WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #178 II. 13 - The anarchist communists, the Jewish and Palestinian questions - section II.: The nationalist and statist drift of the PLO (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in Jerusalem at a
meeting held in May 1964. It was attended by 422 dignitaries
representing the Palestinian nation. In the original PLO statute of 28
May 1964 it was declared that Palestine was a single regional unit
within the British mandate: the right of return for refugees and the
right to self-determination for Palestinians were affirmed, rights
questioned by the Zionism. Only in 1988 did the PLO officially adopt the
two-state solution, Israel and Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its
capital.
In 1993, PLO President Yasser Arafat, in compliance with the Oslo
agreements, recognized the State of Israel in an official letter sent to
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, thus allowing the birth of the
Palestinian National Authority. Today, years later, mutual recognition
cannot be said to have benefited the PLO which, having assumed the
government of the West Bank, relieving Israel from the formal occupation
regime, but, in reality, allowing Israeli policy to progressively take
possession of the territory and to transfer the land to Israeli
settlers, without even minimal restraint being placed on them. This has
discredited both the PLO and the Palestinian National Authority, today
reduced to a simulacrum of itself, burdened by the well-founded
suspicion of bad governance, theft, appropriation by its leadership of
the organization's funds, the result of donations and not always
legitimate activities of the PLO. Yet, it must be said that originally
this was an organization with a socialist, or at least progressive,
orientation, and that it included various Palestinian movements with a
substantially secular ideological approach, committed to the struggle
for the achievement of Palestinian independence and for the liberation
of the occupied Palestinian territories! After the six-day war, the
credibility of Egypt and Jordan as countries that should have
interpreted the interests of the Palestinians and liberated their land
had definitively foundered, the majority of the PLO came under the
control of Al Fath led by Yasser Arafat , effectively creating a state
within a state in Jordan. Seeing its power undermined in 1970, the
Hashhemite monarchy that governed the country. he believed he had to get
rid of this cumbersome presence by organizing the armed repression of
the Palestinians. This action, which went down in history as "Black
September", led to the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps and the
transfer of many Palestinians who were already refugees in Lebanon and
Syria; all this although the Arab League recognized the PLO as the only
legitimate representation of the Palestinian people, at the same time
Jordan declared that it did not represent the Palestinians in the
struggle for their land, renouncing any claim on the West Bank which
becameres nullius on which Israel placed a heavy mortgage, colonizing it.
In an attempt to reach a peaceful resolution of the issue, in 1974, the
Palestinian National Council approved the "10 Point Program", formulated
by the leaders of al-Fath, in which it was hypothesized to reach a
peaceful resolution of the issue, to give life for a binational
Palestinian/Israeli state, democratic and secular, in which all citizens
would enjoy identical rights, without discrimination on the basis of
race, sex or religion. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP) dissociated itself from the project and abandoned the PLO. This
suggestion was taken up by the UN in 1976, but opposed both by the Arab
countries of the so-called Rejection Front and by the United States who
opposed their veto.
This policy temporarily put the nationalist projects of the Jewish State
in crisis, aided in discrediting Arafat by Abu Nidal, leader of the PFLP
with attacks against supporters of the project. Meanwhile, the presence
of the Palestinians in the countries bordering Israel became the cause
of the weakening of their institutional stability, as their military
organization constituted a state within the state, destabilizing the
legitimate powers. It so happened that, once the Lebanese civil war
broke out, the PLO first fought against the Maronites, then against
Israel and finally against the Amal militias supported by Syria. From
1985 to 1988 Amal besieged Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon to
eradicate Arafat's supporters. Many thousands of Palestinians died from
gunfire and starvation. After the sieges of Amal ended, there was an
explosion of conflict between the different Palestinian factions present
in the camps and the mutual massacre of many of them.
It was entirely predictable that the Palestinian population, exhausted
by exile, disoriented by its many supposed supporters, would end up
being used as cannon fodder, as militias to settle the many disputes
within the Arab countries between the Sunni and Shiite components, the
militias that were headed by this or that government, this or that
ethnic group or religious group, with the result of unleashing the
fratricidal struggle.
Caught between Israel's refusal to accept any negotiations, the
contradictory position of the USA which, while operating in support of
the Jewish State, declared that it would negotiate with the PLO if it
accepted resolution no. 242 of the UN and had recognized Israel, having
taken note of the massacre of its people and its militants, moved its
headquarters to Tunisia, as if wanting to escape from the conflict.
The first Intifada, which exploded in the Occupied Territories. it took
the PLO and its leadership by surprise, demonstrating that the
Palestinian question still remained open; the people had reacted by
giving themselves a new leadership with the establishment of the Unified
Intifada Command, which brought together numerous important Palestinian
factions.
To regain political control of the situation with the Palestinian
Declaration of Independence in Algiers, the independent State of
Palestine was proclaimed and, even without explicitly mentioning
declarations number 242 and 338 of the UN Security Council, the
intention emerged to support a solution to the conflict on those bases,
confirmed a month later in Geneva by Arafat himself. The premises were
thus laid for the Oslo agreements, concluded on 23 August 1993 and
signed in Washington on 13 September of the same year, according to
which Gaza and the West Bank would be self-governed by the PA.
Netanyahu became the leader of the conservative Likud party in 1993,
after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic of the Israeli
far right, and on March 3 and 4, 1996, Palestinian terrorists organized
two suicide bombings in which 32 Israeli citizens were killed and we
went to the vote. These two attacks led to the fall of Peres as prime
minister.
Netanyahu took advantage of this to lead his party to victory in the
1996 elections and become prime minister.
For the first time, the Israelis directly elected their head of
government, which demonstrates, if any were needed, the importance of
the structure of the institutions in allowing a solution to problems
that responds to the real interests of the populations. Netanyahu
campaigned against the agreements made by the Labor government: he made
it a condition for any progress in the peace negotiations that the PA
respect its obligations, mainly with regard to the fight against
terrorism, but it is clear that regardless of the intentions, none of
the Palestinian leaders could have guaranteed control of the galaxy of
groups into which the Palestinian front was now fragmented.
Four years of Netanyahu's government followed during which Israeli
penetration into both Gaza and the West Bank was characterized by the
foundation of numerous colonies, but the open conflict smoldered in the
bowels of Palestinian society and exploded on 28 September 2000 on the
occasion of the visit, believed by the provocative Palestinians, by the
then head of the Likud Ariel Sharon accompanied by a delegation of his
party and hundreds of Israeli police in riot gear at the Temple Mount, a
sacred place for Muslims located in the Old City. The Intifada was a
succession of violent events that rapidly increased in intensity and
continued for years.
The growth of these settlements was interrupted by the subsequent Barack
government which, at the end of its mandate, decided to dismantle many
of these settlements and above all in 2005 those in Gaza and the
abandonment of the Strip by the Israelis. This produced a climate of
discontent and loss of confidence in the Israeli public which meant that
the subsequent elections were won by the right led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Thus the construction of settlements in the West Bank resumed massively;
land was confiscated and Palestinian homes were demolished. In
particular, the new neighborhood called Har Homa was built around
Jerusalem, despite international condemnation. On Netanyahu's part there
was a refusal to allow the establishment of an independent state, to
allow the return of refugees, to proceed with the dismantling of the
settlements built, abandoning the occupied territories, thus returning
to the 1967 borders. Netanyahu's policy it was instead oriented towards
prolonging the negotiations as much as possible by taking advantage of
the Israeli position of strength, relying on accomplished facts.
This policy caused the definitive discredit of the Palestinian national
authority and increased consensus towards extremist groups with an
Islamic religious orientation and characterization such as Hamas and the
Islamic jihad in Palestine. With the second intifada there was a strong
resurgence of Palestinian suicide attacks in the main Israeli cities, in
particular against places of civilian aggregation such as buses and
nightclubs. These terrorist acts had already been present in previous
years, but had not obtained significant political consensus from
Palestinian public opinion, however they were the most evident and
immediately visible result of the crisis of representation for
Palestinian interests, indicative of the desperation of the population
who was experiencing the drama of the occupation, and this also because
the Israelis, for their part, carried out various operations against the
civilian population such as the demolition of buildings and
neighborhoods, both in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, to a policy
of "murders targeted" with a political motive and engaged in bloody
battles such as the siege of Jenin.
In the strip the second intifada. in fact it ended with the electoral
victory of the Palestinian extremists of Hamas who defeated the
moderates of Fatah, while relations between the new Israeli government
and the PA became tense again.
Finally, Netanyahu's government had a counterpart that mirrored it and
pursued the same goal: to make the project of creating two states to
resolve the Palestinian question impossible. From now on, on the one
hand, Hamas launched an option on the West Bank, fueled by Netanyahu who
thought, by doing so, to gain the necessary time to turn the situation
in his favor, with the progressive occupation of the territories.
The figures of the second intifada, updated to 15 February 2006, speak
of a total of 4,995 deaths of which 3,858 on the Palestinian side and
1022 on the Israeli side. As of September 28, 2006, exactly six years
after the start of the Second Intifada, many media outlets reported the
figure of 4,312 Palestinian deaths and 1,084 Israeli deaths. Seven years
after it began, Palestinian deaths have risen to 5,000, according to the
Palestinian Statistics Center.

https://www.ucadi.org/2023/11/05/i-comunisti-anarchici-la-questione-ebraica-e-quella-palestinese/
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