Palestinian Land Day: Struggle for self-determination continues

The following is adapted from a talk presented at a meeting of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSLweb.org) in San Francisco, April 2.

March 30, Land Day, commemorated the Palestinian people’s struggle for self-determination. This day is marked by Palestinians all over the world. On March 29, 1976, more than 1,000 Palestinians living within the 1948 borders of Israel marched through Jaffa, chanting and carrying Palestinian flags to denounce Israel’s plans to demolish over 500 homes. The next day, a general strike was held. Israel killed six Palestinians participating in the demonstrations.

Today, 34 years later, Israel continues to terrorize and evict Palestinian families and demolish homes across the West Bank and in Jerusalem. It is fitting on this occasion to go over the situation in Palestine and also to analyze the rift that has developed between Washington and Tel Aviv.

Gaza under siege

Dec. 27, 2009, marked one year since the beginning of Israel’s 2008-2009 brutal siege and invasion of Gaza. The three-week land and air assault on Gaza was a highly concentrated use of firepower directed overwhelmingly at civilians. As a result of Israel’s barbarity, opposition to the occupation around the world has escalated.

The beginning of the attack involved 54 warplanes bombing civilian and government buildings. During the first nine hours of the attack, 100 tons of munitions were dropped on the Gaza Strip. In all, 1,440 Palestinians were killed, including 926 civilians. Over 5,000 people were wounded and thousands of homes destroyed. Israeli forces targeted women and children, ambulance drivers, and schools and hospitals and destroyed as much infrastructure as they could. They used highly destructive weapons, including banned phosphorus munitions.

The Gaza Strip has the sixth highest population density in the world, with 1.5 million people forced into an area of 139 square miles. Four thousand homes were destroyed, leaving 50,800 Gazans displaced. The total damage has been estimated at over $2 billion.

Following the military attacks, Israel has strengthened its debilitating blockade on Gaza. Access to electricity, natural gas and other sources of fuel is severely limited. Palestinians living in Gaza are generally unable to rebuild their homes, businesses and schools, since Israel refuses to let steel and cement through the border crossings.

The situation of political prisoners

For decades, Palestinians, confronted with great violence, have tirelessly struggled against the crimes of the state of Israel. It is instructive to look at the situation of political prisoners in this so-called democracy.

A Palestinian researcher, Abdul-Nasser Farawna, a former political prisoner himself, has come up with statistics on Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. There are currently 8,200 Palestinians imprisoned, among them 320 children. The number of detainees who have died in detention is 197, and hundreds of detainees have died after their release due to health complications resulting from torture and medical negligence during interrogation. Hundreds of detainees have been in solitary confinement for several months, in some cases for several years, and are deprived of visitation rights.

A former Israeli military commander, Eran Erafti, detailed the widespread abuse and torture of Palestinian youth by occupying Israeli soldiers: “You take the kid, you blindfold him, you handcuff him, he’s really shaking. … Sometimes you cuff his legs too. Sometimes it cuts off the circulation.” Erafti acknowledged that some of the kids are as young as nine or 10.

Of the 9,000 Palestinians arrested in 2009 by Israel, 700 were children. These children are tried in military tribunals in which anyone over the age of 16 is tried as an adult.

The West Bank and the two-state ‘solution’

Since the formation of the state of Israel, its military strategy has not only been to conquer land, but also to drive out as much of the Palestinian population as possible. Nearly 80 percent of the Palestinian population was forcibly removed within the first year to make way for the new Israeli state. In the 1967 war, Israel seized the remainder of historic Palestine—the West Bank and Gaza. This created 300,000 more refugees. Settlers now occupy numerous homes left behind in Jerusalem by Palestinians expelled in 1948 and 1967.

The so-called peace plans under consideration are based on a two-state “solution.” To get an idea of what a two-state solution would look like, we could look at the allocation of resources in the West Bank. The daily life of Palestinians in the West Bank consists of dealing with checkpoints, a heavy military presence, and the apartheid wall that coils around their existence. Added to these burdens, Palestinians can look in any direction and see illegal Israeli settlements with lush green lawns, well-maintained swimming pools and, in some Israeli cities, huge leisure water parks.

Just minutes from these government-subsidized settlements, Palestinians live with limited and unstable access to water. According to an Amnesty International report issued Oct. 27, 2009, Israeli settlers, whose population numbers about 450,000, use four times as much water as the 2.3 million Palestinians in the West Bank—that’s over 20 times as much water consumption per capita. Between 180,000 and 200,000 Palestinians in rural communities have no access to running water.

Expansion of settlements in Jerusalem

The expansion of settlements in and around Jerusalem is very important to the apartheid state of Israel. Roughly 245,000 Palestinians and 200,000 Israelis live in East Jerusalem. Some plans for a two-state solution have involved making Jerusalem the capital of the state of Palestine—that is what Yasser Arafat hoped would happen. Israel has continued to build Jewish-only settlements in East Jerusalem, while bulldozing Palestinians’ homes, leaving many families with nowhere to go.

According to the Israeli Coalition Against Home Demolitions, 18,147 Palestinian homes were demolished by Israel between 1967 and 2006. This figure does not include homes that have been destroyed or significantly damaged by Israeli air or artillery strikes.

In 2009, Israel announced plans to build 40,000 homes in Jerusalem over the next 10 years, with at least 2,000 of them in East Jerusalem. The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories reports that 89 Palestinian homes were bulldozed in 2008 alone in East Jerusalem.

During U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden’s visit to Israel, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu announced approval of plans to build 1,600 new apartments for Jews only in East Jerusalem. This is in open defiance of the international legal prohibition against building settlements on illegally occupied land.

U.S.-Israeli differences

Even though it is really a continuation of a decades-old expansionist policy, Israel’s recent announcement created somewhat of a rift between the U.S. government and Israel. During her March 22 speech at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee summit, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the building and expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem has hindered the “peace process.” But what is the real source of the rift between Washington and Tel Aviv?

For U.S. imperialism, Israel’s role is to serve as a watchdog and proxy army. But the reason the United States needs this garrison state to begin with is to help ensure its domination over the oil-rich region of the Middle East. The United States definitely needs the state of Israel, but it is also interested in the survival and stability of its client states in the region. For client states like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and others, Israel’s continued expansionism and belligerence poses a problem.

There is widespread sympathy for the Palestinian people and equally widespread hatred for the state of Israel among all the Arab people in the region, and beyond. The client states need to have something to show to their own people to pretend that they have done something for the Palestinian people. Otherwise, their chances of going the way of the Shah of Iran will be greater.

For this reason, for the survival of its client states, the United States really wants to get a phony peace process going. And that is the so-called two-state solution. The Obama administration is interested in pursuing this policy not out of sympathy for the Palestinian people but in pursuit of imperialist goals.

For Palestinians, the two-state solution is not a solution at all. In fact, Israel has made it impossible to implement a two-state solution. Throughout the 1990s, the Israeli government consistently blocked the implementation of the Oslo Accord. Successive Israeli governments have continually stepped up the building of settlements in the West Bank. The aim is to make the emergence of any kind of a real Palestinian state impossible, even one that encompasses only the West Bank and Gaza—a mere 22 percent of historic Palestine.

But even if a two-state solution were possible, it would not really be a two-state solution. It would be one state, Israel, and a series of Palestinian municipalities. Palestinians would still have to go through Israeli checkpoints to go from one part of Palestine to another, because the so-called Palestinian state would be disjointed. Israel would continue to control the air, the sea and the borders, and Palestine would not even have a military. Israel would continue to control water and other resources. The Palestinian so-called state would merely have control over city services.

The only just solution

It has become increasingly obvious that the only just and feasible solution is the dismantlement of the racist apartheid state of Israel as an exclusionary Jewish state, and the founding of one secular state for all of the inhabitants of historic Palestine, with the right of return for the approximately 6 million displaced Palestinians. This is not such a fantastic idea, but if this were to happen, the United States would no longer have its attack dog in the region.

The problem for the Obama administration today is that the right wing of the Israeli ruling class, headed by Netanyahu, is unwilling to go along even with a fake two-state peace process. Israel is interested in its own expansion and not overly concerned with the stability of U.S. client states. In fact, if things get out of hand in one of the Arab client states, that may create conditions for Israel to underline its indispensable role for the United States. U.S. imperialism does not specifically benefit from Israel’s expansionism, although it has largely been willing to go along with it because of Israel’s strategic role in U.S. policy.

It is hard to tell how far Washington is willing to push Tel Aviv to moderate its approach and play along with the fake peace process. This will depend on the calculation of the Obama administration on the costs and benefits of a confrontation with the Israeli state.

Both the United States and Israel are working toward subjugating the Palestinian people. Their differences in approach should not lead anybody to place any hope for the Palestinian people being granted their rights by the United States. As they have done for decades, the Palestinian people continue to wage their courageous fight, with the full consciousness that their freedom will only come as a result of struggle.

In this struggle, the Palestinian people need international support. The apartheid system in South Africa was finally brought down with the persistent struggle of the South African people aided by the kind of international support that made it impossible for imperialist countries to continue supporting it. Israeli apartheid, faced with the same array of forces, will eventually collapse.