From Challenge # 74  July-August 2002

editorial

BREAD OF LIFE versus CULT OF DEATH

For twenty years (1967-87), Palestinians from the Occupied Territories could freely commute to jobs in Israel. By nurturing economic dependence, the security establishment thought to keep the vanquished quiet: "Full bellies, empty heads." The Intifada of 1987 put an end to this wishful thinking. Five years later, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin set up checkpoints, the infamous "closure", ending the unhindered movement of Palestinian workers. Ever since then, Israel has kept a firm hand on the spigot, sometimes opening a little, sometimes closing down. 

 

Meanwhile, a new approach went into effect: while keeping the labor market shut, Israel gave the vanquished a regime with the trappings of independence. This puppet show was to take charge of their economy. Seven years passed, and this approach too fell flat. Opposition broke out, and the puppets got uppity.

 

Now Israel stands perplexed before 3.5 million people demanding bread and work. The jobless rate in Gaza is 70%, in the West Bank 50%. Two-thirds of the population live below the poverty line of $2 per day. "The approach of 'Occupation deluxe', without taking responsibility, will soon come back at us like a boomerang. The erection of a fence, high and formidable though it may be, won't change the fact that as long as no Palestinian state is declared in the Territories, Israel remains responsible for what happens there." (Yehuda Litani, Yediot Aharonot July 4.)

 

Things may soon get out of hand. We can see the beginnings of trouble in the demonstrations for bread (not sponsored by Yasser Arafat) that have taken place since June in Gaza. They reached their maximum force to date on the first of July in a protest of 5000 jobless before Arafat's office in Gaza. The Israeli leadership believes the dissent will contribute to Arafat's downfall.  It is doing all it can to bring this about. Thus it creates a vacuum of leadership in the Territories. Instead of taking responsibility, it plays cynically with the fate of the people, keeping "Palestinian society in a state of flotation on the surface of the water, so that it shouldn't drown, but only that and no more." (Alex Fishman in Yediot Aharonot, July 4.)

 

This game is not just cynical. It is dangerous. The agenda proposed by Israel and America sets the Palestinians back many years. After long hesitation, US President George W. Bush made a speech on June 24 (the product of 27 drafts) that was meant to set the framework for an overall solution to the conflict. In essence, it expressed the program of Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, who confirmed his victory in light-hearted remarks at an economic gathering on July 4. "You thought I lacked a political program?" he asked the surrounding bigwigs. "I worked on the plan in secret and brought it straight to the Americans." That is, Sharon passed over his own government, going directly to World Boss. 

 

The Sharon-Bush concept is not so much a program as a hot-air balloon patched with speculations. It demands that the Palestinians undertake basic reforms, administrative and economic, which will remove Arafat from the center of power. After this condition has been met, a temporary Palestinian state is to arise, over a three-year period, in Areas A and B, that is, in 42% of the West Bank (the part over which the Palestinian Authority [PA] ruled before "Operation Defensive Shield"). During these three years of temporary statehood – and provided that things stay quiet – the sides will discuss their final borders, as well as other thorny questions that the Oslo architects never got to, such as the fate of the settlements, Jerusalem and the refugees.

 

The demand for PA reform caused muffled laughter in the Arab states, for two reasons. First, because the supervisors of reform are to be those paragons of virtue, Egypt and Saudi Arabia: two dictatorships, one secular, the other royal-religious. Second, everyone knows that the West opposes democracy in the countries of the third-world.

 

"Are Israel and the US prepared to see their favourite Palestinians put behind bars or barred from public service on corruption charges? Will the international community insist on municipal elections if the polls predict Hamas will control a substantial number of local councils? How will it perceive a legislative assembly empowered to force the executive branch to submit a peace treaty to a national referendum?" Mouine Rabbani, "Agendas of Palestinian Reform," Middle East International, May 31, 2002, p. 26.

 

In the elementary logic of capitalism, Western democracies do not support third-world democracies. The political parties in Western democracies compete for voters, appealing to their economic interests within the capitalist framework. They must, therefore, EXPLOIT the third world in order to get the best terms for their own constituencies. The last thing they want is a third-world country whose parties represent the interests of the “natives”.

 

This was the logic, at first, behind Israel's rule over the Palestinians: it gave them work (i.e., exploitation) without political freedom. When this attempt ended in explosion, it tried the opposite: freedom sans work. But political freedom, in the absence of work, degenerates dictatorship, because only thus can the ruling apparatus survive against rising opposition.

 

The demonstrations of the jobless in Gaza are a protest against PA inaction and corruption. They are also aimed against the US and Israel, which, with the PA, have made the Palestinians "a people of beggars," as one of the protestors put it. Yet these demonstrations have another dimension as well, albeit implicit. Throughout the long months of the second Intifada, Hamas set the ideological tone, translating its Islamic agenda into war against the Occupation. The Hamas strategy held that suicide attacks would bring Israel to its knees. The effect has been the opposite: Israel is back in the Territories with American sympathy and support, and the Palestinian millions are helpless.

 

The jobless of Gaza have put, in effect, an alternative agenda on the table: "The bread of life, not the cult of death!" A minimal monthly allowance, to be given them by the PA from the charity coffers of Europe, may soothe their rage for a while. But as long as the demonstrators don't organize as a political entity demanding radical change, they will continue to depend on a corrupt regime that is lackey to the White House.

 

The sole combination that can solve the problem of the Gazan jobless, and that of the Palestinian people altogether, may be found in a formula that neither Israel nor America is willing to adopt: political rights and economic opportunity. That "and" contradicts the logic of capitalism, where the third world is concerned. It is the true Palestinian agenda. It awaits the emergence of leaders to take it up.

 

By Roni Ben Efrat

 

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