[Socialism Today, No 1, September 1995, p. 8-9]
In September 1993 PLO leader Yasser Arafat appeared on the White House lawn with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, and US President Clinton, celebrating the Mid-East peace deal.
Two years down the line, the accords secretly negotiated in Oslo are in severe crisis, threatening the political ruin of the three men responsible for them.
An eventual crisis was predictable at the time the accords were signed; while the PLO was given limited sovereignty over the Gaza strip and Jericho on the West Bank, all the substantive issues – Israeli settlers and land seizures, further troop withdrawals from the West Bank and the question of an eventual sovereign Palestinian state – were put on hold for ‚further negotiation‘.
While negotiations have fitfully continued, PLO control of Gaza and the West Bank has done little for the small minority of the Palestinians who live in these territories – and zero for the vast majority of Palestinians who live outside (especially those in the refugee camps).
As a result, Arafat’s popularity is at an all-time low, even among his cronies in the top PLO leadership. In a recent opinion poll for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the Palestinian pollsters refused to ask people whether they still supported Arafat, fearing that the question would be met with derision. The Islamic group Hamas has much more support in Gaza than does Arafat, and increasing support on the West Bank.
The big challenge for Arafat was administration of the Gaza hell-hole. Vastly overcrowded and pitifully poor, its main industry is providing cheap labour for Israel. The tens of thousands who get up at 3am each day to make the long coach trip to work are still subject to the same harassment and abuse from Israeli soldiers which they have always endured, capped off with periodic closure of the border following Islamic Jihad bombings.
Money from outside donors has gone to finance the PLO’s bloated administration – about 40,000, including 18,000 in the various ’security‘ services. Hundreds of Gaza residents have been arrested in anti-Hamas clampdowns, 12 shot by Arafat’s police and two tortured to death. Meanwhile Israeli settlements continue to exist in even this minute piece of ‚liberated‘ Palestinian territory.
On the West Bank, with a much larger Palestinian population, land seizures, the demolition of Palestinian houses to make way for new settlements, and outrages by Arafat’s popularity at all time low. Israeli settlers, continue. Following resistance in Palestinian Hebron, the town has been subject to the same routine of brutality and curfew which characterised the Intifada
More than 80 Israelis have been killed in the last year by Islamic bombings and stabbings, fuelling the campaign by Benyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party against the Oslo agreement.
If the Israelis have been prepared to give so little, why did they initiate the accords in the first place? The Oslo agreement was the direct result of the 1980s Intifada (uprising), led predominantly by Palestinian youth, which cost 1,200 killed by the IDF. While of course the Intifada did not drive the Israelis out of the occupied territories, it inflicted a huge price, economically and politically, on the Israeli ruling class.
Under former premier Yitzhak Shamir, Israel became a pariah state. The economic deals recently done with China, India and other Asian countries would have been impossible during the Intifada, with its daily TV images of Palestinians brutalised. As even the sympathy of American Jews declined, the United States insisted on a change in direction: Israel had become in technical terms a financially bankrupt state, bailed out only by the US.
Against the background of right-wing opposition, Rabin and Peres utilised the accords to demobilise Palestinian activism, while giving nothing of substance. With minimal economic assistance and Arafat’s corrupt regime, most Palestinians feel that nothing has changed.
The net result is that Hamas is the most influential political movement in Gaza, not only among the radical youth, but also among the middle class lawyers, doctors and teachers who play a key role in developing public opinion. The possibility thus arises of the final demise of Arafat, and the defeat of Labour by Likud at the 1996 elections.
Tragically, because of the chronic failures of local Stalinism and left-sounding PLO factions, in the short-term it is the Islamic forces who will inherit the mantle of radicalism among the Palestinians.
Phil Hearse
Schreibe einen Kommentar