European Union / Palestine * The road to a just settlement THE resolution which follows was adopted by the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International, the worldwide organization of revolutionary socialists, at its October 2000 meeting.
HE bloody autumn unleashed by the provocation committed by general Ariel Sharon, supervisor of the massacres at Sabra and Chatila in Lebanon in 1982 — with the escort graciously provided for him by general Ehud Barak, "Labour" prime minister of an Israeli state more than ever dominated by the military — already constitutes one of the most brutal episodes of the long history of criminal violence perpetrated by the Zionist enterprise against the Palestinian people.
The entire world has seen yet again to what point the discourse of the imperialist powers on human rights and the rights of peoples is variable according to the interests of their world hegemony: intensive bombardments and murderous embargos for Iraq and Serbia, "rogue states"; unequalled levels of military aid and friendly advice for Israel, key member of the strategic apparatus of imperialist domination in this major oil-producing area of the world and in any case non-recognition of national rights, whether of Palestinians or Kosovars.
Sharon's provocation was nonetheless only the drop of water that made a cup that had been full to the brim for a very long time run over. It shattered the process opened up by the Oslo accords and their signature in Washington, on the White House lawn, in September 1993. It is the consequence of the overaccumulation of frustrations in the course of the seven years since then, during which the economic and social position of the Palestinian people have worsened
In signing these accords, general Rabin offered the Palestinians a fraudulent deal: he could proceed to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from inside the zones of Palestinian population in the territories occupied in 1967 — a withdrawal which Israel's military top brass had demanded since the Intifada in 1988, motivated by a concern to preserve the moral of their army and worried about the consequences of its being bogged down in the tasks of repression in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on its state of general preparation in relation to the Arab environment.
### Elementary demands
Beyond this redeployment, Rabin offered no concession of a nature to satisfy the elementary demands of the Palestinians: dismantling of the Zionist settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, total withdrawal of the Israeli army from the territories occupied in 1967, establishment of a Palestinian state on the whole of these territories, including East Jerusalem, and the return to Palestine of the refugees of 1948 and 1967.
It only held out the possibility of accepting a largely truncated and perverted version of Palestinian aspirations, on the express condition that the Palestinian Authority (PA) headed by Yasser Arafat fulfilled its part of the deal, by showing that it was capable of bringing the population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to heel efficiently and on a lasting basis.
This fraudulent deal very quickly came up against a major contradiction: successive Zionist governments, those of Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak, conceded to the Palestinians only some of the promises of Oslo, with an eyedropper and increasingly late, demanding each time that the PA increase its proxy repression as condition for the following stage. Their "security"-fixated mentality, their chauvinist arrogance and their racist contempt for the Palestinians meant that their priority concern was pandering to the most reactionary fringe of Israeli public opinion. Meanwhile, they have carried out a policy of development of the Zionist colonies and a military and infrastructural parcellization of the Palestinian territories. which has ot ine talesunian tertories, wich nas
International Viewpoint #326 December 2000 7
* Palestine been humiliating and revolting to the highest point for the population of these territories.
In such conditions, it was totally predictable that the PA, confronted with the exasperation of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, would experience a lot of difficulty in muzzling Palestinian society completely, despite its efforts to do so. Moreover, Yasser Arafat and his lieutenants were much less inclined to push the repressive escalation further given that, on the one hand, they knew that in losing all legitimacy in the eyes of their population, indeed in the eyes of a section of their troops, they weakened themselves in relation to Israel; while on the other, they feel increasingly that they have been duped.
This increasingly obvious impasse determined the recent explosion and the bloody autumn which has resulted from it and which is still going on. These events illustrate in a cruel manner the total bankruptcy of the strategic choice of the Arafat leadership, consisting in counting on the benevolence of the Zionist state and the so-called arbitration of Washington so as to obtain a Bantustan in the 1967 territories. The increasingly evident bankruptcy of this strategy only fostered the growth of Islamic fundamentalism among the Palestinian population.
Barak, who is trying to win the participation of Ariel Sharon in a government of Zionist unity, proclaims today his intention to go back to the initial project of the Israeli military leadership, as it was conceived in 1988: to carry out unilaterally the redeployment of the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in such a way as to consolidate strategic Israeli control of these territories and their external frontiers, placing the enclaves of Palestinian population under permanent siege, reduced to the situation of vast self-managed concentration camps, constantly threatened with being asphyxiated by a retightening of the Israeli blockade.
The first difference between this perspective and the Israeli interpretation of 8 International Viewpoint #326 December 2000 the Oslo accords would be the absence of direct collaboration between the Palestinian leadership and the Zionist government and a contemptuous indifference on the part of the latter as to the internal management of the Palestinian territories. Faced with this, the only progressive perspective which is offered to the Palestinian people would be to develop anew the forms of self-organization which characterized the early days of the Intifada, instead of the repressive and highly corrupt administration set up in the framework of the Oslo accords.
### Points of support
The Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip does not have the means on its own to free itself from the Israeli yoke. The relationship of forces is unfavourable to it in a crushing way. It can hope to change it only by finding the points of support which until now have been cruelly lacking:
• in the pressure of the popular movement of solidarity on the Arab governments to force them to give the Palestinians the diplomatic support and economic aid which are indispensable to them;
in the pressure of the movement of international solidarity for the recognition of the right of the Palestinians to a state, for an emergency international aid, to stop the state of Israel from pursuing its policy of strangulation of the Palestinian territories and to cut off all military and related aid; one of the conditions for an effective movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people is to forcefully reject any expressions of anti-Semitism;
• inside the state of Israel itself, where the outburst of violence of which those Palestinians holding a second class Israeli citizenship have been the victims has shown to what depths Israeli society could plunge. It is to be hoped that this fearful perspective could impel a large number of Israelis to mobilize to force their government to stop starving the Palestinians and to recognize their right to a sovereign state on the whole of their territories occupied in 1967, as an indispensable element on the road to a just settlement on the principle of equal rights of all people Arabs and Jews without which this region of the world would have no perspective of the future other than murderous violence and permanent insecurity. *