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The latest eruption of fighting in the occupied territories of the West Bank caught many activists off guard. The horrifying events on the news provoke outrage every day. But feeling depressed and powerless to affect events, even folks who long ago learned how to read between the lines of the media's "even-handed" support of Israel catch themselves thinking, "Jeez, are these people just gonna keep blowing each other up and gunning each other down for the next 500 years?"
In the six months since 9/11, activists in this country have not had an easy time getting our footing. There's no place stable to stand—the situation changes on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. It has often been unclear where we should focus our attention: Shine a light on the mess that is post-Taliban Afghanistan? Build solidarity with Colombia? With the Philippines? Prepare for a massive assault on Iraq? Defend the detainees and other immigrants under attack here at home? Rally against Ashcroft's attacks on civil liberties? Try and rebuild the global justice movement and bring the trade union movement back into it?
Now the war in the Middle East is front and center on the world stage. Even if the intensity of the current conflict recedes for a time, the underlying contradictions there will continue to shape world politics. It is essential that we understand what's happening right now, so we can analyze upcoming developments, so we can act most effectively against Israel's barbaric assault and so we can make use of contradictions in the existing system to expose and hobble the US imperialists behind the scenes.
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Context is key. The incursion by the Israeli Army into the occupied territories, the destruction of the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority and of daily life on the West Bank, the sinister roundups of Palestinian men—everything going on now is conditioned by changes in the world since 9/11.
In the first days after the World Trade Center hijackings, US government figures and media pundits were talking seriously about the need to deal with the question of Palestine in order to cool out anti-US sentiment in the Muslim world.
Faced with the threat of US policy changes, the rulers of Israel played things very cleverly as they sought to return to their accustomed role as reliable ally and junior partner of the US in the Middle East. When the Bush administration declared an open-ended global War on Terrorism, Sharon and company rushed to sign on. They went all out to paint the Palestinians as terrorists and to provoke attacks that could be portrayed as terrorist.
But Israel's rulers had seen that their old strategy was inadequate. That strategy involved endlessly prolonged peace negotiations while settlements (which they call "facts on the ground") were expanded and linked up so that any eventual Palestinian statelet would be born crippled. US and UN officials had continued talking openly about the need for a Palestinian state, which could turn out to be realer than the series of dependent Bantustans the Israelis envisioned as the end of the process. Also worrying was the heavy influence of the big oil companies, with their ties to the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, on the Bush administration. Finally, the new US stance is unilateralist, "Who needs allies? We'll do it ourselves."
So the political balance within the Israeli ruling class continued to turn away from reliance on peace negotiations, as they saw political currents shifting against them after 9/11. This might be the last time a pre-emptive strike would be possible against the Palestinian Authority, toothless though it was designed to be—with no real sovereignty, no armed forces, no authority over the huge chunks of Palestinian territory turned by the Israeli government into settlements. Hence the current assault.
The fact that Israel's rulers have a strategic approach does not mean that it is a smart one, or that it will accomplish their goals. In the 1980s, for example, the Israeli government and its secret service Mossad set out to weaken the leadership of the Palestinian movement. "Israeli support for Islamic extremists, as an opposition force to the secular pro-PLO movement, eventually blew up in Israel's face. Hamas, for example, which was born out of the Moslem Brotherhood with Israeli encouragement, is to this day a central factor in the Palestinian resistance and political system." (Summarized by the British Broadcasting System—the famous BBC—on April 22, 1998). Hamas was also the first organization to adopt suicide bombings as a central tactic.
Look at the current crisis: Israeli oppression produces rage and desperation among the Palestinian people, to the point where there are literally thousands who are willing to give their lives in attacks on their enemies. The intensification of that oppression, and Israeli triumphalism, will only fan the flames. The logic of the present situation is driving the rulers of Israel toward a genocidal approach: use starvation and state terror to drive the Palestinians out of the occupied territories and remove them from within the pre-1967 borders of Israel itself. There are elected officials in the Israeli parliament and the Sharon administration who openly argue for this.
It would be very hard to do, for two reasons. For one thing, Israel is dependent on low paid Palestinian labor to carry on its daily economic existence. Furthermore, "transfer," as the Israelis call it, would further strip away the aura of moral superiority Israel assumes on the world stage. The state of Israel was created after World War II in part as a response to the horrors of the Holocaust. But the homeland for the survivors of European Jewry was created on someone else's land. For over 50 years, Palestinians driven out when Israel was formed, and since then, have lived in desolate camps in Gaza and on the West Bank. Will regular Israelis accept the vision of Israel and Palestine cleansed of Arabs (like the Nazi term Judenrein) to provide more living room (like the Nazi Lebensraum)? Will the world?
It is important that when we speak of Israel's rulers or the Israeli government, we recognize that there are many in Israel who want peace. And by peace they mean not just an end of the current war, but a full withdrawal from the Palestinian lands occupied in the 1967 War, equality for Arab citizens of Israel and peaceful relations with Israel's neighbors. A particularly heroic role is being played by Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldiers and reservists who are refusing to serve in the occupied territories. Nearly 400, decorated veterans of previous wars among them, have signed a statement denouncing the occupation and calling for peace. Even as they face court martial and prison, their efforts have helped revive the battered forces of the Israeli peace movement.
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Israeli Prime Minister Sharon calls it a "war," but that suggests a parity between the combatants which is utterly lacking. It is an attack intended to terrorize the Palestinian community and destroy many of its political, social and economic institutions, to set back the Palestinian liberation struggle as far as possible. The rest is window dressing. How can anyone take seriously Israeli demands that Yasir Arafat crack down on attacks on Israelis when he is penned up in his Ramallah headquarters, surrounded and under fire, with power, water and phone lines cut?
Suicide bombings aimed at civilians, at religious rituals, are not tactics which deserve our support. We should be very careful indeed about how we condemn them, however. The Israeli Army, the Mossad, and vigilante groups have been killing Palestinians, including many children and other civilians, destroying people's homes and livelihoods and imposing a reign of terror on the occupied territories. Somehow this is not considered terrorism by the US media and government.
The Palestinians are fighting back as best they can. They have no tanks, no helicopters, no jets. They are sparsely armed. After a recent sniper attack on an Israeli Army outpost ended, the weapon that was recovered by the survivors was a decades-old single shot rifle with its stock held together by nails!
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Despite the savagery visited on the West Bank, all polls show that Palestinian morale is high and support for the intifada and the Palestinian Authority is solid. The Palestinian's greatest weapon is simply determination. They know that Israel's greatest goal is to drive them out of their land, and that if they refuse to leave in the face of overwhelming military force and terrorizing tactics, they have won the battle.
Above all, remember, this situation only seems intractable. The United States government could stop it in a single day, could stop it tomorrow!
For over 50 years successive US administrations have stood behind Israel, and share responsibility for its acts against the Palestinians. And Israel is deeply, irrevocably dependent on US aid for its survival. Over 30% of the total US foreign aid budget goes to Israel! Last year that ran to over $2 billion in military aid, $840 million in economic aid and an additional $2 billion in loan guarantees, money which the US promises to repay if Israel defaults. That is nearly five billion dollars each and every year. If that were to vanish from the Israeli budget, the government would plunge into its deepest economic crisis ever.
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For the US to step in and stop it would require slapping down or uprooting powerful entrenched forces in the United States. First, there's the Zionist lobby of publicists, pundits, publications, lobbyists and the politicans they buy. This well-funded lobby is backed by significant numbers of American Jews who sometimes tend to bloc vote based on a politician's stance toward Israel, by Christian fundamentalists in whose theology Israel is central, and other ideological conservatives. Then there's the military-industrial complex which would probably lose several firms to bankruptcy if the US ever cut aid to Israel, since over 75% of that aid goes to purchases from US arms manufacturers!
Against all this, it is impossible to overstate the importance of US Jewish voices opposing Israeli aggression —as attested by the violent response they've received from hardcore Israel-backers. When the US press reported on Adam Shapiro, a paramedic and peace advocate of Jewish heritage who spent a night trapped in Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah on an ambulance run, his parents in Brooklyn received so many death threats they had to move out of New York state. Similarly Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, a progressive Jewish magazine, who co-authored articles with Black theologian Cornel West criticizing Israeli policy and US support of it, also received death threats and had to hire body guards to protect his family. US Jews who vocally oppose Israeli atrocities and settlement policies make it much harder for Israel-backers to equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism and that takes a big moral weapon away from them.
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The crisis that grips the Middle East now is changing the global political scene very rapidly and unpredictably. In the aftermath of the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan with minimal US losses, the Bush administration was deep into a drive to take advantage of and expand the US role as the Big Dog in the 21st century world. That bid may now have hit its first roadblock.
One of the next major steps on the Bush agenda has been the overthrow of the government of Iraq. Even in the face of strong opposition from its European allies, the government's military preparations were advancing, and a quiet effort has been underway to persuade Saudi Arabia and other US allies in the Arab world to turn a blind eye to a US attack on Iraq.
The growing rage in the Arab "street," that is, among the masses of working people throughout the Middle East, places drastic limits on how much the conservative and tyrannical governments of countries there can be seen to be collaborating with the United States. The recent meeting of the Arab League took a unanimous stand opposing any attack on Iraq.
Although the Arab rulers have made it clear that they aren't especially interested in launching a new oil embargo, like the one after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, oil prices are spiking on the possibility. The Wall Street Journal and other business publications carry worried pieces remembering the role of that embargo in triggering the devastating stagflation which racked the US economy in the late '70s. And the Arab rulers will surely cut oil production and more rather than face the prospect of being toppled by their own people.
Unlikely as it seems right at this moment, the situation could cool down fairly quickly—an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, the start of a new round of US-brokered negotiations, a cessation in Palestinian military operations inside the Green Line (the internationally recognized borders of Israel). The underlying contradictions would still sit like landmines, triggered to explode again at the slightest motion, but the conflict would no longer be the focus of world attention that it is today.
7 – What do we do, here, now?
Demonstrate. Actions are stating to rip all over the country. Take leadership from Palestinian organizations and Jewish peace and radical groups. They're the ones who've lived with this issue year in and year out. Support their work and activities. They have a built-in right to speak which can get them a hearing where others will have a harder time.
Do education. A lot of people know little about the roots of the conflict or are likely to be swayed by the media drumbeat about terrorism. Use materials like the statements from the refuseniks in Israel's armed forces in which they explain why they're not fighting any more.
Fight anti-Semitism. In the ranks of those who oppose Israel's aggression and US policy, there will be some of the "That's the way the Jews are" kind of thinking. It should not go unchallenged. This is not about religion or ethnicity. It's about oppression and liberation.
Target the US government. Even Israeli officials acknowledge that if Bush seriously demanded it, Sharon would stop the current attacks and pull back form the West Bank. It is US planes, US helicopters, US weapons and ammunition, US bulldozers which are killing Palestinians and destroying their homes. We have an obligation to tackle this homegrown component of the current crisis.
Put it on the agenda. After moving from success to success, the global justice movement was knocked off track by 9/11 and the change in the political climate in the US. Under these difficult conditions, a new anti-war movement was built, drawing on lessons from the global justice struggle. Anti-globalization activists have learned that it simply won't do to pretend that the US government's War on Terrorism is not the main challenge to global justice now, or to continue to make, say, sneaker companies the main target. Now both the global justice movement and anti-war forces have to deal with the fact that the question of Israel and Palestine is front and center. We must deal with it and all the contradictions it raises, or we become irrelevant.
National Executive Committee,
Freedom Road Socialist Organization /
Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad
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