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Analyzing
class role and culture sheds significant light on the nature of the
Palestinian struggle on one hand, and clarifies why it ends to an
impasse on the other. However, most writings on Arab-Israeli
conflict rarely deal with issues of class in general, structure and
roles of Palestinian social classes in particular.
This paper traces the class component in the Palestinian society
and struggle without ignoring other aspects. Its main emphasis is
issues such as: Palestinian classes that supported the Oslo Accords
and those that did not, how does the Palestinian Authority rule in
the Occupied Palestinian Territories, why was the PA a stand-by
regime, what is the class origin of Hamas, why did Hamas succeed to
replace the PLO organizations, why western capitalist regimes, Arab
rulers, United Nations and Israel did not respect the ‘democracy’
that they insist on, and finally, who represents the Palestinians.
Introductory Approach
Class Conflict in the Final Era of the Ottoman
Empire
Palestinians of al-shatat and Resistance
The Second Occupation 1967: Mechanisms of
National Struggle and Class Integration
Oslo
Peace for Capital
Who Supported the Oslo Accords?
More Reasons to Accept Oslo?
Oslo Accords: PA Practice and Class Situation
Why was there no Class Culture of Protest?
Who Rules in the West Bank/Gaza?
No Chance for the 'Second Republic', But for
Oslo
Hamas: Class, Education and Economy
NGOs in forefront against Hamas. Why?
Democracy, Elections, Regime And stand-by
Intellectuals
Who Represent the Palestinians?
* * *
Introductory Approach
Writings on the Arab-Israeli conflict rarely deal with the issue of
class in general and the structure and roles of Palestinian social
classes in particular. Many writers approach this conflict from an
ethnic-religious perspective that maintains their loyalty to the
brutal colonialism of the U.S., Britain and France, while ignoring
the core of the issue: "the role and interests of ruling capitalist
classes in Western Europe and North America", i.e accumulation. Even
writers whose analysis is based on the role of the world capitalist
system, including the Arabs among them, do not tackle the class
issue in Palestine itself because they are mainly driven by the
national aspect of the conflict. The Palestinian Resistance Movement
(PRM) also concentrates on the national/political dimensions while
avoiding the class content of the struggle. From the beginning this
struggle was carried out by popular classes, albeit led by
Effendis, petty bourgeois and middle class figures1.
Few Palestinian intellectuals adopt the class analytical approach in
their writings. Even when Marxism was the “ideology” of the
Palestinian left, these intellectuals raised Marxist slogans, but
were subjugated to bourgeois leadership in practice. This is why,
when the PLO leadership decided to sign the Oslo Accords that
brought them back to the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBG), most of the
leftist leaders and intellectuals failed to address the class issue
in general and to grasp the class content of those Accords. Today,
many continue to avoid this approach.
The aim of this paper is to trace the class component in
Palestinian society and struggle without ignoring other aspects. A
reading from within the Palestinian struggle and with a deep
analysis cannot ignore its class component. If one were to write the
people's history, and not only that of the leaders, it is
amply evident that while territorial, economic, class, cultural, and
political disintegration of Palestine affected all social classes in
the first occupation in 1948 and the second in 1967, those who were
most deeply harmed, and at the same time exerted the most
resistance, were the popular classes. Even within the Palestinian
society, which is immersed in a deep national struggle, the class
struggle persists. This is an issue which has been hidden. Since
1948 the upper classes in Palestine have been very tied to their own
interests; these interests were, in a way, opposed to the interests
of the majority of the population. On the other hand, the popular
classes always fought for the national cause. This, in itself, is
one form of class and political exploitation, launched, albeit
indirectly, by the bourgeoisie against the popular classes. This may
support a different theory on nationalism: that nationalism in
each society, especially those subjected to colonialism, whether in
its traditional form or in new dependency modes, is manifested in
two contradictory commitments, and not only one, albeit hidden
during national liberation era,: the nationalism of the bourgeois
class which is mainly compromise the national cause and the
nationalism of the popular classes which is for independence,
development and socialism. Other classes are always reluctant
and divided between the two.
Top
Class Conflict in the Final Era of the
Ottoman Empire
Class
struggle is not limited to ‘street fighting’ as it was in Paris
Commune or in Lebanon’s civil war in 1970s and 1980s. Internal class
conflict in Palestine during Ottoman rule, was between the upper
social/political elite, ‘merchants’ and sheiks,
and later between the educated of Ashraf (aristocratic
families) and their sons in the last years of Ottoman rule. Class
struggle is always present in class societies; it does not matter
how it manifests itself. In colonies the dependent classes fight for
the trickle-down economic interests or political role. This struggle
might also be against the colonial power and for the interest of one
class against another. Even today, how do we understand and
analyze the conflict between Fateh and Hamas? Is it beyond a
conflict for power within the same classes, though in a colony and
under the false umbrella of a global colonized democracy….so-called
Palestinian elections.
The extraction of surplus by the tax collectors in
Ottoman Palestine was the main factor that contributed to the
creation of a merchant class in rural areas. But the integration of
Ottoman Palestine into the World Order, and the concessions and
privileges offered to the merchants, strengthened their role at the
cost of the sheiks. While the merchant class started in urban
areas, it extended its direct contraband trade from the colonies,
i.e. Palestine, to Europe. The restoration of the central power by
Sultan Abdul Hamid during the last three decades of the 19th
century put an end to the sheiks' rule (who were the good
tools for the Iltizam era), and put the educated young sons
of the Ashraf and merchant families who took their place.
(Samara 1991:73)
The dependent classes are not always free to choose
their allies. The dominant class and the nation are those who
decide. That is why, when the merchants became most necessary for
the Ottomans, they, i.e. the Ottomans, backed them to replace
sheiks. Relatively speaking, this competition for the
trickle-down gains is a class struggle, even if it is between
'dependents'. Other classes in the society were marginalized and
remained passive in political terms, but they were the focus of
class struggle among the upper classes, which means that a class
attack, class exploitation, was imposed upon them. "This new era
enabled the merchants to accumulate large amounts of money but they
failed to invest in the industrial sector" (Loutsky, 1980). Why? It
is because this class, while accumulated money liquidity, failed to
transfer it into capital. This class failed to transfer itself into
an independent class. The absence of independent policies and
culture will never breed an independent modernized economy. The
monetary liquidity that this class accumulated was not a result of a
productive activity, but instead was through its relationship with
the colonial power. So long as this class was not motivated by an
independence mentality, productive investment on a national scale
will never be in its political program. It might be right to say
that a class dependent on a trickle-down economy will breed a
trickle-down politics, i.e. Self-Rule not independence (as was the
case later with the PLO).
The era of British colonialism in Palestine (1917-1945)
was not different. The creation of a foreign state in Palestine, a
state designed to be a base performing a specific “function”, was
necessary for the British colonial empire, regardless whether it was
Jewish or not. It should be noted that, Jews were never able to
settle in Palestine without being brought, protected, trained,
financed and armed by British colonizers. In that period,
Palestinian peasants and workers suffered from the settlers, that is
why they started national resistance through strikes and upheavals
(known as Intifada throughout the ‘British Mandate’ in Palestine).
At the same time merchants, big land owners and effendis were
looking for employment for their educated sons in the Mandate
government. The upper class factions were consumed by the idea that
British colonialism would find a ‘just solution’ for the conflict in
Palestine. Committed to its colonial project, i.e. the creation of a
Jewish agent state in Palestine, the British colonizers were
extracting surplus from Palestinian peasants; they bankrupted the
national economy in order to build the infrastructure of the Jewish
colonial settlements.
"In fact, the Palestinian economy (which was mainly
agricultural) was heavily taxed, and the extracted surplus was
transformed to the Jewish capitalist economy" (Asad, 1975) (Hodgkin,
1986). However, big landowners, Palestinian and Lebanese, sold the
Arab land to Jewish settlers.
The mercantile mentality of the Palestinian bourgeois
class did not change during the British mandate. Its economic
activities continued on both the merchant and usury levels. Its
accumulated surplus was transferred to the British banks in Great
Britain as liquid assets, leaving the country without any
significant productive investments despite the existence of several
local opportunities for profits making and accumulation of capital.
It was not until the years of World War II that the
Palestinian Arab economy experienced a dramatic commercialization of
agriculture and a semi-industrial production base devoted to
satisfying the needs of British colonial troops. This development
was due to the desperate need of the British colonial military
forces in the Middle East for a readily available food supply to
meet the shortages that resulted from the Axis' sea blockade of the
allied navies in the Mediterranean Sea.
Therefore, while the Jewish settlers were strengthening
the productive base for their capitalist economy, the Palestinian
bourgeois class was transferring the surplus of their country's
traditional economy abroad. "Figures on Arab deposits in October
1945 show that they rose from a total of 532,515 Sterling Pounds at
the end of 1941 to just 7 million by the end of October 1945. (The
magnitude of such a sum can be gauged by the fact that this 7
million Sterling Pound amounted to almost 1 million more that the
entire civilian budget of the government of Palestine in the fiscal
year 1944/45" (Smith, 1984:118). The accelerated money transfer
shows that fast profiteering was matched by the fast transfer of
money abroad.
The money may have fled the country for any one or all
of the following reasons: the threat presented by the British
planted Jewish settlers and their potential occupation of the
country; Palestinians were not encouraged by the British occupation
to invest in local needs and, lastly, because the Palestinian
merchant bourgeois' culture wasn't a national - productive one.
Whatever might be the real reason or interpretation, the deduced
lesson is that the rich class, the merchants, did not prioritize
either their struggle or their productive activity.
Following the defeat of the Palestinian resistance and
the Arab armies in the 1948 war, Palestine as a country was totally
disintegrated in terms of space, society, economy and even as a
national movement. Nearly one million Palestinians were evicted
after that defeat and scattered all over the world. Many of the rich
faction (merchants, aristocracy, manufacturers and the educated)
found their way either to Britain or the United States while most of
the educated and professionals immigrated to various Arab capitals
to work there and develop into a contract financial capitalist
faction2. The petty bourgeoisie found its shelter
inside and around the cities in the West Bank and Jordan, while the
majority, the poor, were piled in refugee camps.
Palestinian merchants and aristocracy3, especially those with the World Bank, established a
class alliance with the Jordanian ruling class, and both maintained
a strong relationship with British colonialism despite its major
role in creating Israel. This alliance was reflected in two sources
of privileges for the Palestinian bourgeoisie: benefits derived from
its share in the political power and benefits from employing the
poor refugees who earned low wages.
The reason why Palestinian big landowners invested in
agriculture in the Jordan Valley was the concentration of a large
refugee labor force in that area.4 That is why, "…
a substantial part of the Sterling Pound 10 million in Sterling
balances held by Palestinians in London at the end of the Second
World War was invested in agricultural development in the West Bank
and the Jordan Valley after the 1948 war as well as in urban real
estate in Amman and other East Bank cities. Other funds became
available in 1953 when Israel released part of the deposits held by
Palestinians in Arab banks which came under Israeli rule 1948" (Gabbay,
1959:451). Another important source of capital arose when the
government of Jordan established an agricultural mortgage program in
1950. By the end of 1954 it had granted a total of more than three
million Jordanian Dinars (JD) in loans mainly to those large land
owners who supported the monarch.
"In fact that the JD 3 million granted in mortgage
during this five-year period went to less than four hundred
borrowers indicates the extent to which the mortgage schema
concentrated capital for agricultural development in the hands of
the large landowners."(Smith, 1984)
Accordingly, Palestinian capitalism established a new
alliance according to the new changes, i.e. from Britain to the
Jordanian regime, motivated by its own interests while leaving
struggle for the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian Right
of Return (ROR) to the popular classes. That is why it is
understandable that this bourgeoisie maintained its loyalty to the
ruling class in Jordan, (which, in turn, maintained its alliance
with British colonialism)5,
separating themselves from Jordanian national movement against the
regime.
Moreover, Palestinian capitalism maintained its loyalty
to the Jordanian regime even after the 1967 occupation and during
Jordan's and the PLO's competition over the representation of the
Palestinian people, a loyalty which proved that Palestinians were
divided on a class basis despite their eviction from Palestine as a
people and their collective fate as refugees. The popular classes
supported the PLO and, in fact, they were its backbone. In Gaza
Strip, the Nasserite regime of Egypt provided the merchants and
aristocracy with a window for smuggling and making a living in a
poor, tiny and crowded area. The position of the popular classes was
the same: they were the backbone of the national struggle.
Top
Palestinians of al-shatat
and Resistance: The Capitalist Class
Following the destruction of the Palestinian space in
1948, all social classes became fragmented, escaped the Zionist
massacres, and looked for a temporary space waiting for the final
return, a goal which is still not accomplished.
Place and status determined the role of each class in
the shatat. The popular and middle classes were integrated
into the parties of the Arab national movement, and later, after the
1967 war and the occupation of the rest of Palestine, when the
Palestinian Resistance Movement (PRM) was mainly an armed struggle,
the youth of the popular classes became its backbone. Those in oil
producing countries and some in the America's and Europe paid (daribat
al-thawrah) "revolution tax" to the PRM leadership, a tax which
was agreed upon by the ruling classes in the oil countries, but was
totally orientated to the right wing of the PRM. This deliberately
channeled money was never an ‘innocent’ matter. It was directed to
de-radicalize the PRM through two means:
- Arab oil producing regimes were deliberately strengthening the
right wing against the left which was at that time 1967-1970
competes the right wing.
- By corrupting the PRM as a policy aimed at
terminating and capitalizing it. (This is one of the early trials to
transform PLO leadership into bureaucratic capitalism).
Palestinian shatat capitalists maintained a “wait
and see” relationship with the PLO. Following the eviction of the
PLO from Lebanon in 1982, the Palestinian shatat capitalists
held a conference in London on June 24, 1982 in preparation for
inheriting the PLO. The theme of this summit may be defined as
follows: "Since PLO lost its military role, then it is time of the
capitalists to lead".8
Following the London conference, Arafat opened the
channel of communications for those people who, soon after, froze
their initiative; this was probably because they realized that
Israel was not ready to withdrew from parts of the occupied
territories or that Israel recognized their weakness, and if she
were to negotiate, Israel would rather negotiate with those who have
popular support, i.e. PLO. Briefly, the role of Palestinian
capitalists in the national conflict is through negotiation, not
struggle, and the Homeland for them wasn't a dunam of land in Jafa,
but their bank account. As a people of capital, the Homeland is a
business. That is why, when PLO started negotiations with Israel
that Palestinian elite supported and became closer to Arafat and his
bureaucratic capitalist structure. Even inside the occupied
territories that large section of capitalists became sub-contractors
and essentially formed a Palestinian comprador.
The Popular Classes
While most of the rich and intellectual Palestinian
refugees migrated to far areas, i.e. Arab Oil producing countries,
Britain and the US, the popular classes remained and ‘settled’ as
close as possible to the occupied Homeland, i.e. in the WBG, Jordan,
Lebanon and Syria…etc8. It is clear that they, the popular classes, insisted
on returning to their homeland, and, at the same time, that their
financial situation could not help them to go further. They were
concentrated in the refugee camps to create a different community: a
very poor people, who were integrated into the wage earners of most
of the host countries, but maintained a special status different
from that of the social classes of the countries they lived in. The
situation in Jordan was the exception. The politically active
Palestinians integrated into the Jordanian national movement which,
in fact, considers the Palestinian question on the top of its
agenda.
Briefly, the Palestinians of the shatat
integrated into the economies of the host countries, but
politically, they remained divided on a class basis. The rich people
supported the moderate policies of the ruling Arab classes, while
the popular classes integrated into the national, Political Islam
(PI) and socialist Arab movements. The defeat of the Arab
nationalist and ‘socialist’ regimes led to the defeat of the Arab
nationalist and socialist movement in the 1967 war.
Top
The Second Occupation 1967:
Mechanisms of National Struggle and Class Integration
There is no consensus among Palestinians whether Israel
had, prior to the occupation in 1967, prepared any plans as to how
to control the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).9
The Israeli occupation designed its policies in the occupied
territories step by step and according to developments on the
international level as well.10
As for the class integration among Palestinians, the
occupation gave this issue serious consideration and early on aimed
to avoid people's resistance. At the official level, two Israeli
ministers provided their government with their proposals on the
issue. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli minister of war, suggested that
Israel should terminate the infrastructure of the occupied
territories so as to keep the Palestinian labor force and the entire
society dependent on the Israeli economy, i.e. permanent
integration without annexation, thus keeping Israel as a pure
Jewish state. Pinhas Sapir, the Minister of Finance, suggested, on
the other hand, to keep the economy of the occupied territories as
it is, and to build a free trade relationship between the two
economies, the Israeli and that of the occupied territories. The
Israeli government adopted Dayan’s proposal which was a true
settler-colonial one that included ethnic cleansing of the native
people and confiscation of their land. This entailed forcing
Palestinians, as much as possible, to leave not through direct
eviction, but by creating all sorts of obstacles and harsh living
conditions. This destroyed and uprooted the Palestinian culture of
steadfastness so they eventually left without being able to claim or
prove that Israel was transferring them, i.e. a soft transfer.
Israeli economic integration of the occupied territories
started in the early days of the 1967 occupation. The occupied
territories were denoted as a military zone at the advent of the
occupation in June 1967 and since then Israel has issued well over
2000 military orders and regulations, covering all aspects of life.
Israel outlawed existing export-import relations (orders No. 10-12)
in the occupied territories during the first few months of the
occupation. Since then local merchants started marketing Israeli
goods or goods imported through Israel. Thus, merchants can be seen
as the first social class to become linked to the Israeli economy,
i.e. normalizing with the enemy motivated by class interests at the
cost of national cause. Some of these merchants imported raw
materials from Israel (such as wood, metal and cement) for the
supply of local factories. The result was the dependency of local
manufacturers on Israel. In this way manufacturers became the second
class to be linked to the Israeli economy. Until that time,
boycotting Israeli products wasn't at stake; only a few
intellectuals were doing it on individual basis but then boycotting
failed as a political/national slogan because they believed that the
community would not practice it.
In the mid 1960s, Israel started to transform its
industries toward specialization in electronics and sophisticated
military industries so as to accommodate with the world division of
labor that pushed developed countries towards technological
specialization. This was the reason Israel decreased its emphasis on
many of its traditional industries such as textiles, footwear and
chemicals. The occupied territories faced a process of re-allocation
of industries to their detriment. While Israel concentrated on
industries with a future, the occupied territories were left with
branches of production of lower technological level and with fewer
prospects of growth, a situation which perpetuated the economic gap
between them. Much of the re-allocation took the form of
transferring textile production to the occupied territories. These
textile workshops were the beginnings of the sub-contract
industries, which "cemented" the dependency of a sub-contracting
(see later) and comprador class in the occupied territories on the
economy of Israeli occupation. As for the working class, despite the
150-200 thousand strong wave of emigration in the wake of the 1967
war, the unemployment rate actually increased. The reason for this
was a sharp decline in the demand for labor in the occupied
territories. As a result, the Palestinian workers were faced with
the choice of emigrating or working in Israel. The first step in the
latter case was work for Israeli contractors inside the occupied
territories themselves as Israel started to expand the road network.
Israeli appointed local foremen, in turn, recruited local
Palestinian workers. The expansion of road networks might have been
primarily due to Israeli security reasons and to enable military
forces to quickly reach the remote areas which might serve as secure
areas for guerilla fighters.
Ten thousand Palestinian workers were per diem workers
for road construction. This marked the beginning of the creation of
a stratum of sub-contractors and mediators who stand as buffer zone
between the Israeli entrepreneurs and capitalists on the one hand
and a labor force from the occupied territories on the other. The
number of workers increased rapidly to reach one third of the
occupied territories labor force in the mid 1970s. Even before the
large scale expropriations of land, Palestinian workers came
primarily not from cities but from rural areas and refugee camps
that served as a pool for surplus labor force.
To orientate peasants towards dependency on the Israeli
economy, Israeli authorities started a policy called al-mushahada;
Israeli bonuses were paid to farmers planting certain crops which
Israel required to satisfy its exports, and flood the markets of the
occupied territories with cheap products, thus competing with those
products that were locally produced.
The peasant family was compelled to increase income by
sending its members to seek employment in cities of the occupied
territories, oil producing Arab countries, and even in Israel. As a
result, the entire society of the occupied territories, consumers
and producers began to depend on the Israeli economy. This was not
voluntary dependence, (with the exception of the traders and
compradors) since it was shaped and formed by the policy of the
Israeli state. The political factor, the role of the Israeli state,
worked relatively autonomously in the peripheralization of the
occupied territories. Nevertheless, the economic factor was, and
still remains, the determining one, crystallized in land
expropriation, collecting taxes, economic integration, rapid
increase in prices, employment of cheap labor and the accumulation
of profits through unequal exchange and the obstruction of the
occupied territories internal accumulation process.
There are three local classes or class factions that
played the role of deepening dependency, which ultimately made the
occupied territories a periphery to the Israeli center:
·
The merchant capitalists (city
merchants) who existed since the period of the Jordanian rule and
had extensively exploited local farmers.
·
The large agricultural
landowners who oriented their production to or through Israel to
foreign centers.
·
The new comprador capitalists
who were created directly and intentionally by the occupation
authorities, and included remnants of the same faction that existed
since the Jordanian and Egyptian rule. The change that took place
here was in terms of individuals not of the stratum.
These three strata provided a good example of the structural
dependence (economic, social, political and cultural) of a
peripheral colonized capitalism.
The Israelis captured and dominated the markets of the
occupied territories, i.e. 90 percent of imports to the occupied
territories and 50 percent of its exports are from Israel; one third
of the labor force of the occupied territories works in Israel. The
combination of these facts illustrates how these three strata
quickly prospered. This reminds me of what Meron Benvenisti noted in
relation to the occupied territories, under occupation there is an
individual prosperity and mass poverty. It seems that Benvenisti
grasped the surface of the issue not its deep currents. That is why
he failed to grasp the fact that fat-cats are not only individuals.
These new wealthy people rarely contributed to the
development of the local economy, or even in the expansion of the
domestic market. Their trickle-down share of the surplus, while it
is modest in comparison to that of the share of the
settler-colonialists, would have been adequate to activate the local
market and provide a basis for internal demand if they did not
channel their demand towards luxurious goods, which were already
available in the Israeli market. Moreover, these strata continued
draining the surplus by shifting it abroad as a continuity of the
same class behavior prior to 1948, when Palestine was one social
formation.
We might assume that the most clear class structure of
Palestinian people was in the West Bank/Gaza (WBG). But this
structure wasn't an obvious one, i.e. we can not say that there was
a real capitalist class in terms of values, industrialization, and
traditions of liberalism. Nor can we say that there was a capitalist
class in terms of investment in industry. This class is still
relatively close to the merchant class with a comprador mentality;
and although it is not rich in comparison to the same class in the
capitalist center, there are real boundaries that divide it from the
popular classes especially the refugees.
After the 1967 war, Palestinian capitalism faced the challenge of
political/class identity. Should it donate its loyalty and alliance
to the resistance movement, the PLO, or should it maintain its
loyalty and alliance with the Jordanian ruling class. Or, should it
compromise with the national enemy, the Israeli occupation.
While this class continuously demonstrated its
Palestinian identity and character, it never cut off its connection
to other involved parties. This class is a part of the social fabric
of OPT, occupied Palestinian territories, but at the same time it is
those 'Palestinian individuals' who prospered during the occupation,
to use Meron Benvenisti's description for this class. The striking
example of this class is the sub-contract faction which started in
early 1968. In fact, the only faction that was harmed by the
occupation is the productive one. But this is not the main faction
of this class, and it is hard to investigate if this faction is
really, only, or purely productive. Many who were well known as
industrialists are, in fact, agents for foreign products from the
same sector of their own products.11
The compromise attitude of this class towards the
occupation stems from the fact that, as non-productive capitalism,
it lacks the motivation of monopolizing and protecting its own
national market. The fact that the Homeland itself, and not only the
market, is occupied and colonized, made this class more inclined
towards making compromise, a compromise which was crystallized in
compradoric economic and political roles.
The same goes for its relationship with Jordanian
regime. Through the policy of Open Bridges, Israel maintained a
relationship of mutual interests between the local capitalists and
Jordan as an alternative to the PLO. The Jordanian regime would
maintain access to agricultural products from Jordan Valley,
which belongs to the same rich landowners who benefited from
Jordanian loans following the 1948 war.
As for the popular classes, they were the first that
continuously declared their support for the PLO as the sole
representative of the Palestinian people. These classes constituted
the social base of the PLO inside oPt, the occupied Palestinian
territories, while the refugee camps were that base in the shatat.
The support of the popular classes for the PLO was always exploited
by the PLO's leadership, i.e. a leadership that was mainly composed
of the petty-bourgeoisie, but included some middle class people, and
little elite of the bourgeoisie. Throughout the entire long march of
the PLO leadership, it was clearly supported by the popular classes,
but it was working, even as a liberation movement, for the interests
of the middle and upper classes.12
The Oslo Accords were an obvious example of that "peace for
capital".13The
middle class leadership of the Palestinian labor movement, which was
mainly from the Communist party, and later from other leftist
organizations, is to be blamed for deforming the class consciousness
of the popular classes under the pretense of a patriotic position in
the national struggle of the upper classes.
Top
Oslo
Peace for Capital
When the PLO was created it was supposed to be a leading and
representative body for all Palestinians. As a liberation movement,
the PLO exhibited relative harmony between its form and content,
while in essence it was led and monopolized by the petty-
bourgeoisie and its organic intellectual elite who was hesitating
between national struggle and class interests and the ambitions for
higher social status. This contradiction does not appear during the
era of military
struggle, 1967-199414. By signing the Oslo Accords
(Oslo), the PLO leadership introduced a drastic change in
Palestinian politics. As a “peace for capital” process, the Oslo
Accords served most of the segments of Palestinian capitalist
classes, at the cost of the historical rights of the rest of the
people. The PLO changed from the ‘mother of all’ to be the ‘tool of
the few’.
Once the PLO leadership signed Oslo Accords, it, in fact, fell into
the trap of ‘splitting’ its homeland with the settler colonial
entity whose lust for land confiscation was limitless. This opens
the discussion about the PLO national commitment, i.e. what
motivated this leadership, was it a national commitment or its
material class interests (economy, power, culture…etc)?
The Oslo Accords confirmed the subjugation of the Palestinian
bbourgeoisie to the enemy's conditions. The Palestinian economy
continues to be dependent upon and integrated into the Israeli
economy. Every economic activity in the WBG is designed to be a
client of its counterpart in Israel. For instance, every bank that
operates in the Palestinian Authority (PA) areas must be represented
by an Israeli bank in a clearinghouse. Telecommunications in the WBG
are subsidiaries of the Israeli monopoly Bezek. WBG water and
electric companies are dependent on Israeli water and electricity
companies. The same goes for the customs system15.
The Palestinian tax authority is connected with the Israeli system,
which explains why their computer system closes on Saturdays16.
The PA has no authority over its population; its movement in and out
of the territory is controlled by Israel. Israeli authorities are
the only ones allowed to register births and deaths. No Palestinian
is able to leave or return without an Israeli permit, no
export/import activity is possible without Israeli control. The
territories of the WBG are divided into three categories: A, B and
C. Area A, which includes territories that are dense in population,
cities and some towns, is under a civil Palestinian rule, but the
Israeli army enters these areas freely. Area B, which is mainly
villages, is under direct Israeli security control, but some civil
activities are donated to the PA. The most important is area C,
which contains most of territories of the WBG, and is under absolute
Israeli control17.
That explains why Israeli settlements continued to swell up after
the Oslo Accords. The powers delegated to the PA are to collect
taxes, receive donors’ funds, trickle-down economy and opportunities
for corruption.
An in-depth discussion of the terms and conditions of the Oslo
Accords is beyond the scope of this paper. However, the issue here
is what social class those Accords were designed to serve? The
nature of the social classes that supported the Oslo Accords might
shed some light on the nature of the Accords themselves.
Top
Who Supported the Oslo Accords?
The social classes that supported the Oslo Accords were the PLO
leadership, the Palestinian capitalist class inside the Occupied
Palestinian territory and Palestinian financial capitalists. The PLO
leadership became capitalists through controlling the flow of money
from various Arab regimes into its accounts; the taxes collected as
contributions from Palestinians working in Arab oil producing
countries and the contributions and donations from Palestinians in
shatat.
This leadership transformed into a bureaucratic capitalist class
that did business in Lebanon and many African countries while at the
same time it looked for a safe haven for its own interests to
practice power albeit under the rude supervision of foreign
occupation. As a right wing, middle class and petty bourgeois social
class, it was a natural development for this class to develop into a
bureaucratic capitalist class and adopt the market economy18.
The Palestinian capitalist class inside occupied Palestinian
territory is mainly composed of subcontractors, commercial and
comprador capitalists, all of whom are integrated within and
dependant upon Israeli capital.
The Palestinian financial capitalists in the shatat are more
integrated within international financial capital. Most of this
segment of Palestinian capitalism was composed of contractors in the
Arab Gulf countries.
These capitalist factions were backed theoretically and politically
by three groups of capitalist organic intellectuals.
The Palestinian liberal westernized intellectual elite, academics,
NGOs cadres and the intellectual compradors, who did not practice
military struggle, and argued against those who conducted it19.
In fact, these intellectuals normalized relations with the Israelis
from the early years of the Israeli occupation.
A second group of intellectuals who supported the capitalist
factions were renegade leftist intellectuals opposed to or neutral
towards military struggle and the liberation of Palestine. They were
always in favor of recognizing Israel and attacked Arab nationalism
and imperialism from a communist point view. Later they remained
against Arab nationalism, but became neo-liberals!
And finally, the capitalist factions were also supported by
ex-militant intellectuals who had always justified the policies of
the PLO leadership and returned with it to the West Bank/Gaza
through the Oslo Accords. This group is the most dangerous because
of its long dependency on the PLO leadership. They justified the
leadership's signing of the Oslo Accords, came back with it, NGO-ized,
and normalized with the Zionist Entity (ZE).
Many intellectuals from within these three groups became directors
of NGOs, supporters of the World Bank prescriptions, and
crystallized in a group of ‘invisible income’. The issue here is
that, they are really organic intellectuals for the capitalist
class. As long as this class compradorized, they follow and justify
that deformity. Both of them pull the country to the same problem.
They are selective intellectuals, once analyzing from a Marxist
point view, and another time from a liberal point view and
normalizing with the Zionist Entity!
The PLO acceptance of Palestinian Self-Rule (SR) in parts of the
West Bank and Gaza, demonstrates the fact that this is the first
political entity in modern history to exchange sovereignty for
trickle-down economy. It is the first entity that meets the criteria
of globalization in terms of complete surrender of sovereignty, and
since the creation of the World Bank, it is the first to adhere to
its prescriptions as well as to create a secret Chairman’s budget
parallel to the national one20.
In 1967 Israel proposed 'self-rule' for the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. This project suggested that Israel would be responsible for
security in the Occupied Territories, and Jordan would have the
responsibility for matters of law enforcement. Water resources came
under joint administration21. When one compares
what Israel offered to the Jordanian regime in 1967 with those of
the Oslo Accords, then the PLO acceptance of the latter becomes
clearly shocking.
Oslo does not mention joint responsibility for water and it accepts
Israeli control of most of rural areas. But, why did the PLO
leadership accept all this subjugation? As noted earlier, it is the
exchange of the Homeland for a business project. It is “peace for
capital”, especially when the capitalist class dominates politics,
and when there is no opposition. But how?
Top
More Reasons to Accept Oslo?
All of the aforementioned Palestinian capitalist classes and
factions accepted Oslo despite the fact that it never contained an
Israeli withdrawal or land liberation, and it did not breed an
independent Palestinian state in the 1967 occupied areas. Was it,
then, autonomy? They sacrificed the liberation of Palestine, the
Palestinian right of return (ROR), and even the independence of the
West Bank/Gaza, but what did they receive in exchange?
This concentrated the issue of class interests and, for the
capitalists; these interests took priority over the national cause.
In the early 1970s the PLO leadership realized their inability to
liberate Palestine. A detailed examination of why the PLO leadership
welcomed “peace missionaries” and gave up its militant role is
beyond the scope of this article but a few significant factors
should be noted.
The social classes and factions, who supported Oslo, were accustomed
to conducting businesses without being in an independent state. some
of them actually developed outside of the homeland and, except few
individuals, they were capitalists who never participated in
political struggle, not to mention military struggle. As a petty
bourgeois (commercial) and intellectual middle class, the PLO
leadership learned how to conduct business in shatat, so why not do
business with the enemy? They have long comprador experience with
Arab ruling classes and business experience in the pre-Oslo era.
They turned the PLO into a political and financial mixture of
business/State/NGO’s. This became obvious after Oslo, when the
Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership received billions of dollars
and used them as if it was their own money.
Through business experience, the PLO leadership slowed down military
struggle. But the turning point was the eviction from Lebanon to
Tunisia in 1982, as the PLO leadership realized that an independent
state is not an imperative condition to conduct business and
accumulate profit, especially as long as the price of independence
is too much. Accordingly, they decided to be satisfied by the
trickle –down economy and politics, i.e. the self-rule.
The structure of the PLO was never a democratic one. Fateh
leadership was the leadership of the PLO; the left organizations
were to play the opposition role for a certain time and according
to certain priorities, but later on they came to agreement with that
leadership. It was a comfortable opposition for the leadership22.
Inside occupied Palestinian territories the occupation assisted PLO
leadership to be the sole leadership. All political parties were
prohibited, and even the moderate Lajnat al-Tawjih al-Watani
(Committee for National Guidance) was repressed in 1978 because
Israel wanted the recognition from the PLO. That is why, the West
Bank/Gaza were at all times ruled from outside, even before
inventing the fax and remote control.
In addition to the oppression of the Israeli occupation, there were
many other factors that supported this PLO dictatorship. One of
these was the reformism of the Communist Party which spent tens of
years fighting to be accepted by the PLO, while the correct position
was to be its negation! The Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (DFLP) were preoccupied by military struggle and dependent
on Fateh. The theoretical poverty of these organizations did not
allow them to design a social program, neither in the PLO nor under
the PA and their intellectuals and leadership returned to the
occupied territories with the right wing leadership of the PLO after
Oslo, ‘froze’ their Marxism and called themselves 'democrats' and
‘democratic forces’.
All PLO factions viewed the society inside the West Bank/Gaza as a
Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, a mere pool of fighters who
depended on PLO for their lives. None of PLO factions designed a
development policy and they all lacked debate and literature on
development.
The Palestinian intellectuals in shatat were dependent on the
leadership to keep the salary going, and since they were idle, they
had no alternative, but to follow the right wing leadership. In the
West Bank/Gaza intellectuals were more fragile, and stayed as
‘tails’ to their organizations in the shatat. Moreover, it should be
noted that criticizing the PLO was a taboo, and if any one would
dared to criticize it, he/she was accused of being a petty-bourgeois
intellectual, adventurist and renegade against the "legitimate"
regime of LPO "al-shariyyah".
Top
Oslo Accords: PA Practice and Class
Situation
PLO leadership never functioned as individuals. The leadership was
parts or segments of social classes, which were motivated by joint
interests. Leadership, other classes and/or elite …etc were the
components of the social structure of extraction/smuggling of the
surplus, not accumulation, in the so-called "peace era"; it was a
coalition of middle and upper bourgeois class which was never
motivated to accumulate surplus inside the country. Since this
leadership came to the country through compromise and defeatist
negotiations, it was totally driven by a selfperception that its
existence in power, or even in the country, is temporary.
Accordingly, they ignored what they claimed i.e. that they would
Taiwanize the WBG23, as if Taiwan was ideal!
They adopted neo-liberalism, monopolized profitable companies within
the hands of the leadership (later they privatized these companies
for little money), facilitated the flight of surplus abroad, adopted
World Bank prescriptions, the first regime in history to adopt the
World Bank’s destructive prescriptions since the era of
nation-building. They did not design a policy for development and
practiced policies of corruption which made the political economy in
the West Bank/Gaza a "political economy of corruption". After Hamas'
success in the last democratic elections, many of them either fled
or sent their families abroad, and Hamas continues to pretend that
it is still ‘trying to get them back’.
Since the Madrid Conference in 1991 several World Bank reports
emphasized that the benefits of peace should reach most of
Palestinians. What a bribe, a politically and ideologically oriented
way of thinking! It has no connection at all with development,
especially for a people in a nation-building era. This is even lower
than the deformed image of the PLO dreaming of Taiwanizing the West
Bank/Gaza. There is no doubt that the World Bank conceptions stem
from the politics of the core capitalist countries which embarked
into the globalized capitalist era or in our case, the so-called
donors. The irony is that the World Bank conceptions were even
better than the applied politics of PA.
The PA under Fateh leadership 1994-2006 behaved as if Fateh was not
a political organization, but a complete society. Fateh leadership
occupied the highest positions and donated to its "working class"
the lower jobs; the PA achieved full employment for Fateh and
unemployment for all those in working age. There is no doubt that
Fateh donated to its allies24 some benefits here
and there to maintain the décor of the ruling coalition. But, it was
a parasitic and corrupted coalition, a coalition that was based on a
fragile, and certainly not clean, basis.
That is why, when Hamas won the elections, the Fateh leadership
supported each other and started a large campaign against Hamas25.
Most people know of their corruption, the dangerous compromise of
the Oslo Accords and even the security cooperation with the CIA
which opened offices in the West Bank/Gaza.
As mentioned earlier, Arafat, the leader of the PLO coalition,
established bridges with Palestinian capitalists as early as 1982
when these capitalists met in London directly after the PLO eviction
from Lebanon. At that time, the competition between the capitalist
factions for leading the Palestinians became heated again. Both
camps had their own weaknesses, and it seems that they struck a
secret agreement to be allies at least for that period of time. PLO
capitalist leadership lost its source of power after its moral
defeat and escape from Lebanon. Its departure from Lebanon proved
that it realized that guerilla fighting was impossible, which
Hizbullah later proved false), and that negotiations with Israel are
the only possible route even without power.
The rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, who liberated south Lebanon in
2000 and later defeated Israel in July-August 2006 proves that
guerilla war is possible, if the fighters are ready to either fight
or be martyrs like Hussein bin Ali or like the Paris Communards.
Briefly speaking, the PLO leadership proved that its goal was not
national liberation, but compromise. This was later crystallized in
‘peace for capital’, i.e. the Oslo Accords. But, despite all the
weaknesses of the PLO, it was socially much stronger than financial
capitalism in the shatat which is strong financially, but lacks
popular support. At that time, as well as today, there wasn't a new
force, even a populist force to fill the gap and lead the struggle;
the horse is still waiting for a real knight. That is why the PLO
continued to cheat the people and continued its position as their
representative even during the first Intifada. The irony is that the
PLO succeeds in “riding” the Intifada,
stealing its credit, and even stopping its expansion to Arab masses26
or briefly, to betray it.
When the PLO leadership was allowed by Israel to enter the West
Bank/Gaza in 1994, it was supported by the people, the United
States, donor countries and Arab regimes. The supporters were from
several origins and with different and even contradictory interests
and agendas.
The practice of the PA from 1994 to 2006 proved that it never chose
the popular side.
The PA acted as if it was the owner of a fief. Corruption was the
norm. The PA leadership thought that people ‘admired’ it as if it
liberated Palestine. As a ‘peace for capital’ instrument, the PA
applied World Bank prescriptions and favored the private sector,
especially the returnee financial capitalists. For instance, PLO
former Chairman, Arafat, donate Pal Tel Company, the privilege of
communications for JD 20 million, i.e. peanuts27.
After heavy criticism, the PA decided to grant a permit for another
mobile telephone company (Palestinian-Kuwaiti) which will pay $350
million!
"The first strategic fault, the PA fell into was done through the
Ministry of Finance when it signed a privilege contract for the
managing of Palestinian bourse (Stock or Securities Market) which is
80% for PADICO and 20% for Samid"28. It might be
the first regime to put the financial market under the supervision
of a private company. But local capitalists got their shares as
well.
Many of the so-called local industrialists are, in fact, agents for
foreign and Israeli companies29.
Regarding corruption, the Attorney General declared in January 2006
on the eve of the second elections that he had fifty files of
corrupt people who were accused of stealing $350 million, and later
he declared that he completed the investigation of 27 files30.
A year has elapsed since then and no one has been brought to trial.
As noted above, the returnee financial bourgeois was granted many
privileges for little money and the boycotting tradition during
Intifada was terminated to let the comprador import easily and
openly from Israel.
There is no freedom, democracy, sovereignty or even an economic
viability for a state.
Despite that, the party that dominates the PA acts in an absolute
manner. Arafat acted as though the donations, estimated at over $7
billion, were a gift for accepting the Oslo Accords, a political
rent for the PLO’s political/national compromise, not assistance for
the Palestinian people. In reality, it was. None of the donor
countries questioned Arafat about where and how the money was spent31!
Donations were a bribe for the PLO's leadership. That was why there
were two budgets: one in the hands of the Chairman, and the other
between him and the government.
And still there were two heads of power, the presidency, supported
by donors, and the cabinet. All these deformities were not separated
from the will of political (of Israel) and money donors (the
Western and Arab regimes). This was confirmed by the re-channeling
of money by the EU, Israel, Arab regimes, Arab League, and the
United States, to the PA president and not to the people!
It should be noted that, the PA structure wasn't a limited
bureaucratic elite. It was, under Fateh, a pyramid of social class.
Its upper segment was ruling elite drawn mainly from the "returnees"
who were members of Fateh leadership (ministers, advisers, colonels,
public managers…etc). This elite managed its own parallel economy,
starting from the companies tied to Arafat himself (oil, cigarettes,
cement…etc) and ending with a demand for commissions or shares from
any private investor who applied for a business license. Even when
the PA decided to privatize, the privatized companies were
privatized for little money. This might be through a compromise to
bribe financial capitalism. The companies which were related to the
regime, were not a form of public sector, they were a monopoly for
the leading elite of Fateh, not for "the ruling party". That is why;
when Fateh lost the last elections, its economic situation was never
affected. This, in addition to the fact that the ‘Donor’ countries
decided to channel money through Fateh leader Abbas32.
The PA regime not only rules on behalf of the capitalists, but
partners with them. Even in business, many business licenses have
been issued for investors with a PA high rank; officials receive
some form of shares in the business or cash. This breeds fat-cats
and ‘small-cats’ which were poor and idle. The first PLO ruling
coalition guaranteed its financial ‘future’, but sacrificed that of
the people.
As long as capitalists are treated this way by the ruling elite,
they feel that the ‘state’ is theirs, although their aspiration for
national independence is low since they are a parasitic class.
This made it acceptable for them not to practice power directly, but
instead generating easy and large profits, which in itself is some
from of power or generates the same result as being in power. This
class might not be enthusiastic about taking power currently because
it lacks three social sources of power: a large and organized class,
a political party with ideological hegemony and the army.
This indicates that there is a coalition between the ruling
political party, the bourgeoisie and the Donors to rule. That is
why, when Hamas came to power, these three joined efforts in a
campaign against it. During that period, rumors were spread that the
big tycoon Minib al-Masri would be the prime minister of a
technocrat government, in a Palestinian step to imitate Lebanon.
This would not happen because al-Masri lacks social base.
As for the popular classes, nothing has changed in their political
status, i.e. as a vehicle for other classes. These classes continued
their traditional role, the resistance, but now in a deteriorating
manner. Now, they are protectors of Oslo without a real knowledge of
how dangerous it is, dangerous for them on both national and class
levels. Before Oslo, they fought to defeat the occupation and
achieve the right of return (ROR), but at the same time one third of
the working power was wage earners in Israel, gaining relatively
good wages. These workers suffered both, national and wage
discrimination. Under Oslo, many of these workers were recruited to
the PA law enforcement apparatus, security police and army. They
were trained to forget their militant tradition. They were
essentially taught to forget the past. When the economic situation
deteriorated, and the unemployment increased these people found they
were relatively lucky compared to the idle young Palestinians. This
made them even closer to the regime with the feeling that they have
something and those who have nothing are their social enemy. If
these youngsters were not recruited to PA apparatuses, many of them
might have joined Hamas.
Consider, the fact that the PA apparatuses, especially that of
security, might have done that deliberately? Despite the fact that
the Paris Economic Agreement between Israel and the PA stated that
Israel will issue permits for 100,000 Palestinian workers to work in
its economy, this rarely happened; and when it did happen, the
number was around one third of this.
The majority of the popular classes spent several years following
the Oslo Accords in political chaos. The absence of a radical left
contributed a lot to that chaos as the organizations of the left,
directly, the CP, or indirectly, PFLP and DFLP, supported Oslo.
Their leaders returned to the West Bank/Gaza under Oslo conditions,
and later they participated in the second elections.
As long as the popular classes are without a class leadership, they
will remain a mere tool exploited by other classes.
It is a unique situation where political parties do not represent
social classes in a clear manner, where large sections of social
classes (financial capitalism and the middle class) grew outside the
country, peasants hardly do any agricultural work, and two thirds of
the working class are either in shatat or have to commute to their
work sites in Israel. The donors behave as rulers, either directly
or through NGOs, and NGO employees become a faction that lives from
‘invisible income’. This emphasizes the role of the regime: to rule
smoothly, to replace social classes and to accept the role of
stand-by. But despite that, many still pretend that there is a civil
society in PA areas.
The PA practices were full of corruption and lacked transparency and
the territories were absolutely open areas where the Israeli army
killed, demolished and arrested at will. All this led to the
disintegration of militant values. People were busy looking for
their individual security in social, economic, political, cultural
and fiscal terms. Military apparatuses, militia groups, gangs, mafia
became sources for young Palestinians to ‘feel safe and strong’.
Most of the real and genuine grassroots organizations, i.e. the
worker and student movements, have disappeared during PA rule. The
PA appointed colonels in the leadership of workers’ unions; the
student movement became factional, and competed along the party
lines.
Grassroots organizations were either occupied or replaced by NGOs
and security police apparatuses. The political society liquidated
every genuine social organization. The irony is, as mentioned above,
that many Palestinians still pretend that there is a civil society
in the PA areas.”
The donors, the World Bank, Arab regimes, and the people did not
protest, until the Manifesto of Twenty 33 was
issued in 1999. The silence of the Donors and the World Bank could
be interpreted as the acceptance of Fateh leadership for Oslo
process was an exchange for the donations that leadership received.
Is it a conspiracy theory to say that the Donors and the World Bank
were keen to let the Oslo process pass as an agreement in the
service of Israel?
Passive popular classes without radical representatives waited until
the last elections (January and February 2006) to say its word, to
vote for an alternative, Hamas. Strange enough, the popular classes
punished one bourgeois faction by voting for another. The base did
not determine or replace the top, but exchanged one elite for
another. The new elite were militant and not corrupted, but, like
those they replaced, they used, not served, the popular classes. The
popular classes moved from blind support for the PLO to a blind
acceptance of the globalized democracy, which is void of any
content. It is a decoration of Oslo process. When the election
results were not as desired by the donors, all of them boycotted
Hamas22 an aggressive step which the PA president accepted. He is on
stand-by (see later).
Boycotting Hamas government was a punishment of wage earners, mainly
the popular classes who suffer unemployment and low wages. This
boycott led to the failure of many small scale projects, depression,
low quality of nutrition and chaotic expansion of the informal
sector, market contraction, delinquency in paying bills, and cheques
without sufficient funds which led to social tensions especially
because courts are not working. The open door policy helped banks
transfer national surplus abroad, and enabled many to import low
quality products from China, without quality control. Unemployment
and the lack of social, health, political and working security
increased the theft, which started against Israelis and then
expanded internally.
Each of the petty bourgeois factions were affected according to its
source of income. The productive faction, in manufacturing and
agriculture, was affected as part of the market process.
Other factions, those not related to the productive process and not
direct components of the mode of production, that part of the
service sector that served the capitalist mode of production but
depended on their jobs or intellectualism, (professionals, medical
doctors, engineers, lawyers…etc) and middle rank PA employees were
affected to a lesser degree. Directors of NGOs never suffered as
their income is invisible, but guaranteed. Nothing was deeply
changed in the politics of this class since it was already divided
between the two large right wing.
capitalist organizations. The change took place in that segment of
the petty bourgeois/middle class members who lost their places to
another segment of the same class.
Top
Why was there no Class Culture
of Protest?
PLO leadership and a lot of its militants entered the
West Bank/Gaza according to the Oslo Accords. The leadership
maintained its previous way of leading as it did in the shatat.
The elections that took place in 1995 did nothing more than
strengthen the same traditions. Arafat continued ruling as if he was
still the underground leader. He and his close Fateh leaders
controlled everything. Nobody was able to ask, inquire, or to demand
transparency. As noted earlier in this paper, the donors’ silence on
corruption and lack of transparency was aimed at encouraging
Arafat's policy of compromise with the Zionist Entity (ZE).
But, if one assumes that PLO leaders, cadres and
intellectuals were used to Arafat's policy, how about the rest of
WBG population who never depended on the PLO? One of the reasons why
people did not protest directly against Oslo, is that it divided the
Palestinian Resistance Movement into those who accepted and those
who rejected it. The majority were for the approval of these
Accords. In the first years after the Oslo Accords, the people were
in ‘political shock’. Most of the Palestinian Resistance Movement
and the people never imagined that their leadership made all that
compromise. What caused the chaos among people and put some in the
‘gray area’ is the praise and justification which the ‘PLO
intellectuals’, later the PA, offered to the Oslo Accords.34
All Fateh members were busy ‘decorating’ that compromise.
The donors also played a major role here. They paid a
lot of money to let people "taste the fruits of peace" (the words of
the World Bank!). Arab ruling classes participated financially in
the process, and even Jordan signed a ‘peace’ agreement with Israel
adding more credibility to the Oslo process. The PA leadership used
donors' money to corrupt as much of the population as possible so as
to guarantee their silence. This became obvious in the policy of
bribing each social class. The regime civil and police apparatuses
expanded to absorb 160,000 persons from the middle and popular
classes. All those who were tied to the regime became either
supporters or silent about its mistakes.
NGOs played a role in deepening the corruption. They
recruited many of the leftist cadres, paying them high salaries and
neutralizing them from politics, i.e., radical politics. In fact,
this phenomenon expanded to the extent that the left itself NGO-ized.
While a lot of social conflict appeared in the society during the PA
rule, the left failed to perform its supposed role.
Considering that the Israeli occupation is still in the
West Bank/Gaza, tightening its various forms or repression, all
these factors played a role in minimizing social protests.
But, how about other social classes which did not protest? Despite
the corruption and political compromise, generally speaking, there
was no real social protest in the PA areas, neither at the political
nor at social and economic levels. This might support my theory
that: there was not a Palestinian revolution, but only a resistance
movement. Even today, the image others have about the Palestinian
question is that it is much bigger than its real content. It should
be noted the Palestinian Resistance Movement lags behind the just
right of the Palestinian people. What makes the resistance movement
looks better than its reality is the brutality of the Zionist
Entity. The lack of revolutionary tradition, bribing the opposition,
'the right wing-left', the flood of NGOs to the extent of the
NGO-ization35
of political parties, all these are the reasons that lie behind the
silence towards the PA political compromise and economic and social
corruption.
Neither the capitalist class, nor the middle class or
the intellectuals protested against the PA social politics. Was it
because all people's efforts were directed against the occupation,
the society itself lacking the culture of protest, or because of the
deformity of the popular classes and even of the national
consciousness? It should be noted that the bourgeois class had no
motivation to protest as long as it gained the highest rate of
profit in a colony, on the one hand, and because it lacked the
ability and the aspiration for national independence on the other.
It accepted the trickle-down economic role; there is no state
apparatus which belongs to the people, i.e. an establishment of
state which is relatively not owned by a political party. It might
be used by party, but not owned!
The bourgeoisie did not protest because, on the one
hand, it is bribed, and on the other it failed to build its own
party. But why? In a country under settler colonization, there is no
space for a new party unless it is fighting the occupation, which is
not the case of Palestinian bourgeoisie. The same was true for PLO
intellectuals. They failed to practice social protest under the PA
because they continued their compromise with PLO under the PA
regime. They came to occupied Palestinian territory under the Oslo
compromise through routes that are controlled by Zionist Ashkenazi
Entity (ZAE) where their minds were ‘stamped’ at the borders before
their IDs.
One might imagine that popular classes, especially in
refugee camps and rural areas, must be vanguards of protest,
at least because of their large number, high birth rates,
exploitation by the rich class, little income and the exclusion from
any political power. But it is important to consider that the
popular classes lacked political/social education, class
consciousness and culture and this was crystallized in the final
analysis in a low motivation for protest. Moreover, the occupation,
and later the PA regime, succeeded in offsetting the potential
protest of the poor and densely populated areas, through employment
in Israel before 1994, recruitment of large numbers of youth in PLO
organizations, the creation of a climate of migration and finally,
absorption into various PA apparatuses.
The year 2006 witnessed a drastic change that manifested
itself in a bloody chaos but not civil protest. More than 322 people
died as victims of security chaos. This was due to political
conflict for power and large unemployment.36
Social protest is a degree of class struggle and an arena in which
the left operates. But the Palestinian left, which always lagged
behind the right wing, failed to practice this role during the PA
where it became very dependent on it. The left failed, years before
the PA era, to build a labor movement, it even failed to lead trade
union protests.37
The structure of the Palestinian economy under occupation
contributed to that crisis since the industrial base was unable to
absorb labor power. This was reflected into fragmentation of the
working class into three unconnected groups, in the West Bank/Gaza,
inside Israel and abroad, especially in the Arab oil producing
countries.
Top
Who Rules in the West Bank/Gaza?
One might ask, who rules in the PA areas? It is obvious
that it is the Israeli military occupation, which then ‘donates’ a
role for the PA. In other words, there is a functional division, a
trickle-down in various aspects. The Israeli occupation controls all
of what is related to population registration and movement, borders,
most of the agricultural and unpopulated land, export-import,
foreign affairs, defense…etc. The same coalition of Palestinian
capitalist factions dominate on the internal social and economic
issues. The bourgeoisie does not directly rule, it rules through the
bureaucratic capitalist and police apparatus, similar to that of
Lois Napoleon Bonaparte, who ruled on behalf of bourgeoisie on the
one hand, but differs from him because the Palestinian bourgeoisie
is not as productive as the French bourgeoisie in the 1860s on the
other. It is similar to Bonaparte's at the level of defeat since it
came to the West Bank/Gaza through a compromise with its enemy and
not through the liberation of the occupied Palestinian territory.
Palestinian elections took place in 1996 and the chairman and
Palestinian Legislative Counsel (PLC) were elected. However, the
majority of voters and political organizations did not participate
in voting. It was the first election under the sword of the people's
enemy. The PA did not rule in a sovereignty fashion, it was limited
to the management of internal affairs, and the bourgeoisie did not
rule directly. The segment that ruled was the bureaucratic
capitalist faction, which was the military structure that was
brought from abroad. This might be a strange assessment. But it is a
fact. If the bourgeois goal is the highest rate of profit, it
doesn't care if it comes through an independent state or a
self-rule, as long as the PA came to the West Bank/Gaza through
compromise with Israel, i.e., so long as it paid the price of the
false authority. What was most important was that the PLO was the
only strong power able to pay that price without being accused of
treason. This price was beyond the capacity of the bourgeoisie. It
is only the Palestinian form of military junta that was able to do
it and it did.
Top
No Chance for the 'Second Republic',
But for Oslo
The passivity of the society towards the PA national
compromise and social corruption encouraged the designers of the
Oslo Accords to re-strengthen the camp of the ‘Oslo Palestinians’
(Palestinians who support the Oslo Accords) through new elections
aimed at liquidating the Palestinian question. They were aware of
Hamas' popularity, but they never imagined that Hamas
would match and defeat Fateh.38
Pressure was applied on Hamas to participate in the elections
aimed at keeping Hamas contained within Oslo. Many said that
if Hamas did not participate in the ‘democratic’ elections,
it might have been liquidated.
There are many scenarios on why Hamas
participated in elections of 2006 and what it hoped to achieve by
doing so. There was no doubt that Hamas was a power seeker as
it is a part of the Moslem Brothers (MB) international movement. My
inclination is that, Hamas’ popularity reached its peak after its
military operations. Hamas’ leaders realized that this was
the highest limit of military struggle that Palestinians can
practice, as long as Arab borders are completely quiet. Those
leaders decided to use this popularity for gaining political power
which is logical. But Hamas failed to differentiate between
its success in resistance, on one hand, and the use of its
resistance as credit in a power donated by its enemy! In other
words, to move from underground military resistance to open
political ruling in a colonized country.
In fact, until the elections results were revealed,
Hamas leaders were still arguing that they would not go to the
cabinet if they got majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council
(PLC). They sought advice about what to do if they found themselves
in the majority.39 When they won the elections, they established their
cabinet. They ignored the facts on the local and international
ground that Oslo is a donation from people's enemy, and anyone who
rules according to Oslo must recognize Israel and compromise the ROR,
and even accept the Israeli theft of large parts of the West
Bank/Gaza. There is no doubt that when Hamas was elected, the
voters considered Hamas' political program. But Hamas never
realized that its program was inapplicable under the present
circumstances; there was no place for a 'republic' unless it
recognized ‘Israel’.
From the first moment in ‘power’, Hamas was
ordered to follow the policies of the previous government, i.e. to
normalize with Israel, to recognize Israel and to meet openly with
Israeli officials with all the hidden meanings of these conditions.
Hamas found this unacceptable, but the enemy's front was
ready to attack. While Israel built the colonial expansionist wall,
Israel, the US, the EU and Arab rulers built ‘another wall’, the
financial wall which kept the people at the edge of famine.40
The experience of 2006 made it obvious that there was no chance for
a ‘second republic’, a different regime.
Top
Hamas: Class, Education and Economy
Although the Moslem Brotherhood participated in the struggle during
the 1948 war, Islamic political parties did not share in the
struggle against settler colonialism after 1967. Perhaps they were
influenced by their relationship with the “moderate” Arab regimes
whose goal was to fight communism, secularism and Arab nationalism,
which the PLO was considered to be a part of. The official Moslem
Brotherhood position towards the PLO did not represent all Moslem
believers. Many Moslems, even those who were influenced by the
Moslem Brotherhood were members of the PLO organizations, either as
leaders like Abu-Jihad, Yaser Arafat, or as middle cadres who were
like “sleeper cells" inside Fateh, but their discourse wasn't
sleeping.41
Many aspects of the Fateh discourse are similar to that of the
Moslem Brotherhood, however, the experience of Fateh, its
relationship with Arab regimes, the benefits and interests it has in
ruling a little Palestinian ‘regime’ (even if it is a stand-by
regime), all this attracted and changed Fateh’s discourse more
towards secularism on the one hand and Iqlimi42 on the other. The first Intifada, which,
unlike earlier elite opposition, was a mass resistance and it, was a
turning point that motivated young cadres from the Moslem
Brotherhood to share in the struggle, and, in turn, they were able
to persuade their leadership to do likewise.
The first Intifada was a lesson to PLO organizations as
well: that people's struggle is possible and even more effective
than that of the elite. Hamas, as a militant organization affiliated
with Moslem Brotherhood participated in the Intifada and benefited
from the positive and negative experience of the PLO. On the
positive side, Hamas adopted the military struggle which was
appreciated by the people. Hamas also did not ignore or denounce,
military struggle as many PLO groups did to prove to the US, Israel
that they are ‘moderate’.
During the first Intifada, the new force, Hamas,
emerged as a militant, but not a social organization. The social
base of Hamas expanded through struggle and came mainly from
the same base as the PLO, from the popular classes. In other words,
the PLO leadership and Hamas belonged to the same social factions,
bazaar, comprador, big merchants, petty-bourgeoisie, especially its
intellectuals and ‘the middle class’. But most of its members, and
especially its supporters, were from popular classes. Both Fateh and
Hamas were ideologically on the side of the bourgeoisie and not on
the side of their social base. Whom to blame for that? Is it the
bourgeois treason of the popular classes, or the supporters of both
organizations who lack the consciousness of their class interests,
and the political organization that pretends its represents the
popular classes?
In societies like Egypt and Algeria political Islamists
came from, or at least were supported by, the class of old
exploiters. These old exploiters were big landowners who felt
threatened by capitalist modernization of society and included:
clergy who control the Waqf land, traditional merchant
capitalists, and owners of chains of small shops. The life style of
these people was closer to religious conservatism. In Palestine, big
landowners are closer to the Jordanian regime and the PA.
There is another similarity with Algeria and Egypt
represented by a new, non-traditional capitalism which is mostly
manufacturers who employ wage labor (but on religious and not labor
employment terms), these are the sub-contractors who partner with
Israelis and consider it a mere trade, a business transaction. For
this class, trade and profit are never tied with religion or
nationalism, they are international. Accordingly, we can't say that
Hamas is a petty bourgeois organization. It includes people of all
classes. It might be that the petty bourgeoisie, ‘especially the
middle class’ is a strong component of Hamas, but they are not the
majority or the only ones.
Many NGO-ized left and liberal intellectuals argue that
Hamas is an organization of the petty bourgeoisie, and expand their
argument to say that it is a fascist organization and use this
description to support the PA chairman against the Hamas cabinet.
They use the argument that when petty-bourgeoisie43
reaches power it will repress the working class for the sake of
capital.
This might be true in different places, where capital
and labor are in a direct class challenge as in an independent
social formation, but this is not the case in the PA areas.
Moreover, repression of the working class comes from several
regimes, especially in the Third World, not only from Islamist
petty-bourgeois leadership.
One might argue that Hamas is closer to populism.
An organization of the owning middle class which is able to mobilize
the popular classes, the poor classes, especially urban poor youth,
and rural unemployed youth who prefer not to work in agriculture,
against the settler colonial occupation which confiscates the land
and blocks development. While populist regimes always promise its
supporters a better life, Hamas did it even before being in
power by establishing networks of small businesses for men and
women. When one compares this policy with the corruption of the PA,
he will understand why Hamas received so much support.
The populist regimes in Egypt (Nasser) and Algeria (Bumedian)
promised to enlarge the middle class or to reshape the whole society
to be a middle class. They applied import substitution, and did not
threaten the private ownership of the petty bourgeoisie. Hamas,
even when in power, can't adopt any of these policies because it is
in contradiction with its socio-economic and gender thoughts on the
one hand, and because it is impossible to apply any formal
development policy in a colony unless it is development by popular
protection on the other. But, like many populist regimes, Hamas
was able to concentrate on cultural discourse (see later),
especially in the era of globalization as the United States tried to
terminate cultural diversity on world scale.
Top
NGOs in forefront against
Hamas. Why?
Hamas came to power when the society was deteriorating, under
brutal repression by the Zionist Entity, the deep corruption of the
PA, high unemployment rates, almost total dependence on donor
countries which support Israeli settler colonial occupation and non
democratic, underdeveloped and compromising Arab regimes. All this
in addition to official international policies that support Israel
blindly.
One might argue that the class origin and base of
Hamas is, relatively, the same of other political Islamists in
Egypt, Algeria, Sudan…etc. But the situation is different,
especially with regard to the battles fought. In Egypt and Algeria,
a lot of youth and middle class professionals were angry because of
unemployment and the lack of a better life. And petty bourgeois
landowners maintained their nostalgia to the past in order to resist
the creeping capitalization of the society and to maintain private
ownership of their land. In Palestine, the same social factions were
motivated by two motives:
- The religious attitude against the occupation, which, in the final
analysis, deprived them of a better life.
- National sentiment which differentiated them from the classic
Moslem Brotherhood movement.
In fact, much of the membership of Hamas is from the privileged
petty-bourgeoisie, including the middle class.
Moreover, Islamists in Egypt and Algeria were challenged
to choose between a comprador capitalism which betrayed the people
or the political Islamist which is against this ruling class for
being an agent of imperialism.
In Palestine, the young militants are facing the settler
colonial occupation. The PA regime, despite the Oslo Accords, is not
considered a traitor regime since it is composed of an alliance of
organizations which practice military struggle, and some of them are
still doing that. Similarities, however, are in the social issues,
which Hamas members rarely interfere in. It might be for
tactical reasons, or that some of them are trying to expand their
social perspective. But, the similarity is in the attitude of the
left, which in Palestine, like Egypt and Algeria, support the
comprador against Hamas. Even when Hamas decided to
compromise the national cause and participate in the elections of
the ‘second republic’, the colonial/globalized democracy, the left
pretended that Hamas did not believe in democracy. The question here
is: what is the proper tactic? Is it to fight against Hamas
or to think in a different way, i.e. to build the Historic Block
with it?
At the educational level, since the very beginning of
the Moslem Brotherhood movement, their popular school, the Mosque,
existed as a ‘college’ that was never closed by any regime, either
due to respect for religion during the British colonialism or
because of their alliance with the Jordanian regime. Meanwhile the
national movement was subjected to harsh repression.
Under the Zionist settler colonialism, the Moslem
Brotherhood maintained a neutral stand towards the occupation; they
were still influenced by the old imperialist propaganda about
‘communist threat’. While the occupation made many hints that its
policy encouraged the MB, no one has clear evidence on real ties
between the two, but the MB benefited from that truce.
When the Intifada, as spontaneous popular revolt,
erupted, the young generation of Hamas members, influenced by the
national cause, applied heavy pressure on its rich conservative
leadership to change their tactic towards the national conflict.
This was the birth of Hamas. Despite of occupation's harsh
repression against Hamas, until today, the Mosque continues to play
its role, and many cultural centers were already established as well
as newspapers, radio stations and TV stations.
In parallel with good income, smoothly conducted
businesses, continued education in Mosques, Hamas slowly dominated
Mosques, squeezing out the role of Hizb al-Tahrir, another
Islamist political party. In addition to religious teachings,
education also concentrated on attacking the Palestinian Resistance
Movement for being secular and the PLO as an organization
established to terminate the Palestinian question.
The eviction of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982 left a void
in the West Bank/Gaza and PLO branches inside these areas become
relatively independent from the direct influence of their
leadership, except those who were financially dependent on this
leadership. During the years 1982-1988 three main developments at
the political-cultural level took place:
- The decline of military struggle by PLO led to recognition of
Israel;
- Expansion of NGOs activity, especially after US Secretary of State
Shultz 1982 speech calling for improvement of the quality of life of
the Palestinians,
- MB building small, but varied businesses in the West Bank/Gaza,
Islamic NGOs.
The cultural role of Hamas was supported by the
de-education of Fateh and the left. While the Intifada was at its
peak, the PLO negotiated with the occupation (the Madrid conference
and the Oslo Accords, the Paris Economic Agreement…etc). In other
words, while the PLO betrayed the Intifada through using it for
political compromise and blocking it from growing into an Intifada
for socio-economic and cultural development, Hamas was building its
culture of resistance and economic base.44
The discourse of Fateh and the left concentrated on ‘peace’ and
ignored the military struggle, supported negotiations and
normalization with Israel, amended the Palestinian National Charter
(of the PLO), stopped the Intifada and boycott against Israel…etc.
In this context, the intellectuals of al-shariyyiah (the
legitimate power/authority), who came from Beirut, played the role
of the organic intellectuals of Oslo. The same role was played by
the leftists who were absorbed by PA institutions, the Ministry of
Culture, NGOs and so on, intellectuals tails to the political
leading elite. This confirmed that these two elites were the weakest
and the most destructive in the Palestinian struggle. Hamas, who did
not stop the struggle, was the only party that benefited from that,
especially because the occupation intensified repression, land
confiscation and the building of the wall.
It became obvious that Hamas’ education for resistance
beat the call for normalization which was concentrated in the PA
discourse, many liberal universities, the World Bank and others. The
main looser in this competition was the left whose discourse
deteriorated from Marxism, to the left, to progressive and lately,
to the recently assumed loose identity of the “Democratic Forces”.
There is no doubt that the social discourse of the PLO/PA camp is
more progressive that that of Hamas, especially regarding gender
equality, but this does not mean that they are that much ahead of
Hamas. Slogans of equality, criticizing Hamas as fundamentalist, run
parallel with corruption, absence of development policy, politically
NGO-ized, adopting World Bank prescriptions, working with and for
western capitalist cultural organizations; all of this negates that
these people are true fighters for women’s rights and equality.
Before the first Intifada, the MB built their social and
economic networks in the West Bank/Gaza. Their leadership of big
merchants, including comprador, sub-contractors, small shops, and
industrialists, prospered during that era. The popular classes were
good costumers as long as they worked in the Green Lineearning45
relatively good wages. In the absence of a local bank system or
Islamic banks, these classes dealt with the Israeli banks which
opened 38 commercial branches in the West Bank/Gaza.
Top
Democracy, Elections, Regime And
stand-by Intellectuals
All parties that participated in the preparation and
sponsorship of Palestine’s second elections pretend that it was
‘ideal’. In fact, it was a democracy ‘cooked’ and financed by the
center of imperialism for a colony under brutal military and racist
occupation. However, since the results of the elections were
‘different’ than what was hoped for when they were conducted, plans
for a gradual coup against the Hamas victory were openly declared
and launched. None of those who praised the ‘colonized democracy’
respected the choice of the voters. They fabricated 'democracy',
imposed a financial blockade over the occupied Palestinian
territory, stole tax withholdings that belonged to the Palestinian
people, prevented local and foreign banks from paying salaries of
government employees who were then obliged to go into a long,
wrongful strike, i.e. against the besieged government, not against
those who imposed the blockade.
In less than two decades, Palestinian working class was
obliged to get down into its knees, twice. The first time, when the
PLO leadership decided to sign the Oslo Accords and enter the
occupied Palestinian territory under Israeli control, most of its
guerrillas was faced with by two bitter choices. They could either
agree and enter the occupied Palestinian territory under the
domination of its enemy or they could stay in Lebanon and shatat
while lacking any protection.46
The second time, when most of the 160,000 workers
who were working in Israel before Oslo lost their jobs after the
Oslo Accords were signed, the PA employed many of them in its
bureaucratic apparatuses. The donor countries committed to pay the
salaries of PA employees equal in number to those once employed
inside Israel. When Hamas won the elections, the donors
closed the ‘tap’ and made the payment of these salaries contingent
upon Hamas’ recognition of Israel.
After ten months of pressure on the people in general,
and Hamas in particular, the PA Chairman delivered a speech
(16-12-2006) threatening Hamas, demanding that Hamas either
accept a government of national unity or accept his call for new
presidential and legislative elections in the West Bank/Gaza. The
Chairman's declaration provoked many clashes between the two
organizations (Fateh and Hamas) and raised the possibility of open
internal war.
What kind of a regime practically ‘donates’ most of its
country to the invaders? It was first regime in the world to
implement the new destructive theories that sovereignty is not
necessary. When the US ordered it to create a new job of Prime
Minster it said yes, and yes for 'democracy' under occupation, yes
for a gradual/globalized coup d’etat against those who were elected
by its own democracy, and yes for civil war! In his speech
(16-12-2006), the PA Chairman emphasized that the PA is dependent at
all levels. He confirmed that any government must obey the
conditions of Israel, Arab regimes, Quartet (UN, USA, EU and Russia)
and the international community. Consider the fact that Israel never
gave the PA any sovereignty, and just 11 days after Abbas’ speech47,
Israel announced the change of a military camp in the West Bank to a
settlement. These are additional indications that the PA is a
stand-by regime.
Despite all that, liberal intellectuals pretend that
there is a civil society in PA areas. They re-shape the reality
according to the demands of the donors and that is why there are
many research centers in the PA areas for the research of democracy,
civil society, gender equality…etc. All of these centers are
stand-by nests for intellectuals to produce what the donors' agenda
needs them to do, ‘intellectual business’ or export-led researches.
They are willing to do any research requested, even if it is
directly for the intelligence services of any regime, and justify it
as ‘intellectual work’. The same intellectuals participated in joint
intellectual programs with Israeli counterparts, i.e. normalization
with the colonial intellectuals.48
While Civil Society, is the main site where ruling class
hegemony can be exercised, in occupied Palestinian territory the
hegemony is not local or national, it is foreign, colonial, and
global. Its tools are the local externalized, stand-by
intellectuals. Through this role, Palestinian intellectuals of the
PLO who supported the Oslo Accords, negotiated with Israelis,
established and worked with western NGOs, and were normalizers who
distorted people’s education and re-engineered its memory. In fact,
this form of stand-by intellectuals started in occupied Palestinian
territory in the 1970s.
Top
Who Represent the Palestinians?
Following the continuous pressure over Hamas to betray
the people's choice and recognize Israel, whether Hamas will agree
or pay the price of disagreeing, which is the gradual, but obvious,
coup d’etat that will develop into civil war. This made it clear
that the international community did not respect the mission that it
sponsored and financed, and did not respect the choice of those who
voted.
As long as the stand-by state is ready to accept all
forms of external pressures, including the compromise of people's
memory and historic rights, and the termination of the election
results and as long as the international community favors the
Zionist Entity, the question of ‘who represent the Palestinians’
remains legitimate.
When the PLO was a militant organization committed to
the liberation of Palestine, it gained its legitimacy through
struggle and people accepted it as their sole representative even
without elections. At that time, the PLO was for many Palestinians
the 'Mother of All'. But when the PLO accepted the Oslo Accords,
recognized Israel as a settler colonial regime in the territories of
the first occupation in 1948 and accepted living under the second
occupation after 1967, for many, the PLO lost its legitimacy.
The rise of political Islam (PI) militant organizations
that maintained the old line of the MB and their refusal to become
members of the PLO, confirmed that the PLO represents only part of
the Palestinian people, concretely, those who supported the
organizations of PLO. After Oslo, the PLO became the representative
of those who supported 'peace for capital'. As for the defeated
government of the PLO, when the international community did not
respect the legitimacy bred through elections and 'democracy', and
supported the PLO/PA's president in his coup d’etat, then the people
had to fight again for a real representation.
The last elections show that Hamas won people's
support more than all the PLO organizations, the liberal current,
big capital, NGOs and all the normalizers with Israel. Moreover,
those who did not participate in the elections, estimated at 25%,
are for sure closer to Hamas' political, not social, position
and are also not for the PLO. This means that the majority of the
Palestinians are not for the PLO. But Hamas, failed to tackle
some sensitive issues like the trial of the corrupt people. They
did not confiscate the money stolen from development and salaries
nor did they impose laws that stop banks from transferring people's
surplus abroad. Hamas did relatively stop its military operations
and more important, did not give any signs of a new understanding
for women’s equality. Hamas’ participation in the elections
is recognition of Zionist Ashkenazi Entity (ZAE) – Israel in an
objective, even if not in a written, manner.
The military organizations accept the stand-by regime
because they are unable to liberate Palestine. The capitalists
accept the self-rule regime because they are not productive and lack
the aspiration to monopolize the local market and protect it. The
popular classes are still in the service of other dependent classes
and did not breed their own political party. Since this is the case,
the need for a new representative, a historical block as a
resistance movement, might be more urgent now than ever.
But, a new representative is necessary for what goal? As
long as the Oslo Accords ended in the current destructive situation,
it is clear that the two-state solution did not work. This proves
again that the only practical solution is a one state solution,
which I believe must be socialist state that will be part of
socialist Arab countries for Arabs, Kurds, Amaziq, Jews all other
nationalities, ethnicities and sects.49
Top
*
A paper presented to a conference on “The Economy and the Economics
of Palestine: Past, Present and Future” sponsored by SOAS Palestine
Society at the University of London 27-28 January 2007.
1- There is a long, yet not solved, debate whether
the middle class is an independent class, or even the
petty-bourgeois, the weakest point in this class is that there is no
such mode of production called the petty-bourgeois mode of
production.
A movement of Jordanians and Palestinians whose main
parties were the Ba'ath, the Communist, al-Qawmiyoun a-Sourioun, and
Arab Nationalist Movement parties. Most of the members of this
movement were from the popular classes.
Shatat is an Arabic term that signifies one's living
outside of his/her homeland. In the context of this paper, shatat is
used to indicate Palestinians who were forcefully expelled from
their homeland – Palestine as a result of the Zionist occupation of
Palestine in 1948 and the years that followed. These Palestinians
reside, since 1948, in many Arab and other countries world-wide as
Palestinian refugees.
-In fact, this is similar to what has been said by Hikmat
al-Masri in 1978 who stated:
- It should be noted that all projects to re-settle
Palestinian refugees were designed to settle them far from the
borders of Palestine.
Peace for
Capital: Several peace agreements have been signed between some Arab
regimes, especially the PLO leadership (later the Palestinian
Authority), and Israel. The experience shows that this peace has,
indeed, taken place among the capitalist classes in the western
capitalist center, especially USA and Europe, the Israeli capitalist
ruling class, and the Arab capitalist regimes in the periphery. The
main goal of this peace was to maintain and accelerate the
capitalist slogan: “The liberalization of trade on the World scale”.
The experience in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBG) also shows that
those who benefited from this peace were the capitalist hierarchy
starting from its center in the USA to the comprador capitalists in
the WBG. Briefly, this peace did not serve or save the lives of the
Palestinians in the WBG. That is why it is a peace for capital, not
for people.
14 A paper presented to a conference on “The Economy and the
Economics of Palestine: Past, Present and Future” sponsored by SOAS
Palestine Society at the University of London 27-28 January 2007.
15 Leaders
of underground and military struggle, even in liberated areas allow
themselves some autonomy and “to be little dictators”. Under those
conditions, it is difficult to apply democracy, transparency…etc. In
fact the right wing Palestinian leadership enjoyed these excuses.
The catastrophe becomes clear when the same leadership held secret
negotiations in Oslo and came back to oPt to govern in an absolute
manner.
16 The
Fateh regime always pretends that PA is independent regime. But when
they want to justify compromise and oblige Hamas to recognize
Israel, they say the truth, that the PA is dependent on Israel. See
the speech of exminister Muhammad Shtayia, al-Quads 18-12-2006 who
confirmed that Israel controls and decides every policy in the PA
areas.
17 This is
why banks in the PA areas decide to make their holidays Friday and
Saturday. The irony is that nobody tells the people what is really
the hidden items of peace agreements until each body face a problem
to discover things himself.
18 In 1997,
I received a permit from the PA to build my poultry farm. After the
building was completed two Israeli patrols came and gave me a
military order to demolish it at my cost, they told me that Israel
is the only authority that can issue building permits.
17 While
there are several estimations of PLO secret accounts, they all agree
that there is a lot of money there.
19 These
intellectuals never participated in the national struggle they in
fact built a long contacts with the organic Zionist intellectuals
through meetings and discussions…etc. See Adel Samara Muthakafoun fi
Khidmat al-Aakhar: Bayan al-khams wa-Khamsin, Ramallah 2003.
20 It
should be noted that Mr. Arafat passed away while the people never
knew the size of his budget and who inherited it.
21 al-Hadaf,
no 824, 14-7-1986. In October 2006, the Jordanian government
declared the establishment of a legal committee to review the
provisions of Jordan's decision to "disengage" from the West Bank
announced on 31 July 1988 effectively suggesting the possibility of
a reversal of part of all of these provisions.
22 Even
liberal intellectuals believe that PLO will build a democratic
state. This was one of the reasons that they supported the
negotiations and took share in the government as well. See Joseph
Massad, Sasah Waqiaiyoun am Muthakafo Comprador (Realist Politicians
or Intellectual Comprador), in Kana'an Review, no 85, April, 1997,
p.p14-28.
23 The mere
thinking of Taiwanization reflects the comprador mentality of PLO
leadership and their ignorance that the capitalist center does not
need another Israel beside Israel in the Arab Homeland and the
Middle East.
24 The
allies of Fateh are the CP, FIDA, and some other smaller
organizations. All of Fateh allies collectively concluding PFLP and
DF and the rest of PLO organizations won in the second elections 5
out of 138 PLC seats. Theliberal and NGOs blocks won 4 members.
25 PLO
organizations, the liberals and the NGOs launched a campaign to
oblige Hamas to agree for a national unity government composed of
'independent, technocrat' and donated a year of work without being
responsible in front of the PLC, a suggestion that was rejected by
Hamas.
26 The same is after Hizbullah victory 2000 and 2006. PA leadership
was and still the first who minimizes these victories.
27 A Palestinian capitalist from shatat met me in Jerusalem 1991
with an offer to manage a feasibility studies center for the WBG.
The first study should be telecommunications. I ask if it will be an
independent Palestinian company, he said no: it is a privilege of
the Israeli company, Bazek. That is why, the cost of telephone calls
in oPt is at least double than Israel, while the service is
miserable and the per capita in the oPt is 1-20 of that of
Israelis.
28
Kirresh_mohammed47@hotmail.com.
29 In pharmaceutical industry some owners of local factories are
agents for foreign companies. They import medications with an
expiration date less than 6 months, and pharmacies are obliged to
buy it since there is no alternative.
30 The Palestinian Land Dependent Commission for Citizens' Rights,
no 27, October 2006.
31 The first challenge to PA corruption was the Manifesto of 20,
which we signed in November1998, noted that Arafat is leading and
sponsoring corruption. Except some PLC members, all of us were
arrested.
32 In
her speech, 16-12-2006, the US Secretary of State, and female
warmonger, declared that tens of millions of dollars will be donated
to the PA security apparatuses. This was one day after these
security apparatuses killed and injured tens of prayers in Ramallah.
33 On 27
November 1999, a group of twenty Palestinians political figures and
intellectuals issued a manifesto under the title ‘The Homeland Calls
Us’. For the first time since the signing of the Oslo Accords, where
the Oslo Accords were criticized and the Palestinian Authority (PA)
and its president were publicly accused of corruption, humiliation,
abuse and of selling the homeland.
The number of deaths because of security chaos was 93 in 2004 and
176 in 2005, the deaths in Gaza was three times more than the West
Bank (al-Quds 5-12-2006)
Iqlimi is an adjective of iqlim. Iqlimi or qutri refer to a part of
a country that is usually larger than a district or province. In
Arabic political life and discourse, it signifies an area that was
artificially severed from the rest of the Arab Homeland and refers
to the fragmentation of the Arab Homeland into aqtar (plural of
qutor).
But this argument proves that the Petty-bourgeois did not represent
its own mode of production, but that of the capitalist
class.
The Green Line is a concept used in reference to the division
between the part of Palestine, which was occupied by the Zionists in
1948 and the part, which was occupied in 1967. The term "within the
Green Line" is used by Arabs who do not recognize the settler state
of "Israel" as a legitimate entity in Palestine when referring to
the land and people who fell under its control in 1948.
For instance, militants who left their professions, universities and
businesses to participate in the resistance, were unable to do
another jobs, after long years of being fighters.
The number of settlements 160 including East Jerusalem, and small
settlements are 101. Their total population 450,000 settlers,
190,000 of them in East Jerusalem, and the rest in the West Bank
which is a home for 2.4 million of Palestinians. (al-Quds,
21-11-2006). The wall of colonial expansion, separates 250, 000
Palestinians of Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, this in
addition to tens of thousands who are separated in small pockets in
many places in the West Bank. As this is the case, Oslo is an
agreement of stand-by for the settlers, not the local population. In
all of their arguments, the Israeli leaders repeated that
settlements are hard obstacles for peace, but we can't prevent
settlers from building homes for their children!
In the first and the most explosive few weeks of Intifada, while
people were shot dead in streets a group of liberal intellectuals
were meeting with Israeli intellectuals discussing peace! See Adel
Samara 2003, opcit.
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