TOUFIC: This is a complicated question to answer. Let me begin by saying that all the grievances of Palestinians that initially gave rise to the Intifada still remain today—and in fact are deeper and more apparent after more than two years of struggle. The Intifada first began as an expression of anger and frustration—and, it’s important to emphasize, was completely unplanned. It flowed from a disgust with the occupation, a lack of faith in negotiations and also had a degree of anger that we can’t deny towards the Palestinian Authority (PA). After the first two weeks of the Intifada when about 80 protesters had been killed in unarmed demonstrations, the Intifada had reached a point of no return.

Amongst Palestinians, the need for the Intifada and for resistance is now more crystallized in the Palestinian consciousness. If you read the newspaper, it becomes clear how daily life under occupation is unbearable. Yesterday, a 95-year-old Palestinian woman was shot and killed trying to go through a checkpoint to buy presents for her kids for the Eid festivities to signify the end of Ramadan. In Hebron, the Israeli army issued 100 orders for house demolitions, and 61 parcels of land are to be confiscated. Sharon announced that he’s going to intensify settlement building for the next three months. And the list goes on. The occupation completely cripples the Palestinians’ national ambitions, whether it’s for an end to occupation, for statehood, for being free of colonialism and settlement expansion or whether it’s just the basic desire to move freely or to determine one’s destiny.

TIKVA: What we are facing at present is a total war against the Palestinians in the 1967 Occupied Territories and the Palestinian citizens of Israel (although with different means). The aim is to eliminate the Palestinian national movement and to carry out a “sociocide”—the destruction of any possibility of the organization of social life including basic services and any meaningful economic activity.

The failure to settle the entire area in the West Bank—only 2 percent of it is populated by settlers although at least half has been declared “state lands”—has brought about the present stage characterized by the drive to control more and more cultivated lands; remove the Palestinian inhabitants from them by means of uprooting many thousands of olive trees and by settlers’ raiding cultivated lands; prevent the owners from picking the olives and robbing them. All this is under the protection of the occupation army.

The West Bank is already divided into three separate cantons, across which the free movement of people and goods is blocked. In November [2002], Israel began building a wall of separation that requires the confiscation of lands and pushing Palestinians into these three cantons. A wall has surrounded Gaza—the fourth canton—for many years, and its disconnection from the West Bank is already complete.

Moshe Ya’alon, the chief of staff for the Israel Defense Force, declared in an interview that the Palestinians are like a cancer because they aim to liquidate the “Jewish state.” Therefore, he added, “the day may come when it will be necessary to amputate organs”—meaning commit ethnic cleansing. We should take seriously the opinion of Ya’alon because, as Hebrew University professor Gabi Sheffer recently pointed out in Ha’aretz newspaper, the military and military-industrial complex have for a long time been the real decision makers of Israeli policy, both domestic and foreign, though they operate behind a thin veneer of formal democracy.

TOUFIC: One of the other reasons that the Intifada broke out is that Palestinians also lost faith completely in the Oslo process. Palestinians understood that the negotiations process was being used to squeeze more and more concessions from the Palestinians while providing a cover for the occupation and settlement expansion. Furthermore, distrust had emerged between the PA and the Palestinian people and the former’s ability to represent and protect Palestinian national rights.

This very same distrust still exists today. Palestinian society is still witness to PA representatives, speaking in the name of the Palestinian people, saying things that flagrantly violate their rights or are contradictory to Palestinian interests. Minister of Information Yasser Abed Raboo made a statement in Belgium in November saying that the Palestinians don’t demand the right of return. Now, that’s the basis on which the entire Palestinian national movement was originally built! The Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964, before the ’67 occupation, as a movement to demand the right of return for Palestinians who were driven from their land and homes by the Zionist militias during the 1948 war.

Then you also have people like top PA negotiator Mahmoud Abbass (better known as Abu Mazen) who are overtly courting the West. He recently made statements to Israeli papers saying that the Intifada is a complete failure, a drastic and terrible mistake, we should never have engaged in it and that negotiations are the only way to achieve Palestinian rights. The great bulk of Palestinians obviously feel quite differently, especially after two years of sacrificing so much through the Intifada.

I’m not saying that these two elements—anger at the occupation and distrust of the PA—are equivalent in bringing about the Intifada. The main responsibility for the emergence of the Intifada is obviously the Israeli occupation. At the same time however, you can’t deny the widespread sentiment that the PA had veered too far from pursuing the national aspirations of the Palestinian people and that people had lost faith in its methods of negotiating endlessly and “seeing what comes from it.”

To date, around 2,000 Palestinians have been killed, and well over 20,000 people have been injured, to say nothing of Israel’s continuing confiscations of land and the intolerability of daily life in the Occupied Territories. The West Bank has been under almost constant curfews since April 2002. This has devastated all elements of Palestinian daily life—from employment, to school, to availability of health care. About 70 percent of Palestinians are now living on less than $2 per day. Malnutrition among children under five is about 35 percent. In Gaza, 84 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

The experience of the past two years has put us in a very dangerous situation, where people are losing a lot and are threatened with losing even more—especially if a war breaks out against Iraq. Yet the people remain overwhelmingly behind the Intifada for several reasons. First off, the Intifada remains the popular expression of the Palestinian desire to shake off the occupation and achieve Palestinian national rights in a local and international setting that offers no alternatives to compel or force Israel to comply with United Nations resolutions to end the occupation and allow for the refugees to return. Second, the Intifada is used by Palestinian popular forces to delegitimize the largely national, bourgeois elements within the PA and Palestinian society that were willing to accede various national rights, and in fact benefited—unlike the rest of Palestinian society—from the Oslo process. The Intifada has been used as a means to give legitimacy back to the people who represent the national question in the first place.

Yet, given the experience of the past two years, it is also apparent that the Intifada faces many pitfalls and has made many errors. It needs to be better organized, it needs to determine its tactics and strategies, it needs to be able to provide alternatives for the suffering population and it needs to develop and sharpen its discourse to the world, to the Israelis and even to the Palestinian public. All these elements are in disarray and are in need of being worked out. Yet this difficult and essential process, which in my opinion will determine the success or failure of the Intifada, is taking place within an extremely complicated social, political, economic, security and international context that Palestinian society is not immune to. We face terrible internal difficulties in building a movement—the Israeli army tanks are in every city and on every road hunting down anyone with a political background; people are impoverished and have an incredible economic dependency upon the PA—especially in places like Gaza, where the 135,000 people who work for the PA make it the largest single employer in the ’67 Occupied Territories, and especially in times where there are no jobs.

Israel understood from the very beginning that it was not facing an organized Palestinian uprising, but uncoordinated protests of anger and frustration. Furthermore, the high human costs the Palestinians were suffering eventually resulted in the militarization of the Intifada. This further allowed Israel to paint itself as the victim, which has had enormous political advantages ever since, both internationally and within Israeli society.

And because the Palestinians gained nothing during negotiations, Fatah [Yasser Arafat’s political faction within the PLO] was losing credibility—they couldn’t defend themselves to other political parties. Oslo turned the Fatah cadre into the policemen of the neocolonialist regime, the police of the bantustans. But Fatah became unwilling to do this anymore. The PA realized that anger at the PA itself was beginning to grow. There had been various different kinds of rising social movements within the Palestinian territories against the PA that were beginning to bubble and brew. So in a sense, the PA didn’t stop the militarization of the Intifada which the Israelis had instigated in order to deflect or allow anger to be directed at Israel and not at the PA.

I remember the first days of the Intifada and its early experiments in militarization. It wasn’t organized groups doing military operations. Young men would come out in the streets and just shoot into the air, or shoot from neighborhoods at settlements that were well fortified and they could never hit anything. There was no military experience or leadership directing it. There wasn’t organized guerrilla activity, it was not centralized, there was no clear methodology or clear goals that were being articulated or pursued.

TIKVA: The attack on Arafat and the PA does not indicate an Israeli intention to go back to direct military rule of the Occupied Territories. Despite the declaration of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that the Oslo process is dead, Israel clings to the essence of this agreement: Oslo aimed to establish “self-rule” in the Occupied Territories by a collaborationist leadership that would eliminate any Palestinian opposition and keep the population subdued. The prevailing belief that “Oslo has failed” is wrong. If we look at the goals of Oslo, we get a different picture. The preparation of the entire area of Palestine for the establishment of a “canton state” and the prevention of any possibility for a viable Palestinian state have actually been completed.

The resistance of the Palestinian people in the ‘67 Occupied Territories and among the Palestinian citizens in Israel—the ‘48 Palestinians—was unexpected. The heroic Intifada constitutes a heavy stumbling block to the smooth establishment of a “self-rule” bantustan.

Another refuted assumption of Oslo is the belief that the “Israelization” process of the ‘48 Palestinians is complete and that their separation from the rest of the Palestinians by the ‘48 war and the Nakba¹ has resulted in them losing their national identity. It has been assumed that the ‘48 Palestinians make up an atomized, disintegrated community that accepts its secondary citizenship and the policies of all Israeli governments—left and right—who were and are committed to the aims of the Jewish state.

However, alongside the deepening of national identification and solidarity with the uprising of their brothers and sisters in the Occupied Territories, we are witness to the ever-spreading demand for collective rights (initiated by the Tajamu’ Movement-Balad), particularly among the younger generation which is no longer content to demand individual citizen rights. The rejection of the demand for individual rights and its replacement with the demand to recognize the Palestinians in Israel as a national minority is justly perceived by the Israeli establishment as a challenge to the Jewish Zionist state and—although not admitted by it—a challenge to the undemocratic, discriminatory aspects which are structurally part of it. The concern which this demand has raised throughout Israeli society—right, center and left—has driven government-initiated legislation and policies aimed at delegitimating the genuine national leaders of Palestinian society and destroying the political and social self-organization within it. And there have been attempts to redefine Palestinian citizenship in ways that further empty it of its already limited political contents. At the same time, the continued process of settling the land (“Judaization” of the Galilee and Triangle) has escalated—by means of theft of what remained of Palestinian lands and by means of building Jewish settlements between Palestinian populated areas in order to disconnect them from each other and from the Palestinian communities in the West Bank.

Plans to commit mass ethnic cleansing as part of a decisive solution to the Palestinian issue—which even “new historian” Benny Morris endorsed in a recent article in the British Guardian—fits in well with the “new Middle East” to be established in the wake of a U.S. war against Iraq. The coming U.S. attack had been enthusiastically welcomed by the Likud-Labor unity government before it dissolved and has been accepted with silence by the leftmost fringe of the Zionist political spectrum, though many of the latter do not openly support the scheme to transfer Palestinians.

COULD YOU characterize the orientation of the PA and Fatah as well as Hamas towards the Intifada? Do they want to wrap it up or harness and direct it?

TOUFIC: First the PA. The PA is not a homogenous entity so it cannot be judged as such. Overall, however, its position can be summarized as supporting withdrawal, ensuring its own survival, reiterating its stated objectives of “ending the cycle of violence” and “returning to negotiations” to accomplish a negotiated settlement. Officially, the PA neither directly supports nor impedes the Intifada, but rather takes a backseat position to see what arises from it, and how this can be used.

Beneath this official veneer, there is a spectrum of individuals ranging from those who are against the Intifada entirely because they perceive it as a mistake—for example, Abu Mazen—to those who have engaged in Intifada activism, in an official or unofficial capacity, which is sometimes difficult to disentangle. These people include Marwan Barghouti [leader of tanzim Intifada activists, on trial in Israel on numerous “terrorist” charges] or Toufic Tirawi, the head of General Intelligence in the West Bank. It is, however, important to mention that those in the latter category represent a minority within the PA, and the great majority of sacrifices are taken up by people with no association with the PA whatsoever. If anything, the PA has been criticized by Palestinian society and political factions—including Fatah—for not doing anything to help the Intifada while undermining the Intifada’s public discourse (for instance, when it condemns resistance operations).

On top of this, of course, is the architect of this strategy—Arafat—who is motivated by a deep determination not to lose his grip on power, while playing on the internal contradictions which he oversees. He’s always waiting to see what comes his way. That’s why he’s a survivor; in fact, he’s only thinking about surviving and not thinking about leading. Israel understands this and tactically prefers this to someone driven by ideological commitments, a political program or coming up with a strategic approach to resistance. At the same time, he’s the kind of person who will make sure that no one else will rise up to overtake him—particularly someone or some movement of the aforementioned type—which is also why Israel prefers him. Much of his power derives from his financial supremacy, however not all of it. His historical role, his unifying symbolic appeal as well as his very willingness to allow the existence of contradictory strategies enables Arafat to remain the better of poor options—or of no options.

Of course, an essential pivot of Arafat’s power rests in Fatah. Fatah itself has undergone many changes during the Intifada and can hardly be said to represent one political line or ideology. The middle- and lower-range cadre of Fatah never felt comfortable with the Oslo agreements and to some degree felt elbowed out by the way the Tunisian Fatah² came in. These cadre, who represent the majority in the movement, played an essential role in enabling the Intifada to continue, as they mutinied against the role they were set to play as “bantustan cops,” policing anti-Oslo dissent, and joined the Palestinian masses in the Intifada protests, and then later as resistance fighters. As the Intifada continues, elements of them have radicalized further, forming resistance alliances with other parties, irrespective of political ideology. Some of them have even sought to establish financial lines independent of the PA and Arafat, so as not to be bound in any way by PA-controlled directives.

Three main groupings of people (not parties) are participating in the Intifada. First, there are the refugees, who throughout the Oslo process had none of their issues addressed. Furthermore, their socioeconomic conditions have worsened drastically because of the closure policies instituted after Oslo, cutting them off from their jobs in Israel. Their residency situation has deteriorated because it’s getting more and more crowded within these refugee camps. Nothing has improved for the refugees—least of all the national question of the right of return.

The second grouping is the villagers. These are the people who have experienced the destruction of their agricultural communities. During the last 20 years, a process of urbanization has taken place whereby living and working on the land has become less and less viable. Israel is taking the land, preventing people from digging wells, building settlements, preventing people from harvesting their crops, fanatical settlers are harassing people on a daily basis, preventing agricultural produce from getting to market, etc.

Third, there are the city poor. We really don’t have too many cities, but if you walk around the neighborhoods in Gaza City, it’s obvious that the poverty is crushing entire generations. There is no work. Kids leave school early, marry early, and life offers them little. You have the same phenomenon in cities like Ramallah and Nablus and Bethlehem where there are these pockets of oppressed and marginalized people.

I don’t really think there are so many ideological differences between anybody at this stage—not because in principle ideological differences don’t exist between them, but rather because ideological principles were never truly implemented or developed into social, developmental and economic programs by the political parties. This has resulted in an ideological retreat to the basic demands of the national political center, an over-reliance upon military struggle and a failure to think in alternative ways (other than military) to achieve national goals.

Of course, this isn’t the fault of those involved in the Intifada. They’ve been very much betrayed by all the structures and institutions that were supposed to protect them or lead them. Hamas, though it has a political platform, is not trusted because most Palestinians don’t want an Islamic state, and they are aware of the dangers of the Islamicization of the national movement that prided itself throughout history as being a secular, national movement. At the same time, however, it has developed some popularity because of its oppositional stance to the PA during Oslo.

The left is suffering from a combination of factors. A lot of people went into NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and moved away from the popular movement and became involved in making sure that their NGOs continued receiving funding. Through their actions during the Oslo years, they showed that they weren’t interested in serving the daily needs of the Palestinian people. They allowed the direction of their NGOs—beneath the banner of professionalism—to be tailored by the aid agencies which gave them money. This was instead of working in the labyrinth of the national political and economic situation that existed under Oslo. Throughout the course of the Intifada, it is not an exaggeration to say that there is an NGO stream that feeds off of the fundraising opportunities that the Intifada offers in order to get money for, say, more mental health projects.

But the weakness of the left actually runs deeper, I believe, to the poverty of their ideological understanding of what it means to be left. The Palestine Peoples Party, for example (the former Palestinian Communist Party), actively supported the imperialist-sponsored Oslo agreements, becoming a political ally of the PA. Today, they are one of the main adherents of neoliberal philosophy in Palestine, actively funding themselves through USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] grants. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which in its literature claims to be Marxist-Leninist and has strong strains of romantic pan-Arabism, has failed to develop much of an alternative platform to counteract the imperial agenda, or even the PA’s brutal neoliberal economic program, or to link the Palestinian movement to the anti-globalization and anti-imperialist struggle. Much of the left considers itself left by virtue of the fact that they’re not Islamists and that they’re not ideologically empty like Fatah. But that’s not the same as being a left political party with a program that works in grassroots communities and organizations.

If there’s a party that’s going to benefit politically from this period, it’s the Islamic Jihad. It’s not because of their Islamic ideology at all. In fact, they’re different from Hamas in the sense that they do not come from a Muslim Brotherhood background. Rather, they assume a proto-revolutionary approach, which the current age is characterized by, despite its obvious downfalls.³

WHAT IMPACT will a U.S. assault on Iraq have on the situation facing the Palestinian struggle?

TOUFIC: First of all, there’s a great danger. Israel’s “use” of the Intifada to accomplish some of its own objectives through the escalation of the Intifada—including the liquidation and fragmentation of the Palestinian national movement and the Palestinian people through closures, the destruction of the PA and so on—is something that Palestinians are aware of. The internalization of this fact is pushing resistance forces to think in different ways. At present, this is moving in the direction of organizing a serious underground resistance network that spans all factions.

There has been a general internalization of the dangers posed by a U.S.-led war against Iraq, including the danger of transfer.⁴ Much discussion concerning this matter is seen in Palestinian papers, intellectual circles and on Arabic satellite stations. But there is a double danger of the talks that have so far taken place: first, discussion of transfer has been “normalized” to the extent that anything that Israel does that is less than taking three million Palestinians and chucking them over the border could be considered acceptable.

Secondly, discussion of a “forthcoming transfer” obfuscates the forms of localized transfer that are already taking place throughout the West Bank and Gaza. In the Rafah refugee camp, you have more than 400 homes completely destroyed. Think about how many people that affects. In the village of Yanoun near Nablus, there are people who have suffered daily harassment for the past five years from settlers who beat them up in front of their families inside their houses, burned their generator, poisoned their water. Two months ago, everyone in the village left. That’s also a form of transfer.

It is this kind of transfer that will be accelerated under the smoke and dust and rubble of war. We’ll wake up the day after and see that villages on the “wrong side” of the “separation wall” now being constructed will no longer exist. And we’ll see 500 meters from the Egyptian border—which right now comprises the entire Rafah camp—completely cleared. When I talk about the Gazification of the West Bank, I mean it in the sense that Gaza is an experiment where the Israelis have been successful at gradually herding more and more people into a smaller and smaller space. Israel controls all the roads, all the borders, all the access points. And that’s why the resistance campaign in Gaza is so difficult. It’s without a doubt the vanguard of scientifically refined human control. And this will most likely be consolidated further if an attack against Iraq begins, both within Gaza and especially in the West Bank. We already scarcely hear of the nightly raids into Khan Younis and Rafah, where the Israeli army invades with 50 tanks and stays for eight or nine hours, blowing up houses, shooting incredible amounts of ammunition, and terrorizing the whole population. This is able to take place because there is still a terrible lack of press coverage, especially of the horrors taking place in these peripheral communities.

The last place where a transfer is going to happen is in the middle of Ramallah where there are plenty of Palestinian-Americans and foreigners and journalists and NGOs. They’re not going to come in and start pointing guns at people and kicking them around and making them place their hands on their heads and busing everyone out.

If there are conflagrations on the northern border and the issue becomes a more regional conflict, there are even greater dangers. Although my assessment is that this likely won’t happen. But that’s not to say that the Israelis won’t do anything provocative. They could well do something—like attack Lebanon or Syria or Iran.

HOW WILL Israel try to justify transfer politically? Has the process already begun?

TOUFIC: It’s not so difficult, and it’s clear that it’s already underway. There’s the discourse of the postñSeptember 11 “war against terrorism”—this is the overarching ideological framework. Then, any connection between Iraq and Palestine automatically vilifies the Palestinians. If there’s a war against Saddam, Israel will say that Saddam Hussein is giving money to the suicide bombers, and that we have our own war against terror with the Palestinians. Sharon already called the PA “the Taliban” and Arafat “our bin Laden.” Israel is also increasingly talking about how al-Qaeda is attempting to carry out operations inside Israel, attacking Israel just like the Palestinians are “attacking Israel.” They rely upon a false logic and guilt by association. Israel has also embarked on a whispering campaign that al-Qaeda has cells in the Occupied Territories.

But all these are only the fancy forms of justification. When war breaks out with Iraq, you can have no doubt that the Palestinian people are going to be against this war. They’re going to be against this imperial war for oil and what it will do to the Iraqi people—on top of all that they’ve already suffered. You’re going to have Palestinians in the streets waving Iraqi flags—just as there will be throughout the Arab world. The simple fact that Palestinians will be antiwar could be justification enough. There’s already a huge vilification campaign against Iraq and Saddam Hussein underway in the West, and all they need is a picture of a Palestinian in the street holding up a Saddam Hussein poster and they’ll have all the justification they need when the tape is shown on CNN. This is the nature of modern media and how it’s used against the Palestinians. In the absence of a convincing Palestinian media strategy, everything becomes possible.

WHAT ABOUT the re-emergence of the debate in Between the Lines and elsewhere about the one-state versus two-state solution to the Palestinian national question? What’s driving this debate, and what are the contours of it?

TOUFIC: At this point, it’s clear that the viability of the two-state solution—irrespective of the ideological and national questions and whether it fulfills or conflicts with Palestinian rights—is almost nil. This is due to Israel’s settlement policy and control of the land, air and sea which has been described as akin to a “matrix of control,” which, unless completely dismantled, will make a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip unviable.

We at Between the Lines feel a responsibility to address these questions. We don’t see ourselves as virtual negotiators, but at least we try to push forward the understanding that calling for a secular democratic state is the only genuine progressive solution that addresses all the problems of the conflict (in all their imperial, capitalist, colonialist, apartheid, racist, revisionist colors) and at the same time is just as likely or unlikely as any other solution.

It is also time we thought more seriously about it given the way the Zionist movement has artificially divided the problem into three parts—the 1967 Occupied Territories, the 1948 Palestinians (who are citizens of Israel), and the refugees of the diaspora.

The one-state solution—the call for a secular, democratic state in all of Palestine—is a holistic solution that is a framework of thought that the Palestinian movement has lacked since it was dropped from the PLO political platform as early as 1974 in favor of what was termed a more “pragmatic” approach—the concept of “liberation in stages” and accepting a two-state solution. This fit with the national bourgeois interests within Fatah, which was funded by the pro-American regimes of the Gulf states that wanted the Palestinian issue neutralized because of the instability it brought to their own countries. But we can see where that approach has gotten us today—neither liberation in a geopolitical sense, nor liberation in the progressive humanistic sense.

The “pragmatic,” see-what-you-can-get kind of approach is a world apart from a platform that calls for an end to colonial oppression, an end to religio-ethnocentrism, an end to racism and occupation while fighting for liberation, human empowerment, justice and equality between peoples of different religions, nationalities and cultures. This was the great error of the Palestinian national movement when it called for accepting the two-state solution: it gave up talking in these terms. Yet without it, we are doomed to the equation of the balance of forces (in Israel’s favor), unable to muster international support or allies within the Israeli polity.

TIKVA: The facts on the ground have ended any prospects for a minimally viable Palestinian state. Therefore, our strategy should be built on recognizing the fact that calling for the two-state solution is not realistic any more and thus an impediment to the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and for democratization of the Jewish Zionist state. Continuing with this empty slogan only helps what is called the “peace camp”—in Israel and abroad—to appear “just” and “progressive” in calling for dividing Palestine into two equal states for the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples. This implies that these are two peoples who somehow have the same rights to this land. This slogan also misleads the masses into thinking that a Palestinian state within the framework of the two-state solution will end the conflict. Inside Israel, adherence to the two-state solution and the Oslo process— which prevails among the majority of the members of the peace camp, such as Gush Shalom’s leader Uri Avneri—also enables them to continue with the hypocrisy that has always characterized the Zionist labor movement. They pretend that there’s no contradiction between a Jewish state and a democratic state. The latter implies a secular, non-ethnic definition of citizenship and universalistic values and social institutions to safeguard it—which Israel lacks.

However, I don’t mean to say that a secular democratic state in all of Palestine is more realistic than the two-state solution, although I believe that it is the most just solution and the only one that can end the conflict. What I mean to emphasize is that an apartheid regime and ethnic cleansing are already emerging in historic Palestine and will be consolidated with the help of the U.S. and even Europe, who will willingly be misled by the farce of an “independent Palestinian state.” The recognition of this should guide our re-thinking about the nature of the struggle and about the political forces which can lead it.

It is a long-term struggle, and its final victory is largely dependent on the radical transformation of the Jewish Zionist state and the Arab states—and their disconnection from imperialism. But this should not discourage us to launch this battle, which is part of the ongoing worldwide battle against colonialism, imperialism and capitalist globalization.

But this raises a question. Are there any real progressive forces within present Jewish society? The concepts of “left” and “right” are totally distorted in the Israeli political scene because of the central role of the Labor Zionist movement in building Israeli capitalism from the beginning and strengthening it in the years prior to Oslo. The Labor Party was the guiding force in the transition to neoliberal capitalism, which started in the midñ1980s. Its social base has traditionally been wealthier and middle-class Ashkenazi Jews, whereas the rival Likud Party, which is to the right of the Labor Party, began to win allegiance from the poorer layers of Mizrahim⁵ in the 1970s. These elements later left and supported Shas [the main religious party of Mizhari Jews]. Today, there is very little difference between the economic policies of Labor (including the most left in the Zionist political spectrum, Meretz) and Likud—both of which have wholeheartedly embraced neoliberalism.

On the political level, there’s also a remarkable similarity between Labor and Likud with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict—both in terms of supporting the war against terror in the Occupied Territories and in terms of the essence of the “solution.” Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, until recently the chair of the Labor Party and minister of defense in Sharon’s unity government, has committed a horrific number of war crimes and together with the other Labor ministers—especially [Shimon] Peres, the architect of Oslo—conferred legitimacy on Sharon’s policies. Amram Mitzna—the newly elected chair of the Labor Party and considered the most dovish of the three who ran for the post—is supported by a number of the biggest capitalists in Israel and his “peace plan” represents their interests.

Thus, the capitalist class—made up of the bourgeoisie, the higher echelons of the government bureaucracy and the high-tech and intellectual elites—is behind the forces which strive for peace. This is the same peace that was offered by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and rejected by Palestinian negotiators—and justly so—at Camp David [in 2000].

The Mizrahim’s commitment to Zionism is the stumbling block to building a struggle against its own cultural and racist oppression by the dominant Ashkenazi Jews. Like the rest of Israeli society, they share allegiance to Zionism which is the center of the Jewish state.

There’s a semi-fascist political culture in which the notion of security—which increasingly overlaps with the notion of a “Jewish numerical majority”—contains an ever more explicit disdain for the values of human rights. The most recent public expression of this by the military and the religious establishment was the interview with the Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon. But he could not have said this without the substantive retreat from an absolute commitment to human rights among the secular, legal and intellectual elites. One example of this trend is Ruth Gavison, professor of law at Hebrew University and former chair of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. “Manning checkpoints, clamping down closures and even destroying houses from which shooting at soldiers takes place are legitimate military steps,” said Gavison in Yediot Ahronot on August 28. “Also, the killing of those who were about to commit attacks on Israelis or of those who send them [to these operations] are not acts over which the black flag [of illegitimacy] is waving.”

Thus while there is no class or strata among Jews in Israel which can lead the democratic struggle, the Palestinians inside Israel are launching a daily struggle which hits the core of the Jewish state.

The Palestinians inside Israel should lead the local anti-Zionist, democratic struggle against the Jewish state. They are oppressed nationally and not only in class terms, which drives the Palestinian middle class to be actively involved in the struggle. Indeed, the different situations facing the Palestinian people on both sides of the Green Line⁶ dictates at present different means and different immediate assignments for each front. However, it’s time for the Palestinian national movement to do away with one of the central aspects of the internalization of the defeat—the separation of the Palestinian people into the ’48 and ’67 groups forced on them by Zionism. The importance of the democratic front opened by the ’48 struggle against the nature of the Jewish state should be recognized as an integral and significant part of a new strategy that contributes to the long-term joint goals of both progressive Palestinians and Israelis as well as the masses throughout the entire Middle East.

NOTES

2 Fatah leaders around Arafat who returned to the 1967 Occupied Territories from exile in Tunis to implement the Oslo Accords.

3 The main Islamist political organizations operating in the 1967 Occupied Territories are Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, started as the more political arm of the moderate Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, which historically engaged in charity and religious work, launched Hamas in 1987 as a response to the Intifada and the Islamic militants in Islamic Jihad.

4 Transfer—the term commonly used in Israel to describe the mass removal of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.

5 Mizrahim—Jews of Middle Eastern origin, as opposed to Ashkenazi Jews, who are from Europe.

6 Green Line—the line dividing Israel proper and the West Bank territories.