Israeli right feels wind in its sails

Scan page 11

JERUSALEM—It was an average October evening in the West Bank. A bus crowded with Palestinians on their way home from work rolled down the road from Jerusalem to the Arab city of Hebron. Suddenly an explosion rocked the bus, screams filled the air, and the bus crashed off the side of the road. One Palestinian was dead and a dozen others injured.

The right-wing Zionist terrorists had struck again. Later the Israeli police picked up a suspect who was accused of firing the rocket-taken from the Israeli military and made in the U.S.A.-that was launched into the Arab bus. The suspect, a reserve Israeli soldier, claimed he was acting out of vengeance because "when the police won't act we must."

The attack was not unusual. Zionist terrorism is part of the everyday experience for Palestinians.

Israeli society in crisis The background to the escalating use of terrorist violence by right-wing Zionists is the growing crisis of the Israeli economy and the impact of 17 years of occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The economy, despite recent austerity measures by the "National Unity" government, remains out of control. The inflation rate is running at an annual rate of over 800 percent.

The Israeli government is in desperate need of the $4.85 billion they have asked Reagan for in 1985but even that unprecedented aid won't halt the economic crisis. The economy is feeling the impact of the $2 million a day spent on the occupation of Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Gideon Spiro, a leader of Yesh Gul, the Israeli soldiers' anti-war movement, explained the changes in Israeli society resulting from the occupation in a speech to a United Nations conference in September 1983:

"Sixteen years of occupation and oppression has created a new Israeli with a colonial mentality, an Israeli who is a racist, an Israeli who tries to cover his government's brutality and ignorance with quotations from the Bible.

"This Israeli, which I would call the ugly Israeli, the occupier and oppressor, calls on the assistance of the Almighty and thereby sanctifies the torture of Palestinians, their expulsion, the confiscation of their land, the denial of their basic rights. In the Occupied Territories there is already a system of apartheid—one law for the native Palestinians and another for the master race, the settlers."

As Spiro told me in an interview:

"The polls show that 60 percent of the Israeli Jewish youth are against democratic values. Sixty percent of the population as a whole is against freedom of the press. This is the result of 17 years of occupation ...Until now, the Israelis have not had to choose between settlements in the West Bank and owning a car.

Now they will have to. Now Israel is moving to the right. Israel is going toward civil war. The settlers have already started it on the West Bank."

Deir Yassein, Qibya, Kafr Qasim, Sabra, and Shatila. To the Western world, they are foreignsounding names. To Palestinians, they evoke the memories of massacres carried out by the Israelis. For the Palestinians, Zionist terrorism is nothing new. Yet in the recent period there is a clear escalation of the right-wing Zionist settlers' violence against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

In the last few years, there have been numerous attempts to blow up the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque-one of the holiest shrines for the world's 800 million Muslims—in the old city of Jerusalem. On June 2, 1980, four Palestinian mayors in the West Bank were bombed. Gunmen burst into the Islamic University in Hebron in July 1983, killing three students and wounding 40 others. On April 27 of last year, explosive charges were attached to five Arab buses. The bombs were discovered, saving the lives of hundreds of Palestinians.

Last spring the Israeli government felt pressured to arrest some of the right-wing Zionist terrorists. It was revealed that the underground movement included top Israeli army officers, people in senior administrative positions in the Occupied Territories, and the family members of public figures and members of the Knesset. The trial of the terrorists has dragged on for months—unlike the "trials" of Palestinians, which are mere show trials.

The defense has argued that the government was aware of and supported their attacks on the Palestinians. In October, 7000 Zionists turned out in the Arab city of Hebron to show support for the underground terrorist movement. The rally was led by former Israeli chief of staff, and now minister of Industry, Ariel Sharon—the butcher of Lebanon— and Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the right-wing Kach movement.

Kahane and the Kach movement In July of this year, Kahane was elected to the Israeli Knesset with 25,000 votes. His followers have been responsible for much of the above-mentioned terrorism. His election program called for driving out the 700,000 Arabs from Israel, as well as the 1.3 million Arabs from the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Kahane argues that "the very idea of a democratic Jewish state is nonsense. A state can be permanently defined as Jewish, or as democratic, but never as both."

Chaim Ginsberg, a leader of the Kach movement and like Kahane also a U.S. citizen, told me in an interview, "In the next election we expect to win five more seats, or up to 100,000 votes. The nation is moving toward the right, toward Kahane."

After Kahane's election, he and 100 supporters marched through Palestinian East Jerusalem, attacking Arabs, and chanting, "Death to Arabs-Arabs out!" Since then Kahane has led marches on a whole series of Arab cities, where he has been met by massive demonstrations of Arabs as well as some Israeli Jews.

Kahane, although more blunt than mainstream Israeli leaders, does not differ in essence from their program. The ultimate source of the growing rightwing terrorism in Israel today is the leading Zionist figures in the Israeli government.

Dheisheh refugee camp assaulted The focus of the right-wing violence in recent months has been the Dheisheh refugee camp, which lies outside Bethlehem in the West Bank. The 10,000 Dheisheh Palestinians, like the other 400,000 PalesIn November the government further escalated its moves to terrorize the Dheisheh Palestinians by ordering five newly built shops along the HebronJerusalem road to be demolished. Rabbi Levinger has set up an encampment outside the main Dheisheh entrance, and the right-wing settlers have been given permission by the government to patrol outside the camp.

One Palestinian told me "the camp is like a massive prison."

Residents have reported that the "camp resembles an army camp with [Israeli military] patrols everywhere."

Palestinian leaders in the West Bank have warned of the danger of a massacre of Dheisheh Palestinians at the hands of the right-wing settlers and the Israeli military.

Israeli leftists respond

In October and again in November, two dozen Israelis from the "Committee in Solidarity with Birzeit University" picketed in front of Dheisheh camp against the actions of the right-wing settlers and the Israeli government. Both times they wère arrested.

As Gideon Spiro, one of the protesters, explained, "The settlers arrive at Dheisheh camp Steve Ashby Zionist settlement under construction outside Jerusalem. Over 30,000 settlers live in housing complexes on Palestinian land confiscated by the Israeli state.

behaving like terrorists and are not arrested, while we hold a peaceful demonstration to protest violations of human rights and terrorist acts and we get arrested!"

In addition to the actions of the Committee, a new group called the "Committee Against Racism" was formed in September by leaders of the Peace Now movement. It was organized to mobilize opposition to Kahane among Israeli Jews.

In October, for example, Kahane and his supporters marched on a theater in Jerusalem that was showing "Beyond the Walls, a film that advocates Jewish/Palestinian dialogue. They were met by 3000—mostly Jewish-protesters, who threw tomatoes at the right-wingers.

But it is the right wing that feels the wind is in its sails. As Israeli society polarizes, increasingly the Israeli people must decide which side they are on. And the American people, whose government has given Israel $29 billion since 1948, must decide which side they are on as well: Are they with Kahane and Sharon, for anti-Arab terrorism, for racist violence—or are they with the Palestinians and the progressive Israeli movement, for justice and equality for Arabs and Jews alike.

SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 1985 11

Scan page 12

THEORY AND DEBATE On New Year's Day in 1959, Fidel Castro entered Havana at the head of the victorious Cuban revolution. Scores of gangsters, generals, and torturers who once propped up the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship fled in the dawn to Miami.

The revolutionary government did not wait long before responding to the demands of the impoverished Cuban people. It enacted a series of economic and political reforms and began to set up a planned economy.

These reforms were resisted, however, by a number of wealthy ruling-class figures who had joined the coalition government. They saw that their own privileges were threatened. In addition, the revolution was confronted by not only clash with objective economic realities; it would also create obstacles to the revolutionary movement in the rest of Latin America. In my judgment it would weaken the revolutionary movement because you would be presenting every movement for democracy and social justice as a radical movement. I believe that would only help the United States in its campaign to maintain its domination. I do not believe socialism is on the agenda in Latin America. What is on the agenda is national liberation."

According to The Guardian, Castro's comments "mark a major change from which subordinates the struggle against capitalism to "campism."

"Campism" is a term describing a conception of the world as being divided into opposing imperialist and anti-imperialist "camps."

From this flows a strategy of uniting all "anti-imperialist" forces—workers' states and "anti-imperialist" capitalist states—against the imperialist "camp."

Socialist revolution, according to this viewpoint, must be postponed to an indefinite future. Moreover, the political revolution against the bureaucratic dictatorships, like Poland, is ruled out.

A good presentation of this outlook was given by Cuban Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez in an interview Central America or to the rest of the world."

The transitional method The greatest potential for victory over imperialism and for true national liberation lies in the elemental anti-capitalist inclination of the masses of workers and rural laborers. One must remember that it was Fidel Castro himself who once said that tactics designed to fool the enemies of the revolution only end up fooling its friends. Much more is lost by "tactics" that defuse the workers' anti-capitalist instincts than can possibly be gained.

But today Castro fails to distinguish between the tactical slogans and the demands of the mass movements required to advance the revolutionary struggle along the road to its ultimate