Middle East peace?
The decision by the Israeli government to sign an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organisation to allow the Palestinian Arab population in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho limited "self-government" reflects the failure of Israel's 45-year-long policy of seeking to repress the Palestinian people's struggle for national self-determination.
The agreement has been sharply denounced by the hardline Zionist forces in Israel, led by the Likud party. Former Israeli foreign minister and current Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu claims the agreement is "the start of the destruction of Israel". Yet the Gaza-Jericho agreement has many similarities to "self-government plan" for the West Bank and Gaza approved by the Likud government as part of the Camp David accords with Egypt in 1978.
Under that plan, Israel was to withdraw its troops to "security positions", and the Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza were to elect an "Administrative Council" to be responsible for social and religious affairs, education and health, and the supervision of "local police bodies". The Israeli army was to maintain control of the "self-governed areas" and the illegal Jewish settlements were to continue. After a five-year period of Palestinian "self-rule", negotiations were to begin to define the permanent status of the West Bank and Gaza.
The key difference between that plan and the present one is that Likud's plan explicitly excluded PLO candidates from participating in the elections. Israel was to decide who the Palestinians' representatives were to be. The Likud leadership is opposed to the current plan precisely because it opens the road to the establishment of an open PLO presence in the West Bank and Gaza, and the establishment of the interim government of the democratic, secular State of Palestine proclaimed by the Palestine National Council in November 1988.
The Rabin government, however, has made it clear that it has no intentions of allowing an independent Palestinian state to emerge. Moreover, it is demanding, as the price for recognition of the PLO and its right to run candidates in elections in Gaza-Jericho, that the PLO renounce its long-term aim of replacing the racist, clerical Israeli colonial- settler state with a democratic, secular state in the whole of Palestine where Arabic- and Hebrew-speaking Palestinians would live together on an equal basis.
Since 1988, however, the PLO has been willing to agree to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement based on the acceptance of all UN resolutions relevant to the Palestine question, including not only those that uphold Israel's military "security", but also those such as Resolution 194 (December 1948) that affirm the right of Palestinian Arabs to "return to their homeland". The Israeli rulers have, and continue to reject, this as the basis for a settlement because they recognise that the return of the Arab Palestinians to their homeland would call into question, not Israel's "military security", but its racist, colonialist policies and institutions. Their current demands on the PLO are aimed at forcing it to abandon its political struggle for the full recognition of the democratic rights of Arab Palestinians wherever they live under Israeli rule.
The best assistance that supporters of the Palestinian Arabs' rights to national self-determination can provide the PLO in resisting Israel's blackmail is to demand that the Israeli government immediately and unconditionally lift its ban on the PLO, that it withdraw its occupation forces from Gaza and the West Bank immediately and unconditionally, that it allow the Palestinian Arabs to return to their homeland and grant them their full civil, political, and cultural rights.