"A first step towards socialism is to reject the Israel-PLO agreement"

Socialist Outlook April 1994
Dr Adel Samara

Dr Adel Samara, an independent Marxist economist from Ramallah in occupied Palestine, has spent 8 years in prison - 2 years under Jordanian rule and 6 years under Israeli occupation. In December 1999, along with other Palestinian dissident activists, he was arrested and held without trial by the Palestinian authority, after issuing a call for democratic rights in Palestine.

This article is based on his address to a Socialist Outlook public meeting during a visit to London in March 1994, and subsequent conversations with Socialist Outlook.

It was not necessary to wait for the Hebron massacre in order to understand that Israel is still not ready for a just and lasting peace with the Palestinian people and the Arab world. During the three years since the start of the imperialist settlement process at the Madrid conference, Israel has intensified its repression in the Occupied Territories, with more killings, expansion of settlements, more settlers ’imported’ from the ex Soviet Union and other places, and a tight siege of the Occupied Territories. The ’Declaration of Principles’ signed by Arafat and Rabin was an indirect annexation of the Occupied Territories, with no hint that Israel will withdraw, and no discussion of the Palestinian people’s right to return to their homeland.

It is important to understand that this agreement is primarily about economics rather than politics. What we are seeing is a re ordering of capital in the Middle East. The agreement closely mirrors the proposals of the World Bank mission which visited the Occupied Territories just after the Madrid conference. The overt project of the World Bank, and of the imperialist settlement, is the creation of a Middle East Market, in which Israel is accepted by the Arab world as the local representative of the imperialist world order. Israel would be the economic centre of the region, and its gate towards western Europe and the US, while Turkey would have a secondary role as the gate towards central and eastern Europe. This project, which would prevent Arab economic integration and perpetuate the underdevelopment of the region, is in truth not a Middle East Market, but a market in the Middle East. Economic development is impossible under the Israeli occupation, which is characterised by confiscation and control of land and resources, establishment and expansion of settlements, treating the Palestinians as a captive market, and control over the Occupied Territories’ imports and exports. This agreement does not offer any prospect of Palestinian independence, and I have never heard of a political status between occupation and independence. Therefore, this agreement is not intended to develop the Palestinian economy. Under the guise of a move towards Palestinian self-rule, it merely offers the annexation by Israel of the economy of the Palestinian cantons.

The agreement has been negotiated and promoted by the imperialist, Israeli, Arab and Palestinian capitalists. The Palestinians who support this agreement are the bureaucratic and capitalist leadership of the PLO, capitalists inside the Occupied Territories (mainly sub contractors for Israeli companies), Palestinian employees of foreign institutions and NGOs in the Occupied Territories, Palestinian financial capitalists in the Diaspora, and westernised and renegade communist intellectuals. These forces are all parasitic rather than productive. They are not ’the people’; they are the capitalists, and as such are more interested in profits than in independence. We note that many of them are already adjusting the economy of the Occupied Territories to meet the needs of the world market, and planning joint projects with Israeli capitalists as part of the regional economic collaboration outlined in the agreement.

The Palestinian delegation was appointed rather than elected. This anti democratic beginning leads us to expect the establishment of a bourgeois dictatorship in any Palestinian ’Autonomy’, which will act to strengthen rather than end this structural dependency. The new regime will consolidate a capitalist socio economic formation, in which class differentiation and struggle will be even sharper than today. It is important to recognise this, and to abandon the romantic idea that the PLO is a framework for all the Palestinian social classes.

Faced with this alliance of the various capitalists against Palestinian rights, the Marxist and socialist forces must put forward a programme which can confront the capitalist exploitative programme. This Popular Classes Programme should be based on the establishment of a democratic Civil Society and the creation and consolidation of a cooperative mode of production as a prelude to a socialist mode, with disengagement from the Israeli economy, the struggle for producers’ democracy against bourgeois political democracy, and the self management of producers against the private ownership of the capitalists and their appointed managers. The leaders, cadres and rank and file of the party which will struggle to achieve this programme will be women as the oppressed gender, workers as the exploited class, poor peasants and refugees.

This programme cannot be confined to Palestine. Only through a struggle for socialism in the Arab world as a whole can the plans of imperialism be frustrated. A precondition for this is the rejection of the Israel PLO agreement.

Dr Adel Samara is an independent Marxist economist from Ramallah in occupied Palestine.