Eygpt's uprising shakes Washington

The prospect of a renewed period of linked revolutionary struggles not seen since the 1989 anti-Stalinist movements in Europe, is taking shape in North Africa. Events are shaking not just regimes like Mubarak’s in Egypt but the calculations of Washington and London too.

The major powers have relied heavily on authoritarian governments in the Middle East, fundamentalist as in Saudi Arabia as well as secular as those in Damascus and Cairo, to sustain their own interests in the region. These centre on maintaining the flow of oil and sustaining Israel, regardless of its treatment of the Palestinians.

Washington has turned a blind eye to systematic repression while hypocritically prattling on about “democratic values”. Now that the people themselves in Tunisia and Egypt have taken matters into their own hands in defiant uprisings, the United States and others are urging caution!

Clearly, to talk about democracy is one thing, but to actually fight for it is not acceptable.

The position was summed up by Tony Blair, the New Labour prime minister who introduced the world to “regime change” with the joint US-British illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Middle East “peace envoy”, told the BBC’s Today programme that Egypt
should "evolve and modernise",

He added: “The question is how they evolve and modernise, but do so with stability. The danger is if you open up a vacuum anything can happen. As Hillary Clinton [Obama’s secretary of state] was saying yesterday, the important thing is to engage in this process of modernisation, and improving systems of government, but do it in a way that keeps the order and stability of the country together."

Fortunately, there are moments in history when the thoughts of people like Blair and Clinton count for little and express only their nervousness at the appearance of the masses on the streets.

A new generations is simply not prepared to put up with mass unemployment, rising prices, political corruption and authoritarian rule. Men like Mubarak can no longer – unjustifiably – claim the mantle of previous leaders like Nasser who led the fight against colonial rule and nationalised the Suez canal.

Nor are the people of Egypt buying into the regime’s propaganda that it’s either us or the fundamentalists. That kind of scaremongering is reminiscent of the old Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe who justified their authoritarian regimes by warning of the imperialist enemy at the gates. Fat good it did them in the end.

Blair is right in one sense. No one knows where a revolutionary process will end up. Egypt, with its population of more than 80 million, is key. The struggle of the 1950s for national independence roused the nation’s workers and rural poor. Many lay down their lives to thwart the 1956 invasion by Britain and France.

With the dire intervention of Moscow, the revolutionary movement degenerated and the country became a pawn in the struggle between the major powers. Today, Stalinism is no more and America’s power and influence is clearly waning. The opportunity arises to launch a new stage of a revolution that was distorted and halted by Sadat and then Mubarak.

This time, the aim has to be a transfer of political and economic power into the hands of the masses themselves, with the objective of ending private ownership of industry and land and creating a renewed democracy based on popular people’s assembles. Driving the upsurge in North Africa is the world crisis of capitalism. The same crisis is having a deep impact in Britain, with growing unemployment, exorbitant fuel costs and inflation. We should take our inspiration from those on the streets of Cairo, Suez and Tunis.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

One solution, one state

The leaked “Palestine Papers” establish beyond any doubt that the Zionist rulers of Israel are not interested in any sort of an agreement, however dramatic the concessions Palestinian negotiators are prepared to make.

Tragically in some ways, the papers also reveal the degeneration of the Palestine Authority (PA) under Mahmoud Abbas. The more intransigent the Israelis, the more PA officials grovelled while hiding the truth about what they were doing from the Palestinian people.

All to no avail. The lingering death of the "peace process" is self-evident.

Al Jazeera TV published the leaked files, which contain more than 1,600 internal documents related to the last decade of peace negotiations. They include memos, e-mails, maps, minutes from private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations.

Among Al Jazeera's significant revelations are major offers by the PA to Israel in the context of settlements in East Jerusalem, including major portions of the Old City that adjoin the Dome of the Rock, the second holiest site in Islam.

PA leaders also proposed "unprecedented" land swaps with the Israeli government, Al Jazeera revealed. In 2008, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with PA President Mahmoud Abbas after the PA offered to allow the Israeli state to annex most of the East Jerusalem settlements without demanding concessions in return.

Olmert reportedly showed Abbas a map of the newly-proposed swaps, which outlined Israel's plan to annex more than 10 percent of the West Bank. "Abbas was not allowed to keep a copy of the map, and so the 73-year-old Palestinian president had to sketch a copy by hand on a napkin," the network added.

Desperate for a deal, Palestinian negotiators led by Saeb Erekat privately agreed that only 10, 000 refugees and their families, out of a total refugee population exceeding 5 million, could return to Israel as part of a settlement.

Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state under George Bush, suggested in 2008 Palestinian refugees could be resettled in South America. "Maybe we will be able to find countries that can contribute in kind," she said. "Chile, Argentina, etc."

PLO leaders also accepted Israel's demand to define itself as an explicitly Jewish state, in sharp contrast to their public position. Erekat privately told Israeli negotiators: "If you want to call your state the Jewish state of Israel you can call it what you want." Israel's 1.3 million Palestinian citizens are particularly opposed to the notion of a “Jewish state” because it undermines their own rights which are constantly being eroded in any case.

The Electronic Intifada’s co-founder and executive director, Ali Abunimah, was given special access to the documents and helped analyse them for Al Jazeera. He said:

What we can discern immediately from these documents is that the US-brokered negotiations, especially under the Obama administration, can never lead to the restoration of Palestinian rights and that the two-state solution is basically dead. In the long term, we will have to ask how the peace process charade, revealed in these papers, was allowed to continue for so long as Israel continued its relentless colonisation of Palestinian land and the Palestinian Authority that was supposed to be a step on the road to freedom become a sophisticated tool of continued Israeli occupation.

He is right. But the responsibility for the almost desperate nature of the concessions lies not just with the PA leaders but with also with other Arab regimes, especially Egypt’s who help Israel to enforce a blockade of Gaza, for example. From Damascus to Amman, discredited leaders have watched the Palestinian people’s suffering from a safe distance. Washington, of course, has consistently backed the Israelis and the Zionist view that they have a God-given right to occupy Palestinan land.

A way forward may now be opening up as the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia finds its echo in Cairo today and other Arab cities tomorrow. The sweeping out of the old dictatorships can open the way to a new leadership and the building of a secular, single state which Jews and Palestinians can co-habit as they did in earlier times.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor