[lbo-talk] Stop Playing State (was Palestinian group threatens to kill Hamas leaders)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Thu Oct 5 18:23:45 PDT 2006


On 10/4/06, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Barbarism rearing its head the contemporary near east.
> With tacit U.S., Israeli, and European support, rival
> warlord factions tear each other to pieces.

To put it more precisely, Washington and Tel Aviv want Mahmoud Abbas's enforcers to dominate the rest of Fatah, destroy Hamas, and police Palestinian society on their behalf.


> Yet another reason why attempts to locate an
> emancipatory potential in any "national liberation
> movement" in the year 2006 is just projection and
> wishful thinking on the part of western leftists.

What the Palestinian people have is not a national liberation movement but a collection of competing political factions who are playing state, like playing house, so to speak. You can't have a state without having the power of taxation and a monopoly of violence, neither of which the Palestinian Authority has. You can't have a state whose revenues solely consist of taxes collected by a state hostile to you and foreign aids given by other states, some of which are also hostile to you, as the Palestinian Authority's revenues do. It's really time for the Palestinians to stop playing state, like accumulating government employees. They should just dissolve the government and go back to the business of resistance. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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