Roland Rance charts the bloody legacy of Zionism from its inception a century ago. A HUNDRED years ago, in August 1897, 200 Jewish dignitaries gathered in Basle, at the invitation of the Viennese journalist and would-be playwright Theodor Herzl, for the first Zionist Congress.
This meeting adopted the plan put forward by Herzl two years earlier, in his essay "The Jewish State', for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and created the Zionist bodies dedicated towards this end.
Herzl had already outlined the major characteristics of the conflict between the Zionist movement and the Palestinian people, which has continued for the past century: expulsion of the Palestinians ("We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border") and alliance with imperialism ("We should form a part of a wall of defence for Europe, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism").
The centenary of the Zionist movement is only one of the critical anniversaries being marked this year in Palestine. November marks the eightieth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, in which the British government promised "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people"
As British Foreign Secretary Balfour noted: "in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. .. The four great powers are committed to Zionism".
November also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations partition resolution of 1947. Following the collapse of the British mandate after World War Two, and the transfer of Zionist allegiance from British to US imperialism, the UN voted to carve up Palestine into several small entities, which would form separate Jewish and Arab states.
This decision ignored the fact that Palestinians were a large majority of the population, and even in the area allocated for the Jewish state more than half the population was non-Jewish. In the area allocated for the Arab state, only 1 per cent of the population was Jewish.
In the subsequent war, the new state of Israel expanded far beyond the borders determined by the UN, and expelled about 800,000 Palestinians from their homes and land.
Refugee camps
Fifty years on, these people and their descendants still live in refugee camps, the slums and the shanty towns of the Middle East. In the Israeli state, discriminatory laws were used to steal the land of Palestinian refugees.
Twenty years later, in June 1967, Israel again attacked the Arab states, occupying the remainder of Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Golan Heights. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were once more forced to flee. Others remained in the towns, villages and refugee camps of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in East Jerusalem, which was illegally annexed to the state of Israel.
For the past thirty years, the residents of the Occupied Territories have lived under harsh military law, while their land has been taken over for exclusive Jewish settlement. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers now live in the Occupied Territories; over half of the land area is now officially set aside for exclusively Jewish use.
A system of social, economic, political and legal separation between Jews and non-Jews has been implemented in the areas occupied by Israel in 1967. In effect, Israel has introduced apartheid in these areas. Israeli settlements - in reality, towns with populations of tens of thousands - occupy most of the hilltops, dominating the Palestinian towns and villages in the valleys. The theft of Palestinian land has turned many peasants into wage labour dependent on the Israeli economy.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation, which was established in the early 1960s by the Arab states, had some successful confrontations with the Israeli army, particularly after it was taken over by Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement in 1965. Notably, the battle of Karameh in 1969 demonstrated that Israel was now faced with a new and potentially more threatening foe.
With its slogan of until victory", and its support for guerrilla movements around the world, the PLO offered leadership to the dispersed Palestinian people. Within a short period, it had became the almost unchallenged leader of the Palestinian struggle From the early 1970s, under pressure from its left components, the PLO amended its original nationalist charter and began to call for the establishment in Palestine of a democratic secular state. This call, which replaced the original demand for the establishment of an Arab state in the whole of Palestine, had the potential of attracting support from Israeli revolutionaries.
And indeed some of them did respond positively. Small groups of Israeli activists began to meet clandestinely with Palestinians; some even attempted to establish an Israeli section of the PLO. For twenty years, all such meetings - even open political or academic discussions - were illegal, and many Israelis served prison sentences for "contact with a forbidden group".
The PLO was strongly based in the refugee camps of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where it established and ran education, health and welfare projects as well as organising the political and military struggle against Israel.
However, its radical rhetoric, and the aggressive response of Israel to PLO bases in neighbouring states, brought the organisation into conflict with the governments of Jordan in 1970, and Lebanon in 1982.
Government in exile Thousands of Palestinian activists were eventually removed to Tunisia, several hundreds of miles from Palestine, from where the PLO increasingly acted as a state and government in exile, rather than as a revolutionary liberation movement.
Following the Lebanon war, a reassessment inside the PLO of its military and political strategy ultimately led to a civil war in the camps in Lebanon. The debate, however, was posed in mistaken terms. The PLO leadership posed a "political" strategy, which was in effect an appeal to the UN and world governments to put pressure on Israel to make concessions towards the PLO.
The dissidents opposed this with a "military" strategy based on an incorrect assessment of the lessons of the Lebanon war, and an attempt to build up a Palestinian regular army to confront the Israeli army. Neither side put forward a strategy of mass struggle, whether political or military, which alone would be able to challenge Israeli hegemony.
A strategy of mass struggle did, however, develop in the Occupied Territories, where the Palestinians had been building up independent national bodies despite the restrictions imposed by Israeli rule. After 1967, there were several waves of rebellion, notably in 1982 before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
By far the most important of these was the Intifada, which started in December 1987 and for a while seemed to threaten the continuation of Zionist rule in the whole of Palestine. The Intifada was conducted and led by Palestinians under Israeli rule. Although it proclaimed allegiance to the PLO, it was not (despite the claims of the Israeli government) controlled from Tunisia. Indeed, the slogan of the Palestinian youth confronting the Israeli army was not "We support the PLO", but "We are the PLO".
The Intifada established the Unified National Leadership, which bought together representatives of all the political currents in the Occupied Territories.
The Intifada challenged more than Israel's continued rule in the Occupied Territories. It offered a model for struggle elsewhere in the Arab world, and it posed an alternative leadership for the Palestinian struggle. The PLO in exile attempted to assert its authority over the mass popular uprising, but was severely weakened by its support for Iraq during the Gulf War.
This triple challenge, to Israel, the Arab regimes and the PLO leadership, created in effect a common interest between all three, which was eventually to lead to the 1991 Madrid conference and the 1993 Oslo agreement.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the cynical pragmatist, understood that Israel's continued domination over the whole of Palestine would be better assured through a client Palestinian authority than through direct rule.
Despite Rabin's assassination by a right-wing religious Zionist, and the return to power of a Likud government under Binyamin Netanyahu, this remains the guiding principle of Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories.
Symbolic "rule"
Israeli troops have been withdrawn from most towns, though the army has drawn up contingency plans for their re-occupation. A symbolic Palestinian 'rule' has been established over these towns -which cover less than 3 per cent of the area of the Occupied Territories.
The Palestinian authority indeed governs without courts and civil rights; over a dozen Palestinians have been tortured to death in Arafat's prisons, strike leaders have been arrested, freedom of publication restricted (with the books of Palestinian academic Edward Said being banned). These enclaves are separated by Israeli settlements and roads, creating a patchwork reminiscent of South Africa's Bantustan policy.
Most Palestinians are denied entry into Israel. Their place in the Israeli economy has been taken by hundreds of thousands of foreign workers brought in from Romania, Taiwan, Thailand and other impoverished countries. Land theft and house demolitions continue on a huge scale, in order to enable the expansion of Israeli settlements.
Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the Islamic movements are able to recruit suicide bombers to attack Israeli civilian targets. Even some Israelis understand this. After the last such attack in Jerusalem, the mother of a four-year-old victim blamed the Israeli government for her daughter's death. This is unprecedented in Israeli politics, and shows the deepening divisions in society.
New war?
While the government seems to be preparing for war - with Syria, with Hizbollah in Lebanon, or in the West Bank and Gaza - it can no longer count on the unquestioning support of the majority of its own population. Such a war, if it does come, will be extremely bloody, with huge civilian casualties on both sides. However, despite the growing urgency, any left critique and programme is sadly lacking.
In both Israeli and Palestinian society, the revolutionary groups are dormant, split, ineffective, and in despair. The peace movement still persists with its demand for "Two states for two peoples", although the developing situation renders this demand even more unrealistic than before.
Only a perspective which opposes the carve-up of Palestine, the partition of the Palestinian people and the separation of the peoples of Palestine can offer a way out of the current spiral of violence. The balance of forces means that the battle for socialism seems a long and arduous task - but one which must be waged if the whole region is not to descend into barbarism.