The horrific bombing of Gaza demands a clear response…
End Israeli oppression
WORKERS, FEBRUARY 2009 ISSUE
The horrific attacks on the Palestinian population of Gaza by the Israeli military demand new clear thinking about this 60-year-old problem.
We now have a scenario in which anyone who criticises Israel is branded anti-semitic by the Zionists and anyone who doesn’t shout “We are all Hamas now” is branded as a Zionist by the “left”. Well we are not anti-semitic and neither are we all Hamas now. This kind of logic is the same as calling someone who criticises mass immigration a racist. We are British workers and we have responsibilities to our class but we also have a duty of solidarity to those workers who struggle against the effects of British government policy.
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Demonstrating against the Gaza massacre in London, 10 January. Photo: Cherry Howes |
We should start from the premise that the United Nations made a mistake in 1947 when it decided to partition Palestine, creating two states out of the British mandated colony, one of which would be exclusively for followers of a particular religion most of whom didn’t live there. It did not even bother to consult the people who did live there.
Britain was largely responsible for this decision because our government had promised, through the Balfour Declaration in 1917, a “national home for the Jews in Palestine”. But the British and French governments had simultaneously promised the Hashemite family “lordship” over the region in reward for their support in the imperialist Great War.
To add to this duplicity, the governments in London and Paris, aware that vast oil reserves lay beneath the sands of the Middle East, carved up the remains of the defeated Ottoman Empire into new, weak, semi-colonial states, many headed by feudal rulers who were guaranteed backing so long as the oil flowed.
Divide and rule
The foundation of the Zionist state, though nominally opposed by our government, suited imperialist ambitions very well: it would be a handy agent of imperialism and, above all, would pose the easy issues of Israeli against Palestinian, Jew against Muslim, and enable the real issue of the class struggle by workers throughout the Middle East against the capitalists and feudal lords to be dodged. Their dilemma is really no different from that of the British working class: there is no avoiding class struggle.
So there we have it. Israel was born terrorising its Palestinian population and continues to do so. It has its strong armed forces, funded by the US, and still wants to expand its territory. It should be able to negotiate with Hamas or anyone. It simply chooses not to, and to ignore UN Security Council resolutions or mediation.
Israel has no intention of agreeing to a two-state solution because it wants those borders. Its current method is to continue to build new Jewish settlements and create facts on the ground. They’ve probably written off Gaza and so are happy to blockade it and turn it into something comparable to the Warsaw ghetto, despite the fact that under international law, Israel has responsibility for the welfare of the people living under its occupation.
What of the Palestinians? Most of those driven off their land were forced to seek refuge in neighbouring countries. More were driven out in the 1967 war, some for the second time. The refugees organised themselves in the camps and demanded the right to go home to their land, and many still have the deeds to the land. They are not like those “refugees” who travel half way round the world to settle in Britain or some other wealthy country. They do not disappear into some foreign city’s black economy. They are an honourable people. Every child knows the name of the village that their family was evicted from at bayonet point.
The Palestinians living in the West Bank have been reduced to hopelessness. Israeli checkpoints prevent their travel, unemployment is sky high, Israeli settlers divert their water supply from their farms, their olive trees are uprooted and their houses demolished as punishment, their organisations, especially trade unions, have been destroyed and the people have been dehumanised. They wonder what the point of the struggle is given the scale of Israeli retribution. They are shot, their houses broken into and they are being surrounded by a wall, which is also taking more of their land away.
After the elections in Gaza, Hamas MPs were jailed and Gaza blockaded by Israel, with US support. They were then told that Israel and the US would only negotiate with friendly Palestinians and not with their enemies. In Gaza life is hell, like living under a medieval siege amid the rubble.
Israel has washed its hands of Gaza but has locked the Palestinians who live there in a dungeon. There is little sewage treatment, no electricity (Israel bombed the power station), and the rest of the world can only feed, clothe and provide medicines to its people at the whim of the Israeli military. They are bombed and shelled and massacred again in their hundreds. Small wonder there is increased religious fantasy, doubtless a source of delight for the Israeli government.
Resistance and oppression
Gazan resistance is ineffective except in bringing more intense oppression, while the West Bank has only its hope for the two-state solution, feeling that Gaza and the West Bank will never be allowed to form an effective state.
Israel is wholly dependent upon US aid for its survival, let alone its military adventures. The US could stop this conflict at once, but finds it too useful as a method of keeping the whole region backward and compliant as a source of oil. It remains to be seen if the new Obama administration will continue this divisive and destructive policy. The UN must find ways to exert more pressure upon it to change. Only then will Israel cease to show such utter contempt for the UN demonstrated by its shelling of UN schools and supply depots in Gaza.
If Israel does not agree to a two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders and return of refugees in good time, the concept might be abandoned. The UN, which created the problem in the first place, should take responsibility and uphold the secular demands of the Palestinians.
The Palestinian Liberation Organisation, led by Yasser Arafat, was a secular movement, formed to fight for the interests of all Palestinians regardless of religion. Now that struggle has split, into the still secular Fatah and Hamas, a narrowly Islamic organisation, weakening the potential for change.
But sooner or later, the solution will have to be a secular one – for all sides.