'Arabs were driven into exile'

Henry Maitles

To understand the roots of the recurrent crises, intifadas and wars in the Middle East, and the reason why US presidents, western foreign ministers and the United Nations secretary general are so fearful of the rebellions inside Israel and the Occupied Territories, it is necessary to recognise the role of oil, imperialism and Zionism. The Middle East has been the central area of western concern since early last century because of the oil and who should control it. Today the region still has more than half of all the world's oil reserves. This makes the stakes very high--on 13 October, one week into the crisis, oil prices soared to a ten-year high and journalists warned it could lead to a world slump.

While the US now works on behalf of all western interests through compliant Arab ruling classes where possible, it is important to the west that there is a power in the area that can act militarily in western interests when necessary, whether through frightening reactionary Arab rulers or by invasion. In 1917 one British statesman said that supporting the Zionist enterprise meant that there would be a 'loyal little Ulster' in the area, keeping control and ensuring no challenges. In 1951 the influential Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz likened Israel to a 'watchdog' for western interests which could be 'relied upon to punish neighbouring states' that began to threaten its interests. Paradoxically, the west could not use Israel to 'punish' Iraq during Operation Desert Storm as this would have broken up the carefully nurtured Arab front against Saddam Hussein. It is no surprise that Israel has been, and remains, the major recipient of US aid, ensuring that Israel's massive expenditure on arms, which makes it the third or fourth most powerful military force in the world, can go ahead without the fabric of society falling apart.

Jewish state is no answer

Zionism is the political nationalist movement which insists Jews must have a state of their own because non-Jews are socially, innately and genetically anti-Semitic, and developed as a movement in direct competition with socialism for the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe. One Zionist leader, Leo Pinsker, claimed that 'Jew-baiting is not a quality of a particular race, but common to all mankind. Like a psychic affliction it is hereditary and as a disease has been incurable for 2,000 years.' The Zionist leader Theodore Herzl argued that there is an 'emptiness and futility in trying to combat anti-Semitism'. From this reasoning, Zionism negotiated with vicious anti-Semites, such as the Tsarist government, western imperialist powers and even the Nazis for a homeland for Jews. The continuation of this type of collaboration was shown in 1982 in Lebanon, where the Israeli invasion force (ironically under the command of Sharon, the present Likud leader) encouraged the fascist Lebanese Falange militia to massacre Palestinian women, children and old people in the Sabra and Shatilla camps.

Socialists have always argued that Jews had to oppose oppression wherever they were, and that a Jewish state was no answer to racism, and would be an oasis of reaction where Jews would threaten others and find themselves constantly threatened. Most politically active Jews joined or supported Russian social democratic movements, and Zionists were a very small minority among Jews until the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust--most Jews who emigrated from the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century headed west to the US and western Europe rather than to Palestine. The natural sympathy for Jewish suffering after the Second World War and the machinations of the western powers ensured that the Zionists, with a mixture of terrorism and diplomacy, were able to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. The very western powers which connived and passed laws to ensure that Jews were not allowed to escape from Nazi persecution in Eastern Europe to the West were now promoting a Jewish state.

Although the Zionists maintained that Palestine was 'a land without people for people without a land', there was the unfortunate fact that in 1947 there were 630,000 Jews in Palestine and 1,300,000 Palestinian Arabs. To ensure a Jewish state, Palestinian Arabs had to be driven into exile and villages destroyed--of the 475 Palestinian villages and towns in 1948, 385 were completely destroyed and reduced to rubble. Jews became a majority in the new state, armed to the teeth, and Palestinian Arabs were either refugees or third class citizens in their own country. To the outside world any criticism was answered by the Holocaust, and internally left wing Zionism became completely incorporated and ultra-nationalistic (although Israel's policies were so reactionary that they have given rise to courageous peace movements post-1982).

Zionist nationalism is opposed by Palestinian nationalism. Although incredibly brave, here is the main weakness--Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation have moved from a position of calling for a democratic secular Palestine to one of having accepted a statelet completely under Israeli economic and military domination. This is a poor compromise after years of defeat by Israel and treachery from the very Arab ruling class that the PLO looks toward. It is this that has led directly to the growth of the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas, the organisation leading the opposition to both Barak and Arafat. Yet the uprisings and the clear injustice of Israeli actions encourage the natural sympathy of the Arab working class in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other places, and thus bring onto the stage exactly the force that has the potential to change the whole history of the area.