The occupation continues, the occupation will continue, is there any solution?

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday April 08, 2002 16:52 by Israeli libertarian communist

Israeli libertarian communist declaration

Declaration - May 2001 unofficial text of small libertarian communist group in Israel

The occupation continues, the occupation will continue, is there any solution? [excerpts]

The truth is now there for all to see: there is no peace agreement between Zionist Israel and the Palestinian Arab people, and there will never be. Zionist Israel is a state which adheres to discrimination between its Jewish citizens (and actually all the Jews of the world), and the rest of its citizens.

Zionist Israel is a state that stubbornly refuses to mend, even in minor steps, wrong doings it inflicted on the Palestinians. It not only refuses to dismantle the settlers' colonies and to allow the return of any number of the refugees, it even refuses for more than 40 years to let the evacuees of the villages Iris and Burma return from neighboring places despite the Supreme Court verdict.

Every agreement achieved in the short run between Israel and the Palestinians will express the present power balance between an occupying force and the occupied, between the oppressor and the oppressed between the strong and the weak between the masters and the enslaved. In other words, every agreement that will be achieved in the near future will be based on the trampling of the Palestinians as a people and as individuals.

The solutions suggested for the present are based on "compromise" between two sides that are not equal. The formula for a "Palestinian state besides the Israeli state" is in the present conditions a big fraud. Even if Israel will agree in the near future to the establishment of such a state ruled by the PLO, it will necessarily be like a Bantustan in the time of Apartheid in South Africa: A state divided into at least two parts, with no real army, with only partial control of its borders, ground and water; A state inflicted with high unemployment, flooded by hundreds of thousands of returning refugees, while a very high percent of its population will be dependant on the Israeli economy.

A "state" like this will not only be a Bantustan, but also a social and political ticking time bomb and for sure it would be not any kind of solution.
This is the reason we do not find any value in searching for or offering any solution for the present or the near future. However, there is a strong reason to put forward principled demands worth fighting/struggling for:

1) Immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Israeli army from ALL the territories occupied in 1967 war.
2) Recognition of the right of the Palestinian people for self-determination.
3) Cancellation of all the discriminatory rules that Israel has and replace them with fully equal rights for all those who live in Israel .
4) Recognition of the right of the Palestinians ("refugees") to return to their homeland.

All the solutions offered by the Israeli and Palestinian "left" based on equality are impossible to achieve in the near future (if at all): "two states for two nations", "state of all its citizens", "bi-national state", "secular and democratic state".... Are they worthy to fight for in the long run?

All these "solutions" take for granted the hierarchical structure of the state and not contesting the capitalist system. Within the capitalist system these reformists solutions are impossible to achieve and are not even worth dreaming of.

Only a social revolution of all the region (as part of change in the social order of all the world) which will abolish the capitalist exploitation and the hierarchical structure of the states and other oppressing and discriminating mechanisms - will put end to the conflict ignited in the region by the super power states and the Zionist project they nourished.

Such a solution is both worth fighting for and dreaming of.