The shooting dead of sixteen unarmed Palestinians in Gaza this week raises not only the issue of Israel’s disgraceful policy towards Gaza, but also the perennial question of the leadership of the Palestinian movement. We reprint here, an article from the Asian Marxist Review, on the plight of the Gaza population and the broken leadership of the Palestinian movement.
……………………………………….
by Lal Khan
Prime Minister Hamdallah, who heads the Palestinian Authority government based in Ramallah in the West Bank, was attacked by a bomb blast during his recent visit to Gaza, an area which is governed by Hamas. This incident once again demonstrates the convoluted and chronically disrupted nature of the struggle to end Israeli occupation and the socioeconomic liberation of ordinary Palestinians.
It is not just the brutal oppression of the Israeli state and its imperialist backers that are responsible for the grotesque plight of the Palestinians, but also the so–called international community, the United Nations and the rulers and despots that are in power in the Arab and Islamic states. The internecine conflicts between the two dominant Palestinian parties in the occupied territories are no less a hindrance to the liberation struggle. The bomb explosion on March 13th happened shortly after Hamdallah’s convoy passed through the Israeli-controlled Erez checkpoint, known to Palestinians as Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza.
Speaking to the reporters after the attack Hamdallah said, “It [the attack] does not represent patriotism. It is a cowardly act that does not represent our people, nor does it represent the people of Gaza.”
His party, Fatah, which governs the West Bank through the Palestinian Authority, called the incident a “terrorist attack” and blamed it on Hamas. “This attack is an attempt to kill all reconciliation efforts. It is a dangerous step aimed at spreading disorder and infighting among our people”, a Fatah statement said. It added,“Hamas has completely failed in providing security in Gaza, just as it has failed in providing a decent life for our people in the strip.”
Hamas and Fatah signed a ‘reconciliation’ agreement last October in Cairo, supposedly to end the decade-long division, with two parallel governments operating in Gaza and the West Bank. The agreement pledged to form a unity government, but it is proving to be yet another failed attempt at reconciliation.
Replying to these accusations Hamas spokesperson, Iyad al-Buzom, said, “This act of placing blame has political dimensions. Here in Gaza, we take all the security precautions to welcome all the convoys and delegations and particularly the prime minister as he entered Gaza. Several suspects were arrested a short while ago and an investigation to find out who was behind the explosion is under way.”Mustafa Ibrahim, a Gaza-based political analyst said,“Several sides are trying to benefit from this explosion…We will hear Fatah saying that some members of Hamas do not want reconciliation, and likewise, we will hear Hamas saying this could have been a fabricated attack by Fatah’s security services.”
The harsh reality is that both Fatah and Hamas represent only the Palestinian elite. With no significant Palestinian economy, the all social life and the economy are totally dependent on Israel. However, the ruling cliques are funded by different regional regimes and world powers that have cynically used the Palestinian issue as a pawn for their state interests, as they have done for decades. To some extent the conflict between Hamas and the Fatah is also the consequence of the sharp contradictions and the enmity between these financing regimes, as for example between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and Iran and Qatar, all of whom are the main benefactors of the Palestinian elites.
What the Palestinian struggle of the last seventy years has proved is that neither diplomatic agreements nor so-called ‘armed struggle’ – with urban guerrilla tactics and bombings – have succeeded in bringing Palestinian liberation any nearer. The acts of religiously-incited terror have damaged the Palestinian cause. In fact, it seems to be further away after all those seven decades. The opportunist diplomatic wheeler-dealing of Mahmood Abbas and other leaders of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank with the main capitalist powers has only ended up with giving the Israeli occupiers more space and time to impose their rule and accelerate land confiscation and settlements.
Without the covert and sometimes overt support of the Israeli state these Palestinian elites would not last. The Israeli state is happy to see Hamas hurling ineffective rockets into desolate Israeli territory, so they can use this as a pretext to increase their vicious oppression against Palestinians. Although these Palestinian elites engage in a barrage of vociferous condemnations of the Israeli occupation, the Israeli state is sometimes found to be in cahoots with them, policing Palestinian youth and masses, when their stirrings threaten to erupt into another intifada.
Successive US regimes have been the main backers of the Israeli state in perpetrating the occupation of Palestine. The UN has proved to be little more than a pawn of the world powers. There have been innumerable resolutions on Palestine passed by the UN General Assembly, yet these have failed to bring any respite to the national and class oppression of the Palestinian masses.
The Israeli occupation of Palestine is the longest occupation in modern history and tragically, there seems to be no end in sight. Today, 80 per cent of its population receives food through charities; half of the population is food-insecure and only 10 per cent have access to an adequate water supply. Gaza’s electricity crisis means that power was not available for up to 20 hours per day in 2017. Both the Israeli state and the Palestinian Authority have cut power to Gaza. Unemployment amongst Gaza’s youth exceeds 60 percent, and 25 percent of Palestinians currently live in absolute poverty. Besieged Gaza is dubbed as the largest open prison in the world.
The West bank has been fractured and fragmented by the monstrous ‘Occupation Wall’ being constructed by the Israeli state, further inhibiting the movement of Palestinians living in different towns and preventing them from meeting families and friends. According to a Human Rights Watch report, “Israel’s closure of the Gaza Strip, particularly restrictions on the movement of people and goods, continued to have severe consequences for the civilian population, separating families, restricting access to medical care and educational and economic opportunities, and perpetuating unemployment and poverty. Approximately 70 percent of Gaza’s 1.9 million people rely on humanitarian assistance. Travel through the Erez Crossing, Gaza’s passenger crossing to Israel, the West Bank, and the outside world, is limited to “exceptional medical patients” and of course “prominent businesspersons”.
The European imperialists’approach of cosmetic empathy towards the Palestinian is hypocritical. In reality they have tacitly supported the Zionist regime. The Russian and the Chinese elites’ policies are fundamentally determined by their own vested economic benefits and strategic aims to compete with Western imperialist geopolitical and strategic hegemonic interests. Their ‘support’ has brought no respite to the Palestinian masses either.
The attitude of the Arab regimes and the so-called Islamic countries is perhaps the most shameful. These rulers have used and abused the ‘Palestinian issue’ for domestic consumption. Their verbosity of condemnations and support of the Palestinian cause was always for domestic consumption, used to distract the masses in countries they rule and to crush dissent, manipulating the widespread sympathy for the Palestinians. Now their covert and overt relationships with the Israeli rulers are being laid bare.
The repression of the ordinary Palestinians by the Hamas Islamic fundamentalists in Gaza and by the corrupt leaders of Fatah in the West Bank is perfidious. Both of these Palestinian authorities restricted freedom of expression, torture and ill-treat detainees. The Fatah and Hamas regimes arrest and coerce activists who criticize their corruption and policies of duplicity.
The Palestinian youth and masses have proven to be resilient against all these odds and oppression. It was the mass movements of the two intifadas since the 1980s that shook the Israeli state and forced some concessions. But once these mass movements fizzled out, there was even greater economic and military oppression.
The Palestinian struggle had a much wider regional and international support when it was radically left wing and it was not tainted with religious bigotry and diplomatic wheeler-dealing with the great powers. Incongruously, in the decades of the 1970s and 80s it was the Israeli secret service, Mossad that nurtured Islamic fundamentalist outfits to undermine the radical groups in the Palestinian struggle. Fatah and Hamas dominate all politics in the occupied territories today. For the success of their struggle for national and social emancipation ordinary Palestinians can only rely on the support of the oppressed classes and peoples of the region and beyond. Ruling elites and states have and will only use them for their own vested interests.
Paradoxically, a greater and wider Palestinian uprising can catalyse class struggle in the whole region. Such movements can cut across religious sectarianism, ethnic and narrow nationalist divisions and unite the oppressed toiling masses into a revolutionary class struggle to end this system of occupations, repression and exploitation.
April 2, 2018
