The dynamic of the
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MIDDLE EAST occupied in 1967, including the Palestinian lands. The latter had in fact been under the jurisdiction of Arab states: Egypt had administered Gaza after 1949, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank. Therefore, the primary responsibility for recovering these lands fell on them.
This political view of things prevailed in particular because the society within the 1967 territories remained very traditional
INTIFADA, an Arabic word meaning "uprising" or
"insurrection," has become part of international vocabulary as a result of the new episode in the heroic struggle of the Palestinian masses on the West Bank and in Gaza. After 14 months continuous harassment of the
Zionist occupation forces, the intifada is still showing no signs of flagging.
Abroad it is often seen only as a spectacle of demonstrators throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. That is, of course, the most visible aspect of the Palestinian challenge to the occupation. But the intifada is a much richer experience than simply stone-throwing. Its lessons, moreover, have implications that go far beyond the Palestinian framework.
SALAH JABER
HE OUTBREAK of the intifada on
T
December 9, 1987, was not a bolt from the blue. It was the product of a long process of maturation - an explosion of resentment built up over 20 years of occupation and repression. The oppressor power was even more intolerable because it came into the world, with the creation of the state of Israel 19 years before the occupation of 1967, already based on the usurpation of the bulk of Palestinian
From this historical standpoint, the intifada also represents a new generation going into action, the third since the Palestinian exodus of 1948, which is now taking over from the generation of 1967, symbolized by the fedayeen. While these are generations of the same people, they have not grown up on the same territory.
Intifada presently limited to occupied territories
The fight of the 1967 generation was waged essentially by Palestinians in exile, first in Jordan until 1971, and then in Lebanon. The struggle of the 1987 generation, the intifada generation, is now being fought only in the territories occupied in 1967 - at least for the time being. In the aftermath of the occupation, their population remained stunned, overawed by an army that had gained a reputation of invincibility in six days of war.
The maximalism of the Palestinian resistance organizations in exile offered the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza no credible perspective for liberation in the foreseeable future. These organizations, moreover, were mainly occupied with setting up secret cells for an armed struggle that was supposed to liberate the whole of Palestine. Given the effectiveness of the Zionist repression, under the occupation this sort of activity could only involve very small numbers, even if the fighters enjoyed the sympathy of the population.
The people looked elsewhere for deliverance — to the Arab states, which through diplomatic activity and military pressure might get Israel to evacuate the territories
ANIONT ENO
— a small proletariat scattered in workplaces on a cottage-industry scale; a large peasantry and petty bourgeoisie; the predominant role in the hands of the commercial bourgeoisie, landowners and lay and religious personalities who had been local relays for the Jordanian government. Massacres perpetrated by
Jordanian army
Thus, in the climate of bitterness that prevailed after the crushing of the resistance in Jordan, the municipal elections held in 1972 on the West Bank were won by personalities linked to the Jordanian monarchy. However, the political turn made by the PLO the following year upset this state of affairs (see IV 156, February 9, 1989). By adopting the objective, described as transitional, of an independent state in "all of the Palestinian territory that will be liberated," the PLO staked its claim to govern the territories if they were evacuated by Israel.
So political action, until then neglected, became fundamental. A Palestinian National Front was formed in 1973 in the territories, under the aegis of the PLO. It included the currents sympathetic to the Palestinian organization, as well as the local branch of the Jordanian Communist Party (which subsequently became the Palestinian Communist Party, PCP). The latter's program was always limited to the liberation of the territories occupied in 1967, by virtue of the Stalinist tradition on the Israel question.
Revolted by the massacres perpetrated by King Hussein's army, the popular majority lined up behind the banner of the National • Front. It strongly opposed a return to Jorda-
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intifada
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3
MIDDLE EAST nian sovereignty', and favored Palestinian sovereignty in the event of liberation. An important section of the bourgeoisie followed suit, attracted by the perspective of freeing
Jordanian itself from tutelage.
The result was an overwhelming victory for the PLO's supporters in the April 1976 municipal elections on the West Bank. A year later, Likud, the Zionist right-wing bloc, won the parliamentary elections in
Israel for the first time.
Despite Egyptian presi dent Sadat's "peace initiative," Likud leader
Menachem Begin proclaimed a plan for creeping annexation of the
— maintenance of the Israeli territories occupation with administrative "autonomy" for the Palestinians and stepped up Zionist settlement.
With Likud's encouragement, the number of settlers rose from 5,000
(34 settlements) in 1977
70,000 (124 settleto ments) today. Parallel to this, repression of the Palestinian national movement increased considerably. Between
1980 and 1982, the main mayors who supported the PLO were expelled or ousted. Likud tried to set up a network of collaborator "representatives" (the
"Village
Leagues"). In 1982, Likud tried to liquidate Palestinian nationalism by invading Lebanon.
The bitterness of defeat
- the evacuation of Beirut by the PLO fighters and the massacres that followed
- was aggravated from
1983 on by the inter-
Palestinian conflict. EI
Fatah split. Battles raged between the factions in
Lebanon. A de facto split opened up inside the PLO over the Seventeenth Palestinian National Council in Amman in 1984, from which all the nationalist opposition and left formations stayed away.
The main cause of the conflict was the
"Jordanian option" chosen by the Arafat leadership, which culminated in
February 1985 in the conclusion of the Amman accord between the PLO leader and King Hussein.
In the meantime, Shimon
Peres' Zionist Labour Party returned to government in Israel in the framework of a ministerial coalition pact with Likud.
Also a supporter of the "Jordanian option" in his way, Peres chose to appoint replacements for the ousted nationalist mayors in concert with Amman. In November 1985, he appointed Zafer Al-Masri to head the city government of Nablus, the West Bank's main city (after East Jerusalem, which has been annexed to Israel). AlMasri was a figure with a very distinct profile. He was chair of the local chamber of commerce, nephew of the vice-chair of the Jordanian Senate and an uncle of the kingdom's minister of foreign affairs.
Resentment of 20 years of occupation
A few months after accepting the appointment with Arafat's blessing, Al-Masri was assassinated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a left nationalist organization and the main Palestinian formation after El Fatah.
However, after King Hussein had worked out an overall plan for "sharing functions" with Peres, he decided to break unilaterally with Arafat in February 1986 and to close the El Fatah offices in Jordan. The bankruptcy of the right-wing PLO leadership was evident. It resigned itself to accepting Moscow's mediation in order to achieve a reunification with the opposition factions aligned with the USSR in April 1987.2
This tactical accommodation enabled Arafat to absorb the shock of his Jordanian fiasco, so that the opposition could not take full advantage of it. But it did not prevent him from resuming his moves toward Amman. The Arab summit that met in the Jordanian capital in November 1987 was the most glaring expression of the PLO's bankruptcy. Despite being treated with contempt, Arafat abased himself before King Hussein, while the left-wing of the PLO protested in vain.
It was against this background of the PLO's bankruptcy outside Palestine that the intifada broke out a month later. The resentment piled up over 20 years of occupation and repression combined with the exasperation at the lamentable spectacle offered by the organizations outside to produce a spontaneous explosion that developed into a general uprising.
Beginning on December 9 with a protest by young people at the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza against the death of four Palestinians killed in a collision with an Israeli truck, the demonstrations spread like a prairie fire throughout the territory. The day after the Jabaliya demonstration, a new fire broke out in the Balata camp near Nablus, and the flames quickly spread to the rest of the West Bank.
Since 1986, there had been an atomized but quite distinct revival of activities against the occupation. A few months before the intifada erupted, a report by the
West Bank Data Base headed by Israeli sociologist Meron Benvenisti, noted "a new and disturbing evolution for Israel: the violence [in the territories] seems more and more frequently to be carried out by unorganized, spontaneous groups.... Between April 1986 and May 1987, 3,150 violent incidents have been registered, going from mere stone throwing to barricading roads, and including 100 attacks with explosives or firearms." (Le Monde, September 15, 1987)
The political conditioning of the intifada and its incubation on the ground affected a population that had been profoundly changed in comparison with preceding decades. In fact, during 20 years of occupation/ annexation the social fabric of the territories went through the classical effects of the linking of backward traditional societies to an advanced capitalist market — dispossession and proletarianization of traditional small producers, partially absorbed by the needs of the advanced market. "Palestinian society under Israeli domination appears as the result of internal colonialism — a totally distorted class structure, a peasantry deprived of its lands, a dispossessed urban population entirely dependent on Zionist society." 3
In this sense, there has definitely been a "South Africanization" of Palestine - the establishment of a veritable apartheid regime with its "homelands"/reservoirs of labor power. According to official Israeli statistics, a third of the labor force of the territories are working within the 1967 borders of Israel in South-African-style conditions (travel controls, harassment and so on). In reality it is a lot more - 120,000 workers according to current estimates, taking into account the number that moonlight.
"Stateless, impoverished and landless"
If you add to this the workers employed in the settler economy in the territories themselves, it emerges that the majority of the proletariat in the territories - which makes up the majority of the labor force — is directly exploited by the Zionist economy in underpaid jobs looked down on by Israeli workers (construction, agriculture, certain services and jobs in industry). In addition, there are the workers in the Palestinian subcontracting economy.
At the bottom of the social ladder and in the vanguard of the struggle are the workers/refugees from 1948, eloquently described by Meron Benvenisti as follows: "The refugees — stateless, impoverished, landless — are Israel's helots. On their way to work as Israel's menial laborers they 1. The same goes for Gaza, which Egypt washed its hands of, and which was included in Jordan's "United Arab Kingdom" project. 2. On the balance sheet of the "Jordanian option," see IVs 121 and 122, June 1 and 15, 1987. 3. Abu-Lughod et al., "Profile of the Palestinian People, " Journal of Palestinian Studies, 1984.
Social forces in the occupied territories
March 6, 1989 • #158 International Viewpoint pass by their ruined villages and plundered lands. They have nothing to lose except their chains of misery." (Newsweek, January 25, 1988.)
Against the background of a demographic explosion, the proletarianization of the population of the territories has gone hand in hand with a net increase in the proportion of young people — 75% are under 25 years of age; 50% are under 15! The proportion of young people is just as considerable in the working class. In 1984, 20% of the Palestinian workers crossing the 1967 border were under 17 (according to the study cited in footnote 3).
To complete this socio-demographic picture of the intifada population, the growing role of women should be noted. Their proportion has increased as a result of the fact that the economic emigration to the Arab oil-producing countries has essentially involved men. Women's social status has improved relatively, among other things under the influence of the Israeli example, which is much more advanced in this Women playing front-line
So today, a third of university students in the territories are women, a very high proportion for an Arab or Muslim society. Selective repression, one of the rare cases where sexism women, has favored the participation of women in the struggles. In particular, almost all the 10,000 or so people presently detained in the territories (out of a population of a million and a half!) are men.
Women, moreover, are the only ones who sometimes carry out specific public activities within the framework of the intifada, as mothers of detainees or on International Women's Day. But most of the time they melt into the other social and. demographic categories that make up the base of the uprising, in a struggle that is essentially a national one. All social classes and categories join the strikes of the intifada. Its base units are not the workplaces or educational centers but territorial units, the camps and the popular neighborhoods in the cities and villages, as the Palestinian Marxist researcher Khaled Ayed points out
His analysis of the social classes and strata in the territories brings out an important difference between the Palestinian case and that of South Africa, with which it is usually compared: the weight and role of the native bourgeoisie, which includes the landowners, as well as various categories of lay and religious notables.
In their great majority, the members of these possessing classes today swear by the PLO, since the pro-Jordanians have taken note of King Hussein's official renunciation of the West Bank on July 31, 1988. They are exercising their influence over the society in the territories through institu-
THE PRINCIPAL centres of the intifada are the densely populated camps where nearly a quarter of the total population of the West Bank and Gaza are concentrated (nearly half in the latter territory). If we add the [1948] refugees living in the popular neighborhoods of the towns, refugees altogether represent more than half of the total population.... They belong overwhelmingly to the working class and the poor petty bourgeoisie....
Similar to the camps are the poor neighborhoods of the big towns, whose inhabitants belong to the popular classes: blue- and whitecollar workers, petty bourgeois layers.... The third component of the intifada is in the villages, where the majority of people are poor peasants. Here, the Israeli occupation seized the land...and transformed tens of thousands [of peasants] into exploited and humiliated workers, working in the colonies themselves
At the center of these three circles are the youth, notably the revolutionary intelligentsia [students and those with qualifications]....sons of the camps, the poor neighborhoods and the poor villages, who are the nerve-center of the intifada and its day-to-day leadership on the
Facing the front of the people's uprising are a minority belonging to social layers that are either linked through self-interest to the Israeli occupation or vacillate between the occupation and the intifada. These are, first of all, traders in land... and in labour...bosses of subcontracting industries [categories whose self-interest links them to the colonies or the Israeli economy]. There are also the big hoarding merchants.... Of all these layers, the big merchants are the most dangerous for the intifada's future....
• They have at their disposal legal organizational frameworks - the various chambers of commerce -that have sheltered them from the blows of the occupying authorities;
• During the intifada, this layer created 'patriotic merchant's committees' that benefit from the support of the interior United National Leadership of the intifada and the exterior PLO;
• Most importantly, this comprador layer vacillates between two blocks: the first is its...own self-interest in establishing any sort of
MIDDLE EAST intifada; the second is the possibility of endangering its immediate in-
This go-between merchant layer expressed, and still expresses, its
'negotiate' the national cause and to play the role of an 'intermediary' between the popular uprising and its Zionist and imperialist enemies....
Both it and its ideological agents' are concentrated in the Jerusalem area. It has a great deal of influence, that it shares with the PLO in a number of 'legal' institutions: newspamagazines; administration of Bir-Zeit university; the Arab Studies Society; the Palestinian Center for Studies on Non-Violence; press agencies; and local centers that carry out research and doumentation.... Khaled Ayed, Palestinian Marxist, researcher at the Institute for Palestinian Studies. The above extracts, from an unpublished work, are taken from the Lebanese daily As-Safir, November 14, 1988. * 1. As examples the author cites the names of Hanna Al-Siniora, Fayez Abu-Rahmeh, Fayçal Al-Husseini and Sari Nusseibeh 2. The director of this society, Fayçal AlHusseini, the son of a big family of notables, was recently liberated with a big media fanfare after several months of sporadic "administrative detention". Shortly before his release he had discussions with a representative of the Israeli defense minister, Itzhak Rabin. 5
MIDDLE EAST
Positions of the PFLP branch in the occupied territories
The objective of the present stage is the establishment of the state, completely unadapted to the new forms of struggle.
The role of the institutions, nonetheless, has not been eliminated. It has changed
From claiming the leadership of the mass-
1 self-determination and the return [of the refugees], in a way that does not close the door to the realization of the strategic and historic objective of the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a democratic state where all can live without discrimination between nationalities, religions, races or between men and women as part of a progressive, socialist, united Arab society....
• We reject the Security Council's Resolution 242 and we oppose
- totally. We consider its approval by the majority of the PNC as a sut mission to international and Israeli demands, and an unwarranted concession with nothing in return....
* The PFLP does not base its programs on the supposition that the political settlement will take place at any time in the foreseeable future, but on the basis of a long-term struggle. The wager that some are making on the international factor, bang in the middle of a period of detente between the two super-powers, is a lost bet.... Hence, we are against the tendencies for "moderation and flexibility" advocated by Shultz, to which certain people are progressively adapting with their attitude toward Resolutions 242 + their recognition of the Zionist entity + secure boundaries + the rejection of violence....
We categorically refuse the capitulation imposed on our people, such
4 as the obligation put upon the PLO to recognize the enemy state....
- lationship of forces that will Impose the holding of an International
We, In the PFLP, are waging a long-term struggle...to create a new re
Conference on the basis of the right to return and self-determination and of the independent state. This is the only sort of Conference that we will accept as a mechanism for a settlement, and we reject a Conference meeting on the basis of the liquidationist Resolution 242....*
Extracts from a programmatic manifesto, dated December 11, 1988, and distributed in the occupied territories.
tions that they control - the municipal governments elected in 1976 and not ousted, chambers of commerce, the Islamic
High Council, local and religious courts, self-employed professional associations
(lawyers, doctors, engineers), the Council of Higher Education, and so on.
These institutions are called "national" in contrast with those that are appointed by the occupiers or are directly controlled by them, such as the appointed municipal governments or the Palestinian police. The attitude of the Zionist Labourites toward these
"national institutions" is clearly different from that of Likud. For the Zionist right, consistent with its program for the territories, even the most "moderate" of the Palestinians have to be repressed when they reject the occupation. This is the attitude that has prevailed since 1977. It sharpened at the beginning of the intifada, to the great annoyance of the "enlightened" Zionists, who were shocked by such shortsightedness.
Back in January 1988, the pro-Labour Israeli daily Haaretz issued a warning: "If we continue in this way to harass and eliminate the most moderate Palestinian leadership, we are going to find ourselves face to face with the one emerging from the camps, the young people of Balata and Jabaliya.
A few months later, the same Haaretz
6 " The intifada has greatly modified the char-
(September 11, 1988) could note bitterly:
International Viewpoint #158 • March 6, 1989 acter of the activities of Palestinian society. On the one hand, organized social work has become clandestine, in particular because of the government's harassment of the Palestinian 'national institutions' (the shutting down of several of them and the arrest of many of their active members). But on the other hand, and parallel to this, this work has become more popular, penetrating more widely and more deeply into the society. It involves essentially the activity of the 'people's committees,' which have formed in almost every village, neighborhood and refugee camp."
### People's Committees organize the uprising
As a matter of fact, the intifada has acquired an original form of grassroots selforganization, the People's Committees (PCs), which have largely supplanted the traditional institutions in the organization of society in the territories. Two factors have combined to render these traditional institutions inoperative: the fact, on the one hand, that being legal they are known and therefore kept under surveillance; and, on the other, the intifada's revolutionary character. The uprising has set in motion a mass vanguard that, because of its youth and social composition, had nothing to do with the established institutions. The latter were es, they have come to seek to play the role of a moderating intermediary between the uprising and Israel, as well as its American godfather (see the document of K. Ayed) The PCs spread throughout the territories from the first weeks of the intifada. It is thanks to them that it has assumed a durable character. Clandestinity imposed by the occupation
Sometimes formed from pre-existing structures (committees of students, women, sympathizers of political organizations and so on), and in their majority composed of previously unorganized rank-and-file activists, the PCs bring together on a geographical basis - blocks in the camps, town districts or streets, villages — all those who are active and ready to take on the tasks of organization, mobilization and direct action linked to the intifada. In this sense the PCs are similar to Soviets only potentially, given that delegates cannot be directly elected by the inhabitants because of the clandestinity imposed by the occupation.
For the time being, they are more like action committees of the new mass vanguard that has been thrown up during the uprising. The PCs are not, however, surrogate bodies but are well and truly organisms leading the population involved in the intifada. Their extension is in direct relation to the repressive conditions. For example, in the villages where the daily repression is less evident, the committees' meetings are much larger than in the zones strictly controlled by the occupying army, such as the towns. In the latter, the PCs are compelled to adopt a pyramidal structure. But in both cases, the PCs divide up the various tasks among their members, or link up with "specialist committees" (bringing together professional or experienced people).
The People's Committees functions vary considerably and cover all the aspects of social life and of the struggle in the framework of the intifada: propaganda and mobilization, organizing production cooperatives; boycotting of Israeli products: solidarity fundraising for victims of the repression and the unemployed; legal and material aid for prisoners; medical aid; teaching (to compensate for the closing of schools and colleges); provisions and so on.
The PCs have also taken on legislative and judicial functions, the most important being the control and limits exercised on the possessing classes: controlling prices; fighting hoarding; controlling the fees of the liberal professions (private medicine, lawyers); reducing rents; imposing the payment of wages for intifada strike days; setting up popular courts to sort out certain
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Varch 6, 1989 • #158 International Viewpoint disputes; putting on pressure for the resignation of functionaries appointed by the Israeli administration (police, municipal employees) and so on.
In order to efficiently carry out all these functions, as well as paramilitary tasks -stewarding demonstrations, harassment of the occupying army and colonists with stones and molotov cocktails, keeping up the shopkeepers' strike, night guards for residential areas, punishment of collaborators and so on — the PCs are equipped with "shock committees", a veritable revolutionary guard with the peculiarity that, for obvious reasons given the balance of forces, they do not use firearms. These "shock committees" have even recently proclaimed themselves as a "people's army".
Of all the bodies described, only the "shock committees" as a general rule exclude women. Supporters of women's liberation in the occupied territories, men and women, have to fight to change this situation, which is both an injustice and an
So the intifada, thanks to the PCs and its allied bodies, has at its disposal a real structure of people's power, essentially proletarian and peasant, that gives it its original contribution to regional and international revolutionary experience.4 In the occupied territories it has de facto created a real duality of powers - incomplete, true, in view of the vast inequality of the opposing forces. Moreover, many villages and districts have proclaimed themselves "liberated which they certainly are between two interventions of the occupying army. The Israeli defense minister, Itzhak Rabin, was right on target when he went onto the offensive against the PCs last August, accusing them of wanting to "institutionalize the uprising". Since then, participants are liable to get ten years imprisonment, something that has in no way discouraged them from keeping up their action.
Continued harassment exhausts troops
The autonomy of the People's Committees at camp, town or village level is perfectly adapted to the specific form of struggle practised by the intifada against the Zionist army: "guerilla"-type demonstrations and scattered actions. This sort of harassment, which is unpredictable because it is the result of a multitude of autonomous decisions, exhausts the occupying troops and forces them to deploy themselves in large numbers. Without a great deal of success, moreover, because short of drowning the uprising in blood — an option that is avoided for the moment by the Zionist government for reasons that are as much internal as international - quelling the intifada efficiently would necessitate declaring a general mobilization in Israel to ensure a dissuasive presence in all
MIDDLE EAST the populated areas of the occupied territories.
Evidently, however, the PCs' autonomous role in the harassment had to be complemented by centralizing the intifada's political decision-making, the designation of general strike days and directions on rules of action and social organization whenever united action makes for strength and efficacity. But just as the conditions of the occupation prevent the PCs from being soviets of delegates, they make it impossible to give them direct democratic coordination and centralization on the scale of the whole of the territories, or even at the level of the West Bank (it is perhaps possible in the 360 square kilometers of Gaza).
So there was a role to fill that only the existing clandestine organizational networks could take on; this was done by the main ones - the internal extensions of the formations brought together in the framework of the exterior PLO. Less than a month after the beginning of the intifada, as soon as it was apparent that the uprising was going to last, central "appeals" in the form of communiques began to appear and circulate in the territories. At first they came from a United National Leadership for the Intensification of the Intifada, which became, starting from Communique 4, the United National Leadership of the Intifada (UNL).
This leadership was certainly self-proclaimed, but it nevertheless played an indispensable role and was followed and recognized by the large majority of the masses. The political content of the first communiques reyealed the decisive role played in setting up the UN by the PLO's left: the PFLP, the Democratic Front (DFLP), the Communist Party (PCP), and even the radical current of El Fatah in the territories.
A parity coalition with a mass base
Indeed, the real relationship of forces on the ground, in the clandestine struggle under the occupation, has nothing to do with the bourgeois, manipulative composition of the PLO's leading bodies externally (see the last issue of /V). While these are totally under the hegemony of the right-wing historical leadership of El Fatah, the UNL was, and remains in fact a parity coalition of PLO formations with a mass base - that is, the three left-wing formations and El Fatah. This is what led the head of the PFLP, George Habash, to say the following in an interview given to the Kuwaiti journal AlQabas last July:
"The UNL in the occupied territories is the arm of the PLO....That doesn't prevent me from pointing out that this arm, acting 4. Of course, the PCs have received very little coverage in the Wester media, which are much more interested by the most insignificant declaration of "moderate" Palestinians, who are good at expressing themselves literally as well as metaphorically - in Hebrew and/or English.
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MIDDLE EAST for the PLO in the interior, puts forward the PLO's Charter, adheres to its stagist program and to the PNC's resolutions - much more so than certain opportunists and capitulationists in the framework of the PLO...These latter currents live in fear and dread of being overtaken by the UNL".
The difference in nature between the UNL and the PLO's leadership inevitably leads to falling out and friction between the two. The UNL's first communiques in January 1988, while insistently calling on the masses to rally around the PLO, were not presented as coming from the latter.
UNL more radical than exterior leadership
Communique 2 defined the first program of the intifada. Strategic objectives: return (of the 1948 refugees), self-determination and an independent Palestinian state. Immediate objectives: "army withdrawal from the towns, camps and villages, "democratic elections for local and village councils," as well as a whole series of demands against the repression and other aspects of the occupation. Communique 4 expresses an approach completely the opposite of that of the PLO leadership: "The intifada has definitively buried the plans of the rulers of Amman, Cairo and Tel Aviv, and those of their agents, to settle the Palestinian question in the framework of the American imperialist project."
It was at this point that the first intervention came from the exterior leadership. A circular from the "coordination", January 27, explained that in the intifada "no organization was more worthy than anand that many of the participants did not belong to any tendency. The circular proposed to centralize and unify the publication of communiques. At the same time number 5 appeared: for the first time the signature PLO/UNL appeared, and it remained from then on. The UNL was subsequently presented and recognized as an authority of the PLO and under its control in the final analysis. Communique 5 is, in fact, a politically watered-down version of number 4 (without the phrase quoted
In any case, the UNL has not lost its specific character. It therefore remains clearly more radical than the exterior leadership, even more so given that the repressive and clandestine conditions mean that it is not always the same people who participate in writing the communiques. Thus number 6 (February 2) declared: "We reject Mubarak's plot [the Egyptian president, a great friend of Arafat's], and the attempts of the Jordanian regime and its collaborators... to bypass our legitimate leadership and dictate to it capitulatory conditions, such as the recognition of [UN] Resolution 242." Communique 6 reiterated the programme in number 2, and in addition contained — & cations and directives for action for the as would be the rule from then on - indiInternational Viewpoint #158 • March 6, 1989
People's Committees, as well as a program of boycotts of institutions of the occupation and calls for the resignation of those employed by it.
Communiques 8 (February 20) and 10 (March 10) vigorously denounced Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz, who began a series of visits to the region on February 25 to try to nip the intifada in the bud. The UNL called for demonstrations and a boycott of Shultz's visits. This went against the advice of Arafat who, according to George Habash, had already given the green light in January for a trip to Washington and a meeting with Shultz of two "moderate personalities" from the territories who are close to the PLO chief (Siniora and Abu-Rahmeh). In March, the same Arafat again authorized two PNC members who held American citizenship, Edward Saïd and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, to meet the US secretary of state.
The dissensions inside the UNL itself broke out into broad daylight in May: two different versions of Communique 16 were produced, followed above all by two politically contradictory versions of Communique 17. It was the eve of the Reagan/ Gorbachev summit in Moscow. A first version of Communique 17, dated May 21, reflected the line of the El Fatah/PLO leadership: it contained many religious references; added to reference to the PLO was "under the leadership of brother Yasser Arafat"; emphatic praise is showered on the Soviet position; finally, the objective is "global and just peace".
"No alternative to protracted people's war"
The other version, dated May 24, reflects the line of the main left Palestinian group, the PFLP, and in particular its branch in the occupied territories, which is particularly radical: the intifada has shown the impossibility for coexistence with the Zionist entity; "there is no alternative to the choice of struggle and protracted people's war"; a radical attitude concerning the Arab regimes (demanding democratic freedoms and the opening up of borders to the Palestinian armed struggle); "we maintain our people's rejection of all suspicious projects, notably the Camp David accords, [UN] Resolutions 242 and 338, the Shultz initiative and the sharing of functions (Peres' and King Hussein's common policy in 1985-87); and a call for a general strike at the time of the Moscow summit.
The affair of Communique 17 provoked the energetic intervention of the exterior PLO leadership. Starting from number 18, centralization of the communiques was ensured in the framework of the majority consensus in the organization. From then on, they had as a heading the Koranic expression, "In the name of God, the clement, the merciful." By way of a compromise, Communique 18 asserted the "rejection of all liquidationist solutions," without mentioning Resolution 242 and calling for the International Conference. It repeated the immediate objectives outlined since Communique 2.
However, the functioning of the UNL's majority consensus was finally carried out to the detriment of the PFLP, although the latter played a key role in its creation. Thus, Communique 29, dated November 20 and covering the results of the PNC, argued in favour of an International Conference based on Resolutions 242 and 338 (without even mentioning the other UN resolutions), when the PFLP's opposition to these resolutions was well known. In addition, the PLO's new political right-turn since the last PNC meeting risks aggravating the dissensions inside the mass movement in the occupied territories. Programmatic and political autonomy
The PFLP, and even the DFLP, joined with the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, in calling a general strike on November 29, the anniversary of UN Resolution 181 (1947), which so viciously divided Palestine. For the first time in its history, El Fatah refused to join in such an appeal, the PLO having officially accepted Resolution 181 and, even worse still, Resolution 242. On the day of the strike, brawls broke out not only between El Fatah and Hamas, but even between El Fatah and the PFLP at Nablus. The fact that an organization like El Fatah could arrive at a position of opposing by force those who were calling for a protest strike against the resolution that legitimated the Zionist's venture in 1947 is a telling indicator of its degeneration.
The field is wide open for the highest bidders of the nationalist-Islamic current, who are not going to let the opportunity slip through their hands. It is a good thing that the PFLP's branch in the occupied territories, with positions that are clearly more radical than those of the exterior official leadership of the Front (see box p.6), do not give the religious fanatics the privilege of appearing as the only current opposed to capitulation.
The attitude of the PFLP's interior activists is globally correct: unity of action with the UNL in every possible arena; autonomous action when necessary; programmatic and political autonomy, and public criticism of bourgeois and opportu-