ENDLESS WAR MEETS INTIFADA: UPRISING REVEALS THE FLAWS IN BUSH PLAN TO DOMINATE THE WORLD
By Fred Goldstein
"Operation Protective Wall"--the terrible military offensive being waged by the Israeli occupation army against the heroic Palestinian resistance in the major population centers of the West Bank--is meant to be the final, intensive, all-out phase of a prolonged, incremental military campaign to crush the liberation movement that began in the winter of 2000.
This bloody offensive, with its virtual imprisonment of President Yasser Arafat, comes as the extremist, counter- revolutionary regime of Ariel Sharon and his Likud Party, to which the Labor Party is chained, rides a wave of support from the Bush administration in its post-Sept. 11 phase of imperialist military expansionism.
On the part of U.S. imperialism, this offensive is an arrogant attempt to secure and stabilize once and for all its only truly reliable base in the Middle East--an objective no U.S. imperialist administration has been able to accomplish since Washington played the decisive role in establishing and supporting the colonialist settler state of Israel in 1948.
For Sharon and the Israeli ruling class, it is an attempt to destroy all elements of armed resistance and political authority--the germs of true statehood--achieved by the Palestinian struggle.
Israel is Washington's only truly reliable base in the Middle East because it is tied by its umbilical cord to U.S. and Western imperialism. It was founded and shaped by reactionary bourgeois leaders from the U.S. and Central and Eastern Europe. These leaders explicitly gained the support of imperialism by openly proclaiming their intention to be an outpost of the West.
In pursuit of the establishment of the Zionist state, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weitzman and David Ben-Gurion over the years appealed to the German Kaiser, the Turkish empire, the British Colonial Office and finally to the rising star of U.S. imperialism for support. They appealed to everyone but the inhabitants, the Palestinians.
A FUNDAMENTAL CONTRADICTION
Since the mass expulsion of the Palestinians by force and terror in 1948, the destruction of homes and villages, the expropriation of lands by the settlers, and the establishment of the colonialist, privileged position of Israel in the Middle East, U.S. imperialism has been wracked by an overriding contradiction. Its greatest military asset in the region was also its greatest political liability in the Arab world. This is the fundamental contradiction that the Bush administration is trying to solve.
This contradiction was immeasurably multiplied by the 1967 war in which the Israelis, with U.S. backing, occupied the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, creating a second generation of refugees throughout the Arab world who were fleeing occupation. Military rule was instituted over an additional 1 million Arab people.
The consolidation and expansion of the Israeli regime were carried out under the cover of the Cold War. Only massive backing by Wall Street and the Pentagon was able to sustain Tel Aviv because this brand-new, brutal colonial state was forcibly established against the background of the rising worldwide tide of anti-colonialism.
The British were being pushed out of India, the French were being driven out of Algeria, the Dutch out of Indonesia. The Chinese Revolution liberated one quarter of humanity. The Vietnamese and Korean revolutions were on the march. Sub- Saharan Africa was rebelling, from Kenya to Ghana to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to South Africa. The Cuban Revolution soon exploded just 90 miles from the shores of the U.S. And all the while, an atrocious colonial crime of wholesale expulsion and occupation was going on right in front of the eyes of the Arab world.
Imperialism made sure to secure its base by seeing that, in addition to billions in arms, sufficient financial support flowed in to maintain a privileged position for the Israeli population as a whole relative to the Arab peoples.
But the general rise of the socialist camp and the advance of the anti-imperialist struggle worldwide--especially the toppling of the colonial, feudal monarchy in Egypt, followed by the Iraqi and Algerian revolutions and struggles in Libya, Yemen and elsewhere--ultimately created an international environment of support for the Palestinian masses. They were able to start a struggle against the occupation, particularly after the 1967 June war.
A FORCE OF LAST RESORT
Thus, since 1948 imperialism has relied on the Israelis as the force of last resort whenever a crisis was brewing. The Israeli regime invaded Egypt in 1956 when the government of Abdul Nasser nationalized the British-owned Suez Canal. The 1967 war was a preemptive strike against a growing nationalist movement in Syria and in general against the rising tide of militancy in the Arab world, which was a threat to the oil monopolies and the Pentagon.
The $100 billion given to the Israeli government since 1967 has been meant to keep the 300 million Arab people in check. It threatens their regimes, which in turn hold the people back from challenging imperialism.
Washington can regard no Arab king or prince, sultan or emir- -no matter how rich, no matter how tied to the oil companies and bankers of imperialism--as safe. They rule over super- exploited oppressed peoples, impoverished by the multinational corporations. Their regimes are inherently unstable. As opposed to this, the Israeli state is not only tied to imperialism militarily, financially and politically, but is based upon a privileged position in the Middle East and is an oppressor nation.
The Palestinian resistance represents for the Arab people in general their own aspirations to finally be free of oppression in the form of neocolonialism. The Israeli settler state represents the tortured colonial past of the masses as a whole. Every act of aggression and repression by Tel Aviv, which is armed to the teeth with U.S. planes, helicopters, missiles, bullets, communications technology, and so on, is regarded as an act of colonial bullying and terror. And it is totally associated with Washington.
It is not out of love for the Jewish people that the anti- Semitic U.S. ruling class has nurtured the Israeli ruling class for decades. It is pure class interest of the oil billionaires and the Pentagon that defends them and is intertwined with them.
But this support has come up against Palestinian resistance year after year, since the founding of Israel. And with each generation it has grown stronger. With each new round of struggle, the hatred of Washington in the Arab world grows deeper and wider. So long as the Palestinians resist, U.S. imperialism and its Israeli clients will always be on the defensive, living in fear of their futures in the Middle East.
ATTEMPT TO LIQUIDATE MOVEMENT
In the period of general reaction since the collapse of the USSR and the decline in the worldwide struggle, the U.S. military and foreign policy establishment decided that the situation was finally favorable for them to try to contain, if not liquidate, the Palestinian national movement.
They supported the Israeli attempt to crush the first Intifada. In that four-year-long national uprising from 1987 to 1991, some 2,000 Palestinians were killed and 117,000 wounded. But they could not defeat it. Washington and Tel Aviv were forced to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization after 20 years of struggle.
The first Bush administration and then the Clinton administration tried, by dragging out the Oslo "peace process" for seven more years, to take from the Palestinians the victory they had won on the battlefield. They were trying to impose a Bantustan settlement upon the Palestinians whereby their territories would be carved up into 200 enclaves; their air space, water supply, travel, and so on would be controlled by the Israeli government. A few thousand settlers would get the lion's share of the resources while roads on which only Israelis could travel would divide up the Palestinian territory.
When this form of liquidation failed, Ariel Sharon made his infamous armed march with 2,000 soldiers on the al-Haram al- Sharif mosque, setting off the second Intifada in September 2000. This Intifada was met with the utmost brutality by the Israelis. U.S. imperialism was faced once again with its perennial contradiction in the Arab world: Its closest ally, by once again trying to destroy the Palestinian resistance with U.S. military support, was reviving anti-U.S. sentiment throughout the Arab world. Furthermore, the Palestinians were dealing more and more damaging blows to the Israelis.
Then came Sept. 11 and the decision by the Bush administration to launch an all-out, worldwide offensive against any and all regimes that stood in the way of the total domination of the globe by Washington, Wall Street and the Pentagon.
Yet even as the Pentagon was busy incinerating people with megabombs in Afghanistan, the Palestinian people would not curb their struggle against the onerous 53-year occupation, despite the Apache helicopters, F-16s, U.S.-made tanks, assassinations, murder of civilians, destruction of buildings and olive trees, blockades, intimidation at military checkpoints, and all the features of the Israeli regime's campaign.
Now the Bush administration has decided that, after 53 years, it will put an end to the ugly contradiction of having to try to placate the Arab masses by maneuvering with the Palestinian leadership while giving military support to the repressive Israeli settler regime. The Bush-Cheney- Rumsfeld solution, being loyally peddled to the international community by Colin Powell, is to go all out to subdue the Palestinians, using the instrument of the racist, genocidal butcher Ariel Sharon.
Politically, the Bush method is to equate the self- sacrificing resistance of the Palestinian struggle with the horrific Sept. 11 bombings in the U.S. by calling Sharon's offensive part of the "war against terrorism." The adminis tration feels this is its political strong point.
But there is a vast difference. One channels self-sacrifice into a conspiracy to harass imperialism through an underground network that is devoid of any progressive ideology. The other is a genuine ly popular, many-faceted, all-encompassing liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. The differences are obvious, and no one in the Arab world or the oppressed anywhere will be taken in by Bush's strategy, as the mass demonstrations supporting the Palestinians show.
A WHIRLWIND OF RESISTANCE
Such a policy will never work. The demonstrations on the streets of Cairo, Amman, Damascus, and all over the Arab world have already shown that Washington will ultimately reap the whirlwind of resistance should it continue to pursue this course.
The determined campaign of suicide resistance bombings shows the determination to end the occupation has taken such deep root among the people, young and old, women, children and men, that after 35 years there is no way to eradicate the struggle.
Given the depth of this resistance, the long-term contradiction of the Israelis is insoluble. They cannot sustain an occupation and they cannot withdraw. Their settler state will be in permanent crisis until the Jewish people change their leadership, break with Washington, and come to terms with the right of the Palestinians to self- determination.
Right now, however, the Palestinians are suffering heavy blows. And 99 percent of their problem originates in Washington. The U.S. has given the Israelis more arms than all its other client regimes in the world combined. Yet when one shipload of arms is discovered on its way to Palestine, Bush has the audacity to consider this a high crime.
For the imperialists, any attempt by an oppressed people to arm themselves against their oppressor is a crime. But it is perfectly within reason for the oppressors to arm themselves to the teeth.
This is what the movement in this country must address. The Palestinian people are waging a heroic struggle against unbelievable odds. The movement in this country must do everything in its power to change those odds in favor of the oppressed by fighting to close the Pentagon pipeline to the war criminals in Tel Aviv.
International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: mailto:iacenter@action-mail.org
En Espanol: iac-cai@action-mail.org
Web: http://www.iacenter.org
Support Mumia Abu-Jamal: http://www.millions4mumia.org/
phone: 212 633-6646
fax: 212 633-2889
Make a donation to the IAC and its projects
The International Action Center
Home ActionAlerts Press
Share this page with a friend