A retreat under pressure
THE text below, drafted by SALAH JABER, represents the point of view of the Bureau of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
Tikva Honig-Parnass and which is close to that of the Bureau. We want to show, in this way, that the debate does not divide us along "ethnic lines", but only in terms of the different political assessments made by comrades who share the same internationalist
International Viewpoint #252 January 1994
DOCUMENT
THE HISTORIC CONTEXT OF THE ACCORDS THE Accords signed in Washington on 13 September 1993 by the Arafat leadership of the PLO and the Zionist government of Rabin and Peres, under the patronage of Bill Clinton, are the product of three evolutions, summarized below in chronological order.
(1) The culmination of the long process of political retreat by the PLO leadership under the joint pressures of the Zionist state, American (US) imperialism, the reactionary Arab governments, and Moscow — as much under Brezhnev, then Gorbachev, as under Yeltsin.
The Arafat leadership (the emanation of the significantly corrupted bureaucratic bourgeoisie of the PLO apparatus in exile as well as of the Palestinian capitalism of the territories occupied in 1967 and the diaspora) lost its last links with the armed movement of the Palestinian masses when it lost its last positions in Lebanon in 1982-83, under attack from Israel and subsequently Syria. It then resolutely opted for a negotiated settlement with the Zionist state under the aegis of the US, as shown by: praise for the "Reagan plan" in 1982; reconciliation with King Hussein of Jordan, then the Egyptian regime of Hosni Mubarak in 1983; the accord with the Jordanian monarchy and the break with the PLO left in 1985 (the accord was unilaterally annulled by the King in 1986, which led the Arafat leadership to reconcile itself with the PLO left in 1987); official recognition of the state of Israel, its right to exist within secure borders, reconfirmation of the "Jordanian-Palestinian confederariom" in 198t and renunciation of terro-
(2) The transformation of the Palestinian national struggle by the great leap forward of the intifada which, since it began in December 1987, has placed the Palestinian people — more exactly the part of it, resident in the West Bank and Gaza, under Israeli occupation since 1967
- back at the centre of regional politics.
Whereas the successive defeats of the PLO in exile had considerably marginalised its role in Arab politics by 1987, the spontaneous outbreak of the intifada, sparked by accumulated frustrations strengthened in a single blow the Palestinian factor in the Middle Eastern political equation, more than at any time since the massacres in Jordan in 1970. King Hussein drew the necessary conclusion, and officially renounced his claim to recover the West Bank, which had been annexed to his royal kingdom since the Arab-Israeli war
### Introduction
THE Accords signed in Washington on 13 September 1993, between the Israeli government and the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, has stimulated huge debate in the Palestinian solidarity movement, reflecting in part the debate amongst the Palestinian people themselves. The terms of debate have tended to vary according to the political framework in which it is happening. Those who contribute to Intemational Viewpoint, and who have in common a radical critique of the Zionist State as one which is racist and oppressive, as well as firmly supporting the rights of the Palestinian people, in no way view the Washington Accords as reparation for the discrimination suffered by the Palestinian people. However, the "Dis-Accord" does raise two questions which cannot be ignored: Firstly, should the Arafat leadership be condemned for having signed the Accords (although modifying the form of condemnation according to the political context) or should there be regarded as extenuating circumstances? Secondly, should the Accords be viewed as a first step towards progress, in a common struggle with the the Arafat leadership itself, or as a restrictive framework as a result of which the only role left for the leadership is as a repressor for the Palestinian people, as proxy for the occupying authorities, failing which the Accords will be annulled? This debate is of clearly contrasted points of view. In relation to other debates, it has the advantage that before long it will be brought to and end by ongoing events. It is a fascinating and passionate debate: for this reason we have decided that it should be covered in this month's dossier ranging from the position of the Bureau of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, set out by Salah Jaber, to the different point of view held by the majorty of the Revolutionary Communist League (the section of the Fourth International in the Israeli State), as expressed by Sergio Yahni and Michel Warshawsky, to that of the minority of that section, which is presented in the name of aspirations. * of 1948. The plans to settle the regional conflicts which sought to by-pass the Palestinian people by negotiating directly with Jordan — in particular the Allon plan put forward by the Israeli Labour Party since the massacres in Jordan in 1970 and reactivated by Shimon Peres in 1986, following his return to office in the Zionist coalition government — became henceforth impossible to pursue without replacing the Jordanian negotiating partner by the Arafat leadership of the PLO, the only Palestinian interlocutor credible both in terms of political representativeness and disposition to participate in a regional Pax Americana.
The Reagan administration reacted accordingly, demanding new political concessions from the Arafat leadership in 1988, before beginning an official dialogue with it. Nonetheless, this first official attempt came up against an impasse: its conditions of progress foundered as much on the Israeli side — very quickly, when from November 1988 the Zionist right once again governed alone, under the leadership of Shamir — as on the ArabPalestinian side, faced with Likud's rejectionism. Arafat decide to gamble on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which had emerged
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International Viewpoint #252 January 1994 militarily strengthened from its war with Iran. Henceforth, Baghdad became the principal base of political-military support for the PLO leadership, compensating for Gorbachev's abdication of any pretence of providing a counterweight to US pressure.
(3) The transformation of the relation of forces in the Middle East represented by the Gulf War of 1991, and the confirmation of Moscow's alignment with Washington's policy in this region of the world. The destruction of Iraq was seen by the Palestinian people, and not without reason, as a defeat for their cause; not because it was correct to gamble on the ferocious bourgeois dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, but in the sense that the crushing of Iraq radically transformed the balance of regional military strength to the benefit of Israel. This transformation was not however the work of the Zionist army - which this time did not have the means to do the job on its own, as in 1948, 1967 and 1973 — but the army of the United States itself. For Washington, it was imperative to seal the confirmation of its military supremacy in the Middle East by the establishment of a "new regional order", a vital element in the "new world order"
For the first time in history, conditions seemed propitious to the establishment of a global Pax Americana in this region of the world: US hegemony was stronger and less contested than ever, the traditional Soviet rival having become complicit; of the two bastions of Arab nationalism after the defection of Egypt, one, Iraq, had been crushed and the other, Syria, had been "turned" and had joined the camp of Washington's allies; Arafat was weaker and more isolated than at any time, and hence ready for all kinds of compromises. Paradoxically, the principal obstacle to the Pax Americana became henceforth the Zionist right itself, in the form of the Sha-
In the hope of obtaining the $10 billion loan which he said was necessary to absorb the flood of Jewish refugees from the USSR, Shamir agreed to take part in the negotiations inaugurated with great pomp by Bush in Madrid in October 1991. For the first time, all the official parties of the Israeli-Arab conflict were represented, including the Arafat leadership of the PLO which was in reality directing the Palestinian delegation - even if the humiliating conditions adopted for pure form (no representatives from exile, or from east Jerusalem) imposed by Shamir were respected. Nonetheless, the negotiations became bogged down very quickly because of the obstinacy of the Zionist right. The 14 result was the most spectacular strong-arm tactics in the history of Israeli-US relations, with obvious disagreement between the godfather and his godchild, and refusal to agree to the loan demanded without a political counterpart.
2. THE IMMEDIATE
PRELIMINARIES TO THE
ACCORDS
US pressure, the perspective of a break between the world's greatest power and its Zionist protege at a time when the Israeli socio-economic situation was ceaselessly deteriorating, was a determinant factor in the narrow victory obtained by the party of Rabin and Peres in the Israeli general elections of June 1992. The return of this team to power opened the road to the Pax Americana blocked by Shamir. In 1987-88, Rabin and Peres - supported by the upper crust of the Zionist military establishment — had already placed the question of "territorial compromise" at the centre of their political campaign. For these two so-called Labour leaders, faithful to the Allon plan, Israel was obliged to choose between "land" on the one hand, and the "Jewishness " of the "democratic" state (sic) on the other; the two other options seemed to them impossible to maintain in the long term, inasmuch as they risked damaging irretrievably the support of the imperialist countries, and the resident Jewish communities, for the Zionist state — support on which this state is
The violent "cold" expulsion of the Palestinians was unthinkable, except for the crazies of the quasi-fascist Zionist far right, represented in Shamir's government (the problem fol the Zionists is that the Palestinians in 1967 had learned the lesson of 1948 and remained in their territory). The annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was thus impossible, because the granting of Israeli citizenship to the inhabitants of these territories, which would be implied by international law, would radically transform the ethnic composition of the state of Israel, putting its nature as a "Jewish state" in peril. Moreover, Likud's option, that of rampant annexation without granting citizenship, would perpetuate a situation of apartheid which - beyond the fact that it tarnished the "democratic" image of the Zionist state - became increasingly perilous with the radicalisation of the struggle of the Palestinians under occupation and their very much higher rate of population growth in comparison to the Israelis (immigration excepted). Under the Camp David accords between Begin and Sadat under Carter's patronage, Likud itself had been committed, since 1979, to the perspective of Palestinian administrative autonomy in the territories occupied in 1967, without for all that admitting the principle of "territorial com-
" For Begin, and all the more Shamir, Israel should keep these territories, rebaptised "Judea and Samaria", while conceding a sort of status of extra-territoriality to their Palestinian inhabitants: a kind of symbolic, juridical expulsion.
For Rabin/Peres and the enlightened Zionists, Israel had every interest in "exchanging land for peace". Of course, for them this did not amount to the total return of the 1967 territories, and still less the return of a part of the 1948 territories (where the Triangle and the Galilee are still mainly Arab and the abolition of the racist laws preventing the Palestinians from returning or living where they wish on the land from which they have been expelled and enjoying a full equality of -rights with all inhabitants, without any discrimination — the only historic compromise capable of leading to a genuine peace between the Israeli people and the Palestinian people as a whole. What is then at stake for the enlightened Zionists, in the context of the Allon plan, is solely partial withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967; withdrawal from the zones of Palestinian population, except for east Jerusalem, annexed by Labour in 1967, with the maintenance of the Zionist settlements in all the strategic parts of the territories (notably along the Jordan — the majority of the settlements in the West Bank were established under Labour) and permanent deployment of the army to ensure the control of these territories and to filter human and material exchanges between the Palestinian zones and the Arab environment. In exchange for this caricature of "territorial compromise" the Zionist-racist state demanded the recognition of its legitimacy by its Arab neighbours, their commitment to preserve the security of its frontiers and the "normalisation" of their relations with it, that is, essentially — beyond the diplomatic forms, certainly not unimportant — the opening of Arab markets to Israeli commodities and capital (indeed the influx of Arab capital into Israeli banks).
The historic evolutions described above have, at the same time, conferred on this plan an urgency which it never previously enjoyed and imposed an amendment to the initial version put forward by Ygael Allon, supported by Rabin and Peres:
- the intifada has considerably increased the urgency of an Israeli with-
International Viewpoint #252 January 1994 drawal from the Palestinian-populated zones of the West Bank and Gaza. By forcing the Zionist army to permanently repress street demonstrations with a strong participation by women and children, the intifada has brought about a veritable "moral gangrene" in the ranks of an army for whom ideological mobilisation — the conviction of fighting for the survival of Israel" — has always been a factor of the first order in its efficiency. In this sense, the intifada has been inspired by the lessons of the Lebanese resistance to the Zionist occupation, the first case in the history of the state of Israel where it had to withdraw from an Arab territory without having realised its objectives or imposed its conditions, the population of Israel having lost any motivation to stay in Lebanon faced with a growing mass movement and a military guerilla force sufficiently efficient to nourish growing political pressure for withdrawal. From 1988 onwards, the elite of the Zionist military establishment was arguing for withdrawal from Gaza and the Palestinian populated zones of the West Bank, even under the form of a unilateral, non-negotiated withdrawal, since in any case the army would keep these territories in its vice, so as to prevent any threat to the security of Israel and the Zionist settlements, while freeing itself of the exhausting task of controling the civilian population.
Certainly, as all observers have not failed to notice, the intifada, from 1989 onwards, then following the Gulf War, had experienced an overall decline and showed signs of exhaustion, without for all that ceasing and without ever returning to the pre-1987 situation. Nothing however authorised anyone in Israel to claim that the situation was on the road to becoming "normalised". Indeed, the intifada added a new dimension to its struggle, in obvious progression since the Gulf War, namely the resurgence of violent actions, individual or organized, led by Palestinians against the Zionist settlers, against the army of occupation, indeed on the official territory of the state of Israel. It goes without saying that these violent actions (many carried out without firearms) are not of the nature or the density to threaten the "security of the state of Israel", in the same way that the Lebanese guerillas could not militarily vanquish the Zionist army. But these actions were, and remain, of a level sufficient to create a feeling of insecurity among the Israeli population, and in particular its sectors in contact with the Palestinian people, the colonists and the army of course, but also the Israelis in contact with Palestinian workhands exploited in the South African manner.
This hardening of the forms of struggle of the intifada, completely predictable precisely because of the relative exhaustion of the street demonstrations and the growing Israeli response to stone throwing with murderous volleys of fire, has been principally the work of a current which has been ceaselessly growing since the beginning of the intifada among the Palestinians of the 1967 territories: the Muslim fundamentalist current whose majority expression is the Movement of Islamic Resistance, Hamas. In Palestine, as in most other cases of Islamic fundamentalist resurgence, this current feeds on the frustration of the masses, faced with an increasingly intolerable oppression, while the historic bankruptcy of bourgeois nationalism has become manifest (in Palestine, the successive surrenders of the Arafat leadership) and the left is either negligible (in most cases) or politically incapable of building an alternative leadership to the bourgeois leadership, on a historic scale (the Palestinian case). Thus the growth of the fundamentalist current, in very many cases if not the majority, is not first and foremost the expression of a shift to the right in society, unlike the rise of fascism in Europe, which many cite to establish false analogies and justify their support for the dictatorships of bourgeois nationalist origin. This growth - and this is clear in the Palestinian case — can represent firstly the expression of a radicalisation of the national and democratic struggle, disorientated and deformed for the aforesaid historical reasons, in the same way as the struggle of the Iranian masses against the Shah. It remains true, of course, that fundamentalist hegemony on a mass movement born in these conditions is of such a nature as to orientate it in the sense of a reactionary regression of forms of consciousness, combined with an obscurantist and sexist repression inside the movement itself. The resurgence of violent actions advocated and claimed by the Palestinian fundamentalists and the growth of their current among the population made it the "bete noire" of Yitzhak Rabin. The latter thought he had delivered a great blow in expelling 415 of them to South Lebanon in December 1992; he in fact committed a great blunder, handing a considerable political and media coup to their movement. Rabin had counted on the isolation of the fundamentalists, who rejected with vehemence the "peace negotiations" organized by Washington and violently criticized the Arafat leadership of the PLO. He learnt the natural and predictable lesson that Israeli repression of this current, aimed at weakening it organisationally, strengthened it politically. The lesson of Jordan was again underlined; the intervention of the Zionist army on the other side of the Jordan in April 1968 (the battle of Karameh) had galvanised those who it sought to dissuade from continuing their combat; only the action of the Jordanian army itself brought to an end the armed movement of the Palestinian masses. This same lesson was repeated in Lebanon where an Arab army, that of Syria, was more efficient in cutting the throat of the movement of the Palestinian masses than the multiple Israeli interventions.
In one sense, the Jordanian lesson of 1970 was at the source of the Allon plan, as indicated above. This plan sought to charge the Hashemite monarchy with the repressive control of the Palestinian populated zones of the West Bank. However, since the intifada, this "Jordanian option", as it was called, had become obsolete. Given that the Likud itself had accepted to negotiate in a quasi-direct manner with the PLO leadership, this new "option", the Arafat option, could be envisaged by Rabin-Peres without too many political risks. They ensured that Israeli law was in conformity with their action, by the abolition of the criminalisation of contacts with the PLO. They engaged in indirect, then direct, but always secret, negotiations with the Arafat leadership which led to the Washington Accords.
3. THE WASHINGTON ACCORDS
The only new element in the OsloWashington process in relation to the historic project of the Rabin-Peres leadership is the fact that it was carried out directly with the leadership of the PLO, rather than with King Hussein or representatives of the Palestinians of the occupied territories. To believe that the Accords represent a break with the "Zionist consensus" on Israeli sovereignty over the territories occupied in 1967 is to misunderstand the nature of that consensus, which never rested on the "Greater Israel" of the Zionist ultras, nor even the "Judea and Samaria" of the Likud and the mystics. The debate provoked by Rabin and Peres in 1988 on "territorial compromise" in continuity with the Allon plan is the demonstration of it. There was, on the contrary, an undeniable "Zionist consensus" on the question of direct negotiations with the PLO -though Shimon Peres, in particular, has taken care in latter years, above all since the beginning of direct negotiations between Washington and the PLO leadership in 1988, to transform the absolute refusal
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International Viewpoint #252 January 1994 of dialogue into a refusal conditional on the concessions demanded of the latter, concessions equivalent to a total renunciation of its entire historic identity and all that which allowed it to be perceived as the incarnation of Palestinian national struggle.
Rabin-Peres chose to break this consensus, instead of contenting themselves to deal with the delegation of Palestinians from the occupied territories in the negotiations organized by the United States. To assess the historic meaning of this decision, leading to the recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people" — without succumbing to the formidable media intoxication excited by the Accords on the theme of a "peace" which strongly resembles the "new world order" — it is necessary to examine the considerations which lay behind the Israeli rejection. The problem was no longer the fundamental programme of the PLO seeking the destruction of the Zionist state; this had been true for a long time and without any possible ambiguity since the end of 1988. The PLO leadership had progressively abandoned the Palestinian national charter of 1968 to postulate a negotiated settlement with the state of Israel, offering to recognise it and coexist in peace with it in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 leading to the creation of an "independent and sovereign Palestinian
, a state of all the Palestinians including the refugees. This latter demand has become, for several years now, the object of Palestinian national consensus, the sole objective common to all the territorial factions and all the political tendencies of the Palestinian people — a transitional programme very much more realistic than the maximalist objective of the "liberation of
This consensus had nonetheless been recently de facto broken by the Arafat leadership of the PLO, when it accepted negotiations in the framework of the "Madrid conference" on "Palestinian autonomy" envisaged in the Israeli-Egyptian Camp David accords which the PLO had violently denounced at the time they were adopted. The objective of the independent and sovereign Palestinian state was however maintained in official discourse. If the Israeli government of Shamir still refused to negotiate directly with the Arafat leadership, it is because it estimated that this was equivalent to a recognition of Palestinian rights in the diaspora. It was the refusal to recognise these rights which, since the programmatic adaptation of the PLO, became the fundamental reason for the Zionist consensus over non-recognition. 16
Under the Camp David accords signed by Begin himself, the Israeli government has already for fifteen years recognized not only the "existence" of the Palestinians in the territories occupied in 1967, but also their right to administrative autonomy followed, after a transitory period of five years, by the right to be consulted on their future. However, what the Zionist establishment, of all tendencies, has always refused to recognise, is the rights of the Palestinian refugees, of the majority of the Palestinian people forced into exile by Zionism, and whose very existence is a permanent reminder of the historic injustice which is at the basis of the state of Israel and of the "Palestinian problem" well before 1967.
The recognition by Rabin of the PLO as "representative of the Palestinian people" would have been an event of a formidable historic significance if it had this meaning; if it was a recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people as a whole. But the truth is that Rabin has not recognised the PLO as it was and as the Zionist establishment has always refused to recognise it. What Rabin has recognised is the PLO moulded to his conditions and those of Peres, to an extent beyond which either had ever been able to hope. That is, not only a PLO leadership which recognises in advance the legitimacy of the state of Israel, a Zionist-racist state founded on the expulsion and the bloody oppression of the Palestinian people, without mentioning the neighbouring populations — this, let us recall again, was already the case officially since 1988. But also, and above this, a PLO leadership which agreed to sign "peace" accords which rank among the most unjust and humiliating in the history of capitulations, which not only sanction the partition of the territory occupied between the occupier (army and settlements) and the indigenous population, but also deny the right of the territories which will be evacuated to dispose of the attributes of sovereignty, beginning with a national army, and even to be called a state (only "self-government"), neither recognising any of the rights of the 1948 refugees, the great majority of Palestinians, not even the right to return to the territory of "self-government" in the West Bank and Gaza. Even in the case of the 1967 refugees (those who left the territories in 1967 fleeing the Zionist invasion), only a section of them will be allowed to return, on the basis of lists agreed by the occupation authorities.
One could certainly prolong this list of infamous conditions set down by the Washington Accords: "the structure, the powers and the responsibilities of the
Palestinian authority" and even its "electoral system" are subject to the prior approval of the Zionist government; water resources are to be shared, prisoners are not mentioned, and so on. Nonetheless, what has already been cited is sufficient to amply characterise them for what they are, as has been done already by a very broad spectrum of Palestinian forces from the fundamentalists to the far left (including the most moderate bourgeois nationalists who, up until the Accords, were still part of the PLO establishment, indeed among its highest leadership. This undeniable fact is a striking demonstration that the most serious "rupture of consensus" оссаsioned by these accords is the rupture of the Palestinian national consensus — very much more serious, massive and profound than any division inside Israeli society. On the Israeli side, the debate opposes Zionists equally attached to the "Jewishness" of the state and its security, who disagree on the best way of ensuring its long term preservation. On the Palestinian side, the debate is between the partisans of an essentially collaborationist capitulation and those who reject this capitulation, with the common denominator being the sentiment of an injured national dignity and of elementary rights trampled under foot. This explains the well known fact that the negotiations have been led on the Palestinian side by an Arafat leadership working behind the back of its own partners in the official leadership of the PLO — of which only a minority (eight out of eighteen finally approved the accords — and of the delegation of Palestinians from the interior to the public negotiations (who had nonetheless been chosen by Arafat) who, feeling themselves short-circuited, had threatened to resign shortly before the conclusion of the Accords.
In exchange for this new look Allon plan, the PLO leadership has committed itself to halting the intifada, and to renouncing "terrorism and all other acts of violence" (a unilateral engagement which, given the everyday Zionist violence which is a thousand times more serious, is unspeakable). It commits itself to keep "order" in the territories which will be ceded to it. through a "powerful police force" which the Accords envisage for this end. In the military and political context created by the Accords, this order will be imposed essentially against the opponents of the agreement - those who will seek to go beyond its infamous limits and to pursue the struggle for the dismantling of the Zionist settlements and the total withdrawal of the Israeli army from the territories occupied in 1967, as well as for the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and its
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DOSSIER
International Viewpoint #252 January 1994 majority in forced exile. In other words, in accordance with Zionist objectives since the Allon plan, a repressive Arab force — Palestinian, and no longer Jordanian — will be charged with suppressing the Palestinians of the territories, by proxy of the Israeli army and under its strict control (the latter reserves for itself a "right of pursuit"). 4. THE "SELF-GOVERNMENT"
### OF THE PLO
When Yasser Arafat boasted publicly of having proved his ability to maintain order in the Lebanon, he stresses the principal consideration which had led the Zionist government to negotiate directly with him. Since the new look Allon plan would be realised with the participation of a Palestinian authority, rather than with the Jordanian monarchy, the Rabin-Peres government quickly understood that it would obtain very much more from the Arafat leadership of the PLO installed in Tunis and confronted with the problem of maintenance of its enormous bureaucratic apparatus, than it would ever obtain from the representatives of the interior subjected to the daily pressure of a mass movement in struggle. This obvious calculation has proved itself well-founded.
Moreover, the Rabin-Peres government knows that the Arafat leadership has "proved itself in Lebanon". It knows that for the task of repression by proxy of any inclination to pursue the Palestinian national struggle — which is the principle task devolved to the apparatus of Palestinian "self-government" agreed by the Zionist occupation — no internal leadership had the bureaucratic repressive qualifications, the human and material means, the necessary prestige and the disposition to carry out the task which characterised the Arafat leadership.
This mistrust of the Palestinians of the interior and this confidence in the Arafat apparatus, which was publicly proclaimed by the heads of the Israeli repressive services, is perfectly illustrated by the only exception which they have allowed to the principle of the non-return of the Palestinian refugees; namely, Arafat and the gentlemen of his apparatus (excluding the opponents of the Accords) will be admitted to the territories surrendered by the Israeli army along with the soldiers of the Egyptian and Jordanian units of the PLA (Palestine Liberation army) attached to the regular armies of these two countries since the creation of the PLO and the PLA by the Arab League in 1964 (it is even specified that they must be holders of Egyptian or Jordanian documents and "trained as units, to the exclusion of other formations of the PLA (Syrian and Iraqi) is very eloquent. Already, this hard core of the future Palestinian police has undergone an intensive training under the Egyptian and Jordanian armed forces so as to be ready to assume the task which is attributed to it. It is also significant that a priority form of aid from the imperialist powers to the Palestinian "authority" is to endow it with means of repression; thus, Delors declared following his meeting with Arafat at the beginning of November that the European Union was going to make emergency deliveries of arms, vehicles and helicopters to the Palestinian police!
Moreover, the Jordanian option of the Allon plan has not been abandoned, but only replaced by the Jordanian-Palestinian option laid out in the 1982 Reagan plan. The PLO has for a long time situated itself in the framework of this latter plan by adopting the principle of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. This project is at the heart of the Washington Accords; if the choice of Gaza as first stage is easily explained by the great difficulties of the Israeli occupation in controlling this very heavily populated area (in great part consisting of the refugees of 1948) the choice of the town of Jericho is only explained by the proximity of the Jordanian frontier (the Allenby bridge). The headquarters of "Palestinian self-government " will thus be in direct osmosis with the Jordanian state. For Rabin-Peres, the Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian "regional structure", conceived as a common market, will be the Trojan horse of the economic penetration of the Arab hinterland by Israeli sub-imperialism. According to this schema, the comprador bourgeoisies, Palestinian and Jordanian-Palestinian, will become the active agents of this penetration. A reserve of cheap labour could also be exploited on the spot by Israeli capital, without the security tasks inherent in the import of Arab labour to the Israeli populated territories.
In sum, the "Palestinian self-government" of the Arafat leadership will be an extreme case of indirect colonial administration, closer to a "puppet" government than the neo-colonial governments emerging from decolonisation. It will be thus, or it will not be; the Zionist government has decided to proceed by stages, beginning with Gaza and Jericho, to test the efficiency of the Arafat apparatus in the repressive task which has been allocated to it. If this apparatus proves itself incapable of fulfilling this task, the Washington Accords will be thrown in the dustbin.
Thus, the Israeli sword of Damocles will be permanently sharpened, and will certainly form the major pretext of the Palestinian police repression; such is the infernal logic of any collaborationist regime with an occupying power.
And this is by far the worst aspect of the participation of the Arafat leadership in the Washington Accords. It is necessary to avoid the sophisms of the "lesser evil" and the relationship of forces, invoked as a justification for all capitulations (above all when those who suffer the occupation are "short-circuited" by the bureaucrats in gilded exile in Tunis). In the framework of the relationship of forces existing since 1967 between the state of Israel and the fragmented Palestinian people, in the absence of any Arab and international support capable of changing this relationship, it was not possible, on all the evidence, to obtain a complete and unconditional withdrawal of the Zionist army from the territories occupied in 1967. It was not possible, in other words, to realise the correct transitional objective, however illusory, of the independent and sovereign Palestinian state, in the true sense of these words and not in the caricatural and demagogic interpretation which Arafat has given them
The immediate realistic objective was that of an unconditional withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Palestinian agglomerations formulated by the leadership of the intifada in the course of its first months of existence. The pressure of the Palestinian struggle under its different forms could reasonably culminate in this result, on the condition that this struggle was not sabotaged by sowing the illusion of the realisation of Palestinian objectives by the diplomatic path, through the good offices of Washington. If the intifada has been in decline, this is not uniquely for objective reasons, but also, indeed above all, for reasons of leadership. The Tunis leadership had done everything to re-establish its hegemony over a movement which had freed itself from it in its first months. Certainly, the Palestinian self-administration which would thus have been created would not have been entirely sovereign and would have been limited to the very territories that the Israeli army now envisages withdrawal from. But it would not have had to recognise the legitimacy of the Zionist state, and still less that of the presence of its settlements and its army in the territories occupied in 1967; it would not have had to engage itself in a proxy contract to strangle the Palestinian national struggle against the continuing occupation. The refugees would no more have been authorised to return to the territories than
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International Viewpoint #252 January 1994 they are by the Washington Accords; but this would have concerned all the Palestinians in exile, without any exception being made for the bureaucratic and military repressive apparatuses.
Indeed, it is difficult to argue that a self-administration of the Palestinians of the interior, with the experience of the forms of self-organisation from below born out of the early days of the intifada, would not have been very much more in correspondence with the well understood interests of the Palestinian masses, than a "self-government" whose spinal column is the repressive bourgeois apparatus of the exile, still more corrupted and repressive than was the Algerian "army of the frontiers" led by Boumedienne which was entrusted with aborting the revolutionary potential emerging from Algerian independence. The Israeli army is going to withdraw from the Palestinian agglomerations of the West Bank and Gaza, and it is all the better for the masses which have directly suffered occupation for over a quarter of a century. But any pursuit of the Palestinian national struggle, and any social radicalisation of this struggle, will henceforth confront a Palestinian police which has yet to demonstrate that it will be less repressive than the Israeli army, in the long if not the short term: all the more so in that it will act in co-ordination with the Jordanian and Israeli repressive apparamuses.
5. WHAT PERSPECTIVES OF
STRUGGLE?
The problem which today confronts the Palestinian masses of the West Bank and Gaza is not that of the struggle against the Washington Accords, in the sense of a struggle against their application. In the absence of an immediate alternative, it would be absurd to define the tasks in these terms. What is at stake is to go beyond the constrictive framework of these Accords; it amounts first and foremost to pursuing the struggle in all legitimate forms (with the exception of any violence against unarmed civilians) against the continuing occupation, against the presence of the army and the Zionist settlements in the territories occupied in 1967, against the Israeli stranglehold on the resources of these territories, against the penetration of Israeli commodities and capital - in the perspective of the independent Palestinian state. It will amount above all to a struggle for the revolutionary replacement of the Palestinian repressive bourgeois apparatus by a self-organisation of the Palestinian masses, re-establishing the tradition of the 18 first year of the intifada.
For the Palestinians in exile, in particular the Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, the dream of liberation and a return to Palestine must not serve as a pretext for a passive attitude towards the existing regimes, oppressors of the Palestinian people as much as the indigenous populations. The strategic interests of the Palestinian people demand the revolutionary overthrow of the oppressor Arab regimes, in joint struggle with all those who suffer their oppression. In particular, the immediate interests of the great majority of Palestinian people who live on the two banks of the Jordan — and who are in the majority in Jordan itself — is to break the chain which stifles them at its weakest point, the Jordanian monarchy, and to once again transform Jordan into the regional epicentre of the anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist struggle which it was between 1967 and 1970. In other words, it is necessary to replace the confederation envisaged by Arafat and King Hussein by a revolutionary re-unification of the two banks of the Jordan.
This orientation of struggle demands the emergence of a proletarian leadership of the Palestinian struggle, of an autonomous movement of the Palestinian labouring masses in close symbiosis with the struggles of the exploited classes and the oppressed masses in the countries of exile. It is from this point of view that the balance sheet and the choices of the exile leaderships of the Palestinian left must be judged. Their incapacity to affirm themselves as an alternative leadership to that of Arafat for the movement of the Palestinian masses is certainly due to the fact that they have never been able to formulate a class programme combining the social, democratic and national dimensions; that they have not been able to thwart the successive recuperations of the mass movement by the Arafat leadership, and act resolutely for a democratic reorganization of the representative institutions of the Palestinian struggle; that they have constantly compromised themselves with regimes, that of Damascus in particular, justly hated by the Palestinian masses; in short, they have acted within the narrow limits of a petty bourgeois nationalism, certainly radically anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist, but not anti-capitalist.
The choice now made by these leaderships to constitute a "Islamic, Democratic and National front" with the organizations subordinate to Damascus, as well as with the fundamentalist movement, can only hamper the objective that they assign themselves: leading the struggle of the Palestinian masses. On the one hand, it displays a great political m with the organisations co Damascus, which are totally discred the eyes of the masses, and subject to the good will of a regime which is itself negotiating an accord with the Zionist state under US guidance. On the other, it is to play the game of the fundamentalists to accept ideological compromises with them in the name of the united front, and to abdicate the pressing task of an implacable ideological struggle against their eminently reactionary social programme. Alliances on the ground, in Palestine, against the Zionist occupation and every other form of future repression, can certainly not be ruled out with the fundamentalist movement, which has become an unavoidable objectives with this movement, it is no less necessary to "march separately", that is not to mix banners and not to put a damper on the ideological struggle against the religious fanaticism, obscurantism and sexism of the fundamentalists.
The current choices of the leaderships in exile of the Palestinian left are not of a nature to facilitate the indispensable construction of an Israeli movement of struggle for the complete withdrawal of the Zionist army from the territories occupied in 1967 and the dismantling of the settlements which they protect. They are still less likely to facilitate the construction of an Israeli anti-Zionist radical left, a condition of the first order for the breaking of the Israeli working class from Zionism, without which the dismantling of the Zionist state and the de-Zionisation of Israeli society are unthinkable. This is all the more regrettable when one could reasonably hope that the psychological shock of the Washington Accords could favour the development of a critical reflection on Zionism among the workers and youth of the state of Israel.
It is to this end that Israeli revolutionaries will work. With all militants committed to the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, and particularly those of the imperialist countries, they will continue to support the Palestinian national struggle against the Zionist government and any other oppressor, independently of the nature of the leaderships of these struggles. But they will privilege in their support all that which permits the Palestinian struggle to advance on the road of class radicalisation and of internationalism. *
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DOSSIER
• ISRAELI-LO ACCORD