Counting the cost of Arafat's surrender
Tikva Honig-Parnass from the Alternative Information Centre in Jerusalem and editor of News from Within explains why the Oslo accords are in the interest of Israeli big business, American imperialism and the IMF and World Bank. In the light of the recent signing of the Wye accord, such detailed analyses could not be more timely. This article is based on the presentation given at the Socialist Outlook event, Fighting Neo-Liberalism worldwide in London on November 15
The system of globalisation requires that the political and military structure in the Middle East remains intact to ensure American imperialist controls of oil resources as well as its free access to cheap labour and unlimited possibilities for investments. The Zionist State, since its establishment in 1948 has continued to defend and uphold the imperialist position. Furthermore, together with other non-Arab states from the region, Israel was assigned the role to defend the Arab reactionary regimes (termed by Noam Chomsky as the "local facade") from any uprising by their exploited people.
The local bourgeoisie in the Arab States is an heterogeneous class which ‘ combines pre-capitalist elements with local foreign capital. This feudo-bourgeois class is not capable of existing outside the imperialist framework and is consequently not capable of implementing the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution
Historically the Palestinian question has been a source of instability in the Middle East. The continued Palestinian dispossession by Zionism coupled with their struggle for national rights has maintained a situation where the potential of turning the Arab masses against Imperialism and their exploitative regimes, and thereby raising Arab nationalism, is high.
Hence Imperialism’s support of the Zionist colonialist movements aspirations to establish an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine. This goal was achieved during the 1948 Partition War in which the majority of the Palestinian were expelled from the area designed for the Israeli state and those who remained were dispossessed economically and politically, rendering them second rate citizens in the Zionist-Jewish state.
In the 1967 War, which was aimed at destroying the Egyptian President Nasser’s nationalist project, Israel completed what it had not been able to in 1948 by conquering all of historic Palestine. Israel thus won the status of "strategic asset’ for American imperialism. The US accepted the Israeli Labour Party’s "Alon Plan," which has been directly translated into the Oslo agreements. This plan, which is a version of an apartheid solution, was rejected and contrary to international consensus and UN agreements prior to the Gulf War.
The Intifada, the Palestinian popular uprising, which began in 1987 was directed against both the policy of surrender of the PLO leadership (which despite its official declarations, in fact, accepted the US-Israeli plan) and of course the Israeli occupation. The Intifada demonstrated the permanent threat to the stability of the region and furthermore confirmed to the imperial powers the need to implement the Alon Plan.
The Gulf War of 1991consolidated US hegemony in the Middle East and made possible the enforcement of its plan. The aim of this new agreement was to put an end to the national aspirations of the Palestinian people and to ensure the continuity of Israeli rule in the 1967 occupied territories, with the collaboration of Arafat’s leadership.
Arafat, who succeeded in sabotaging the Intifada was the only potential partner who was willing to integrate into the regional Pax Americana and to accept the Oslo agreement and its apartheid solution. Heading the PLO, which led the national movement, made Arafat capable of committing himself to the humiliating surrender conditions of Oslo, with the temporary support and trust of the Palestinian masses. However, a large portion of the leadership in the PLO as well as its institutions opposed Oslo from the beginning.
The PLO officially recognised the Zionist racist state founded on the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinian people and has thus practically accepted the 1948 Partition and even Zionism. Israel, in turn recognised the PLO, but as an organisation which did not represent the entire Palestinian people. Therefore, the Oslo agreements easily avoided recognising the right of return of the 1948 refugees. Moreover, the PLO has renounced the national struggle by accepting its definition of the national struggle as purely terroristic and has promised to forsake it.
The PLO in fact gave legitimacy to an additional partition of historic Palestine by agreeing to Israel’s pretension to ownership rights on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which have now become "disputed territories." The Israeli withdrawal from these territories has become a matter of give and take in the future final settlement negotiations — which of course will be determined by Israel and the US alone.
However, the territories which are due to be included in the Palestinian self-rule areas will only have limited sovereignty. Symbols of statehood may indeed may be granted to them. However control of borders, foreign relations, security, and natural resources will all remain under Israeli control.
Heading the PLO, which led the national movement, enabled Arafat to commit himself to the humiliating surrender conditions of Oslo
What is perhaps more important is that the territories under Palestinian self-rule are not at all contiguous. Instead, they consist of scores of tiny. isolated, enclaves, disconnected by the Israeli settlements and military checkpoints. The bigger enclaves, which include Gaza, the northern West Bank, the southern West Bank, and Greater Jerusalem are also completely separated from each other. These fragmented pieces which will finally be granted statehood, are presently being turned into a caricature of the South African Bantustans.
The Palestinian Authority’s collaborative self-rule, whose backbone is the repressive and corrupt bourgeois machinery of the Diaspora, is already replacing some of the tasks of the Israeli army in keeping "internal order." In co-operation with the Israeli security forces and the American CIA, any struggle against Oslo and the Israeli occupation will be repressed.
The political and military framework which was delineated by the Oslo agreement in 1993 determined economic agreements, sponsored and controlled by the IMF and the World Bank. These agreements aimed to create a unified and "open" economic system in the Middle East which would strengthen the international machinery of economic exploitation in the region.
The political agreements aim at ‘normalisation" and the lifting of the boycott on Israeli goods. This is a necessary condition for opening the Middle East markets and serves as the "bridge" for the economic penetration of the Arab hinterland for Israel.
In the division of labour designed for the " new Middle East" Israel was to be a regional economic power concentrating on high-tech industry and technically advance knowledge. The Palestinian-Jordanian bourgeoisie were designed to become active agents for this penetration and to collaborate in the exploitation of cheap labour resources ,without the security risks inherent in importing Arab labour to the Israeli territories proper. Indeed it was the Israeli big business which in fact led the "peace" process towards the Oslo agreements, as a necessary step towards privatisation and integration into the globalisation system.
American economist Lester Thurow charted the division of labour designed for the Middle east by the IMF and the economic path Israel ought to take:
" Those not producing oil in the region should be making goods and services for those who sell oil. Israel should bring technology, middle waged industries and organisation abilities to the table. But none of that can happen unless and until the political and military disputes between Israel and the Arab World are settled." (Head to Head, Warner Books, pp 216-7)
The PLO leadership which signed the agreement is but the emanation of the corrupted bourgeois of the bureaucratic apparatus of the PLO in exile and of Palestinian capitalism in the territories, who had no special interests in a national market.
The Oslo agreement which denies any real sovereignty for the Palestinians, has instead designed the framework for the Paris economic agreement to strengthen the status of defender of the 1967 occupied territories on the Israeli economy. The Palestinians will be denied control of their own borders and of their national currency, including the authority to impose their own custom duties along with severe limitations on their independent economic foreign relations. Also, the agreement makes possible the continuity of Israeli theft of the natural resources — mainly land and water.
The principle of free movement of goods and individuals, which is supposed to be the foundation of neo-liberalism, and which of course was adopted in the Paris economic agreement, is unilaterally implemented for the benefit of Israel alone. The newly-developed industrial parks which will be opened to Israeli labour-intensive industries and to Israeli, European, and US investments, will have no connection to the domestic Palestinian economy nor its development.
Having total control over the Palestinian economy, Israel is able to reward its own self-policing partners by granting the Palestinian Authority the monopolies which manage the basic sectors of goods bought from Israeli companies. Thus we are witness to the growth of a corrupted layer whose interest is to keep the repressive and exploitative situation. This layer is there to satisfy the main concern of the IMF and US imperialism; namely stability. However it is ironic that the Oslo surrender agreement and the repressive role of Arafat eliminates any prospects of the very stability which is Oslo’s rationale.
The two main dominating parties in Israel, Labour and Likud, do not differ in their positive position toward neo-liberalism (as well as towards Oslo) Beginning in the late 1980s, the Labour party started privatising the huge public sector by distributing public property to multi-national corporations and wealthy businessmen. During the past two decades, many of the assets of the Histadrut (the only trade union in Israel) were privatised as well. This was part of a policy aimed at destroying the only (if even it is corrupt) organised power representing the Jewish working class , reducing wages and making cuts in social welfare.
Thus when Netanyahu from the Likud came to power in 1996 he in fact inherited from the Labour government an economy which replaced collective bargaining with "personal contracts". without unified trade unions and social services which had been destroyed. More than 15% of labour power is foreign workers brought in by the State to replace the Palestinians from the 1967 occupied territories.
Nonetheless, there remains a rather strong support among both Labour and Likud to continue with certain facets of the welfare state economy. This is a natural desire in a settler society such as Israel in which there is a permanent tension between the Zionist, colonialist ideology and policy on the one hand, and economic liberalism on the other hand.
The consensus around the Zionist ideology as well as the national and religious element of Jewish identity of the state and its citizens is almost total. This creates a strong bias towards social defence. Thus the new aspirations to liberalise the economy are compromised by traditional Zionist beliefs which by definition require the state to play a substantial role in managing the economy.
It is therefore impossible that the liberalisation of the Political/economic basis of Israel can be completed within the Jewish sector to the same brutal and unhuman extent which we witness in other places On the other hand, this full mobilisation and commitment to Zionist ideology which incorporates certain measures of social defence mechanisms one of the central reasons which has traditionally blocked the radicalisation of the Jewish working class.
One of the necessary conditions in the pre-state period for the successful establishment of the Zionist-colonialist project was its capability to prove that it could be an effective servant of imperialism in the Middle East (first with the British and later with the Americans). In turn, the Zionist project was therefore dependent upon the success of harnessing the Jewish proletariat in Palestine to support the aims of Zionism and imperialism in the region.
The Histadrut, and the Zionist "socialist" labour movement which headed it, was the main vehicle used to mobilise the workers to the tasks of colonialisation as well as to pacify their exploitation by emerging capitalism. The Histadrut and the labour movement did not come to Palestine to build a new "socialist" society. They did not for example attack the concept of private property. But they did adopt a discourse of socialism (using their local version of "national socialism") for it served as an effective myth in mobilising the workers behind Zionism.
However, it was the Stalinist Palestinian Communist Party which gave legitimacy to the combination of colonialist politics and socialist language, which characterises the Israeli left. The Communist Party accepted the imperialist partition of Palestine and has presented the 1948 War as a national liberation and anti-imperialist war. The positions of the Communist Party have made difficult the possible disconnection of the youth and the proletarian avant-garde from Zionism and enabled the division of the working class according to nationality
The Arab-Palestinians who remained in their homeland after the 1948 expulsion of approximately 800,000 became Israeli , were dispossessed of their lands and were transformed into labourers for whom the village served as only a place to sleep. The policies of all Israeli governments have prevented the Palestinians from working in major industries, such as energy and arms, due to "security reasons." They have been completely marginalised into the lowest paid jobs with the weakest defence of the Histadrut.
"Left Zionism" was born distorted within the colonialist framework. Nationalists and racists saw themselves as revolutionaries and humanists.
The division of the working class in Israel, according to nationality, is supplemented by an important division between the Jewish wage-labourers. This division runs along the major ethnic cleavages which divides the Israeli Jewish society, namely between the Mizrahim (immigrants from Arab countries and their Israeli-born descendants) and Europeans, the Ashkenazim. The bulk of the Jewish working class, especially in non-managerial positions, whether skilled or not, consists of Jewish Mizrahim.
Their exploitation and discrimination in the economic sphere was accompanied by racist and systematic cultural oppression by the Ashkenazi-European settler elite. Thus, the overlapping of race and class among the Jewish working class has reduced the development of a strong class consciousness, mainly through the prevailing discourse which expresses the Mizrahim oppression in the terms and politics of cultural-identity.
In Israel, the executive business class are mostly Ashkenazi Jews Those who loose the most, in declining order, are the Palestinian labourers from the 1967 occupied territories, the Palestinian minority from inside Israel, and the Mizrahi Jews who have remained since their arrival, trapped in the geographic and economic periphery.
Israeli society is characterised by a high consensus around Zionism. The Left Zionist was born distorted within the colonialist framework. Nationalists and racists see themselves as revolutionaries and humanists, settled on the stolen lands of Palestinians and sang the Internationale. The Zionist left, until now, continues to view Zionism as a national Liberation movement and totally rejects its colonialist nature. Both Left and Right agree in principle on all of the fundamental issues of Zionism: Jewish immigration, "security" and the building of an exclusive Jewish state as well as the Oslo agreements as the just solution to the conflict. This is a `left’ which sees the American imperialists as democratic, human, and just allies.
The Palestinian left is now paying for its terrible mistakes. Arafat sabotaged the Palestinian Intifada and took all measures necessary to re-establish his hegemony over the national movement in Palestine, which had liberated itself from him during the first months of the popular uprising.
The struggle, in all of its various forms, had the potential to prevent the Oslo agreements, which culminated in the defeat of the national struggle against the occupation and the legitimation of the Zionist colonialist state
From this point on, every pursuit of the national struggle will be confronted with the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and its police, who under the guidance of the American CIA and Israeli "security" forces, are becoming a brutal oppressor, not less than the Israeli army it has replaced.
At present the Palestinian people lack any organisation or party which is capable of engaging in a systematic struggle against the imperialistic settlement. The Palestinian defeat, the depth of popular de-mobilisation, and the disarray of the left forces that would have been needed to create the progressive dynamic for this step, is enormous. And of course the relation of forces which have brought the surrender of Oslo have only grown as a result of it.
The past politics of the Palestinian Marxist left (the Popular Front and the Democratic ‘ Front) have led to the disintegration which now exists. They failed to ever differentiate their politics from that of the PLO leadership. That is, to carry on a struggle for a democratic program which centres around a secular and unified Palestine. Nor in the past did these parties condemn the PLO leadership which has forsaken this task and accepted the Palestine partition and the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel The Palestinian left never adopted a policy of class independence and could not adopt a class programme which connected the social, democratic and national demands. In short they acted within the narrow confines of petit-bourgeois nationalism, for sure radically anti-Zionism and anti-imperialist but never anti-capitalist.
Thus, in the post-Oslo era, we are witness to the completion of the imperialist partition policy: Palestinian and Israeli working classes whose leaderships are captive under their own national bourgeois ideologies and policies.
This is an achievement much more significant for the multi-national corporations, the IMF, and the World Bank, since it is a necessary condition for the stability of their direct profits throughout the entire Middle East.