Palestinians start campaign for one state for all citizens

Momentum for a one-state solution for Palestine is building up just as the Israeli state is destroying even a remote chance of success for any Saudi-US Arab peace plan.

Last week, Palestinians marked the 65th anniversary of the Nakba, the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. It was also the day chosen by 22 senior Palestinian figures to announce “a popular movement project for a single democratic state in historic Palestine”.

Those calling for the creation of one democratic country between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan were leading members of Fatah, the movement originally led by Palestine Liberation Organisation founder Yasser Arafat.

Their document, issued after a meeting held in the town of El Bireh in the West Bank, was the result of a two-year discussion. It declared that “the racist Israeli policy of separation and segregation has made the two-state solution ‏(based on pre-1967 borders‏) unrealistic”. Therefore, the most desirable option” left for the Palestinian people and the one that will allow the right of return is, they say:  

“[A] democratic state for all its citizens, which will be based on a democratic constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and will guarantee freedom and equal rights, without discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, skin colour, language, nationality, political opinion, social origin and place of birth.”

Professor Uri Davis, from Al Quds university’s Israel studies department, explained that the concept for such a state was still under discussion, but that he personally was in favour of one state for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The announcement came only a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dedicated Route 20, a new highway connecting Jewish neighbourhoods in northern Jerusalem.

Former Israel Defence Forces leader, Shaul Arieli of the Council for Peace and Security, said the new roads undermined the prospect of the re-division of the city and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. All peace plans put forward so far were based on a division of Jerusalem and transfer of portions of the city to a Palestinian state.

An Israeli expert on Jerusalem’s demography, Danny Seidemann, said that “the purpose of these highways is to clearly integrate the [Jewish] settlement blocs into the national highway network of Israel and thereby place East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs within Israel’s de facto borders”.

Their views were published in the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which notes that road could be “the nail in the coffin for plans to re-divide the capital and attach its Arab areas to a future Palestinian state”.

In other words, the road project completely scuppers the notion of a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine, which the extensive Zionist settlement programme on the West Bank had already made unviable.

The highway has been denounced by United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Falk who is calling on the Israeli government to halt its construction immediately. He says it will ruin the livelihoods of the 9,300 Palestinian residents. 

Netanyahu’s road-building is hardly surprising considering that the Israeli Prime Minister’s aides have denounced the Arab peace plan as “trick” intended to entrap Israel.

And, as Jonathan Cook, a distinguished journalist writing for the Israeli Occupation Archive, notes, Netanyahu’s government demanded that Google should not use the word “Palestine”, claiming it was damaging the peace process.

Wikileaks has disclosed documents proving that Netanyahu is only the last of many Israeli leaders with total contempt for peace negotiations. In cables from 1975, US diplomats describe Israel as “hell-bent on self-destruction”.

The Fatah leaders’ support for a one-state solution is a crucial break from the conciliatory position taken for years by PLO president Mahmoud Abbas and Arab League negotiators who, under American pressure, conceded Palestinian territory in the hopes of a deal. A World to Win welcomes the initiative, which opens up a way forward for Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

         

Obama's warning to Israel falls on deaf ears

President Obama’s latest speeches on Palestine, like his visit to Ireland and to London, are arousing a whole range of emotions and reactions.

Anti-war protesters will gather tomorrow outside Buckingham Palace against the three wars currently being fought by the United States under Obama’s leadership – Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

As the Stop the War Campaign points out, Israel continues to enjoy unflinching support from its US Big Brother – large scale arms sales, aid and political support.

But simply to note this would be to miss out on new realities unleashed by the revolutions of the Arab Spring and its effects on the struggle of the Palestinians for self-determination.

Thousands took part in the May marches throughout the Occupied Territories to mark the Nabka, "catastrophe" in Arabic, that refers to the destruction of Palestinian villages and expulsion of their residents that accompanied Israel's declaration of independence.

Israeli border police troops fired on protesters in an attack which drew international condemnation. Despite 11 fatalities and scores of injuries, Palestinians are continuing to prepare a large-scale march for June 5.

This, combined with the demand for statehood which the Palestinians are taking to the United Nations in September, is the tumultuous background to Obama’s call on Israel to “make the hard choices”.

After meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama refused to back down from his insistence that peace negotiations must focus on Israel’s pre-1967 war borders.

While this is not a new position for US presidents, with Obama proposing “mutually agreed land swaps” in support of a two-state solution, it has nonetheless aroused fury in the Zionist camp.

A US official described Netanyahu’s arrogant, hostile response to Obama as “over the top” while in the United States itself, Zionists and the Republican right have launched a ferocious tirade. Some, suggested one website, consider Obama a “pro-Palestinian Marxist, Islamophile, anti-white bigot, anti-American Marxist and a tyrant in the making”.

While Obama is desperately trying to adapt to the Arab Spring, at the same time fearing its consequence in countries like Syria where he wants Assad to lead changes rather than go, his reference to pre-1967 borders is already looking decidedly shaky.

Palestinian leaders from Hamas and Fatah do not themselves agree on the proposal to return to the 1967 borders. And they currently face a boycott against their monopoly of politics by eight Palestinian groups affiliated to the PLO who have withdrawn from the negotiations to form the unity government recently agreed in Cairo.

The head of Fatah’s press office, Issam al-Halabi has rightly noted: “Politicians are following the people. They don’t have much say, the people are doing everything and this is a turning point in the Palestinian struggle to return, which has recently surprised everyone.” Palestinian negotiators should take advantage of these popular movements to “back up their stance during negotiations”, he believes.

Two things need to be said. One is that Netanyahu’s immediate rejection of Obama’s reference to pre-1967 borders killed off negotiations before they began. Secondly, exploiting the sacrifices of Palestinian youth in Gaza, the Golan Heights and throughout the Occupied Territories as a negotiating ploy is quite treacherous and cynical.

When Obama told the AIPAC that “we cannot afford to wait another decade, or another two decades, or another three decades to achieve peace” because the world “is moving too fast”, he was actually keenly aware of the truth.

He was, in effect, warning the Israeli ruling class that its days – similar to the position that the apartheid regime in South Africa found itself in - are numbered. The renewed Palestinian uprisings, like the incredibly courageous movements in Syria and Yemen, are part of a global movement against the status quo. It is mobilising countless youth from Tunis to Tahrir and now in the Spanish May 15 occupation movement. It is impossible to imagine this process succeeding without an independent Palestinian state.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

The Palestinian street has spoken

Perhaps the most serious evidence that the reconciliation agreement signed last week in Cairo by Fatah and Hamas, the two main Palestinian organisations, upsets the global status quo is the chorus of denunciation by Israeli leaders.

The Arab spring – from Tunisia to Egypt – has inspired and driven on young Palestinians themselves and the speed of events has surprised everyone. And since Fatah and Hamas signed the deal, which was endorsed by 11 smaller Palestinian groups and brokered by Egypt’s new government, Israeli leaders from Prime Minister Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and opposition leader Tzipi Livni have all expressed their hostility.

The outbursts from Israel politicians and intelligence agencies, who have worked might and main to divide and rule, are backed up by the withholding of $89 million worth of tax revenues which the Palestine Authority needs to pay 170,000 civil servants and their dependents. This is an illegal act to undermine unity and economically starve the Palestinians, which even the ever-so-tame United Nations general secretary Ban ki-Moon has criticised.

Israeli leaders are terrified that the reconciliation deal that follows years of bitter conflict between Fatah and Hamas – one controlling the West Bank and Hamas the Gaza Strip – will gather momentum for a sense of real Palestinian unity and strength.

Their anger is in sharp contrast to the jubilant feeling in Palestinian refugee camps in the occupied territories and in places like the Ain al-Hilweh camp, the largest in Lebanon, where Fatah and Hamas flags fluttered together and people celebrated over the weekend.

The cessation of hostilities between Fatah and Hamas goes some way towards realising – at least on paper - the demands raised by thousands of Palestinian youth in the March 15 Movement. Two months ago, Palestinian youth under occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank - who make up over 65% of the population there –as well as those living as second class citizens in Israel, took to the streets with 20 of them going on hunger strike. Via Facebook and other means, they issued a call to the governments of the West Bank and Gaza, demanding:

• the release of all political prisoners in the prisons of the Palestine Authority and Hamas
• an end to attacks by one organisation on the other
• the resignation of the governments of Haniyeh and Fayyad to re-build a government of national unity agreed by all Palestinian factions representing the Palestinian people
• the restructuring of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to contain all Palestinian factions and get back to its initial aim: Palestine’s freedom from illegal occupation
• the end of all forms of security co-ordination with Israeli occupation forces.

This new generation seeks national unity independently of political factions. Students and school children on the protest, said they were inspired by movements in other parts of the Arab world to initiate a political movement that would go on until unity was reached.

But as night fell, armed groups in civilian clothes were backed up by the Hamas authorities who then sent in the police. The peaceful youth and many women, journalists and photographers were beaten with sticks and clubs, facts backed up by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

Nevertheless, their discredited leaders have been forced to respond to their “street”. And the Palestinian street, is, as rights campaigner Noura Erakat Erakat has noted, a global one. Perhaps the most significant factor, however, is the ongoing Egyptian revolution. The overthrown Mubarak dictatorship worked with the Israeli regime to turn Gaza into the world’s biggest prison camp. Now Egypt is preparing to open the Rafah border crossing into Gaza, which the Israelis have said they won’t allow.

Many Palestinians interviewed on the streets of Gaza after the deal was signed, are keenly aware that the reconciliation has been made out of a position of weakness by both Hamas and Fatah. Neither the pursuance of a two-state “solution” by Fatah, nor the militant Islam demonization of all Jews by Hamas, has paid dividends. A secular, one-state approach is required. For that to succeed, new leaders will have to come forward.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Blair's 'gratitude' sums it up

The killing of Osama Bin Laden may satisfy America’s lust for revenge but ordinary people have paid a massive price in the hunting down of al-Qaeda’s US- trained leader.

Since the infamous 9/11 attacks, untold numbers of civilians have been killed in Afghanistan by American and British forces who have occupied the country for a decade.

America used the lie that Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were joint partners in crime, even though they regarded each other as enemies, to invade Iraq. Hundreds of thousands have been killed subsequently, and many driven into exile.

Where there was no al-Qaeda presence before in Iraq, there certainly is now. Even Britain’s MI5 warned former prime minister Blair that the 2003 invasion would increase the risk of terror attacks in Britain.

Blair’s sickening statement today, expressing "gratitude" to the US, and declaring that the killing of Bin Laden showed that "those who commit acts of terror against the innocent will be brought to justice, however long it takes" equally applies to himself.

The issues and causes that have served as recruiting grounds by jihadists everywhere remain absolutely unaltered and unresolved since 2001.

The Palestinians, for example, are perhaps further away from the legitimate goal of self-determination than they were. President Obama has followed his predecessor’s policy, isolating the elected Hamas government and backing Israel’s aggression in Gaza and in settlement building.

Puppet American regimes like the ones in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain continue their pro-Western policies and crack down on dissent with impunity and silence from Washington. American troops remain in Iraq.

There is also a sense that the timing of the US operation – miles inside Pakistan and without authority from the country’s government – is also to do with Obama’s attempt to paint himself as a true patriot and a man the country should re-elect next year.

The fact that the news led to rallies on world stock markets and boosted the dollar says as much about the fragility of the global economy as it does about anything else.

Similarly, state-authorised terror in the shape of the Nato war on Libya has given the beleaguered Coalition government in Britain something to brag about. Cameron’s indifference to the death of one of Colonel Gaddafi’s sons and three children in an illegal targeted assassination attempt is a warning to us all.

With the British economy teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession – boosted only by spending spree on bunting for that wedding – war is good for business.

Enemies abroad are being matched by the targeting of the enemy within. The pre-emptive arrests before the wedding were in the spirit of the authoritarian state built by the previous government. Riot police battering Bristolians protesting about yet another Tesco store aimed at driving small shops out of business is also a sign of the times

The market state, as we have warned, long ago abandoned its stewardship of the economy and the welfare of its people in favour of promoting business as the only business of the planet.

Shorn of social responsibilities, the state constantly falls back on its true nature – as an instrument of repression within its borders and military action outside. None of this makes the country a safer place to live, but then the ruling classes are not particularly interested in this as they don’t travel on the Tube or frequent other likely terrorist targets.

In historical and practical terms, the curtain is coming down on bourgeois democracy. We are obliged to replace the decayed political system with something much more democratic and representative, where financial interests are replaced by social and community need. Saturday’s meeting of the People’s Assemblies Network in London has taken on a new significance.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Ending the 'war on terror'

So now air passengers will be subjected to the equivalent of a strip search as the futile “war on terror” enters its second decade. The next step, surely, is to get travellers to leave all their clothes in a bag and fly in a bathrobe. This is how absurd the world has become, with no solution in sight.

Gordon Brown’s plan to call an international conference on Yemen – where the Christmas Day bomb-in-the-pants former Nigerian student received his training – and fund a “counter-terrorism unit” in the country won’t make blind bit of difference. Yemen is facing an insurrection in the north and a secessionist movement in the south and the government is widely seen as a stooge of major Western powers.

It is not as if Britain is unaware of what happens in Yemen. The port of Aden was seized by Britain in 1839 and a colony established in the same year. Considered strategically important as an outpost on the Arabian peninsula, Britain brutally resisted independence demands and South Yemen only won its freedom in 1967, uniting with the north in 1990.

Terrorism, whatever its shape or form, is an extreme reaction to injustices, perceived or real. Islamic-inspired individual terrorism is no different in this respect. And, because it plays into the hands of the oppressor by targeting ordinary people, terrorism is profoundly reactionary. The Al Qaeda brand is in its own league, spurning political “solutions” in favour of annihilation of the enemies of its view of Islam, including other Muslims.

Yet they continue to recruit bright students like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because the grievances felt by Muslims around the world are deep. Moreover, the injustices are ignored by the major powers whose views are only modernised versions of their imperialist predecessors.

The greatest wrong is undoubtedly visited upon the Palestinians. Here double standards know no bounds. The Gazans hold an election and elect Hamas, so it is boycotted because it refuses to accept the state of Israel. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, the client president is allowed to steal the election because he does what the Americans want.

Israel’s government is contemptuous of the Obama administration’s puny attempts to broker a deal with the Palestinians. Settlement building continues unchecked because the White House will always yield to the Israel lobby and do nothing. The United Nations may condemn war crimes in Gaza, but the US will vote against the report. Gaza will remain blockaded and half starved and the world’s governments turn a blind eye.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan remains occupied by American and British troops. And to add insult to injury, Iran is about to face US-led sanctions for allegedly attempting to build a nuclear bomb while Israel, which has dozens of nuclear weapons, once again escapes scot free.

The governments of the United States, Britain and other major powers are incapable of addressing the causes of modern terrorism and resort to ever more draconian “security” measures which, naturally, work only for a short period and are, therefore, no solution in any meaningful sense.

Yet there is another dimension to the growth of Islamic-inspired terrorism. A few generations ago, many young Muslims would have been drawn into national revolutionary struggles, where political programmes and solutions took precedence over religious outlook. Most if not all of these national movements degenerated over time for a variety of reasons. For example, in place of the revolutionary Nasser in Egypt you have the corrupt and repressive Mubarak, whose government helps the Israelis in their blockade of Gaza.

Radical Islam has in some respects stepped into the vacuum left by the failure of secular nationalism, which in turn was heavily influenced by reactionary Stalinism both locally and internationally. The development of fresh internationalist revolutionary thinking and practice which takes us beyond the discredited regimes of Cairo and London is key to finding a way forward from humanity’s present impasse.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Two states no solution for Palestinians

Palestinian leaders meeting the Israelis in Annapolis, Maryland, today will be offered nothing. Instead, they will be asked to sacrifice the right of Palestinian refugees to return, to abandon Palestinians living inside Israel’s 1948 borders and to forget about the aspirations of the Palestinians living in Jerusalem and Gaza. Failed preliminary talks over many weeks mean that all those attending the US-sponsored conference know in advance that no genuine gains can be made.

What is not on offer is a Palestinian state. Where are its borders? Who will control its borders with other countries? Where is its capital? Who has the right to live in it? By consistently postponing the solution of these crucial questions, the Zionist state of Israel has been able to continue to create “realities on the ground” that make any viable Palestinian state impossible. The West Bank and Gaza are two separate prisons. Gaza is a hell on earth for those who live there. On the West Bank, Palestinians continue to be deprived of their land and their right to education and work.

West Bank-based Palestinian leaders have been drawn so deeply into the so-called two-state solution, that they are in danger of sacrificing their own legitimacy to try and achieve it. But 14 years on from the signing of the Oslo Accords, the peace process has become a trap from which the Palestinians must find an exit. Tony Blair’s announcement last week of a handful of meaningless economic initiatives underlined the fact that the only people to benefit from the two-state process so far are a handful of well-off Palestinian businessmen, and the group who are involved in administering and policing the enclave.

Jewish settlements continue to expand into substantial towns, sucking in resources of land and water. The borders between Gaza and the West Bank and neighbouring countries have been cleared of housing and the Israeli army has seized strips of land so that it can control access in perpetuity. The Israeli government has no intention of removing its illegal wall, and further plans include Israeli-only roads. The conditions of most Palestinians have worsened since 1993 and the conflict has claimed more than 4,000 Palestinian lives and more than 1,000 Israeli lives.

A far more significant conference than the one in Annapolis took place in London recently. Organised by the London One State Group - Palestinian and Jewish students who work together - it attracted more than 300 academics, activists and students from all over the world to discuss an alternative way forward that challenges the right of Zionism to rule over a state based on religious exclusivity.

The conference heard from many speakers that the Palestine national cause – made up of Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, those living as refugees in other countries and those living as second-class citizens within the borders established in 1948 – has become more and more divided as a result of the doomed two-state process.

At the same time Israeli Jews are more and more sceptical both about the possibility of a peaceful settlement of the conflict, and – after the defeat of the Israeli army in Lebanon – the chance of a military solution. The conference concluded that the time is absolutely right to revive and bring up to date the proposition that the only way forward for Palestinians and Jews is the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state from the Sea to the Jordan River, where all the people of the region can live together with equal rights.

Penny Cole