2444. The U.S. Socialist Workers Party Accommodates to Zionism

By John Leslie, Left Voice, September 13, 2016

Jack Barnes, Socialist Workers Party National Secretary

Editor's note: For much of my political life, I viewed the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as the leading revolutionary socialist current squarely based on the revolutionary legacy of the short-lived Russian socialist revolution.  Unfortunately, the SWP leadership centered around Jack Barnes has been on a retreat from its revolutionary socialist heritage since the early 1980s.  For some time now, the SWP has become an insular sect while calling itself the "communist current" and all others "petty bourgeois." At the same time, it has been subject to the pressures from the capitalist class offensive and the rot of the labor movement and the socialist movement in the United States and much of the world. One of the latest manifestation of this retreat is the SWP's accommodation to the U.S. imperialist government and "liberal" Zionist position that favors "a two state solution" to the "Palestinian problem." 

When Yasser Arafat signed the so-called peace accords with Yatzhik Rabin on September 13, 1993, the SWP saw it as consummation of the process bourgeoisfication of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.  And until recently, the SWP continued its call for a democratic secular Palestine where Palestinians and immigrant Jews can live as a nation. The idea of the democratic secular Palestine originated from the fifth national council of the PLO in 1969. It is still supported by a small sector of Palestinians, Jews and others.  

In its July 25, 2014 the Militant ran an editorial that suddenly broke with its decades old support for a democratic secular Palestine and instead opted for the two-state "solution" urged by the U.S. government and the liberal Zionist groups that worry about the demographic dynamics that would place the Jewish population in a minority should Israel annex the rest of Palestine.  The editors called for: 

❖ Recognition of a Palestinian state, as it is today, as a stepping stone to fight for a single, viable geographical homeland for the Palestinian people.

❖ Recognition of Israel, as it is today, both a Jewish and increasingly multinational secular state. This includes the right of return for the Jews, which will become increasingly relevant as the world crisis of capitalism kindles Jew hatred as a reactionary bludgeon against fighting labor.

Notice that The Militant editorial comes in the middle of Israeli war against the 1.8 million Palestinians squeezed into less than 141 square miles who have no army or air force to defend themselves against the most modern and powerful air force, navy and army in the Middle East courtesy of U.S. imperialism.  More than 2,100 Palestinian, the great majority civilians including hundreds of children were killed by the Israeli army during the war.  Only 66 military and 7 civilians were killed on the Israeli side.  Yet, the editorial place the primary responsibility on the Hamas: "Hamas terrorism and murderous retaliation of Tel Aviv’s armed forces." Thus, the Militant editors turn the victim into the criminal--in another twist of historical facts, they air the Israeli government;s claim that it was Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel and that forced them into waging a genocidal war.  Thus, the Militant editorial position anticipated self-identified Zionist politician Senator Sanders' depiction of the Gaza War--that it was in retaliation against "Hamas' terrorism" but the Israeli government "overreacted." 

The Militant editors call for the "right of return" for Jews citing the world crisis but not the right of return for Palestinians which has been a central demand of the Palestinians and the SWP's historical position.  But the entire idea of a supposed "right of return" for Jews to Palestine was cooked up by the Zionist colonial-settler movement after it gave up plans for creating a "Jewish Homeland" somewhere else after reaching an agreement with British imperialism after World War I to carve up Palestine for a Jewish State.  There is no other basis for any "right of return" of Jews to Palestine. Jews have lived for a very long time in many countries of the world and they are from various races and ethnic groups just as Muslims and Christians. But the Palestinians were forced from their home and homeland in millions by the Zionist colonial-settler terrorism and war by the Zionist colonizers. The poorest are still living in refugee camps in the Middle East.  Those in the West Bank in effect live under military occupation and their land is gradually being taken from them for new Zionist settlements.  Those in the Gaza Strip are even worse off even though the Israeli army dismantled settlement and withdrew in 2005 because the Zionist State has imposed a harsh land and sea blockade and has waged three murderous wars against its population since 2005. The Gaza Strip is in reality the largest open air prison in the world.  The Palestinians who still remain inside Israel have been second class citizens subject to ongoing racism--how else can life be for non-Jews in the Jewish State?  So, what happened to the Palestinian right of return?  The SWP that now recognizes the colonial-settler Jewish State as legitimate cannot possibly accept the right of return of the Palestinians because many of them were expelled from their homes inside the territory of the Jewish State. Finally, the Militant editorial concerns about the safety and security of Jews given the deteriorating world situation seems a bit bizarre. What happened to the concern for war against "terror" waged by American imperialism that has targeted Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians? Is not rightwing backlash in the U.S. causing Islamophobia? Are not African-Americans being targeted in their churches and home and streets by outright racists and the Police? Are not Latinos being deported en mass and being threatened by one of the two main Presidential candidates? If fact, while Jews certainly face anti-Semitism from the same neo-fascists and rightwing forces in the U.S. and in Europe, they are not the main target of the imperialist and capitalist offensive.  

The U.S. and Israel just concluded an agreement for the highest level of military aid in Israeli history: $38 billion over the next ten years.  Here is what President Obama said about the military aid and U.S. policy towards Israel:

"As I have emphasized previously, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine.  Ultimately, both this MOU and efforts to advance the two-state solution are motivated by the same core U.S. objective of ensuring that Israelis can live alongside their neighbors in peace and security." (Haaretz, September 14, 2016)

Does it not sound like the Militant editors call for the two-state solution? Meanwhile the offensive to stifle any criticism of the colonial-settler Jewish State continues. Just two days ago, the administration of the University of California, Berkeley, suspended the Ethnic Studies course "Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis" because it critically examines the history of Zionism (see the students protest letter here).  In March the Regents of the University of California passed a resolution that equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and aimed to ban it (see, here for a report).  This campaign has been spearheaded by the rightist Israeli government to stop the increasingly successful Boycott  Divest, Sanction (BDS) Movement popular among the youth and on campuses.  Of course, there is a world of difference between  Zionism as the colonial-settler movement that established the racist Jewish State and anti-Semitism.  While Anti-Semitism as anti-Jewish prejudice has a long and horrific history mostly in Europe and it must be opposed by all, it is a fraud to equate anti-Zionism and opposition to the colonial-settler Jewish State as Anti-Semitism.  The same logic would make the Black Lives Movement into an anti-White racist movement.  

The SWP has caved in to this type of pressure imposed by American imperialism and Israeli government.  The following article documents the SWP's retreat from unconditional defense of the Palestinian right to self-determination citing its historical positions that are still the best guide for those who wish to unite the working people on the basis of unconditional defense of the Palestinian right to self-determination and by fighting anti-Semitism to achieve peace in the Middle East.  KN

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What is the new SWP position?

In a nutshell, the SWP position is that there is no Zionist movement; Israel is no longer a colonial-settler state; and the Palestine solidarity movement, in particular the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and sections of the left are infected with anti-Semitism.

The SWP now supports the “right of return” and a two-state solution, having abandoned the demand for a democratic secular Palestine. An editorial in The Militant (8/25/14) states, “Under current conditions, a foundation for a way forward can only be built on an agreement that includes:

 Recognition of a Palestinian state, as it is today, as a stepping stone to fight for a single, viable geographical homeland for the Palestinian people.

 Recognition of Israel, as it is today, both a Jewish and increasingly multinational secular state.

This includes the right of return for the Jews, which will become increasingly relevant as the world crisis of capitalism kindles Jew hatred as a reactionary bludgeon against fighting labor.”

What was the old position?

From the 1971 SWP Resolution on Israel and the Arab Revolution:

"Israel is a settler-colonialist and expansionist capitalist state maintained principally by American imperialism, hostile to the surrounding Arab peoples.”

“It is an imperialist beachhead in the Arab world that serves as the spearhead of imperialism’s fight against the Arab revolution. We unconditionally support the struggles of the Arab peoples against the state of Israel.”

“The principal victims of the creation of Israel were the Palestinians—i.e., the Arabs who inhabited the region where Israel was established, who have been driven from their homes or placed in subjugation within Israel and the newly occupied territories. The Palestinians are a part of the Arab peoples, but they also form a distinct national grouping, with its own history of struggle against imperialism. There were Palestinian uprisings in 1921, 1929, and during the 1930s, reaching a high point in 1936-1939."

We can also refer back to the work of Israeli socialists Machover and Orr, who wrote on the class nature of Israel:

"If the uniqueness of the Israeli working class consisted only in the fact that it was composed mainly of immigrants, then it could still be assumed that through time and patient socialist propaganda it would start to play an independent, possibly revolutionary, role. In such a situation, patient educational work would not differ much from similar work elsewhere.

“However, Israeli society is not merely a society of immigrants; it is one of settlers. This society, including its working class, was shaped through a process of colonization. This process, which has been going on for 80 years, was not carried out in a vacuum but in a country populated by another people. The permanent conflict between the settlers’ society and the indigenous, displaced Palestinian Arabs has never stopped and it has shaped the very structure of Israeli sociology, politics, and economics."

In 2011, SWP leader Jack Barnes upheld the Party’s original position.

“What the Israeli rulers are seeking to impose in order to consolidate Israel within borders of their own choosing is not a ‘peace process,’ as it’s dubbed by liberals in the big-business media. It’s the consolidation of an Israel still based on the forcible expulsion of the Palestinian majority, together with the ‘right of return’ of those of Jewish parentage—and only those of such parentage. Its newly imposed borders will roughly correspond to the 400-mile-long wall the Israeli rulers are building inside the occupied West Bank, which lops off up to 10 percent of that occupied territory for Israel. What’s more, Tel Aviv intends to hold onto East Jerusalem and selected large suburban Jewish settlements in the West Bank, as well as strategic military locations along the Jordanian border.

“There can and will be no long-term peace with the dispossessed Palestinian people on that basis. Or on any other basis that forcibly seeks to guarantee a permanent, large Jewish majority in Palestine. The Israeli rulers aren’t pulling back from their ‘right’ to demolish the family homes of Palestinians accused of bombings or other attacks, let alone their ‘obligation’ to ‘execute’ members and leaders of Palestinian organizations they hold responsible for ‘terrorism’” (emphasis mine).

Supporting the new SWP position requires someone to ignore some crucial facts. If there is no Zionist movement, how do we explain the Birthright trips organized by US Zionist groups, which reinforce the MYTH that the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people? Why is it that Jewish people can fly to Israel and become citizens overnight and a Palestinian who was born there cannot return? Organizations exist to facilitate emigration to Israel, including direct recruitment to the Israeli military

How do we account for the continued existence of illegal settlements and the fact that more are planned? These settlements occupy militarily strategic high ground. Armed settlers, often from the US, harass and assault Palestinians. How do we explain the destruction of olive trees that are hundreds of years old?

Is Israel an apartheid state?

The analogy to apartheid* in South Africa is appropriate — preventative detention without trial, theft of land and ethnic cleansing, curtailment of freedom of movement, and the super-exploitation of labor. More than 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of Israel in the war that followed the founding of the State of Israel, the Nakba. Palestinian workers from the West Bank, who want to work in Israel, face discrimination, strict permitting processes, and lower pay than Israelis. Israel holds more than 6300 prisoners, many in preventative detention. More than 400 Palestinian children are held as “security prisoners.” Palestinians in the occupied territories are subject to military courts.** *http://itisapartheid.org/Documents_pdf_etc/outlineapartheidproofedbyc8.15.12.pdf
**http://www.militarycourtwatch.org/

Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories drive on separate roads and cars have different colored license plates. Israeli settlers move freely and Palestinians still exist under a military occupation. Despite promises to discontinue settlement building, the Israeli state continues to build settlements that are for Jews only — no Palestinians allowed. Jewish people from anywhere in the world can go to Israel and become citizens and Palestinians, who were born there, are forced to remain in exile.

Some Israelis recognize the apartheid character of Israel:

"Apartheid means fundamentalist clergy spearheading the deepening of segregation, inequality, supremacism, and subjugation.

Apartheid means Likud lawmaker and former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter calling Sunday for separate, segregated roads and highways for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank.

Apartheid means hundreds of attacks by settlers targeting Palestinian property, livelihoods, and lives, without convictions, charges, or even suspects. Apartheid means uncounted Palestinians jailed without trial, shot dead without trial, shot dead in the back while fleeing and without just cause.

Apartheid means Israeli officials using the army, police, military courts, and draconian administrative detentions, not only to head off terrorism, but to curtail nearly every avenue of non-violent protest available to Palestinians."

Other Zionist sources reinforce the idea that Israel must remain a state exclusively for Jewish people:

"The government of Israel wants to maintain the demographic dominance of Jews in the country and keeps giving incentives to Jews all over the world for immigrating to the country.
The case is very much otherwise for the non-Jews. You shall need to apply for business immigration if you are really keen to moving into the ‘promised land’ for those who escaped from the horrors of Holocaust. Getting a job here is another way to answer your question on how to move to Israel. However, you shall be required to spend many years working in the country before you can become eligible for settling here permanently. Even after you become eligible, the laws of immigration are not as lax as in Canada or US."

It’s clear that immigration by non-Jews is actively discouraged. Many Jews from other points in the Middle East who have been forced to leave their countries. That said, Israel has not been welcoming non-European Jews, Ethiopian and Middle Eastern Jews.

So what about the Israeli Arabs or Palestinian citizens of Israel?

Palestinian "citizens" of Israel face systematic discrimination in education, employment and at every level of Israeli society.

The law forbids the immigration of the Palestinian spouse from the occupied territories of an Israeli Jewish citizen to the State of Israel. Land ownership by Arabs is restricted.

Palestinian-Israelis are not conscripted into the Israeli military and few choose to serve. "There has also been little attempt to integrate Palestinian soldiers…segregation between Israel’s Palestinian and Jewish soldiers was strictly enforced until the 1970s, and is still the norm. In addition, the air force and elite combat units continue to exclude Palestinian soldiers."
https://electronicintifada.net/content/false-promise-integration-palestinian-soldiers-israel/8465

The military plays a central social, political, and economic role in Israeli society. All Jewish men and women are required to serve, with some exceptions for religious considerations and for married women. Israel’s military posture towards its neighbors has been hostile since the founding of Israel. Using the pretext of self-defense, the Israelis went to war in 1967, seizing and occupying the parts of historic Palestine not previously assimilated in 1948 as well as parts of Syria and Egypt. The Israeli military has historically acted as a proxy for US interests in the region and elsewhere. This includes selling arms to apartheid South Africa, providing arms and training to the Argentine Junta, and arming the murderous dictatorship of Efrain Rios Montt in Guatemala. Former Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, referred to Israel as the “American aircraft carrier…that cannot be sunk.”

The "two-state" solution is a dead end, since the Israeli government has created the "facts on the ground" to ensure the non-viability of a Palestinian state, which would be relegated to less than 20 percent of the territory of historic Palestine. “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a press conference in Hebrew in which he stated that he would never accept Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank because Israel’s security needs are too great in an era of Islamic radicalism.”

Given the increasingly racist and reactionary character of Israeli society, the idea of equal rights within Israel is a pipe dream. The best solution is a democratic secular Palestine with equal rights for all. Promotion of a Palestinian “state” in the remaining parts of the occupied territories is acceptance of a Bantustan. The Israeli ruling class has never once negotiated in an honest way. Never once has an agreement been honored by the Israelis — and when Palestinians resist their own erasure, they are labeled the aggressor.

What is the character of the Palestine Solidarity Movement? How should we see BDS?

Is opposition to Zionism anti-Semitic? How has the Trotskyist movement traditionally approached this question?

The 1971 SWP resolution states:

"Our revolutionary socialist opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state has nothing in common with anti-Semitism, as the pro-Zionist propagandists maliciously and falsely assert. Anti-Semitism is anti-Jewish racism used to justify and reinforce oppression of the Jewish people. Marxists have been and remain the most militant and uncompromising fighters against anti-Semitism and the oppression of Jews.

The source of the oppression of the Jewish people in this era is the capitalist system, which in its period of decay carries all forms of racist oppression to the most barbarous extremes. This was horribly illustrated in the holocaust directed against the Jews of Europe by German imperialism under the Nazi regime. Today, anti-Semitism remains widespread in all of the Western imperialist countries. Until the capitalist system is abolished in these countries there is the ever-present danger that a new variety of virulent anti-Semitism can arise."

Of course, it’s easy to quote a resolution from 1971. To be clear, we should recognize that anti-Semitic ideas are present in society and work their way into the context of the Palestine Solidarity Movement. An anti-semite holds stereotypes about Jewish people, and supports the oppression and even persecution of Jewish people. However, being against the actions of the Israeli state is not based on stereotype, nor is it in support of the oppression of Jewish people. 
The idea that the entire movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people is somehow anti-Semitic is a dangerous political error.

That said, when backward and reactionary anti-Semitic thinking is present, do we abstain and label the whole movement anti-Semitic? Or do we challenge this thinking openly and help to root it out? Communists should provide leadership in these situations.

We can find some instruction in the way the SWP dealt with Malcolm X, who early on expressed extremely backward ideas about Jewish people. Did the Party just walk away? Or did they engage him on these questions? Early on, the SWP recognized the progressive core of Malcolm’s thinking – his opposition to racism and white supremacy, his emphasis on independence from the capitalist political parties, his support for self-determination and the right to self-defense. SWP members regularly sold the Militant newspaper at Malcolm’s speeches and he was a regular reader of the Party press. “…he came to the conclusion that capitalism is the cause of racism, that you can’t have capitalism without racism, and therefore socialism should seriously be considered as an objective by black Americans as well as by Africans and Asians and Latin Americans. At the very least, you can say that in his last year he became pro-socialist and anti-capitalist.” https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/breitman/1967/03/speech.htm

There are racists in the trade unions. Does this mean the labor movement is racist? Of course not. Yes, there are anti-Semites who infiltrate the Palestine solidarity movement. Does this mean the whole movement is anti-Semitic? It does if you support the SWP’s revision of their politics on the Palestine question. Now, according to the SWP, there is no such thing as Zionism and criticism of the Zionist project is code for anti-Semitism. This logic erases the Israeli state and its actions. Simply asserting that the Palestine solidarity movement is anti-Jewish doesn’t make it so.

And what about the manifestations of anti-Semitism that rear their heads in the movement? Communists do not shrink from struggle against backward ideas. Certainly, we stand up to racism and sexism in the unions. Part of revolutionary leadership is taking a strong stand against backward ideas wherever they present themselves. This means standing against manifestations of anti-Semitism in the movement.

We should also recognize the limitations of BDS. Some BDS activists present the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions tactic as “the” way apartheid in South Africa was brought down. This discounts the role played by the Black working class in South Africa, the mass democratic movement in the townships and the military defeat of the apartheid army by Cuban troops that invaded Angola.

The BDS tactic has made it possible for activists to expose the connections between Apartheid Israel and government entities, educational institutions and corporations. By threatening the base of financial support for the occupation, including settlement building, the BDS movement has undermined support for Israeli policy in US society and internationally. It is this threat to the legitimacy of the Israeli state that drives attempts to discredit the BDS movement.

Why does this matter?

In recent years the Palestine Solidarity movement has been the target of a series of attacks aimed at silencing the movement. One common charge leveled by pro-Israel organizations is that the movement is anti-Semitic. In a period where the Solidarity movement is under attack on campuses and in communities, it is imperative that we defend the right of the movement to organize and speak. By serving as a left cover for Zionist attacks, the SWP does itself, and the movement, a disservice.

1660. Archbishop of Westminster Shocked by Effects of Gaza War

By Harriet Sherwood, The Guardian, November 23, 2014

Vincent Nichols, centre, the archbishop of Westminster, meets a priest at Der Latin church in Gaza City. Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters.

The archbishop of Westminster said he was deeply shocked by his first visit to Gaza on Sunday, and that he had seen “a deeply depressing situation in a devastated region where people are trapped”.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the leader of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales, toured neighbourhoods of Gaza that were virtually flattened during the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas in the summer. He visited a hospital and an industrial zone that were badly damaged by air strikes and shelling, and an orphanage caring for dozens of traumatised children, some of whom had been given up by parents unable to care for them.
“I was deeply shocked at the effects of war and endemic poverty,” he told the Guardian. “Pope Francis has said there must be an end to war, and when you see the effect in a place like Gaza it reinforces that.”

There was little sign of rubble being cleared, let alone reconstruction, he said. “It’s astonishing the number of people with the appearance of nothing to do – people just sitting on the streets. There is only the barest sense of order. This is not an economy that is going to be able to support its population.”

Nichols said he was concerned about “the innocent citizens of Gaza caught in a vice of conflicting ideologies – an almost impossible situation for them”.

The greatest fear was that the “rule of the extremists” was coming to the fore in the Middle East. “Political leaders must not be satisfied with a security or military response, but need to find a political solution,” he said.

Real political leadership was essential, he added, but “optimism is not the word that comes to mind, yet without it things will get worse.”

He had given an undertaking to the people he met in Gaza that he would try to widen public understanding of their situation, he said. Nichols has previously spoken in support of Palestinian Christians whose homes and livelihoods are threatened by a section of the vast concrete security barrier Israel is building near the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

During last summer’s war more than 2,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, while Israel puts its death toll at 66 soldiers and six civilians, including a Thai worker. About 17,000 homes in Gaza were destroyed and reconstruction costs have been estimated at £5bn.

1613. Israel as Apartheid: A Personal Story

By Rula Jebreal, The New York Times, October 27, 2014

Palestinian Israeli's demand equality

My mother, Zakia, was so proud that my sister and I spoke better Hebrew than Arabic. Osman, my father, believed that by achieving the highest levels of education, we would one day be treated as equal in our country, Israel. He sincerely believed that Palestinians capable of articulating their narrative would win the hearts and minds of Israeli Jews.

My parents believed in the promise of a democracy that transcends ethnicity. I still retain that dream, but it is tested every time I go home. I am a citizen of Israel, married to an American Jew, yet I am not welcome in Israel. For I am Palestinian.

During a recent visit, my husband breezed through security at Ben-Gurion airport, but our teenage daughter and I — who both have dual citizenship of Israel and Italy — were strip-searched. I’m inured to the procedure: I have to endure it almost every time I enter and leave the country. But our daughter, age 17, sobbed with chagrin. “This place breeds hate everywhere!” she cried.

On the same trip, I attempted to renew her Israeli passport. “She is not Jewish,” an official told me, “and therefore we are not sure she is entitled to citizenship.”

For Israeli Palestinians — and we make up 20 percent of the population — these are ordinary humiliations. But I wonder what my parents, both now dead, would have made of the graffiti that recently appeared on the walls of our family home in Haifa, a mixed city in the north of Israel.

“Death to Arabs,” it read.

During the recent war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, my cousin was walking on the beach near her home, also in Haifa. She overheard a group of Israeli sunbathers casually discussing how the Israeli Army should deal with the residents of Gaza — “Just kill them all,” she heard one say.

“I’ve never felt so scared in my 32 years,” she told me. “I don’t want them to know I’m Palestinian.”

Israel is increasingly becoming a project of ethno-religious purity and exclusion. Religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox parties occupy 30 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, and the coalition government includes members of Jewish Home, a religious Zionist party, and Yisrael Beiteinu, a right-wing nationalist party. Central to their politics is a program of discriminatory legislation, designed to curtail the civil rights of Palestinian Israeli citizens.

Chief among the more than 50 discriminatory Israeli laws documented by Adalah, the Haifa-based Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, is the Law of Return, which automatically guarantees Israeli citizenship for every Jew regardless of birthplace. Often, they are shepherded into settlements in the West Bank (illegal under international law), where they receive government benefits. Palestinian Israeli citizens, meanwhile, are subject to a ban on family reunification: If they marry a fellow Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they are prohibited from living in Israel under the Citizenship and Entry Into Israel Law.

In September, Israel’s Supreme Court dismissed a petition challenging the Admissions Committees Law, which allows communities to reject housing applicants based on “cultural and social suitability” — a legal pretext to deny residency to non-Jews. In practice, even before the law was passed, it was virtually impossible for a Palestinian to buy or rent a home in any majority-Jewish city.

Further ethnic separation is maintained by the education system. Aside from a few mixed schools, most educational institutions in Israel are divided into Arab and Jewish ones. According to Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a Hebrew University professor of sociology who has produced the most comprehensive survey of Israeli public school curriculums, not one positive reference to Palestinians exists in Israeli high school textbooks. Palestinians are described as either “Arab farmers with no nationality” or fearsome “terrorists,” as Professor Peled-Elhanan documented in her book “Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education.”

Israel’s system of segregation has led to a situation where, according to a recent poll, 42 percent of Jews say they have never met a Palestinian.

Historically, ultra-Orthodox Jews did not serve in the armed forces. Today, they do — and serve in every capacity, including in the most important elite Israeli army units, such as the Sayeret Matkal special forces and Unit 8200, whose responsibilities include gathering intelligence on any Palestinian they deem a “security threat.”

Unlike every former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the F.B.I., Yoram Cohen, who today heads the agency, is a religious Jew. That change is typical of Israeli society. The greater integration of ultra-Orthodox Jews clearly offers benefits to Jewish Israelis, but for Palestinian Israeli citizens, it has meant a new, religiously inspired racism, on top of the old secular discrimination.

National leaders proudly promote hate policies. Israel’s foreign minister and the leader of the secular nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, Avigdor Lieberman, has championed a call to boycott the businesses of Palestinian citizens of Israel and, ominously, has even sought to make the “transfer” of Palestinians legal. Secretary of State John Kerry has met with Mr. Lieberman — apparently without challenging him on such reprehensible views.

This is the atmosphere in which Israel’s Palestinians live. And there is no redress available to us elsewhere. Our rights and welfare certainly cannot be represented by the Palestinian Authority, whose jurisdiction is limited to partial control of the population of the West Bank. Its president, Mahmoud Abbas, cannot negotiate for us because we are Israeli citizens. Israel, however, prefers not to think of us as such, and thus resorts to all manner of petty aggressions to prove it, like trying to deny my daughter a new passport.

Israel is quick to point out efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state. Yet what truly undermines Israel’s international standing is not its critics, but Israel’s abysmal treatment of its own citizens who are Palestinian. It is little different than other countries that have systematically discriminated against and segregated a whole class of its people based on race, religion and ethnicity.

While Israel (like the United States) claims to abhor racism and human rights violations elsewhere, the country’s political leadership is actively enacting laws that ensure a pervasive institutionalized system of discrimination. What Israel needs, conversely, is a civil rights movement.

Rula Jebreal is a journalist, foreign policy analyst and author.

1598. The Evolving Political Economy of the Palestinian Liberation Organization

By Raja Khalidi, Jacobin, October 15, 2014

In the eve of the dismemberment of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) military apparatus and its related civil and political infrastructure in Lebanon in 1982, even friendly critics of its performance in the country were not far off the mark in describing it as a “state within a state.”

Until scattering to all corners of the Arab world as a result of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the PLO administration had effectively shared sovereignty with the Lebanese state over a large swath of the country for most of the preceding decade and had developed state-like institutions.

Even in the exile of the refugee camps of Lebanon, the PLO found it difficult to resist pretensions to “national” state-building goals. This was a natural defense mechanism in an environment dominated by Arab regimes that were as threatened by the rise of the Palestinian armed revolution and the wave of popular mobilizations that it inspired throughout the region as they were caught up in it.

The PLO entered Lebanon in the early 1970s fleeing after its “Black September” showdown in Jordan with a Hashemite regime that could no longer tolerate the movement’s effective sovereignty in parts of the kingdom amid a sympathetic mass of Palestinian refugees.

Over the following years, the PLO established a massive military-security and political presence throughout the camps and in much of the south, east, and north of Lebanon. But it was prevented from any similarly autonomous existence in neighboring Syria, whose newly installed Baathist Arab Nationalist regime was no less wary of the PLO than other governments in the region.

Alongside that, an elaborate system of civilian social services (health, educational, and welfare), community and party popular mobilization, trade unions and industrial production, and marketing enterprises had taken root in Lebanon by 1982. The PLO, especially its leading Fatah faction, also channeled hundreds of millions of dollars of Arab official aid and taxes collected on its behalf from Palestinians working in the Gulf states, while also operating a clandestine financial network to fund the armed struggle in Lebanon and elsewhere.

Despite the military and political defeat ultimately endured by the Palestinian national movement in Lebanon, this broader institutional landscape seemed for a moment to manifest the PLO’s “viability” as a forerunner of the national state project in a future liberated Palestine. The most prominent Palestinian industrial organization in Lebanon by then was Fatah’s Samed Institution, established to produce for both the PLO and the broader Palestinian market.

In the vision of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat at the time:

Samed embodies aspirations that go beyond the original goals set for it, and it is a school for fighter-workers, a structure for training the children of martyrs, an industrial base to employ them, together constituting the core of the independent Palestinian economy and of a Palestinian public sector liberated of bureaucracy and infused with the determination and spirit of revolution.

And yet within a little more than a decade the PLO had signed off on an economic policy package within a limited self-government deal with Israel that aborted the plans and possibilities for an independent Palestinian economy and enshrined a free-market system in line with neoliberal globalization and trade liberalism.

Over thirty years have passed since Beirut’s “Fakhani Republic” was relegated to just one more chapter in a long Lebanese civil conflict and the exile of the Palestinian resistance movement. The heralded Palestinian public sector has been reduced to a $2 billion corporate investment fund with limited public oversight and some leftover assets in international financial markets.

The top-heavy Palestinian bureaucracy is limited to the management of the handful of resource and commercial rents that its soft-touch regulatory role permits. Meanwhile, the spirit of revolution is hard to discern in the restaurants and leisure spots of the de facto capital of Ramallah or in the burgeoning gated communities that adjoin the city.

When and why did the Palestinian revolution abandon its national liberation economic development program? What went wrong, or perhaps, what went right? Was its liberationist path subverted by the forces of neoliberal capitalism in a bogus “money-for-land and-peace” deal instead of the “land-for-peace” formula that supposedly underpinned the Oslo agreements with Israel?

Or, as so many of its predecessors in the Global South, did the PLO simply succumb to the same pitfalls of nationalism that Frantz Fanon warned against in newly independent countries, namely that once in power the nationalist revolutionary elites could remain under the sway of the former metropole and trade one form of colonialism for another?

It would appear from the almost seamless transition that the national liberation movement leadership and ruling elites made from their pre-Oslo militant stance to the accommodating position towards Israel, global powers, and the lures of neoliberalism since the 1990s that the PLO has not differed in that respect from many post-colonial countries. Yet even so, why did it accept to do so within the framework of prolonged occupation and colonial rule?

The trajectory of “national economic thought and practice” is a part of Palestinian revolutionary history that has yet to be researched and one of which this essay can only scratch the surface. The most telling documents that chart the shifts in Palestinian economic thought and policies before and after Beirut (1982), between Madrid and Oslo/Paris (1994), during the Arafat Palestinian Authority (PA) regime in the occupied territories and also since 2005, will most likely remain inaccessible for years to come to researchers and historians, if they even still exist.

Similarly, little has been written about how Palestinian capital survived the 1948 Nakba and reformed in the Gulf and Arab States in the exile of the 1950s and 1960s in the wider context of Pan-Arabism, and then re-emerged as an ally of the Palestinian revolution and more recently as a partner (if not leader) in Palestinian economic development.

Class formation processes are no less important a dimension of the broader context that shaped PLO economic ideology and, some would argue, the determining factor in the decline of the economics of national liberation and the rise of Palestinian market fundamentalism more recently. Indeed, much critical comment in the past years, including by myself, has focused on the trade off implicit under recent PA policy (if not since Oslo) between the two NLs (national liberation and neoliberalism).

On the other hand, apologists for PA economic policy assert that it was in line with economic orthodoxy as espoused by the Washington Consensus, not inconsistent with achieving Palestinian national goals, and anyhow was the only option permitted under the political framework the PLO has adopted for the past twenty years.

Many of those liberal Palestinian patriots who matured after Oslo know or care little about the origins of Palestinian economic nationalism. Others who accompanied the PLO from Beirut to Ramallah had by the 1990s (especially following the fall of the Soviet bloc) largely abandoned the concept of a leading public sector and acquiesced to neoliberalism, perhaps unconsciously. This has become the credo of the PA government policymakers, academics, and most economic researchers.

Many contemporary Palestinian economists might scoff at the very idea of a “history of Palestinian economic thought.” All that they see in the rudimentary manifestations of statehood and economic activities in Lebanon and in the pre-Oslo period is mediocre and inefficient management of a liberation movement that lost its way to Palestine in the bars and beach clubs of Beirut and Tunis. Hence, many today may not appreciate just how much the thrust of Palestinian economic thinking has shifted away from safeguarding and promoting the commonwealth towards emphasizing individual enrichment and “quality of life.”

Yet the PLO and its economic policies continue to derive their legitimacy from claiming to represent the Palestinian people’s national rights. While it has tried to assume some of the responsibilities of statehood in the self-governed areas of the occupied territories, it has not delivered on its promise of national self-determination or otherwise closed that unfinished chapter of Palestinian history.

So a better understanding of what the Palestinian public sector once was, or aspired to be, is not only of historical interest. It is also instructive in assessing if, and how, a “role of the state in development” might yet be reasserted in Palestine, even in a context of unabated capitalist accumulation and an unresolved struggle for decolonization.

The lure of Arab socialism
In the period after 1948, and at least until the beginning of the armed resistance movement in 1965, Palestinian intellectual and economic elites (especially those in exile) began to re-emerge or build themselves from scratch in the wake of the Nakba and shock of exile. The Palestinian bourgeoisie was already well established before 1948, with an apparent influence and reach into the neighboring Arab countries. Many were drawn to different strands of pan-Arab nationalism (or, alternatively, communism), and Palestinian national liberation thought as such was still unpopular.

For those Palestinians in exile who aspired and organized for return and liberation, the developmental state models proclaimed by the different champions of Arab socialism seemed politically viable and socially just in the post-colonial Arab context and in the parallel experiences of many countries in the developing world.

The pre-eminent Palestinian economist of that generation, Yusef Abdallah Sayigh, emphasized the potential for such a role for the newly independent states in one of his earliest contributions to Arab economic thought, the pointedly entitled “Bread with Dignity.”

For others simply trying to reconstruct their livelihoods in exile through integrating into Hashemite Jordan or working in the Arab Gulf States, the fruits of capitalism were perhaps something of an antidote to the pain and alienation from the loss of a homeland. No wonder that the most influential (and widely mistrusted, if not misunderstood) Palestinian capitalists of today, the Masris, Shomans, Khourys, Sabbaghs and Aqqads, claim to view their own investments in Palestine through the lens of “return” and “homeland” as much as profit and loss.

Financing the revolution in the 1970s

After the emergence of the armed resistance movement (based in Jordan and Syria and later in Lebanon), funding and financial management of its military and political wings became a major undertaking for Fatah and PLO factions. The 1970s witnessed the first social, industrial, and employment generation projects managed and funded by Fatah, beginning in Jordan. These were needed mainly in order to discharge the rapidly growing social responsibilities assumed by a political leadership that sought to mobilize and organize the resources of the Palestinian people everywhere in its struggle with Israel after the 1968 Battle of Karameh.

The Fatah Institution of Social Affairs (ISA) assumed a growing role in providing social security payments to martyrs’ and prisoners’ family members and later provided educational, health, and other services for martyrs’ children. Indeed, it was probably the first PLO “institution” thus named.

After the PLO was uprooted from the camps of Jordan, social welfare functions were supplemented by economic activities. These focused on securing more cost-effective, self-reliant forms of supply for the PLO administration, vocational training and jobs for the camp workforce, and financing for some of its other activities. Samed was the most notable venture in this respect.

Another pioneering industrial-technological “center of excellence” was the Fatah “Scientific Committee,” which was essentially the nucleus of a rudimentary military industry. It provided weapon maintenance and repair services, as well as simple armaments for the PLO and experimenting in industrial design to enhance the reach or efficiency of a growing arsenal. It was something of a forerunner to today’s missile and armaments production, which the Palestinian resistance has developed in the Gaza Strip.

In 1980, the United Nations produced a study on the socioeconomic conditions of Palestinian people in the host countries of exile and under occupation, and focused specifically on Palestinian “national planning.” Working under the Palestinian consultancy firm TEAM International, a group of Palestinian and Arab experts produced a series of reports, including case studies of the main institutions employing and serving Palestinians in Lebanon, who by 1980 numbered some 338,000 — including a camp population of 105,000:

• Samed Society, employing 700 workers in twenty-one factories and administration

• The Consumer Cooperative Society of the Trade Union Federation with 3,300 members in ten camp outlets

• The Palestine Red Crescent Society, employing 1,300 medical professionals in nine hospitals and numerous clinics

• UNRWA, employing 2,300 professional Palestinians in camps around the country (though not a PLO institution, most of its work force was PLO)

While the camp-based labor force in Lebanon in 1980 numbered around twenty-one thousand, not including the many Palestinians living and working outside the camps, many of these were PLO military, administrative, or political employees. The PLO evacuated fifteen thousand personnel of the latter contingent when it withdrew from Lebanon in 1982, so in retrospect the scale and complexity of the Palestinian public sector in exile (in the broadest sense of public service employment and services) is no less significant than its self-government version today in Palestine.

Preceded by a joint venture by the Fatah women’s organization and ISA in Jordan in 1968 to provide some measure of self-reliance and income to martyrs’ families, Samed developed in line with the growing needs of the liberation movement. By late 1970, in Lebanon, the “Palestinian Martyrs’ Children’s Workshop Society – Samed” had been established by the ISA. As the UN study indicates:

In this manner the new Palestinian resistance movement witnessed the first experience, albeit largely unsystematic and spontaneous, of institutional mobilization of the productive abilities of the Palestinian people in exile… If a Palestinian “public sector” ever did develop, it was not represented only in Samed, but rather in the numerous PLO social, educational, health and economic institutions active in Lebanon, a sort of “social/economic public sector.”

With the mobilization of mass organizations, such as professional and trade unions, additional forms of socioeconomic concern and initiative were promoted by all PLO factions, such as consumer and production cooperatives and camp self-reliance home-production projects (embroidery, handicrafts, food processing), not to mention cultural, educational, and social service provision.

The PLO Research, Planning, and Information Centers in Beirut enriched the statist institutional landscape by publishing books, technical/academic journals, newspapers, and advocacy material, covering all imaginable facets of Palestinian social, political, and economic conditions inside and outside Palestine.

Fatah was not alone in such ventures, and the Palestinian leftist factions had smaller scale, less ambitious self-financing projects that extended their reach. But it should not be surprising that the historical record of this social and economic experiment was largely one powered and registered by Fatah. It had wider mass political support, greater financial resources, less stringent criteria for performance and success, not to mention the ability to mobilize broader inter-class engagement in its economic projects (including portfolio management on its behalf by Palestinian bankers in Beirut and the region) than its rivals.

This meant that for all the “right-wing bourgeois” alliances it manifested in the Palestinian leftist narrative, Fatah was able to claim the mantle of promoting the “public good” and pioneering a real-world quasi-socialist social and economic project. In one of the paradoxes of Palestinian political history, it was the leftist tendency within Fatah that not only provided an umbrella of protection for the non-Fatah PLO left factions to function and take part in decision-making, but also left the faint imprint of the “developmental state” in the revolutionary history of that period.

Steadfastness in the occupied territory
Once it was cast out into the Arab wilderness after 1982, even further from the Palestinian people’s villages, towns, and refugee camps than before, the PLO economic enterprise had to be reinvented. By then, the strategy of entrapping essentially hostile Arab regimes into providing the protective “front-line” state role for a viable cross-border armed struggle had been smashed to pieces in Lebanon.

The failure of the Arab regimes, especially the Baathist Syrian and Iraqi self-proclaimed champions of the pan-Arab struggle, to prevent the Israeli victory in Lebanon made the PLO’s political isolation all the more apparent. This prompted increasing resort to affirmation of the “independent Palestinian decision” that Yasser Arafat emphasized to insist that Arab regimes should neither interfere in PLO internal affairs nor represent the Palestinian people after the 1974 Arab Summit (and UN) resolutions accorded that status to the PLO alone.

So just as the leadership and military forces of the national movement became more exiled than ever, and spread around Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, and Yemen, its economic project had to be transformed. This was needed for operational (funding) reasons, as well as the physical detachment of the PLO leadership and military forces from its mass base for the first time in its twenty-year existence.

This shift accompanied the political re-positioning of Palestinian political and diplomatic focus from the camps of the shatat to the occupied territories, as well as within Israel, while Palestinian military operations against Israel from outside and inside Palestine soon resumed, exposing all PLO activities to continuous Israeli retaliation and deterrence measures.

Whereas the confrontational posture with Israel remained the order of the day throughout the 1980s, the means and requirements of the struggle had to change. The distancing of the PLO from the borders of Palestine undermined the feasibility of pursuing armed struggle from abroad with impunity — a message that many contemporaneous PLO leaders paid for with their lives for not heeding.

With the military weakening of the PLO, a political and diplomatic strategy became increasingly prioritized, while armed mobilization inside the occupied territories also resumed. Meanwhile, the need to reinsert the PLO into the socioeconomic fabric of Palestinian life led to numerous new links with Palestinian political parties, communities, and NGOs in both Israel and the occupied territories.

Indeed, well before the eruption of the First Intifada, the PLO had designed the first “Program to Support the Steadfastness (Sumoud)” for the Palestinian people inside the occupied territory. This shift of attention from the Palestinian communities in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan — with which the PLO could no longer interact — to the Palestinian people inside the occupied territory and Israel was first and foremost a strategic political reorientation. But it also gave the PLO a chance to translate its national economic vision from the experimental and ad-hoc conditions that shaped it in Beirut into more concrete projects targeting the social and economic needs of the Palestinians living under occupation.

Sumoud, drawn up largely by Fatah economists and planners, had been originally endorsed at the 1978 Baghdad “Steadfastness and Resistance” Arab Summit and was partially funded in the following years by the Arab states. A Jordanian Palestinian Jordanian Committee (JPJC) was established that channeled over $400 million of Arab funds (less than half of that pledged) over a ten-year period to a wide range of housing, agricultural, industrial, research, cultural, educational, and health projects throughout the occupied territories, mainly in the form of soft loans.

This provided an important lifeline to many communities, while also serving as a patronage tool for both the Jordanian and PLO interests that the JPJC reflected. In the perfect “Palestinian marriage” between the political and the economic, the PLO representative on the JPJC was Khalil Al-Wazir, also in charge of Fatah military operations against Israel, and staff seconded by him ran the JPJC “Technical Office” in Amman, particularly after 1982.

The JPJC represented the first organized, systematic, and professionally guided “development aid” provided to the Palestinian people. Unlike today’s international aid flows, 80 percent of which are transfer payments to help cover salaries and budget deficits, all the JPJC funding was earmarked for concrete projects, institution building, and development in the broad sense of the term.

Though monitoring expenditures on the ground was difficult from a distance and the bulk of the funds that were provided on credit terms were never repaid, the JPJC funding constituted a critical lifeline for Palestinians under occupation at a moment when the PLO needed to reassert its relevance and leadership role.

Meanwhile in the same period, the first Palestinian grassroots development planning in the occupied territories was launched, with a landmark 1982 “Conference on Steadfastness for Development,” organized by another pioneer of Palestinian development thought, Ibrahim Dakkak. This included a series of economic and social studies on the occupied territories and a national dialogue organized around them, providing another indication of how the post-Beirut era of Palestinian national struggle was increasingly focused on preserving the land, people and resources of Palestine through non-military means, indeed through an unprecedented mass mobilization of people under the banner of development, resistance, and “sumoud.”

The Madrid/Paris/Ramallah trajectory
Even as a weakened, exiled PLO continued to resist in the wake of its post-Gulf War isolation, the ensuing Madrid Peace Conference set in motion political negotiations that continue into their third decade. This drawn-out process in itself implies a trade-off between pursuing national liberation through resistance or through cooperation, the disastrous results of which are witnessed today more than ever. But this inherent constraint is not adequate to explain the dramatic policy reversal that the PLO undertook when it signed off on the “Protocol on Economic Relations” with Israel as part of the Oslo accords.

An important dimension of the dynamics of the retreat of developmentalism in Palestine was the rapidly transforming global and regional political scene at the time. The collapse of the Soviet bloc meant that while the PLO bought into the Madrid process in 1991 with USA-USSR co-sponsorship, by the time the Oslo accords were reached in 1993 the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian track had become dominant.

Only when the peace process was threatened by the Second Intifada was some nominal multilateralism restored and a UN “Quartet” eventually created that included the US, Russia, the EU, and the UN. But by then, the PLO had welcomed with open arms the engagement of influential Washington and Brussels players, who came armed with money, political influence, and a textbook of technical advice, not to mention their own secretariat in the form of the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs).

By this point, the Palestinian left was no less exhausted by the Beirut-Tunis trajectory and certainly was in no position to offer an alternative to the Fatah drift towards Oslo or neoliberalism, as subsequently enshrined in the Paris Protocol. By 1993, PLO negotiators were quietly being drawn into a secret deal with Israel in Oslo, led by one of the “left-Fatah” officials — Ahmad Qurie (Abu Alaa’).

Indeed at the same moment, the same official — who was also the director general of both Samed and the PLO Economic Department — was putting the finishing touches in Tunis on the “Program for the Development of the Palestinian National Economy 1994-2000,” a monumental achievement by Yusef Sayigh and a team of Palestinian experts.

The first “PDP” was fully in line with the heterodox, public goods, social justice brand of economics that was Sayigh’s trademark. It was intellectually consistent with the tradition of economic nationalism of the PLO and reflective of the actual conditions and requirements for establishing a Palestinian economy that was geared to ending, rather than accommodating, occupation and dependency. The PDP at once harked back and projected forward to a different era, but at a moment that the forces of global economic liberalization were being unleashed.

In the tradition of the era, the First Intifada had witnessed a series of Palestinian grassroots and centrally supported economic self-reliance initiatives, including boycotting jobs in Israel and Israeli goods, a commercial strike, a tax revolt, large-scale return to agriculture, and the emergence of so-called “household economy.”

But these were difficult for Palestinians to sustain economically, and even if the Israel economy felt a pinch, the Palestinian social fabric could not withstand relentless retaliation and collective punishment, nor could political organization turn this into a viable long-term strategy, especially after the Gulf War and the first Israeli punitive “closures.”

Meanwhile, PLO leaders were increasingly open to any formula that would return them to Palestine and that might achieve what they believed would be a short transition to independence. Even the PDP was modified at the last moment to include a “transitional period” of self-government without altering its core principles, goals, or institutions. In retrospect it is not difficult to see why the PDP, which represented the culmination of the thinking of an earlier generation, didn’t stand a chance once the World Bank arrived on the scene in 1993.

The forceful entry into the Palestinian economy arena, especially after 1993, of the BWIs and the powerful appeal of the World Bank’s first (of many) publications on the subject added an influential player to a scene that had been previously dominated by Israeli unilateralism. Indeed it appeared for a moment that the stars were aligned in favor of an international push for Palestinian development, based on the first PLO “Programme for the Development of the Palestinian National Economy” that had just been completed in 1993, with UN and BWI institutions working together. But the UN agencies’ mandate of “assistance to the Palestinian people” became subjugated to the BWIs “support to the Middle East peace process” agenda that has defined the parameters of their Palestinian engagement since then.

“International legitimacy” has always meant for the Palestinians and the UN one thing: UN Resolutions 181 (1947) on Partition of Palestine, 194 (1949) on Right to Return, 242 (1967) on Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. But for the US and most donors, the IFIs, and Israel, their only binding referential mandates are the 1991 Madrid peace conference, the 1993 Oslo Accords, and the 1993 Paris Protocol.

The awkward marriage between these hitherto opposed parties was best epitomized by the appointment of the seasoned Norwegian diplomat and Oslo negotiator Terje Rod Larsen to the newly created USG post of UN special coordinator for the oPt (and for the Middle East peace process). This new UN beast, UNSCO, at once reflected the common interests of donors and IFIs, Palestinians, and Israelis and was staffed accordingly. The UN, too, added its influence to the pressure on the PLO to accede to the unbalanced terms of Oslo and (for the five-year interim period) to adopt the customs union with Israel in Paris that after twenty years has become an albatross burdening the Palestinian economy.

There has been some recent debate amongst Palestinians as to whether so-called (Salam) “Fayyadism” in its economic dimension is only a higher stage of “Arafatism,” insofar as the latter had approved all the economic arrangements with Israel that the former simply took to their logical conclusions. After all, the Fatah economic project was never socialist. Samed aspired to operate according to market criteria, and while the PDP might have been a sound national development program, it was certainly not a manifesto for democratic planning.

The PA under Fayyad may have witnessed a greater degree of centralization and clarity of financial functions under the minister of finance/prime minister (instead of the PLO chairman), largely at the behest of donors and the IMF. But the core economic philosophy and policies of the PA under the Paris Protocol have been constant for the past twenty years, while shifting gradually more to the right in the past five to seven years.

More pertinent perhaps is to consider the limited options that the nationalist leadership (and an exhausted resistance movement) had in the early 1990s. These constraints were obvious both in terms of the ability to resist the terms of a dictated “peace settlement” and the capacity to manage the lives of some three million Palestinians with only a somewhat patchy record of institution building in exile.

And the opportunity that Oslo offered for expatriate Palestinian capital to link up again with the PLO, except this time inside Palestine in a shared economic and investment program, meant that the PLO could only embrace the new world economic order.

Was there ever a Palestinian public sector?
I have always found it misleading when official Palestinian and international development discourse refers to the “leading role of the private sector” in Palestine. This presupposes the existence (or, in the eyes of some, the threat) of a “public sector” of the economy in the conventional sense of the word, whereby the state owns and operates economic, commercial, or utility enterprises. But the Palestinian economy is and always has been fully a private-sector economy, so really the term is a something of a canard.

The 1990s did witness much rent-seeking and some attempts to manage these through public monopolies and commercial ventures in what Mushtaq Khan has analyzed as Arafat’s rational strategies to counter Israel “asymmetric containment.” Yet the PLO entered the scene after 1993 bankrupt and effectively dependent on the potentials of limited rent management and some public revenue from trade and taxation intermediated with Israel, as well as the kindness of donors that since the Second Intifada again brought the PLO to its knees.

Indeed, the first IMF order of the day in 2001 was to establish new mechanisms for cutting off the remaining sources of off-the-books income that Arafat had managed to maintain even in the confines of the Oslo framework and to privatize the remaining economic assets and rents managed by the PLO.

So looking for a Palestinian public sector in the post-Oslo period is probably a futile exercise. But to what extent was the pre-1982 goal of a “national economy” and a “public sector liberated of bureaucracy” simply reflective of some blurry patriotic vision of the future, as articulated in that period by Khalil Al Wazir?

The significance of what Samed does is in the productive operations that it undertakes that help to preserve our people’s productive skills and in training more of them in modern production techniques. The Palestine that we dream of will depend on the resources of its people and their ability to rebuild it.

Or perhaps such rhetoric was more about the nature of the economic project at hand in the circumstances of Beirut, when the national liberation trajectory that the PLO had embarked on was still predominant and the lure of power, money, and the good life had yet to entrap tiring PLO leaders and cadres?

With all its limited but increasingly forgotten achievements and all its oft-cited failings in economic institution-building in Lebanon and elsewhere, through the First Intifada and until Oslo the PLO had remained faithful to the national liberation model of a leading public sector and social policies that benefited the broad masses of the Palestinian people. Skeptics today might argue that adhering to that economic vision was superficial and more about political survival in those circumstances than ideological or intellectual sophistication, especially since it was so abruptly abandoned in the 1990s.

Regardless of the internal and external factors that contributed to the rapid decline of developmental public-sector ideology, the record of PLO social-economic institution building in the fleeting moment of “sovereignty” it enjoyed in Beirut until 1982 deserves recognition for what it was and for the traditions it embodied. That earlier revolutionary period, for all its failings and limitations, embodies the substance (though perhaps not the form) of an alternative to today’s self-government model emanating from Ramallah.

This is especially so because the non-sovereign, non-liberated Palestinian people living under Israeli control have been co-opted into a neoliberal economic and political trajectory that has largely renounced resistance and undermined the imperative to struggle for national self-determination, in an unabashed flaunting of Fanon’s lessons. Instead, what is needed is that Palestinian public authorities take the lead in sovereign “state building”— alongside a national liberation struggle, and not instead of it.

From the vantage point of Ramallah in 2014 and recalling the path taken for the thirty years since Beirut, and most critically those since Oslo, what should Palestinian policy makers and PLO leaders conclude about the sort of state that the Palestinian people deserve after so many years of revolutionary struggle, social transformation, and institution building?

It would be naïve to expect after so much attrition of the very concept of a Palestinian public sector, that any reversal in PA economic policy can be countenanced by the PLO and Fatah leadership, at least within the prevailing balance of economic and political forces in Palestine. This is not only because of how neoliberal economic thought and values have become acceptable, indeed desirable, to ruling elites and even the broader middle-class constituency of the PA. Nor is it simply because of the extent to which capital investment has been committed to the PA project in its current form.

More importantly, a nationalist economic and social agenda presupposes a national liberation movement and struggle, something that for all intents and purposes remains suspended in an infinite “peace process.” And there is no real constituency in the Palestinian political and capitalist leadership today for Arafat’s fantastical “independent Palestinian economy and a Palestinian public sector liberated of bureaucracy and infused with the determination and spirit of revolution.”

The identity of an alternative to the continued decline of Palestinian economic thought and practice may be found not just in some of the earlier stages of Palestinian economic history and practice outlined here. There are also some signs of life in the economics of sumoud tradition that was once the only Palestinian narrative, especially in grassroots experiences on the ground in Palestine.

While even the recent PLO announcement of the planned establishment of a “national” oil and gas company is rhetorically in tune with that tradition, it remains to be seen whether the more muscular “guardian of public goods” posture recently adopted by the PLO investment arm, the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF), amounts to more than grandstanding in the face of growing public awareness of the bankruptcy of prevailing economic, not to mention fiscal, policy and the institutional degradation of a toothless and aimless PA.

More indicative of a lingering Palestinian “spirit of revolution” are today’s numerous examples of “economic resistance” and sumoud of Palestinian communities in Area C of the West Bank, the persistence of a distinct Palestinian economy in besieged east Jerusalem, the survival of a largely rural, peasant and refugee society throughout Palestine, and other dimensions of the endurance of a greater Palestinian public development good despite the inexorable advance of neoliberal capitalism under occupation.

These disparate phenomena have yet to emerge in a coherent manner that strengthens the argument for a developmental state approach to resisting prolonged colonial domination. Meanwhile, the need to leverage the potentially influential role (and potential) of Palestinian private and public capital in the service of national liberation cannot be dismissed as naïve belief in the role of a “progressive wing of the national bourgeoisie.”

To the extent that the spirit of national liberation is able to re-ignite a coherent Palestinian national movement, especially after the impressive uprisings and armed resistance in different Palestinian areas in 2014, so would the opportunities increase for rebuilding a Palestinian public sector and heeding the lessons of both Fanon and Arafat.