Palestine: a regional peace conference is not the answer As we go to press, the uprising of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories is continuing. The solution being mooted by many shades of political opinion internationally, is a 'regional peace conference'. This is supported, in different guises, by the Soviet Union, the PLO leadership, Neil Kinnock, and Shimon Peres, the leader of the Israeli Labour Party. Here we publish an article by RALPH SCHOENMAN explaining the dangers of sacrificing the Palestinian struggle to a US-dominated conference. Ralph Schoenman is a long-time anti-imperialist militant and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, as well as the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. Here Schoenman defends the position, long Palestine'. This is not the position of Socialist Outlook, which is organising a discussion among it supporters about the most middle east. The article is taken from the US newspaper Socialist Action. Yasser Arafat Top: a young Palestinian is arrested in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem eft: Palestinian women at Beach camp, Gaza remonstrate with an Israeli soldier: should the Palestinians settle for a rump statelet on the West Bank and Gaza? 7 2 ON 10 JANUARY, Al-Fajr, a Jerusalem Palestinian weekly, published an advert- isement signed by prominent Jews and Arabs living in the United States which called for an end to the Israeli occupa- tion of the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The signatories of the advertisement offer their political perspective for 'res- olving the violence' in Palestine. They write: 'We Jews and Arabs believe that con- tinuation of the occupation will only lead avendish to more violence. We support a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian con- flict to ensure both Israeli and Palesti- * nian national rights. So do a growing
campaigner. In the 1960s he was resident in Britain and helped found officially proclaimed by the PLO leadership, of a 'democratic, secular appropriate slogans to express a revolutionary socialist position on the number of Israelis, including former defence minister Ezar Weissman. 'We call for an end to the occupation through the convening of an inter- national peace conference on the middle east with the participation of all parties to the Arab-Israli conflict, including Is- rael and the PLO.' In an interview with the Reuters press service on 18 January, Hanna Siniora, editor of Al Fajr, specified how Israeli and Palestinian 'national rights' might be ensured at such an international peace conference. Siniora called for 'an association among Israel, Jordan, and a Palestinian state like that of the Benelux countries — 27
Young Arab inhabitants of the Israeli-occupied West Bank with a demilitarized West Bank as the Luxemburg'.
'Palestinians, including Arafat, would accept autonomy as an interim step toward independence' , Siniora said. 'Autonomy is a step that would lead eventually to negotiations between the state of Israel and the PLO, ending in a Palestinian state emerging as a result of these negotiations.'
Siniora met with Secretary of State George Shultz in Washington on 28 January to discuss this proposal.
The call for a middle east peace conference has likewise been endorsed by a number of presidential candidates, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
'the US objective is to
eradicate the Palestinian
resistance'
'Overtures from Arafat for talks with Israel ought to be welcomed,' Jackson said. 'When the United States gives up the right to talk to the Palestinians, it gives up its right to protect Israel.'
Jackson said that ever since his meeting with Arafat eight years ago, he has realised that it would be possible 'to move the PLO from its position of destruction and frustration to one of mutual recognition'. (San Francisco Examiner, 20 January 1988.) THE STRATEGY of the United States and Israel has always had one core objective: the eradication of the Palestinian resistance.
In the aftermath of the recent Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza, a growing wing of the US ruling 'not one zionist grouping
supports even a "separate
but equal" Palestinian state' class has joined the call for the establishment of a Palestinian 'mini-state' in the West Bank as means towards accomplishing this objective and preventing the 'destabilization' of the entire Arab region.
George Ball, who served as under secretary of state under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, recently spelled out how the United States and Israel should approach an international peace conference. Ball's article, "peace for Israel hinges on a state for Palesti28 nians', states:
Bob Gannon/Reflex
'Israel's security worries could be largely met by writing stringent, enforceable safeguards into a formal treaty, denying the new (Palestinian) state any armed force of its own and limiting the number and kinds of weapons available to its police.
'As a safeguard, the settlement could Le than tal require installation of surveillance posts larger, more numerous and more effective than those now functioning in the Sinai under Israel's peace agreement
with Egypt. '(Los Angeles Times, 17 January 1988.)
Ball explains that the establishment of what he openly admits would be a 'rump Palestinian state in the West Bank' is a matter of urgency. 'If the United States does not seriously seek to bring the parties together', Ball warns, 'the ... warfare in the holyland will spread and intensify; sooner or later, the neighbouring Arab States — even Egypt — will be dragged into the maelstrom'.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 6 March/April 1988
The 'maelstrom' that this imperialist spokesperson so strongly fears is the emancipation of the Arab masses of the region from the Israeli colonial-settler state; from the feudal sheiks of the Gulf and Arabian peninsula; and from the Egyptian regime, which has reduced the workers and peasants of Egypt to a level of poverty unknown even under King Farouk. THE APPEAL for mutual recognition and for a peace conference to set up a Palestinian 'rump state' will do no service to the Palestinian people.
Those who call for mutual recognition argue that there are two peoples and that each should be entitled to national rights - that is, a state. The Palestinians, it is implied, should close the book on pre1967 Israel and settle for a statelet on the
Others who hold this position have argued on the basis of 'realism' that only by accepting the fact of the Israeli state can the Jews be induced to support the idea of Palestinian statehood.
Ware based upon a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict and of the dangerous consequences of such advocacy.
Peace is inconceivable between a racist Israeli enclave — where even the
Mapam Party excludes Palestinians from full membership in its kibbutzim — and the Arab peoples of
No Palestinian could recognize Israel in good faith. Some 90 per cent of the land in Israel is administered by the Jewish national fund under rules which require that those who lease or settle land prove that they descend from Jewish mother, grandmother, and greatgrandmother.
Not one zionist grouping supports even a 'separate but equal' Palestinian state. Even the best of them insist that Israel maintain its full military might while the Palestinians are disarmed
The Labour Alignment and Likud reject even this. To advance the view that a Palestinian state would be permitted by any zionist government is to succumb to 'crackpot realism'.
As to the illusion that the recognition of the state of Israel would remove a weapon from zionism, quite the opposite would occur. The zionist politicians would then be able to say that even the 'terrorists' have been forced to accept Israel.
They would say that 40 years of irrational intransigence' were responsible for the conflict and that at last it is clear that the only Palestinians with whom Israel can deal are the ones who all along SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 6 March/April 1988
MIDDLE EAST accepted the Israeli state. Jesse Jackson's denunciations of the PLO's past positions of destruction and frustration' and his appeal for 'mutual recognition' play right into the hands of Gorbachev's rapprochement with Israel ON 13 MAY 1987, A. Vasilyev, the assistant director of the institute of africa of the USSR academy of sciences, wrote an article in the Moscow daily Izvestia in support of the idea of an international conference on the middle east. Vasilyev's article is revealing: "To put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Soviet Union favours an international peace conference... A close examination of our proposals will show that they do not encroach on the rights and security of Israel... The existence of the state of Israel cannot be debated at an international conference'. Vasilyev's support to Israel and his concern for its security — the rationale the zionist state has alway: ised to crush the Palestinian peopl - should come as no surprise. The Soviet Union, along with the United States, was one of the first to recognize the zionist state in 1948. It is nonetheless somewhat surprising that on 19 January 1988, at the very moment the Israeli government was imposing a policy of collective punishment upon the insurgent people of the West Bank and Gaza, the Soviet Union announced that an Israeli delegation would be welcomed in Moscow to discuss the resumption of diplomatic relations. The Soviet bureaucracy broke off ties with Israel following the 1967 middle east war. But within the last year the Soviet Union has established a consulate in Israel. Moreover, according to the Washington Post (20 January 1988), 'Moscow has said that ties (with Israel) could be resumed in the course of a middle east settlement process. dropping its insistence that Israel first retreat from territories occupied in 19673 This is just one more example of what Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev meant when he promised Ronald Reagan that he woula help promote regional stability' in key areas of the world • the zionists. Jackson's strong implica- tion is that the Palestinians have got what they deserved over the years. Were South Africans to advocate an international conference predicated
upon the preservation of the South African regime, the guarantee of its security, and the policing of a black entity by the apartheid regime itself, no one would fail to see the social and political meaning of such a proposition.
An international conference designed to legitimize the security interests of apartheid Israel in exchange for a Palestinian "bantustan' can never be viable except if a Palestinian leadership were to provide this plan with protective
Such an outcome will merely hand to the PLO the unenviable task of policing the Palestinian people and of converting self-determination into another sad replica of the reactionary regimes which plague the Arab masses — from Jordan to Syria and from Egypt to the Gulf.
It was but a few years ago that no Palestinian nationalist would dare associate him or herself with so blatant an effort to betray the long years of struggle for Palestinian self-determination and emancipation, let alone translate the Palestinian cause into a plea for a role in preserving the status quo in the region — with its grinding poverty and relentless exploitation and subordination to US imperialist control.
The rightsof the Palestinian people can never be advanced in this way. The alternative is before us in the upsurge of the Palestinian masses. The struggle awaits a political strategy which poses the need to dismantle the zionist state of Israel and to establish a democratic and secular Palestine.
Such a programme was first advanced by Arafat's Fatah organization in 1968 — though it has since been shunted aside in favour of the 'mini-state' The democratic Palestine of Fatah's vision was one 'in which Jews and Palestinians would live as equals and without discrimination'.
Arafat described his proposal as follows: 'We were saying "'no" to the zionist state, but we were saying "yes" to the Jewish people of Palestine. To them we were saying, "You are wel come to live in our land - but on one condition — you must be prepared to live among us as equals, not as dominators" ›
Socialists should not advocate a peace based on acquiescence, a peace based on a 'bantustan' policed by Israel and its agents.
We must link our demands for the release of all the political prisoners in the West Bank and Gaza and for an end to the deportations of Palestinian activists to demands which address the root of the conflict in the middle east — that is, the very existence of the state of Israel 29