A new phase in the struggle WALID Salem is both a Palestinian academic living in East Jerusalem, and a political activist in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. He has been arrested several times for the role he played in the leadership of the intifada, and was accused of being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Early this year he was released from his latest detention - 18 months in the Negev prison, built by Israel after the outbreak of the intifada and considered to be the toughest of all the detention centres. We asked him for the opinions of the Palestinian left. In future issues we will return to the debate in the Palestinian left, particularly in relation to the question of alliances with the Islamic national problem, with a national movement, requiring a national solution. Instead - and this was the framework defined at the Madrid negotiations — Israel was ready to negotiate with a representation, even a genuine and national one, of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories.
There are two possible readings of Israel's recognition of the PLO. Either Israel had to accept the fact that it was impossible to solve the problem of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories outside the framework of the PLO, without the Palestinian leadership itself taking up the matter. This would represent a big victory.
The other possibility is that Israel finally obtained what it wanted from the PLO, transforming it from a Palestinian national movement into a leadership of the Occupied Territories. This is how Fatah and PLO dissidents read what is happened. In these ranks can be counted founding members of Fatah such as Hani El Hassan and Khaled El Hassan, Mahmoud Derwish and the former PLO ambassador to Beirut, Shafik El Hout.
According to them, after the Oslo compromise, the PLO no longer represents all Palestinians but only the Occupied Territories. If this is true, it represents a tremendous setback. For Palestinians on the outside, this would constitute a real danger of the "Kurdisation" of the Palestinian question, and the dismantling of a national question into a number of local questions: the problem of the Palestinians of Jordan, those of Lebanon, and so forth.
I don't think that matters are fully settled. But there is a real danger, which would have historic significance. For the Palestinians of the diaspora — the majority of the Palestinian people — this would be a massive setback. * fundamentalist current. INTERVIEW — 21 October 1993
UPPORTERS of the S
Gaza-Jericho accords often point to the unfavourable relationship of forces for the Palestinians. Do you think these accords were inevitable?
The PLO president Yasser Arafat contends that the Madrid process was inescapable. The reasons were, on the one hand, the collapse of Soviet Union and the countries of the socialist bloc and, on the other, the Iraqi defeat. But Arafat's claims are contradicted by a number of facts.
First, Palestinians are living in a revolutionary situation. They are not confined to the framework of a State. In general, revolutions are less sensitive to changes in the relationship of forces than States, which are outlets for diplomatic relations. But Arafat is behaving as if the PLO was a State apparatus, while the Palestinian people itself has no State.
The upheavals on an international and Arab level are very negative. But in Palestine we had the weapon of the intifada. The PLO could have seized upon it, broadened the uprising and given it a programme for action, in order to chaging the relationship of forces on a Palestinian level. While there may be an undeniable regression on an international level, it is not for all that inevitable that it should affect the situation in all countries and all revolutions.
There have to be nuances made between the particular and the general, between the absolute and the relative. In other words, the deterioration of the relationship of forces does not necessarily lead to a gloomy situation in Palestine. It was possible to create a relationship of forces in Palestine that would fulfill the rights of the Palestinian people: the right to return, to self-determination and to an independent State.
It should also be noted that the objectives of the intifada went well beyond those Arafat had at Madrid. These included a call for the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the territories occupied in 1967, to be placed under international jurisdiction up until independence.
Why did Yasser Arafat not take on the demands of the intifada as his own?
While the intifada called for independence, Yasser was attached to the idea of autonomy. But this is not all; he also helped put down the intifada, to abort it. I am not exaggerating when I say that Arafat's renunciations contributed more to the crushing of the intifada than Israeli repression, which at least could be fought by resisting. Renunciations are a much more formidable weapon. Instead of using the gains of the intifada to create a more favourable relationship of forces, Arafat renounced the intifada and set more and more minimalist objectives until he called, as he recently did during his visit to China, for a halt to the intifada.
The imperialist countries have promised to "help" Gaza and
Jericho. How real is this aid?
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Let me first point out that these promises have created many illusions among Palestinians in the area of job creation and salaries. The economic plan developed by the PLO for the next five years has called for 12 billion dollars, while the World Bank has spoken of a programme that requires 14 billion dollars. And today, in the wake of the Washington Conference, we know that aid will not even reach the sum of two billion dollars.
The 42 countries present in Washington weren't able to come up with any more than that - and we know that even these two billion dollars will not be fully handed over. And all the money promised by the EEC, Japan, the USA and the UN before the signing of the accords has to be subtracted from the final sum [to calculate the amount secured as a result of the agreement).
But the needs of Gaza alone in the area of infrastructure and job creation for the whole active population have been evaluated by experts at a sum oscillating between five and six billion dollars. Arafat was only able to get two billion!
In the west, the prevailing feeling is that people can be bought with money. It is forgotten that a people has its dignity, a conscience, a sense of belonging and commitment to a national struggle. Suffice it to say that Arafat does not have the means to buy the Palestinian people. The Gulf countries, his traditional source of financing, have not given a single penny.
How is the aid process going to unfold?
It will be supervised by the World Bank and the PLO will be nothing more than a tool in its hands. The plan drawn up by Abou Alaa, the head of the PLO's economic department, calls for full World Bank control of the development process. Thus there is an official Palestinian request for the World Bank to be the main actor. This is an unheard of situation, in which the leadership of a country itselt proposes to be dependent.
The Harvard Plan was drawn up jointly by Palestinian economists that support the negotiations process alongside Americans and Israelis. This plan also calls for active World Bank involvement. In practice, the World Bank already controls the process. It has gone ahead and done economic evaluations and asked that a banking establishment be set up. Thus, it has already begun to control economic trends in Palestine.
There is talk of a kind of common market between Israel,
Jordan and the Occupied
Territories. There is talk of lifting the boycott of Israeli products.
How real is this project? How can Israeli products compete with Arab products in Arab markets? We know the difference in production costs, if for no other reason than the high level of salaries in Israel.
The Palestinian commercial bourgeosie will be a comprador bourgeoisie that floods Israeli products onto Arab markets. It will play the intermediary role of "commissionary" as we say in our Palestinian tongue. This is a project that goes beyond the Arab region. It is called the "Middle Eastern common market" ', and would include Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey in mixed projects, trade, a regional development bank and a system of pricing agreements. The setting up of such a system also has political objectives. The first such objective is that of isolating certain countries like Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Iran and Yemen - all the countries that were opposed to the USA during the Gulf War aside from Jordan, which cannot be excluded.
The second objective is that of compromising Arab unity and preventing it from coming to fruition. All these Arab countries are going to develop relations with Turkey; Egypt, for example, which will do so without having relations with brother Arab countries like Tunisia and Morocco.
Another objective of this common market is to make the Israeli presence more acceptable, more natural. Israel will be able to develop its economic potential and become a country of the centre, whereas now it is a country halfway between the centre and the periphery.
Finally, the existence of this Middle Eastern common market would strengthen US imperialism against the EEC and the Asian dragons. It is fundamentally an American project which perpetuates imperialist hegemony in the economic, military and political spheres.
How do you explain the contradictions inside Fatah, its contradictory declarations, the volte face of Hani El Hassan, the positions of Haidar Abd El Chafi, and the assassination of leaders like Abu Chaabane and Assad
Saftaoui?
Contradictions inside Fateh are based on a complex array of factors. You have to go back to their historic origins. Fateh had three historic leaders: Arafat, Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad. When I say leaders, I mean those with a base, with their own group within Fatah. This was the case for the three men I mentioned; with the killing of Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, only Arafat remains. People like Hani El Hassan and Khaled El Hassan are not in the same league; they don't have a base and their criticisms cannot lead to splits in Fatah. Arafat can easily elbow Hani El Hassan out of the way. As for Khaled El Hassan, he recently founded a party, the Party for the Right to Return, for Palestinians abroad. It is difficult to say how much influence this group has, but I'm sure that it wouldn't be able to mobilise on a large scale. Another member of Fatah, Abbas Zaki, is trying to replicate the experience of Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad through the building of his own base. He has set up groups in the West Bank, Nablus and Galilee. He has a conciliatory position; he began by challenging Arafat, and has now taken a few steps back
In Gaza it's a different story. There are not political struggles but rivalries for positions of power. Abu Chaabane founded the "Fatihoune" in order to establish his position.
Not all Palestinians have been Not all Palestinians have been
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taken into account in the accords. Jordan considers
Palestinians to be Jordanian
"citizens". What does the future hold for those "forgotten" in the accords?
The agreement signed by Yasser Arafat does not mention the refugees of 1948; this implicitly means they are seen to be settled in the countries where they currently reside. The Palestinian leadership has quite simply abandoned them. As far as the 1967 refugees are concerned, the agreement mentions the possibility of repatriating a certain number of them, a number which remains to be specified by the Israelis and Palestinians. Subsequent Israeli declarations have discussed the possibility of return for those that left in 1967 with an exit permit but did not return within the prescribed time. But the accords do not include those who were forced to flee by the 1967 war. Israel destroyed three Palestinian villages, obliging their inhabitants to flee abroad; the same thing happened to people in the camps arond Jericho, whose inhabitants were forced into exile.
Arafat said that he will demand the right to return for 1967 refugees. The Jordanian regime has officially declared that it is willing to give Palestinians the choice between returning to the Territories and remaining in Jordan. Those that remain in Jordan would get Jordanian citizenship. As for Lebanon, the question has not been settled; but there are signs that things are moving in the direction of the settling of Palestinians where they are.During the last round of negotiations, Lebanonasked Israel if it could take charge of the upkeep of inhabitants in the certain northern regions of Palestine, as Lebanese citizens. This represents a change in the position of the Lebanese government. This question of settling Palestinians was already posed in the 1950s by US and European imperialism. Today, alongside Israelis and the Arab reaction, they feel that this is the time to proceed with this plan. There would be a "Kurdisation" of Palestinians, spread out across several countries and thereby losing the unity of the people.
What then are the perspectives in this new context?
The Palestinian struggle has entered a new phase. It needs a new, alternative leadership. It needs a new programme, alternative to that of the bourgeoisie. Currently, in the face of the failure of the bourgeoisie, we have three programmatic orientations that are trying to provide this alternative:
first, there are the fundamentalists of Hamas, wh refuse to recognise the PLO, its charter and its programme. The second are the nationalists in the Salvation Front, who support the National Charter and who hope to amend the programme, especially in relation to the stages of the struggle. This orientation is underscored by a nationalist ideology. Finally, there is the socialist and democratic orientation, based on Marxism and which takes on the Charter and the programme of the PLO as its own.
For these latter two components, the PLO is an institution, an activist force, a Charter, a programme and, finally, the representation of the identity of the Palestinian people. The PLO as such has disappeared. The Charter remains, as does the programme, the moral reference point and the identity, represented by those forces who remain attached to the programme and the Charter and to this political and moral entity. These forces must rebuild the PLO with new people and new structures, which can represent the legitimacy betrayed by Arafat and the supporters of theaccords.
Recently there were calls from opponents of the accord to form an Islamic national front...
There was a debate within the "ten fractions"!, the framework that includes the three orientations I just mentioned, including the fundamentalist current. They agreed to set up a "Islamic Democratic National Front" — not only a National Islamic Front, but Islamic and democratic. Its first objective is to scuttle the accords, and the second is to rebuild the accords. This means that Hamas has agreed to this final point, too, the rebuilding of the PLO. And Hamas is in agreement with the Charter, as they clearly said in the communiqué released after the meeting of the "ten" in Damascus four days back.
As such, the Palestinian struggle has produced a new leadership, the Islamic Democratic National Front. It remains to be seen what perspectives they will give the Palestinian people following the accords. Henceforth, future perspectives are linked to this front, since Arafat has abandoned the struggle.
But we have to recognise that the struggle has become much more difficult for a series of reasons. First, Arafat will want to prove his good intentions toward the Zionist State in the regions under his control -by preventing activities against Israel by Palestinian activists. The accord says that the Israeli army wii have the right to intervene in Gaza and Jericho in order to hunt down the authors of such acts. In order to prevent the Israeli army from entering, Arafat will have to prevent these acts from happening in the first place in order to avoid giving Israel a pretext for intervention. This is going to complicate the struggle.
Moreover, the Israeli army is going to be redeployed outside populated Palestinian areas. Certain Israeli objectives are going to be more difficult to achieve than beofre. Finally, a third element of complication, the struggle against the Zionist entity is going to have a new dimension. It will no longer only be a mass struggle and a military conflict with the Zionist army. It will also include against Israeli exploitation - but now the capital will be both Israeli and Palestinian. I have confidence in those forces that constitute the front; they will come up with solutions.
Thus, to the national struggle a democratic struggle has to be added, for human rights against repression, for women's freedom, for ideological and political pluralism. As for the intifada, it is on a downward slope. It will continue to struggle against the occupation. Now that Arafat is within reach of power in Gaza and Jericho, we are entering a new phase of the national and democratic struggle, different than that of the intifada. *
1. The ten fractions make up a kind of front of opposition to the Madrid process and the accords. Its main elements are the PFLP, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Popular Front (General Command) of Ahmed Jibri, and Hamas.
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