New Left Review 10, July-August 2001 Behind the second Intifada lies a century of conflict in Palestine. What are its roots, and what are its prospects? The Oslo Accords, the Israeli landscape and the Arab world.
PERRY ANDERSON SCURRYING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM Editorial
It is now nine months since the outbreak of the second Intifada against the longest official military occupation of modern history—currently entering its thirty-fifth year. The conflict over Palestine, of course, goes back much further. The first clashes between Arabs and Jews date from the twenties of the last century. Since 1948 five wars have been fought by Israel, and two civil wars unleashed by side-effects in adjacent states. Whatever the battles in the Middle East, however, there are few divisions today in the West. Here, it is safe to say, there is no major international issue on which there is such consensus and so much cant as the question of Palestine—where a ‘peace process’ unanimously applauded by respectable opinion has supposedly been unfolding for a decade, whose progress can only be jeopardized by resort to violence. It is in the interest of all parties, so the official wisdom runs, that the uprising in the West Bank and Gaza be brought to an immediate stop. To cut through the massif of obfuscation that surrounds relations between Israelis and Palestinians, of which this notion is an end-product, is a task beyond any brief review here. But a few basic considerations can be set down. [clip]