Volume 3, No. 3-4, March-April 2002

It is sixteen months into the heroic uprising, intifada, of the people of Palestine. This uprising is confronting the most vicious and barbaric terrorism of the State of Israel. Armed to the teeth by US imperialism, the theocratic Jewish State which was forced on the Palestinian people in 1948 has been resorting to the blatant use of all kinds of weapons, except the nuclear ones, in its arsenals to break the back of the Palestinian resistance. So far, the Zionists have been unable to achive their murderous objective. Oslo ‘peace process’, sponsored by the US gangsters, is dead in essence. The so-called peace which the US and Israeli States wanted to secure through Arafat’s capitulation has failed to deliver. Now the US and Israeli criminal state wants to impose another ‘peace’ through wide spread destruction and terror tactics by forcing on the Palestinians a "realisation" that Palestinians cannot secure their rights and indepedence through the barrel of the gun. Clearly enough, this "realisation’ is being sought through the unbridled use of the gun barrel itself.

The US-Israeli marauders are acting with the understanding that if Arafat still fails as an instrument for the defence of US and Jewish interests in Palestine it is time to end the strategy of using him and his faction as a reliable vehicle, ditch him, and seek, or wait for, some new leadership that can replace him to do the dirty job of imposing stability and carry the process of capitulation to the end where majority Palestinians would accept the position that ‘the best solution under the present circumstances’ is to learn to live with the Israeli domination. That the new PA should contain and destroy every kind of opposition and resistance from the people, Palestinians and Arabs. Thus, they seek to extinguish the fires of resistance in that part of the planet.

Arafat, though a very shrewd and cunning agent politician of imperialists and the Zionists, has failed to arrest the fire of resistance struggle. Men within his own Fatah faction, whom he tried to convert into a police force for the State of Israel, for keeping a tight control over the people living in Gaza Strip and the West Bank, have become disillusioned with the so-called ‘peace-process’. They have been forced again by the rising tide of intifada to take up guns against the Israeli armed forces. They almost daily confront the Israeli attacks and clash with the enemy. A number of Fatah fighters, including very senior ones and close to Arafat, have been killed by the Israeli occupiers. Yassir Arafat had to say yes to the "tanzeem" (an organisation that participates in the uprising on behalf of the Fatah Faction of PLO). Though he sought to control the intifada through the tanzeem yet the circumstances have led to such a state that the tanzeem activists have invariably bore the brunt of Israeli state forces though they were not allowed to retaliate with fire arms and always used stone missiles like most of the ordinary Palestinian resisters. Yet Israeli fire arms did not differentiate and spare Arafat’s men. As a result, many Fatah fighters joined the battle and retaliated fire with fire.

On the other hand, Arial Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, increasingly presssuried Arafat to prevent his men from taking part in the battles, but, at the same time refused to listen to his pleas to hand over control of East Jerusalem and the dismantling of settlements. Arafat, pushed into the corner, made repeated appeals to the Palestinian resisters to desist from using guns and advised that they confine themselves to using stones only. This did not have the desired effect and the confrontations escalated.

Amid all this entered Hames into the fray with its daring bombings with individuals acting as powerful human bombs. This further complicated the situation for Arafat as Israeli onslaughts became more frequent, devastating and barbaric. Israel added tanks, bulldozers and F-16 warplanes to its military campaign. Even its master, the US imperalism, had to admit that it was using fire power "disproportionately." Before starting over his aggression on Afghanistan Bush rebuked Israel and pressurised both the PA and the Zoinist State to work for establishing peace through a ceasefire so as not to further infuriate and antagonise the Arab masses in the region. But when all went well with his campaign in Afghanistan the US came back to its previous self and condemned Arafat more often than admitting to the Israeli atrocities which had never stopped even during the war in Afghanistan. With the Afghan war almost won and putting Hamid Karzai as the new stooge PM there the US openly endorsed the Israeli attacks on the Palestinians. Now Bush says he is "disillusioned" with Arafat and has threatened to snap diplomatic ties with the PA. Arafat is left to cringe before the US, appealing it to see the Israeli bellicose behaviour and actions. Arafat is being pushed to openly side ‘either with the US and Israel or with the Palestinians.’

Arafat’s long innings as a confidante of the US imperialists is facing rough times. He is being considered an "infidel" who "has tried to import weapons from Iran" to buttress its weaponary. Now no body knows whether the weapons captured by Israeli gunships in the Mediteranean off 350 kilometers from Gaza strip did really belong to the PA. May be, it is just a story concocted by Israel and the US or a thing of their own making. Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. The US and Israel, however, claim that the consignment of arms contained such weapons which the Oslo Accord forbids the PA to acquire. According to the Oslo Accord PA or the "future’ Palestinian State can only possess small arms that can be used for policing to maintain law and order. Nothing for war to defend itself if Zionists ever decide to attack it. Farce of a state, farce of an independence.

Arafat has been taken aback by the accusation that he knew about the ‘import’ of arms. He denied it time and again. But the lion refuses to listen to the lamb. Arafat is trying his utmost to argue that he still wants to cotinue the "peace process" (read : serve the US and Israeli interests) but Israeli military "responses" have been too harsh denying him the courage to convince his people. He wants Israel to be leashed for a while so that he gets the time and pretext to crack-down on the Palestinian resisters. Instead, he has got his own headquarters destroyed by F-16 planes and tank missiles. His airstrip is pulverised and all the three helicopters he used to transport himself have been inactivated by precision bombing. He is forced to live in the West Bank town of Ramallah and disallowed to move out, even to the point of cancelling his trips abroad. Israeli tanks stand at a distance of 30 meters from him. Bullets and missiles fly past him reminding him that his life too is at the mercy of Israeli authorities. The President of the ‘State of Palestine’ is hounded, condemned and intimidated beyond all civility. Yet he dares to promise to the Palestinian people that he is the man who can secure a state and independence for them. The world renowend ex-guerrilla leader has lost all self-respect and dignity. Such are the wages of capitulation and betrayal.

US and Israel treat him as an old rut who is good for nothing. Really horrible for Arafat if he is still left with some sense and sensibilities! Betrayal has pushed him into the hell. Discredited with his own people and condemned by his masters he sits on the rubble of a Palestinian State that never was. The ‘Kingdom’ has gone with the wind.

Some people still talk of salvaging the ‘peace process’ but it is so much drenched with the Palestinian blood that it is no longer recognisable. For sixteen months the fascist Israeli forces have been using tanks, helicopter gunships, F-16 war planes, machine guns and booby-traps to indiscriminately kill and destroy. Precision bombings and guided missiles have carried on targetted killings. Palestinian residential quarters, farmlands, telecommunication centers, PA and police headquarters, courts — nothing has been spared by tanks and bulldozers . Whoever dared to resist the Israeli destruction brigade was sprayed dead with machine gun bullets. Every act of resistance was met with Hitlerite brutality by the theocratic fascist State of Israel. The whole land of occupied Palestine has been turned into a big concentration camp with numerous men, women and children being burried in graves daily.

The barbarity has not stopped at that only. Palestinians from Gaza and West Bank have been barred from entering into the areas under the direct control of the Israeli authority for earning their livelihood. Economic hardships have played havoc with the lives of the people. Deaths due to these hardships and constraints are not being investigated and reported. Israeli crimes have created another Iraq in the land of Palestine. Not that sanctions are imposed like the US butchers did in Iraq — the Palestine is quarantined. Arab and Palestinians people have been denied the right to work and earn their bread while Zionists import thousands of poor Chinese labourers in close collaboration with the revisionist Chinese authorities and ciminal labour agents.

West Bank and Gaza is dangerously under seige while the whole land of Palestine is occupied by imperialist backed marauding forces. This monster — the State of Israel — is illegitimate, barbaric and inhuman. It deserves total destruction and needs to be swept away from the face of earth alongwith its creators.

PA, the Palestinian Authority born out of the dirty relationship between the US imperialists and Zionists on the one side and renegade Yassir and his close circle of betrayers on the other has no credibility whatsoever. Presently, it is literally non existent. The Zionist killers can enter into PA "held" areas at will and can commit any crime they like. Moreover, the Gaza strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River is criss-crossed with roads that join the numerous Jewish settlements and are under the direct control of the Israeli Army. Palestinians have to answer many questions and prove their identity while passing through or crossing over these barriers. This is utter himiliation, which give rise to limitless indignation. This is the Israeli version of Nazi fascism and concentration camps. It is these Jewish settlements which PA wants vacated and the Oslo Accord calls for dismantling. But successive Israeli governments, whether Likud or Labour or a coalition of the both, as present is the case, have refused to honour their own comittment. This has only compounded the troubles of Yassir Arafat and his PA who find it impossible to sell their Oslo sell-out to the Palestinian masses. Other major trouble for Arafat is the question of a Palestinian capital that can be none other than Jerusalem. The city of Jerusalem is not only the cultural and religious centre of the Palestinian and Arab masses of Palestine but of the whole of the Arab world too. The imperialist conspiracy was to flood it with Jews right from 1948. Now the western part of Jerusalem is all Jew while eastern districts are predominantly Palestinian and Arab. A Palestinian State, whether it is truncated or complete, is unthinkable without Jerusalem. Arafat, under the US pressure, agreed to settle for the eastern part but the Zionists have refused this demand and want a complete conrol of whole of the city though agreeing to allow the ‘Palestinian’ mini state to maintain its central government head-quarters in it. Not only the Palestinians and Arab masses of Palestine but the peoples and governments (though under the pressure of Arab public opinion) of the rest of the Arab world say that the division or the Israeli control of the city is unacceptable. Arafat is caught between the devil and the deep sea. Without securing the control of Jewish settlements and Jerusalem (though only the eastern part) he has nothing to offer to the Palestinians. Israel and the US want him only to act as a cop. His predicament is that he feels disarmed and now almost ditched.

Through continuous terror strikes the Zionist State wants to hammer the point that the PA, present or future, will have to act against anti-Israel Palestinian people with the same ruthlessness if there is ever to be a ‘Palestinian State’. Arafat has failed to act up to the mark despite his willingness and need. Now he is relied no more. the US and Israel are on the look out for a better clubbing instrument. As yet, there is no one to replace Arafat.

Those who had expressed the opinion in 1993 that there was no "other way than to accept the reality of the existence of Israel" and had described the wisdom to accept a handicapped and truncated state of Palestine as "objective and rational" have been silenced by the turn of events. The Arab and Palestinian population of Palestine is seething with rage. Istraeli attacks and targetted killings are putting fuel on the fire. A number of "ceasefires" have failed during the last sixteen months.

Intense and widespread Israeli terror has pushed the Palestinian youth to desperation. And in the absence of new and higher forms to which the stone throwing crowds should have been taken by an able and farsighting leadership, the youth is compelled to resort to daring acts of revenge over the Israelis.

Slowly, the intifada is losing its mass character and individual acts in the form of human bombs are increasingly taking its place. In oppressed Palestine there is no dearth of men full of such a great spirit of sacrifice. Recently, a Palestinian woman fighter too has sacrificed herself in this way. These death defying acts have badly shaken the Israeli fascists who are resorting to even more barbaric and devastating attacks after every such act.

The rage, anger and the great sacrificing spirit which has been the hallmark of the Palestinian fighters for the last forty years is not finding an appropriate outlet—an outlet that could have turned the massive mobilisation in Palestine into the launcing of a great and protracted people’s war.While intifada inspired and mobilised hundreds of thousands to confront the fascist security forces of the Zionist State the human bomb form is restricting the initiative of the masses who could have been mobilised as various arms of the armed revolution. Moreover, the majority of the human bombs target thickly populated civilian areas and crowded shopping places. The scene is fast turning into a situation where it is acquiring the character of Muslim fighters vs. Jews. The initial character of the intifada being the oppressed Palestinians vs. the Zionist State of Israel is being overshadowed thus. That is what the theocratic state of Israel wants. The Israeli state further provokes such actions on the part of Palestinian youth when it unleashes its barbaric military forces to destroy specific areas in an all out manner. Such tactics not only restrict the Palestinian fight-back to a few individuals but target the Jewish people as a whole. It is becoming Muslim vs. Jews, religion Vs. religion. But Palestinians are not entirely Muslims. There are Palestinians who are Christians and also Jews. Even Arabs living in occupied Palestine are not all Muslims. Hamas’s theocratic logic, taken to a higher level, only "justifies" and makes way for Jewish Theocratic State to be replaced by a Muslim Theocratic State. Palestinian national struggle has never been into that objective and its glorious past has to be resurrected which had the mission of the establishment of a democratic, secular and progressive Palestine. Arafat’s capitulation has contributed much to the emergence of such a wrong understanding emerging in the Palestinian national question. The idea of a division of Jerusalem into Muslim East and Jewish West is one strong indication that when one settles for less and compromises on principles the things are bound to snowball into a wrong direction. Jerusalem is being debated now as a "holy city belonging to Muslims" or a "holy city belonging to Jews" and not as an ancient and strong cutural center of the people having developed as Arabs, Jews and Palestinians. The imperialist conspiracy to give Jews a "home" in Palestine after Hitler butchered 60,00,000 of them in Germany, by dividing it on religious lines into Jewish and Muslim parts is taking a massive toll of the two communities. Arafat only contributed to this imperialist conspiracy. It is not without reason that progressive and revolutionary people all over the world condemned the imperialists for not rehabilitating the Jews from Europe in the vast unpopulated lands of the USA, Canada or Australia at the time of the creation of Israel. The imperialists needed a blood hound in the oil rich Middle-East to exercise control over the Arab peoples and they succeeded in their dangerous and horrible design. Jewish people turned into a fodder for feeding Zionist Fascism from being victims of Hitlerite Fascism.

Hamas, which is spearheading the human bomb campaign, has a programme to establish a theocratic Muslim State in Palestine which means putting the present equation in the Palestine upside down where Palestinian and Arabs will replace the Jews as Muslim rulers and Jews will take the place of their adversaries as oppressed ones. This scenario is far removed from the objective of the Palestinian national revolution having the objective of establishing a democratic, secular and a progressive sovereign state of Palestine where Palestinians, Arabs and Jews would live in harmony under a single authority covering the whole of Palestine. No Israel, no Gaza and West Bank for a part of the population and no division of a great city like Jerusalem into east and west on communal lines. Only a unified Palestine for all the people living in this great ancient land is the answer. It is a quite different scenario and most "appropriate, feasible and objective" which will undo the capitulation of Arafat and his ilk,

Quite recently, Hamas declared that it was ready to halt all actions "inside Israel" so that Israel stops its attacks on Gaza and West Bank. It also declared that it was ready even to stop actions in the West Bank and Gaza so as not to weaken the position of Arafat vis-a-vis Israel to maintain the unity of Palestinians (and probably enable him to strike a deal with the Israelis). This was after the Sept. 11 aeroplane attacks in the US. Hamas might have considered that the tactics of Human Bombs have a dead end and cannot lead to the destruction of the State of Israel. May be, it is finding difficult to devise other tactics to confront the powerful Israeli army. However, the offer did not materialise.

Months ago, Hezbollah had declared that it was stopping its attacks on Israel from the Lebanese territory. This was after the news that Iran had softened its stand towards Israel in its bid to come closer to the US. It did stop its attacks and for months not a single incident happened. But quite recently, when a report was doing rounds in Washington that the US might include Iran in its hit list for the "international war on terrorism", and also when the US took the side of Israel on the alleged capture of Iranian weapons meant for the PA, Hezbollah became active again. May be, both times it was a coincidence. But it is an open secret that Hezbollah is financed and supported by the reactionary Islamic regime of Iran (and also Syria) and much of its activities depend on the nuances from Teheran. Before Hamas became active and started making news, Hezbollah was the dominant active Islamic group in Gaza but Khatami’s overtures towards the US drastically cut its operations making way for the Hamas.

The latest statement from Hamas is that it will launch "a total war" against Israel while Arafat has called on all Palestinian groups to "stop attacks on Israel" and agree to a ceasefire so that peace could be established. Arafat wants to steadfastly continue on the path of capitulation while the "total war" is just a rhetorical statement by Hamas knowing well that a total war has a quite specific meaning in military parlance and it is nowhere near a sustained military campaign against Israel, let alone a total war. A total war cannot be launched without progressively involving the majority of the masses. It is far less thinkable with human bombs hitting non-military targets in the main. This only provides a vent for the anger and fire burning inside the Palestinian people but cannot become an instrument to end Zionist oppression and occupation. The Palestinians need an end to the Zionist hell under which they have been living for more than five decades now. Their destination is neither the Taliban or Al Qaeda nor ‘victories’ like that of the Islamic republics of Iran and Sudan. These experiences point to the fact that these obscurantist forces either face liquidation or are destined to capitulate.

This more than ever brings forward the question of addressing to the building up of a revolutionary vanguard in Palestine and other oppressed countries where people belonging to Muslim religion feel threatened or are under the boot of imperialism. Only this can lead to a path of real liberation and put an end to the cycle of rebellion-betrayal-rebellion and again betrayal. The great uprisings like the Intifada needs to be converted into a real war on a higher ideological and political level. The whole history of national liberation wars underline the necessity of making revolutions as thoroughgoing as possible to achieve everlasting victories. Only Marxism-Leninism-Maoism has the proper answer to recurrent betrayals and defeats. Thus far, the brave Palestinian people who have a glorious history of resistance and struggle behind them have not been able to throw up a revolutionary vanguard. The Palestinian fighting spirit and sacrifice has the potential of pushing whole of the Arab world into a spinning effect. The Pa;estinian revolution is inextricably linked with the revolutions in the Arab world. In 1987 when the first intifada was hitting hard at the Israeli foundations Arafat and reactionary Arab rulers were busy behind the scenes in Oslo for enacting the great betrayal. Most of the militant Palestinian groups and organisations, situated in the adjoining Arab countries, remained aloof from the intifada and were busy in carrying sporadic adventurous actions outside of the occupied Palestine or were involved in inter-group rivalries and fights as was seen in Lebanon. No serious attempt was made to raise intifada to a higher level though thousands had sacrificed themselves in that uprising. The sacrifices continue unabated. The Palestinian people are proving once again that they can defy death in the most daring manners. In the absence of strong proletarian forces the world over the enemy has become strong, ferocious and fearless. Yet, the Palestinians refuse to be cowed down. The way foward lies only in a revolutionary breakthrough in the resistance struggle that can come through the building a proletarian vanguard. It is time to transform the intifada into a real war of liberation by devising new tactics and new forms of organisation. The old left like the PFLP is almost out of action. The void was first filled by Hezbollah, and after Hezbollah retreated Hamas built up forces but the latter too does not know where to go from here. This leaves the ground open for a new revolutionary beginning.

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