No hate. No violence
Races? Only one Human race
United We Stand, Divided We Fall
Radio Islam
Know Your enemy!
No time to waste. Act now!
Tomorrow it will be too late

English

Franç.

Deutsch

عربي

Sven.

Español

Portug.

Italiano

Русск.

бълг.

Hrvat.

Češt.

Dansk

Suomi

Magyar

Neder.

Norsk

Polski

Rom.

Srpski

Slov.

Indon.

فارسی

Türkçe

日本語

汉语

The Struggle for Palestine

By Lance Selfa

International Socialist Review, Spring 1998

 

When the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel agreed to limited "autonomy" for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in 1993, most Palestinians were willing to give the "peace process" a chance. But more than four years after the signing of the original Oslo Accords, the more than 2 million Palestinians living in the occupied territories can feel that their conditions have worsened. What is more, they see the Palestinian Authority as a corrupt and repressive regime, and that Arafat has succeeded only in making himself Israel’s cop.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to repress the Palestinians and to steal their land. In 1997, Israeli death squads terrorized Palestinians to drive them from areas designated for Israeli settlers. According to one report:

Mohamad Abad al-Aziz Hilu, 57 years old and the father of 10 children, was murdered . . . by an Israeli undercover squad known as Mistaravim, an elite, dangerous, trigger-happy, secret group of soldiers who dress like Palestinians, infiltrate their towns and kill people with almost total impunity. When Mr. Hilu and several other villagers discovered the squad in their village of Hizme, the three undercover agents fired at the men, wounding four of them in the legs, including Mr. Hilu, who they then grabbed and forced to the ground. One soldier sat on the back of Hilu's neck while another beat him on the head with a radio transmitter, according to testimony. Hilu was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.Later, an Israeli army spokesperson announced that Hilu had been shot and killed 'by accident.'
 

. . . Now Mr. Hilu's widow finds herself not only alone with 10 children, but also facing house demolition orders. Israeli authorities plan to tear down her shack-like home and run her off the land where she and her children tend their sheep, their only source of income.. . .[Earlier] near the settlement of Susiya, outside Hebron, bulldozers destroyed the 100-year-old home of Mohamad Abdel Rashid, the foundation of which was built on caves used by shepherds from the time of the Romans. Such construction is common in the area. "About 100 soldiers plowed down our homes, then pushed the rubble into the cave so we would have nowhere to go. But we're not leaving, I'll sleep under the stars before I will leave here," said Abdel Rashid who, along with neighbors who suffered the same plight, now is living in a tent. They were warned by Israeli soldiers on several occasions not to clean out the rubble and return to the shelter of the caves.

". . .It reeks of ethnic cleansing. They're making it clear that as long as they have the power to enforce it, only Jews can live on this land," said Abdel Rashid's son Wahid, who is the local schoolteacher.

These terrible conditions contrast to the lives of a small number of Palestinians - most of them Arafat loyalists - who have gotten rich under the PA. To take one example, 27 "private" and "public" monopolies control the import into Gaza of fuel and basic foodstuffs.

Controlled by a handful of PA officials with particularly close ties to Israel’s security and business establishments, the political purpose behind the monopolies is to generate revenues for the bureaucracy and so consolidate the PA’s rule in the autonomous areas. But the economic impact [on Gazans] has been disastrous, with the monopolies causing spiraling price rises, destroying local firms and creating a lawless climate that serves as a major disincentive to private investment.

This class divide in the Palestinian movement has always existed. For most of the 11 years before signing the Oslo Accords, the PLO leadership administered the organization’s affairs in Tunis, far from the daily repression of the Israeli occupation in Palestine. When the mass Palestinian uprising (the intifada) began in 1987, young fighters denounced the likes of Arafat as "Cadillac revolutionaries," more accustomed to high-stakes diplomacy that to fighting the Israelis up close.

From its formation under the sponsorship of Arab states in 1964, the PLO maintained a policy of "non-interference" in the affairs of the Arab states. Over the years, the PLO relied on one Arab regime after another - and faced betrayal from each Arab state. In 1970, King Hussein expelled PLO fighters from Jordan. In 1976, Syria sided with the Lebanese right and against the Palestinians when it intervened in the Lebanese civil war. In 1991, the Gulf states conducted pogroms against Palestinian guest workers to punish the PLO for supporting Iraq in the Gulf War against the West.

With each defeat, the PLO narrowed its demands. From 1964 to 1974, it fought for the liberation of all of Palestine. From 1974 onward - after the Black September rout in Jordan - it backed the idea of a "ministate" coexisting with Israel. Its 1993 acceptance of the Oslo Accords marked a retreat from the previous "two-state" position.

The PLO never sought to connect the Palestinian struggle to the only force powerful enough to break the hold of imperialism and Zionism on the area: the working classes of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. By divorcing the fight for national liberation from workers’ and peasants’ struggles, the PLO’s nationalist politics led it to the dead end of Oslo. Forced to choose between the interests of the majority of Palestinians (including Palestinian refugees, whose right to return to their homeland isn’t even recognized in the "peace" process) and their desire to run a Palestinian "statelet," PLO leaders chose the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The failure of secular nationalist politics has created an opening for Islamist organizations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to gain influence in the Palestinian movement. Hamas and Islamic Jihad clearly have reactionary politics. In that sense, the growing influence of Islamism among Palestinians—whose main organizations in general are secular and left-oriented—represents a real backward step. But for all their backwardness, they at least are seen as fighting the Israelis. Since the right-wing Netanyahu government took over in Israel in 1996, Islamist influence has grown. Arafat acknowledged the growing Islamist influence when he embraced two Islamist leaders in August 1997.

In the short term, the prospects for Palestinians seem bleak. But every time in the past 50 years that the Palestinian movement has suffered a defeat which its enemies said would consign it to "the dustbin of history," it has come back. After Israel routed the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, the Arab regimes began to distance themselves from support for the Palestinian cause—even expressing support for a long-time U.S.-Israeli scheme for joint Jordanian-Israeli control over the occupied territories. But the intifada pushed the Palestinian issue back to the forefront of world politics. It also raised the cost of the occupation to Israel.

Breaking out of the current dead end will take nothing less than a new intifada throughout the region. A movement that stresses class, rather than national solidarity, will be crucial. Any intifada-like uprising in the occupied territories or the "autonomous" regions under PA control will confront not only the Israeli forces, but PA security forces. An uprising against the "peace process" will be a de facto uprising against the PA whose entire legitimacy is invested in continuing negotiations with Israel. The success of a movement will require appeals to Palestinian security forces to join the movement—to "turn the guns around" as they did, briefly, in September 1996.

Only a region-wide challenge to the stability of the "state system" the U.S. and Israel prop up in the Middle East will shift fortunes for the Palestinians. Challenging the Arab ruling classes, which desire to be full collaborators with Israel in imperialist domination of the region, will shift the balance of forces in the region. And the only force which can shake the foundations of the Arab states is the Arab working classes. The U.S. moved to impose the "peace process," in part, because it feared repeats on a bigger scale of the intifada-inspired unrest which shook regimes from Algeria to Jordan in 1987 to 1991.

A new movement for Palestinian liberation would have to jettison the entire tradition on which the PLO and many of its secular nationalist critics embrace. A new strategy would have to place emphasis on building class solidarity between Palestinian and other Arab workers. Such a strategy would be based on connecting workers’ struggle in the region to the fight for a secular, democratic state of Palestine. There will be no peace in the Middle East until there is a secular democratic state in all of Palestine in which Jews and Arabs can live as equals.

  1. Maureen Meehan, "Israel Carries Out Massive House Demolitions Throughout the West Bank," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April/May 1997, pp. 6-7.

  2. Middle East International, June 27, 1997, p. 4



"When a Jew, in America or in South Africa, talks to his Jewish companions about 'our' government, he means the government of Israel."

- David Ben-Gurion, Israeli Prime Minister


Palestine banner
Viva Palestina!

Latest Additions - in English

What is this Jewish carnage really about? - The background to atrocities

Videos on Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam and Blacks and Jews  

How Jewish Films and Television Promotes bias Against Muslims

Judaism is Nobody's Friend
Judaism is the Jews' strategy to dominate non-Jews.

Jewish War Against Lebanon!

Islam and Revolution
By Ahmed Rami

Hasbara - The Jewish manual for media deceptions

Celebrities bowing to their Jewish masters

Elie Wiesel - A Prominent False Witness
By Robert Faurisson

The Gaza atrocity 2008-2009


Iraq under Jewish occupation
Iraq - war and occupation


Jewish War On Syria!

CNN's Jewish version of "diversity" - Lists the main Jewish agents

Hezbollah the Beautiful
Americans, where is your own Hezbollah?

Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan's Epic Speech in Madison Square Garden, New York  - A must see!

"War on Terror" - on Israel's behalf!

World Jewish Congress: Billionaires, Oligarchs, Global Influencers for Israel

Interview with anti-Zionist veteran Ahmed Rami of Radio Islam - On ISIS, "Neo-Nazis", Syria, Judaism, Islam, Russia...

Britain under Jewish occupation!


Jewish World Power
West Europe    East Europe
Americas          Asia
Middle East       Africa
      U.N.              E.U.

 

The Internet and Israeli-Jewish infiltration/manipulations

Books - Important collection of titles

The Judaization of China

Israel: Jewish Supremacy in Action - By David Duke

The Power of Jews in France

Jew Goldstone appointed by UN to investigate War Crimes in Gaza

When Jews rule...
The best book on Jewish Power


The Israel Lobby - From the book

Jews and Crime - The archive

Sayanim - Israel's and Mossad's Jewish helpers abroad

Listen to Louis Farrakhan's Speech - A must hear!

The Israeli Nuclear Threat

The "Six Million" Myth

"Jewish History" - a bookreview

Putin and the Jews of Russia

Israel's attack on US warship USS Liberty - Massacre in the Mediterranean

Jewish "Religion" - What is it?

Medias in the hands of racists

Strauss-Kahn - IMF chief and member of Israel lobby group

Down with Zio-Apartheid
Stop Jewish Apartheid!

The Jews behind Islamophobia

Israel controls U.S. Presidents
Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton...

The Victories of Revisionism
By Professor Robert Faurisson

The Jewish hand behind Internet The Jews behind Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, MySpace, eBay...

"Jews, who want to be decent human beings, have to renounce being Jewish"

Jewish War Against Iran

Jewish Manipulation of World Leaders

Al Jazeera English under Jewish infiltration

The Founding Myths of Modern Israel
Garaudy's "The Founding Myths
of Israeli Politics"


Jewish hate against Christians
By Prof. Israel Shahak

Introduction to Revisionist
Thought
- By Ernst Zündel

Karl Marx: The Jewish Question

Reel Bad Arabs - Revealing the racist Jewish Hollywood propaganda

"Anti-Semitism" - What is it?

Videos - Important collection 

The Jews Banished 47 Times in 1000 Years - Why?

Zionist strategies - Plotting invasions, formenting civil wars, interreligious strife, stoking racial hatreds and race war

The International Jew
By Henry Ford

Pravda interviews Ahmed Rami

The Founding Myths of Modern Israel
Shahak's "Jewish History,
Jewish Religion"


The Jewish plan to destroy the Arab countries - From the World Zionist Organization

Judaism and Zionism inseparable

Revealing photos of the Jews 

Horrors of ISIS Created by Zionist Supremacy - By David Duke

Racist Jewish Fundamentalism

The Freedom Fighters:
   Hezbollah - Lebanon
   Nation of Islam - U.S.A.

Jewish Influence in America
- Government, Media, Finance...

"Jews" from Khazaria stealing the land of Palestine

The U.S. cost of supporting Israel

Turkey, Ataturk and the Jews

Talmud unmasked
The truth about the Talmud


Israel and the Ongoing Holocaust in Congo

Jews DO control the media - a Jew brags! - Revealing Jewish article

Abbas - The Traitor

Protocols of Zion - The whole book!

Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem
Encyclopedia of the
Palestine Problem


The "Holocaust" - 120 Questions and Answers

Quotes - On Jewish Power / Zionism

Caricatures / Cartoons 

Activism! - Join the Fight!