There will be no Palestinian State, but rather the Decomposition of all the Peoples of the Region
By Francois Lazar (April 28, 2011)
In the same vein as his predecessors, Mr. Alain Juppe (the French Secretary of State) has just taken his turn at making a declaration favoring the constitution of a
Palestinian State
. In fact, he announced during a colloquium on April 16th that
the aspirations of the Palestinian people were no less legitimate than the aspirations of the other peoples of the southern Mediterranean. Israel also has the right to live in peace. That is why, in the coming months, the idea of a democratic, viable, continuous Palestinian State living in peace and security alongside the State of Israel need go from oft-repeated incantation to reality (…)
A little over a year ago, in February 2010, Bernard Kouchner expressed his belief that a
rapid
constitution of a Palestinian State – putting the creation of a Palestinian police force as well as economic aid from the European Union first (and we know what that means: the setting up of special economic zones that are totally deregulated). Flying in the face of a reality that sees the control of the Israeli state imposing itself more and more on the territories that are still Palestinian, that sees the daily murders, exactions and humiliations that are committed against Palestinian women, men and children, all of our ministers and heads of State are lining up to speak of hope and equality.
The content of the State that Mahmud Abbas — the non-elected president of the Palestinian Authority — defends in each of his diplomatic tours, remains an imprisoned police State. It is imprisoned in that it is surrounded by an eight-meter high wall, impassable barriers and military check-points. It is a police state because, in order to contain the hopes of the refugees to their right to return, to freedom and to the equality of the rights of the Palestinian population of the West Bank, which are incompatible with the existence of a predator and racist Israeli State, the United States and the European Union have furnished the Palestinian Authority with an over-equipped police force whose essential function is to supplement the Israeli army and to protect the occupant against any revolt or protestation by the occupied. The State that we are talking about could not include the Gaza Strip, under the control of Hamas — whose only demand is to be at the head of the Palestinian Authority, instead of the corrupt leadership of Fatah. With or without the Gaza Strip, it would be without geographic contiguity and, as such, a sole and unique case in the entire world.
As for the Palestinians on the inside, subjected to profound racial and social segregation, they simply don’t exist for the likes of Obama, Juppe and Kouchner. A State without an airport, a State without sovereignty, an
archipelago
State made up of Bantustans like so many dotted islands without geographical contiguity, is not a State. The proclaiming of this State, however, does serve several objectives: first, keeping in place the mafia-like regrouping, backed by the IMF and the European Union, that is currently in power in Ramallah; secondly, doing away
officially
with the unity of the Palestinian people, wherever they are, by denouncing any claim to the right to return; and thirdly, preserving the State of Israel.
This last point needs some clarification. In a Middle East that is unpredictable and unstable from imperialism’s point of view, the State of Israel is not only a factor of order. It represents the regional outpost of a society based on the private ownership of means of production, whose connections with the American economy and political class have become inextricable. Confronted with revolt and revolution in the Arab countries — which are regional expressions of a universal movement against oppression and exploitation — the State of Israel, which is rightly considered by the Arab peoples as the military arm of the USA in the region, has been seriously shaken. It remains only the more dangerous, for its neighbors as well as for the Jewish populations living there. The problem is that Israel can only transform itself within the framework of Zionism… and Zionism is Israel.
Mahmud Abbas, flanked by his Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a former senior executive of the IMF who never changed partners, only acts with the specific agreement of the White House. As direct agent of imperialism, he doesn’t have a free hand. Hamas, whose essential strength in the isolation of the West Bank, remains the favorite bogeyman of the Israelis. Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister who is preparing a trip to Washington to denounce any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State, has invoked the lack of results of a
peace process
that never existed and will not break with the Zionist settlers, whose representative he is. Facing upcoming presidential elections in America, Obama cannot afford to even suggest re-opening negotiations that at best will never result in anything but a temporary status quo. Not only is it a total impasse, but also it makes the State of Israel — founded on the negation of the Palestinian people — more and more appear to the eyes of the whole world as what it has always been: a colonial type of State, a foreign body in the region, a warmonger.
Here a major question appears: in what way would the fundamental democratic aspirations of the Palestinian people be incompatible with the aspirations of the Jewish populations living in the region?
In Tunisia, in Egypt, the regimes of Ben Ali-Mubarak (corrupt torturer regimes based on the looting of the peoples for the account of the multinationals) were justified as being the ramparts of
Islamism
. For the leaders of this world, any justification is valid when it comes to defending their interests and their profit. The media under orders have for a long time now specialized in acknowledging this political necessity.
The
Palestinian State
has only been devised to enable the maintaining of the Israeli State, which does indeed exist and within which a growing number of Jewish populations are sinking rapidly into poverty and the worst uncertainty. Democracy and equality of rights are not divisible. The main obstacle to the establishing of a single democratic and secular State over all the historical area of Palestine, a single structure in which all the components of the region could live in equality, is the perpetuating of a failed mode of production — that of capitalism — based on making people believe that they are bound to the interests of their leading class. The revolution led by the Tunisian people, the revolutionary mobilization of the Egyptian people have once again revealed all the lies of this enslaving vision, whose goal is to divide the people amongst themselves for the greatest profit for a handful of thieves.
