BEHIND THE REVOLT
OF THE ARABS IN ISRAEL by JON ROTHSCHILD In 1940 Mr. R. Weitz, a major Zionist leader and for many years head of the colonization department of the Jewish Agency, made this notation in his diary: "Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. ... We shall not achieve our goal of being an independent people with the Arabs in this small country. The only solufion is a Palestine, at least Western Palestine (west of the Jordan River) without Arabs... And there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them: Not one village, not one tribe, should be left." Twenty-seven years later, in September 1967, the same Weitz, discussing the results of the June 1967 war, looked backward to 1948: "... when the UN passed the resolution to partition Palestine into two states, the War of Independence broke out, to our great fortune. In this war, a twofold miracle occurred: territorial victory and the flight of the Arabs," But not quite all the Arabs. The Zionist armed forces, charged primarily with the task of emptying Palestine of Arabs, did their work effectively. In November 1947 the Arab population of the territory that was to become the state of Israel at the end of the 1948 war was approximately 800, 000. By the beginning of 1949, that population had been reduced to 133,000. The more than 650, 000 expelled Arabs were scattered across the Arab world, the majority of them settling in miserable refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip. They are the Palestinian refugees. "Forgotten" for some twenty years by the majority of world "public opinion, " they were to make their presence felt beginning in 1968 with the rise of the Palestinian Resistance movement. The fate of the other 133,000 Arabs of Palestine was different. They became not "Palestinian refugees, " but "Israeli Arabs. " Most of them (not all) were granted
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citizenship in the new Zionist state. According to the claims of the Zionist ruling class and propaganda machine, these Arabs enjoyed an enviable life, unlike their refugee brothers and sisters who had allegedly fallen victim to the hysterical anti-Semitic propaganda of the Arab leaders and had thus abandoned the territory of the Jewish state. Their standard of living was said to be higher than that of any Arabs elsewhere in the world. They were said to benefit from all the rights granted in Israel, the "only democracy in the Middle East." They were living proof that Arab hostility to the state of Israel was based solely on the racist demagogy of the leaders of the Arab states, for after all, if the Arabs could live peacefully and happily under the very administration of the Jewish state, why could not the Arab states make peace with Israel? The tranquility of the Israeli Arabs, even during the wars of 1967 and 1973, was pointed to as the proof of the ultimate success of the Zionist state. The myth of the contented Israeli Arab thus took its place in the pantheon of myths that, taken together, constitute Zionist ideology. During the last week of March 1976, this myth went the way of a number of others of its ilk: into the trash can. In spite of sweeping preventive arrests and violent assaults on preliminary demonstrations, thousands of Arabs in Israel launched a general strike to protest against the seizure of Arab land in Galilee in northern Israel. The target date was March 30, the day of the strike called by Rakah (the Israeli Communist party) and the Committee for the Protection of Arab Lands, a coalition opposing the Zionist land grab. The Israeli military forces opposed the strike with arms. At least six Arabs were killed by Israeli soldiers; dozens were wounded; more than 300 were arrested. Clashes occurred in at least nine villages in Galilee, as the Arab population, for the first time in more than twenty-five years, fought back actively against the Zionist army. The regime ordered its troops to fire into crowds; Arabs were beaten indiscriminately; in Jerusalem soldiers forcibly opened shops that had closed in solidarity with the strike. In Nazareth a group of twenty-five to thirty Israeli soldiers broke into the home of Tewfik Zayad, the Communist party mayor of the town, and beat members of his family. But the collapse of the myth of the contented Israeli Arab enjoying equal rights with Israeli Jews raises o deeper question: Can the Israeli state make sufficiently sweeping reforms to satisfy the demands of its Arab population while still preserving its character as a Zionist state? Or, put another way, Is oppression of the Arabs of Israel a necessary and integral feature of Zionism and its state, or is it simply the result of bad policies followed by unwise leaders? The question is not merely academic. The Israeli Communist party, which holds. political hegemony over the Arabs of Israel, answers the first question positively. And its program consists of a series of demands aimed precisely at making some reforms in the context of the maintenance of the Zionist state. Thus, the development of a revolutionary outlook on the struggle of the Arabs of Israel requires an ex26 amination of the essential bases of both the Zionist movement and the state it created. Zionism: The root of the problem The core of Zionist ideology is a delusion: that all the Jews of the world constitute a single nation and that this dispersed nation has suffered systematic oppression because of the dispersion. The problem of anti-Semitism can be solved only by "ingathering" the members of this dispersed nation and establishing a Jewish nation-state "as Jewish as England is English." Any form of struggle against anti-Semitism that does not have as its goal establishing this Jewish nation-state is a utopian endeavor, misguided at best, disastrous at worst. Furthermore, the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land on which this Jewish nation-state is to be built must be dispensed with one way or the other; any means necessary to effect that task are justified, since the native inhabitants are, by definition, part of the universal oppressor of the Jews. The colonization of Palestine, conducted on the basis of this ideology, thus took an unusual form. Under the usual form of colonization, the colons displace the indigenous inhabitants, destroy their culture and society, and then transform them into a proletariat exploited in an economic system owned and controlled by the settlers. But the leaders of the Zionist colonization were not primarily interested in exploiting the labor-power of the Palestinian Arabs; they were interested in removing the indigenous population to make way for the "normalization" of the Jewish nation, which meant creating a Jewish bourgeoisie, a Jewish petty bourgeoisie, and a Jewish proletariat. Palestinian Arabs displaced by Jewish settlers were not reintegrated as workers in Jewish-owned economic enterprises; on the contrary, they were deliberately excluded from economic life in the Jewish sector. The Palestinian Arabs were not seen as a potential supply of labor-power, but merely as obstacles to the construction of the Jewish state. The three major slogans under which this colonization was conducted were: kibush hakarka (conquest of the land), kibush haavoda (conquest of labor), and t'ozteret haaretz (produce of the land). The first slogan meant that as much land as possible had to be acquired from its Arab owners and that no land owned by Jews could be sold, leased, or otherwise returned to Arabs. The second meant that Jewish-owned factories and farms should exclusively employ Jewish labor insofar as possible. (In fact, the Histadrut, which masquerades as a "trade union" in Israel today, was formed for the purpose of creating a Jewish proletariat by imposing a boycott on Arab labor.) The third slogan meant boycott of Arab production by Jewish settlers. Dozens of pages of testimony, statistics, and records could be cited to demonstrate that these three slogans represented not only the theory but also the practice of the Zionist colonization. In the interest of brevity, we will simply quate a statement made in November
1969 to the Secretariat of Mapai, the former name of the ruling Labor party, by David Hocohen, an Israeli parliament member for many years and the chairman of the parliament's Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee: *I remember being one of the first of our comrades to go to London after the first world war. ... There 1 became a socialist... . When I joined the socialist students - English, Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Indian, African — we found that we were all under English domination or rule. And even here, in these intimate surroundings, I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there, To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; to praise to the skies the Keriin Kayemet (Jewish Fund) that sent Hankin to Beirut to buy land from absentee effendi (landlords) and to throw the fellahin (peasants) off the land - to buy dozens of dunams (a land measure) from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, god forbid, one Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited. ... — To do all that was not easy. And despite the fact that we did it — maybe we had no choice - 1 wasn't happy about it." We may pass over Hacohen's unhappiness, which is but a minor psychological occupational hazard of the "socialist" Zionist. The point is that the implementation of the program was aimed at creating a hermetically sealed Jewish society free of Arabs, a society with its own class structure, economic life, administrative apparatus, press, armed forces, and so on. That is what it meant to have a Jewish state. There is simply no place in it for Arabs, nor can there be. Institutionalized repression After the 1949 armistice that ended the first Arab-Israeli war, the ruling class of the new state faced a serious problem. The tasks of the construction of the Jewish state were complicated by the annoying presence of 133,000 non-Jews, the Palestinian Arabs who had not. been put to flight. The Zionist leadership could not sacrifice its democratic pretentions without also sacrificing an ideological weapon that was crucial in maintaining support for Israel among democratic world opinion, especially working-class opinion. Thus, it was not possible to simply pass a series of laws openly denying rights to Arabs. At the same time, it was necessary to establish a legal and social structure that did just that. The first step that was taken in this direction was to place the Israeli Arabs under military government. The legal basis of this regime, the content of which still exists throughout Israeli territory although its form has been modified, is the Emergency Regulations. These laws date back to the 1936-39 Arab revolt, which began in Syria and spread throughout Palestine, then under British rule. In 1936 the British passed the "Emergency Laws, "creating the legal machinery for suppressing the revolt. In 1939 these laws were supplemented by the Defense Laws, which were aimed at constructing a durable system of repression based on the military defeat of the revolt. In 1945 these two sets of laws were combined and modified into the Defense Laws (State of Emergency). This time they were directed largely at the Zionist movement, which was then taking the initiative to establish an independent Jewish state in Palesfine, whereas the British imperialists were still attempting to maintain the territory as a colony. The fact that the 1945 Defense Laws were aimed primarily against the Zionist movement stimulated great opposition to them among the Zionist leadership. In 1946, for example, a Jewish lawyers conference was held during which one Yaakov Shapira said, The regime built in Palestine on the Defense Regulations has no parallel in any civilized nation. Even in Nazi Germany there were no such laws. " But it is likely that Mr. Shapira came to regret that outburst, for in 1948 the entire body of the Defense Laws, without change or amendment, was incorporated by the Zionist government. Mr. Shapira was later to become minister of justice in Israel and thus the odministrator of these same laws, which had in the meantime become part of the foundation of the "only democracy in the Middle East." The Emergency Laws consist of 170 articles divided into fifteen sections. Essentially, they grant military commanders the following prerogatives: to imprison any individual indefinitely without charge or trial; to prohibit an individual from traveling within the country or from leaving the country; to expel any individual from the country; to restrict any individual to his home; to order any individual to report to a police station several times a day; to bar an individual from seeking work; to confiscate any property; to order the inhabitants of any area or village to provide food and lodging, at their own expense, to any members of the police force who are sent there for any reason; to impose a total or partial curfew in any village or area, Finally, one of the most commonly used articles, number 125, gives military commanders the right to declare any area "closed"; it is forbidden to enter or leave any area that has been declared closed. These regulations also establish a series of military courts whose purpose is to try cases of infringement of the laws. Any measure provided for in the Emergency Regulations can be imposed by the local military authority at will; there is no appeal process except that established in article 119, which stipulates an appeal procedure the final authority in which is the minister of defense. In addition, the military courts that try cases of infringement of the Emergency Regulations are totally unconnected to the civilian courts; they must also not be confused with courts martial, which try cases of alleged violation of law by active-duty soldiers. These military courts have jurisdiction over the civilian population.
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ISRAEL In essence, these regulations and the court system connected to them constitute a second judicial system in Israel, one parallel to and separate from the "normal" civil system. On a few occasions, the regulations have been used to break strikes by Jewish workers. On the whole, however, they are used - and frequently -exclusively against Arabs. The law says "person'; in practice it means 'Arab,!" That is, there are two difFerent legal systems in Israel, one for Jews and one for Arabs. In his book The Arabs in Israel, which contains the most comprehensive study of the rule to which Israeli Arabs are subject, Sabri Jiryis offers some examples of the use of the Emergency Regulations to demoralize Arabs: "In January 1956 a number of inhabitants of villages in the Triangle (an Arab area east of Tel Aviv - INPRECOR) were banished to the village of Beit Jann in Upper Galilee and told to report every day for six months at the police station in Ma'uno, 20 kilometers from their place of exile, In September 1957 the Military Governor gave orders that five men of Baqa al-Gharbiya should report every day to the police station in Bardas Hanno, which is 15 kilometers from their home village. Similarly, two inhabitants of Tira in the Triangle were ordered to remain in their homes all night (from one hour after sunset until sunrise), and report twice a day to the police station at Tiba, eight kilometers from their home village. A particularly cruel and 'amusing' order was issued in the case of a certain Ahmad Hassan, a Bedouin of the el-Wadi tribe near the village of Araba in Galilee. The Military Governor ordered that he should sit every day for six months, from sunrise to sunset, under a large carob tree which stands to the West of the village of Deir Hanna." Seizure of Arab land The role of the Emergency Regulations in the imposition of repression against political movements and individual militants is clear enough. But that is not the only use to which the regulations have been put. They have also served as the legal mechanism for the massive theft of Arab land and property. The first manner in which the Emergency laws were used for this purpose was simply to expel Arab villagers from the country. This process, which was especially intense during the years immediately following the 1948 war, was aimed at "cleansing" the border regions and making way for the establishment of Jewish settlements. Ashkelon, for example, near the border of the Gaza Strip, used to be an Arab village. One morning during the summer of 1950 the Israeli army arrived in the village, loaded the inhabitants onto trucks, drove them to the Gaza border, and. ordered them to flee. The new city of Ashkelon, which is free of Arabs, was then built. Between the years 1949 and 1951 the following Arab villages were emptied of their inhabitants in more or less the same manner: Rama, Kfar Bar'am, Anan, Kafr Yasif, Hisam, Qatiya, Jauneh, Ghabasiya, Batat, Mijdal, and thirteen villages in the Wadi Ara. 28
In certain cases, Arab villagers appealed to the Israeli legal system for redress against the misdeeds of the military rule. In some cases, they even won favorable rulings from the Israeli Supreme Court, but to no avail, for the court decisions were simply overridden by the military, which has the "right" to act in defiance of the court for reasons of "security." Two of the best known such cases concern the villages of Bar'am and Agrat. Bar'am was declared a "closed" area under the Emergency Regulations. The villagers were then expelled. They appealed to the Supreme Court, which in September 1953 issued an opinion stating that they should be allowed to return to the village. On September 16, 1953, the Israeli air force bombed the village out of existence. The lands of the village were handed over to near-by Jewish colonies for cultivation. The village of Agrat was occupied by Zionist forces in October 1948. (There was no resistance from the population.) On November 5, 1948, the villagers were told to leave the area for a period of two weeks until "military operations in the area were concluded." For the following year and a half the villagers negotiated with the authorities, who refused to allow them to return. The Arabs finally decided that the military had no intention of rescinding the evacuation order, so they appealed to the Supreme Court. At the end of July 1951 the court ruled that there was no legal reason to prevent the return of the villagers. The villagers then asked the military governor for permission to return. They were referred to the minister of defense, who referred them back to the military governor. They then decided to appeal to the Supreme Court a second time, and the case was scheduled for a hearing on February 6, 1952. But on Christmas day 1951 the Israeli army systematically dynamited every house in the village. The lands of the village were handed over to two Jewish colonies. But the seizure of Arab land - the most basic pillar of the entire Zionist endeavor - was too important to be left solely to the operation of the Emergency Regulafions. Thus, these regulations were supplemented by more than half a dozen land expropriation acts. It is noteworthy that none of these laws refers specifically to the seizure of Arab land; that would be undemocratic. There are ways, however, of designating "Arab" without saying "Arab, " just as there are ways of persecuting Jews while waging a struggle against rootless cosmopolitans. " In the space of a few paragraphs it is impossible to examine all these laws and their implementation. Let us therefore restrict ourselves to one example: the Law on the Acquisition of Absentees' Property, which was passed in 1950, The stated aim of the law was to transfer the property of absentee owners to a "custodian of absentees" property" appointed by the law. On the surface, it seems wholly reasonable. After all, as all progressives know, there is nothing more reactionary than an absentee landlord. There was only one catch, and that was the definition of "absentee. " The law stated that "any person who was a citizen of the Land of Israel and left his ordinary place of residence in the Land of Israel" during and immediately after the 1948 war was
an "absentee. " The real intent of this definition was quite simple. In large part, the Palestinian Arab peasants were not active participants in the 1948 war. (This was a result of the reactionary character of the Arab leadership at the time, which was consciously opposed to any mass mobilization of Palestinians.) Thus, when the war came to their villages, many peasants did what unarmed and non-politicized peasants have always done when invaders have entered their fields: They left, hoping to return when the fighting ended. But this was a new kind of war. These peasants later found that when they tried to return home they had been declared "absentees" and their property had been confiscated. In other words, if a peasant had fled to a neighboring village in 1948 during the war, he could be declared an absentee owner in 1950, even If he had in the meantime returned to his village; alternately, he could be prevented from returning to his village for "security reasons" and then be declared an absentee because he was not on the scene cultivating his land. To ensure smooth implementation of this law, the following provisions were added: absenteeism is determined by decree of the Custodian of Absentees' Property and the "Custodian may not be questioned about information sources which led him to issue a decision by virtue of this law. " In other words, the "Custodian, " which is the Israeli state, has the right to declare anyone an absentee and the reasons for the decision may not be questioned. One final point. What if, by some freak chance, it should turn out that a mistake had been made, that someone had been declared an absentee incorrectly, even under the sweeping scope of the definition? That contingency is provided for. The law states: "No deal concluded between the Custodian and another person in connection with property which the Custodian believes to be absentee property of the moment the deal is concluded may be invalidated, but shall remain in force even if it is later proved that such property was not absenfee property of that time. Lest there be any doubt that what is involved in this Kafkesque legal structure is institutionalized theft on a grand scale, here is a citation from the 1959 edition of the Israel Government Yearbook: " "Village property" belonging to all Arab absentees, whether they are outside the country or living in Israel, 'acquired" by the Custodian of Absentees' Property includes some 300 abandoned or semi-abandoned villages with a total area of 3 1/2 million dunums. The agricultural property includes 80 thousand dunums of orange groves and more than 200 thousand dunums of orchards. ••. Property in the towns includes 25, 416 buildings consisting of 57,497 residential apartments and 10,729 shops and light industry workshops. " (Cited by Jiryis in The Arabs in Israel, p. 61) Of the 370 Jewish rural and urban enterprises established between 1948 and 1953, a total of 350 were created on "abandoned" Arab land. As of 1954, more than one-third of the IsraeliJewish population was living on confiscated land and nearly a third of the new immigrants were living in urban quarters "abandoned" by Arabs. The last major wave of confiscation of Arab lands in Israel occurred during the 1960s. At the time, the government issued guarantees that this wave would be the last. It is no wonder, then, that the Arabs of Galilee reacted with rage this year when the regime published plans to seize 1,575 acres of Arab-owned land in Galilee to build schools, apartments, and factories restricted to Jews. The projected land seizures are part of a government plan to "Judaize Galilee" (that is the official term), that is, to increase the Jewish population of Galilee from 60,000 to 300, 000 within ten years. It is not simply a question of a piece of land, It is a question of Zionism, of making sure that "not one village, not one tribe" of Arabs is left in the Land of Israel. Systematic social oppression The Emergency Regulations and the array of land seizure laws constitute two of the central underpinnings of the systematic oppression of Arabs in Israel. But the social institutions that they embody extend that oppression to virtually every sphere of life. This oppression begins at the most basic level: It forbids Arabs to live in large areas of the state: "First of all, as in the case of any persecuted minority, where are non-Jews authorized to live within the Jewish state? The answer is that in most places they purely and simply do not have the right to live. The majority of the land in Israel belongs to the state, which subjects it to rules prohibiting non-Jews from living there. A non-Jew is prohibited from building a house there; he is prohibited from renting an apartment there; he is prohibited from opening a business; in short, he is prohibited from living there. This is especially cruel in that the majority of the land in which these segregationist laws are in effect belonged to these very Palestinians who are officially defined in Israel as non-Jews and was taken from them. They are thus deprived, even as citizens of the 'Jewish state, of the right to enjoy the lands of "their state. For example, in Israel there are entire cities - Cariel, Nazareth-Illit, Hatzor, Arad, Mitzpeh-Ramon, and others - in which the law formally prohibits non-Jews from living. In places in which the majority of the land is private property, like Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or Haifa, the 'Jewish state' does what it can to construct only segregated quarters in which the 'non-Jews' legally do not have the right to live." (Israel Shahak, chairman of the Israeli Human Rights League, in his new book Le Racisme de l'Etat d'Israel, Editions Guy Authier, Paris,
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ISRAEL 1975, pp.56-7.) In fact, in all Israel there are only six towns (and a couple of small villages) with mixed Jewish and Arab populations: Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Acre, Ramleh, and Lod, In cases in which the regime finds it undesirable for reasons of public relations to formally bar Arabs from enjoying the benefits of laws passed for Jews, the govemment manages to find "code words, " words that define an Arab without saying so openly. This is standard racist practice in the modern world, in which racism has become largely discredited. For example, one of the most pressing concerns of the Zionist ruling class is the fact that the Arab birth rate is significantly higher than the Jewish birth rate (because of the much higher economic and social status of the Jewish population). The 133, 000 Arabs who remained in Israel in 1948 had become at least 400,000 by 1975. The formal annexafion of Arab Jerusalem further raised the Arab population, and the gradual annexation of the territories occupied in the aggression of 1967 is raising it still further. Once again, there are simply too many Arabs. One of the ways devised by the ruling class to deal with this problem was to pass a series of laws granting financial subsidies to large families - a monetary incentive to increase the birth rate. It was thought undesirable to formally restrict these benefits to Jews, for that would be too obviously racist. The problem was solved in the following manner: The subsidies to large families were altached to an "aid to military veterans" bill. "Veteran" was defined as any person who had served or was serving in any branch of the armed forces or in any of the paramilitary organizations established before 1948. It just so happens that military service is obligatory for all Jews in Israel, male and female, and that 99 percent of all Arabs (the 1 percent are members of the Druze sect) are barred from serving in the army for "security reasons. " Thus, the family subsidies affect 99 percent of the Jewish population and exclude 99 percent of the Arab population. The same technique is used on a broad scale to deny employment to Arabs. A random reading of the want ads in an Israeli daily newspaper indicates that virtually all offers of jobs apart from unskilled manual labor (and often even in the case of such labor) require that the applicant have "completed his or her military service. And the oppression extends also to the educational and cultural spheres. Higher education is conducted exclusively in Hebrew, even though Arabic is listed as one of the official languages of the Israeli state. Of the 40,000 university students in Israel, barely a thousand are Arabs. The situation in secondary schools is scarcely better. Here the intent is to deny Arabs any knowledge of their own culture and history, vast os it is, and instead to instill in them an admiration for the achievements of Jews. In the four years of secondary education, a total of 32 periods are devoted to Arab history and civilization; 384 periods are devoted to Jewish history. As for elementary education, Sabri Jiryis summarizes the official curriculum as follows: "In the fifth elementary class ten hours are devoted to the study of the Hebrews, as against five hours for the study of the Arabian 30 peninsula; while in the sixth class Islamic history gets 36 periods out of a total of 64 for the whole of Arab history up to the end of the thirteenth century. ... In the seventh elementary class Arab history is not studied at all, whereas a sixth of the school year is devoted to the study of the relations between Jewish communities abroad and Israel, while in the eighth and last class ten periods are devoted to Arab history from the 19th century up to the present day, as against thirty periods for the study of the history of the State of Israel." A revolutionary solution A number of important political conclusions flow from the position of the Arabs in Israeli society. Primary among these is that any important structural reforms to improve their status challenge the very existence of the Zionist state. As long as Israel remains a state whose purpose is to "ingather" the "exiles" of the "Jewish nation" presently scattered around the world, it is impossible to give the Arabs back their land; it is impossible to allow them to live wherever they want within the borders of the state; it is impossible to grant them equal rights in employment; it is not even possible to alleviate the crude chauvinism that characterizes the educational system, for to do so would simply be to foster the consciousness of the "Israeli" Arabs that they belong to the Arab nation and are logically a component part of its struggle for national and social liberation. To make Arabs the equal of Jews in Israel would be to deprive Israel of its character as a Jewish state, that is, to "de-Zionize" it. For the Zionist ruling class, this would be equivalent to extinction, a fact which is openly admitted by the more honest representatives of the Zionist establishment. "We are a settler generation, Moshe Dayan said in 1956, . "and without the steel helmet and the canon we cannot plant a tree or build a house." And, twelve years later, the same Dayan, speaking to a group of American Jewish students visiting the occupied Golan Heights: "During the last 100 years, our people have been in the process of building up the nation, of expansion, of getting additional Jews and settlements in order to expand the borders. Let no Jew say that the process has ended. Let no Jew say that we are near the end of the road." It is symbolic that the response of Yosef Almogi, the head of the Jewish Agency (which is funding the plan for "Judaizing Galilee") to the Arab general strike of March 30 was to say, "We'll have to speed up the project." The open mobilization of the Arabs in Israel represents a tum in the Israeli political situation. It marks the end of the political passivity of the Arab population. It is a certainty, however, that the response of the ruling class will be intensification of repression; there is simply no available alternative. Up to now, the leadership of the Arabs in Israel has been monopolized by Rakah, the Communist party. The reason for Rakah's hegemony is that it is the only mass
party in Israel that has consistently defended the democratic rights of the Arab population and has even won some small victories in this sphere. But Rakah does not challenge the existence of the Zionist state. Faithful to Kremlin diplomacy, it instead advocates Arab recognition of "secure bordens" for Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from some of the territory occupied in 1967. The shift of the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization to a similar outlook has created the basis for a potential bloc between Rakah and the PLO, and especially those sections of the PLO whose politics are most similar to Rakah's. The political activity of Rakah in the current Arab upsurge in Israel thus has a dual aim: on the one hand, to ensure that the Arabs in Israel are not attracted to the revolutionary-socialist perspective represented by the Revolutionary Communist League (Matzpen-Marxist), supporters of the Fourth International in Israel; on the other hand, to aid in bolstering the strength of that current in the PLO represented by the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the organization led by Nayef Hawatmeh. The more long-term project is an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank of the Jordan and the subsequent establishment of a Palestinian rump state in that territory. Should that come to pass, Rakah, as the Israeli Communist party and the representative of the Israel!" Arabs, would enter into close relations with the self-proclaimed "Marxist-Leninist" wing of the PLO (mainly the DPF), which would become the Communist party of the new Palestinian rump state. The problem with this perspective - apart from the fact that there is no sign that the Israeli ruling class has the slightest intention of withdrawing from any substantial portion of the West Bank - is that it offers the Arabs of Israel no real possibility of altering their present status to any considerable extent. Instead it leads them into an impasse, for there is no hope of modifying the position of Arabs in Israel as long as Israel remains a Zionist state. But an alternative does exist. It begins from the understanding that the very characteristics of Zionism that muke it a displacing colonialism have also given rise to a force that can potentially become a major weapon in the destruction of Zionism. The Zionist state combines features of three types of capitalist states. As a settler-colonial state it is an instrument for procuring and maintaining privileges for Israeli-Jews of all classes (as well as for Jews everywhere who choose to immigrate) of the direct expense of the Palestinians and other Arabs. As a client state of imperialism it is an advance guard in the Arab world that spearheads imperialism's fight against the Arab revolution. But the Zionist state is also a capitalist nation-state, an instrument in the hands of the Israeli-Jewish ruling class for the economic exploitation of the Israeli-Jewish working class. The existence of an Israeli-Jewish proletariat with class interests that directly conflict with those of the ruling class distinguishes Israel from such states as South Africa, where the lines of national oppression coincide almost entirely with the lines of class oppression. Ultimately, the isolation of Israel from the Arab world is against the interests of the Israeli-Jewish working class, which pays for that isolation in the form of the deepening economic crisis, the militarization of Israeli life, the dependence on imperialism, and the constant series of wars generated by the inherently expansionist nature of Zionism. The inexorable long-term rise of the Arab revolution will make the maintenance of the present system of Jewish privilege ever more costly to the Israeli-Jews, especially to the Israeli-Jewish proletariat, both in terms of physical casualties and in terms of the increasing rate of exploitation of labor that will be required by the capitalist military economy, particularly in the context of the international crisis of the capitalist system. The solution, then, not only for the Arabs but also for the Israeli-Jewish proletariat, is the dismantling of the Zionist state and its integration into a socialist Arab East. In the course of the struggle for this perspective, there are a series of democratic demands which have a transitional character in the Israeli context, demands that can mobilize the Arabs of Israel in a revolutionary struggle against the Zionist state and that are also in the objective interest of the majority of the Israeli-Jews themselves. These include the abrogation of all laws and practices conferring privileges on Jews, beginning with the law of retum, which grants automatic Israeli citizenship to all Jews who wish to immigrate; the repatriation of all Palestinians to the present territory of the state of Israel; the rupture of all military and financial ties to the imperialist powers and of all financial and political ties to the Jewish communities of the world. Linked to these demands is the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal from all territories occupied since 1967. There is no doubt that such a program represents the objective interests of the Arabs of Israel and also corresponds to their subjective concerns. It is also incontestable that such a program is supported today by only a tiny minority of the Israeli-Jewish population. At the same time, it has the potential of winning increased numbers of Israeli-Jews, for the only alternative is endless warfare with the Arab world and now, steadily increasing and violent conflict with the more than 400, 000 Arabs who are said to be "citizers" of the Jewish state. O
ETTORE 1938-1976 Comrade Ezio Ferrero (Ettore Salvini) was killed in a tragic automobile accident in Milan on the night of March 13. Comrade Salvini will be familiar to readers of INPRECOR as the author of a number of articles on the Soviet economy and Italian political and economic problems. At the time of his death, he was working on an article on the foreign policy of Brezhnevism, which was to have been published in the dossier on the Soviet Union that appeared in the last issue of INPRECOR (No. 47/48, April 1, 1976). Comrade Ezio was born in Turin in 1938. He became a communist in his youth and joined the Youth Federation of the Italian Communist party. In 1956 he went to Moscow to attend the university there and remained in the Soviet Union for three years. Later on, he made frequent trips to the Soviet Union in connection with his professional activity and thus acquired an uncommon knowledge of that country. Also in the course of his professional activity, he was able to visit many other countries, among them the United States and China. In this manner, Ezio had the opportunity to acquire important international experience, which permitted him to develop analyses that were both concrete and of broad vision. Shortly after his return to Italy from the USSR in 1959, Ezio, on the basis of what he had been able to see in Moscow and the studies he had undertaken, began to develop leftist positions critical of the bureaucracy. Thus opened the period of his collaboration with such publications as Nuova Generazione, Citta Futura, and La Sinistra. In 1962 he was among the promoters of the far-left publishing company Samond e Savelli. Ezio soon came to revolutionary Marxist positions, Finding in them an answer to all the questions he had begun to pose during his stay in the USSR and during the time of his activity in the Communist party. In 1962, as a logical outcome of his political development, he joined the Fourth International. From that moment on, Ezio fulfilled important tasks for the Gruppi Comunisti Rivoluzionari (GCR-Revo38 Ediseur responsable: Rend Groslambert, 34 rue Nothomb, 1040 Bruxelles lutionary Communist Groups, the Italian section of the Fourth International), both locally, in Turin, Rome, and Milan, and nationally. For many years he was a member of the National Secretariat and worked closely with the Political Bureau of the GCR. In 1963 he was elected a delegate to the Eighth World Congress of the Fourth International. At certain periods during his activity, he took on fasks assigned him by the leading bodies of the Internations! Comrade Ezio contributed frequent articles and essays to the press of the GCR (Bandiera Rossa and Quarta Internazionale) and of the International (Quatrième Internationale and INPRECOR), signing his articles first with the pseudonym Sandro Mantovani and later