept, such a perspective is impossible.
It can only become possible if workers take the lead in the struggles of the peoples of the region, with the aim of overthrowing all the ruling classes of the region, those of Israel and the Arab states.
The working class is the only revolutionary class of our time, the only class that has nothing to gain from maintaining a system based on exploitation, a system that endlessly produces and maintains inequalities and many forms of oppression. And, because it is an international class, it’s the only class that has nothing to gain from maintaining the national states that serve to defend the interests of the rich.
To overthrow imperialism, such a revolution will have to become part of the struggle of workers throughout the world. It will then be possible to build a political and social organisation that meets the interests of workers and exploited people, an organisation in which the production of wealth will be determined by the needs of the greatest number. And this can only be done by creating a true socialist federation of peoples in the Middle East and across the globe.
A working class capable of such a struggle already exists in the Middle East! It’s made up of the Palestinian workers who are exploited by Palestinian bosses in the West Bank, the 150,000 Palestinians who, before the current war, went daily to Israel to work on building sites and in restaurants. There are also Israeli workers, some of whom went on strike a few months ago against the judicial reform draft of Netanyahu’s government. Like every worker in the world, they have to face exploitation and, particularly at the present time, infl ation. And there are also over 200,000 immigrant workers in Israel today, from Romania, Thailand, the Philippines, Eritrea and Sudan.
The working class, in Israel like everywhere else in the world is international! The working class is divided, not everyone has the same living conditions.
It is also divided by the apartheid regime established by the Israeli state. But, everywhere and always, militants have had to fi ght with the aim of uniting workers in the same struggle and the same organisations. This was the fi rst struggle of the communist movement founded by Marx. In 1848, in the Communist Party Manifesto, Marx defi ned what distinguished communists from all other working-class parties : “In the national struggles of the proletarians […] they [communists] bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality”.
Today, as revolutionary communists, we have to affi rm that, from Tel Aviv to Ramallah, from Beirut to Cairo, all workers have the same interests and must unite in a common struggle against Netanyahu and Hamas to overthrow imperialism and all those who exploit them. And that this is the struggle of workers the world over.
Workers will need a party with a revolutionary communist programme that consciously sets itself this objective if they are to see this revolutionary struggle through to the seizure of power. And, if events in the Middle East show us anything, it’s that workers need a worldwide revolutionary party. We are convinced that these ideas will eventually give rise to such parties because they represent the future and the only hope for the peoples of the Middle East and for all humanity.
We have absolutely no infl uence over events in the Middle East, but we have a responsibility here to at least make this prospect known and to contribute on our modest scale to putting all our revolt and militant energy into building the revolutionary party that the working class needs.