People's Democracy

THE lifting of the 34-day long siege of Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah by the Israeli armed forces has been greeted with relief all over the world. But the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has left a trail of destruction; hundreds have been killed, the entire infrastructure in the West Bank destroyed and thousands uprooted from their homes. The Oslo Accord of 1993 has been finally buried under the debris of the Israeli occupation.

Since the second intifada, known as the Al Aqsa intifada, broke out in September 2000 after the infamous and provocative visit of Sharon to the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Israeli rulers set in motion a diabolical plan to reoccupy the West Bank and smash the vestiges of the Palestinian Authority. The Israelis embarked upon on a savage colonial war against the Palestinian people. The aim was to decimate the Palestinian leadership at all levels through "targetted killings", the word used for murder of Palestinian leaders and cadres; armed incursions into the West Bank towns and punitive measures against the people residing in the West Bank.

The Oslo peace accord was tilted against the Palestinian people. The Israeli intransigence in implementing even the limited and flawed provisions of the accord led to a situation where only 18 per cent of the West Bank was handed over to the Palestinian Authority. Jewish settlements continued to come up after 1993. There are 200,000 settlers at present, of which more than 75 per cent were settled after 1993. With 170 settlements dotted across the occupied territories connected by 300 miles of roads with the Israeli armed forces controlling all movements between the enclaves of the Palestinian Authority, the occupied territories began to resemble the "bantustans" under the racist South African regime.

The withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces from the three cities of the West Bank and the lifting of the siege of the Palestinian headquarters in Ramallah is itself a sham. Since then, Israeli forces have regularly made forays into the West Bank towns using their tanks, helicopter gunships and infantry. The recent one being the attack on Nablus on May 3. The occupation has led to three quarters of all production in the West Bank disrupted and three quarters of all the work force unemployed either temporarily or permanently.

In Ramallah, Israeli soldiers behaving like Nazi soldiers systematically destroyed the Palestinian Authority buildings, ministries, destroyed land records and computer hard disks containing details of schools and enrolment of children. They even stole money from the banks after blasting open the safes.

The Israeli armed forces sought to systematically destroy the basis for the existence of a Palestinian State. In Nablus city, in a 17-day occupation, the oldest mosque in the town was gutted. In Bethlehem, the Syrian Orthodox Church was bombed and the Hermitic caves dynamited. The effort was to eliminate all traces of Palestinian history.

The siege of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem known as the birthplace of Christ has exposed Israeli brutality and callousness as never before. Part of the church caught fire because of the relentless Israeli bombardment. Efforts to end the siege are on with an agreement to send the Palestinian militants targeted by Israel who had sought sanctuary in the church, to go abroad into exile.

The Jenin refugee camp which houses 13,000 people has become symbolic of the Israeli savagery. Four days of relentless bombardment by planes and tanks reduced a big part of the camp into rubble. 4,000 people have been rendered homeless and when the Israeli forces withdrew, 50 corpses were recovered by the paramedics which included those of women and children. Many more were buried under the rubble. When it became impossible for Israel to hide this brutality, the Security Council of the United Nations unanimously decided to send a fact-finding team to Jenin. Israel first agreed, then set new conditions and finally refused to allow such a team in. The UN Secretary General had to cancel the sending of the team.

Israel has been able to carry out this brutal military occupation with the approval and backing of the United States. If there is any "axis of evil" today, it is represented by Bush-Sharon partnership. Prime Minister Sharon's plan to eliminate the Palestinian Authority took full advantage of the "war against terrorism" declared by President Bush after September 11. Sharon put into action his long cherished desire to decimate the Palestinian movement by jumping into bandwagon of the "war against terrorism". Sharon declared he was sorry he had not liquidated Yasser Arafat in 1982 at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon when he was the defence minister of Israel. He followed this up by declaring Arafat to be the world's No. 1 terrorist. Using US supplied jets and helicopters, he began the campaign to finish off the Palestinian leadership. Before that, Israeli helicopters fired missiles into the office of Abu Ali Mustafa, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Ramallah in August 2001. The PFLP which is the second largest organisation in the PLO with a Marxist orientation declared that it would retaliate against the assassination of its leader. Rehavam Zeevi, an extreme right-wing member of Sharon's cabinet was shot dead soon after.

The killing of Abu Ali Mustafa was a naked act of State terrorism. The United States backed Israel in its punitive actions against the Rehavam Zeevi killing without it taking a single step against Israel for the assassination of the PFLP leader. The blockade of Arafat's office was lifted only after an agreement was reached on the status of those who were arrested by the Palestinian Authority for the killing of Zeevi. Four PFLP activists had been arrested in March and they were tried within the Palestinian Authority compound and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. The Israelis demanded handing over of these detained persons as a condition to lift the encirclement. Not only that, the Israelis demanded that the General Secretary of the PFLP who was elected after Ali Abu Mustafa's murder be handed over to them. The arrest of Ahmed Sadaat by the Palestinian Authority under Israeli and US pressure was condemned by the PFLP and all other Palestinian organisations. The siege was lifted and Arafat allowed to come out only when six Palestinians were put in custody in Jericho with US and British security personnel supervising their custody.

The siege of Arafat's headquarters was targeted both at eliminating him as a leader and also the leadership of the Palestinian movement. That Arafat would come out of the siege and become a rallying figure during the occupation, was not what the Israelis intended. But the damage to the Palestinian leadership has been severe.

The shameful act of handing over the general secretary of the PFLP to be held in jail under the supervision of US and British officers has outraged all sections of the Palestinian movement. The sixth person handed over is Fuad Shubaki, the chief financial officer of the Palestinian Authority. He is accused by the Israelis of arranging an armed shipment for the PLO from Iran which was intercepted by the Israeli forces. The United States had harshly condemned Arafat and the Palestinian leadership for this act. The US with brazen hypocrisy supplies the most sophisticated weapons to Israel to carry on the brutal war against Palestinians while any effort by the Palestinians to procure small arms for defence is branded an act of terrorism.

The fascistic efforts to erase the existence of the Palestinian people gave rise to the horrific phenomenon of the suicide bomber. Sharon's boast that Palestinian terror has been smashed by the recent military operations will prove to be hollow. Out of an embittered nation, scores of young men and increasingly young girls are ready to strike at Israel by blowing themselves up. Every time Bush and his cohorts denounce the suicide bombings and endorse Israeli counter terror, the more the younger generation of a dispossessed and embattled people will take to this desperate path. Sharon will never be able to crush such resistance, nor can Yasser Arafat be held accountable for something he cannot check or control.

It is a grim pointer to the plight Arafat finds himself in that he had to agree to the handing over of both Sadaat and Shubaki as per an arrangement brokered by the United States. Arafat and the sections who accepted the Oslo accord are now faced with a situation where Israel has maneouvered to put the entire Palestinian leadership under threat of annihilation. Relying on the United States has brought them to this unenviable state. When the one-sided Oslo agreement began to be implemented and the Palestinian Authority came into being, the United States took the responsibility for training and equipping the security apparatus of the Palestinian Authority. The CIA was instructed by President Clinton to undertake this job. The CIA Director, George Tenet was directly involved in the setting up of the Palestinian security system. Today, the key leaders of the security apparatus find themselves targeted by the Israeli forces with the Bush administration backing the Israelis. A senior leader of the Al Fatah, Marwan Barghouti was captured by the Israelis and is being interrogated and tortured in an Israeli prison. The Palestinian security chief, Jibril Rajoub, who was liaisoning with the CIA, was forced to surrender his security personnel to the Israelis. The Palestinian security forces had to pay the price for their inability to meet the Israeli demand to eliminate the Hamas and other militant groups.

The Israeli war on the Palestinian people is an integral part of the "global war against terrorism" declared by the United States. The last vestiges of the Palestinian Authority and the peace process have been blown away in this campaign.

The United States will continue to bolster Israel which has now, under Sharon, become the most dangerous state which respects no international laws or human rights. The United States which is now preparing to target Iraq and launch the second war in the campaign against terror by attacking Iraq, requires Israel's unstinted support for this venture. America's traditional allies amongst the Arab states, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan are being told that something will be provided for the Palestinians. Bush has set forth the "vision" of an independent state, if they all fall in line with the US campaign against terrorism directed against states like Iraq, Iran and other recalcitrant countries. The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah visited the United States last week. He warned the US that popular Arab feeling is mounting against Israel and unless the US acted quickly, it would affect US interests and endanger the pro-US regimes in the region. The brutal Israeli aggression and the heroic Palestinian resistance has brought hundreds of thousands of people on to the streets of the Arab capitals. The United States has been caught in the midst of this popular outrage which acts as a stumbling block to its immediate plans for an attack on Iraq. President Bush therefore talks of an independent state for Palestine as a sop to these Arab rulers while at the same time declaring Sharon to be a man of peace.

Ironically, the Israeli occupation has led to complications for Bush's immediate plans for the Middle East. The Bush administration cannot go beyond a certain limit in reining in the Israelis. The US Congress and Senate have recently adopted separate resolutions fully backing the Israeli government in its actions. The House of Representatives adopted a resolution describing Israel's policies as "a common struggle against terrorism". It was passed by 352 to 21. The Senate resolution was passed by a vote of 94 to 2.

The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has announced on May 2, the convening of an international peace conference on the Middle East which would take up the Palestinian issue along with Israel's problems with its neighbours like Syria and Lebanon. The US plans to co-sponsor such a conference with the United Nations, the European Union and Russia. Given the Israeli position and the American resolve to back them in their war against terrorism, it is difficult to conceive of anything positive emerging from this US initiative. Any revised version of the Oslo Accord which subjects the Palestinian territories to Israeli suzerainty will be met with resistance from the people. Arafat cannot repeat the same history on the ruins of the Palestinian Authority.

The chauvinist positions and military attacks by Sharon and his rightwing government find a positive response amongst the BJP and its RSS mentors in India. The war against the Palestinians is seen through the prism of the Hindutva war against Muslim minorities in India. Some of the barbarism which is taking place in Gujarat find a parallel in the Israeli atrocities in the West Bank. That is why the Vajpayee government has remained silent throughout except for a muted expression of concern for Yasser Arafat during the siege. There is no indignation or revulsion at the savagery of the Israeli onslaught. The nexus with the Israeli regime established by the BJP rulers needs to be exposed and thwarted.

The Palestinian resistance severely mauled by the Israeli offensive has survived and keeps fighting. Yasser Arafat has also survived and enhanced support. Despite the US and Israeli manouevres and the compromising role of sections of the Palestinian leadership, the Palestinian movement with the experience of decades of struggle has not succumbed and will be able to withstand the serious onslaught. That is why the Palestinian struggle for liberation is the centrepiece of the anti-imperialist struggle today and an obstacle to the ongoing American-sponsored war on terrorism. Its existence is a threat to the hegemonic plans of the US and its lackeys in the oil-rich West Asia.

Of all the major national liberation struggles in the 20th century in the post second world war period, except for the Palestinian struggle all the other struggles triumphed, one by one. Palestine remains the unfinished agenda of the 20th century. In India, the CPI(M) has strongly come out against the Israeli war of occupation. In the month of April, protests were held in many parts of the country including West Bengal, Kerala, Delhi and other places in support of the Palestinian people. But these efforts are not sufficient and need to be stepped up. It is important that the struggle of the Palestinian people be foremost in the anti-imperialist campaign and agenda of the Left and democratic forces in India.