The world turmoil finds the most explosive form today in the Middle East volcano. The central question in the Middle East crisis is the Palestinian Question: the expulsion of the Palestinian people from its lands by Zionism, occupation and repression, the expropriation of Palestinian national rights, including the right of return of all refugees to their homes.
The recent dramatic events in Gaza, marking a decisive turn in the situation in Palestine, in the region and internationally, have to be seen in a historical perspective to draw a strategic line for an alternative program for emancipation.
The Palestinian people had passed through a series of recurrent Nakbas- catastrophes. First in 1948 with the establishment of the Zionist State of Israel. Then in 1967, when with the 6-Day War the occupation of Palestinian lands was completed. The infamous Oslo "peace process" was introduced to stop the popular 1987 Intifada; it was a Nakba in slow motion trying to impose a phony "mini-state" of disconnected Palestinian Bantustans with a phony "consensus" of the oppressed forced upon them by their oppressors with the complicity and treachery of their nationalist leaders of the "Palestinian Authority". The process failed as it produced the explosion of the Al Aqsa Intifada in 2000.
The political contradictions and bourgeois nationalist limits of the Palestinian national movement, the corruption of the secular nationalist PA leadership, the sinister role of Dahlan and its Palestinian "security" forces co-opted by Israel and the CIA has pushed the Palestinian masses to find a kind of alternative way out to that worked out by political Islam and Hamas, which triumphed in the elections in January 2006. The recent events in Gaza are the direct result of the genocidal economic embargo and the blockade of the Territories imposed by the United States, the European Union and Israel condemning the Palestinian population to starvation, misery, lack of medical and other social services, and death as a means to overthrow the Hamas government. Gaza, particularly, was transformed into an open air prison of desperate, jobless, starving dispossessed people.
The Second Lebanese War in 2006 itself started as a consequence of the US-Zionist campaign to overthrow the elected Hamas Palestinian government; as the Lebanese Hezbollah was the only Arab force that actively intervened in defense of Gaza under attack, the Israeli Generals activated their already prepared plans to destroy Hezbollah, as a dress rehearsal for a wider offensive against Iran and Syria.
As the Lebanon War led to a humiliating military-political defeat of Zionism, it precipitated its internal disintegrating crisis. The Saudi initiative to form a Palestinian national unity Hamas-Fatah government collapsed, mainly because of Israeli intransigence. The Bush and Olmert governments moved to finish with Hamas by military means using as Contras Mohamed Dahlan's troops, armed and financed by the American, Zionist and Egyptian regimes. While Dahlan was in Egypt to complete the preparations to implement the imperialist-Zionist planned coup, Hamas in self-defense made a pre-emptive counter-attack. Fatah forces were defeated and evicted form Gaza with ferocious force by the Hamas militiamen.
It is a lie propagated by imperialist, Zionist and Arab reactionary media that a Hamas coup took place; as a matter of fact the coup engineered by US, Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Abbas was defeated and imperialism received a blow.
The brutalities and the violent separation of Gaza from the West Bank controlled by Abbas are the byproducts of the criminal policy of US, Zionist and E.U. imperialists helped by their local stooges. The cynical talk on "Hamastan" and "Fatahland" tries to cover up the imperialist strategy to transform Palestinian national self-determination into a national self-destruction of pulverized enclaves.
This strategy now tries to take advantage of the Hamas/Fatah strife to achieve its goals. The Bush Administration, the Olmert government, the EU immediately gave their full political, financial and military support to Abbas and to its fake "government of emergency", while Gaza under siege is threatened to die either through starvation or by a new military aggression. The defense of Gaza under siege from a Zionist aggression is the first priority for all anti-imperialist and working class forces internationally.
The implemented imperialist strategy is a continuation of the original Bush "roadmap to peace" and Sharon's "cantonization plan". It was presented by Israeli PM Olmert in the US Congress in May 2006, just before the invasion in Lebanon. Its aim is the establishment of "a truncated Palestinian ‘state' comprised of four disconnected cantons, three in the West Bank and Gaza. By annexing its major settlement blocs defined by the wall, Israel thereby expands onto 85% of the country leaving the Palestinians confined to impoverished enclaves on the remaining 15% of the land. In such a ‘two state solution' Israel would control the borders, external and internal Palestinian movement, the ‘greater Jerusalem' area, all the water resources, the air space, the communications sphere and even the Palestinian state's foreign policy" (Jeff Halper, " Keeping a Steady Course in Apartheid", Media Monitors Network , 25/6/ 07).
With the separation of these would be ‘cantons' between a Hamas controlled area and a West bank under Abbas/ Fatah control, even this "two state solution" is imploding. There is a plan B elaborated by the US and Israeli Foreign Ministers Condoleezza Rice and Tzipi Livni, which is now advanced calling "for the unilateral declaration by the US of a ‘provisional' Palestinian state with no fixed borders, no meaningful sovereignty and no viable economy, squeezed between the Wall, Israel's eastern ‘demographic' border incorporating the settlement blocs, and the Jordan valley, Israel's eastern ‘security' border." (Op. cit).
The fiction of a "two state solution", much cherished by pacifists, Stalinists, NGO activists, centrists of all kinds etc. is now in ruins. Some people applying in a mechanical way the South African experience are returning to a bourgeois version of a "one State solution", which is nothing more than a "democratization" of the existing State of Israel to become "a democratic Republic of all its citizens". Zionism cannot be "de-zionized", it must be defeated. The more its crisis worsens, the more militaristic and undemocratic it becomes, threatening not only Syria and Iran but the entire region with new "preventive" wars and driving towards a "final solution of the Palestinian problem" by escalating repression and plans of forced "transfer".
Hamas cannot provide an alternative solution. Religious nationalism is an expression both of despair and of disintegration of bourgeois secular nationalism. While we resolutely oppose the imperialist-Zionist campaign to destroy Hamas, we reject the assumption that a Palestinian brand of the right wing Muslim Brotherhood, initially aided by the Saudi monarchy and even Mossad against secular nationalism and the PLO, opens the road to national and social emancipation. The position taken by the British SWP/IS Tendency is a vulgar manifestation of the opportunist capitulation of this tendency to the Muslim bourgeoisie and to their electoral allies in the British Muslim Association dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
All the bourgeois fake "solutions" in Palestine represent a lethal dead end for the Palestinian cause. The CRFI's strategic orientation and program opens the only way out. The moment of the implosion of the ‘two state" fallacy is potentially a moment of transition from disintegration to a new revolutionary rise.
Death squads should not be allowed to divide and terrorize the Palestinian population; the Palestinian people has to rise, give an end to sectarian divisions and fragmentation, arm itself under the supervision of People's Committees as those functioning during the 1987 Intifada. Demolish the Wall and all the apartheid "regulations"! Immediate withdrawal of IDF troops from the Territories and dismantlement of the settlements! For a common struggle of the Palestinian national movement and of the Jewish workers and poor against the common enemy who oppresses and dispossesses the Palestinians and condemns the Israeli Jews to impoverishment and permanent military adventures! For the right of national self-determination of the Palestinian people, for the right of return of all Palestinian refugees to their homes!
Zionism has revealed itself to be a bastion of imperialism in the region, a camp of extermination for Palestinians and a death trap for Jews, a powerful and poisonous driving force of racism and anti-Semitism. The Zionist State machine of ethnic cleansing and war has to be smashed and a democratic, secular and socialist Republic has to be established in the entire historic territory of Palestine as a crucial step in the establishment of a Socialist Federation of all the freely associated peoples of the Middle East!