Daily Times

Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem are essentially stateless and stuck in legal limbo. They are not citizens of Israel, but nor are they citizens of Jordan or the Palestine Authority. Israeli regime treats these Palestinians in East Jerusalem as foreign immigrants who live there as a ‘favour granted to them by the state’ and not by right, despite having been born there. They live in a constant fear of having their residency revoked.

The partition of these lands and the creation of Israel dates back to The Balfour Declaration, a public pledge by Britain in 1917 stating that it was Britain’s aim to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. This declaration promised a state to foreign Jews in a land where the native Palestinians made up more than 90 per cent of the population. It was inscribed in form of a letter from Britain’s then foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of the British Jewish community.

It was part of the plot to carve out artificial countries from the Provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire divided as war booty between the victorious imperialist powers, mainly France and Britain — a renewed neo-colonial hegemony. In practice, it meant that the Palestinian Arabs who lived there would not gain independence. After the World War II, the well-armed Jewish militias occupied Palestine with imperialists’ support and this Zionist state was formed.

Ever since the establishment of the state in 1948, Israel has been a Middle Eastern outpost for American imperialism in the region. The strategists of imperialism have been able to use wars and conflicts in the region to bolster their policy of ‘divide and rule’ based on religious, ethnic, nationalistic and sectarian prejudices. It was designed to sustain their plunder of Middle East’s resources and maintain strategic control.

Benjamin Netanyahu and other reactionary Zionist leaders are intoxicated with the euphoria of their endorsement by Trump, but they will soon have to face the wrath of perhaps another Intifada in the occupied Palestinian territories. The first intifada was spontaneous and was a genuine mass movement that took the Palestinian leadership by surprise. It had such a mass appeal among Arabs that it had a big effect among Israeli masses too, along with ‘Israeli Arab’ protestors in the streets of Israeli cities. The current leadership of the Palestinians — both Hamas in the Gaza, and Fatah/PA in the West Bank — are terrified of any genuine mass movement of Palestinian masses, for all their bluster about a new intifada. But another spontaneous upsurge of Palestinians — despite and not because of their ‘leaders’ — may yet take place.

Palestinian ‘leaders’ like those in Hamas — supported by the leaders of states like Iran — who still call for the destruction of Israel, play into the hands of the Israeli right. Far from strengthening the Palestinian struggle, violent slogans weaken and divert it at every step

Such is the traumatic tragedy of these imperialist partitions in the Middle East that for seventy years it has not only been the Palestinian masses who have suffered but the oppressed classes of every national, ethnic and religious community have been traumatised.

To these we might also add the Israeli workers and the poor who have been brought to Israel from across the world and have had to live in the constant fear of an encircled population beset by the fear of war and conflict. Israel is also a class society and the toiling classes face capitalist exploitation. It is through this concocted fear of siege, inoculated in their mass psychology by the elite intelligentsia and the state that makes their class oppression cumbersome. Rather than being a ‘safe haven’ for Jews worldwide, Israel has been beset by one war after another — and that insecurity has not changed.

Those Palestinian ‘leaders’ like those in Hamas — supported by the leaders of states like Iran — who still call for the destruction of Israel, play into the hands of Israeli right like Netanyahu, far from strengthening the Palestinian struggle, weaken it and divert it at every step. The Zionist regimes have also used these ‘threats’ to impose their despotic grip upon the Israeli workers and society.

Leon Trotsky warned of such a dreadful life for Jews migrating to their ‘ancestral homeland’. He wrote on December 22, 1938, “The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish people.” On the other hand, peace and security for Israeli workers can never be achieved on the basis of the denial of the national and social rights of the Palestinian masses.

In the last 70 years, three Arab-Israeli wars, protracted armed struggles including acts of individual terror and decades of negotiations have failed to achieve for the Palestinians their right to freedom. It was only the mass militant uprisings of Intifadas’ of 1987 and 2000 that shook the Zionist state and they were forced to concede some cursory demands. The hard reality is that the road to Palestinian emancipation passes through the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and other Israeli cities where ordinary Israelis’ are suffering from socioeconomic and psychological distress. They also yearn for an end to this nightmare of fear and despair.

The most significant aspect of the 2011 Arab revolutionary upheaval was the entrance of the Israeli masses into the arena of revolt in solidarity with their class brothers and sisters in the Arab world and against their despotic regime. The outrage and turmoil in the region that can erupt will also engulf Israel. The heavily armed Israeli Zionist state and its imperialist backers will fail to suppress a new uprising where the masses come out on the streets to end this violence, exploitation and oppression. A new revolutionary situation will spread across Middle East that could break the shackles of imperialist slavery, smash the Zionist state and the overthrow the reactionary Arab regimes that have pulverised the region. US imperialism’s Nero will face the vengeance of history’s retribution.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, December 11^th 2017.