It is time for the opponents of Israel's colonialist war against the Palestinian people to mobilise in support of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Yasser Arafat's demand that a United Nations force be sent to protect the unarmed and defenceless people of east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza from Israel's brutal occupying army.
Every day since the latest intifada (uprising) began on September 23, thousands of courageous Palestinian young people have dared to take on the might of the Middle East's most powerful military machine with little more than stones.
The murderous response by Israel's occupation army has shocked the world — hundreds of Palestinian civilians have been shot at with potentially deadly rubber-coated steel bullets; slingshots have been answered by deadly accurate Israeli snipers; and isolated, mostly ineffective, Palestinian gunfire has been answered with collective punishment on residential areas inflicted by tank cannons, mortars and helicopter-fired missiles.
Following each of the relatively few Israeli deaths that have occurred over the last two months, the Israeli military and its paramilitary allies among the Zionist settlers have unleashed an orgy of revenge attacks on Palestinian neighbourhoods, towns and villages, using all the heavy weapons at their disposal. Homes, schools and hospitals have not escaped Israeli bombardment.
The death toll from this Gestapo-style terror has increased by an average of six Palestinians every day. As of November 14, more than 250 Palestinians have been slaughtered — around a third under the age of 18 — and 9000 wounded since September 23.
Israeli generals have openly threatened to unleash hit squads to take out Palestinian leaders who refuse to "control" the Palestinian people's just struggle for national independence. That these threats were not idle was made viciously clear when Fatah leader Hussein Abayat was assassinated on November 9 by Israeli missiles fired from a US-supplied helicopter gunship.
The intifada exploded in September, not because the Palestinian leadership had control of the Palestinians living in the territories occupied by the Israeli army in 1967, but because to a large extent it had lost control of them. The new intifada is a largely spontaneous revolt produced by seven years of pent-up frustration and anger at the US-controlled Oslo "peace process" and the unanswered litany of compromise-upon-compromises agreed to by the Arafat leadership.
Since Oslo accords were signed in 1993, Israel has consolidated its military and economic control over the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. In all areas, life has got worse for the majority of Palestinians. Illegal Israeli Jewish-only settlements have expanded across the occupied territories.
For seven years the Arafat-led PA has played the role Israel's Palestinian gendarme against the aspirations of his own people as the Zionist occupiers transformed the West Bank and Gaza into a patchwork quilt of bantustans dependent upon, and servile to, Israel. Despite this, Israel has refused to abide by the most minimal of commitments given in 1993.
The new uprising of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories — supported by the Palestinian minority within Israel and the masses of the Arab world — seems to have pulled the historical leadership of the Palestinian national liberation struggle back from the brink of the Oslo precipice.
"Negotiations from now on must be about implementing international legitimacy and ending the occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem", Palestinian leader Mustafa Barghouti told November 9-15 Al-Ahram newspaper. "That is only possible peace, the bare minimum of justice and the real compromise. Oslo was an adventure where Palestinians were continually being asked to compromise on the compromise. And you can't compromise on the compromise. If the intifada is telling us anything, it is telling us that."
The Palestine Liberation Organisation's representative for Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, told the same newspaper: "We do not want to 'negotiate' UN resolutions 242 and 338. We want Israel to implement them and recognise the 1967 lines as the borders of Palestinian sovereignty."
Husseini was referring to the two key resolutions unanimously passed by the UN Security Council demanding the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the Palestinian lands it invaded in 1967.
In November 1988 the Palestine National Council, the Palestinian parliament-in-exile and highest decision-making body of the PLO, compromised and accepted UN resolutions 181 (the resolution which partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in 1947), 242 and 338 as the basis for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This was a significant step back from the PLO's previous demand for a united, democratic, secular Palestine. Israel's repudiation of even the phony Oslo "peace process" proves that the Zionist ruling class was not content with the PLO's "historic compromise", but wanted its total surrender.
Under pressure from his people to halt the leadership's retreat, and in the face of the Israeli army's indiscriminate killings of Palestinian civilian protesters, Arafat on November 10 demanded that the UN Security Council approve a 2000-strong UN "protection force" for the occupied territories to protect Palestinian civilians and to supervise the withdrawal of Israel's occupation army.
For 33 years, Israel has occupied east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in open defiance of the UN resolutions. The United States has persistently used its veto in the Security Council to prevent any action being taken to force Israel to comply with these resolutions. US President Bill Clinton has stated that Washington opposes Arafat's call for a protection force because Israel will not agree to it.
Washington's attitude toward Israel's 33-year occupation of the internationally recognised Arab territories stands in stark contrast to the US response to Iraq's invasion of the oil-rich, pro-Western emirate of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Then, the US called the Security Council into emergency session immediately, and passed resolution 660 which condemned the invasion, demanded an immediate withdrawal and called for direct negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait. Four days later, the council imposed a trade and financial embargo on Iraq that continues to this day and has taken the lives of 1.5 million Iraqis.
On November 29, 1990 the Security Council passed resolution 678, which authorised UN member states "to use all necessary means" to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. The US air force began bombing Baghdad on the evening of January 16, 1991. The Pentagon had sent 400,000 troops to Saudi Arabia well before November 29, and the US commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, was in command from the first. The UN secretary general was not even informed when Operation Desert Storm was to begin.
Why did the US take such a hard line against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait while working hand in glove with Israel to maintain its 1967 invasions? Because Washington's decisions on whether to act against an invasion, or condone one, have nothing to do with the lying rhetoric it peddles about "respect for international law", "the rights of small nations" or "human rights". Rather, they are decided on the basis of what will protect and extend its corporate masters' global empire.
Needless to say, Israel is US imperialism's key ally in the Middle East. As a Pentagon document reported upon by the New York Times on March 8, 1992, explained: the "overall [US] objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the [Middle East] region and preserve US and Western access to the region's oil."
The Palestinian leadership's demand for the sending of a UN protection force to the West Bank and Gaza and for the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation army has the potential to mobilise the millions of people around the world who are shocked and disgusted at the magnitude of the violence being inflicted upon a defenceless people. It should be vigorously supported by all those who support the democratic right of the Palestinian people to national self-determination.