Michel Warshawsky, director of the Alternative Information Centre (AIC)
was freed after four months in prison. Sophie
Massourl Interviewed him by telephone on November
29, 1990. W HAT were the conditions of your detention and liberation? I was relatively welltreated. I had a certain freedom of movement and my conditions of detention were the best possible. Although I did not have any contact with other political prisoners, my relations with the common law prisoners were quite good. This was due to the literacy courses that I gave in the prison and because I was editor of the prison journal.
The Shin Beth (Israeli secret services) tried to make things more difficult for me. My first permission to go out only arrived a week before my conditional parole, and they tried to prevent the reduction in my sentence. In the end, I got out quite fast [Warshawsky was originally sentenced to 30 months in prison]. I am now on parole and my activities are under surveillance. • Israel is directly interested in the Gulf conflict. After the massacre in Jerusalem (see IV 193) has there been increased violence towards the Palestinians?
There can be no doubt today that all the Israeli leaders want war. They hope that this will unblock the internal situation in Israel and solve the Palestinian problem. They are doing everything possible to, at one and the same time, prepare public opinion for war and its consequences, and to urge the US to "behave like men" and teach Saddam Hussein a lesson.
But the battle for the Constituent Assembly, whatever its limits, continues, even if, given the electoral results, it is not clear who will lead this struggle.
Navarro Wolf, the M-19 leader and formerly Gaviria's Health Minister, now elected deputy, will surely not be a part of this struggle; it is no longer part of his political project, although this does not mean that he is safe. Serious threats to his life are being made, since, despite his conciliatory positions, he is not a recognized part of the bourgeois two-party game.
COLOMBIA / ISRAELI STATE
The idea that the international confrontation can resolve Israeli internal problems is not the sole property of the leaders, it is also shared by a large part of the media and press. • What has been the general reaction of the public?
One could say that on the whole people are keyed up for war. They are waiting anxiously of course, but it is a contradictory thing, because they are also impatient.
The general trend of public opinion is a melange of fear of the coming conflict which may be very costly, with, at the same time, the impression that, if all goes well, this will be the moment to deal with the Palestinians. People like Sharon and Shamir express the feelings of a big majority of public opinion that a solution to the Palestinian question is on the cards. • What has been the reaction of the population in the occupied territories?
Confronted with the hardening of Israeli policy, in the absence of any obvious way out, and in the new situation opened by the conflict between Iraq and the West, there is a also a hardening of attitudes on the West Bank and in Gaza. This is more a popular feeling than a clearly harder political line.
This is expressed by violent individual acts for example, and also by some leaders making more intransigent statements than they would have done six months ago. • What about the Israeli left?
For the first time in a long while, the Israeli left is divided. What one might call the broad pacifist movement, which includes a moderate Zionist wing, has split into two.
One part has come over to complete identification with the "sacred union" , and has made it clear that they have separated from the Palestinians, telling them: "now you have supported Saddam Hussein, we have unmasked your bad faith and your real intentions."
This position is a step back for the progressive forces in Israel and has provoked divisions in the moderate left. The shock has hit the Civil Rights Movement, where there are two contradictory positions, the Left Zionist organization, Mapam, its youth organization and "Peace Now"
, whose spokespersons have adopted opposed positions. • What do you intend to do now?
I am hoping to resume my work for the Alternative Information Centre, which I have been unable to do since the beginning of my case, four years ago. But I am now also rather concerned about the penal world and I have decided to try to take part in work concerning common law prisoners, to maintain contact with the prison through publications, cultural activities 19 and so on.
WESTERN EUROPE T he British case is perhaps the most spectacular, given the radical positions taken by Thatcher. But in other countries, the traditional right has divided over the European question. Moreover, the inability of some right-wing parties to respond positively to this challenge has given the social democrats an open field to present themselves as the only coherent European political force.
Nonetheless, it should be noted that the situation differs very much from country to country. The German right, for example, has obviously not dragged its feet in playing the game of European unification. In other words, the European "rights" are responding differently to this challenge in accordance with the pressures put on them by various sections of the capitalist class.
In some countries, where the 1992 Single Market will force an abrupt reorganization of the economic fabric by removing all protectionism and eliminating obsta cles to foreign competition, sections of the traditional right are taking the risk of advancing increasingly systematic criticism of the scheme of economic and monetary union. This is not easy for them, inasmuch as they have to reconcile the interests of part of their electorate with those of big industry and banking.
Right wing parties play double game
None of these parties can easily give up their relationship with small and middle-sized enterprises or a section of the petty-bourgeois voters who are frightened by the European future. So, they have to play a double game, and find a scapegoat by putting all the blame on the Brussels bureaucracy and the European Commission for problems that they claim are arising from too rapid economic unification. This is the classical denunciation of "Euro-statism." But it makes impossible any bloc of the right-wing parties in the Strasbourg European parliament, and this accentuates the new role of the social democrats as offering more up-to-date answers to capitalist needs.
What very much worries people like Thatcher in Britain or Chirac in France is the new relationship that all this involves between the "national" state and EEC institutions. Over and above the reactionary stupidities of the former British premier, there is in fact a contradiction today between the national authorities and the supranational ones. And this puts a big question mark over the future of the European project.
The problem is indeed one of the legitimacy of the state and its intervention in regulating social relations. The multiplication of decisions, measures and regulations now proclaimed as coming from "Brussels" is tending to undermine some 20 "social consensuses" that have been built on the acceptance of "national" instituInternational Viewpoint #197 • December 24,