Endless war meets Intifada
Uprising reveals the flaws in Bush plan to dominate
world
By Fred Goldstein
"Operation Protective Wall"--the terrible military offensive
being waged by the Israeli occupation army against the heroic
Palestinian resistance in the major population centers of the
West Bank--is meant to be the final, intensive, all-out phase
of a prolonged, incremental military campaign to crush the
liberation movement that began in the winter of 2000.
This bloody offensive, with its virtual imprisonment of
President Yasser Arafat, comes as the extremist,
counter-revolutionary regime of Ariel Sharon and his Likud
Party, to which the Labor Party is chained, rides a wave of
support from the Bush administration in its post-Sept. 11 phase
of imperialist military expansionism.
On the part of U.S. imperialism, this offensive is an
arrogant attempt to secure and stabilize once and for all its
only truly reliable base in the Middle East--an objective no
U.S. imperialist administration has been able to accomplish
since Washington played the decisive role in establishing and
supporting the colonialist settler state of Israel in 1948.
For Sharon and the Israeli ruling class, it is an attempt to
destroy all elements of armed resistance and political
authority--the germs of true statehood--achieved by the
Palestinian struggle.
Israel is Washington's only truly reliable base in the
Middle East because it is tied by its umbilical cord to U.S.
and Western imperialism. It was founded and shaped by
reactionary bourgeois leaders from the U.S. and Central and
Eastern Europe. These leaders explicitly gained the support of
imperialism by openly proclaiming their intention to be an
outpost of the West.
In pursuit of the establishment of the Zionist state,
Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weitzman and David Ben-Gurion over the
years appealed to the German Kaiser, the Turkish empire, the
British Colonial Office and finally to the rising star of U.S.
imperialism for support. They appealed to everyone but the
inhabitants, the Palestinians.
A fundamental contradiction
Since the mass expulsion of the Palestinians by force and
terror in 1948, the destruction of homes and villages, the
expropriation of lands by the settlers, and the establishment
of the colonialist, privileged position of Israel in the Middle
East, U.S. imperialism has been wracked by an overriding
contradiction. Its greatest military asset in the region was
also its greatest political liability in the Arab world. This
is the fundamental contradiction that the Bush administration
is trying to solve.
This contradiction was immeasurably multiplied by the 1967
war in which the Israelis, with U.S. backing, occupied the West
Bank, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, creating a second
generation of refugees throughout the Arab world who were
fleeing occupation. Military rule was instituted over an
additional 1 million Arab people.
The consolidation and expansion of the Israeli regime were
carried out under the cover of the Cold War. Only massive
backing by Wall Street and the Pentagon was able to sustain Tel
Aviv because this brand-new, brutal colonial state was forcibly
established against the background of the rising worldwide tide
of anti-colonialism.
The British were being pushed out of India, the French were
being driven out of Algeria, the Dutch out of Indonesia. The
Chinese Revolution liberated one quarter of humanity. The
Vietnamese and Korean revolutions were on the march.
Sub-Saharan Africa was rebelling, from Kenya to Ghana to
Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to South Africa. The Cuban Revolution soon
exploded just 90 miles from the shores of the U.S. And all the
while, an atrocious colonial crime of wholesale expulsion and
occupation was going on right in front of the eyes of the Arab
world.
Imperialism made sure to secure its base by seeing that, in
addition to billions in arms, sufficient financial support
flowed in to maintain a privileged position for the Israeli
population as a whole relative to the Arab peoples.
But the general rise of the socialist camp and the advance
of the anti-imperialist struggle worldwide--especially the
toppling of the colonial, feudal monarchy in Egypt, followed by
the Iraqi and Algerian revolutions and struggles in Libya,
Yemen and elsewhere--ultimately created an international
environment of support for the Palestinian masses. They were
able to start a struggle against the occupation, particularly
after the 1967 June war.
A force of last resort
Thus, since 1948 imperialism has relied on the Israelis as
the force of last resort whenever a crisis was brewing. The
Israeli regime invaded Egypt in 1956 when the government of
Abdul Nasser nationalized the British-owned Suez Canal. The
1967 war was a preemptive strike against a growing nationalist
movement in Syria and in general against the rising tide of
militancy in the Arab world, which was a threat to the oil
monopolies and the Pentagon.
The $100 billion given to the Israeli government since 1967
has been meant to keep the 300 million Arab people in check. It
threatens their regimes, which in turn hold the people back
from challenging imperialism.
Washington can regard no Arab king or prince, sultan or
emir--no matter how rich, no matter how tied to the oil
companies and bankers of imperialism--as safe. They rule over
super-exploited oppressed peoples, impoverished by the
multinational corporations. Their regimes are inherently
unstable. As opposed to this, the Israeli state is not only
tied to imperialism militarily, financially and politically,
but is based upon a privileged position in the Middle East and
is an oppressor nation.
The Palestinian resistance represents for the Arab people in
general their own aspirations to finally be free of oppression
in the form of neocolonialism. The Israeli settler state
represents the tortured colonial past of the masses as a whole.
Every act of aggression and repression by Tel Aviv, which is
armed to the teeth with U.S. planes, helicopters, missiles,
bullets, communications technology, and so on, is regarded as
an act of colonial bullying and terror. And it is totally
associated with Washington.
It is not out of love for the Jewish people that the
anti-Semitic U.S. ruling class has nurtured the Israeli ruling
class for decades. It is pure class interest of the oil
billionaires and the Pentagon that defends them and is
intertwined with them.
But this support has come up against Palestinian resistance
year after year, since the founding of Israel. And with each
generation it has grown stronger. With each new round of
struggle, the hatred of Washington in the Arab world grows
deeper and wider. So long as the Palestinians resist, U.S.
imperialism and its Israeli clients will always be on the
defensive, living in fear of their futures in the Middle
East.
Attempt to liquidate movement
In the period of general reaction since the collapse of the
USSR and the decline in the worldwide struggle, the U.S.
military and foreign policy establishment decided that the
situation was finally favorable for them to try to contain, if
not liquidate, the Palestinian national movement.
They supported the Israeli attempt to crush the first
Intifada. In that four-year-long national uprising from 1987 to
1991, some 2,000 Palestinians were killed and 117,000 wounded.
But they could not defeat it. Washington and Tel Aviv were
forced to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization after
20 years of struggle.
The first Bush administration and then the Clinton
administration tried, by dragging out the Oslo "peace process"
for seven more years, to take from the Palestinians the victory
they had won on the battlefield. They were trying to impose a
Bantustan settlement upon the Palestinians whereby their
territories would be carved up into 200 enclaves; their air
space, water supply, travel, and so on would be controlled by
the Israeli government. A few thousand settlers would get the
lion's share of the resources while roads on which only
Israelis could travel would divide up the Palestinian
territory.
When this form of liquidation failed, Ariel Sharon made his
infamous armed march with 2,000 soldiers on the al-Haram
al-Sharif mosque, setting off the second Intifada in September
2000. This Intifada was met with the utmost brutality by the
Israelis. U.S. imperialism was faced once again with its
perennial contradiction in the Arab world: Its closest ally, by
once again trying to destroy the Palestinian resistance with
U.S. military support, was reviving anti-U.S. sentiment
throughout the Arab world. Furthermore, the Palestinians were
dealing more and more damaging blows to the Israelis.
Then came Sept. 11 and the decision by the Bush
administration to launch an all-out, worldwide offensive
against any and all regimes that stood in the way of the total
domination of the globe by Washington, Wall Street and the
Pentagon.
Yet even as the Pentagon was busy incinerating people with
megabombs in Afghanistan, the Palestinian people would not curb
their struggle against the onerous 53-year occupation, despite
the Apache helicopters, F-16s, U.S.-made tanks, assassinations,
murder of civilians, destruction of buildings and olive trees,
blockades, intimidation at military checkpoints, and all the
features of the Israeli regime's campaign.
Now the Bush administration has decided that, after 53
years, it will put an end to the ugly contradiction of having
to try to placate the Arab masses by maneuvering with the
Palestinian leadership while giving military support to the
repressive Israeli settler regime. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld
solution, being loyally peddled to the international community
by Colin Powell, is to go all out to subdue the Palestinians,
using the instrument of the racist, genocidal butcher Ariel
Sharon.
Politically, the Bush method is to equate the
self-sacrificing resistance of the Palestinian struggle with
the horrific Sept. 11 bombings in the U.S. by calling Sharon's
offensive part of the "war against terrorism." The adminis
tration feels this is its political strong point.
But there is a vast difference. One channels self-sacrifice
into a conspiracy to harass imperialism through an underground
network that is devoid of any progressive ideology. The other
is a genuine ly popular, many-faceted, all-encompassing
liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. The differences
are obvious, and no one in the Arab world or the oppressed
anywhere will be taken in by Bush's strategy, as the mass
demonstrations supporting the Palestinians show.
A whirlwind of resistance
Such a policy will never work. The demonstrations on the
streets of Cairo, Amman, Damascus, and all over the Arab world
have already shown that Washington will ultimately reap the
whirlwind of resistance should it continue to pursue this
course.
The determined campaign of suicide resistance bombings shows
the determination to end the occupation has taken such deep
root among the people, young and old, women, children and men,
that after 35 years there is no way to eradicate the
struggle.
Given the depth of this resistance, the long-term
contradiction of the Israelis is insoluble. They cannot sustain
an occupation and they cannot withdraw. Their settler state
will be in permanent crisis until the Jewish people change
their leadership, break with Washington, and come to terms with
the right of the Palestinians to self-determination.
Right now, however, the Palestinians are suffering heavy
blows. And 99 percent of their problem originates in
Washington. The U.S. has given the Israelis more arms than all
its other client regimes in the world combined. Yet when one
shipload of arms is discovered on its way to Palestine, Bush
has the audacity to consider this a high crime.
For the imperialists, any attempt by an oppressed people to
arm themselves against their oppressor is a crime. But it is
perfectly within reason for the oppressors to arm themselves to
the teeth.
This is what the movement in this country must address. The
Palestinian people are waging a heroic struggle against
unbelievable odds. The movement in this country must do
everything in its power to change those odds in favor of the
oppressed by fighting to close the Pentagon pipeline to the war
criminals in Tel Aviv.
Reprinted from the April 11, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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