Israel owes its origin and initial stability to its wholesale expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population. Yet the consequences of that very dispersal and ghetto-ization now threatens the Middle East’s conservative status quo so favored by Western imperialism, the reactionary Arab semi-feudal/semi-capitalist ruling classes, and the Israeli ruling class.

What these forces fear above all is a sweeping national democratic revolution in the region. Could the new Palestinian upsurge ("Intifidah") spark just that?

Negotiating

Intifada 2000 is rooted in the bankruptcy of the "Oslo peace process" which completely collapsed during the "final status negotiations" at Camp David in the fall of 2000. The Oslo accords were the fruit of a process begun by the Bush Administration following the Gulf War.

After Washington’s success during the 1990-91 Gulf War in enlisting virtually all the Arab states against Iraq while short-leashing its Israeli junior partner, it moved to impose a neo-colonial "solution" to the Palestine Question --paper recognition of limited Palestinian rights ... under complete Israeli domination. This nevertheless required enough Israeli concessions in territory and control to allow acquiescence and demobilization of the Palestinian masses.

But what did the "Oslo peace process" mean in practice for the Palestinians?

Stalling

Leading Israeli commentator Ze’ev Schiff writing in the 24 November Israeli daily Ha’aretz describes how, under Oslo, Palestinian population centers were given purely nominal autonomy through an Israeli policy of "deliberate foot-dragging and disruption of the timetables contained in the agreements --for example in the implementation of the various stages of [military] redeployment. As a result, the Palestinians reached the conclusion that Israel was pushing them into accepting small-term interim agreements which kept on being renewed endlessly and are never carried out."

The purpose of Israeli stalling was to forge a servile Palestinian administration in the occupied territories that would both police the indigenous population and replace unsustainable direct Israeli rule.

Meanwhile, Israeli troops only withdrew from Palestinian cities to their outskirts, leaving the military in complete control of both surrounding countryside and routes between cities. As Edward Cody wrote in the 27 October Washington Post, "In West Bank towns people saw that the areas under Palestinian control were still like disconnected islands in an Israeli-controlled sea. After seven years of talks, the Israeli military still had effective control of about 80 percent of the West Bank and more than a third of Gaza. Movement from one Palestinian-controlled town to another has remained subject to the wave of a soldier’s hand at Israeli checkpoints."

Grinding

Humiliation, always an attempt to demoralize the oppressed, is at the center of Israeli occupation policy. A 19 October article in The Times of London describes this ritual degradation of Palestinian migrant workers (traveling to their own homeland!): "The 60,000 Palestinians who live in Gaza but work in Israel have to leave home every day at around 4am. They are marched through cattle pens, individually interrogated and go to work. At the end of the day they pass back through the pens....Travel between the West Bank and Gaza is strictly controlled by the Israelis, who also control Gaza’s airport which takes an age to get through. [Meanwhile] Jewish settlers on the West Bank and Gaza enjoy a heavily subsidized life. Water costs more than 50 percent less for a Jew than an Arab. Israeli lawns are green and flourishing while Palestinian olive groves wither."

But the relentless expansion of Zionist settlements under current Prime Minister Barak is perhaps the single most obvious refutation of the Big Lie that his regime --unlike the previous Likud administration of Benjamin Netanyahu (who eventually agreed to freeze settlement construction in Palestinian East Jerusalem)-- was pursuing a policy of a just peace. This illusion has been further shattered by Barak’s murderous policy of repressing the Intifada.

As a 24 November Ha’aretz article states, "No one can deny that the settlements have prospered and expanded during the Barak era more than the previous regime --settlements have expanded, new neighborhoods have been added, government grants defrosted."

Edward Cody writes, "The number of Jewish settlers has risen to about 200,000, with 740 new settlement buildings started in the second quarter of this year alone, a 40 percent rise over the same period last year."

And every settlement is also an Israeli military garrison.

Faking

This is the context for the failure of this fall’s Camp David negotiations. Of course the big-business press in the U.S. has parroted Tel Aviv’s and Washington’s line that Barak offered "unprecedented" concessions there. The figure of "90% of what the Palestinians wanted" being offered by the "brave" Barak has been endlessly repeated as if to make it true.

But as Palestinian spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi explained, "Arafat was being asked to swallow a deal that created a Bantustan." [Bantustans were Black reservations --phony "independent homelands"-- created by apartheid South Africa in the 1960’s and 70’s.]

As the previously cited The Times of London put it, "Arafat was offered political control of the Muslim and Christian quarters of Jerusalem’s Old City. In return he was to give Israel a military presence in the Jordan Valley, allow Israel to slice off between 10 and 15% of the West Bank, have no army and no sovereignty over the sea or Palestine’s air space.

"He was told to agree that the Palestinians would have to give up their claim to the right to return to their lands. A capital in East Jerusalem would be abandoned in return for a handful of outlying villages, hemmed in by Israeli developments.

"The results would have produced an economically unviable mutant state consisting of blotches of land divided from one another by settlement blocks and sliced up by a web of Israeli bypass roads linking the Jewish settlements."

Note that in the previously-mentioned survey 92% of Palestinians believe peace isn’t possible if East Jerusalem is not the capital of a Palestinian state or if Israel does not recognize Palestinian refugees’ right to return.

Briefing

Historically and politically, the question of Zionist settlements at Palestinian expense is at the very center of Israel’s being a specifically Jewish state -- a state created in the vast Arab East when Britain and France had to give up their vital colonial holdings there.

Israel itself was the 20th Century realization of a 19th Century-and-earlier phenomenon: the colonial-settler state (e.g., French Algeria, British Rhodesia, and British/Afrikaner South Africa). But there were decisive differences between the Zionist colonial settler-state and those originating from European colonial empires.

Jews had no nation-state as a home-base for the settlers, while British- and French-based colonial settler states began as adjuncts to Imperial policies of resource extraction and lucrative super-exploitation of indigenous populations. So though Zionists sought collaboration and partnership with various colonial powers, they were not primarily interested in exploiting the labor of the indigenous Palestinian Arab population. (This did not become a central part of Zionist practice until the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.)

Expulsion

On the contrary, Zionist colonization was always aimed at displacing the overwhelmingly-Arab inhabitants of historic Palestine. Its culmination was the brutal expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands during the 1948 war around Israel’s formal establishment under UN auspices.

The 5 million expellees and their descendants are now spread throughout the Arab East, most still in wretched refugee camps, dependent on charity from the UN and reactionary Arab regimes. In an ironic echo of the Jewish condition during the first millennium, the Palestinian people form a massive, modern Diaspora.

How could the Zionist movement succeed so decisively in 1948 -- establishing the state of Israel with overwhelming support in the UN and with the sympathy of world public opinion? Why did the world virtually ignore the catastrophe that Israel’s establishment meant for Palestinian Arabs?

In a word: Hitler. More fully: his fascist movement’s 1933 conquest of power and German imperialism’s subsequent sensational expansion ... and crashing defeat in 1945.

Holocaust

Hitler’s 1933 victory was not only a deadly defeat for both the German working class and democratic rights in that advanced capitalist country, but a devastating blow to Germany’s small (1%) Jewish citizenry. Enactment of laws abolishing social and civil rights for German Jews set loose a decade-long wave of Jew-hatred --an ever-used tool of capitalist reaction throughout Europe and, indeed, worldwide. Physical terror against Jews escalated as German fascism and its allies took power in a series of European countries leading up the formal start of World War #2 on 1 September 1939.

Hitler’s later invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 also marked the transition to physically exterminating all European Jews, beginning with those living in the Soviet Union, Poland, and other eastern European nation-states. The dreadful ferocity and thoroughness of that policy yielded a literal Holocaust whose profound evil left 85% of all Jewish children in the world dead by 1945.

Best estimates are that the Nazis systematically murdered some six million European Jews in death camps --plus millions more communists, socialists, and other political opponents of the Nazis, Soviet war prisoners, Roma people ("gypsies"), homosexuals and the physically handicapped. Needless to say, Palestinians had nothing to do with any of this.

Useful dump

But, come war’s end, "democratic" western Europe refused to provide permanent residence to the hundreds of thousands of wretched Jewish survivors.. Meanwhile in Palestine, Zionist settlements had been heavily bolstered during the 1930s by Jews --overwhelmingly refused entrance to western Europe and the United States-- fleeing Nazi terror.

The 1930’s influx --plus especially the massive post-war immigration of displaced Jews-- raised Palestine’s Jewish population to around 500,000, then somewhat more than half the size of the Palestinian Arab population.

The victorious imperialist "democracies" in Washington, London, and Paris-- along with the Stalin regime of the Soviet Union--then proceeded to carry out one of modern history’s greatest cynical maneuvers to deal with their "Jewish problem." Unwilling to accept Jewish survivors of Nazism as equal citizens of their own countries --and exploiting massive international sympathy felt for the Jews-- these powers essentially forced Jewish survivors to emigrate to Palestine.

These same powers, who controlled the just-founded United Nations, then sanctioned the establishment of Israel while ignoring or acquiescing in the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs. The notorious anti-Semite Stalin, for his part, provided much of the weaponry Zionist armed forces used in the fighting that accompanied Israel’s declaration of statehood and consequent uprooting of the Palestinians.

2000 not 1948

But conditions that allowed Palestinians’ 1948 expulsion do not exist today. World public opinion overwhelmingly favors self-determination for the Palestinians. Israeli propaganda is far less able to exploit existing anti-Semitism to rationalize the brutality of its occupation policies. (In fact, among the baleful consequences of Israel’s policies is that they feed Jew-hatred --ever the deadly tool of rightist forces. That’s why it’s crucial for consistent opponents of Zionism to simultaneously be uncompromising fighters against anti-Jewish racism.)

In other words, Israel cannot simply crush the Palestinian struggle for self-determination in today’s world. However many more Palestinians are gunned by Israeli centurions, their moral determination and growing conscio usness--like the VietNamese 25 years ago-- will ultimately prevail over the might of the occupiers.

Rulers anxious

Now an entire new framework is emerging in Middle East politics. A fresh generation of fighting Palestinian youth considers this Intifada a ‘War of Independence’.

What’s different --and explosive-- is the impact of this heroic resistance on the entire neo-colonial Arab East. The largest mass demonstrations in several decades have exploded from Rabat (Morocco) to Cairo and Alexandria (Egypt) to Amman (Jordan). These demonstrations not only express solidarity with Palestinians fighting back, but also aim at Arab governments cringing before Yankee power, collaborating with the Israeli occupiers, and suppressing democratic rights in their own states.

As the new Intifadah challenges what Israel rests on --Palestinian dispossession-- a tremor moves through the Middle Eastern house of cards. Should Palestinians initiate its collapse, they will irreversibly better a world which once sacrificed them.

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