MIDDLE EAST lestinian Arabs on the usurped 80% of this territory, as against a million Jews. Such were the two pillars of the Zionist colonial enterprise: massive expulsion of Arabs and
Self-determination massive immigration of Jews in the name of "biblical rights."
In June 1967, the Zionist usurpation of
Palestinian territory was completed by the
Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the addition of the Syrian Golan plain and the Egyptian Sinai desert. Israel has withdrawn from only one of these territories since then — the Sinai - which it evacuated in 1982. East Jerusalem was officially annexed for "biblical" reasons right away in 1967, and the Golan, for "security" reasons, in 1981.
THE PAST YEAR marked a double anniversary in the Near
East, that of the two main stages of the Zionist takeover of
Palestinian territory: 1947 and 1967. The Palestinians did not let it pass unmarked. Since December 9, there has been the most extensive popular uprising - both in breadth and duration - on the Palestinian lands since the creation of the state of Israel. (See also article on page 28.) What sparked it off is not important — the explosive material had been there for a long time.
SALAH JABER
ORTY YEARS have gone by since
F the United Nations adopted its iniquitous partition plan on November 29, 1947 [see map]. That was the signal for the Zionist armed gangs to launch their war of annexation. In 1948 they seized, in total, 80% of the lands of the former British mandated territory of Palestine. (The UN plan granted them 55%). In 1947 the Jews held only 6% of this land and represented only a third of the total population: 630,000 inhabitants out of nearly 2 million.
In December 1949, in the wake of the war for the establishment of the Israeli state, there were no more than 160,000 Pa-
Status of the occupied territories
The rest of the West Bank, as well as the Gaza Strip, retain to this day the official status of occupied territories, and for good reason! Unlike the Golan, where the great majority of the population (more than 150,000 before June 1967) fled during the six-day war without being able to return, and where Jewish colonists now outnumber the natives, these territories are still populated by Arabs numerous enough to upset the ethnic and political makeup of Israeli society if they became Israeli citizens - a corollary of formal annexation. That would be contrary to the very essence of Zionism.
In the long term, the very nature of the Israeli state as a "Jewish state" would be threatened, given the difference between the growth rate of the Jewish population and the much higher one of the Arab population. This, by the way, is the reason why the Zionist movement attaches
Lebanon
Lebanon
Syria
Haifa
Nazareth
Tel
Aviv
Jerusalem
•
• Gaza
•
Beersheba
PALESTINE
BEFORE
1947
Lebano,
Syria
Jordan
UN
BTITION
PLAN
1947
Arab areas so much importance to
Syria the emigration of Jews from the USSR, the only source of massive potential immigration into Israel that exists today and therefore the only availa-
Jordan ing for the relatively low birth rate of Israeli Jews.
Israel lacks, but cannon
In the aftermath of the
June war, the Zionist state
1,400,000 Arabs under its control, including more than a million on the
TODAY
West Bank and in Gaza, as against 2,400,000
Jews. The Palestinian exodus this time was not as large proportionally as in
1948, when the vast
Egypt
Egypt
Trans jordan
Egypt
Jewish areas
Occupied
3
1. See the editorial in /V 122, territories
June 15, 1987.
January 25, 1988 • International Viewpoint
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EDITORIAL for the Palestinian people
MIDDLE EAST majority of Palestinian Arabs fled the usurped territories. Even though increasingly since 1967 the majority of all Palestinians lived outside the frontiers of the former British Mandat of Palestine — against only a quarter at the beginning of the 1950s, and nearly 35% after the June war - nevertheless less than a third of the residents of the West Bank and Gaza fled these territories in 1967.
The reason for this was not that the 1967 invasion was any "gentler" than the preceding one, although it did not give rise to deliberate collective massacres, such as the one perpetrated by the Zionist terrorists of
Irgun at Deir Yassin in 1948.
Second Arab exodus in
The exodus in 1967 was proportionally smaller for several combined reasons. In
1948, for two-thirds of those involved, the exodus was from one part of Palestinian territory to another. This was no longer possible in 1967, since the whole of Palestine was occupied. Secondly, the great majority of the 1948 refugees thought that they were leaving their homes only temporarily. By 1967, the lesson had sunk in.
The fact that the Arabs who remained under Israeli rule in 1948, while persecuted, were not massacred was also an important factor. Finally, the poverty in which the 1948 refugees were living could only encourage the people of the West Bank and
Gaza to hang onto their homes and their livelihoods. Thus, the bulk of the 1967 refugees included those who had already fled in 1948, and had nothing of much worth to leave behind. This was their second experience of displacement, their second exodus.
As a result, when the Zionist state took over the remaining 20% of Palestine territory, it brought under its control nearly of the Palestinians, in addition to those already under its jurisdiction. This was the main flaw in the Zionist expansionist project - a veritable time-bomb that successive governments of Israel have not succeeded in defusing, and whose explosive power grows with each day that passes. Today, according to Israeli figures, 2,125,000 Arabs are living under Zionist jurisdiction (two-thirds on the West Bank and in Gaza), against 3,590,000 Jews. The ratio is thus 37 to 63. The Israeli's own projections are that, given the present rates of growth, this ratio will be 45 to 55 in the year 2,000, that is in twelve years!
This explains the worry of the "enlightened" Zionists (an epithet more appropriate than "moderate"). It was enough to hear their leader, the Laborite Shimon Peres, exclaim nervously on December 30 that in 12 years, there will be a million Arabs in Gaza and the demographic density will be greater there than in Hong Kong." At the same time, he lamented that today "out of 4 fordan and the Mediterranean, 50 are Ar- every hundred children born between the International Viewpoint • January 25, 1988 abs and 50 Jews, and nobody is going to stop this phenomena."
This is Zionism's fundamental dilemma
- the contradiction between its expansionist territorial ambitions and its racist project of a "Jewish" state. The latter, of course, is the overriding principle. "To preserve Israel's Jewish character," as Peres says, is the chief concern of all Zionists.
How can this be reconciled, therefore, with the demographic data presented above?
This is a debate that goes back 20 years in
Israel. Among the Zionists, four different answers to this question can be discerned.
First of all, there is the answer of the biggest fools, or the most outspoken, such as the fascist rabbi Meir Kahane, the leader of the Kach party, who is fighting to make
Israel "Arabenrein" — free from Arabs — just as the Nazis wanted Germany to be
"Judenrein." Unable to expel the Arabs by military force, he is offering visas, airline tickets and financial aid to any Arabs willing to leave. Another example is the general who a few months ago made the term
"transfer" notorious in Israel by proposing massive deportation of the Palestinians
Then there are those who, while proclaiming their unfailing attachment to the same "Greater Israel," and in particular to
Judea and Samaria (the biblical names of the West Bank territories), realize that
"transfer" today is impracticable. They know that Israel's extreme dependence on the United States makes a massive expulsion of the Palestinians from their territories quite impossible circumstances.? "I prefer to keep the Arabs under our control"
They prefer, nonetheless, to hold onto the territories in question, even at the price of maintaining indefinitely the apartheid that was shaped several years ago under Zionist auspices. It is the view of the Zionist right and part of the extreme right that was expressed recently by the outspoken leader of the Tehiya party, Geula Cohen, in the American magazine Newsweek of August 31, 1987: "I prefer to keep the million-plus Arabs here, where they are under our control, despite all the problems. At present, the idea of a mass population transfer seems to me impossible, although not immoral. It is the most moral idea in the
However, this "realism" of the Zionist right does not reduce the dilemma described above. It cannot refer to the fact that in the country where apartheid originated 5 million whites control six times their number of Blacks. The power of Israel's Arab environment and the narrowness of the Palestinian territory are major factors making Israel's situation qualitatively different from that of South Africa. This is why, in fact, the Zionist right envisions solving the demographic problem by
"creeping" expulsion of a large mass of Palestinians, even if it does not always avow this openly.
Repression and persecution worsen
Already at the Thirtieth Congress of the
Zionist Movement in December 1982,
Menachem Begin replied to Peres' demographic argument by saying that the statisticians were often wrong in their predictions because they did not take account of the growing emigration of Palestinians! The worsening in recent years of repression, persecution and provocations against the
Palestinians in the territories occupied in
1967 have been designed precisely to goad them into leaving "voluntarily."
Enlightened Zionists consider that this option is as illusory as it is impossible, just as much as "transfer" pure and simple. Illusory because there is nothing to indicate that emigration of Palestinians from their territories is compensating for their birth rate. On the contrary, a number of factors have increased Palestinians' attachment to their homeland: the closing of the traditional outlets for emigration - especially the oil states of the Arab-Persian Gulf, which have suffered an abrupt fall in their buying power; the Palestinians' political determination; and the spectacle of the misfortunes of the refugees in Lebanon, the last country where they could have a certain autonomy
The Palestinians will only leave en masse if they are forcibly driven out - there is no way that their departure could appear "voluntary." This is why it is as impossible as "transfer." When Peres, with his hypocritical air, says that Israel must not lose its "democratic" soul, he means that such a deterioration of its image could be fatal for the Zionist state, in view of its dependence on outside support from its American tutor or from the "diaspora."
Peres, therefore, proposes simply to maintain control of the territories, while leaving the Jordanians the job of controlling the population! According to the Laborite plan worked out by Yigal Allon in the 1970s, Israel would maintain on the West Bank - where 55,000 Israelis have now settled — a belt of strategic colonies and military bases, especially along the Jordan valley, which is considered the untouchable "safe" border of the Zionist state. The Israeli army would withdraw from those parts of the territories that have a 2. The mere decision to banish nine Palestinian "agitators" has cost Israel strong criticism (as well as a vote against them in the UN) from its American tutor, anxious to calm down the game in the Middle East. A massive deportation of Palestinians would immediately set the whole region ablaze — a real disaster for Washington. It should be pointed out, moreover, that intemational condemnation of the banishings — although this practice has been well-utilized almost constantly by Israeli goverments — shows to what extent rights are only imposed by struggle. The rights of the Palestinian people have never been so evident in the eyes of the whole world as since the present uprising.
dense Arab population, while maintaining the right to oversee their demilitarization. Civilian administration and law and order would be entrusted to King Hussein, in the framework of a settlement coming out of an "international conference," which Peres sees as a sort of second Camp David, only this time with Jordan.
Given the reluctance of Israeli public opinion to accept his party's plan and the Zionist demagogy of Likud about "JudeaSamaria," Peres has chosen recently to divide the problem by focusing his campaign on the fate of Gaza. It seems to him easier to get a majority on the question of Gaza for several reasons: there is not the same Zionist "biblical" attachment to it as there is to the West Bank; it is a small territory (360 square kilometers), that has a dense population (600,000 inhabitants) with a well-established reputation for rebelliousness; fewer than 2,000 Israelis have settled there; and, finally and mainly, on the other side of Gaza is the immense buffer-zone of the Sinai desert, which was restored to Egypt on condition that it be de-militarized under the supervision of the US.
"Peres proposes the creation of bantustans"
From the beginning of December, even before the spread of the ongoing Palestinian uprising mainly based in Gaza, Peres opened his campaign on this territory's fate. He took the offensive again at the end of December, as soon as the Palestinian struggle seemed to have subsided. His proposals for Gaza are identical to those concerning the West Bank, except that in the first case no role is foreseen for the Jewish settlements, whose numbers are negligible.
"Peres proposes the creation of a bantustan, " ingenuously protested Yassar Arafat, leader of the PLO and of its dominant right-wing faction. As if anything else could be expected from an international conference for a negotiated "settlement" of the Palestinian question on the basis of a Jordanian-Palestinian "confederation" — that is, in the framework of the official program held by the PLO since 1983 and reconfirmed last year! As if it were not entirely clear that:
"Leaving aside the totally illusory independence of such a mini-state completely trapped in the Israeli vice, with its back to Jordan on the one side (the West Bank) and to the sea and desert on the other side (Gaza), with Israel stuck in between the two — it would be quite impossible to achieve this through a (negotiated) Israeli agreement to withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967. At best, the Zionist state would agree to a very partial withdrawal from the West Bank — where it has already "appropriated" almost half the land
- and Gaza, involving draconian conditions which would render these territories little more than bantustans, and this at the price of a total political capitulation, Sadatstyle, by the Arab states."
In fact, no partial self-determination of the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza can be real without an unconditional Israeli withdrawal from these territories. But in the present relationship of forces this will never come out of an international conference. Achieving it would require a combination of irresistible pressure from the Palestinians on the occupying forces, firm Arab support for their struggle, strong international pressure on the Zionist govemment and a powerful movement for unconditional withdrawal inside Israel itself.
Today, the supporters of such a withdrawal, both anti-Zionists and "Zionist doves," are in a very small minority among the Israeli Jews — only two thousand demonstrators came out on December 26 in answer to a call issued by the Peace Now movement. But the realization of the other three conditions cited above could only reinforce their arguments.
For this to happen, the determination shown by the Palestinian masses in revolt has to be matched by that of a no less determined leadership rejecting the various schemes for an international conference to decide the fate of the Palestinians, whether these schemes are American, Soviet, Arab or Israeli. A leadership that would unequivocally demand a total and unconditional withdrawal of the Zionist army from the territories occupied in 1967.
For a partial self-determination of the Palestinians to be real, in particular on the West Bank, the Jordanian threat hanging over them would also have to be removed.
This does not only mean that it is necessary to sweep away the proposals that would subject the fate of the Palestinians to the tutelage of King Hussein, including the notorious "confederation" idea. (It should be said in passing that it is a desire not to burn all his bridges to Hussein that explains Arafat's great reticence to proclaim a "Palestinian government in exile," which has been much talked about lately.) It also means that the struggle of the Palestinians in Palestine has to be complemented by a struggle of Palestinians in Jordan, where they are in a large majority; a combined struggle with the Jordanian progressive forces and working masses to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy that has no less Palestinian blood on its hands than its Zionist cronies.
Conditions for emergence of radical leadership
The Palestinian uprising that is underway is creating the objective conditions for the emergence of a radical leadership. This is true in precisely the same measure that, as everyone agrees, the movement is largely a spontaneous one. In fact, given the lasting blind alley into which the successive capitulations of the PLO leadership have led and the general political discrediting of the other factions of the Palestinian resistance out-
MIDDLE EAST side the country, the distinctive feature of the last few years has been the development of spontaneous expressions of the Palestinian struggle. They make up the great majority of the 3,150 "violent incidents" (stone throwing against the army), almost daily occurrences between April 1986 and May 1987, that have been registered by the Israeli sociologist Meron Benvenisti.
A new generation radicalized by uprising
Even if, in the absence of any credible alternative, the majority of the Palestinian masses continue to suf, cat the leadership of the PLO, their new generation has already been radicalized by the experience of the uprising that is underway. It is to be hoped that a left leadership can emerge from this radicalization. Short of this happening, there is a great danger that the Islamic fundamentalist current will be the only one to profit from it. This current is already growing rapidly among Palestinians, in particular in Gaza. But such an an eventuality would end in a new, still more tragic and disastrous impasse than the one into which the policy of the PLO leadership led.
Finally, it should be noted that, over and above any partial self-determination that may come about, real self-determination of the Palestinian people as a whole inevitably involves the destruction of the Zionist state and the abolition of any discrimination and restrictions on movements and settlement of Palestinians in the territory of their historic homeland. After all, to give only one example, 60% of the inhabitants of Gaza are refugees from 1948! This perspective is inconceivable outside of a proletarian internationalist solution, for which the condiare still far from having been assembled on the regional and local level. This makes the task of those fighting for such a solution all the more considerable Hopefully the Palestinian uprising will give a powerful impetus to their activity. *
3. "The crisis of the PLO", International Marxist Retie, Vic 2 reia of the Four intermationated by 5 the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
January 25, 1988 • International Viewpoint