Palestine: Historic achievement, new dangers

Israel’s decision to pull 8,000 settlers out of the Gaza Strip has historic implications for the future, not only of Zionism, but for U.S. domination of the Middle East.

For decades Israel, armed to the teeth by Washington, could be counted on to serve U.S. corporate interests and protect the vast profits extracted from this region. It has been a key part of the Pentagon’s strategic architecture that has allowed U.S. imperialism to politically and economically dominate the entire region.

But consider the situation now.

Today there is an upheaval in the most reactionary wing of the Zionist movement about the Aug. 15 deadline for withdrawal of 8,000 Israeli settlers from Gaza. Splits and resignations rend the Tel Aviv government and the military.

At the same time, U.S. troops are bogged down in Iraq. They face more than 65 sabotage attacks a day. There is instability and chaos surrounding the Aug. 15 deadline for the presentation of a U.S.-engineered constitution.

And in the U.S., support for the Penta gon occupation is falling. According to a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll this month, which echoes other surveys, a 55-percent majority now feel the U.S. “made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq.” Some 56 percent say some or all GIs should be brought home now. (csmonitor.com, Aug. 1)

The individual and collective resistance seen for decades in Palestine is being replicated today on a larger scale in Iraq.

The fact that Israel is forced to withdraw from even an inch of confiscated Palestinian land is a victory of the steadfast Palestinian resistance. It is an achievement of historic dimension.

Imperialism and Zionism

Historically, Zionism as a political movement has always been tied first to British and then to U.S. imperialist power. Israel as a state was financed and supported as an outpost for protecting imperialist interests in the heart of the Arab world. Israel couldn’t have lasted a day, let alone 57 years, without massive infusions of U.S. economic and military aid.

With this funding Israel could be counted on to attack any popular movement that threatened U.S. corporate interests in the region. The U.S. was willing to give billions of dollars to maintain endless war and instability in the region. Since its creation in 1948, the Israeli military has invaded, bombed or occupied Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon.

Expansion, aggression and expulsion of the Palestinian population have been the guiding policy since 1948. Following the 1967 war, Israel seized Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Giant, heavily militarized forts—euphemistically called “settlements”—were established in the West Bank and on the Gaza Strip in violation of United Nations conventions and international law. Settlements that now hold more than 250,000 people were built to surround Jerusalem and cut it off from the West Bank.

The settlements were not just a mobilization of religious fanatics. Every possible financial incentive was used to lure Israeli settlers to Gaza and the West Bank. Homes were far larger while rents were much cheaper than inside the 1948 borders of Israel.

The Israeli state carried out the confiscation of Palestinian land. They built schools, daycare centers, shopping malls and subsidized industries and agribusiness. Electrified security fences and rings of cement walls surrounded these suburban enclaves. Further stretches of Pales tinian land were confiscated to build military posts and bypass roads and to clear security perimeters. Tens of thousands of Israeli troops were stationed in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

All of this was financed with billions of dollars of U.S. aid.

Resistance could not be broken

Since the first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, began in December 1987, Israeli troops have been increasingly bogged down in efforts to quell the revolutionary struggle for Palestinian self-determination. The most extreme tactics—bulldozing homes, massive round-ups, detention and torture—were used. Despite 38 years of militarized occupation, the resistance could not be uprooted.

Now Zionist leaders find they cannot continue the occupation of both the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Strip is an impoverished, sandy strip of land that is a mere five miles wide by 25 miles long. In the midst of the 1.3 million Palestinians living there, in one of the most densely populated pieces of land in the world, Israel established 21 heavily fortified settlements. In the midst of great poverty, posh villas were built for 8,000 settlers.

But rotating tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers into Gaza to protect these settlements from Palestinian resistance fighters became untenable for the Israeli state and for its backer, U.S. imperialism.

Through the most brutal forms of pressure—followed by negotiations, bribery and endless promises of some form of Palestinian state—every effort has been made to divide the resistance and open a civil war in the Palestinian movement.

Having failed to do that, the Zionist movement is at war with itself.

Phony sympathy for settlers

The corporate media in the U.S. are giving enormously sympathetic coverage to the settlers as they are uprooted from their fortified suburban enclaves. Yet those who took over Palestinian land by force will receive $300,000 in relocation expenses, paid by U.S. taxpayers, and new homes in other settlements, also built on stolen land.

There is no sympathy in the media for the tens of thousands of uprooted Palestinians who have lived for decades as refugees.

While dismantling its illegal settlements and military bases in the Gaza Strip, Israel will still maintain a full-scale sea, air and land siege of the territory. Their plan is for Gaza to remain an open-air prison under Israeli control.

Israel’s greatest fear is that the Palestinians will take full advantage of the pullout of the military bases and do as much as possible with their new situation. The mood of continuing resistance in Gaza is visible in signs there that read: “Today Gaza, tomorrow Jerusalem and the West Bank,” and “Resistance wins—let’s go on!”

Struggle continues

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the architect of the settlement policy and guilty of the most brutal attacks on the Palestinian people, did not initiate this withdrawal out of any recognition of or respect for Palestinian rights.

It is a political calculation to aggressively expand settlements in the West Bank, especially those surrounding Jeru salem, while abandoning isolated settlements that are difficult to sustain. While the media focus on Gaza, the construction of the three-story high Apartheid Wall, which makes ghettos of Palestinian towns and villages, will continue.

Sharon makes no secret of his strategy. “The settlement blocs will continue to exist. I will not negotiate on the subject of Jerusalem. The blocs will remain territorially linked to the state of Israel,” he told Israeli television on Aug. 10. “At the same time, there will be no return of Palestinian refugees to Israel.”

This is clearly a strategy carried out in the closest coordination with the Bush administration. Sharon reiterated in an Aug. 12 news conference, “I prefer to reach an agreement with the Americans rather than to reach an agreement with the Arabs.”

The right of return and the right of the Palestinians to their own state, with Jerusalem as the capital, are the very demands that the solidarity movement will need to keep in the forefront.

The days ahead are an extremely dangerous time for the Palestinian movement. The danger is that the Israeli government will orchestrate some horrendous attack to regain credibility with the ultra-right wing of the Zionist movement and try to dampen the Palestinian mood of victory.

This is a vital time to be especially vigilant and to step up the level of solidarity and support for the Palestinian resistance. The links between billions of dollars for war in Iraq and billions of dollars of support for Israel have never been clearer. As support for the U.S. war in Iraq continues to slide, it is essential to show that U.S. aid to Israel is part of the same war.