Ungewöhnliche Ansichten Teil I: Ayasake

Heute: ein antijapanischer antideutscher Operaist. Und er hat einen Kommentar zu den Ereignissen in Ghaza, Filastin:

Klassenkampf gegen den Islamismus

Das sollte ungewöhnlich genug sein für den Anfang. Der seinerseits ungewöhnlich interessante Text findet sich erstens hinter dem Link , zweitens in Auszügen hier.

The Takeover

In a discussion with a German comrade awhile back, I brought up the appeal of Marwan Barghouti, jailed former leader of the Tanzim, and his political faction Al-Mustaqbal. Barghouti had abandoned the Tanzim after a series of suicide bombings, and has a history of collaboration with Israeli left groups such as: Women in Black, Gush Shalom, Yesh Gvul, Ta’ayush etc. My German friend wrote me back saying: „Yes, his politics sound good, but how many guns does he have?“

At the time I was skeptical of his response. The Palestinian intifada had proven (in its best moments) that popular resistance to occupation could overcome a more powerfully armed adversary. What relevance to emancipation would the side with the most weapons really have?

This question was in a way answered rather brutally two days ago in Gaza. By now the basic course of events should be well known: after Hamas‘ election and refusal to engage with the terms of the Quartet, i.e. ongoing negotiation based on the Oslo accords, tensions developed to explosion between Fatah and Hamas, leading to a state of civil war. What is less clear is what events led Hamas to enact an armed dictatorship of the Gaza strip. To understand this we have to return to the period directly after the Hamas election. The boycott of the Hamas government by the west had not gone on for very long when public sector workers in Gaza reacted against the new austerities imposed upon them by Hamas‘ rejectionism, staging strikes and demonstrations against the government late in 2006. Proving their democratic credentials, Hamas attempted to break the strike, firing on the demonstrators and encouraging students to scab against their teachers.

„As a protest against the attempts by the banks to confiscate part of the emergency money paid out to workers for loan repayments, demonstrators stormed offices of banks in the occupied territories. The industrial action taken by the workers resumed the the same day and rumours of an impending all out strike began to circulate
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The strike included at its start, 37,000 teachers, 25,000 health workers, and 15,000 other public-services workers
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In front of the parliament there were continuous demonstrations with thousands demanding payment of wages, unemployment benefit and the creation of more jobs. They shouted slogans, threw stones at building and stormed the gates until they were brutally repressed by the riot police.

In Ramallah on the 30 August, a crowd of 3,000 people demonstrated outside a venue were Abass was meeting UN Secretary General, Kofi Anan. The demonstrators shouted “From today there is no government anymore. From this day on, there is no parliament anymore!” and “We have no money in our pockets.”
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Less than a year ago the local Hamas leadership spoke about the possibility of an Intifada against the PNA. Now it is starting to understand that they themselves could be the target of such an event. The government is in negotiations with the strikers and it looks possible that the conflict will come to a negotiated end. The political direction is towards the formation of a unity government.

(Socialist World)

By the time tension between Hamas and Fatah was building towards explosion in the Gaza strip, Hamas had again to cope with the large-scale walkout of 15,000 public sector workers this April. The question was posed: how could Hamas slow this potential Intifada against its government? We could ask Rasem Al Bayari, Palestinian trade unionist of the PGFTU, one of many workers whose life was targeted by Palestinian security forces (led by Hamas). But sheer violence and repression were not adequate to contain the unrest. Hamas found other means more familiar to its activists. By firing or permitting the firing of rockets into southern Israel, Hamas could continue to make the eliminationist case for claims on Israeli territory, creating a focal point of ’national resistance‘ through which the population could be distracted with the fantasy of evicting the Israeli population. The rockets also double as bait for Israeli counterattacks, which could be used to unify Palestinian factions on Hamas‘ terms (since this interplay has been one of Hamas‘ major strategies after disengagement, it is obvious why Olmert has refused to hit Gaza in any major way so far). The focal point of the rocket launches more importantly allowed the party to compete with rival factions in Gaza, where Hamas struggled to increase its influence in streets that it did not fully control.

Context of the Crisis

The insurgency against the US armed forces in Iraq has completely changed the coherency of American imperialism in the middle East and these changes are visible in the recent events in Gaza. In the midst of the largest crisis of American foreign policy in its history, Washington is increasingly trying to shelve not only the management of the Iraqi state in crisis, but also its stake in the proxy war waged by Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria in Iraq onto American allied Arab states in the region. This ‚disengagement‘ could take the form of withdrawal with a political settlement negotiated among regional powers (including Iran) or an escalation into a wider regional Middle East war involving a mobilization of Saudi Arabia against Iran (the Iraqi civil war is an anticipation of this conflict). The results of the latter would be particularly grave for humanity. Washington has gone so far as to look the other way as Turkey invades Kurdistan to attack Kurdish nationalist militias like the PKK, with the Machiavellian logic that perhaps this pressure could produce a compromise on the bitterly contentious city of Kirkuk. Within this, the American ruling class is trying desperately to shore up its position in the Middle East in order to maintain a potential threat in the region.

That has meant in the context of Hamas‘ putsch in Gaza that the strip could be abandoned to Hamas while the West Bank and even camps in foreign countries like Lebanon are brought under the control of Fatah and the new PA. Under these conditions, the US will release funding for the newly established PA and Israel will release tax revenues withheld from the Hamas government. The ending of the sanctions will in some ways be an improvement, but only for those in the west bank. In this way, America tries to prop up a new Palestinian Authority, loosely federated with the remaining American-allied ruling classes in the region: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Lebanon and Iraq (both shaky).

The shoring up of Fatah is primarily an effort by the Western ruling class to shore up its warfare against the emerging opposition belt from Lebanon to Iran to Syria. There have already been many arguments in the media for bringing both Fatah and Hamas into the ‚Sunni orbit‘, which refers to the American-allied states in the region. Hamas on the other hand is largely viewed as a lost cause due to its engagement with Iran and Syria.

By now much of the left is able to identify the ruthlessness of Hamas in the Gaza takeover. Some on the far left even take a clear position against both Hamas and Fatah, whom they argue will to varying degrees repress struggles within Palestinian society. In a discussion recently a comrade summarized this position succinctly:

„In other words, it’s a conflict between two completely reactionary forces and ideologies.“

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The attacks against Israel on the plane of history and ideology present a particular danger in my view. Popular opinion is generally drifting towards the idea that Israel is a nation that deserves either abandonment, dissolution or, in the extreme, elimination. I’m prepared to argue the exact opposite: that Israel is the only nation with a good reason to exist. That is, along with some on the German left, I think that an opposition to capitalism, imperialism and nationalism must include a solidarity with Israel, a nation whose creation was an inevitable result of the failure of the first revolutionary wave which could not prevent or defeat Europe’s lapse into anti-semetic barbarism. The subsequent history of Zionism and Israel is as much a history of liberation as it is a history of imperialism and colonialism.