Israel, Zionism, and the Palestinian revolution KAHANE SHAMIR

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"Zionists have relentlessly pursued the liquidation of the Palestinians."

SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1987 15 Few states in the world today are more repressive than the Zionist state of Israel.

The ruthless plan to eliminate the organized social existence of the Palestinian people was set forth by all major Zionist spokespersons beginning in 1880.

Leaders of all components of the Zionist movement-from Vladimir Jabotinsky to David Ben-Gurion, from its "right" to its nominal "left" —have relentlessly pursued the liquidation of the Palestinian people.

R. Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department spelled out this policy unmistakably in 1940:

"It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. Our solu -tion is a Palestine without Arabs....Not one village, not one tribe should be left."

Thus, by 1948, before the state of Israel was actually declared, the Zionist militia the Irgun and Haganahhad seized three-fourths of the land of Palestine and expelled virtually all those inhabiting it.

In the beginning of 1948, there were 475 Palestinian towns and villages. Of these, 385 were razed to the ground-quite literally wiped off the face of the map.

Ninety Palestinian villages and towns remained. They were swiftly denuded of land-confiscated without compensation.

A colonial-settler state At the time of the partition of Palestine in 1947, the Zionists owned 6 percent of the land. Through sustained terror against the largely unarmed Palestinian population, they gained control of over 90 percent of the land.

In what is now Israel, the Jewish Agency administers this land under regulations which require that to own, rent, lease, or share-crop land, one must prove at least three generations of maternal Jewish descent.

These laws differ little from those of the racist apartheid state of South Africa. And, ironically, they differ little from the " Aryan blood" laws of Nazi Germany.

The oppression of the Palestinian people is enforced by the Israeli state, not only in territories occupied since 1967, but in all of Palestine.

Palestinians may be detained without charge, held without disclosure of their arrest, and sentenced without any evidence other than that secured by confession.

Hence, Amnesty International was to report that in no other state of the world is institutionalized torture as well documented as in the Zionist state of Israel.

Since 1967, over 300,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been imprisoned under conditions of torture.

Palestinian "mini-state?"

Many of the leaders of the Palestinian APARTHIED movement today advocate the establishment of a Palestinian "mini-state." They call this a "two-state" solution to the plight of the Palestinian people.

A Palestinian "mini-state"-disarmed, policed, and economically dependent on U.S. imperialism and the Zionist regime itself—is no solution for the Palestinians. An enlarged hamlet for Palestinians, a "Bantustan," leaves the Israeli state in place—as racist and oppressive as before.

A Palestinian "mini-state," moreover, ist Action/Kathleer will never be accepted by the Zionist regime. There is no component of the Zionist spectrum with the faintest interest in surrendering territory intended for any form of Palestinian sovereignty that has any meaning.

Such delusions may be comforting to those predisposed to make allowances for a colonist state in Palestine. The Zionists themselves are too busy planning the fragmentation of Syria and Iraq, the absorp -tion of the East Bank-emptied of Pales -bringing food into the camps. favor with imperialism and its agents, the country-selling regimes of the Arab East, and at another indulge in random acts of force. Each course is designed, misguidedly, to induce imperialism into endorsing the establishment of a Palestinian "mini-state."

But these regimes— from Syria to Jordan to Egypt—regard the Palestinian revolution as a clear and present danger. They understand that the extraordinary struggle of the Palestinian nation-even under the nationalist PLO leadership—is a reminder to their own suffering people of what is to be done and who is in the way.

A democratic-secular Palestine A revolutionary Palestinian leadership should struggle, as many do, for the dismantlement of the Israeli state.

It should develop a program which begins the process of the self-activation of the Palestinian masses and their Jewish class allies. The mobilization of the Palestinian people in strikes and demonstrations—with international partici -pants —would find its echo among Jewish workers.

A PLO faithful to its promise of a democratic-secular Palestine would include in its leadership those anti-Zionist Jews who have fought the settler-colonial state. In this way, the Jewish masses themselves would be able to see who really speaks for them, and who offers them a way out of perpetual war, insecurity, and deprivation.

The Palestinian revolutionary movement can only advance by hammering out a new strategy based on combining the Palesti -nian national struggle with the struggle of the workers and peasants of the whole Middle East.

against all odds, the Palestinian resistance has not been broken.

In recent months, mass protests against Israeli occupation have broken out in the West Bank and Gaza. The growing desperation—and militancy—of the Pales -tinians is revealed by the increased number of attacks on Israeli soldiers by youth who are acting on their own and are armed only with stones or screwdrivers.

Ninety-three percent of the Palestinians living in territories occupied by the Israelis since 1967 still consider the banned Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to be their legitimate representative, according to a September 1986 poll by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Yet, despite this heroic resistance, the Palestinian liberation struggle has been led into a blind alley by the policies of the leadership of the PLO, which has consistently relied on the Arab capitalists for the advancement of the Palestinian cause.

But each attempt to build an alliance with reactionary Arab governments —whether it be Jordan's King Hussein or Syria's Assad—has ended in disaster for the Palestinians.

This has revealed that any attempt to win the national and democratic demands of the Palestinian people must be part of a wider struggle against the bourgeois Arab regimes in the region—as well as against the Zionist state of Israel.