Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016
However, this was an attempt to use the state to develop capitalism from above. As a nationalist project, it preached the “peaceful coexistence” of classes. Yet, classes remained. Nasserism’s key social base was among sections of the middle class excluded from the power structures associated with either the old feudal order or with large capital. It was willing to challenge these power structures, but it opposed the workers using their own agency to go beyond capitalism. Indeed, it would readily use repression to prevent the development of independent struggles of workers.49 However, Egypt’s national path of development, pursued by a state with limited resources attempting to carve out a space within the global order, quickly ran up against its limits. From the 1970s, Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, opened up Egypt to the global economy, forcing through a policy of economic liberalisation known as “infitah” (opening), to the enormous benefit of those with access to the levers of power.
The generation of Fatah leaders around Arafat realised such Arab regimes could not be relied on to liberate Palestine of their own volition. Yet, their strategy remained using Palestinian struggle as a “lever on the Arab regimes”.50 This led to the second problem. The notion that the existing Arab states could be forced to act informed Fatah’s policy of “non-interference”, which meant a refusal to disrupt the governance of countries where Palestinians were active—or indeed to upset the stake that a wealthy minority of Palestinians had in such societies.51
There was a possible alternative to this. Israel could be challenged by unlocking the power concentrated within the wider Arab working class in countries such as Egypt, beginning a revolutionary process that would reorder the whole region. Yet, Fatah was uninterested in waging class war to liberate Palestine.
The road to Oslo
The contradictions inherent in this approach fatally undermined Fatah and the PLO. The Arab regimes were, one by one, coming to terms with the imperial order and their place within it. In 1977, Sadat flew to Jerusalem to call for a peace deal. The Camp David Accords, signed the next year, made Egypt the first Arab state to recognise Israel, also helping lay the basis for a close relationship with the US. It is Egypt that controls the southern border of the Gaza Strip, long participating in the siege of the territory. Jordan recognised Israel in 1994, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morrocco in 2020. Saudi Arabia was involved in Washington-brokered talks to exchange ambassadors at the time of the Hamas attacks.
Meanwhile, the PLO faced repeated assaults from Israel—and from Arab regimes in which Palestinian refugees had settled. In 1970-1, the leadership of the PLO was forced out of Jordan following armed clashes with the forces of King Hussein, who believed the huge local Palestinian diaspora threatened his rule. The PLO relocated to Lebanon, where it became embroiled in the civil war that erupted in 1975 between the Christian right and the country’s left-wing forces. Fearful of the Palestinians combining with the left to destabilise the country, the neighbouring Syrian regime sent its troops across the border to aid the Lebanese forces. The PLO managed to survive—but then, in 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, besieging Beirut. Palestinian fighters held out for two months before being forced to flee by sea; no Arab country offered any tangible support.52
The repression failed to break Palestinian resistance, instead having the unintended consequence of shifting the focus of struggle to historic Palestine itself. This was reflected in the outbreak of the First Intifada, a spontaneous mass uprising that began in December 1987 when an Israeli army vehicle killed four Palestinians in a collision in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza.53 The First Intifada continued for six years and was met with extreme repression from the Israeli military:
In January 1988, defence minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the security forces to use “force, might and beatings”. His “iron fist” policy was carried out through the explicit practice of breaking the demonstrators’ arms and legs and cracking their skulls.54
Some 1,376 Palestinians would be killed over the course of the uprising.55
However, even as Palestinian children were hurling rocks at IDF tanks in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Fatah was being drawn into a peace process based on the phantasm of an independent Palestinian state, the “two-state solution”. The Oslo peace process, negotiated in secret in the Norwegian capital, resulted in a set of peace accords, signed by Rabin, now Israeli prime minister, and Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993. The PLO recognised Israel and declared a unilateral ceasefire. In return, a Palestinian Authority (PA) was created to preside over the Occupied Territories. The PA fell far short of a genuine Palestinian state. Indeed, one of its main functions has been to police the Palestinians.56 Another has been to integrate the Occupied Territories as a subordinate element in the Israeli economy—an outlet for Israeli goods and a supplier of a reserve army of cheap labour. Israel retained control of the territories’ borders and can attack and kill Palestinians with impunity. Moreover, the creation of new settlements in the West Bank, armed enclaves that disrupt any sense of territorial integrity and project Israeli power into Palestinian areas, accelerated after Oslo, with the settler population doubling between 1992 and 2000.
The formation of the PA also exposed the class antagonisms among the Palestinian population. Powerful figures from the Palestinian diaspora, who had often enriched themselves in the Gulf States, established themselves within the economy under the PA. A credit-fuelled boom in areas such as construction allowed conspicuous consumption for a minority, and immense corruption within the PA itself, while leaving most Palestinians as excluded than ever.57 As one recent study argues:
The relations between Palestinian political and business/capitalist elites have always been close; indeed, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) maintains strong connections with diaspora capitalists… The Oslo process has transformed the political-business connection into a form of solid coalition, implicating the PLO/Fatah upper echelon, returnee capitalists, the PA technocrats and security leaders, whose interest lies in dominating the political and economic centres of power. Since 2007, the Palestinian capitalists developed an unprecedented influence over the PA decision-making circles…besides embarking on privileged relationships with their Israeli counterparts… The rising power of capitalists has inevitably led to the exacerbation of class divisions and socio-economic inequalities.58
In September 2000, anger at the failure of the Oslo process helped spark the Second Intifada, triggered by Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites in Islam. It was even deadlier than the first; eight years of further struggle would see 4,916 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers.59
The rise of Hamas
The failure of Fatah’s nationalist resistance created a space for an Islamist alternative, Hamas.60 Hamas was born within days of the eruption of the first intifada, but the roots of the organisation lie in an Islamist welfare organisation established in Gaza in the 1970s and inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. These earlier organisations received a degree of support from Israel, which saw them as a counterweight to forces such as Fatah.61
Hamas would position itself as both an element within a broader transnational Islamism, linked to the Brotherhood, and a distinctively Palestinian force, with nationalism incorporated into its ideology. Although the PLO leaders took the opportunity of the First Intifada to signal their willingness to accept a Palestinian pseudo-state, comprising the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, Hamas proclaimed that “jihad for the liberation of Palestine is obligatory”.62 It would engage in its own asymmetric warfare against Israel, for instance, through suicide bombings beyond the borders of the Occupied Territories. More broadly, Hamas engaged in military confrontation with Israel, in many ways returning to the tradition of guerilla struggle once embodied by Fatah and other groups within the PLO.
Hamas achieved considerable support among Palestinians through its willingness to confront Israel militarily and the social and charitable networks it sustained. In 2005, this was reinforced when Sharon announced a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, reducing the burden on the IDF of protecting its settlements there and allowing the state to redirect its efforts towards further encroachment into the West Bank. The move coincided with Hamas’s growing engagement with the politics of the PA. Hamas had previous contested student and professional elections but stood aloof from PA elections, consistent with its rejection of the Oslo Accords. Yet, high turnouts in elections among the population of Gaza convinced it that many of its supporter were participating.63 From 2005, Hamas sought representation within the PA under the banner “Change and Reform”, challenging Fatah’s corruption and its collaboration with Israel.
In the 2006 legislative elections, Hamas won 76 of 132 seats, easily beating Fatah, who took just 43.64 Hamas viewed the victory as an opportunity to refashion the Palestinian resistance movement, breaking with the logic of Oslo. It was met by a furious response from the Israelis, the US and European Union as well as PA leader Mahmoud Abbas. The US and EU made commitments to non-violence, support for existing agreements and recognition of Israel prerequisites for its acceptance of the outcome of elections and continuing financial support for the PA. Meanwhile, Abbas began drawing the PA’s security forces into the presidential apparatus in preparation for a coup. The US applied pressure to its allies, Jordan and Egypt, to train Fatah fighters—with Egypt sending weapons into Gaza. Clashes between Hamas supporters and the PA began to erupt; money supplied via the PA, covering 37 percent of all wages in the hollowed-out economy of the Gaza Strip, dried up.65 Hamas responded by taking control of the Gaza Strip. By June 2007, it had gained commanding authority across the territory, over which it has since been the de facto administration.66 Abbas, who would today certainly lose any presidential election, continued to govern the PA in the West Bank, indefinitely postponing national elections.67
With Hamas in control, Gaza was subjected to its long siege by Israel and Egypt, with catastrophic results. From 2002 to 2018, the number of people within the Gaza Strip dependent on external aid increased from 10 percent to 80 percent. Even before the current assault, 62 percent suffered food insecurity and 53 percent endured poverty. In 2018, youth unemployment stood at a staggering 70 percent.68
Along with the death toll inflicted by the repeated IDF assaults on the territory comes the ongoing traumatisation of the population, particularly children. A study of 1,850 six to 15 year old children in the wake of the 2014 Israeli attacks on Gaza noted that “the majority of the children were exposed to bombardments and residential area destruction (83.51 percent), were confined at home and unable to go outside (72.92 percent), were witness to the profanation of mosques (70.38 percent), were exposed to combat situations (66.65 percent), and saw corpses (59.95 percent)”.69 One only has to pause a moment to consider the impact this might have on a population—of which around half are under 18 years old—that is corralled into this open-air prison, with little chance of leaving its confines or of reconstructing an economy devastated by bombardment and blockade.
Al-Aqsa Flood
The attacks launched on Israel on 7 October 2023 stunned the Israeli establishment. Something like 1,500 commandos from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Islamist group, breached the security cordon around the Gaza Strip, joined by residents of the territory, many leaving the Strip for the first time in their lives. As Adam Shatz writes:
The motives behind Al-Aqsa Flood, as Hamas called its offensive, were hardly mysterious: to reassert the primacy of the Palestinian struggle at a time when it seemed to be falling off the agenda of the international community; to secure the release of political prisoners; to scuttle an Israeli-Saudi rapprochement; to further humiliate the impotent PA; to protest against the wave of settler violence in the West Bank, as well as the provocative visits of religious Jews and Israeli officials to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem; and, not least, to send a message to the Israelis that they are not invincible, that there is a price to pay for maintaining the status quo in Gaza.70
Brutal colonial occupation has always tended to breed a violent response. In the absence of the weaponry of the occupier—helicopter gunships, tanks and fighter jets—resistance mobilises the tools at its disposal. However, it was not as if the IDF had nurtured non-violent protest: “When Palestinians from Gaza protested at the border in 2018-19 during the Great March of Return, Israeli forces killed 223 demonstrators”.71 The current destruction of Gaza, whatever it does to weaken Hamas’s offensive capabilities in the short term, will likely push another generation of Palestinians towards desperate armed resistance.
Ronnie Kasrils, a founder of the armed wing of the African National Congress, which fought against South African apartheid, responded to the Hamas attacks by writing:
What happened to the civilians was tragic but, as we South Africans know, you can’t oppress people for decades and…think the pot won’t boil over sooner or later. When that happens, planned or otherwise, there’s no guarantee it will do so gently and to the satisfaction of the oppressors. This is something that any mature person, and anyone with a basic grasp of history, will understand.72
A similar point could be made about Algeria, which was subject to French settler-colonial rule between 1830 and 1962. Here, from 1954, in response to the French killing hundreds of thousands of Algerians, the National Liberation Front (FLN; Front de Libération Nationale) engaged in armed conflict against both the military and settlers.73 Shatz draws a parallel between Hamas’s attack and that by the FLN on the Algerian harbour town of Philippeville (now called Skikda) in August 1955:
Peasants armed with grenades, knives, clubs, axes and pitchforks killed—and in many cases disembowelled—123 people, mostly Europeans but also a number of Muslims. To the French, the violence seemed unprovoked, but the perpetrators believed they were avenging the killing of tens of thousands of Muslims by the French army, assisted by settler militias… In response to Philippeville, France’s liberal governor-general, Jacques Soustelle…carried out a campaign of repression in which more than ten thousand Algerians were killed… Soustelle fell into the FLN’s trap: the army’s brutality drove Algerians into the arms of the rebels… Soustelle himself admitted that he had helped dig “a moat through which flowed a river of blood”. A similar moat is being dug in Gaza today.74
Marxist philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who lived in Algeria at the time and supported the FLN, responded to those preaching restraint from afar. In a superb study of Fanon, Leo Zeilig recounts:
In the middle of October 1956, he witnessed the French reprisals [to FLN attacks]. In a small town close to Blida, a local European militia rounded up 20 men and shot them. “This is what the French do”, Fanon stammered to a friend in anger, “and to think that some of my intellectual friends, who claim to be humanists, criticise me for being totally involved in the struggle”.75
The limitations of Fanon and the FLN, identified by Zeilig, also apply here. Fanon became increasingly sceptical about the capacity of the working classes to play a decisive, dynamic role in the liberation of African countries such as Algeria, seeing them as largely integrated into the colonial order.76 This accurately reflected the FLN’s own base outside the Algerian working class. A brief, top-down attempt to involve the urban masses was broken by the French repression depicted in Gillo Pontecorvo’s magnificent work of realist cinema, The Battle of Algiers.77
An orientation on the working classes across the region as a force for revolutionary transformation is even more distant from the worldview of Hamas’s intellectuals, whose aspirations, like those of Fatah, reflect those of sections of the Palestinian capitalist and middle classes. However, in the absence of such an orientation, Hamas face a version of the same impasse as the PLO before it. Without a strategy capable of defeating Israel, it also combines attacks on Israel with pragmatic forays into politics and diplomacy. It has long since accepted that it should limit its ambition to pushing Israel back to its pre-1967 borders; it has repeatedly offered ceasefires in return for an end to Israeli presence in the Occupied Territories; and it has at times sought reconciliation with the PA.78 When it began to run in PA elections, it was also happy to embrace a version of neoliberalism, not dissimilar to Fatah’s.79 In power, historian Tareq Baconi argues:
The movement has repressed political plurality and has maintained a conservative social order while demonstrating an ability to adopt a modernist and pragmatic approach to governance, for instance, by maintaining open channels of communication with human rights organisations. To the ire of Salafist movements, Hamas has avoided implementing sharia law… Also central to the movement’s governance is the construction of an identity around resistance. The combination of populist politics and authoritarianism actually mirrors the manner in which the PLO approached its own institution-building during the 1960s and 1970s.80
As Chris Harman argued in his pathbreaking study, these tensions and vacillations—between terrorism and compromise; between imposing authoritarian rule and mounting a confrontation with imperialism; between utopian aspirations for a unified Islamic community and pragmatic acceptance of a class-divided capitalist system—tend to characterise Islamist movements.81
Palestine in the imperial order
As noted above, breaking this impasse requires a wider revolutionary reconfiguration of the region, driven by the power of the regional working classes, particularly in countries such as Egypt. Only this can hope to achieve a just outcome for Palestinians: a single, secular and democratic state, open to Jews, Muslims, Christians and atheists alike, with the full right of return for Palestinian refugees.
Anne Alexander’s article in this issue explores how such a process can emerge. The Palestinian struggle and the IDF’s brutality are already destabilising the imperialist order in the Middle East. Indeed, this instability is part of a much wider crisis for imperialism. A long, slow decline of US hegemony, accompanied by the rising power of China, has spread disorder through the global system, which has been heightened by the disastrous Western interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001. In this context, a range of “sub-imperialist powers”, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, have sought to enhance their own influence, with horrifying results, as seen in Syria and Yemen in recent years. The efforts of China to increase its own influence in the region enlarge the space for these powers to act independently of the US. It is noteworthy that it was China, not the US, that brokered a deal to normalise relationships between Saudi Arabia and Iran in spring 2023.82
Israel stands among the group of sub-imperialisms seeking to assert themselves more aggressively in recent years. Its relationship with the US and other Western powers remains important, but these are relationships with growing tensions. Historically, US support was vital in creating a dynamic Israeli economy, but that economy is today less dependent on external aid. This, combined with the rightward shift of Israeli domestic politics, and the weakening hold of the US over the region, have seen Israel shift towards a more assertive, and violent, stance.
If there is any truth to reports emerging in early December that suggest Israel is planning a campaign lasting a year or more, then the US will face an increasingly difficult balancing act.83 Joe Biden has expressed the US’s strong and continued commitment to Israel. However, he knows that the images of the brutality in Gaza are fuelling rage globally—and that the IDF assault risks a wider regional conflagration, potentially drawing in Hezbollah in Lebanon, and perhaps even Iran, as well as destabilising other regimes on whom the US relies to secure its interests.
Here in Britain, too, Rishi Sunak’s embattled Conservative Party government has rushed to back Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, only to see a mass movement push back against this. The protests have been on a historic scale—at one point, 800,000 marched in London. The movement also gained its first victory in November, toppling home secretary Suella Braverman. Braverman had sought to exploit the suffering of the Palestinians as part of efforts to escalate Britain’s “culture wars” and enhance her standing among the base of her party in preparation for a coming leadership battle. However, she overreached when she contrasted supposed police leniency towards the pro-Palestinian marchers with treatment of far-right activists, who took her comments as a call to mobilise. The resulting clash between the police and far-right demonstrators on the streets of London forced Sunak’s hand. She was swiftly sacked.
Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has been every bit as dismal as one might fear, refusing even to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. This follows efforts to smear his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, as an antisemite due to his support for Palestine. In contrast with Corbyn, Starmer is eager to demonstrate his reliability on international issues to the British capitalist class.
There have, as a result, been a slew of resignations from Labour’s front bench and among the party’s local councillors.84 Such developments are to be welcomed. More generally, the mass movements emerging in many countries are very important. They reflect the internationalisation of solidarity with Palestine, not least due to the efforts of a younger generation of Palestinian activists in the 2000s, operating outside the structures of the PA, who helped build the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.85
Palestine has become the touchstone for any on the left claiming to stand in the tradition of internationalism and genuine liberation.
The last working-class hero in England.
Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018
Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
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