STRUGGLE FOR HISTORICAL TRUTH
The PLO has been the ultimate example of a secular liberation movement of the people struggling against enemies from every side, and going through hell to survive. Here are some of its historical moments, the startling truths
by Tony Hall (in 2003)
Before long, the US war cabinet will turn its evil eye towards the destruction of the PLO as a secular, independent people’s liberation movement. With Iraq under its heel, the way will be clear for the final act. Bush has called for the complete removal of Yasser Arafat from power – why? Because, whatever his shortcomings and those of the Palestinian Authority, Arafat has always led and fought for that secular, independent state, the ideal which more than anything, imperialism cannot stomach. [Read Timothy Mitchell’s fascinating and important "McJihad" analysis of the Islam-Imperialist interface, if you haven’t already, as posted by Raj Patel].
Why is it that even some of the finest journalists, commentators and analysts, Robert Fisk and Edward Said among them, have joined in the process of trashing Arafat and his leadership, and the secular "governing" institutions the PLO has tried to set up, without making nearly enough of the historical context, and the unique and awful combination of forces the movement has had to face for decades?
Imperialism and settler violence has operated far more openly and now viciously, than it could in South Africa, because it is allowed free play in a world of historical and moral confusion about the travesty that zionism came to represent. Adding to the death-dealing Mossad was the constant sniping and attrition against the PLO and Fatah, literally, by enemies within the Palestinian diaspora, and the weakening of the people’s movement and undermining of the mainstream Palestinian institutions as manipulated by some Arab circles.
All these, Arafat has had to hold out against, and has done so, often under fire, literally. If you want a sympathetic understanding of what Arafat’s PLO has meant and means to the Palestinian struggle, read Uri Avnery (someone much admired by Robert Fisk, actually) on the subject. Now there’s an Israeli who could one day be considered one of the founding fathers of the secular state of Palestine (including Israel) whose time will come.
--------------------
With all this in mind, a few weeks ago I wrote to ANC Today, (copied to the Not in My Name people) cautioning the ANC against what may seem a patronising attitude to the PLO. The edited version below, contains points of history that need to be fed into the intensified political planning that lies ahead:
Dear ANC, and friends of a secular democratic Palestine,
As a broadly loyal though not uncritical member of the Congress of Democrats, then the ANC, for more than 40 years, and as a journalist and editor specialising in the Middle East for several years during our family exile, I want to make a few points about the way the ANC seems to be presented as going to tell the Palestinians how freedom and democracy is achieved.
I don't know who needs the ticking off – the ANC spokesmen themselves, or the media – for the way this is coming across, but please, be careful that the approach not seem patronising, but shows respect and awareness of the long struggle, the sacrifices and the heroic leadership of the PLO, the Palestinian people's liberation movement; not to teach, but to learn; at least to share lessons and experience.
The Palestinians are at the sharp end of imperialist-backed settler violence, at least as relentless in recent decades as the ANC had to face over a comparative period. The PLO, precisely because it is a secular, inclusive democratic movement, has been battered from all sides.
Many of its leading cadres have been picked off for years by enemies from many quarters. PLO leaders in exile through the 1970s and 1980s were assassinated, in London, in Paris and elsewhere, precisely because they were not only totally committed, but good strategists and tacticians, balanced and yes, moderate in the important sense. Those are the people that imperialism directly or indirectly picks off one by one. Like our Chris Hani, Ruth First, Eduardo Mondlane and so many others. It wasn't only Mossad who were killing these PLO leaders, it was also such vicious renegades as Abu Nidal and his band.
Back in 1970 in Jordan, in what became known as Black September, it was the heavy bombing by Jordanian forces of the Palestinian camps, and the suspiciously tardy response of the Syrian forces in protecting the refugees, that led to the death of many thousands of Palestinians, and the refugees fleeing once more, this time to Beirut.
Then in the mid-1970s there were the mass killings of Palestinians in Tal al Zaatar camp, by the Lebanese Phalange, as allowed by the Syrians. Only later, in the early 1980s, came the mass slaughter of Palestinians once again, by the same Phalangists, in Sabra and Chatilla camps, sponsored, as everybody knows, by Ariel Sharon.
And when the Israelis then ousted the PLO from Beirut in the early 1980s, it was the end of the uneasy but workable modus vivendi, the understanding between armed militia over which the PLO presided in West Beirut, so that people could move about. What followed PLO’s departure was a vacuum of order, and the long hell for years, of street anarchy, of killing and hostage-taking by Muslim extremist movements around the capital.
When Yasser Arafat much later got the chance to move the PLO base yet again, from Tunis to the Occupied Territories, he knew as well as anybody that it was going to be a long struggle to turn the cruel charade of a Palestinian state into a meaningful democracy. But that toehold has been the only way to keep Palestine, the idea and the filmable reality, alive – and leadership clung on to by the secular democratic liberation movement, not released to runaway Islamic extremism.
Probably, the only way our experience in South Africa can be fully relevant is when they can forge a secular state out of Palestine and Israel, with religious tolerance and equality for all. One day.
-----------------------------------------
The world’s last settler state
The struggle for a liberated Palestine/Israel of the people must continue. And the enemies to be fought are: Israeli state terror, and Islamic fundamentalist terror.
How do you recognise these enemies? They are the ones financed and supported, when the chips are down, by the US military/financial complex and its intelligence agencies – with whom the terrorists are often intricately intertwined
It is heartening to see from the Not-in-my-name letter and the debate, how many tough-minded, articulate and aware people there are among SA Jews. But ‘twas ever thus.
Go to Israel (as an aware anti-apartheid South African) any time over the past thirty or more years, and you see the similarities with our Bantustan days. But you also come across a fair smattering across quite a wide spectrum, of liberal and progressive people, from Peace Now campaigners to all-out activists for a secular, multiethnic, multi-religious state in Palestine/Israel. This is the same kind of spectrum we saw in the SA communities for decades, from Black Sash demonstrators to Congress movement strugglers of all races who fought hard and sacrificed much.
The differences are crucial, and offer many sad reasons why Israel/Palestine is in such a mess, with the Israeli regime sometimes perpetrating more extreme oppression than the SA white minority government would even have tried to get away with; whereas here in SA we at least moved on to become a modern secular democratic state with a progressive constitution. And we can go on from there.
First of all, Israel started out trying to be a post-war haven for the persecuted Jews of Europe, with a more or less social democratic policy and thrust. But soon the thrust altered as Israel became one more settler state – and worse – ever more entrenched as a religious settler state, getting away with more and more pillage, torture and murder – and second-line support for all kinds of US imperialist tactics in other countries (the subject for another letter altogether) -- as it was spoiled rotten, literally, by American support. Israel flouted every human right in the book, in the name of compensating for the Holocaust, with every government tending to move further and further to the right (with the Rabin/Peres exception – but look what happened to Rabin) just like Rhodesia, or SA’s Nat party governments, one after the other. That’s the way settler governments go.
Government by or for a race or creed multiplies intolerance and race/ethnic/faith divisions. Uri Davis was telling us in the 1970s how original Israelis were employing recent Jewish migrants from Yemen as domestics – referring to the maid as ‘my Yemenite’. Each new wave of Jewish immigrants has been put on the front line. In Israel’s earlier days, in a letter from Ben Gurion to Jan Smuts some time in the 1940s he posed a question along these lines: how are you doing with your schwarzes [in South Africa]? Ours [the Palestinians] are giving us lots of headaches…
The biggest feeders and stirrers of the brave little Israel myth have always been visiting New Yorkers and such, who don’t have to live there, but go back to the US and mess up any hope of the Democratic Party ever embarking on a remotely even-handed initiative on the Middle East. One presidential or gubernatorial candidate after another, making reasonably decent pledges on many issues, sooner or later has to put on the yarmulke and pledge undying support for Israel, never mind what viciousness it may get up to.
All one can say is: oye veh!
As for the two-state solution – it isn’t really what progressive Israelis want, is it? Nor is it what progressive Palestinians want. So, the struggle for a liberated Palestine/Israel of the people must continue. And the enemies to be fought are: Israeli state terror, and Islamic fundamentalist terror.
How do you recognise these enemies? Well they are the ones financed and supported, when the chips are down, by the US military/financial complex and its intelligence agencies – with whom the terrorists are often intricately intertwined.
By Tony Hall (as posted on the SA Debate network in 2003)
Arafat. Photo by (?)
The PLO has been the ultimate example of a secular liberation movement of the people struggling against enemies from every side, and going through hell to survive. Here are some of its historical moments, the startling truths
by Tony Hall (in 2003)
Before long, the US war cabinet will turn its evil eye towards the destruction of the PLO as a secular, independent people’s liberation movement. With Iraq under its heel, the way will be clear for the final act. Bush has called for the complete removal of Yasser Arafat from power – why? Because, whatever his shortcomings and those of the Palestinian Authority, Arafat has always led and fought for that secular, independent state, the ideal which more than anything, imperialism cannot stomach. [Read Timothy Mitchell’s fascinating and important "McJihad" analysis of the Islam-Imperialist interface, if you haven’t already, as posted by Raj Patel].
Why is it that even some of the finest journalists, commentators and analysts, Robert Fisk and Edward Said among them, have joined in the process of trashing Arafat and his leadership, and the secular "governing" institutions the PLO has tried to set up, without making nearly enough of the historical context, and the unique and awful combination of forces the movement has had to face for decades?
Imperialism and settler violence has operated far more openly and now viciously, than it could in South Africa, because it is allowed free play in a world of historical and moral confusion about the travesty that zionism came to represent. Adding to the death-dealing Mossad was the constant sniping and attrition against the PLO and Fatah, literally, by enemies within the Palestinian diaspora, and the weakening of the people’s movement and undermining of the mainstream Palestinian institutions as manipulated by some Arab circles.
All these, Arafat has had to hold out against, and has done so, often under fire, literally. If you want a sympathetic understanding of what Arafat’s PLO has meant and means to the Palestinian struggle, read Uri Avnery (someone much admired by Robert Fisk, actually) on the subject. Now there’s an Israeli who could one day be considered one of the founding fathers of the secular state of Palestine (including Israel) whose time will come.
--------------------
With all this in mind, a few weeks ago I wrote to ANC Today, (copied to the Not in My Name people) cautioning the ANC against what may seem a patronising attitude to the PLO. The edited version below, contains points of history that need to be fed into the intensified political planning that lies ahead:
Dear ANC, and friends of a secular democratic Palestine,
As a broadly loyal though not uncritical member of the Congress of Democrats, then the ANC, for more than 40 years, and as a journalist and editor specialising in the Middle East for several years during our family exile, I want to make a few points about the way the ANC seems to be presented as going to tell the Palestinians how freedom and democracy is achieved.
I don't know who needs the ticking off – the ANC spokesmen themselves, or the media – for the way this is coming across, but please, be careful that the approach not seem patronising, but shows respect and awareness of the long struggle, the sacrifices and the heroic leadership of the PLO, the Palestinian people's liberation movement; not to teach, but to learn; at least to share lessons and experience.
The Palestinians are at the sharp end of imperialist-backed settler violence, at least as relentless in recent decades as the ANC had to face over a comparative period. The PLO, precisely because it is a secular, inclusive democratic movement, has been battered from all sides.
Many of its leading cadres have been picked off for years by enemies from many quarters. PLO leaders in exile through the 1970s and 1980s were assassinated, in London, in Paris and elsewhere, precisely because they were not only totally committed, but good strategists and tacticians, balanced and yes, moderate in the important sense. Those are the people that imperialism directly or indirectly picks off one by one. Like our Chris Hani, Ruth First, Eduardo Mondlane and so many others. It wasn't only Mossad who were killing these PLO leaders, it was also such vicious renegades as Abu Nidal and his band.
Back in 1970 in Jordan, in what became known as Black September, it was the heavy bombing by Jordanian forces of the Palestinian camps, and the suspiciously tardy response of the Syrian forces in protecting the refugees, that led to the death of many thousands of Palestinians, and the refugees fleeing once more, this time to Beirut.
Then in the mid-1970s there were the mass killings of Palestinians in Tal al Zaatar camp, by the Lebanese Phalange, as allowed by the Syrians. Only later, in the early 1980s, came the mass slaughter of Palestinians once again, by the same Phalangists, in Sabra and Chatilla camps, sponsored, as everybody knows, by Ariel Sharon.
And when the Israelis then ousted the PLO from Beirut in the early 1980s, it was the end of the uneasy but workable modus vivendi, the understanding between armed militia over which the PLO presided in West Beirut, so that people could move about. What followed PLO’s departure was a vacuum of order, and the long hell for years, of street anarchy, of killing and hostage-taking by Muslim extremist movements around the capital.
When Yasser Arafat much later got the chance to move the PLO base yet again, from Tunis to the Occupied Territories, he knew as well as anybody that it was going to be a long struggle to turn the cruel charade of a Palestinian state into a meaningful democracy. But that toehold has been the only way to keep Palestine, the idea and the filmable reality, alive – and leadership clung on to by the secular democratic liberation movement, not released to runaway Islamic extremism.
Probably, the only way our experience in South Africa can be fully relevant is when they can forge a secular state out of Palestine and Israel, with religious tolerance and equality for all. One day.
-----------------------------------------
The world’s last settler state
The struggle for a liberated Palestine/Israel of the people must continue. And the enemies to be fought are: Israeli state terror, and Islamic fundamentalist terror.
How do you recognise these enemies? They are the ones financed and supported, when the chips are down, by the US military/financial complex and its intelligence agencies – with whom the terrorists are often intricately intertwined
It is heartening to see from the Not-in-my-name letter and the debate, how many tough-minded, articulate and aware people there are among SA Jews. But ‘twas ever thus.
Go to Israel (as an aware anti-apartheid South African) any time over the past thirty or more years, and you see the similarities with our Bantustan days. But you also come across a fair smattering across quite a wide spectrum, of liberal and progressive people, from Peace Now campaigners to all-out activists for a secular, multiethnic, multi-religious state in Palestine/Israel. This is the same kind of spectrum we saw in the SA communities for decades, from Black Sash demonstrators to Congress movement strugglers of all races who fought hard and sacrificed much.
The differences are crucial, and offer many sad reasons why Israel/Palestine is in such a mess, with the Israeli regime sometimes perpetrating more extreme oppression than the SA white minority government would even have tried to get away with; whereas here in SA we at least moved on to become a modern secular democratic state with a progressive constitution. And we can go on from there.
First of all, Israel started out trying to be a post-war haven for the persecuted Jews of Europe, with a more or less social democratic policy and thrust. But soon the thrust altered as Israel became one more settler state – and worse – ever more entrenched as a religious settler state, getting away with more and more pillage, torture and murder – and second-line support for all kinds of US imperialist tactics in other countries (the subject for another letter altogether) -- as it was spoiled rotten, literally, by American support. Israel flouted every human right in the book, in the name of compensating for the Holocaust, with every government tending to move further and further to the right (with the Rabin/Peres exception – but look what happened to Rabin) just like Rhodesia, or SA’s Nat party governments, one after the other. That’s the way settler governments go.
Government by or for a race or creed multiplies intolerance and race/ethnic/faith divisions. Uri Davis was telling us in the 1970s how original Israelis were employing recent Jewish migrants from Yemen as domestics – referring to the maid as ‘my Yemenite’. Each new wave of Jewish immigrants has been put on the front line. In Israel’s earlier days, in a letter from Ben Gurion to Jan Smuts some time in the 1940s he posed a question along these lines: how are you doing with your schwarzes [in South Africa]? Ours [the Palestinians] are giving us lots of headaches…
The biggest feeders and stirrers of the brave little Israel myth have always been visiting New Yorkers and such, who don’t have to live there, but go back to the US and mess up any hope of the Democratic Party ever embarking on a remotely even-handed initiative on the Middle East. One presidential or gubernatorial candidate after another, making reasonably decent pledges on many issues, sooner or later has to put on the yarmulke and pledge undying support for Israel, never mind what viciousness it may get up to.
All one can say is: oye veh!
As for the two-state solution – it isn’t really what progressive Israelis want, is it? Nor is it what progressive Palestinians want. So, the struggle for a liberated Palestine/Israel of the people must continue. And the enemies to be fought are: Israeli state terror, and Islamic fundamentalist terror.
How do you recognise these enemies? Well they are the ones financed and supported, when the chips are down, by the US military/financial complex and its intelligence agencies – with whom the terrorists are often intricately intertwined.
By Tony Hall (as posted on the SA Debate network in 2003)
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ReplyDeleteNope. Sorry. Won't post enigmatic comments with dodgy links unless you explain yourself properly.
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