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﻿<title﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, Palestine: The Point of No Return - Article﻿</title>﻿
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﻿<b﻿>﻿Palestine: The Point of No Return
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by Samer Elatrash﻿<br﻿>﻿
﻿<i﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, April - May 2002﻿</i>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿
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In every armed struggle, wrote the anti-colonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon, "there exists what we might call the point of no return," which is marked by a huge and all inclusive repression which engulfs all sectors of the people." This juncture is accompanied by a mood that "things couldn't go on as before." In Palestine, this moment was marked by the new Israeli offensive in the occupied territories that started at the end of March. 
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Ostensibly, Operation Defensive Wall came as a reaction to the suicide bombings in Netanya, Haifa and Jerusalem in the last week of March. Israeli officials said that Israel has "taken off the gloves" and by the following day, Israeli troops laid siege to Yassir Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah and declared it a closed military zone. In a televised address to the nation, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared the army's intent to "embark on a wide spread campaign to uproot the terror infrastructures in the areas of the Palestinian Authority." The army called up twenty thousand reserves for the operation. At the time of this writing, Israeli troops, accompanied by hundreds of tanks, APCs and helicopters have overrun all the major cities in the West Bank. 
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The human toll of this operation remains unclear, as Israeli troops have barred ambulances and medics from evacuating the dead and wounded from the streets of Ramallah, Bethlehem and Tulkarim. Reports are beginning to emerge of massacres and summary executions. Abu Dhabi news channel televised an interview with a resident of Bethlehem who sat next to the decomposing corpses of his mother and brother in his home. The man, who had moved his children into another room in order to hide the sight from them, reported that troops blew their way into a room that housed his mother and brother and opened fire, killing them instantly.
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The most evident aspect of this offensive is that the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was partly constructed with the help of the Israelis in the wake of the Oslo Accord, is the initial target. The first action Israeli troops undertook was the occupation of Yassir Arafat's compound, imprisoning the leader of the PA. Sharon declared that Arafat will be "completely isolated" and offered him a "one way ticket" out of the West Bank. The physical isolation was accompanied by a fervent diplomatic attempt to delegitimize Arafat internationally (which have in fact been underway since the start of the Intifada). Israeli troops triumphantly produced a document from his headquarters 'proving' that Arafat has been financing suicide bombers all along. This document was revealed after President Bush stated that Arafat could not be considered a terrorist. It is possible that the White House will backtrack on exempting Arafat from the 'Bush Doctrine' if Israeli propaganda succeeds in attracting enough attention towards this document, making it impossible for the Americans to ignore it. The document is currently being scrutinized by the CIA.
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As Israeli troops tightened their grip on Arafat's compound, tanks and helicopters pounded away at the headquarters of the Preventive Security in the West Bank, the effective link between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. The head of the Preventive Security, Jibril Rajoub, a chief collaborator with Israeli intelligence, had previously gathered a dozen Hamas and Islamic Jihad prisoners into the compound's jail. They were forced to surrender, but not before one militant reached the Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Abdullah Rantisi, informing him that Rajoub had essentially handed them over to the Israelis. The Izz Al-Din Qassam brigades-Hamas's military wing- issued a press release denouncing this action as treason. In an interview with Abu Dhabi television, Rantisi affirmed that Rajoub's days are numbered.
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Thus, the contradictions of the Oslo Accord came to their fruition. In retrospect, Oslo seems to have been designed for the purpose of establishing a collaborative Palestinian security apparatus, along the lines of the Southern Lebanese Army, to control Palestinians in the large demographic centres as Israeli settlement building went on unabated -- indeed, at a faster pace. Still, within the Israeli government, this arrangement came against intense opposition.  A Likud party meeting in 1993 adopted the position that Israel should occupy its "biblical borders." The Palestinians, then Housing Minister Sharon proposed, should look towards Jordan if they wished to live in their own state. 
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Within Israeli ruling circles, the distinction between the 'accomadationists'-those who are willing to accommodate a Palestinian 'state' in the form of cantons in the West bank and Gaza- and the 'rejectionists' of Palestinian statehood is not very clear, however. This ambiguity was most evident during the tenure of Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister who supposedly made the most far-reaching 'concessions' to the Palestinians. The fastest settlement expansion happened during his rule, a policy that is irreconcilable with the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state.
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The position of the Palestinian Authority was no more forthright. Although Arafat had basically accepted the role of a 'mukhtar' for the Israelis, it is doubtful that he fully internalized the implications of Oslo. According to one of his close aids, Arafat remained the chief obstacle to an outright collaboration by the Palestinian Authority with Israel's interests. This is apparent from the manner in which he dealt with the Intifada-while essentially opposed to it, since it undermined his authority-he nevertheless accommodated it. Indeed, he set out to dominate it. Once the Intifada had served his interests of "raise the ceiling", in the words of Ahmed Sa'adat, of what could be attained from the Israelis through negotiations, he urged Al-Aqsa martyrs and Tanzim to put a halt to. He therefore found himself in the impossible predicament of quietly supporting the actions of the resistance groups while they served his interests and, under pressure from Israel and the US, cracking down on them to fulfil his role as a warden. His role as a warden, of course, could only be maintained if he could muster the loyalty of the Palestinian population, which was already fed up with the corruption of his Authority and its lack of leadership. 
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In the midst of these seeming ambiguities, Operation Defensive Wall emerges as s clear formula of mutual exclusivities. There can either be a Palestinian state rid of the settlements or Israeli domination of the Palestinians in the West bank and Gaza, a dominance supplemented at best by a collaborative security apparatus that would unabashedly betray the more radical Palestinian political movements-and hence lack any credibility in the eyes of the Palestinians. The attempt to formulate a third option created an eruption in the form of Al-Aqsa Intifada that swept it away. The Palestinians realized that armed revolt-'negotiation' undertaken by the masses- provided the most concrete path towards liberation. The Israeli government responded with its counter-revolution, of which Operation Defensive Wall is the most consistent and far-reachi﻿ng phase yet. Provided with unconditional US backing, the Israeli government will attempt to carry this campaign to its logical conclusion: the continued occupation of the West bank and Gaza. Yet, should this succeed, the contradiction of the attempt to forcefully subjugate a people yearning for freedom will remain. There are two possible conclusions to this conflict: the expulsion of the Palestinians from the lands in the West bank and Gaza or the expulsion of the settlers and their protectors, the soldiers, from the same lands. 
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﻿<font﻿ ﻿size="1"﻿>﻿Samer Elatrash is a Palestinian activist and student at Concordia University.  As a 'Third World' liberation activist, he has organized with several groups including Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights.﻿</font>﻿</font>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

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