Daily Times

The British neglected the Palestinian bourgeoisie at the expense of Zionist entrepreneurs. ‘Pinhas Rutenberg [a Jewish entrepreneur] was given exclusive rights to use water in the north of the country and an electric company to provide electric supply to almost all Palestine and Transjordan’. The ownership of the Electric corporation was organised in such a way to ensure its control in the hands of pro-Zionists groups.

The labour alliance between the Jewish workers and the Palestinians was the only hope in creating class unity between two people. But Ben Gurion had other aims. The Histadrut led by him became a hardcore Zionist labour organisation. It became an instrument in securing jobs for the newcomer Jewish citizens at the cost of lowly paid Palestinian workers receiving discriminatory pay rates. The policy broke the class solidarity between Jewish and Palestinian workers and the former became not only an instrument of production but an instrument to guard the interests of the Jewish bourgeoisie.

The occupying forces needed army to control the native population, hence history of Hagenah became synonymous with the history of occupation. Despite being an illegal army, it was permitted not only to smuggle the arms from outside but at times received the ammunition from the Mandate authorities. Legalised in 1936, it swelled up to 10,000 trained men and an extra force of 40,000 for rapid mobilisation. British, fully aware of the importance of police, recruited 5000 men-strong Jewish police, Notrim. It initially defended the oil pipelines, but it unveiled its real character of suppressing the Palestinian revolt, thawra reaching its zenith between 1936-39, with sheer brutality. Once the Arab revolt was crushed by the joint effort of British and Zionism, the last obstacle in the formation of a Jewish state was removed and with that the possibility of the freedom of Palestine was lost. The python of capitalism sucked up an entire nation and a populated country into its entrails, a new reality of a place without people for the new usurpers emerged and what was real was not rational.

The corrupt and handpicked ruling bourgeoisie of the Arab world has completely yielded before the US and Israel. It is a stinking corpse, as is the indigenous Palestinian bourgeoisie which clings to power, collecting nothing more than crumbs from the Israeli table

In 1948 the tragic incidence of Der Yassin happened when the far-right paramilitary organisations Irgun — led by Menachem Begin the sixth premier of Israel — and Lehi massacred over hundred unarmed Palestinians in the cold blood. The incident was only possible with the connivance of the David Shaltiel, commander of Hagenah with the approval of the Israeli state. The incident revealed the cornerstone of the Israeli policy of Lebensraum; expulsion of Palestinians to settle the incoming Jews from abroad. Nakba led to the expulsion of 7,50000 Palestinians from their homeland and loss of 78 percent of their territory making Palestine the only country practically without territory having lost half of its population with no right to return. The process of primitive accumulation, a sheer robbery for Marx, could not have achieved without the total destruction and depopulation of the original people. A new liberal bourgeois state was founded on the tomb of the one interred deep in the ground. The new relations of production were forced upon the old not by the evolutionary process but by the reactionary method of genocide.

The process of accumulation through dispossession continues even today. Eyal Weizman, points out the crimes committed by Israel on the drawing board. The way the lines separated, bisected, surrounded, enveloped, and suppressed the Palestinian neighbourhood was the architectural violence, and for him the violence was a slow, incremental but as lethal as the one exercised by tanks and aeroplanes. The wall that separates Palestinians from Palestinians and Jews is not merely a concrete object but a politics of separation between have and have nots, and oppressor and oppressed. Separation is apartheid but Israel takes pride in its apartheid. For Israel, the kind of apartheid it practices is not a scandal but a system of managing the people that has been perfected and provides a solution to the Europe to segregate and deal with its refugees, the non-citizens with the same violence.

After the destruction of Iraq, Syria and Libya, the corrupt and handpicked ruling bourgeoisie of the Arab world has completely yielded before the US and Israel. It is a stinking corpse, so is the native bourgeoisie of the Palestine clinging to power, collecting nothing more than the crumbs fallen from the Israeli table. The Palestinian state does not exist. For Edward Said, ‘the Oslo accord was a treaty of Versailles imposed upon the Palestinians’, it turned PLO into a policeman of the Israeli regime. Hamas the product of Zionism is trading with innocent Palestinian blood. By launching a senseless missile attack on Israel, it has destroyed the peaceful movement in Sheikh Jarrah against the eviction of Palestinians from their homes, in return Israeli politicians have obliged it by cutting Gaza with the rest of the country and bombing indiscriminately killing children and civilians, making Hamas popular among Palestinians but also creating its a Frankenstein. The sane course left to the Palestinians is to adapt the war of position and passive revolution suggested by Gramsci and wait for the people of the world to rise in their support. It will be the only solution from this horrible Palestinian nightmare.

Weizman is inspired by two movements offering concrete resistance to Israel, the first one is the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Economic Sanctions) movement, creating a new culture of resistance not only against the Israeli state but against the ruling classes of all those states supporting the Zionist regime. The anxiety of Israeli regime and its urge to ban the peaceful movement speaks volumes of its effectiveness. The other movement led by the Arab Bedouins in Negev desert in the south Palestine is equally peaceful. Their houses are destroyed for 186 times, they were expelled from their homeland but on each occasion, they returned without seeking permission and rebuilt them. Their struggle akin to all other resistances within Israel remains unreported by the media within and outside Israel.

The bloodbath, a permanent legacy of Balfour — and Redcliff in case of India and Pakistan —will continue unabated till the people of both sides come out of their stupor to defeat their respective bourgeoisie. The question of one state or two states can only be addressed by the masses. So far, the capitalist classes of both sides have managed to defend themselves by blinding the people with nationalism and hate. “Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth — there stands bourgeois society…. [its] madness will cease, and the bloody demons of hell will vanish only when workers . . . will extend to each other a brotherly hand and drown out the bestial chorus of imperialist warmongers and the shrill cry of capitalist hyenas with labour’s old and mighty battle cry: Workers of all countries unite. (Rosa Luxemburg). But the workers of Israel are the beneficiaries of this carnage. Ironically, they are looking for the space left by the Palestinians to occupy/ build their homes. Gideon Levy rightly complains that no one in Israel is opposing this horrific war. This regimentation under mass culture made Marx to blurt out, ‘In the final analysis the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of [hu]mankind from Judaism’.

‘Poetry after Auschwitz’, Adorno once said ‘is barbaric’ but poetry after Gaza and the cries of the children dying a premature, unnatural death may not be music to Adorno’s ears, once concerned, about the safety of Israel during 1967 war, but they are music to the Zionism’s ears caging the Palestinians in the slaughterhouse, gazing upon them as animals. The road that began at Auschwitz is ending at Gaza. Israel has moved on from ‘’the slingshot to the Megaton bomb” will “it end in the total menace which organised mankind poses to organised men’’?

The writer, an academic has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com