Chapter 10

The Palestinian Question has no "Middle-of-the-road" Solution 

WITH THE INAUGURATION of the New World Order, the Palestinian national movement took the same path as other anti-colonial movements -- those of Northern Ireland and South Africa, for example. All became victims of U.S.-imposed solutions that failed to provide the minimum political, social, or economic basis necessary for real progress in the lives of these oppressed nationalities. In South Africa, for instance, the abolition of Apartheid proved to be a merely formal change: the keys of the economy remained in the hands of the white minority. A thin layer of the black bourgeoisie enjoy the fruits of the token reform, while the vast majority of blacks are left in utter poverty. (See for example: John Pilger: "South Africa: Did the ANC betray?" South African "Mail and Guardian" 17 April 1998).

The Palestinians, similarly, were driven into the Oslo Accords, a formal peace that actually perpetuated Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands. The United States has developed a strategy of coopting the elite of the national movement with offers of political and economic privileges for it in exchange for abandonment of the people's national rights. The Oslo agreement represented such an exchange, guaranteeing that Israel could be secure without having to reduce its control of the occupied territories. What the Palestinians got in return was more autonomy for the populated areas on 42 percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 

The Oslo Accords thus abolished, with the consent of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, the Palestinian National Program. The PLO, in its capacity as sole representative of the Palestinian people, also abolished the Palestinian armed struggle for liberation as a form of terror.

Israel, for its part, never committed itself to dismantle or even to stop building settlements, to withdraw from East Jerusalem, or to recognize the refugees' right of return. The PLO's renunciation of its national program was not accompanied or even followed by a parallel Israeli renunciation of the expansionist Zionist program.

Illusions about the prospect of peace vanished; it became clear that the Palestinian leadership represented the narrow interests of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, which became associated with Israel's security and economic interests. The question then appeared in all its acuteness: Is this the end of the road? Or is there a radical and fair way to put an end to the occupation of Palestinian land and the suffering of Palestinian refugees?

The "two states" solution becomes non-viable

When the Palestinian Resistance organizations (Fatah, PFLP, DFLP) formed the PLO, their platform called for the creation of a Secular Palestinian state in all of Mandatory Palestine. The demand gained neither international nor Arab support, because it required the dismantling of the Israeli state. The negotiations following the October 1973 War changed the situation. The region started moving toward a peace process just when a power equilibrium had brought the Soviet Union and the United States to an era of "peaceful coexistence".

Since Israel was the U.S. strategic ally in the region, and the Arab Regimes turned to the Soviets for military and diplomatic support, it was natural for the Palestinian movement to seek Soviet support in any bargaining that might ensue. It therefore adapted to Soviet strategy in the area, which aimed at a "middle-of-the-road" solution. In 1974, the Palestinian national movement endorsed a new political program, which was compatible with the Partition plan. It accepted for the first time a political solution based on Israel's withdrawal to its 1967 borders. This was also compatible with UN Security Council resolutions 242, as a basis for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A minority current in the Palestinian movement (the "Rejection Front") saw the PLO's readiness to accept negotiations with the Israeli enemy and accept the division of the land as a betrayal of the national cause. But this decision was in reality the most reasonable one within the contemporary political context. The Palestinians, like other national liberation movements, understood that they could not achieve all their aspirations. They therefore adopted a formula designed to pursue concrete achievements through Soviet support. The "two-state" formula was a bid for a realistic "middle-of-the-road" solution secured by an international agreement.

To a certain extent, the bid succeeded. The Transitional Program which codified this new posture attracted the sympathy of Europe and even certain circles in the United States. The change of direction strengthened the popular basis of the Palestinian revolutionary movement and gained it substantial international solidarity as well.

During the period of "peaceful coexistence", Europe and the U.S. were seeking "middle-of-the-road" solutions in domestic as well as international affairs. Their aim was to preserve an equilibrium between the interests of capital and labor. As mentioned in previous chapters the state played an important role in sustaining this kind of coexistence through an array of laws, regulations, welfare programs, and spending designed to keep unemployment low.

The political atmosphere in both foreign and domestic affairs changed radically after 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the U.S. presidency and Margaret Thatcher had become prime minister of the U.K. As we saw in Chapter 5, these leaders, who represented the interests of the most powerful capitalists, decided that in face of economic competition from abroad, the "middle-of-the-road" policy was not in the best interest of their constituents. Their solution was to suppress labor costs and social spending at home and heighten military spending and the Cold War abroad. In the Middle East, this new direction was manifest in U.S. support for Israel's 1981 bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

The drastic turn in U.S. policies was not matched by a parallel change in the USSR. The Soviet Union continued to pursue the policies of the 1970s until the ascendance of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. During the Gorbachev period it started to lose its position as a superpower by giving way to the frenzied hostility of the United States. Gorbachev responded to this hostility by addressing the people of the United States and Europe, attempting to convince them of the uselessness of lethal weapons and the need to end the Cold War. At the same time, he pushed for democratic openness in the socialist states. 

To the world's oppressed peoples, the Soviet turn to courting the West signaled clearly that they were about to lose their strategic ally. Their national leaderships quickly chose to adapt to the new conditions. There can be no doubt that the decline of the USSR was one of the main factors that brought Arafat to denounce terrorism during a UN meeting in Geneva in 1988 and to declare the Palestinian National Charter invalid. These dramatic declarations, made on the background of the first Intifada, led to the opening of the PLO - US dialogue and eventually were a cornerstone in Arafat's road to Oslo. 

The Gulf War signaled the end of the UN's role

The last traces of "middle-of-the-road" solutions vanished with the demise of the Soviet Union. George Bush's Gulf War represented an intensification of Reagan's position; clearly, the days of balanced policies were past. Now the United States ordered the peoples of the world to submit to its priorities and even to the interests of its major competitors, Europe and Japan. Global capitalists were now free to conquer the markets from which the power of the USSR had excluded them. The weak countries, left without a backer, had no choice but to succumb to the dictates of the United States and its financial institutions.

These enormous changes in the world transformed the functions of the UN Security Council, which had been designed as a broker in a two-superpower international system. As we saw in Chapter 6, the Security Council acknowledged its new, subservient position by acquiescing to America's Gulf War. Only after seven years and much criticism did the UN Secretary General tried to claim a relatively independent role, by forging an agreement with Iraq in face of the Clinton Administration's complaints. (see Kofi Anan's negotiated agreement with Iraq in February 1998).

After this, the US decided to ignore the UN completely (as we also saw in Chapter 6), turning to NATO as the cover for its attempt to bomb Serbia into submission. The war over Kosovo exposed the weakness not only of the Security Council, but of America's rivals, Russia and China. Although these clearly were indirect objects of the assault on Serbia, they failed to demand that the Security Council discuss this aggression against a UN member state. The bombardment of Serbia closed the era of Security Council effectiveness in international disputes.

The UN General Assembly in 1975 had described Zionism as a form of racism; over the years, it adopted many other decisions that gave the Palestinian people a framework of legitimacy for their demand for self-determination. Although the Security Council had not been similarly supportive, its loss of power posed a grave problem for the Palestinians.

The rise of the single-superpower international regime after 1990 deprived the Palestinian people of another important source of formal support as well. Arab acceptance of the U.S. sanctions regime on Iraq voided the Arab League of all content. After its 1991 move from Tunisia to Cairo, it never convened again. Relations with Israel replaced the former solidarity of the Arab states.

Israel's rejection of a compromise

The Oslo agreements mirrored the new international system exactly. The international legitimacy known and acknowledged during the Cold War era gave way to a new legitimacy based on the position of the White House. The arrangements stemming from the Oslo agreements became the legal basis for the Palestinian question, reducing the UN resolutions to useless pieces of paper.

The Oslo negotiators missed the opportunity for Israelis and Palestinians to reach a compromise based on dividing the land and giving the Palestinians full sovereignty. The Palestinian side proposed this compromise; Israel, Left and Right, refused. Israel made use of the new international balance of forces to impose its historical program -- establishment of sovereignty over all of Mandatory Palestine -- and to prevent the Palestinians from exercising their right to self-determination.

Since 1967 Israel saw the occupied Arab territories (the Golan Heights, Southern Lebanon, and Sinai) as an asset to be exchanged for Arab states' agreement to accept Israel's legitimacy and end their historical conflict with it. At the same time, it insisted that the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip must be seen otherwise. In consequence, Israel insisted that any Oslo-based agreement on the final status must legitimize Israel's colonial settlements. Former Prime Minister Barak spoke of unilateral separation of the two peoples, but the Oslo agreement requires three million Palestinians to coexist with 150,000 settlers in their midst. The Palestinians are to content themselves with whatever land remains after Israel deducts the perceived territorial requirements of the settlements and of its own security.

The final status agreement therefore aims at turning the Palestinian territories into an Israeli reserve. Israel will control the borders and the passages between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. By so doing, it will control what is allowed to happen inside the occupied territories. The Palestinian Authority will regulate civil life only within the limits of Israel's perceived economic and security interests. Given this restriction, the Palestinian Authority will need to repress democratic rights, buying whatever loyalty it needs with appointments and favors. As for the Palestinian economy, its foundations will be the export of cheap labor into Israel and the import of Israeli goods.

The reality created by the Oslo agreement mandates the existence of two national entities under one overall sovereignty -- Israel's. While Israelis enjoy full political rights, Palestinians are to remain without civil, national, or even human rights. Their homeland will be a deformed political entity that enjoys neither sovereignty nor the necessary economic foundations to guarantee full independence to its people.

The bi-national state: an unrealistic proposal

Many Palestinian intellectuals refuse to accept this humiliating situation. They also criticize the Palestinian Authority for its corrupt and oppressive character. They recognize that no adjustments in the Oslo Accord can produce a real alternative; changing some minor terms won't affect the underlying imbalance of power. Some of these critics of Oslo propose an alternative: a bi-national state in all of Mandatory Palestine, where Arabs and Jews will enjoy equal rights.

This solution echoes the Palestinian Charter's original call for the abolition of the Zionist entity and the building of a secular state on all of Mandatory Palestine. However, while the old program envisioned for the Jews full civil rights but no national rights over the territory, the new formula accepts equal rights for the two peoples in one state.

This bi-national state proposal ignores negative world and regional balance of forces. It implies accepting the world capitalist order as an eternal and immutable reality. This proposal is unrealistic because it requires Israel to abandon the main tenet of Zionism: that Palestine is the historical and inalienable property of the Jews.

Moreover the idea of a bi-national state is an essential concession of the principle of self-determination. It exchanges the national rights of the Palestinians over their national territory for equal civil rights in an imaginary "shared" territory.

The real significance of the bi-national proposal today is its assumption that the era of compromises embodied in the famous "two-state solution" has come to an end. In this sense it mirrors the Oslo accords, since it, too, dismissed the possibility of a real compromise through partition.

No solutions in the framework of the world capitalist system

To acknowledge that the period of compromises is over does not imply that no alternative to the Oslo proposition is possible. No alternative has appeared because those who seek an alternative have begun with a mistaken assumption: they try to fit their proposals into the capitalist framework. Simply shifting the basis of negotiations from Oslo to the Palestinians' legitimate rights as defined by the Palestinian Left won't correct the imbalance of power that shaped Oslo. Within the world capitalist framework, Oslo is the only possible blueprint for the Middle East settlement.

To see what's needed for a real alternative, we must understand that the Palestinian problem is not the only question that remains unresolved. The capitalist New World Order, centered in the U.S. and in corporate business, has exacerbated economic crises, encouraged war as a method of dealing with conflicts, and deepened the exploitation of the working class all over the world. Nor does it stop at creating a deep gap between capitalists and workers. By refusing compromises and abolishing the welfare state, it is driving the middle classes into the ranks of the working class. In addition, it is heightening the tensions between colonized peoples and colonizing states.

Israel is deeply implicated in all these pressures. Besides being historically attached to colonialism, it is closely integrated into this new world order. Every crisis at the peak of the capitalist pyramid in New York has an immediate repercussion in Israeli economic and political life.

The Palestinian question is therefore closely connected to the struggle against the capitalist system. The prospects of the Palestinian working class are tied to those of the working class in the main industrialized centers and in the economically underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Unemployment and constant decline in living standards are not Palestinian phenomena -- they're general throughout the Global Village. 

In times like these, when the capitalist system is shaken by its inner contradictions, the outlines of a solution for the oppressed peoples of the world begin to reappear. This solution rests on the progress of the working class towards building a world socialist system.

By refusing to let go of a part of Palestine (the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem), the Zionist movement has posed the dilemma in its most acute form: either Palestinians will accept living under the overall control of the Israeli state without sovereign rights, or they will have to secure their liberty through the abolition of the Israeli colonial system.

The Oslo accords specify the first choice, but the Palestinians will not tolerate it for long. Israel will not be able to live in peace and tranquility with a people in its midst completely deprived of political and social rights. On the other hand, the Oslo solution fits the present world reality. It cannot be altogether overthrown unless the entire international situation is transformed.

The situation of the Palestinian people reflects developments throughout the Arab world. The increase in the rate of unemployment and poverty, the regimes' lack of credibility due to their uncritical support for U.S. policies, and the corruption in the bureaucratic apparatus are creating a strong public opposition to normalize relations with Israel. The Oslo agreements may stand as long as the Arab situation remains unchanged, but if the Arab world plunges into social and political upheaval, Oslo will not survive.

It is difficult to foresee the precise manner in which the Palestinians will solve their dilemma. Clearly, it will be at the expense of the Zionist state, because the Zionist state has refused all compromise, exploiting to the fullest the present historical opportunity to impose its colonial program on the Arab peoples. Clearly, too, there is no middle-of-the-road solution for the Palestinians: their problem will be solved only in the context of an overall socialist solution. If society on a world scale does not opt for a revolutionary change, no oppressed people can hope for liberation.

In the third world's struggle for liberation, the working class will have to take leadership. The last decades of the twentieth century showed that the national bourgeoisie holds a very narrow outlook; invariably, it has been ready, for its own convenience, to give up the national rights that would benefit the whole society.

The success of a Palestinian national revolution with a socialist class content depends, by definition, on the defeat of the bourgeoisie that allied itself with U.S. capitalism and the Zionist state. The path adopted by the Palestinian bourgeoisie left the Palestinian people an easy prey to class overexploitation and prevented them from gaining any civil or national rights. At this moment, the Palestinian people have, as their main task, to solve the question of leadership and program. This they can accomplish only if a new leadership emerge from the midst of a working class mass movement and prove capable of adopting a socialist program as the only alternative to the present capitalist system.  n

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