The road to a just settlement teria and the stability pact, and without being present in the ECB). But it is doubtful that in the first case, the EU is pushing for homogenisation. In the second, this partial involvement in the EU could structure itself.
Contradiction
THE resolution which follows was adopted by the International
In this scenario, the contradiction between the institutional deepening of the
Executive Committee of the Fourth International, the worldwide
EU and its enlargement is a false problem, organization of revolutionary socialists, at its October 2000 meetartificially puffed up by the tactical needs of countries playing the game of the balance of power and by superficial journaling.
THE bloody autumn unleashed by the concern to preserve the moral of their army ists. In reality, there is substantial agreement between the trio (and others like Italy) on this perspective. Even if this agreement is shot through with contradictions, these are secondary.
What obscures this basic dynamic is the difficulty the British government has in joining the monetary union and the necessity for Blair to make rhetorical concessions to a majority of the British population. But Blair (and big British and foreign capital) is in favour of membership. The European army under construction is an initiative by Britain (with France), on the basis of their common engagement in the Balkans and their irritation (also common) with the US. If this question is resolved, the other problem, that of the political management of the ECB, could be approached.
The EU and its vanguard (the three key imperialist countries) have the perspective of creating a political leadership in tune with their European, indeed global ambitions. It would be otiose to stress the threat that this carries for democracy in the EU and for the conquests of the working class.
Another Europe is needed - social, democratic, egalitarian, generous. For that it is necessary to do everything possible to stop this machine. There is only one way: the mobilisation of the labour movement and progressive public opinion around one idea: Stop right there! Break down the closed doors of an omnipotent European Council! The right to speak and make decisions must lie with the peoples of Europe!
They must determine, through public debate, through a decision of their elected representatives, the fundamental bases on which they wish to live together: from the Pole to Gibraltar, and from the Atlantic to the Urals! * * François Vercammen is a member of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.
TAra Shan,
provocation committed by general Ariel Sharon, supervisor of the massacres at Sabra and Chatila in Lebanon in 1982 — with the escort graciously provided for him by general Ehud Barak, "Labour" prime minister of an Israeli state more than ever dominated by the military
— already constitutes one of the most brutal episodes of the long history of criminal violence perpetrated by the Zionist enterprise against the Palestinian people.
The entire world has seen yet again to what point the discourse of the imperialist powers on human rights and the rights of peoples is variable according to the interests of their world hegemony: intensive bombardments and murderous embargos for Iraq and Serbia, "rogue states"; unequalled levels of military aid and friendly advice for Israel, key member of the strategic apparatus of imperialist domination in this major oil-producing area of the world and in any case non-recognition of national rights, whether of Palestinians or Kosovars.
Sharon's provocation was nonetheless only the drop of water that made a cup that had been full to the brim for a very long time run over. It shattered the process opened up by the Oslo accords and their signature in Washington, on the White House lawn, in September 1993. It is the consequence of the overaccumulation of frustrations in the course of the seven years since then, during which the economic and social position of the Palestinian people have worsened.
In signing these accords, general Rabin offered the Palestinians a fraudulent deal: he could proceed to the withdrawal of Israeli troops from inside the zones of Palestinian population in the territories occupied in 1967 — a withdrawal which Israel's military top brass had demanded since the Intifada in 1988, motivated by a and worried about the consequences of its being bogged down in the tasks of repression in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on its state of general preparation in relation to the Arab environment.
### Elementary demands
Beyond this redeployment, Rabin offered no concession of a nature to satisfy the elementary demands of the Palestinians: dismantling of the Zionist settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, total withdrawal of the Israeli army from the territories occupied in 1967, establishment of a Palestinian state on the whole of these territories, including East Jerusalem, and the return to Palestine of the refugees of 1948 and 1967.
It only held out the possibility of accepting a largely truncated and perverted version of Palestinian aspirations, on the express condition that the Palestinian Authority (PA) headed by Yasser Arafat fulfilled its part of the deal, by showing that it was capable of bringing the population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to heel efficiently and on a lasting basis.
This fraudulent deal very quickly came up against a major contradiction: successive Zionist governments, those of Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak, conceded to the Palestinians only some of the promises of Oslo, with an eyedropper and increasingly late, demanding each time that the PA increase its proxy repression as condition for the following stage. Their "security"-fixated mentality, their chauvinist arrogance and their racist contempt for the Palestinians meant that their priority concern was pandering to the most reactionary fringe of Israeli public opinion. Meanwhile, they have carried out a policy of development of the Zionist colonies and a military and infrastructural parcellization of the Palestinian territories, which has
International Viewpoint #326 December 2000 7
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European Union / Palestine *
* Palestine been humiliating and revolting to the highest point for the population of these territothe Oslo accords would be the absence of direct collaboration between the Palestinian leadership and the Zionist government and a contemptuous indifference on the part of the latter as to the internal management of the Palestinian territories. Faced with this, the only progressive perspective which is offered to the Palestinian people would be to develop anew the forms of self-organization which characterized the early days of the Intifada, instead of the repressive and highly corrupt administration set up in the framework of ries.
In such conditions, it was totally predictable that the PA, confronted with the exasperation of the inhabitants of the West nely, depret for to do Bank analestion plation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, would experience a lot of difficulty in muzzling Palestinian society completely, despite its efforts to do so. Moreover, Yasser Arafat and his lieutenants were much less inclined to push the repressive escalation further given that, on the one hand, they knew that in losing all legitimacy in the eyes of their population, indeed in the eyes of a section of their troops, they weakened themselves in relation to Israel; while on the other, they feel increasingly that they have been duped.
This increasingly obvious impasse determined the recent explosion and the bloody autumn which has resulted from it and which is still going on. These events illustrate in a cruel manner the total bankruptcy of the strategic choice of the Arafat leadership, consisting in counting on the benevolence of the Zionist state and the so-called arbitration of Washington so as to
The increasingly fostered the grow obtain a Bantustan in the 1967 territories.
Islamic fundamentalism among the Palestinian population.
Barak, who is trying to win the participation of Ariel Sharon in a government of Zionist unity, proclaims today his intention to go back to the initial project of the Israeli military leadership, as it was conceived in 1988: to carry out unilaterally the redeployment of the Israeli army in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in such a way as to consolidate strategic Israeli control of these territories and their external frontiers, placing the enclaves of Palestinian population under permanent siege, reduced to the situation of vast self-managed concentration camps, constantly threatened with being asphyxiated by a retightening of the Israeli blockade.
The first difference between this perspective and the Israeli interpretation of 8 International Viewpoint #326 December 2000 the Oslo accords.
### Points of support
Bank and Gaza Strip does not have the means on its own to free itself from the Israeli yoke. The relationship of forces is unfavourable to it in a crushing way. It can hope to change it only by finding the points of support which until now have been cruelly lacking:
• in the pressure of the popular movement of solidarity on the Arab governments to force them to give the Palestinians the diplomatic support and economic aid which are indispensable to them;
• in the pressure of the movement of international solidarity for the recognition of the right of the Palestinians to a state, for an emergency international aid, to stop the state of Israel from pursuing its policy of strangulation of the Palestinian territories and to cut off all military and related aid; one of the conditions for an effective movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people is to forcefully reject any expressions of anti-Semitism;
• inside the state of Israel itself, where the outburst of violence of which those Palestinians holding a second class Israeli citizenship have been the victims has shown to what depths Israeli society could plunge. It is to be hoped that this fearful perspective could impel a large number of Israelis to mobilize to force their government to stop starving the Palestinians and to recognize their right to a sovereign state on the whole of their territories occupied in 1967, as an indispensable element on the road to a just settlement on the principle of equal rights of all people Arabs and Jews without which this region of the world would have no perspective of the future other than murderous violence and permanent insecurity. * appeal to the Israeli public in which they outlined their grievances and aspirations. The appeal was published in major Israeli newspapers and on the web (www.arabrights.org/palestine/statement/index.htm) and has since attracted wide international attention.
~N February of this year, we, a group of
Palestinian academics and activists,
_addressed an urgent call to the Israeli public. We expressed in it our fear that the Oslo peace process, as it had evolved over the past seven years, was inevitably leading to further conflict -perhaps even war-rather than to our hoped-for goal: a final historic reconciliation that would enable our two peoples to live in peace, human dignity and neighborly relations.
We expressed our concern that the Oslo accords have been used by Israel, despite claims to the contrary, to create unprecedented expansion of settlements, almost double the settler population, and continue the expropriation of Palestinian land. Freedom of movement for Palestinians has been severely curtailed while settler violence against our communities continues without restraint.
Against this background, the Palestinian population has had no physical, legal or political means of protection. While military occupation is a palpable reality that affects us every day, it has been disguised under Oslo in ways that negate international law and the protection it might afford. We now live in a series of small disconnected areas which are being posited as the emerging Palestinian state. The only way to expand these Bantustans according to the distorted logic which has dominated negotiations, is for the Palestinian leadership to make concessions which would legitimize a number of Israeli demands in contravention to international law: to concede our national rights to East Jerusalem, allow settlements to remain in occupied territory and renounce the right of return for Palestinian refugees
The Israeli leadership (be it Likud or Labor) has continued to imagine that, given the massive military balance of force in its favor, it would be able to impose on the Palestinian Authority its unjust vision of a final settlement, and pretend that the conflict is resolved in the eyes of the world. This delusion that a deeply
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An urgent statement to the Israeli public IN November, 121 Palestinian political and academic personalities issued an
unjust agreement can be made by Israel with President Yasser Arafat alone, who is then expected to force his people into accepting it, is profoundly shortsighted and has inevitably led to the critical situation that confronts us now. Many of us were in the streets over these recent weeks, holding neither guns nor stones. We were holding candles to commemorate the deaths of our students, neighbors and relatives who tried to make the world hear with their lives what we were unable to with our words. The naive and dangerous notion that Palestinians took to the streets following Yasser Arafat's orders is not only an insult to our intelligence but also a clear sign of the lack of understanding of the reality in which we live.
We are deeply concerned that the conflict has, at times, dangerously spiraled, into an ethnic/religious one, as the pogroms against Arab citizens of Nazareth, the lynching of the two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah and the numerous mob attacks on synagogues and mosques have shown. The profoundly irresponsible and selfserving act of the Barak government in allowing Ariel Sharon onto the Haram al Sharif shows not just an alarming lack of judgement, but also a total disregard for Palestinian, Arab and Muslim sensibilities.
The use of live ammunition against unarmed Palestinian civilians at demonstrations there the next day and at protests ever since, shows total contempt for Palestinian life. The stubborn and escalating use of Israel's overwhelming military power in order to crush the current uprising and terrify the Palestinian population into submission shows a dangerous, wilful refusal to address its underlying causes. Military might may be able to subdue the current wave of protest — at the immediate cost of many lives. But in the long run, it cannot stem the will of a people seeking their just and rightful place in the world. It will also condemn us to re-visit the current crisis again and again.
All of us are firm believers in an equitable and just negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians that recognizes the right to self-determination. However we, like our communities, have lost hope in the possibility of resolving the current inequities in the framework of the Oslo agreements and the exclusive American "brokerage' of the process.
We believe that we must find an equitable basis for peace which must necessarily take the following broad principles as a point of departure:
1. Negotiations must be based on the principles that all the lands occupied by Israel in 1967 are, in fact, occupied territories and that peace will be only be achieved by ending the occupation of these territories and thus enabling Palestinians to exercise their right to self-determination and sovereignty.
2. East Jerusalem is part of these Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967. Consequently, a final settlement must include Palestinian sovereignty over East
Jerusalem and the commitment to Jerusalem as the recognized capital of two states.
3. Israel's recognition of its responsibility in the creation of the Palestinian refugees in 1948 is a pre-requisite to finding a just and lasting resolution of the refugee problem in accordance with relevant United Nations resolutions.
4. Both sides must recognize the spiritual and historical affinities of each other to sites and locations within their own borders and they must affirm and guarantee the access and protection of the other people to these places within their own borders. But in neither case should the existence of such sites be used to advance extra-territorial claims to locations within each other's borders.
We believe that the implementation of these principles will provide for a just and therefore, genuine and lasting peace. The hoped-for coexistence between our two peoples can only become possible if a reconstructed peace settlement is equitable. This requires moral recognition of the historic injustice visited upon Palestinians. Peace and co-existence will not be accomplished by imposing an unjust settlement that goes against the will of the people.
This land is destined to be the home of our two peoples. The need for a solution based on mutual respect and accommodation is dictated not only by the search for security and stability, but also by the quest for freedom and prosperity of future generations. It is our hope that, out of the tragedies of recent weeks, a new and fair vision of peace can emerge between the two peoples. * I. Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi Head of Red Crescent Society, Gaza 2. Dr. Hanan Ashrawi PLC Member 3. Dr. Saleh Abdel Jawad Birzeit University 4. Dr. Kamal Abdul Fattah Birzeit University 5. Dr. Abdul Rahman Abdul Ghani Birzeit University 6. Ezzat Abdul Hadi Bisan Development Center 7. Dr. Rabab Abdul Hadi American University, Cairo 8. Ghassan Abdullah Birzeit University 9. Prof. Ibrahim Abu Lughod Birzeit University 10. Dr. Lamis Abu Nahleh Birzeit University 11. Dr. Ragheb Abu Sarris Birzeit University 12. Nadia Abu Zahra Researcher 13. Dr. Mohammad Abu Zaid MD and writer 14. Dr. Ilham Abu-Ghazaleh Birzeit University 15. Dr. Latif Abuhijleh Birzeit University 16. Prof. Eisa Abu-Shamsieh Birzeit University 17. Khader Abusway Journalist 18. Dr. Mamdouh Aker Surgeon 19. Mohammad Alagha Journalist, London 20. Dr. Suad AlAamiry Riwaq 21. Dr. Nazmi Al-Ju beh Riwaq and Birzeit University 22. Ghassan Al-Khatib Jerusalem Media and University 24. Mustafa Al-Kurd Composer and musician 25. Dr. Helga Al-Kurd/ Baumgarten Birzeit University 26. Dr. Majdi Al-Malki Birzeit University 27. Dr. Sherif Al-Mousa American University, Cairo 28. Hussein Al-Rimmawi Birzeit University 29. Dr. Simon Araj Birzeit University 30. Tayseer
Palestine *
Arouri Birzeit University 31. Naim Ashhab Journalist 32. Prof. Naseer Aruri Emeritus, University of Massachusetts 33. Naela Ayesh Women's Affairs Center, Gaza 34. Suheir Azzouni Women's Affairs Technical Committee 35. Dr. Raja Bahlul Birzeit University 36. Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi MD and Head of Palestinian Union of Medical Relief Committees 37. Siham Barghouty Palestinian Federation of Women's Action 38. Kamal Boullata Visual artist, France 39. Ibrahim Dakkak Institute of Palestine Studies 40. Rabeiha Diab Ministry of Youth and Sports 41. Dr. Beshara Doumani Berkley, USA 42. Ali El-Taher Birzeit University 43. Dr. Tamer Essawi Birzeit University 44. Prof. Ghassan Faramand Birzeit University 45. Anita G.-Abdullah Birzeit University 46. Dr. Rita Giacaman Birzeit University 47. Dr. Rema Hammami Birzeit University 48. Rudaina Hammouri UK 49 Dr. Sari Hanafi CEDEJ, Cairo 50. Dr. Ahmad Harb Birzeit University 51. Dr. Roger Heacock Birzeit University 52. Dr. Jamil Hilal Writer, Palestine National Council member 53. Prof. Khalil Hindi Brunel University, UK 54. Dr. Suha Hindiyeh-Mani Birzeit University 55. Dr. Samia Huleileh Birzeit University 56. Islah Jad Birzeit University 57. Penny Johnson Researcher, Birzeit University 58. Aysha Joma Terre des Hommes 59. Hassan Joubeh Publisher 60. Zahira Kamal Ministry of Planning & International Cooperation 61. Prof. Sharif Kanaana Birzeit University 62. Mustafa Karkuti Journalist, London 63. Samira Kawar Journalist, London 64. Hassan Khader Writer 65. Jalal Khader Advocate 66. Salima Khalil Journalist 67. Dr. Samir Khalil Neuro-Pediatrician 68. Rashid Khatib Orlando, USA 69. Amal Khreishe Palestinian Working Women Society 70. Eileen Kuttab Birzeit University 71. Flora Lahham Journalist, London 72. Khalil Malouf Terre des Hommes 73. Prof. Nur Masalha SOAS, University of London 74. Dr. Nadim Mseis Birzeit University 75. Zakaria Muhammed Poet and journalist 76. Prof. Ibrahim Muhawi Edinburgh University 77. Prof. Foad Mughrabi University of Tennessee 78. Reem Musleh Birzeit University 79. Dr. Walid Mustafa Bethlehem University 80. Dr. Issam Nassar Institute of Jerusalem Studies 81. Prof. Jamal Nassar Illinois State University 82. Maha Nassar Palestinian Women's Union 83. Mamdouh Nofal Writer and PCC member 84. Dr. Muna Odeh University of Sao Paulo, Brazil 85 Ziad Othman Journalist and researcher 86. Imad Qamhiyeh Birzeit University 87. Dr. Mudar Qassis Birzeit University 88. Nahla Qourah Ramallah Municipality 89. Suleiman Rabadi Birzeit University 90. Ramzi Rihan Birzeit University 91. Adnan Sabah Lawyer, UK 92. Nahed Sabri- Mikki Pediatrician 93. Abdul Jawad Saleh PLC Member 94. Hilmi Samara Petroleum Consultant, UK 95. Dr. Rosemary Sayigh Researcher and author 96. Prof. May Seikaly Historian and author 97. Dr. Othman Sharkas Birzeit University 98. Raja Shehadeh Lawyer and writer 99. Samih Shibib Lecturer and journalist 100. Dr. Azmi Shu'aibi PLC Member 101. Mahmoud Shukeir Novelist 102. Prof. Salim Tamari Institute of Jerusalem Studies 103. Vera Tamari Artist, Birzeit University 104. Dr. Spiro Tamas Surgeon 105. Muna Tamimi Birzeit University 106. Dr. Liza Taraki Birzeit University 107. Laura Wick Birzeit University 108. Prof. Muhsin Yusuf Birzeit University 109. Jamal Zaqout Palestinian National Council member 110. Prof. Elia Zureik Queens University, Canada 111. Dr. Wassfi Kafri Birzeit University 112. Dr. GamaL Siyam Birzeit University 113. Dr. Muhammed Abd al-Haq Birzeit University 114. Dr. Samih Geda' Birzeit University 115. Dr. Ilias Sagan Birzeit University 116. Dr. Mundir Barakat Birzeit University 117. Dr. Khalid Abaza Birzeit University 118. Dr. Allan Tlaibi Birzeit University 119. Dr. Fuad Husni Birzeit University 120. Dr. Mervat Bulbul Birzeit University 121. Prof. Mashhour Abudaka Birzeit University.
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