(From the Pages of the IBRP Press - This article first appeared in Italian, in the pages of Battaglia Comunista, last May. Our comrades of the Partito comunista internazionalista, Italian section of the IBRP, publish this newspaper monthly. I.N. - Canada).

The tragedy of the Palestinian proletariat is destined never to end, so long as it remains the prisoner of ruling class strategies.

It is an undeclared, low intensity war, but it is a war. On the ground, there aren’t two armies facing off, but only one army that is repressing a population fed up of enduring the unsupportable. Tanks against stones, soldiers against kids, while repression - terrorism - repression succeed themselves in a perverse spiral with no end in sight. At work, the usual scenario: two nationalism’s dispute the same land but from different positions. The State of Israel isn’t even prepared to grant mere crumbs, fearing to open the door to a series of concessions that would later on end up reinforcing the nationalist aspirations of the Palestinians, which could go beyond the current claims on the Occupied Territories. The Palestinian bourgeoisie, which identifies with Arafat’s PLO, gave up its old political program to be able to have a scrap of ground on which to plant the national flag.

Behind the scenes, other interests and forces are in motion and end up interfering heavily in the tormented Palestinian problem. First of them all is the long arm of American imperialism. After the Gulf War, during the eight years of the Clinton Administration, the Palestinian problem was the order of the day of American attentions. Clinton’s concern was that the decennial conflict between the Palestinians and the State of Israel did not degenerate into an open conflict, with the possible intervention of other Arab countries, because that would have involved the risk of calling into question the network of political alliances, linked to oil, born immediately after the Gulf War. This has rendered least strategic, though still important, the alliance between the government of the USA and that of Israel. It was Clinton who forced on Rabin the "historical agreements" of Oslo in an attempt to reconcile a hearth of tensions which could have had not only negative consequences on the control, not only of oil, but also of the oil-bearing revenue of the whole Middle East area. Even the Bush administration, though more closely linked to the reactionary apparatus and the warmonger media that inspires them, had to condemn as excessive the Israeli reaction to the acts of suicidal terrorism of some Palestinian factions not controlled by the PLO. Europe timidly, given its weak political weight and the non-existence of a military apparatus, but with a continuous determination, showed it would fly to the aid of the Arab world, in the hope of gaining better access in the future to Middle East oil, without having to support the consequences of an alignment with the strategies of Washington which seem to have no end. From this angle, we can understand the initiative of the PLO. Arafat, aware of the Europe-USA conflict on the oil question, guesses the minor strategic importance of the State of Israel in the American plans. He is using the arm of Pan-Arabic and Pan-Islamic blackmail between the "brother" nations and he knows that his nationalist bet must be played now or never.

But, there is another scenario that must be taken into account, and it’s that of the Palestinian people with its proletarian component. For decades, they’ve been asked to give up much in terms of hunger, misery and blood, for interests and objectives that do not belong to them. In the first place, it must pay its dues, and what dues, to the Israeli ruling class which is not disposed to give in at all, not in terms of perspectives nor even of daily life. With the arrival of Sharon, things have gotten worst. From use of water for agricultural and rationing reasons to work in the Israeli territories, to freedom of movement inside those territories and wages, for the Palestinians, their daily lot is an ordeal. Each burst of anger is repressed in blood, each demand rejected. The violent reaction to the new Intifada delivers each day its harvest of victims among young men and children.

The second dues, the Palestinian proletariat pays to its own bourgeoisie. From the petty bourgeoisie, that lives in the Occupied Territories to the larger one, the commercial and financial one which operates in other countries, though they function differently by their perspectives and methods, they must both pay reference to the poor Palestinian population and even more impoverished proletariat if they are to attain their respective nationalist objectives. The first group resorts to the Palestinian proletariat as key to its direct collision with the Zionist enemy, with the goal of having its own state in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, which would not be an autonomistic fiction from a simply administrative point of view. The second group, less interested in the territorial state than the political, would satisfy itself with less to be recognized, and the use its makes of the Palestinian proletariat is that of using it as a political mass of maneuver, to be used as a deterrent during negotiations, with or without the Intifada, according to the needs and circumstances.

The third dues which the Palestinian proletariat is obliged to pay, is to the international ruling classes who, with oil and based on oil, intend to establish one of the pillars of their economic power. Of course, the USA and Europe, but also the Arab countries of the region use the Palestinian problem as an instrument of economic interest and political strategy. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the other countries of the Arab League related to oil do not put all their eggs in the same basket. In theory, they declare themselves ready to support the cause of the Palestinians; obviously the moderate vision of the PLO. At the last meeting of the League, they decided to affect 200 million dollars in favor of Arafat and of the bourgeoisie he represents. At the same time, they wholly declared themselves with the American projects in the region and, as much as possible, they also take a look at the European propositions, all the while being watchful of the reaction of the Americans.

As long as the Palestinian proletariat spills its blood for a nationalist solution, whatever the bourgeois fraction it supports, it will always and in each manner operate on the terrain of class defeat, imposed by the internal and international relations. The other alternative, one that has to be built from scratch, is that following the leadership of a revolutionary party, it takes the only correct road that links the working class of the whole region, including that of Israel. Only the renewal of the class struggle involving the workers of Tel Aviv, of Riyadh and of Cairo can pose the premises of the solution to the problems. If not the fights, the determination to resist and the thousands of deaths will finish by being reabsorbed by the very terrain which produced them, that of bourgeois nationalism.