Vol. 73/No. 3      January 26, 2009

From the early 1960s, the U.S. government increasingly supplied Israel with modern military equipment and had to rely on it as a bastion to defend imperialist interests in the Middle East. During the mid- to late 1950s, an upswing in worker and peasant struggles for national sovereignty and land throughout the region gave rise to bourgeois regimes in a number of countries that, from the standpoint of imperialism, were too weak and unreliable to play this role. With the consolidation over the past quarter century of larger and stronger capitalist classes, and a growing middle class, however, Washington grabbed the chance to use these bourgeois governments more effectively to promote its own interests. The military defeats dealt to these regimes by Israel in wars in 1967 and 1973 induced sections of their ruling classes to turn more sharply toward imperialism. The Egyptian rulers have led the way in this regard, recognizing the State of Israel following the 1978 Camp David Accords engineered during the James Carter administration.²

The U.S.-organized war in the Gulf widened the divergence between the foreign policy interests of the U.S. and Israeli ruling classes. The Israeli rulers come out losers from U.S. imperialism’s strengthened alignment with the Egyptian, Saudi, and Syrian regimes, which joined in the military alliance against Baghdad. This weakens Israel’s influence with Washington, its special place in the world imperialist system, and thus its leverage in wresting ever-increasing U.S. economic and military assistance and attempting to block such U.S. aid to regimes in the Arab countries.

This divergence between Washington and Tel Aviv is contrary to what most of the major media portrayed during the war as a new high point of cooperation. This is supposedly exemplified by the Israeli government’s “agreement” not to send its warplanes against targets in Iraq in response to Baghdad’s Scud missile attacks and Washington’s subsequent dispatch of Patriot antimissile missile batteries to Israel. The truth, however, is that Tel Aviv never had any choice in the matter. The U.S. military command simply refused to give the Israeli air force the “friend or foe” codes that would have allowed Tel Aviv’s bombers and fighter jets to enter Iraqi airspace without being shot down by—or shooting down—the U.S. aircraft that controlled those skies.

In fact, Washington humbled Tel Aviv during the Gulf war in order to block it from disrupting the U.S. rulers’ foreign policy and military goals. Israel relies on its proven record as a garrison state: that it will respond militarily to any perceived threat, and respond tenfold to any attack on its territory. The Israeli regime, though, was forced by the U.S. government to take the hits from Baghdad’s Scud missiles without responding. Although the Scuds are militarily insignificant, the inability to retaliate was another political humiliation for Tel Aviv. The bitterness and frustration in Israeli ruling circles grew even more as it later became clear that Washington’s much-touted Patriot missiles are a failure. They didn’t destroy most warheads or prevent the Scuds from doing damage. The Patriots did nothing more than blow apart the highly inaccurate Scuds, scattering the warheads and other debris at random. Scud warheads came down and exploded on Israeli territory regardless, and parts of both the Scuds and Patriots did damage as well. (In fact, Israeli military evaluations insist that each Scud missile launched by Baghdad after the deployment of the Patriots did more damage than those beforehand.)

While Washington’s interests have diverged further from Tel Aviv’s, however, this has not brought the U.S. rulers any closer to a “solution” to the Palestinian question, without which their efforts to establish stable relations with bourgeois regimes in the Middle East are continually disrupted. Washington’s biggest political obstacle in this regard is the irrepressible fight by the Palestinians for their national self-determination—above all the struggles of the Palestinians living inside the post-1967 borders of “Greater Israel.” This remains an enormous problem for imperialism, no matter how much cooperation the U.S. government gets from Moscow, and no matter how many trips Secretary of State James Baker makes to the region, shuttling between Tel Aviv and the capital cities of Washington’s allied regimes in various Arab countries.

Tel Aviv seized on Washington’s war drive as cover to extend its garrison-state brutality against the Palestinian population in the West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon, and inside Israel itself. It imposed a round-the-clock curfew—virtual house arrest—on the Palestinian population, depriving hundreds of thousands of families of their livelihoods. Thousands of Palestinians were rounded up, beaten, and jailed. Israeli cops, troops, and rightist vigilantes murdered Palestinian fighters with greater impunity. Tel Aviv stepped up air raids on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Despite earlier pledges to Washington, the Israeli regime openly organized immigrants from the Soviet Union and other Jewish settlers to expand land takeovers in the West Bank and Gaza. If the Israelis can’t fly the skies against the U.S. Air Force, they can still build settlements on stolen Arab land—for a while.

Within an imperialist framework, there is no solution to the Palestinian question. The fight for the national rights of the Palestinian people is the axis of the class struggle in Israel and throughout those areas that historically constituted Palestine. The Palestinian people continue to press forward the fight against their dispossession and earn solidarity from Arab peoples and conscious fighters among the oppressed and exploited around the world. The Palestinians have not been so dispersed geographically as to lose their national identity and cohesion.

Above all, so long as the Palestinians are not expelled en masse from Israel and the occupied territories, every step forward in their struggle for national liberation is at the same time an internal social and political crisis for Tel Aviv. Moreover, every move by Tel Aviv to incorporate the occupied territories into a permanent “Greater Israel” guarantees intensified resistance, including among the Palestinians inside Israel itself, thereby deepening its internal crisis. In addition to some 3.5 million Jews, 2.5 million Palestinians are currently living under Israeli rule: 800,000 inside the pre-1967 borders, and 1.7 million on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian national self-determination is irreconcilable with the class interests of the Israeli ruling class. The bourgeois regimes in the surrounding Arab countries, while claiming to speak on behalf of their “brothers” the Palestinians, have repeatedly shed Palestinian blood to preserve their own class power and state privileges. Washington is pressuring more of these governments to follow in the footsteps of Cairo by establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, and some may do so. Nonetheless, these capitalist regimes must take into account the potentially destabilizing political consequences at home among the Arab and other oppressed peoples—who strongly identify with the Palestinian struggle and who, along with working people the world over, are the only reliable ally of the Palestinians.

The nearly four-year-long intifada on the West Bank and Gaza Strip has reaffirmed that the Palestinians will not stop fighting until they have won their struggle for land and national self-determination. That’s why Washington is no closer after the Gulf war than it was beforehand to finding a way around this dilemma. The U.S. rulers urge Tel Aviv to trade “land for peace.” But the response by the Israeli rulers in deeds outweighs any diplomatic words. Tel Aviv acts on the conviction that only the peace of the grave will still the Palestinians’ struggle for land.

2. In June 1967 the Israeli government invaded Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. By the time a cease-fire took effect after six days of fighting, Israeli forces occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. Nearly 1,000 Israeli soldiers were killed and 4,500 wounded. Some 4,000 Arab combatants were killed and 6,000 wounded.