Palestine: the uprising continues
JG and LM: What historical stage in the Palestinian revolution do you see represented in the current uprising? MW: I think that the emergence of the new Palestinian national movement has had three dates. The first one in 1969 was the Karameh battle which was in fact the embodiment of the existence of the national movement abroad, outside Palestine. The second important date was the 'day of the land' in 1976 which was the emergence of the Palestinians of '48 in the arena as part of the national struggle. And the intifadah (uprising) is the third one which is the emergence of the Palestinians in the territories occupied in '67 as an active component of the national liberation struggle.
In that sense they have achieved in a sense the unification of the Palestinian movement in the struggle itself not only as part of the same people, the same national movement, but as an active component having its own autonomous struggle in the framework of the overall struggle of the Palestinian people. How do you see the current uprising affecting the general political spectrum within Israel, particularly with reference to the Peace Nove After the invasion of Lebanon, Israeli society went through a deep polarisation and a deep crisis affected what was the basic strength of the Israeli society, of the Israeli state, which was the national consensus upon which the huge majority of the people, the political forces, including the left-zionist forces, were united.
For the first time in the history of the state, Israeli society was divided, and in my opinion the fractures which occured during the Lebanese war still exist and are very deep. Now the intifadah is opening a new stage in the crisis of Israeli society and deepening this polarisation.
In Lebanon, however, it was still, we say in inverted commas, a 'foreign policy question'. Therefore, a force like SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no7 May/lune 1988
The Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule has entered its sixth month. JACK GOLDBERG and LUCY MATTHEWS spoke to Israeli marxist MICHEL WARSCHAWSKY about the current stage of the struggle and prospects
Ffor the future. and, at a certain point, after one year of war in the Lebanon, on the correct issue of withdrawing from Lebanon stopping the war.
Today, the core of the immediate problem is the Palestinian question, and Peace Now doesn't have a true answer to this question. So we see today a variety of initiatives, by local groups, organisations, movements, petitions, by sections of the Peace Now movement trying to give their own answer, and not willing
On the other hand, there is the radical wing of the peace movement which developed during the period of the invasion of the Lebanon. The committee against the war in Lebanon, and the committee in solidarity with Bir Zeit university, which united the whole of the left, the zionist left, the non-zionist left, the communist party and anti-zionists around the demands of withdrawal from the occupied territories, recognition of the PLO, and defence of the idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Today, for many of the people who identify themselves with this radical wing, these demands are either too much or not enough.
They are too much because they cannot be used to build a broad movement
the occupation, which is the priority now in my opinion.
This should not restrict itself to specific solutions nor even to reasons for mobilising against the occupation. It should be able to include Israelis who are doing it for Israeli patriotism because they want a jewish state or because they are afraid of the Arabs, because they hate to live with Arabs, as well as people who want a democratic secular state for example — one broad movement pushing out the Israeli army and the Israeli state from the occupied territories. So in that sense, building a movement which
On the other hand, the three demands mentioned above are not enough, or problematic, if we want to offer solutions. Because the solution - the final solution, not just an interim demand -offered by the organised majority of the Israeli left, mainly the communist party, the 'progressive list for peace' and some currents in the zionist left, Palestinian state by the side of Israel, for many people does not answer the real
What will happen to the refugees? What guarantees do we have, ask many people, as to what will happen to the 700,000 Palestinians inside Israel who are today an important component of the movement.
Here too we have a process of political clarification and differentiation inside the movement, though we are still able to work together and to be the most determined element of the peace movement, trying to mobilise on a permanent basis and a clear basis to withdraw from the territories, to recognise the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people and for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Do you think that the uprising has affected the outside organisations of the Palestinians in terms of them changing their programme and gearing up to it? I don't know. It's hard for me to imagine that it won't. I don't believe any of the Palestinian leaders today are claiming that they knew this would happen and that they initiated it. It's not true. And in that sense I agree with George Habbash (leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP) on the one hand, and Sabra Jiryis on the other who say: this needs a balance sheet on the leadership because we were not prepared for what happened. 33
I believe that one of two possibilities will happen, and must happen in each organisation. Either the Palestinian strategy will have to re-adapt itself with a much more important struggle inside — which is not just a change in geographical focus but on a new conception of struggle, struggle, at the expense of military struggle on the one hand and diplomatic struggle on the other. Or this or that organisation will not change its policy and will not pay enough attention to what is happening, in which case we enter a process — not for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, but a process, of a hard split.
You cannot imagine that the intifadah will have a tremendous effect on the Palestinian population and the Israeli population and on the Palestinians inside Israel, and will have no effect on the PLO. A lot of people are very intrigued by the leadership of the intifadah that has arisen and some people see it as a 'new leadership. In what sense do you think this leadership is 'new' and to what extent do you see it suffering from many of the same limitations and shortcomings in perspective as the PLO leadership 'outside'? There is a new leadership in a broad sense in that a new generation has taken the leadership of the movement. This is in the broad sense not the narrow sense of 'leadership'. What is known as 'the generation of occupation' is today the leadership of the movement and this generation differs from the earlier one in several crucial ways. Many of the battles that had to be fought by the leadership of the previous generation have, for this
already been won. The existence of a Palestinian national entity, for instance, is fact today, it no longer has to be fought for. Also, the weaknesses of Israel are known to this generation. There is no longer this myth of the all-powerful, unbeațable power and so on. They know Israel from the defeat in Lebanon, they know Israel from the defeat in '73.
This general leadership, this generation, is also a main component of the organised local leadership, but it expresses itself through the existing organisations. It is not new organisations against the old ones.
There is still an overall strategy where the centre is still outside outside meaning the leadership from abroad and its political and military initiatives. Despite controlling the running of the intifadah, they see their role and the role of the intifadah as limited to mobilising 34 the Palestinians of the occupied territo-
ries to express their existence and complete rejection of zionist occupation, but leaving the actual solution of the conflict to come from initiatives - both diplomatic and military — external to the movement. In that sense there is still, in my opinion, no real breakthrough on the political level, there is no real political translation, or strategic translation, the big achievement which is the intifadah What are the developments that are open for building solidarity work inside Israel, in terms of the broad axis of building a revolutionary entity, perhaps even spanning the green line? And in relation to these two questions you could say something about the 'democratic secular state' slogan in the current situation. We are organising our work around three different levels, each one within the other one. One is to try to have the broadest movement against the occupation built around one single demand: 'down with the occupation; withdraw from the occupied territories'. This is a fight, mainly against the left, which 'the intifadah is opening a new
stage in the crisis of Israeli
society' doesn't understand, or doesn't want to understand that we have to act on a mass scale, just as we did during the invasion of the Lebanon, in order to really stop, either partially or wholly, the Israeli policy.
The second level is, in the framework of the mass movement against the occupation, to organise a more limited coalition of forces, which we see as very important firstly to reach the first objective, and also within itself. This smaller coalition, in addition to opposition to the occupation, Palestinian dimension: not only the demand to withdraw from the occupied territories, but to also to support the Palestinian right to self-determination, solidarity with the Palestinian people, to agitate for recognition of the PLO and so
The third level which is basically our own, is not only based on the question of occupation and the question of solidarity with the Palestinians, but the conception of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence and the very nature of zionism. The nature of zionism as a state which has occupation, and ultimately deportation, as an in-
tegral part of it. But the problem is not only the question of the occupied territories, but the overall conflict between the colonial movement and the national liberation movement, and in this framework — the third — we are not not only in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we are supporting politically and as far as we can also materially, the uprising.
As we said in last year's paper, 'the intifadah is liberating us from occupa" tion' not only in the sense of the territories occupied since '67 but the very determination of the Palestinian people in Palestine. In that framework we raised the slogan of a democratic solution or a democratic state, which we don't counterpose to a withdrawal from the occupied territories but which we pose together. We say 'we want a democratic solution, which is by definition against zionism, against the very structure, the nature of the zionist state'.
A main component of the democratic solution is the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Part of its self-determination is its right to have its own state where it wants. We explain that for us, the demand to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza is not basically different from another demand we use: the demand that the Israeli army withdraw from Palestinian inhabited areas. And we support any demand, and we raise any demand which we think can mobilise people, Palestinians, in order to add democracy and limit the power of zionism, be it to stop deportations, to get the Israeli army out of the towns, to withdraw from the occupied territories, to get zionism out of Palestine completely.
In the past the 'democratic state' slogan was conceived as a historical solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What is becoming more and more apparent now is its aspect as an immediate answer to real problems: that is, from a maximum slogan, it is becoming really a transitional slogan which emerged from the very needs of the population.
The question of secularism, the question of democracy and also the question of the Palestinians within the borders, and the idea of the irreversibility of the occupation: all these things raise the question of Palestine. Not any more a question of territories, but a question of regime and of the future of two peoples under the rule of this regime: the Israelis on the one hand and the three sectors of the Palestinians on the other — the refugees, the Palestinians within Israel's '48 borders and the Palestinians of the occupied territo-
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no7 May/June 1988
COLIN SMITH Cathy Porter, Larissa Reisner: a biography, Virago Pioneers, £5.50, 195pp. LARISSA REISNER was a remarkable woman even for the remarkable times through which she lived. In this country her reputation is obscure, if not nonexistent, but from Cathy Porter's new biography she emerges not only as one of the first and finest of the literary talents born of the Russian revolution but also as a revolutionary, a fighter in the civil war, of exceptional energy, courage and resourcefulness.
She was, in a short life, a bolshevik, the red army's first woman political commissar, a diplomat, an officer for the comintern and itinerent correspondent for various Soviet journals, especially Izvestiya. She died of typhus in 1926, three months short of her 31st birthday.
Her background and • upbringing seems in hindsight to have peculiarly prepared her for her all too brief but brilliant life. Larissa was born with an apt sense of timing on 1 May 1895, the first child of Ekaterina and Mikhail Reisner, well known members of the Russian socialist intelligentsia. The early years of her childhood had the cosmopolitanism of exile as her parents joined the temporary diaspora of socialists escaping the threat of tsarist repression.
Like other daughters of similar background Larissa was brought up to be independent, critical and outspoken. She was encouraged to read voraciously - history, politics, literature and science and trips to the theatre and opera were regular features of her adolescent years. Elegant in her taste, restrained but confident in her manner and with a sharp. witted intelligence she was a product of the pre-revolutionary cultural elite of St Petersburg, albeit of a socialist sort.
February 1917 pitched Larissa from her first love, poetry, into the midst of revolution and in 1918, at the SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no7 May/June 1988
David King collectior age of twenty-two she joined the Bolshevik Party. For the next two years she was in the thick of the fighting against the counter-revolution from Kazan to the Caspian Sea aboard ships of the new red navy, carrying out dangerous reconnaissance missions and giving talks to the soldiers and sailors on literature and revolution in the respites from battle.
She was among the first to write of the civil war, its successes, horrors and heroism. From 1921 to 1923 she lived in Kabul with her husband, Fyodor Raskolnikov, then the Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan, from where she wrote articles on the conditions of Afghan women, the independence struggle of the mountain tribes and the conditions of workers in the factories of Kabul.
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