Rebellion continues against Israel's
MIDDLE EAST second-class citizenship because of their religion, as was the case before 1967. Today, a real apartheid system is being imposed on a population that represents more than a third of all those living under Israeli
Along with the various features of apart-
"apartheid"
heid (such as segregation, denial of rights, restrictions on the right of movement, super-exploitation) that Israel has repeated against the Palestinians, there is now anoth er resemblance between the two states: The
WITH THE HEROIC Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza about to go into its fourth month, US secretary of state George Shultz began a new tour of the Middle East. The fact that he undertook this journey indicates that he has given up hope that the movement of Palestinian youth will ebb in the near future.
Indeed, the State Department chief had every reason to wait until the uprising ended before going to the region, if only out of fear that his visit might be the occasion for a new flare-up of the rebellion. However, three months after it erupted on
December 9, the uprising seems to have developed a formidable staying power.
SALAH JABER
HE UPRISING of the Arab youth
T in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including the
Syrian Golan Heights, looks more and more like prolonged guerrilla warfare against the occupiers. It is a guerrilla war in which the fighters have no weapons but stones. The Palestinian youth have developed a stone-throwing aim worthy of the biblical David.
Nothing works against these young people — neither metal or plastic bullets nor the beatings to which the Zionist armed forces have resorted in succession. Every new victim of the murderous rage of Israeli soldiers and settlers, every addition to the already long list growing implacably day by day, adds new fuel to the undying fires of the rebellion. Every new Palestinian victim draws down more opprobrium on the colonist and racist enterprise that has long insulted the memory of the Jewish victims of Nazi barbarism by falsely associating it-
It is not this "self-hatred," which the Zionists, in a narrow-minded racist spirit, attribute to anyone of Jewish origin who disapproves of their actions, that can explain why today among those who express the most deeply felt outrage at the repressive cruelty of the Israell forces we find a number of men and women much better qualified to represent the victims of the
Holocaust than a Shamir or a Rabin.
What condemnation of the Zionists could be more powerful, more tragic, than this reaction, among others, which was reported from Jerusalem by New York Times correspondent John Kiffner: "In a fashionable boutique Monday, a middle-aged saleswomen put down her sandwich as she read an article in the Jerusalem Post about a blood-spattered wall on a vacant lot in the West Bank town of Ramallah where Israel soldiers had taken Palestinians to beat them. 'I can't eat my sandwich anymore, she burst out. "This is like what was done in the camps. I can't eat anymore'." 1
Resemblance between
Israel and South Africa
Nonetheless, if a parallel is to be drawn between Israel and another situation, it is not with Nazi Germany, although there are inevitably common features in the repressive brutality of systems of national, racial or social oppression. Yassir Arafat's verbal excesses at a recent UN session in which he said that the Israeli soldiers "exceeded the cruelty of the Nazis" change nothing in this respect.2 Such exaggeration is no help to the Palestinians inside the country, whose courageous struggle has won more sympathy for their cause in three months than the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has in 20 years.
A real resemblance, which is being confirmed from year to year, is between Israel and South Africa. This is so clear that even the American mass media, which are generally favorable to Israel, point to this analogy.3 The problem today is no longer the presence within an elitist Israeli democracy of a small minority of people condemned to revolt of the native youth has become an enduring factor in the situation.
This has even prompted a person close to Shimon Peres, the academic Shlomo Avineri, to say recently that if Israel kept the territories occupied in 1967, "the next 15 years will look more like the last weeks." And at this rate, in the year 2,000, "We will look into the mirror and we will see South Israel's "Apocalypse Now"
In Newsweek of January 25, moreover, the Israeli left-Zionist sociologist Meron Benvenisti made the following analogy: "To understand the time frame of this civil war, one should recall that... the Sharpeville massacre that started the black-white violent confrontation in South Africa occurred in 1960. The future is here." The title of Benvenisti's article could not be more eloquent: "Israel's Apocalypse Now"
The corollary of the prolonged Palestinian revolt is that the Zionist army, like the South African armed forces, is increasingly being turned toward the interior of the area it controls. In addition to its original nature as an army for colonial expansion and counter-revolutionary intervention, the so-called Israeli Defence Force is confirming its acquired character of an internal repressive body. In this respect, it is every bit as bad as the worst special forces of riot police, despite the fact that it is a conscript army. Already omnipresent in Israeli society and politics, Tsahal's role will grow still further. The myth of Israel, the model democratic state, has already been dealt an irremediable blow.
Another aspect of Israel, the real Israel, that the Zionist leaders want to preserve is its character as a "Jewish" state. The enlightened Zionists, represented today by Peres, consider that the long-term survival of the Zionist state requires restoring its democratic reputation, which is important for the Western aid on which Israel is entirely dependent.
The only way to do this, and at the same time preserve the "Jewish" character of the state, is to get rid of those parts of the terri.International Herald Tribune, January 26, 1988. 2. Le Monde, February 21-22 3. In this respect, see the article by Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post in the International Herald Tribune of January 26. 4. Quoted by G. Frankel, ibid.
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MIDDLE EAST tories occupied in 1967 with large Arab populations. To the Zionist right, which objects - not without arguments - that the security of Israel would be threatened if there were a substantial retreat from the territories, the Labourites have long given the following assurance: There is no question of letting the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza determine their own fate nor of abandoning control over these territories. What is in question is turning over the task of handling the populations concerned to the Jordanian police and keeping military control of the territories by maintaining a belt of settlements and military bases, especially along the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, which separate the West Bank from Jordan proper.
This policy of the Zionist Labourites was worked out by Yigal Allon back in 1967. But it was only after 1971, that is, after King Hussein of Jordan managed to crush the Palestinian resistance in his kingdom, that the conditions were assembled for it to become credible. Continually counterposed to this view of things has been the policy formulated by Moshe Dayan in the same period: "Coexistence between Israel and the Arabs is possible only under the aegis of the Israeli government and Defence Forces, under whose authority the Arabs can also lead a normal life [sic]." S Principle of administrative autonomy
Today, Moshe Dayan's policy is being defended by the Zionist right, in particular by Likud, which is led by Shamir, the present premier of the "National Unity Government." In Likud's view, there can be no future for West Bank and Gaza that goes beyond maintaining Israeli occupation, with the granting of "administrative International Viewpoint • March 7, 1988 autonomy" to their Arab populations.
It is this principle of administrative autonomy, encompassed by an ambiguous suggestion of "transition," that prevailed in the Camp David Accords concluded in 1978, under US auspices, between Egypt and Israel. In the preceding year, Likud had won the Israeli elections, and was at the height of its power. Carter and Sadat could not risk a failure of the process initiated by the Egyptian president's visit to Israel in November 1977. Therefore, they made a concession to Begin on the fate of the West
In 1982, on the occasion of the negotiated withdrawal of the Palestinian fighters from a Beirut besieged by the Israeli army, the Reagan Plan in fact revived the principles of the Allon Plan. "The United States is firmly convinced that the best chance for reaching a lasting and just peace is to establish self-government for the Palestinians on the West Bank of the Jordan and in the Gaza sector, in association with Jordan." 6
In order to put this "peace" into operation, the US Administration, its Israeli Labourite allies and their Jordanian cohort projected an "international conference" as the essential framework for negotiations between Israel and Jordan. This was because the Jordan regime was too weak to be able to afford a Sadat-style process of open negotiations with the Zionist state.
The Palestinian uprising has convinced the Zionist Labourites and the Reagan administration more than ever that their common conception was well founded. Shultz's new Middle East tour fits into the framework of efforts to promote it. However, this policy today is running up against two main obstacles. One is the opposition of Likud, which Shultz and Peres hope eventually to get around through a Labour election victory. Since that possibility is not yet shaping up, however, the US Administration is trying to gain some time by relaunching, on a temporary basis, the idea of autonomy contained in the Camp David Accords, without abandoning the objective of an international conference. Shultz is bringing this suggestion in his baggage, hoping with it to be able to mollify both Shamir and the Palestinians.
Last card of the Arafat leadership
The other obstacle, of course, is the problem of who is going to represent the Palestinians. While it seems more and more impossible to "go around" the PLO in order to achieve a "settlement" of the Palestinian question, it is no less true that this organization as such remains unacceptable as an intermediary for Washington and Peres, insofar as it fails to officially recognize the "right" of the state of Israel to exist. But, in the present state of things, such a recognition would mean a new split in the PLO, already severely weakened by its successive capitulations since 1982.? This is the last card the Arafat leadership has left. It is hes itant to play it without solid guarantees regarding the role reserved for it in the proposed "settlement".
The PLO has already granted everything except this last concession. It has already officially adopted the principle of a "Jordanian-Palestinian confederation," as well as that of an "international conference, which Arafat has been playing up in recent
In other words, carried along by its substitutionist policy, the PLO is declaring its readiness to negotiate the fate of the West Bank and Gaza with Israel and the great powers, instead of holding firmly to the inalienable right of self-determination of the people of these territories. It goes without saying that nothing could come out of such an international conference but a diktat aimed at liquidating the Palestinian question and stifling the Palestinian people.
The only pusition worthy of the sacrifices made by the fighting Palestinians and faithful to the feelings that they have clearly expressed is an intransigent demand for a total and unconditional withdrawal of the Israeli army from the territories occupied in 1967 and for self-determination for the population of these territories.
This would be partial self-determination for the Palestinian people. It would have to be complemented by self-determination for the Palestinians in Jordan, where they are the majority. Finally, it would have to be completed by self-determination for the whole Palestinian people, through a JudeoArab revolutionary dismantling of the racist Zionist state and abolishing all forms of discrimination against the territory of 5. Speech made at the University of Tel Aviv on 6. Reagan's speech, September 1, 1982. 7. See IV 121and122; June 1 and June 15, 1987.
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