Just a few weeks ago, U.S. president Bill Clinton was crediting his administration with helping to bring "the spirit of peace" to the Middle East. The assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing opponent of the Israel-Palestinian accords, however, was a rude awakening for many to the reality that there is no peace.
And there will be no peace until the fundamental question in the region - the Palestinian people's fight for national self-determination - is resolved.
Despite the campaign by big-business politicians and the media to paint Rabin posthumously as a "peacemaker," his four-decade record was that of a bloody warmaker and a faithful representative of Israel's Zionist rulers in their dispossession and brutalization of the Palestinians. The ultrarightists responsible for his assassination are a direct product of this system of oppression - of the Israeli colonial settler-state. They are not an aberration.
But Tel Aviv's garrison-state brutality has failed to crush the Palestinian struggle, as was demonstrated by the intifada (uprising) that exploded in the occupied territories in 1987-92. Arrests, torture, deportations, military rule, bombings of refugee camps, breaking limbs of young protesters, and assassinations by Israeli forces continue to be met with resistance. For the Israeli ruling class, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are a migraine headache that they eventually decided to pass on to the PLO leadership. This led to the 1993 accords, which began a process of limited Palestinian self-rule in these territories.
The accords also registered the increasingly bourgeois character of the PLO leadership and the virtual exhaustion of its revolutionary character - the toll of years of continued dispersion of the Palestinian people and the growth of a PLO apparatus dependent on capitalist regimes in neighboring Arab countries.
The imperialist rulers of the United States have a great deal at stake in the Mideast, and they face a nightmare: no matter how close their relations with the surrounding capitalist regimes, there will be no stability in the region until there is a solution to the Palestinian question. This is why Washington, despite its foreign policy differences with Tel Aviv, has strongly backed the self-rule accords for the occupied territories.
Nonetheless, the continued repression against the Palestinian population, the presence of right-wing settlers, and other aspects of Israeli oppression guarantee that nothing will be settled until the Palestinians win their fight for self-determination - for a democratic, secular nation. This fight deserves the support of working people around the world.