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New Flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian Conflict at Palestinian
Forces Feud
by Gerry Foley / November 2005 issue of Socialist Action
newspaper
At the
end of October, war between the Israeli military and Palestinian armed
groups, which had been in abeyance since the Zionist evacuation of Gaza,
seemed to be igniting again.
On
the weekend of Oct. 22-23, the Israeli army invaded the West Bank town of Tulkarm
and assassinated a top leader of Islamic Jihad, Luai Saadi. Zionist
officials accused him of having planned suicide operations that killed 10
Israelis. They announced that they would continue to pursue militant
leaders they consider responsible for planning attacks on Israel.
Islamic
Jihad is the second largest Islamist organization, after Hamas. Its
response to the
assassination
of Luai Saadi was to threaten an all-out war against Israel. “We will not
stand handcuffed while the blood of our fighters is being shed. … Let calm
go to hell,” said a statement by the group, the liberal Zionist daily
Haaretz reported Oct. 24.
On
Oct. 26, an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber, 20-year-old Hassan Abu Zeid, blew
himself up in front of a falafel stand in an open-air market in the Israeli
coastal town of Hadera. The blast killed outright five Israelis, and
another six were reported in serious condition.
The
Zionist rulers announced that they were launched a campaign of retaliation
against the Islamist organization. On Oct. 27, Israeli missiles hit a car
carrying a senior Jihad leader for the northern Gaza strip and his aide.
Both were killed. Four bystanders were also killed, including a 15-year-old
boy and a 65-year-old man.
The
following day, Israeli missiles killed a leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs
Brigade, a military organization affiliated with Fatah, in the northern
Gaza town of Beit Hanun. Al Aqsa, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas all threatened
reprisals. The duel of missiles between Israel and Palestinian fighters in
Gaza also resumed, making Gaza once again a shooting gallery for the
Zionist
forces.
In
fact, before the new flare-up of military strikes, the effect of the
Zionist government’s withdrawal from Gaza seemed to be mainly that it had
increased conflict among Palestinians. In its Oct. 13 issue, Haaretz noted
that the number of Palestinians killed in inter-Palestinian conflicts
exceeded the number of Palestinians killed by the Zionist forces for the
first time:
“In
the report [released Oct. 13], the Palestinian Authority's Interior
Ministry cited 219 deaths as a result of inner-Palestinian violence
compared to 218 deaths at the hands of Israeli security forces over the
course of the first nine months of this year. The statistics reflect the
relative calm in the territories vis-a-vis Israel as well as the increasing
anarchy in PA-controlled areas.”
It
has been the constant objective of the Zionist rulers to turn the fruits of
the Palestinian struggle into an apple of discord for the oppressed
people. Concessions to the rights
of the Palestinian people are always made conditional on the Palestinian
forces themselves repressing the more intransigent fighters. The tensions between the militants and
the Palestinian Authority politicians and the police force they command
have grown as the Gaza Strip has moved to self-rule, since Islamists who
are identified with a line of unyielding struggle against Israel are the
dominant force in the territory.
Both
the United States and the Israeli authorities have only recently retreated
from putting pressure on the Palestinian Authority to exclude the Islamist
organization Hamas from running in the upcoming Palestinian elections.
Undoubtedly, they feared that pushing the PA too openly into a
confrontation with Hamas would only weaken it and strengthen its Islamist
rivals.
Moreover,
they obviously hoped that the spoils of compromise could also tempt a wing
of Hamas. There have been statements by some Hamas leaders that could indicate
a conciliatory turn, despite the organization’s strident anti-Zionist
rhetoric. In fact, the Islamist organizations are fraught with
contradictions, since they have no consistent political strategy for
fighting the Zionists.
The
Palestinian Authority leaders could only protest that the Israeli assaults
made it more difficult for them to keep the situation in the Palestinian
territories under control.
But
the benefits for the Palestinians of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza
remain small. The Israelis are continuing to isolate the economically
deprived area. The New York Times
reported Oct. 24: “A special Mideast envoy criticized Israel for not
allowing greater Palestinian movement in and out of the Gaza Strip, where
residents currently face greater
difficulties
in traveling than before Israel's withdrawal from the territory.” The envoy
was James
Wolfenson,
a representative of the so-called Quartet, which includes the United
Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia.
The
results of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza thus resemble those of the Oslo
Pact, which was supposed to set in motion a process leading to Palestinian
self-rule. In fact, it made the situation of the Palestinians even more
difficult. And the latest wave of Palestinian resistance has been a
response to that. In the context of
the new flare-up of violence, the Israeli government has stepped up its
demands that the Palestinian Authority disarm the fighters. Haaretz of Oct.
29 reported that the Palestinian Authority had arrested four Islamic Jihad
supporters but that the arrests had prompted a demonstration of protest
that the PA police dispersed by gunfire.
The
Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, who has accepted responsibility for
maintaining the “security” of the Egyptian border with Gaza, has warned
Israel that any attempt by the Palestinian Authority to disarm the
militants could lead to civil war in the Palestinian areas. That is
probably what the Israelis want. Their difficulty is that if there were a
civil war today,
the
PA would probably lose it.
However,
the danger of inter-Palestinian conflict is obviously increasing, and the
Palestinian militants need a new political strategy to avert it and to
undermine the political power that the Zionist state has over them.
They
would be greatly strengthened if they called for a democratic solution, a
single state of Palestine in which Jews and Arabs could live together
peacefully based on the common economic interests of working people in the
region.
The
projection of regional unity based on the basic interests of working people
could foster the broadest unity in struggle against imperialist domination
and manipulation.
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