Socialist Outlook December 1995
Following the assassination of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin, many commentators were concerned at the effect on the ’peace process’. Such concern is misplaced. In the first place, Rabin’s successor, the former Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, should be regarded as the true architect of this process, the man who convinced Rabin to swallow his doubts and attempt a different strategy. And secondly because, despite the doubts of the extremists who plotted the assassination, this process truly serves Israel’s interests and confirms the dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people.
Indeed, amongst all the euphoria at the signing in September of the second Oslo agreement, some activists were asking "Why all the fuss? What has changed?" For what has been decided is that the Israeli army will withdraw completely from six Palestinian towns, and partially from Hebron; that the other 450 Palestinian towns and villages in the occupied territories will be administered by the Palestine Authority, although the Israeli military presence will continue; and that 68% of the West Bank will remain entirely under Israeli control.
This 68%, which is effectively being annexed to Israel, includes not only the hundreds of Zionist colonies in the West Bank, but the lands which they have stolen from Palestinian cultivators, the roads which link them, all ’strategic’ routes, and the whole of Greater Jerusalem. The West Bank and Gaza are being cantonised, with areas under nominal Palestinian rule being surrounded by Israeli soldiers and settlers, who will control all access to the Palestinian zones, and communications between them. In the words of Israeli Police Minister Moshe Shahal: "Arafat was forced to sign in the White House an Agreement which includes Palestinian acquiescence, de facto and de jure, to the entire network of Jewish settlements in the [occupied] territories... If Oslo I gave the Palestinians in the interim period everything but the settlements, Oslo II reversed what had been agreed upon and has kept everything in Israel’s hands but the Palestinian cities".
So the agreement does not even begin to resolve most of the issues that led to the Intifada - the continuing misery of the Palestinian refugees, languishing in the camps of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in Lebanon and Jordan, since the establishment of Israel in 1948; the theft of Palestinian land and other natural resources, for the benefit of the Zionists; the lack of any social, economic, cultural or political prospects for the mass of the Palestinians in the occupied territories; the swaggering racist arrogance of the Israeli settlers, backed up by the army of occupation.
Even an agreement on the lines hoped for by some Israeli liberals and Palestinian optimists - complete Israeli military withdrawal from all of the territories occupied in 1967; dismantlement of all Israeli settlements; the establishment and recognition of an independent Palestinian state - would not bring an end to the conflict. Except for the replacement of Jordanian rule in the West Bank and Egyptian rule in Gaza with rule by the PLO, such an unlikely agreement would simply restore the situation that existed before the war of June 1967.
But the 1967 war was not an accident. Nor - despite Israel’s regular propaganda claims - was it a war of defence against threatened Arab aggression. Three weeks before the start of the war, Rabin, then Israel’s Chief of Staff’ had threatened on Israel Army Radio: "The moment has come when we will march on Damascus to overthrow the Syrian government". And after the war, he remarked: "I do not believe that Nasser wanted war". Similar remarks have been made by President Weizmann, then Israel’s Air Force chief.
Israel went to war in 1967 in order to seize Palestinian land and natural resources (particularly water), and in order to destroy the nascent Palestine Liberation Organisation, which struggled for the return of Palestinian refugees to the homes from which they had been expelled in 1948. Zionists of the left as much as the right had seen the 1948 partition of Palestine as a necessary first stage in the occupation of the whole of Palestine. (Indeed, the Likud opposition still officially lays claim to the whole of Jordan as well).
1967 provided the opportunity for the achievement of long standing Zionist aspirations. The so called ’peace process’ is simply a means of stabilising and policing Israel’s continued rule in the occupied territories.