AUT: Fwd: about dual power in Palestine

[Scott Hamilton <s_h_hamilton@xxxxxxxxx>]

Here is an interesting article, from the bourgeois
media, which was the first I read about the growth of
the militia/committees of resistance which have
created a situation of dual power in Palestine by
challenging the authority of Arafat's Palestinian
Authority. It was militia like the ones described
which fought the most recent Israeli incursion into
Gaza, driving back several tanks.

You will never hear the US or Israeli government
acknowledge the autonomy of these militia, because
they try to pin every Palestinian armed action on
Arafat. The US and Israel, of course, have played a
huge role in smashing Arafat's authority and creating
the vacuum which the militia have moved into.

It is important to understand, though, that many of
the members of some militia, at least, are members of
Fatah, Arafat's faction of the PLO, or even of
Arafat's own security forces. They are rank and file,
many of whom broke with Arafat's leadership at or
shortly after the beginning of the second intifada.
>From the beginning Arafat has had to negotiate joint
action with them, rather than give them orders (ie
they make a military bloc with him, not a political
bloc). Arafat did manage to reincorporate many of the
breakaways back into the security forces last year,
but it is not clear how many have remained, given the
ruinous state of Arafat's proto-state. It is not
unusual for security forces to 'turn rogue' in a
revolutionary situation.

If we accept that Arafat has lost his ability to
control most of Palestine, if the militia present an
alternative (if somewhat fragmented) source of
authority based at least on classes other than the
Palestinian national bourgeoisie, which was tiny and
seemed dependent on the largesse of Arafat, and if
capitalism, homegrown Palestinian capitalism as well
as US-Israeli imperialism, is in crisis in Palestine,
then it seems that we must say that a
pre-revolutionary situation exists in Palestine. At
the very least, we can say that these
militia/committees, which local leftists may need to
criticise as well as support, represent a better
option than waiting for capitalism to make Zionism and
Palestinian nationalism obsolete.

Of course, it would nicer for some people's schemes if
the anarcho-syndicalist vanguard party was leading the
revolution, or if the revolution was taking place in
an advanced Western country, or if suicide bombings
was not a tactic of some Palestinians, or if Islamism
had no influence in the militia, or if revolution was
spontaneously erupting worldwide, but real life does
not often follow the dictates of schemes.



The Nation
COMMENT | April 29, 2002

Palestine Militias Rising
by Graham Usher

Israel's latest military offensive in the West Bank,
code-named Defensive Wall, was met with fierce armed
resistance, as Palestinians fought house to house and
sometimes hand to hand to repulse the
reconquest of their towns, villages and refugee camps.
Some of the young defenders are guerrillas from new
Palestinian militias forged by the intifada, others
are Palestinian Authority police officers and
many are both.

"This is our Karameh," said one in Jenin. Karameh, a
village on the East Bank of the Jordan River, is the
site of a battle fought between the Israeli army and
Palestinian guerrillas in March 1968. Although
the army took the village, the heroic resistance put
up by the Palestinians consecrated Yasir Arafat and
his Fatah movement as the undisputed leadership of the
Palestinian cause. One year later Arafat
was elected chairman of the PLO. He converted the
movement from a front for Arab regimes into an
authentic representative of Palestinian nationalism.

Many believe a similar changing of the guard has
occurred during the eighteen months of the latest
uprising, with leadership gradually passing from a
Palestinian Authority that once ruled over the
Palestinian areas to armed and cross-factional
militias that now, alone, defend them. Formed in the
uprising's first months as a defense against army and
settler incursions, Fatah-led militias like
the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) in Gaza and
the Al Aqsa Brigades in the West Bank have seen their
power and legitimacy soar in inverse ratio to the
collapse of the PA's governing and military
institutions after a wave of Israeli assaults. As a
result, former officers in PA police forces have
swelled the militias' ranks.

This transformation has accelerated during Ariel
Sharon's premiership. Following his election in
February last year--and with Arafat's oblique
blessing--the Palestinian armed factions united behind
one policy: to destroy Sharon by creating a "balance
of
terror" with the occupation, a phrase borrowed from
Hezbollah's triumphant resistance to Israel's
occupation in south Lebanon. "We have to convince
Israelis that whatever else Sharon brings them, it
won't be security," says Jamal Abu Samhandanah, a PRC
leader.

The strategy has exacted a brutal toll. Nearly 2,000
Palestinians and 400 Israelis have been killed in the
current conflict, as Sharon's exclusively military
solutions went from bombardment to reoccupation,
and Palestinian resistance went from guerrilla warfare
in the occupied territories to suicide bombings in
Israel, executed recently as much by Fatah as by the
Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The politics of Palestine's new young guard is as
inchoate as the local militias that it comprises. But
it opposes the PA-Israeli security cooperation and
US-led diplomacy of the Oslo peace process, favoring
instead armed struggle and alliances with the Arab
world, including the million or so Palestinian
citizens of Israel. One militia leader in Bethlehem
said the most suitable response to Israel's current
assault would be "resistance in Israel's cities and
mayhem from the Galilee to Cairo."

Overwhelmingly from village and refugee backgrounds,
the young guard is critical of PA mismanagement and
corruption and of an Oslo leadership they believe
reaped the spoils of the peace process
without delivering on Palestinian aspirations to
statehood, independence and Israeli withdrawal. But
they are loyal to Arafat, and rarely more so than now:
The army's siege on the Palestinian leader's compound
in Ramallah is seen as a symbol of the plight of
every Palestinian. "We think Arafat and all the
leaders around him compromised too much in the
negotiations. But as long as Sharon acts
against him, we will be with Arafat. We will not let
Israel decide the Palestinian leadership," says
Samhandanah.

The young fighters are positioning for leadership in
the post-Arafat era, whether this comes through his
natural demise or through forced removal by Israel.
The contours of the contest are already clear:
between the historic Oslo leadership that seeks a
negotiated settlement courtesy of US and international
intervention, and a resistance vowing that the
intifada will end only with independence,
even if that means the destruction of what is left of
the PA. Arafat has maintained his leadership by
balancing between the two wings; he will side with the
winner, say Palestinian analysts.

If Sharon succeeds in reimposing military rule
throughout the occupied territories, the Palestinian
national leadership will revert to what it was after
Karameh, this time laced with a strong Islamist
current. It will be young, underground, armed,
refugee-based, perhaps more democratic and certainly
more radical. It will take the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict back three decades, and perhaps further.







=====
"Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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