In their grovelling attempt to curry favour with the USA and Europe, the Palestinian negotiators have secretly tabled offers that have included virtual full Israeli control of East Jerusalem, the abandonment of the right of return of Palestinian refugees and the acceptance of most Jewish settlements – all of which are publicly opposed by these same Palestinian ‘leaders’.

Writing in The Independent, Robert Fisk has described the documents as being “as damning as the Balfour Declaration.”

“The Palestinian ‘Authority’”, he says,  “– one has to put this word in quotation marks – was prepared, and is prepared to give up the "right of return" of perhaps seven million refugees to what is now Israel for a "state" that may be only 10 per cent (at most) of British mandate Palestine.” (Jan 26).

The so-called Palestinian Papers, released to the Arabic news network Al Jazeera and copied to the The Guardian in the UK, show how the Palestinian representatives offered the most humiliating concessions to Israel time after time, yet without the Israel or the USA making the slightest concession in return.

Settlements

Since the capture of the West Bank in 1967, Israel has continued to build settlements, so much so that in the last twenty years the number of Israelis living in settlements has risen from a quarter to half a million. Most of these are on land confiscated from Palestinian owners as a result of the bulldozing of Arab houses, villages, orchards and farms. For two generations Israel has been creating ‘facts on the ground’, a calculated policy aimed at making a settlement of Palestinian national aspirations increasingly unlikely.

The West Bank may be nominally run by the Palestinian Authority (PA) but it is effectively still controlled by Israel. It is dotted with hundreds of Israeli settlements from large new- towns to small ‘illegal’ outposts, tolerated and protected by the Israeli military. The region is criss-crossed with new roads for use by the settlers only. Scores of Israeli military road blocks, taken down, moved or re-established at will, preventing the free movement of Palestinians and Palestinian farm produce. 

The Palestinian Authority is really a complete fiction. It only has the “authority” to administer local government functions in the large population centres like Ramallah, Hebron, Jenin and Nablus, cities which the Israelis are reluctant and probably unable to control themselves. The effective land area controlled by the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank is less than a quarter of the total land area.

The only reason the PA is tolerated at all by the representatives of Israel is because it is a means of keeping the radicalism of the Palestinian people in check. In the last elections to the Palestinian assembly, in January 2006, Fatah, the main component of the PLO, was trounced, winning only 45 out of 120 seats, against 75 won by Hamas. As Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent, at the time, “The Palestinians didn’t vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic – which is how Hamas’s bloody victory will be represented – but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas’s Fatah and the rotten nature of the Palestinian Authority.”

Mahmoud Abbas, is the Palestinian leader, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word ‘occupation’”. He is the ‘moderate’ leader trusted by the US and the EU leaders because he “wears and tie and goes to the White House”.

Immediately after the election, with the connivance of Fatah, Israel, the USA, Britain and other European capitalist states declared Hamas to be a ‘terrorist’ organisation and following a serious of swinging boycotts and sanctions, its control was effectively limited to Gaza. The PA has actively suppressed Palestinian opponents of Fatah in the West Bank are subjected to the same restrictions and oppression as they would be if they attempted open political agitation in Israel itself. 

Even before the elections that rejected Fatah so decisively, it was openly acknowledged that the British government has played a leading role in the building up of the police apparatus of the Authority, but the Palestinian Papers now reveal for the first time the intimate connections between the security machinery of the PA, Israel and Britain. There are details of a plan drawn up by the British MI6 in 2004 and passed over to the PA security chief. This plan was largely implemented and included the internment of oppositionists, the closure of radio stations and a tighter control of imams and mosques in the PA-controlled areas. 

The British plan recommended “the detention of key middle-ranking officers” of Hamas and other opposition groups and added, “We could also explore the temporary internment of leading Hamas and PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) figures, making sure they were well-treated, with EU funding.”

This is all the more disgraceful, given the fact that these policies were conducted under a “Labour” government whose foreign minister David Milliband, almost became the new leader of the party after the election. In drawing up a balance-sheet of the failures of the Labour government, Labour Party members need to ask of David Milliband and his supporters in the party how these policies were ever carried through in the first place. 

Meetings

Meetings between representative of the Israel and the PA are even recorded as discussing the assassination of Palestinian leaders. In 2005 a meeting was held between Israel’s then defence minister Shaul Mofaz and the PA’s interior minister, Nasser Youssef. Referring to Hassan al-Madhoun, a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade (which is linked to Fatah), Mofez asked, “We know his address…why don’t you kill him?” Rather than express outrage at the suggestion, Youssef claimed the PA didn’t have the capacity to do it. “…our capabilities are limited…” Months later, the Israelis assassinated al-Madhoun.

According to the papers, the PLO’s chief spokesman in the talks told a US official in 2009 that “we have had to kill Palestinians to establish one authority, one gun and the rule of law…we have even killed our own people to maintain order and the rule of law.” The response of US security chiefs to the Palestinian security forces is understandable. “The (Palestinian) intelligence guys are good,” they reported. “The Israelis like them.”

On the West Bank, today, therefore, it is the losers of the election who effectively control the Palestinian Authority and the so-called negotiations. Of course the representatives of capitalism wouldn’t have it any other way. According to the leaked documents, the Obama administration, following the previous policy of Bush, has made it clear that it “will not allow any change of Palestinian leadership in the West Bank.”

This is hardly surprising, since the current PLO leadership of Mahmoud Abbas is closely tied to the leaders of capitalism. To the ordinary Palestinian workers the Palestinian leadership is characterised by the curtailment of democratic rights, the outright suppression of political opponents and above all by corruption.

One of the leaders of the negotiations, Ahmed Qureia, is a banker and the PA minister of economy, trade and industry. He was the subject of a recent controversy when it was reported that his family’s company had imported cement from Egypt…for the construction of the Israeli so-called ‘security’ wall that cut across so much Palestinian land.

Israeli negotiators have apparently floated the idea of some Arab villages within the Israeli border being ‘exchanged’ so that they would become a part of the Palestinian Authority. Even the Palestinian negotiators understood that this would not be popular…”Absolutely not,” they replied, “All Arabs in Israel will be against us.”

Questions

The question that needs to be asked is why would Israeli Arabs be so violently opposed to being transferred to the government of the Palestinian Authority? The answer is a crushing indictment of the leadership of Fatah and the PLO in the West Bank – because despite the limitations on their rights within Israel itself, the 1.3 million Israeli Arabs still havegreater democratic freedoms than they would have under the Palestinian Authority. 

As bad as the situation is for Palestinians in the West Bank, it is a hundred times worse in Gaza. The Gaza Strip is like a huge prison, only 4 miles by 18 miles, restricted on all sides by the military of Egypt and Israel. The area was bombed to rubble in 2008 and is everyday subject to fresh military incursions, bomb strikes or assaults by Israeli soldiers and snipers. The leaks show, incidentally, that the PA leadership were tipped off before the Israeli attack on Gaza, although even they must have been taken aback by the ferocity of the relentless bombings and the scale of the slaughter.

Marxists in the British labour movement have for decades been critical of the pro-capitalism and pro-western stance of the PLO/Fatah leadership. While the ultra-left sects of the fringes of the movement called for the “unconditional support” for the PLO as the “sole legitimate representation of the Palestinian people” it was the Marxists who condemned their open collaboration with the most reactionary Arab regimes and with imperialism.

This slavish support of reactionary Arab regimes (in return for massive financial support to the PLO apparatus) cost the Palestinians huge political capital and lost opportunities. Even today, even given the slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza three years ago, it is likely that it has been Arab armies rather than the Israelis who have been responsible for more Palestinian casualties, in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt.

A former PLO representative, Karma Nabulsi, commented on the content of the leaked documents in The Guardian (Jan 26), referring to “a small group of men who have polluted the Palestinian public sphere with their private activities are now, finally, exposed.” The indignation is entirely justified, but the policy of the PLO and its leading party Fatah, is not new. It has been unchanged for decades and has led the Palestinian people from one disaster to another. The pursuit of the so-called ‘peace-talks’ is only one more disastrous policy that follows a long series of disastrous policies.

Now the PLO leadership is looking at another tactic – aiming to get ‘official recognition’ for the quasi-state on the West Bank in the hope of stacking up a large number of even a majority in the general assembly of the UN. Some countries in Latin America and elsewhere have given official recognition. But even if the PLO managed to stack up a large number of supporters in the UN, it would not make the slightest difference on the ground in Palestine.

For their part, the representatives of capitalism are happy to keep the PLO locked in talks, even if they go nowhere. In the piece in The Guardian mentioned above, Karma Nabulsi, condemned the role of the US and Britain “in creating a security Bantustan”. It now seems that the British ruling class were so determined to lock the PLO into negotiations that they even subsidised the administrative back-up of the Palestinian team. Their “negotiating support unit” (NSU) has been heavily funded by the British government via the right wing think-tank, The Adam Smith Institute. It appears that the leaks to Al Jazeera and The Guardian have happened because Palestinian staff had become so disillusioned with the craven and unproductive manner of their ‘leaders’ negotiation.

What is also apparent from the leaked documents is that the offers of concession from the Palestinians evoked virtually no response from the Israelis. The documents have confirmed what Marxists have argued for years, that from the point of view of Israeli capitalism, there is no solution to the question of Palestinian national freedoms. For the foreseeable future, the only policy of Israel will have is one of crisis management, alongside a creeping annexation of the West Bank.

Radical

The Israeli ruling class cannot allow a radical Palestinian state on its doorstep, even one that made big concessions on land, on Jerusalem and on the settlements. The Palestinian negotiation team have accepted that the state they would have expected to come of any agreement would not be a state in the normal meaning of the word. The chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, apparently told US special representative Mitchell, “They (the Palestinians) won’t have an army, air force or navy”. But it is not a limited state apparatus that Israeli capitalism fears – it is the possibility of the hopes and aspirations of millions of Palestinians being expressed in the election of a radical government, one that would appeal to Israeli Arabs and to Israeli workers in general.

The mass of Palestinians will want an independent state to carry through genuine reforms in their interests. The only ‘state’ Israeli capitalism can accept is one that keep the lid on Palestinian aspirations, by the suppression of democratic rights if necessary…and that is precisely what they already have. The USA, Europe and Israel have actively sought to arm and train the Palestinian Authority’s military arm as a means of suppressing opposition.

On the basis of capitalism in Israel and a pro-capitalism policy in the West Bank, there is no possibility of a solution to the problem of Palestinian emancipation. There is no possibility, in other words, of a national emancipation, without a social emancipation in the same movement. Nowhere is this impasse more evident than in relation to the question of the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. 

The descendents of those refugees who fled or were expelled from Palestine in 1948, in the war that established the state of Israel, now number more than seven million. Their ‘right of return’ is a demand that the Palestinian movement has always supported. But nowhere in the official policy of the PLO raise the question of how the ‘return’ would be managed. Since 1948, Israel has changed enormously. As long as the right of return is presented to Jewish workers as a threat to their position, or even their very presence in Israel, then the mass of Israelis will not accept the right of return. Even Abu Abbas, the leader of the PLO has stated that “it is illogical to ask Israel to take 5 million, or indeed 1 million. That would mean the end of Israel.”  The leaks show that PLO negotiators put forward as few as 10,000 returnees.

Many of the more than seven million Palestinians outside of Israel/Palestine, in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, still live in temporary camps and depend on UN aid to get by. High unemployment, discrimination in favour of ‘indigenous’ Arabs and political oppression have characterised their lives for decades. For the PLO leadership to abandon what has been a historic demand means condemning these Palestinians continued hopeless and despair. But the question of their return is a dead-letter as long as it is posed as an “us or them” issue to Israeli Jews.

For Jewish workers, the whole strategy of the Israeli ruling class is a trap. The official propaganda that runs on security, security and more security in fact only offers unending war  instability, and, moreover, greater and greater economic sacrifices to pay for it. Yet the fear of the destruction of Israel and the perceived threat to their own rights and even their very existence the key factors that bind Jewish workers to the state.

A socialist programme, adopted by the mass of the Palestinian people, and winning support among Jewish workers in Israel, would completely and utterly transform the political horizon. If the organisation of the productive resources of Israel/Palestine were organised on a socialist basis, with the banks, industry, the land and agri-business owned and managed by the mass of the population, it could provide for the first time for a huge development of productive potential. It could provide enough for the provision of living standards, not only for the current population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, but also for the incorporation and assimilation of the descendents of the refugees of 1948.

For decades, the last thing the PLO leadership has wanted has been a mass movement of the Palestinian people. In that they have been in complete accord with their political and financial backers in the various Arab leaderships and in the western states. The first intifada in December 1987 was a genuine mass movement. It took the Palestinian leadership by surprise and even though it was inchoate, disorganised and without a clear political programme, it had a huge effect in the whole Arab world and among Israeli workers. Since that time the main preoccupation of the PLO ‘leadership’ has been to prevent a repeat.

As Karma Nabulsi wrote, about the PLO leadership, “It is now on record that they have betrayed, lied and cheated us of basic rights, while simultaneously claiming they deserved the trust of the Palestinian people.” The comment to add is that this is not new. It did not commence with and is not restricted to the ‘peace’ talks.