Weekly Worker 428 (18/4/02) - Hamas - Sharon's Palestinian Allies

Weekly Worker 428 - Towards a Socialist Alliance
Party!

In this week's Weekly Worker, paper of the Communist
Party of Great Britain;


Hamas - Sharon's Palestinian Allies

Ariel Sharon?s bloody occupation of territories in the
West Bank and Gaza - supposedly controlled by the
Palestinian Authority - is an act of open war against
an oppressed people.

It is a war in which socialists and communists cannot
be neutral bystanders. The so-called Israeli Defence
Force is an army of occupation carrying out an
ethnically-based tyranny which resembles some of the
crimes of European fascism. Our opposition is based on
the fundamental idea of the equality of peoples - that
the Palestinian people have as much right to their own
national existence and territory as any other people,
and certainly as much as the Israeli people, whose
state currently deprives them of that political right,
and much else besides. This is fundamentally a
question of democracy, of the right of a people to
resist tyranny and oppression, of the fight against
all forms of national oppression and injustice that is
an integral part of the struggle for a socialist
international order in which such forms of oppression
will become a thing of the past.

We support all that is democratic and progressive in
the content of the programme of Palestinian
resistance, all that is effective, all methods that
actually aid the struggle for liberation. However, the
question immediately arises as to what our attitude is
to the Palestinian suicide bombings that have
mushroomed into a more-than-weekly phenomenon in the
last few months. Long the favoured tactic of Hamas - a
Palestinian muslim fundamentalist group which not only
seeks the destruction of the state of Israel but,
shades of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an end
to the international jewish ?conspiracy? to ?control
the world? - as the conflict with the Sharon
government has become more desperate, it has even been
emulated by sections of the secular Palestinian
nationalists, such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an
offshoot of Yasser Arafat?s Al Fatah guerrilla
movement. 

The fact that the brigade is named after the victims
of a particularly vile Israeli atrocity - the massacre
by an ultra-Zionist settler of dozens of worshippers
at islam?s third most holy site, the Al-Aqsa mosque in
Jerusalem, during the early period of the Oslo peace
process under Labour prime minister Rabin - reflects
the extent to which Hamas is setting the ideological
and tactical agenda among elements of the Palestinian
resistance.

Yet in reality Hamas, and those who are being sucked
into imitating its methods, are actively helping
Sharon to maintain the support of the Israeli
population for his war, and are thus, in political
terms, facilitating his butchery of the Palestinians.
There is no way to avoid this conclusion. We support
all methods of resistance that actually helps to
defeat the Sharon government and its armed aggression,
and that actually therefore lead in the direction of
the liberation of the Palestinians. But we cannot
support, or in any way excuse or fail to condemn a
reactionary programme and the actions designed to
promote that programme which create a climate of fear
amongst the Israeli workers and the middle class and
lead to a situation where Sharon can point to ordinary
bus passengers, or those attending a wedding or a bat
mitzvah, being blown to smithereens, as a
justification for his murderous actions. He is able to
advance his own far-right agenda, which in its logic
points toward the expulsion and/or massacre of the
Palestinian population, with the support of the
Israeli population on the basis of perceived
self-interest and its own safety.

Recently, Chris Bambery, one of the key leaders of the
Socialist Workers Party, has taken it upon himself to
denounce the CPGB for allegedly equating the violence
of Hamas suicide bombers with that of the Israeli
state. The aim being, of course, to cement the
disapproval of the many SWP members whose attitude to
essentially political questions such as the Middle
East is heavily determined by considerations of
liberal guilt: ?How dare I, as a white British person,
criticise these poor oppressed people??

The SWP is currently suffering from a sectarian bout
of close-mindedness, making their stubborn opposition
to any hint of a two-state solution in relation to the
Israeli-Palestinian question a point of honour. It
seems to be determined to bow before inchoate militant
rejectionist sentiments among Palestinians. The fake,
and blatantly undemocratic, nature of the now-deceased
Oslo accord, with its circumscribed blueprint for a
Palestinian semi-bantustan riddled with armed Jewish
settlers, of course feeds this sentiment.

Yet this spontaneous rejectionism, which generates
mass support for the actions of Hamas among the
Palestinian population, is being directed in a way
that threatens disaster for the Palestinian people
themselves. One crucial programmatic point that Hamas
has in common with Sharon is opposition to any kind of
solution involving mutual and peaceful coexistence of
Palestinians and Israelis. Sharon, and even more the
overtly fascist formations on his right flank, want a
greater Israel, with the Palestinians either
massacred, driven out or subjugated, or possibly a
combination of all three. Hamas also wants a single
state - with the Israeli jews likewise massacred
and/or driven out and/or subjugated.

Hamas is quite prepared, in the pursuit of its goals,
to aid Sharon in the achievement of the destruction of
the Palestinian Authority and the Kosova-style mass
expulsion of the Palestinian people, in the hope that
this too would call forth a terrible retribution
against ?the jews? from the surrounding Arab peoples.
Given Israel?s possession of a fearsome nuclear
arsenal, this is a suicidal, apocalyptic strategy for
the Arab peoples. 

Thus Hamas?s tactics over the past several years have
been deliberately designed to create the political
conditions for the destruction of Arafat?s
administration, dovetailing exactly with the schemes
of the Israeli far right - without Hamas itself being
seen to fire a single shot against Arafat. It is no
accident that Hamas was originally, in the 1970s,
promoted - and, some say, financed - by the Israeli
right as a counterweight to the secular and left
nationalists. For the likes of Sharon, such support
has paid off handsomely.

So those on the left, such as the SWP, who turn a
blind eye to the reactionary manifestations of Hamas
influence are deluding themselves. What is worse, they
are abstaining from the duty to point out to the
oppressed the truth about the reactionary consequences
of Hamas?s activities. In political terms, they are
helping to shepherd the Palestinian people toward
another 1948-style historic disaster.

Ian Donovan


Also in this issue;

'Scottish Socialist Party: Campaign for a Republic' - 
The Scottish Socialist Party has agreed to militantly
campaign for republicanism in the year of the queen?s
jubilee. Sarah McDonald reports

'What Sort of Palestine?' - The left can not act as
uncritical cheerleaders for islamic movements, writes
Tina Becker.

'Taking issue with SWP: United Front of a Third Kind' 
- Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group
argues against Alex Callinicos? Socialist Review
article and calls for the Socialist Alliance to become
a ?united front party?

'Simon Harvey of the SLP: Thin on the Ground' - A
comrade in Scargill's little party reports on their
local election campaign.

'Left Challenge' - Peter Manson surveys the left's
intervention the English local elections

'Hackney: Make it Happen!' - Socialist Alliance
candidate for Stoke Newington, Anne Mc Shane reports
on the slow start to the campaign.

'Argentina: Democratic Questions for Socialists' - 
Christopher Pike assesses the current situation in one
of Latin America's most important countries

'Resolution of the National Workers' Assembly'.
 
'Republican Counterblasts: Revolution of the World' - 
Terry Liddle remembers an outstanding opponent of
monarchism.

'Socialist Alliance Executive: Debating Palestine and
Deepening Union' -  Marcus Strom reports reports on
the April 13 meeting.

'Programmatic Confusion' - The left must raise the
banner of consistent democracy for both Palestinian
Arabs and Israeli jews, argues James Mallory. Under
present circumstances that means a two-state solution.

'Resistance with Responsibility' - Mohammed Al Batal
is a member of the foreign relations committee of the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He
spoke to the Weekly Worker about Israeli expansionism,
Sharon?s murderous war aims and the prospect for a
democratic settlement between the Palestinian and
Israeli jewish nations.

'Building for the Future' - Local elections in England
are set for May 2. With Labour reeling from charges of
being in the pay of big business this is the Socialist
Alliance?s most important challenge since the 2001
general election. Rob Hoveman is the Socialist
Alliance?s national secretary. He decided to give
written responses to our questions which he asked to
receive in advance.

'Whose Money?' - Derek Goodliffe of the RMT's grades
executive gives a brief sketch of the recent national
conference.


And Letters (SWP, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Spanish
Demo), Fighting Fund, and Action.

This edition can be read at
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/428/index.html
For more information and sub details, go to
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London, WC1N 3XX, quoting 'e-ad'.

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Wales and the Scottish Socialist Party. 
Please visit
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