Vol. 73/No. 27      July 20, 2009

Adom raises an important question. Are Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and inside Israel itself, part of the working class? Or is the struggle in Palestine a special case where the laws of motion of the class struggle don’t apply?

The question can be posed a different way. Is it possible to fight to end the oppression of the Palestinian people? If so, what class will lead that struggle? Where can it find allies? What should they fight for?

Adom says most of the 2.5 million Palestinians who live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank are not workers. Although unemployment is high, people in the West Bank hold a wide variety of jobs. They work for Palestinian-owned businesses and farms, the Palestinian National Authority, on farms owned by Jewish settlers, in Israeli-owned industrial parks in the West Bank, or inside Israel.

Thousands work on farms run by Jewish settlers in the Jordan Valley alone. In one of the largest of the industrial parks, near the Barkan Jewish settlement, there are 2,400 Palestinian workers from the West Bank at 120 businesses including plastics, metal-work, food-processing, and textile plants.

Some 25,000 West Bank Palestinians have permits that allow them to work in Israel, mostly in construction, agriculture, and cleaning buildings. In addition to those with permits, some 50,000 work in Israel “illegally,” according to Kav LaOved (Worker’s Hotline). There are also thousands of small and not-so-small farmers who tend citrus and date groves or plant tomato, wheat, and barley fields.

In the Gaza Strip there are 70,000 mostly small farms and 30,000 farm workers. Since the beginning of the Israeli blockade in 2007 thousands of Palestinians lost their jobs in Israel and most factories in Gaza were forced to close. Most Gaza residents are now dependent on handouts from the United Nations, other aid groups, or “charities” run by Hamas, a bourgeois party. This does not advance their self-confidence, class-consciousness, or ability to organize. That’s why demanding an end to the blockade and the opening of border crossings is so important.

Adom seems to ignore the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. Like Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank—and like Jewish citizens of Israel—they are class-divided. There are some Palestinians who own capitalist businesses or farms and exploit wage labor.

In Israel more than 21 percent of farm workers, almost 43 percent of construction workers, and more than 15 percent of industrial workers are Palestinian Arabs, according to Sawt el-Amel (The Laborer’s Voice). Unlike in Gaza or the West Bank, it is impossible for the Israeli rulers to put up a fence to control the flow of their labor or remove them at will from their jobs.

Palestinians often work side-by-side with Jews and immigrants. And it is not uncommon for Jewish, Palestinian, and immigrant workers to join in common struggle to resist the employers’ attempts to make working people pay for the capitalist economic crisis. The capitalist rulers in Tel Aviv, like their counterparts around the world, will deepen their assault on working people in the months and years ahead.

Workers and small farmers will play a decisive role in the fight by Palestinians for land, water, travel, language, and women’s rights, against racist discrimination, and for the right to return to their homeland. These battles will open the road to a revolutionary struggle for a democratic, secular Palestine for all who live there. And they will draw in Jewish workers and others in Israel and inspire workers, farmers, and youth throughout region.  
 
 
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