In pursuit and deepening of the debate that took place with Emilio
Minassian at the Quercy libertarian meetings this summer, in order todefend a reading and a class perspective of the situation in
Palestine-Israel, we asked him a few questions. In the first part, we
will discuss the integration of the Israel/Palestine region into world
capitalism and the class composition in Palestine. In the next issue, we
will address the implications for proletarian struggles and the national
liberation struggle.
As an introduction to the subject
First a word about "where I speak from", as they say. I am not
Palestinian, I have regularly spent a few months in the West Bank over
the last twenty years playing the usual roles of left-wing Westerners
who visit the Territories: solidarity activities, short documentaries,
academic research without follow-up. No doubt in many places this has
been a form of militant tourism, with a Marxist-toto sauce.
I quickly tried to avoid the social frameworks in which pro-Palestinian
activism projects itself, namely hanging out with "professionals" of the
narrative of oppression, in marked encounters. I more or less succeeded,
depending on the periods, the contexts and the energy deployed, and more
on the side of the unemployed and the thugs in the refugee camps than
the workers (not to mention the workers): the unemployed have free time,
and the thugs often want to share their stories of struggles against the
armed forces (Israeli but also Palestinian), of imprisonment and torture
(practiced in Israeli but also Palestinian jails).
Opening one's mouth to say "there are social classes in Palestine" may
seem out of place in a context where for a year now the populations of
Gaza have been drowned in bombs. I probably wouldn't do it, or I would
do it differently, if it were in Gaza and not in the West Bank that I
had dragged my feet. I don't do it to put the massacre at a distance,
but to combat the idea of a radical otherness, of an exteriority, of
what is happening in relation to capitalist social relations, there as here.
You defend the idea that Israel-Palestine is a unit in the global and
regional capitalist space. Can you explain why?
Originally, the Zionist project conceived of a separate Jewish society
in Palestine. This project led to the ethnic cleansing of 1947-1948,
which, while not total, created a "Jewish" space, then essentially of
European origin. In 1967, with the occupation of the Gaza Strip and the
West Bank, which had been annexed by Egypt and Jordan, the population of
the territory administered by Israel ceased to be essentially Jewish. It
was at the same time that a properly Palestinian nationalism was
constructed - and no longer "Arab". One could then have the feeling that
two "nations" were facing each other on the same territory. But from
this Palestinian nationalism, to this day, no separate state entity has
emerged other than on the basis of the administration of "pockets" in
Gaza and the West Bank. The territory controlled by Israel is not made
up of Jewish territories on the one hand and Palestinian territories on
the other. There are many areas of Palestinian majority in the
territories of the state formed in 1948, and a large settler population
in the West Bank. This territory is a puzzle where national
distinctions, if one renounces subjective affiliations, are themselves
the subject of multiple subdivisions, which, in addition to being
ethnicized (including on the "Jewish" side), are today of a social
nature and are all inserted into the Israeli economy.
Starting from the "unity of space" between Israel and Palestine is
therefore a way of moving away from an analysis of the Palestinian
question considered as that of a "people without a state", unified by a
common sense of belonging and a single dispossession. This reading tends
to essentialize national categories that are socially produced, and also
to anchor Israeli state violence in a continuity since 1948, a
continuity that does not take into account its inscription in global
dynamics.
What has been going on for a year is not a war involving two national
spaces facing each other, nor an enterprise of conquest aimed at seizing
resources and markets. It is not the "Palestinian people" who are being
drowned under bombs in the context of a struggle for existence between
two nations. The Gaza Strip is not a social entity external to Israel.
It has been integrated into the Israeli market, into Israeli capitalism,
for nearly sixty years. The Palestinians who live there are, in their
overwhelming majority, proletarians without their own resources who
consume Israeli goods, which they buy with Israeli currency, but who are
not workers whose labor is exploited. They are surplus workers that
Israeli capital expelled from the labor market in the 1990s and herded
into an immense "reserve" a few dozen kilometers from Tel Aviv, in a
logic of animalization inscribed in colonial history.
Can you detail the history of the integration of this space (and its
workforce) into the capitalist market?
From the market point of view, the "Palestinian" space is constituted
by the partition of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. We
start from a situation dominated by feudal structures and the beginnings
of a commercial bourgeoisie. The mandate and Zionism mark the real
beginnings of the proletarianization of the Palestinian Arab peasantry,
but the real trigger is 1948 and the Nakba. Palestinian bourgeois and
feudal lords leave the territory that has come under Israeli control
with their movable property under their arms; Palestinian peasants, most
of them sharecroppers, are driven from their lands and are crammed into
camps.
We can distinguish three cycles in Israeli colonialism. In the first
phase (1948-1967), we are, faced with the Palestinian peasantry, in a
typology close to the settlement colony: ethnic cleansing, land
grabbing, "Jewish" capital and labor. There is a corollary to this, as I
said above, it is the importation of a Jewish proletariat from the Arab
world, itself ethnicized and caught in a colonial relationship of
animalization-exploitation. The accumulation of capital, during this
period, is done under the rule of an omnipotent planning state, held by
the Ashkenazi and socialist elites, with a trade unionism integrated
into the state.
In a second phase, between 1967 and 1990 or so, with the conquest of
Gaza and the West Bank, we moved to a colonial situation of the
"exploitation of indigenous labor" type. Israeli capitalism entered a
phase of intensive integration into international capital, among other
things through the military industry. For about twenty years, the
proletariat of the Gaza and West Bank camps experienced massive
integration into wage labor, in the least qualified sectors:
construction, agriculture, etc.
The Oslo Accords opened a new phase, that of a colonial relationship
structured around the figure of the Palestinian surplus and the
subcontracting of its management. Israel retained control of the
territory, continued its offensive to destroy the peasantry and
entrusted the management of the Palestinian proletarians, who were
herded into sealed urban areas, to a national framework, resulting from
the liberation struggle.
In this context, there is an integration of the commercial bourgeoisies
that had escaped the Nakba - those, anchored in Hebron and Nablus, who
had found themselves in the territory annexed by Jordan between 1948 and
1967 -, with this management class from the PLO (Palestine Liberation
Organization). This class, integrated into the security apparatus of the
PA (Palestinian Authority), has a dual origin: there are the managers
from the "external" who arrived in Arafat's suitcases between 1994 and
1996, and those from the "internal", from the first Intifada and Israeli
prisons. It is a composite class, divided into competing factions. It
enjoys an international security rent, but it also controls entire
sectors of the territories' economy, in construction, infrastructure,
telephony, and of course import-export with Israel. All these sectors
are connected to the Israeli market and investments.
Does the war in Gaza not mark the entry into a new phase?
One might think so. The post-Oslo phase was marked by the inflation of
control techniques deployed by Israel on this proletariat that had
become essentially unproductive: division of the territory into
micro-zones, implementation of a crazy permit system to authorize
travel, work, access to care, general profiling, surveillance of social
networks, computerized recognition system, but also massive use of
randomness (in arrests, opening or closing of crossing points, access to
permits) to "test" behavior. These technologies and know-how were
massively exported, and therefore producers of value.
It seems to me that since last year we have entered the military aspect
of this logic of experimentation. The current practice of destruction
and massacre is not only limitless: it is meticulous, thoughtful,
controlled, and, at the same time, it is difficult to imagine what
"victory" is being sought. My hypothesis is that the massacres in Gaza
constitute a sequence of experimentation, which has value for global
capitalism - as had, in another way, the "stop and go" logic of the
global economy during Covid, which implied a strong dimension of
"biopower". Be careful, this is not to be postmodern and say that any
logic of domination has become autonomous from capitalist relations. The
surplus proletarians of Gaza no longer have a productive function for
Israeli capital, but the cutting-edge sector of control technologies,
with high added value, "needs" them as guinea pigs in order to then
enter into an international circulation. Thus, we test bombings and the
profiling of individuals by artificial intelligence, we manage the
relationship to famine with a meticulousness aimed at constantly staying
on the edge of malnutrition (until now), we do the same with epidemics, etc.
This logic of endless military aggression against the surplus
proletarians of Gaza is supported at arm's length by the Western powers:
all the political gesticulations calling for moderation are theater (one
only has to compare the question of the delivery of weapons with Ukraine
to see that no limitation is placed on the Israeli war machine by its
allies).
You speak of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat in Palestine. Could you
give us a portrait of the class composition in Gaza and the West Bank
and tell us what are the conditions for exercising the struggle between
these classes? Does the status vis-à-vis Israel determine this class
affiliation?
The Palestinian bourgeoisie does not form a firmly established national
class: it remains effectively dependent on its submission to Israeli
capital and the Israeli state. Palestinian capitalists (if we mean by
that "of Palestinian origin"), as soon as they are free to invest, will
spontaneously prefer to realize their capital outside the Palestinian
territory - and therefore outside the Israeli national framework. It is
undeniable that the Israeli occupation has constrained the development
of a territorialized Palestinian capitalist class. An American
researcher (Sara Roy) popularized the notion of "de-development" to
evoke the way in which Israel has prevented the creation of a "free"
market economy, that is to say, one inscribed in the world market, in
the territories. The occupation has oriented the development of
capitalism in Gaza and the West Bank in the direction of an exclusive
and subordinate complementarity, shaped production in a logic of
subcontracting, and Israeli capitalists have carved out a captive market
for themselves in the Territories. The Palestinian business bourgeoisie
has every reason to resent the occupation: it is confined to the traffic
sector, it is a comprador bourgeoisie, to use a term invented by
Trotskyists. Does this imply that its struggles are those of the
proletarians of the Territories? Unless we believe in trickle-down
effects, we must doubt it.
What is central, however, in the social dynamics that run through the
Territories is this "political" bourgeoisie formed in the context of the
Oslo Accords, whose destiny is linked to the management of the
Palestinian proletariat. In its sociology, it itself largely comes from
this proletariat. It imposed itself on the traditional dominant classes
(what we call the "great families"), who pledged allegiance to it, and
penetrated their world. Its middle managers (from Hamas in Gaza but
especially from Fatah in the West Bank) constitute a force for
supervising the surplus proletariat "on the ground". They are at the
intersection of the world of militancy and that of the rent from
international donors. They are both strongly contested (insofar as they
do everything to "shut the door behind them") and solicited in access to
salaries; and they have embodied a form of social ascension and class
revenge via political struggle.
To speak of a surplus proletariat does not imply that people do not
work, but that they have been sent to the margins of capitalist
exploitation. Many work in a piecemeal manner, in small structures,
often commercial, for poverty wages and without a contract (of the order
of 10 dollars per day, while the cost of goods is indexed to those of
the Israeli market).
Others in the West Bank continued to work in Israel, in construction,
catering or agriculture, on very precarious terms, either by crossing
illegally or by relying on intermediaries to access permits that could
be revoked at any time (they have been suspended since October 7).
Contract workers were paid around EUR1,400 per month, from which had to
be deducted prohibitive costs of "passage" and, often, of purchasing
work permits.
In the West Bank, there also persists a peasant economy that is often
"secondary" and under pressure from colonization. The dynamic of
proletarianization of the peasantry has continued constantly since the
beginning of Zionism, a direct consequence of the process of land
grabbing and monetization.
And then, there is this world of political rent, resulting from the
money poured out by international donors to defend forms of relative
stability linked to their interests. This rent supports between a
quarter and a third of the population, knowing that 40% of public sector
employees work for the PA security forces. They are paid according to
the legal scale of "formal" salaries, around EUR450 per month, but the
funds paid to the PA by its donors and by Israel (via a system of tax
retrocession) are constantly threatened with being cut, which leads to
suspensions of salary payments.
Moreover, part of this political rent is diverted by political
executives for their own benefit, to maintain clienteles and develop
investments in the informal sector. A significant part of the surplus
proletariat survives thanks to these diversions. It is a socially
restless population, which had been massively integrated into the
wage-earning workforce in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, and which had
been massively mobilized during the two Intifadas. It is concentrated in
the refugee camps, which are historically the breeding ground for the
Palestinian "dangerous classes" and remain so today. In Gaza as in the
West Bank, from Jabaliya to Jenin, these "suburbs within the suburbs"
are under constant fire from the Israeli army.
The volatility of the social structure in the Occupied Territories is
therefore significant. The political bourgeoisie and especially its
cadres are always under threat of going backwards, that is to say of
being demoted by Israel from the status of collaborator to that of
resistance fighter, and therefore of being imprisoned.
And in Gaza?
In Gaza, during the period when Hamas was in power (since 2007), the
centrality of political rent and of an essentially "comprador"
bourgeoisie integrated into political circuits remained the same, but in
a context of blockade, therefore with even lower investments and
exacerbated volatility. Rents came from the control of the movement of
goods and international prebends from Qatar and Iran. The entrepreneurs
who have built fortunes in recent years (for example in the tunnel
economy) have done so in connection with the Hamas security apparatus.
Can we even talk about a class structure in the current situation in
Gaza? There are always, even in this kind of situation where every
tomorrow is uncertain, groups of individuals (linked to Hamas, to clan
military organizations, or formed on the basis of gangs) who manage to
do business. But that does not make a class structure - or it is a
concentration camp type class structure, which is not part of any social
reproduction over time.
The rest in issue 346 of January
Interview conducted by zyg in October/November 2024
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4309
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten