Mahmoud Abbas and the degeneration of the Palestinian national movement (part 1)

The cease fire announced by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheik comes just weeks after Abbas was elected to office. It demonstrates the degree to which his ascendancy has been bound up with the ruling Fatah faction’s and the Palestinian Authority’s abandonment of any opposition to the demands of Washington and Tel Aviv.

The cease fire has been billed as the start to implementing President George W Bush’s “Road Map” and the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state. But there was no agreement on when talks would start on the “final status” of any Palestinian state, much less the thorny issues of East Jerusalem and the right of return for the Palestinian refugees.

Sharon, under pressure from the White House, agreed to end all military action, transfer security control of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, release 900 prisoners held in Israeli jails over the next three months, and implement other “confidence building” measures. But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said that Washington would not pressure Israel to make further concessions until after the “disengagement plan” to withdraw settlers from Gaza and four outposts in the West Bank was completed. Most importantly any further moves will be dependent on Abbas suppressing all armed resistance to Israel, reining in the militant Islamic groups and centralising the various security services under his control. Rice even said that Washington would appoint a former US general to supervise the reform of the Palestinian security forces.

Abbas has already made strenuous efforts to appease Israel. Since coming to power on January 9, he has sought to persuade Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade to end their campaign of bombings against Israel. He has offered Hamas the prospect of sharing political power by agreeing to hold parliamentary elections in July that, given its success in the recent local elections in the West Bank and Gaza, should give Hamas political representation in the Palestinian Legislative Council. At the same time he has deployed over 8,000 police to Gaza in order to prevent rocket attacks on Israeli targets, and arrest suicide bombers.

Although Abbas has sought to cultivate Washington’s support by carrying through measures against his own people that the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) long-time leader Yasser Arafat balked at, his present course nevertheless expresses the degeneration of the Palestinian nationalist movement as a whole—a degeneration rooted in the bourgeois character of the PLO itself.

The fundamental perspective of the PLO for the establishment of a Palestinian state has always been based on reaching an agreement with imperialism. This goal has been pursued through two methods—negotiations and the armed struggle. While appearing to be opposed, they have always been essentially complementary. The final aim of the armed struggle has always been a negotiated settlement with imperialism, never the independent mobilisation of working class and peasant masses. In other words, the acceptance by Abbas and the PLO leadership of a ceasefire, and its imposition, does not contradict the logic of the armed struggle but arises organically from it.

The PLO was the most radical of national movements and established a mass popular base amongst broad sections of the Palestinian people due to its determined advocacy of armed struggle against Israel. But in essence its leadership represented the Palestinian bourgeoisie and its interests and not those of the masses, as it professed. National bourgeois organisations, however radical, are organically incapable of consistently leading an independent struggle against imperialism along a progressive and democratic route because their interests are, in the final analysis diametrically opposed to those of the working class and peasantry.

Whereas the Palestinian working class and peasantry saw the establishment of a national entity from the standpoint of reclaiming the land stolen since 1948 and ending oppression by imperialism and Zionism, the essential aim of the Palestinian bourgeoisie in its conflict with Israel is to establish its own class rule—which centres on its right to exploit the working class. As such its opposition to imperialism is always conditional and partial. Its aim is not to end imperialist domination, but to establish its own relations with the major imperialist powers that dominate the global economic order. At all times it seeks to oppose any independent political action by the working class that would threaten the basis of capitalist rule. Hence, even in its most radical period, the PLO insisted that it was recognised as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” and that its perspective for establishing a Palestinian state on the basis of capitalist property relations was unchallenged.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/abb1-f16.shtml