Socialist Outlook October 1996
Although the exact timing and nature of the latest Israeli massacre of Palestinians could not have been predicted, it has been clear for some time that the faltering ’peace process’ had reached a dead end, and that an explosion was inevitable. The spark which set it off was the Israeli decision to open a tunnel through the Old City of Jerusalem, to give tourists better access to the Western Wall of the ancient Jewish temple; but the underlying cause was growing Palestinian resentment at Israel’s refusal to honour even the minimal concessions promised in the Oslo and Cairo accords.
Once again, as at the start of the Palestinian Intifada in December 1987, Israeli apologists have described the Palestinian resistance as planned and coordinated. But this is a distortion. As in the Intifada, this rising of the Palestinian masses is as much a challenge to their recognised leadership as it is to the Israeli army of occupation.
This time, the leadership is not in exile, seeking diplomatic channels to negotiate with Israel. The leaders have returned to Palestine, and face mounting anger as the scale of their capitulation to Israel, and the humiliating contempt in which the Israelis hold them, become ever more clear. As Michel Warshawsky of the Alternative Information Centre in Jerusalem pointed out at the summer school of the French Revolutionary Communist League, "The Palestinian Authority today has less autonomous room for manoeuvre than the PLO and the Unified Leadership of the Intifada had in 1989."
In a further change from the Intifada, this resistance is armed. The Palestinian security forces, who up to now have faithfully executed Israel’s aims and repressed the Palestinians as Israeli mercenaries, are now attempting to regain credibility by defending unarmed Palestinian civilians against Israeli brutality. When armed Palestinians have previously fought back against the Israeli army - from the battle of Karameh in 1968 through to the siege of Beirut in 1982 - they have inflicted heavy casualties, and gained limited political victories. For the first time, such resistance is taking place inside Palestine.
It would be a mistake to blame the new Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu for the collapse of the ’peace process’. Long before his narrow election victory, it was apparent that Israel had no intention of honouring its commitments. Former PM Yitzhak Rabin, having signed a detailed timetable for Israeli military withdrawal from the occupied territories, then claimed that "There are no sacred dates". He and his Labour successor, Shimon Peres, reneged on firm promises including the release of political prisoners, the return of refugees forced to flee in 1967, freedom of movement between the West Bank and Gaza, and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Hebron.
As Warshawsky also noted, "There is no crime against peace that the Peres Rabin team did not commit". In that sense, Netanyahu’s victory in the Israeli election, while a defeat for the Labour Party’s strategy for containment of Palestinian resistance, was a consequence, not a cause, of the collapse of the sham ’peace process’. But this resistance is weakened as a result of the capitulation by its former leaders.
In 1987, when the Intifada erupted, an entire generation of young activists - many of them schooled and tested in Israeli prisons - rose to prominence at the head of a mass popular upsurge of frustration and anger. They created a genuine revolutionary leadership, which took effective control of large parts of the occupied territories, controlling not only security but also economic affairs, education, health, welfare and most other aspects of civil society.
This example threatened not merely continued Israeli control over Palestine, but the future of all of the undemocratic Arab regimes. It was necessary for Israel to come to terms with the exiled leadership, which had been outflanked by the popular uprising and which shared a common interest in its defeat. This led to the unprecedented Israel PLO accords, and the agreement to repartition Palestine and to collaborate in the repression of Palestinian dissent.
Netanyahu and the Likud Party have never accepted this agreement. Even though it guarantees Israeli political and economic domination of the Middle East, it has a price. Although Rabin and Peres pretended otherwise, the agreement could only hold if the parts of the occupied territories from which Israel withdrew were granted formal independence, and if most of the Israeli settlements were dismantled.
While the Labour Party delayed meeting its commitments in the hope of profiting politically and further weakening a discredited PLO leadership, before having to pay a much-reduced price, the Likud insisted on the price as a reason to reject the entire package. The Israeli peace movement, which effectively retired from activity rather than press its government to honour its commitments in the agreements, contributed to their failure.
The Palestinian left, meanwhile, has in effect given up the struggle, and conceded leadership of any resistance to the fundamentalists. But a struggle based on religious obscurantism can never defeat Israeli occupation and end the partition of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinian people. It cannot even mobilise the whole of Palestinian society, let alone offer a way forward for war weary Israelis. The challenge to Palestinian and Israeli socialists alike is to learn the lessons of past defeats.