BY AHMAD NIMER
November 9 saw an international day of mobilisations against the construction of the Israeli apartheid wall. Actions and demonstrations were held in cities around the world to protest Israel's mass land-grab, aimed at building a 650-kilometre concrete wall surrounded by barbed wire, ditches and minefields around Palestinian areas in the West Bank.
The protests against the wall are coming at a critical time, for the construction of the wall is the final stage of Israel's cantonisation of the West Bank — a project aimed at dividing Palestinian towns and villages into isolated enclaves separated from each other by military checkpoints, Israeli settlements and other physical barriers such as the wall.
Once completed, the wall will destroy any possibility of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — reducing Palestinians to eking out lives in cantons dependent on Israel economically and politically while hidden behind the guise of "sovereignty".
There is a commonly held view about the wall prevalent in the West, which states that it is merely an ad-hoc barrier built along the western border of the West Bank to prevent Palestinian attacks inside Israel. This view has been deliberately propagated by Israel to obscure the reality of what the wall is designed to achieve and portray it as a means of "self-defence".
In reality, the wall is not being built along the borders of the West Bank. Rather, it weaves its way around the illegally established Israeli settlement areas and runs along the edges of Palestinian towns and villages.
Since 1967, Israel has followed a strategic plan of settlement construction using confiscated Palestinian land to build three huge settlement blocs — Ariel bloc north of Ramallah, Maale Adumim bloc around Jerusalem and Etzion bloc near Bethlehem — which divide the West Bank into four separate areas. These blocs serve the purpose of dividing Palestinians in the north, centre and south of the West Bank from one another.
The proposed path of the wall will make this division permanent by annexing 98% of the Israeli settler population into Israel proper. In other words, Israeli settlements will no longer be seen as occupied areas inside the West Bank, but will become normal Israeli towns, with around 50% of the land in the West Bank being annexed by Israel.
Furthermore, the wall is not only being constructed on the western side of Palestinian towns and villages. Land confiscation orders given to Palestinians indicate that the wall will also be built on the eastern side. Thus Palestinian towns will be completely surrounded on all sides. Entrance in and out of Palestinian towns will be regulated by Israeli military checkpoints, enforcing the prison-like existence of the 2 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.
Parts of the wall have already been completed in the north of the West Bank, with towns such as Qalqilya and Tulkarem already surrounded.
Finally, the wall is not a new plan devised as a response to the Palestinian resistance. The path of the wall follows Israeli plans for the West Bank devised since 1967. The aims of these plans, developed by successive Israeli governments, have as their final goal the cantonisation of the West Bank into isolated enclaves ruled over by a Palestinian "self-government" that is politically dependent on Israel.
In addition, because the wall annexes to Israel most of the West Bank's natural resources — including water and farming land — any future Palestinian entity will be completely under Israeli economic control.
The construction of the wall provides the context for understanding the latest phase of the Palestinian uprising. The Israeli government is attempting to brutally suppress any Palestinian resistance as Israel seeks to make the cantonisation of West Bank a "fact on the ground" before any resumption of US-supervised "peace" talks.
In the last month alone, 63 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military — the vast majority of them civilians. Curfews continue to be in place in many Palestinian areas and movement is extremely difficult between population centres. More than 5000 Palestinians are currently held as political prisoners in Israeli jails and a number of them are currently on hunger-strike to protest their continued detention and mistreatment including torture.
At the same time as this repression continues, there are several indications that negotiations have resumed between Â鶹´«Ã½ of the Israeli government and parts of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Israeli newspapers have reported that "security coordination" has resumed in some areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a claim that has been confirmed by Palestinian sources within the PA. A new "peace proposal", dubbed the "Geneva accords", was announced last month by Palestinian negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo and elements from within the Israeli Labour Party.
While Labour is currently in opposition, the Geneva accords have been given a semi-official status through the open support of US secretary of state Colin Powell.
Palestinian newspapers have carried the text of the Geneva accords alongside editorials and articles expressing various positions towards the proposals. Some of these papers, such as Al Ayyam, which is controlled by Akram Hanniyeh, a close advisor of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, have taken a stance in favour of the accords. However, the generally lukewarm response of Palestinians to them is indicative of tensions within the PA and the scepticism of the Palestinian public.
The key feature of the Geneva accords is that Palestinians should give up the fundamental demand of the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their lands and homes from which they were evicted in 1948 in return for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Critics of the Geneva accords point to the similarities between this latest proposal and previous failed agreements and plans. The right of return is the bedrock of the Palestinian national struggle as it relates directly to the cause of Israel-Palestinian conflict — Zionist colonisation and expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their national homeland.
Despite the numerous attempts to force Palestinians to give up the right of return, any attempt by Palestinian negotiators to raise this suggestion has been completely rejected by Palestinian refugees themselves and the Palestinian national movement as a whole. Demonstrations across the West Bank and Gaza in late October reiterated that this demand remains at the heart of the Palestinian national liberation struggle.
Critics of the Geneva accords also argue that it replicates the key problems with earlier "peace plans", most notably the Oslo accords of 1993 and more recently the US-devised "Road Map to Peace". All of these plans demand that the PA undertake repressive measures against the Palestinian population while negotiations over a final settlement take place.
As the post-Oslo negotiations demonstrated, while the PA may attempt to guarantee "calm" on the ground, Israel always uses any demobilisation of Palestinian popular resistance to accelerate implementation of its cantonisation plan. During the Oslo process years, this meant massive settlement expansion and the imposition of military permits to regulate Palestinian movement. Today, this most likely means finishing the apartheid wall.
For these reasons, the Geneva accords have been largely rejected by the Palestinian population. The response of the PA is indicative of this fact. While the Geneva accords were negotiated under the auspices of key PA representatives and the details differ little from earlier plans agreed to by the PA, overt support has not been forthcoming due to popular hostility.
The key factor in the situation remains the level of organisation and resistance on the ground. Despite the massive levels of repression it has imposed on the Palestinian population, Israel has clearly failed in its attempt to militarily crush the resistance. It is also clear that it would be politically suicidal for the PA to act on the calls by the US and Israel for the PA to arrest and disarm the Palestinian population.
There is another factor that could potentially impact greatly on the course of the resistance movement in the next period — the increasingly successful resistance to the US occupation of Iraq. This resistance is being closely followed by the masses in the Arab world.
Dramatic evidence that US imperialism's attempt to conquer Iraq is failing could lead to massive realignments in the relations of power within the Middle East. Corrupt Arab regimes closely linked to US imperialism, such as those in Egypt and Jordan, could face renewed mass protests from their own populations. Mass protests in these countries were evident at the beginning of the Palestinian intifada but were swiftly crushed by the Egyptian and Jordanian governments.
As it becomes increasingly clear that the US cannot defeat the Iraqi resistance, the prospects for revolts by the worker-peasant masses in other Arab countries against their pro-US capitalist ruling elites will grow, and such revolts would greatly strengthen the Palestinian national liberation struggle against the Zionist state and its US ally.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, November 19, 2003.
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