Maavak Sozialisti: Jassir Arafat (11. November 2004)

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Yasser Arafat (1929-2004)

Palestinians mourn Arafat but struggle for liberation willcontinue

Many Palestinians will view the death of Yasser Arafat with a mixtureof sadness and a wish that the Palestinian Authority he led, had donemuch more to end the poverty and oppression that blights their lives.

Whatever doubts some Palestinians may have had about hisleadership they will see in his death, a snapshot of the brutaloppression and tenuous existence they face on a daily basis. Arafatremained a virtual prisoner in his compound for three years, asituation which undoubtedly contributed to the illnesses from which hedied.

Rotem and Gal11.11.2004

Yasser Arafat is seen by most Palestinians as a symbol of the longstandingPalestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. His past as a guerilla leader sincethe 1960s as one of the founders of the Fatah organization and the PLO(Palestinian Liberation Organisation) gave him a special status among thePalestinian masses. It is hard for many Palestinians to think who could play thesame role or have the same authority as Yasser Arafat.

But while respect will be shown for the role he played amongst many Palestinians,there will be others who rightly question Arafat’s (and the other PLO leaders’)tactics and strategy in attempting to win Palestinian national liberation. In theearlier years of Fatah and the PLO this was armed attacks by secretive guerillagroups as opposed to mass action by the working class and peasantry armed forself-defence. Later on Arafat and other leaders attempted to form diplomaticalliances with corrupt Arab regimes and negotiate with imperialist powers.

Black SeptemberWhen Arafat was faced with a revolutionary situation, he unfortunately betrayed

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such movements. September 1970 in Jordan was one such example where largesections of Palestinians and Jordanians rose up against the corrupt regime ofKing Hussein. Arafat and the PLO leaders could have led a revolutionary strugglefor power which would have changed the whole face of the Middle East. InsteadArafat made concessions to King Hussein and tens of thousands of Palestinianswere killed in the retribution by the Jordanian army that followed.

After the war and the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s, Arafat and mostof the PLO leadership escaped to exile in Tunis. Exile meant that they no longerhad the same intimate connection with the Palestinians and also alienated themfrom the conditions that the majority of Palestinian faced.

The distance between the Palestinian masses and the leadership based in exilewas clearly demonstrated at the beginning of the first Intifada. The PLO leadershipin exile was completely taken by surprise by this event, as was the Israeli regime.The first Intifada provided the basis for the growth of a new leadership from belowin the West Bank and the Gaza strip. After the signing of the Oslo agreementbrought the Tunis leadership back to the Occupied Territories, tensions anddisagreements developed between it and the local leadership which haveremained in different forms up to the present day.

At the beginning of the 1990s the pace of the Intifada had slowed as aconsequence of years of struggle without the defeat of the Israeli militaryoccupation of the territories. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the support ofthe Fatah for Sadam Husain during the first Gulf War left the PLO isolated andfinancially bankrupt.

Under the pressure of US imperialism, which feared future upheavals in theregion, the Israeli ruling class took advantage of the PLO’s weakened position toforce it into negotiations and to accept the Oslo agreement. This deal was nevermeant to give the Palestinians national liberation. It was designed to grant aBantustan-type prison existence to the Palestinian masses with the PalestinianAuthority acting as guards and the Israeli state as prison governor.

The Israeli ruling class preferred to deal with the old weak leadership from Tuniswhich was not as militant as the leadership on the ground. Arafat's regimerepresented the capitalist interests of the Palestinian elite and was totallydependent on the Israeli ruling class for its existence. As such it could not andnever intended to solve the problems of the Palestinians.

The standard of living under the PA regime declined severely hand in hand withthe continuing oppression by the Israeli Defence Forces. At the same time a smallelite enriched itself on the expense of the masses. Without any solution to theproblems of daily life the peace process couldn't last for long. This was the basis


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for the second Intifada.

Second IntifadaThe second Intifada was aimed against both the Israeli regime and in a distortedway the PA. The first reaction of the PA leadership was to condemn this outburst ofthe Palestinian masses. Only after they saw they could not hold back themovement, they tried to take the lead of the intifada.

Over the last few years the Israeli blockade on Arafat in Ramallah, gave him backthe status of a symbol of the Palestinian resistance.

However, despite the fact that for many years Ariel Sharon, the Israeli primeminister, yearned for Arafat's death, the news about Arafat's life-threatening illnesscame at a very inconvenient time for him. In addition to the fear of being blamedfor his death, and the affect it might have on the Palestinian street, the death ofArafat actually poses serious questions concerning the strategy of the Israeli rulingclass.

For the last few years the main claim of the Israeli regime was that Arafat is anobstacle to any negotiation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This wasone of the main arguments Sharon used to justify the disengagement plan.

The death of Arafat could lead to events which dramatically change the situation inIsrael and he PA. Many names have been mentioned as candidates to replaceArafat as the PA president and the leader of the PLO and Fatah: Abu Alla, AbuMazen, Muhamad Dahlan, even Faruq Kadumi (who opposed the Oslo agreementat first) and Marwan Baraguti who has sat in an Israeli jail for more than 2 yearsand holds credit for that in the Palestinian street. But none of them have the creditArafat had as a symbol and a guerilla fighter.

Even during Arafat's life we saw early struggles over the future control of the Gazastrip, when last summer Dahlan's faction in Fatah challenged the control of Arafat'sarmed forces.

More complicatedNow the situation has became more complicated, since Hamas have also laid aclaim for a share in governing the PA. Hamas enjoy mass support in Gaza, but if itbecame part of the PA this might change over the long run and could causeenormous pressure to be exerted on the PA by the imperialist powers who couldoppose its inclusion.

Other issues might bring clashes quite quickly – even before his death there was ademand by the PA for him to be buried at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem whichwas ruled out by the Israeli authorities. Whatever the eventual decision on this


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issue, the main question will be that the funeral will be accompanied by a masspresence of Palestinians on the streets in a situation which will not be fully underthe control of the PA.

At the end of October Sharon won the vote on the disengagement plan in theKnesset (Israeli parliament). The Israeli ruling class wants to withdraw from theGaza strip, but many of the Likud MPs from Sharon's party are opposed which hasexerted huge pressure on the Prime Minister. Four of Likud's ministers tried toambush Sharon during the voting.

Sharon suffers from a lack of support inside his party, and his governmentalcoalition includes less than half of all MPs and therefore the government isunstable.

At the moment he claims that nothing has changed since the death of Arafat, butthere is strong pressure from inside the Likud for canceling the disengagementplan and going back to negotiations with a new future partner.

The option of a government of national unity is still open but it seems like the nextgeneral elections in Israel are only a matter of a short time away.

The death of Arafat has released forces of instability that were hidden beneath thesurface, building up for a long time. These pressures did not develop because ofthe personality of Arafat but because of the inability of capitalism and imperialismto solve the daily problems of Palestinian and Israeli workers.

The solution is way beyond the hands of capitalism and its agents. The problemsof the masses can only be solved by the organisation of society under a socialistplan to reconcile national differences by establishing two socialist states as part ofthe struggle to build a socialist federation on the basis of equal rights in the MiddleEast.

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Maavak Sozialisti: Jassir Arafat (11. November 2004)

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