Gaza's black Friday
Requiem for a massacre foretold
T WAS NOT THE FIRST time that the Palestinian Police have displayed their more inglorious side when they carried out the shocking killings of 18 November 1994 in
Gaza. In fact, from the first days of their swinging into action, the Palestinian suppleplace. The demonstration, which was expected to be big, was to involve an important number of israeli pacifists. This is the same Arafat which organised demonstrations against the Israeli pledge to give Jordan a say in the management of the
4. See International Viewpoint, no. 249, October 1993, & no. 252, January 1994.
International Viewpoint #262 December 1994
HE NEW PALESTINIAN
T policeforce has fired upon an Islamic crowd, resulting in a number of deaths. It is the most pessimistic hypothesis for the tives of the Israeli occupying army have set about demonstrating their talents as repressive and heartless (this goes for a large number among them, at least) brutes; talents developed by those specialists in repression - the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes which had trained them. It had already been possible to observe that a Palestinian death by Palestinian bullet, a Palestine tortured by Palestinian torturers, or several dozen, even hundreds of arrests of Palestinians by representatives of the "Palestinian Authorities" make far less international news than the same acts carried out by the occupying army itself. Rabin is therefore currently winning his bet. As we affirmed from the date of signature of the Washington Accord, for him it was just a question of putting his Zionist/Labour Party ground-plan for the 1967 Israeli occupation of the territories into action: the Allon Plan. Drawn up the day after the "six-day" war, this Plan, approved by the Israeli government, planned the designation of Palestinian enclaves caught in the stranglehold of an Israeli army maintaining control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and notably of the British mandate Palestinian borders the length of the River Jordan and to the south of Gaza. If the Palestinian section of this plan had to wait twenty-seven years before beginning to be put into action, it was because it was missing a vital element: a credible Palestinian partner prepared to repress its own people in favour of an occupation maintained in different forms. What we referred to as "The long march... backwards" of Yasser Aratat's PLO has finally ended up at this point of extreme degeneration for a movement which not long ago advocated the armed struggle for the liberation of its country: it's as if the Algerian FLN had transformed itself, in 1962, into an army of harkisl2 In so doing, Arafat has jeopardised any chance of true Palestinian self-determination, even partial, coming about under present conditions. Similarly too, in breaking long ago the Arab boycott of Egypt, a signatory of the first Israeli-Arab peace treaty, he had cleared the way for a recommencement of regional American politics formerly seized up by this boycott. This time — following the example set by Sadat, under incomparably more ignominious conditions - he has permitted the Arab regimes to co-operate openly with the Zionist State, thus casting the Palestinian people into the worst isolation they have ever known. King Hussein of Jordan was therefore able to draw up his own treaty with Israel which represents a real partnership between the two states, of whom it would be difficult to say which has more Palestinian blood on its hands. And all that Arafat can find to do about it has been to stir up anti-Jordan feelings amongst Palestinians in the occupied territories on the subject of the "holy places" of Jerusalem — rather difficult to stomach, by the way, when you know that he is doing his utmost to prevent any action being taken by the Palestinians against the Israeli occupation of that same town.3 All this confirms too well the opinion which we expressed in these same columns at the very beginning of the proceedings. The issue was, however, far from being obvious at that point; it provoked a debate in our ranks and in our press. Michel Warshawsky was naturally very much involved in this debate. Opposite, he presents his own reassessment in a sharp-edged article which was originally published in the 24 November 1994 edition of Rouge (paper of the French section of the Fourth International). Salah Jaber ©
1. See Salah Jaber, Where is the PLO going? • Part 1: The long march.. backwards", International Viewpoint, no. 156, 6
Feb 1989.
3. Our comrades in the Revolutionary Communist League (section of the Fourth International in the israeli State) have told us how Arafat's PLO supported moves to prevent the demonstration for the liberation of East Jerusalem from taking
Moslem "holy places".
5. See IV, no. 252. 30 future of the occupied territories which has occurred. Yasser Arafat appears to be a prisoner of the policy imposed by Yitzhak Rabin, incapable of influencing the course of events. The maintenance of the Israeli colonies in Gaza was a trap which is now closing.
The images of Black Friday in Gaza were unacceptable. Not only because nothing similar had ever been seen before but, on the contrary, because they recalled the darkest moments of the Intifada, when the Israeli army would fire into the crowd causing dozens of victims amongst the believers who would demonstrate at the end of Friday prayers. This time it was Palestinian police who shot at Palestinians - and this is unbearable.
We will never know how the bloody incident occurred. The Palestinian police has claimed that they were not the first to fire shots. This is somewhat unbelie vable, given that the forces of order were not harmed, while hundreds of protesters were hit. However it started, the fact is that the Palestinian police received an order to use automatic weapons upon their compatriots and did not hesitate to do so. It is a major turning point, and it is still difficult to gauge all its likely consequences.
### Moral autism
"Arabs killing Arabs: What do you want of the Jews?" demanded the former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, after the massacres of Sabra and Chatila in 1982, and you know the outcome: Even the commission of enquiry led by Begin recognised Israeli responsibility for the massacres carried out by the Lebanese forces, obliged the Minister for Defence, Ariel Sharon, to resign and stated that the Israeli army could not shirk its responsibility for the massacre. Begin never recovered from what happened and eventually succumbed to a serious mental breakdown which some have described as resulting from deep guilt.
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
PALESTINE
...it is Rabin's project which has been imposed."
International Viewpoint #262 December 1994
There is no chance that Rabin or Yossef Sarid, the main left leader in the government, will come to such a tragic end, because nothing will dent the moral autism of the first, and the congenital clear conscience of the second. Nevertheless, there is still a comparison to be made with Sabra and Chatila. The Israeli army remains, in reality as well as in the Accords, the ultimate sovereign authority; nothing is done without its agreement and police officers' salaries, like the daily bread of the million inhabitants of Gaza, depends upon the goodwill of the Palestinian authority in applying the directives which come from Tel Aviv. Jurisdiction of international law lies outside in this sense: although the Israeli army remains present in the West Bank and Gaza, it controls their frontiers and can do what it pleases there, as it remains the sovereign authority and therefore responsible for the security and well-being of their inhabitants.
Legally and practically, it is the occupying force which remains respon-
It takes all the hypocrisy of a Sarid to state that "We're sorry about the victims, but we have no reason to involve ourselves in the internal struggles of the Palestinians", even though for weeks this same Sarid has not stopped threatening the Palestinians with reprisals if they did not show more firmness. As for Rabin, he is not embarrassed by moral considerations, and with his own direct style, declared on the radio the day after the massacre: "Here is the proof that Arafat respects the Accords which he signed with us".
The Accords of which the Prime Minister spoke boiled down to what we could all see, the day after the massacre, on television, near to the refugee camp at Nusseirat, at the centre of the Gaza strip. There, in the very heart of the territory run by the Palestinian administration, surrounded by a concentrated Palestinian population, is the Israeli settlers' colony of Netzarim, where thirty families live. It is guarded by several hundred Israeli soldiers, a number of whom are placed on the most important road in the Gaza Strip. Since last May Nezarim has been the object of a number of attacks, one of which, a week earlier, left three parachute officers dead On a number of occasions Israeli ministers have said that "It is a thorn in our side". Whilst thousands of angry Palestinians were converging last Saturday on Nezarim, the soldiers there decided to withdraw several hundred metres, and to leave the Palestinian police to disperse the demonstration. To those which found it scandalous that Tsahal backed away from angry young people, a senior Israeli officer responded: "This is the procedure adopted in the Cairo Accords. If it is a question of a Palestinian demonstration, it is up to the Palestinian police to do the hard work, not us."
### Allegiance
It could not be any clearer: Israel has imposed its settlements in the heart of autonomous Palestinian territory, a complete provocation which will invite attacks and other demonstrations of anger, but will make Palestinians repress resistance. How can we not remember the declaration by Rabin, after the signing of the Oslo Accords, that: "Everything will go on as before, save that we will no longer have a police force in Gaza; this is now the job of the Palestinians, without being hampered by the Supreme Court and the human rights organisations."
A year ago many of us refused to believe that this dream of Rabin and the Israeli leadership would become reality, banking instead on an opposed dynamic, capable of resolving the dilemma between Israeli settlements and real Palestinian self-government, through at least the partial dismantlement of those settlements; Friday's massacre shows that such a dynamic has not born fruit and that, on the contrary, it is Rabin's project which has been imposed. As predicted by the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, the Palestinian police has become a native militia, which does the dirty work that the Israeli army is not capable of doing, and the Palestinian Authority is an appendage of the Israeli forces of occupation. Said has compared the situation with the Vichy regime in France under the Nazis; the US intellectual Noam Chomsky has referred to Chief Buthelezi in South Africa: and others prefer the analogy of the Jewish councils in the Ghettos during the time of the Nazis; whatever the analogy, it falls outside the transition towards national sovereignty and independence
Even if the combined Palestinian political forces try to escape the escalation of violence, while a truce is in the process of being negotiated by mediators, including Dr Haider Abdel Shafi, a respected left-wing leader who led the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid Conference and who today disagrees from Arafat, this truce can only be temporary. The role assigned to President Arafat and his police by the Cairo Accords, alongside permanent pressure from the Israeli government, will oblige them to continue repression against a resistance which the desperate economic situation and on-going humiliation can only make worse.
### Resistance
President Arafat no longer has room to manoeuvre. The framework imposed upon him by the Israeli government forces him to be the chief of a mercenary force in the service of an Israeli army of occupation. It has now been shown that these mercenaries will not hesitate to fire upon their compatriots. For services rendered in the struggle against "Islamic extremism", Shimon Peres will negotiate some dollars more from donor states, and in particular Europe. The elections which must legitimise Arafat's position, the date of which keeps being postponed by the Israelis, no longer have any meaning, at least in convincing Hamas to take part, to which Rabin and his team are completely opposed. However, without popular legitimacy the Palestine Authority will greatly lose its effectiveness from an Israeli point of view. Without doubt it is for this reason, even in the heart of the Israeli government, and particularly around Shimon Peres, that one hears a new tune: To apply the Oslo Accords more rapidly and, in particular, the partial dismantlement of the settlements.
It will again be the actions of the Palestinian armies which will be decisive in the debate which opposes the hard line of Rabin and the moderate line of Peres, an upsurge in violence being the only way to convince the Israeli leaders that they cannot continue their occupation, their confiscation of land, the humiliations - and at the same time save money. This shows the extent to which Arafat and his team no longer have any influence over the course of events. *
31
1994 index reeniening socials To Belgium
International Viewpoint # 262 December 1994
INDEX
CUBA
Asphyxiation
Janette Habel
October 94
260
(issues 252 - 262)
Israeli-PLO Accords
The alternative dialogue