Peace conference or poker game?
ON OCTOBER 30, there opened with great fanfare the Madrid "peace conference" intended to explore ways and means for a solution of the
Arab-Israeli conflict, after more than half a century
MIDDLE EAST
MONEY
MACHINE
!!*?
BELORE!
*DER of fruitless efforts. George Bush and James Baker can heave a sigh of relief: getting this conference off the ground has been a big gamble for the American administration, but also a political imperative in the wake of the Gulf War.
The "New Arab Order"! — one of the pillars of the "New
World Order" which the great architects of Washington, that modern Olympus, are trying to construct - is unimaginable without the establishment of a Pax Americana in the Middle
East. But, as a famous verse from Arab poetry puts it: "the winds do not blow as the ships wish them".
The world's leader writers have not been lacking in perspicacity: with pleasing unanimity they have pointed out that the hardest part is yet to come. Might not the Madrid conference turn out to be nothing more than the biggest press conference in the history of the world, as the French daily
Liberation wrote? In any case, for the Israeli government of
Yitzhak Shamir this is all a bluff.
SALAH JABER
HE reason why the Zionist right
T finally agreed to attend the conference is well
Six known.
months ago, foresaw that we
"the Bush administration will do its best economic pressure regime"? and reckoned that it had good grounds for hoping to get its way. Bush has indeed been able to get the process started, to the great displeasure of Shamir and his acolytes in the most rightwing cabinet in the history of Israel. To this end, the US president has used the issue of Washington's guarantee without which the Zionist state could not get the $10bn loan that it desperately needs — or, to be precise, the White House persuaded Congress to postpone granting this guarantee for four months.
That is to say, these four months are the period fixed by the Bush administration for the "unblocking" of the process of
Israeli-Arab settlement. During these 120 days the issue of the guarantee will remain hanging over the head of Shamir like the Sword of Damocles; if he should behave in a way that appears unacceptable to American interests, the US administration would have a powerful argument at its command to ask Congress to attach explicit political conditions to the granting of the guarantee.
Here are the stakes for Bush-Baker in the poker game being played out between Washington, Jerusalem and its Arab partners: it is a matter of extracting real "concessions" from the Shamir government before the end of the time limit. That is to say "concessions" such as the freezing of new settlements in the Occupied Territories and the acceptance in principle of a withdrawal from some part of these, which would allow the conference to go ahead rather than sputtering to a probable halt.
Inversely, Shamir's aim is to give away nothing essential while giving the impression of being ready to do so. In other words, to find a way of making it look as if the Arabs are responsible for any eventual failure, and to do this in a way that is sufficiently convincing to rule out any possibility of a new postponement of the American guarantee at the end of the 120 days.
To this end, Shamir will probably choose to be flexible on the question of the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967, and to stick to the Camp David agreements on the Palestinian question, that is, the administrative autonomy of the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza for a transition period of five years. The aim of this, of course, is to play for time.
Finally, for the Arab partners, the plot thickens, since there are several of them. Two really count: Syria and the PLO Arafat has been reconciled with Syrian leader Hafez el-Assad. These seasoned players have decided to make an alliance at this stage: both know from experience that the Israeli government's first and most simple tactic will be to play the one against the other. Fragile unity of Syria and PLO
They are sticking together today, although their track record in such matters allows a certain scepticism as to the solidity of this alliance. Shamir's insistence on bilateral negotiations is a gamble on the break-up of the Syrian-PLO front.
In any case, the Zionist right has arrived at the conference with its eyes fixed on the short term - four months. For this period it will have to play a tight game. If it gets its way over Bush - that is if it gets its hands on the $10bn from Congress without giving anything substantial in return - the future of the conference, assuming it has got that far, will be decisively compromised. The United States will have nothing else to do than continue to oversee the modus vivendi between its Arab and Israeli allies in much more difficult conditions.
Actually, the whole game is rotten. Shamir goes to the conference not in search of a peace that he does not really believe in — since he does not want to pay the price for it — but to get the $10bn. But where is the imperative need for this trifling sum, some $2,500 per Isracli inhabitant, which will result in an external 1. See International Viewpoint, no. 206, May 13, 1991. 2. Ibid.
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International Viewpoint #216 • November 11, 1991
MIDDLE EAST public debt unequalled in the world? This is the key question, and it reveals the extent to which some of the cards are marked in this tricky game. These $10bn are needed to absorb the million Soviet Jews that Israel is hoping to take in by next year or the year after. That is to say, an increase of nearly a third in the Jewish population of Israel, at a time when the Zionist state has already been complaining that it lacks "essential space".
The Soviet immigration is the windfall that the most militant Zionists have been hoping for for a long time. It will considerably reinforce the expansionism inherent in the Zionist project, increasing the numbers both of potential colonists and soldiers. Thus nothing could be more natural than that, far from a freeze, a further surge in the establishment of settlements in the Occupied Territories should accompany this new immigration. If the process will have been halted for four months, it will certainly take off again with renewed energy afterwards - with the support of the American billions.
Billions of dollars for new settlements
To sum up, Shamir is going to the conference to get the money he intends to use to carry through his rampant annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. He is going to this "peace conference" with the aim of reinforcing a process that implies permanent war. From this point of view the demonstrations of the Israeli right? do not upset him at all. They can even be useful for him insofar as they counter-balance American pressures and prevent the camp of the Zionist "doves" from occupying the streets.
This last consideration is very important. The parliamentary regime in Israel allows Washington to hope that its pressures will find effective mouthpieces in Israel, and even contribute to a change in the majority and the government so as to allow the Madrid process to go forward. It is therefore a combination of all these elements that will determine the future of the peace conference and of the regional Pax Americana.
If we grant that Washington's objectives are very hard to achieve, then it follows that in the best case, the eventual outcome of the Madrid conference will have as much in common with self-determination for the Palestinian people as a bantustan does with an independent State.
And it is this truth, already evident in the Israeli diktat about Palestinian representation at the conference, that explains the tone of the new Palestinian "Rejection Front" formed by the alliance for the first time of the two main left factions of the PLO and the "Hamas" Islamic fundamentalist movement*. 4 organizations (sce p. 5), leaving aside joint declaration of the three concessions to the characteristic fundamentalist vocabulary, gives an overall correct analysis of the objectives that Washington is pursuing at the Madrid conference. Indeed, it is paradoxical that the Zionist right is so blinded by its fanaticism that it is obstructing an American policy that promises much to the Zionist state. This is why "enlightened" Zionists are furious. This is also why, when the Palestinian right stakes all on this same American policy, this is not naivety but pure and simple capitulation and compromise with the enemy. The argument that they have no choice is the been used by all the
However, the three-party declaration presents three problems that have been and remain important in the inside the Palestinian and Arab left: the acceptability of an alliance with the funPLO's institutions and the programme of
Dangers of collaboration with fundamentalists
On the first, we have already had occasion to underline the dangers of any illusion in a political united front with religious fanaticism, Whatever converin action might occur on the ground. It is essential never to mix banners with the fundamentalists; it is necessary to march quite separately, even if from time to time we may strike together in concrete struggles. extremely vigilant in the face of such a current, which is basically reactionary on the socio-cultural plane and viscerally opposed to the left, and which will not hesitate to wipe out the latter if it considers this possible and opportune. The Lebanese Communist Party found this out the hard way in the course of the resistance to the Israeli occupation in
A direct political alliance with the fundamentalists works almost always to their advantage. It is inevitably accompanied by an ideological truce that facilitates their recruitment on the same groufid from which the left tends to recruit its militants, or even in the ranks
There is also another price to pay: that of repelling all those who have good reason to fear the fundamentalists — in the Palestinian contest, Christians and women - into the arms of the classical right. And this is not to mention the disastrous effects of such an alliance on anti-Zionist and radical pacifist milieux
As far as the institutions of the PLO are concerned, there is a striking similarity between the arguments used in the tripartite declaration and what we have repeatedly said about the bureaucratic nature and non-democratic composition of these institutions.? The PLO's refrain that it is "the sole legitimate representathe Palestinian people" rebounds once more against those who have chanted it most loudly - that is to say the two fronts of the left in the PLO who have signed the declaration. Only yesterday they considered the Executive Committee and the National Council as the exclusive holders of the legitimate representation of their people. Now they are challenging both the exclusivity and the legitimacy of these institutions and demand their democratic recasting. Better late than never!
The third problem is manifested in what is missing from the tripartite declaration; that is, a programme of a transitional nature corresponding to concrete and feasible medium-term objectives. This is the old defect of Arab nationalism and its Palestinian offshoots: maximalism. Under the impact of the accumulating defeats since 1970, this political defect had given way to a series of slip pages to the right, in the tradition of Real-
The present break with the Palestinian bourgeois right, as well as the alliance with the fundamentalist champions of maximalism (who now have the direct support of Iran), and probably the fear of being outbid by the latter in a climate where raising the stakes is the order of the day, have suddenly sent the left of the PLO back to their political point of
An impasse is just around the corner. The despair that may result could have a demobilizing and demoralizing effect and thus favour the capitulationist bourgeoi-
Then the left will lose on two levels: that of the "realism" pursued by the rightist PLO leadership and that of the maxi malism incarnated by Hamas. It is urgent that the militants of the Palestinian left and the radical wing of Fatah in the Occupied Territories retake the leadership of their own struggle and put forward again the programme they worked out in the communiqués of the first months of the intifada, before the PLO leadership imposes its control. Only if this is done will the intifada survive and regain the dynamism of its first year. * 3. See the comment by Michel Warshawsky on p.б. 4. The third faction of the PLO left, the pro-Moscow Communist Party, is, of course, taking part in the "Madrid Conference" operation. 5. See, for example, the debate with George Habash in International Viewpoint, no. 177, January 29, 1990. 6. While Hanan Ashrawi, the notable that the Palestinian bourgeois leadership has chosen to put forward alongside Faisal al-Husseini, is both a Christian and a woman. 7. See International Viewpoint no. 157, February 20, 1989. 8. See /V nos. 156 and 158, February 6 and March 6, 1989.
Democratic and progressive organizations throughout the world need to mobilize to demand the immediate liberation of the Sidi Bouzld six as well as freedom of opinion and organization in Tunisia,
Send protests to the Interior Ministry in Tunis, with a copy to the Tunisian League for Human Rights (fax 1-79 54 66). *
Arab and Islamic markets to its products and the opening up of the treasures of the Gulf in order to plunder the oil riches of our Arab nation.
3. To liquidate the Palestinian cause, the heart of the conflict, by emptying it of its content as a cause of a people having religious, national and historic rights in Palestine and transforming it into a demographic problem that can be resolved at this stage by the establishment of an administrative autonomy tied to the Zionist state. In the best of cases, Israeli sovereignty will be replaced by the formal sove-
MIDDLE EAST ica does not even try to hide what it is expecting, the preliminary and free con-