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 (CA
No. 345), we discussed the integration of the Israel/Palestine region
into world capitalism and the class composition in Palestine. In this
issue, we wish to discuss the implications of this class composition for
proletarian struggles and the national liberation struggle.
Can the national liberation struggle, however interclassist it may be,
not loosen the grip of class domination for Palestinian proletarians?
Because it is possible that Israeli colonization protects the
Palestinian bourgeoisie from an extension of class contradictions.
Where is the national liberation struggle in Palestine today? Does it
even still exist? The national liberation struggle is certainly a
perspective (a national state freed from the colonizer), and we can
consider that it remains valid in Palestine as long as colonialism
persists. But what about the process of mobilization? Historically, this
has always taken place around political formations, while acting on the
class structure. In Palestine, the national liberation struggle was
embodied in the parties of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization),
actors of what was called the "Palestinian revolution" that followed the
1967 war: it is around these parties (Fatah, PFLP - Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine - and all the splits that came out of them)
that a social movement was formed that overthrew the traditional
hierarchies, inherited from the feudal world. The "Palestinian
revolution" gave rise to a management class from the intellectual petty
bourgeoisie in exile, which, through the circulation of political rents,
integrated the proletariat of the refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon,
Syria (and sometimes non-Palestinian proletarians from these countries)
into organizations of struggle. The traditional bourgeoisie was not
overthrown, but it was shaken: it was forced to negotiate with these
organizations to protect itself from the armed proletarians who wore
their colors. This is the classic driving force of national liberation
movements: the absorption, by a political management aspiring to
transform itself into a state apparatus, of a proletarian or peasant
social movement, or, more often - and this is the case in Palestine -,
inscribed in the proletarianization of peasant masses resulting from
colonial relations. The process then spread to Gaza and the West Bank in
the 1980s, but without the military dimension: the first Intifada began
as a revolt of the proletarians of the Occupied Territories (largely
those living in refugee camps) exploited by Israeli capital; it was only
later that the PLO "recovered" it to make it a national political
movement. What happened next? In the "classical" model, when the
political leadership seizes the State, the disconnection between the
interests of the social movement and the political formation occurs, and
the proles are sent back to work by the national State supposedly at the
service of the masses. What is special about Palestine is that this
disconnection occurred without independence having been obtained: at the
end of the period from the Oslo Accords to the second Intifada
(1993-2004), the national leadership abandoned the fight for
independence to be satisfied with the rents and markets granted by
Israel. Since then, the oppression of the proletarians has always taken
on the features of Israeli occupation and colonization, but this in the
absence of a perspective of struggle proposed by the political
organizations that emerged from the national liberation struggle,
because their leaders are now integrated, in the position of
subcontractors, into this configuration. This is the famous "double
occupation", omnipresent in the speeches in the West Bank.
Has Hamas not taken over?
In some ways, Hamas has followed in the footsteps of the PLO. The social
composition of its leadership is similar: middle classes devoid of their
own capital, from universities, which straddles the line between a
proletarian base and the interests of the commercial bourgeoisie. But
Hamas, unlike the PLO, did not rely on a social movement. It formed a
sort of pious, hierarchical counter-society that respected the social
order. It integrated the proletarians in a regimented manner; it never
sought to capture their autonomous activity in the context of its
negotiations with the bourgeoisie.
In this regard, I think that we must distinguish, at least
methodologically, the notion of struggle, which assumes a form of
autonomy of action, material issues and involving social contradictions,
from that of "resistance" as used by hierarchical military organizations
such as the Al-Qassam Brigades in Gaza. Hamas can legitimately claim to
be in the resistance (like Hezbollah or other politico-military groups
in the region), but it must do so on a centralized, hierarchical,
military model, separating the population from its "troops", and being
ready to unleash them to repress the struggles. In the mid-2000s,
fringes within it pushed Hamas to integrate the framework of the
autonomy agreements by participating in the elections, that is to say to
position itself, following Fatah, by subcontracting Israel in the
management of the proletarians of the Territories. This is what it ended
up doing by seizing power in Gaza in 2007. As it did militarily, and
without negotiating with the occupier, it was able to keep its face of
intransigence, but it nonetheless became, objectively, a local
subcontractor in the management of the surplus proletarians. For sixteen
years, Hamas administered the Strip, managed relations with Israel
(through negotiations and missiles), repressed struggles, and allowed a
class of entrepreneurs to enrich themselves under its wing. Until,
suddenly, on October 7, 2023, it freed itself from this role of
subcontractor to, I imagine, reinvest its dimension as a transnational
political-military organization of the Hezbollah type. In doing so, it
sacrificed the class of Gazan entrepreneurs that had developed under its
wing. We can assume that this reorientation was not without internal
tension, that it reflects the explosion of an old contradiction within
it between its political-military branch with a strong proletarian
clientele and its fringe inserted into the Palestinian business bourgeoisie.
British domination, then Zionist colonization, the enormous proportion
of refugees, the daily exercise of colonial violence, etc., were able to
materially construct a common identification of the Palestinians and
their resistance expressed in the form of the term "people". Is this
construction only a reflection of the discourse of the Palestinian elites?
This identification obviously exists, but we must ask ourselves what is
happening behind it. I am not trying to say at all costs "peoples do not
exist, it is a mystification of the dominant class aiming to mask its
domination"; and even less "if the mask fell, the proletarians would
become aware of their class interests".
The idea of a Palestinian people is not specific to Palestinian elites;
it is sometimes even used against them. The question is: what struggles
are being played out within the category of "people," openly or
discreetly, between the different class segments that use it? It is not
because we identify with a people that we do not fight from our social
position.
And we come back to what I was saying about the national liberation
struggle and interclassism. In the 1960s-1990s, the PLO needed
proletarian struggles to negotiate its share of the pie against Israel,
while the proletarians used their "national" leadership as a way of
legitimizing their struggles against the elites. In the Territories, the
first Intifada was the apogee of this dual logic of capture of the
social movement by the political leaderships and use of the national
struggle by the social movement. But, between 2002 and 2005, the
proletarian struggles and those of the national leaderships, which until
then had been moving together (in a conflictual manner), stopped doing
so. In the wake of the failure of the second Intifada (which in its
first months renewed the same interclassist logic linking rioting or
armed proletarians to political leaders), and the national leaderships
(in the West Bank and even in Gaza) entered into a logic of repression
of struggles, including those that mobilize the language of national
liberation. Even if it may seem counter-intuitive, the proletarian
struggles in the Territories have had since the failure of the second
Intifada as their primary adversary a Palestinian national framework.
Simply because it is with this that they are in contact, that they play
the role of buffer. Israel has freed itself from the burden of
reproducing populations, which it has passed on to a Palestinian
framework. Israel intervenes in the West Bank towns according to a logic
of "raid" - and in Gaza of massacre.
What about the struggles for 20 years outside/against the parties?
To talk about what I know best (I have only set foot in Gaza once, in
2002), there was, in 2015-2016, in the north of the West Bank, a latent
insurrection of the proletariat of the refugee camps against the
Palestinian Authority (PA). At the time, there was talk of an "internal"
Intifada, whose epicentre was the Balata camp in the suburbs of Nablus.
This social movement forced the Palestinian police to retreat, leaving
space for young people to reform armed groups on their bases, outside
the party hierarchy, and to impose themselves socially against the
notables linked to the PA, in Nablus and Jenin. The clashes of spring
2021 (riots in Jerusalem and Palestinian cities in the Israeli "1948"
territories, Hamas's political-military offensive, the PA's cancellation
of elections) drove the point home: the PA was weakened and this
somewhat calmed its attempts at authoritarian rule.
What I found interesting in the 2015-2016 cycle of riots was that many
people held a discourse (which is contradictory only in appearance)
according to which the Palestinian administration prevented both
physical confrontation with the occupation and access to the Israeli
economy as a worker. There was a nostalgia for the time when "we worked
for the Israelis during the day, we threw Molotov bombs at the Israelis
at night".
The same year, there was a major strike among teachers employed by the
PA, which the latter managed to neutralize, using logics of
intimidation, repression and blackmail, on the model of the "Arab"
regimes in the region, but which constituted a sequence of social
protest that shook the foundations of its political control.
Why is our political camp silent on these struggles?
The PA and the Palestinian bourgeoisie are omnipresent in the discourses
in the West Bank as a source of oppression. But we must take into
account the situations of interaction, of course: we, the white
activists on the loose in the Territories, are appropriated with a
function: that of testifying to counter the Israeli propaganda machine.
This appropriation is essentially carried out by the middle classes, who
are in one way or another part of a logic of access to capital (material
or symbolic) from the West, and it is a fact that no one expects
solidarity in the class struggle against the Palestinian exploiters. So
people caught up in these "internal" (from a national point of view)
relations of exploitation will talk to you about it, all the time, but
we are not going to invest this speech with a dimension of political
message - except in moments of extreme tension, as was the case in
2015-2016 in the north of the West Bank.
What the Palestinian proletarians experience as proletarians hardly
reaches our ears, nothing surprising in that: this experience is not
contained in the "national cause" that the political leaders transmit to
their relays abroad.
What common perspectives can the proletarians of this zone have? Israel
represents the image of a nightmarish future: that of a state that
belongs to the central bloc of capitalist countries that has reproduced
on its territory the global zoning of the labor force as observed in the
global division of labor. This social zoning is played out in a
quasi-conurbation: the distance between Gaza and Tel Aviv is barely
greater than that between Paris and Mantes-la-Jolie. And it operates on
the basis of ethnicity (this is a constant in the history of Israel as
in many other states, even outside the context of national struggle:
before the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, it was the Jewish
proletarians "imported" from Arab countries who paid the price). But
over the last twenty years, the state has imposed itself as the
guarantor not only of the social reproduction of the Jewish proletariat
that it dominates, but of its very "physical" existence, of its
survival. Today we are witnessing a regimentation of this "national"
proletariat behind its exploiters at a level never seen before in
history, facing the surplus of Gaza penned in a concentration camp under
constant bombing.
We must therefore keep in mind that the struggles are part of this
nightmarish universe. It is difficult to imagine that they could produce
power relations capable of "breaking down the segmentations". Until last
year, the simple fact that, in the Territories, these struggles
continued to exist and to constrain the reproduction of social relations
(once again, I am talking here about the struggles, not about
hierarchical resistance) was in itself something that, personally, shook
me and nourished me. Today, the weight of the logic of massacre crushes
everything: the capacity for autonomous action of the Palestinian
proletariat is under threat of carpet bombing and, as long as the Jewish
proletariat remains captive to the Israeli state (which is not about to
change), there is nothing to negotiate through the balance of power. We
have indeed entered another phase, hardly one that brings much hope.
Doesn't denying the material base of the Palestinian "people" amount to
providing "passive support" to the state that colonizes and represses them?
I think it is possible to develop a framework of analysis in which we
feel solidarity with the struggles in Palestine without being under any
illusions about the perspectives brought by the "national"
socio-political apparatuses. This is what Socialisme ou Barbarie had
partly succeeded in doing during the Algerian War: developing an
internationalist line capable of holding a critical position on the FLN,
based on a class analysis.
In Palestine, as everywhere in the world, we are in a period where we
will not find anywhere a political incarnation "of class" of the
proletariat. Some cling to an identification with left-wing parties like
the PFLP or the FDLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine),
or to a hypothetical civil society at a distance from the parties. I
understand the approach, and I was led to share it in my travels by
"cultural" affinity, but these parties and this civil society are
crossed by class contradictions that the executives want to pass off as
secondary with regard to national domination. However, it is with the
discourse of these executives that we find ourselves (generally) in
solidarity, without realizing it.
I cling to the idea that social relations take precedence over political
ideologies, and that, both emotionally and intellectually, we must
always try to "start from the bottom", socially speaking, beyond
political identifications, to understand the struggles that "the"
national struggle claims to encompass.
In the identification with Palestine, with the idea of Palestine,
distinct logics can be identified according to class, the relationship
to politics, to militant capital, cultural, etc. This is the case there,
but also with us, in expressions of solidarity. These different logics
do not coexist, they do not draw a convergence or a unity: they are
contradictory, they are in struggle, in a more or less assumed or silent
manner.
I have little to say on the terrain of "what to do". It seems to me in
any case that, more than the different political positions held in the
solidarity movement (what we think of Hamas, of a bi-national State or
other), it is appropriate to question its social composition and the
practices of struggle that result from it, in order to then position
ourselves in the movement - in the hope of "bringing the war home", and
of attacking the maintenance of social order where we are and, thus, of
putting an end to the massacres in Gaza. In France, the capture and
supervision of solidarity demonstrations by politicians from La France
Insoumise and their ilk who instrumentalize the "Palestinian cause" as
part of their interests, or even by associations that position
themselves as interlocutors of the government, in my opinion refers to a
defeat of the proletarian, non-political component of the movement,
which had expressed itself for example with more force during the 2014 war.
Interview conducted by zyg in October/November 2024
https://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4337
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