--- Original Message --- Bureau of Public Secrets <knabb at slip.net> Wrote on Sat, 14 Oct 2000 16:20:01 -0700
------------------
THE SITUATIONISTS ON THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION
The absence of a revolutionary movement in the developed countries has reduced the Left to its simplest expression: a mass of spectators who swoon with rapture each time the exploited in the colonies take up arms against their masters, and who cannot help seeing these uprisings as the epitome of Revolution. . . . Wherever there is a conflict they always see Good fighting Evil, "total revolution" versus "total reaction." . . .
Revolutionary criticism begins beyond good and evil; it is rooted in history and operates on the totality of the existing world. In no case can it applaud a belligerent state or support the bureaucracy of an exploiting state in the process of formation. It must first of all lay bare the truth of present struggles by putting them back into their historical context, and unmask the hidden aims of the forces officially in conflict. . . .
Since its origins the Zionist movement has been the contrary of the revolutionary solution to what used to be called the "Jewish question." A direct product of European capitalism, it did not aim at the overthrow of a society that needed to persecute Jews, but at the creation of a Jewish national entity that would be protected from the anti-Semitic aberrations of decadent capitalism. It did not strive to abolish injustice, but to transfer it. The original sin of Zionism is that it has always acted as if Palestine were a desert island. . . . The creation of the state of Israel is merely a miserable by-product of the triumph of world counterrevolution. To "socialism in a single country" came the echo "justice for a single people" and "equality in a single kibbutz." . . . The Jews recreated for themselves all the fanaticism and segregation they had been victims of. Those who had suffered mere toleration in their society were to struggle to become in another country owners disposing of the right to tolerate others. . . . .
The cooption of all the "progressive" forms of social organization and their integration within the Zionist ideal enabled even the most "revolutionary" individuals to work in good conscience for the building of the bourgeois, militaristic, rabbinical state that modern Israel has become. The prolonged sleep of proletarian internationalism once more brought forth a monster. The basic injustice against the Palestinian Arabs came back to roost with the Jews themselves: the State of the Chosen People was nothing but one more class society in which all the aberrations of the old societies were recreated (hierarchical divisions, tribal opposition between the Ashkenazi and the Sephardim, racist persecution of the Arab minority, etc.). . . .
But this is due not only to the contradictions of Israeli society.
>From the
outset this situation has been constantly maintained and aggravated
by the
surrounding Arab societies, which have so far proved incapable
of any
contribution toward an effective solution. . . .
The 1948 defeat signaled the end of the "bourgeois-feudality" as the leading class of the Arab movement. It was the opportunity for the petty bourgeoisie to come to power and to constitute, with the officers of the defeated army, the driving force of the present movement. Its program was simple: Arab unity, a vaguely socialist ideology, and the liberation of Palestine (the Return). The Tripartite aggression of 1956 [England, France and Israel's joint attack on Egypt during the "Suez crisis"] provided it with the best opportunity to consolidate itself as a ruling class and to find a leader-program in the person of Nasser, who was presented for the collective admiration of the completely dispossessed Arab masses. He was their religion and their opium. But the new exploiting class had its own interests and goals. The slogans used by the bureaucratic-military regime of Egypt to win popular support were already bad in themselves; in addition, the regime was incapable of carrying them out. . . .
Twenty years after the first Palestinian war [1948], this new stratum has just demonstrated its total inability to resolve the Palestinian problem. It has lived by delirious bluff, for it was only able to survive by constantly raising the specter of Israel, being utterly incapable of effecting any radical solution whatsoever to the innumerable domestic problems. . . .
The latest war [1967] has dissipated all these illusions. The total rigidity of "Arab ideology" was pulverized on contact with a reality that was just as hard but also permanent. Those who spoke of waging a war neither wanted it nor prepared for it, while those who spoke only of defending themselves actually prepared the offensive. Each of the two camps followed their respective propensities -- the Arab bureaucracy that for lying and demagogy, the masters of Israel that for imperialist expansion. The most important lesson of the Six Day War is a negative one: it has revealed all the secret weaknesses and defects of what was presented as the "Arab Revolution." . . .
As for Israel, it has become everything that the Arabs had accused it of before the war: an imperialist state behaving like the most classic occupation forces (police terror, dynamiting of houses, permanent martial law, etc.). Internally a collective hysteria, led by the rabbis, is developing around "Israel's inalienable right to its Biblical borders." The war put a stop to the whole movement of internal struggles generated by the contradictions of this artificial society (in 1966 there were several dozen riots, and there were no fewer than 277 strikes in 1965 alone) and provoked unanimous support for the objectives of the ruling class and its most extremist ideology. It also served to shore up all the Arab regimes not involved in the armed struggle. . . .
As always, war, when not civil, only freezes the process of social revolution. In North Vietnam it has brought about the peasants' support, never before given, for the bureaucracy that exploits them. In Israel it has killed off for a long time any opposition to Zionism, and in the Arab countries it is reinforcing -- temporarily -- the most reactionary strata. In no way can revolutionary currents find anything there with which to identify. Their task is at the opposite pole of the present movement since it must be its absolute negation. . . .
Unlike the Vietnam war, the Palestinian question has no immediately evident solution. No short-term solution is feasible. The Arab regimes can only crumble under the weight of their contradictions and Israel will be more and more the prisoner of its colonial logic. All the compromises that the great powers try to piece together are bound to be counterrevolutionary in one way or another. The hybrid status quo -- neither peace nor war -- will probably prevail for a long period, during which the Arab regimes will meet with the same fate as their predecessors of 1948 (probably at first to the profit of the openly reactionary forces).
Arab society, which has produced all sorts of ruling classes caricaturing all the classes of history, must now produce the forces that will bring about its total subversion. The so-called national bourgeoisie and the Arab bureaucracy have inherited all the defects of those two classes without ever having known the historical accomplishments those classes achieved in other societies. The future Arab revolutionary forces that will arise from the ruins of the June 1967 defeat must know that they have nothing in common with any existing Arab regime and nothing to respect among the powers that dominate the present world. They will find their model in themselves and in the repressed experiences of revolutionary history. The Palestinian question is too serious to be left to the states, that is, to the colonels. It is too close to the two basic questions of modern revolution -- internationalism and the state -- for any existing force to be able to provide an adequate solution. Only an Arab revolutionary movement that is resolutely internationalist and anti-state can dissolve the state of Israel while gaining the support of that state's exploited masses. And only through the same process will it be able to dissolve all the existing Arab states and create Arab unity through the power of the Councils.
--SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (October 1967)
(Excerpts from a situationist article on the Vietnam and Arab-Israel wars. The complete article is online at the Bureau of Public Secrets website: http://www.slip.net/~knabb/SI/11.wars.htm.)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Bureau of Public Secrets website, which has received over 200,000 page visits during its first two years, features Ken Knabb's SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY (translations from the notorious group that helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France) and PUBLIC SECRETS, the recent collection of Knabb's own writings, including "The Joy of Revolution," "Confessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State," and an assortment of comics, leaflets and articles on Wilhelm Reich, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Chinese anarchists, radical Buddhists, the Watts riot, the Iranian uprising, the Gulf war, and the recent jobless revolt in France.
BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA http://www.slip.net/~knabb knabb at slip.net
_______________________________________________ Right-left mailing list Right-left at savanne.ch http://coyote.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/right-left
----- Sent using MailStart.com ( http://MailStart.Com/welcome.html ) The FREE way to access your mailbox via any web browser, anywhere!