On 23 September 2011, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas submitted the widely-heralded application for full Palestinian statehood to the UN, defying months of diplomatic pressure from the US and European imperialist powers. Earlier, US President Obama criticised the initiative, declaring ‘peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations’. The PLO has placed Obama and US imperialism in an almost impossible position: in opposing the Palestinian bid, the US’s talk of supporting the ‘Arab Spring’ and democratic change in the region is shown to be empty rhetoric. If the US uses its Security Council veto, it will be the 41st time it has done so in support of Israel since 1967. Bob Shepherd reports.
The US is against the initiative because if it were successful it would open up Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to international law and potentially undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli state. US imperialism cannot allow this as its continued hegemony in the region depends upon maintaining Israel as a stable military asset. The revolutionary movements that have erupted across the Middle East and North Africa, particularly in Egypt with the overthrow of President Mubarak, have underlined the importance of Israel for imperialism, and the imperialist powers are now very nervous about the direction of events in the region.
For Abbas and Fatah the decision to go to the UN is in effect the last throw of the dice. Their strategy of ‘peace talks’ and negotiations following the Oslo Accords in 1993 has been a disaster for the Palestinian masses and a growing humiliation for its leaders. No matter what concessions Abbas and Fatah have made to Israel, the Zionists have come back demanding more, all the time advancing settlement construction across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Abbas is using the statehood initiative at the UN as a lever to force the US and Israel into further peace talks and to get settlement construction halted.
In the run-up to the UN Assembly application, the Israeli military issued stun grenades and tear gas to the already heavily-armed settlers in the West Bank. There was a wave of terrorist attacks by settlers on Palestinian villagers, their crops, land and places of worship. 500 olive and other fruit trees were cut down with chain saws in the village of Deir Estia, agricultural land was set on fire near Jeet village, cars were burned in the village of Beit Furik and a mosque was set on fire in Qusra. The settlers are planning for what they call ‘Sovereignty Marches’. Settler leader Itamar Ben-Gvir has said that ‘the settlers will be taking to the streets to show the Palestinians who really owns this land’.
However, Fatah’s strategy was decided unilaterally, and it has divided opinion both within Palestine and throughout the Palestinian diaspora. The groups that have supported the Fatah stand are all part of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and include the leftist organisations – the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Palestinian People’s Party. A leader of the PFLP explained that ‘we support the Palestinian leadership’s plan to go to the UN because that is a natural right of the Palestinians and part of the political battle against Israeli occupation’.
Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad oppose the initiative, as well as grassroots campaigns in the West Bank that are engaged in direct action against the construction of the Apartheid Wall and other aspects of the Israeli occupation. Hamas and Islamic Jihad say that statehood cannot come while the occupation continues. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said hours before Abbas submitted the application that ‘Our Palestinian people do not beg for a state… States are not built upon UN resolutions. States liberate their land and establish their entities’. The organisations also condemned Abbas and Fatah for the way the decision was made: there was no discussion with any other political group. Islamic Jihad’s spokesman said ‘This move needs to be studied to make sure it will not ignore major issues such as the right of return’. The grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign made a similar point about lack of democracy and openness in a statement released on 7 September:
‘At two weeks from the crucial date of 21 September still no one knows what the text and details of the proposed initiative at the UN are. As many Palestinian organisations, intellectuals and activists have stated, we will not and cannot support an initiative the content of which we do not know. The core of the issue is the fact that our leadership has moved this initiative forward without any open discussion about it and now wants the Palestinian people to blindly support it.’
They place Abbas and Fatah’s initiative in the context of a long line of defeats engineered by the politicians who supported the Oslo Accords in 1993:
‘Today, the peace process and the associated negotiations are almost unanimously considered a failure, an instrument at the hands of Israel to continue the colonisation of our land, the theft of our resources, and the displacement of our people. On top of it, the Oslo process was a circus mirror depicting occupation and apartheid as peace and understanding. However, the same people responsible for the two decades of failed peace process ask us now once again to trust another initiative, the risks and content of which is still kept away from the public.’
The fact that the Palestinian movement is divided on the statehood initiative does not diminish its political importance. It has completely exposed the weakness of US imperialism. Despite its wish to see a settlement, Obama has been unable to push the Netanyahu government in Israel into any negotiations. The shifting balance of forces is exemplified by a public warning from Prince Turki Al Faisal, a leading member of the Saudi royal family and a former intelligence chief, that the US risks losing an ally if it vetoes the Palestinian bid. The Saudi stance follows the rupture in relations between Turkey and Israel after the latter refused to apologise for the murder of nine Turkish activists on the Mavi Marmara in May 2010. Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan has denounced Israel as ‘the West’s spoilt child’, warned that it must ‘pay for its aggression and crimes’ and declared that supporting the Palestinian bid was an obligation. Meanwhile Egypt’s Prime Minister, Dr Essam Sharaf, has said that the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was ‘not a holy book’. Elsewhere, the countries of Latin America which make up ALBA, including Cuba and Venezuela, have declared their support for Palestinian statehood, and the PLO claims the support of at least 130 countries.
In this context it is clear that we in Britain must oppose any attempt by the British government or any of the imperialist powers on the UN Security Council to veto the motion for Palestinian statehood.
While the PLO was pursuing its statehood initiative in the UN, its International Relations Department issued a report which pointed to the real issue, Israel’s continued colonial settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In August, according to the report, Israel approved the building of 3,050 new housing units in the West Bank, including 2,780 new units in East Jerusalem. Then, on 20 September, the first meeting of Israel’s new National Housing Committee approved plans to build a further 900 settlement units in existing settlements in Jerusalem. The Israeli government established this National Housing Committee in response to mass demonstrations across Israel protesting over the shortage of housing and the rising cost of living. By excluding the issue of Palestine and the occupation from their concerns, the organisers of these demonstrations have allowed the Israeli government to present the expansion of colonial settlements in Jerusalem as an answer to the housing problem.
Our position as communists is clear: we support the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people. Whatever the outcome of any UN vote, it will not affect our task here in Britain: to build a militant boycott movement on the streets calling for an end to British imperialist support for Israel, the isolation of the racist Zionist Israeli state and an end to the occupation.
Israeli embassies attacked in Jordan and Cairo
The revolutionary movement in Egypt is keeping the pressure up on the military government that has taken over from President Mubarak with continual strikes and demonstrations. On Friday 9 September around 100,000 demonstrators thronged Tahrir Square in Cairo calling for the revolution to ‘return to course’ and condemning the regime for banning strikes and sit-ins.
The Egyptian movement contains an anti-imperialist current which is deeply opposed to Egypt’s ties with Israel, and from 18 August there were continuous protests outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo, demanding the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, after Zionist forces killed six Egyptian soldiers on the Sinai border. As the 9 September demonstration broke up, thousands of people moved to the Israeli embassy and attacked and demolished a wall that Egypt’s security forces had built to protect it. Hundreds of demonstrators then invaded the embassy, throwing documents out of windows and trapping some embassy staff in their ‘secure room’. It took the combined efforts of Israel, the US and Egyptian Special Forces to rescue the embassy staff and to get them out of the country: the embassy staff contacted the Israeli government, the Israeli government contacted the US government, which then told the Egyptian military to organise a rescue. During the Egyptian Special Forces assault, three demonstrators were killed and around 1,000 injured.
Since the ransacking of the embassy, nearly 150 people have been arrested as the regime cracks down on protests that threaten its relationship with the US. Nearly all the political groups and parties that are involved in the ‘Arab Spring’ revolution have condemned the demonstrators’ actions and the so-called violence involved, describing them as alien to the spirit of the struggle that deposed Mubarak. This response highlights the middle class politics of these organisations, which are more interested in coming to an accommodation with imperialism than in siding with the anti-imperialist sentiments of the Egyptian working class.
Regardless of this, the ‘Arab Spring’ has unleashed forces of the working class and poor across the region which want real change and an end to their humiliating subservience to the interests of US imperialism and Israel. Israel’s position in the Middle East will become more and more isolated as the revolutionary process deepens. An indication of this came on 14 September when Israel spirited its ambassador and his staff out of Jordan in anticipation of a large demonstration the following day at the Israeli Embassy in the capital Amman. The next day, hundreds of demonstrators, faced by 1,500 riot police, demonstrated outside the embassy and demanded that Jordan expel the Israeli ambassador, close the embassy and end the 1994 peace treaty.
Bob Shepherd
FRFI 223 October/November 2011
