THE Palestine National Authority President, Mahmud Abbas has just been warmly greeted as a true friend and ‘partner for peace’ by the Israeli government and the Israeli President, Shimon Peres.
Abbas was asked by Israel’s Channel 2 TV whether he wanted to live in Safed, his boyhood town in the Galilee region whose inhabitants were expelled by Zionist gangs in order to establish the state of Israel.
Abbas, speaking from the West Bank city of Ramallah, responded: ‘I visited Safed before once. But I want to see Safed. It’s my right to see it, but not to live there.’
For good measure he added: ‘Palestine now for me is the ’67 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is now and forever … This is Palestine for me.
‘I am a refugee, but I am living in Ramallah. I believe that the West Bank and Gaza is Palestine and the other parts are Israel.’
Peres commented: ‘Abbas’s courageous words prove that Israel has a real partner for peace … These are significant words … We must all treat them with the utmost respect.’
Palestinians have condemned Abbas for making this surrender statement, something which Yasser Arafat refused to make, and which is believed by many Palestinians to be the reason why he was poisoned at the behest of Israel.
The call has gone up for the PLO executive committee and central council to rebuke the president for this betrayal, but many on the executive are believed to support the President’s position and to believe that surrendering the right of the Palestinian refugees is the only way to get an agreement with Israel and also to safeguard their position.
In fact, having sensed weakness and surrender, the Zionists will now press ahead with their drive to settle the vast majority of East Jerusalem, and then impose a swapping of territory, whereby they annexe the settled areas of the West Bank to Israel, in return for chunks of the Negev Desert being handed over to the Palestinians.
Abbas also pledged that as long as he remains in his post there would be no armed resistance to Israeli occupation. ‘As far as I am here, in this office, there will be no third armed intifada, ever … We want to use diplomacy.’
He is proposing surrender. The Palestinian bourgeoisie has opted to end the struggle for Palestine, and adopt a policy of peace at any price.
This is its reaction to the world of crisis of capitalism and imperialism. This has driven the western powers to overthrow Gadaffi, to try to do the same to Syria and Assad, and then to launch an attack on Iran, while Israel assaults Hezbollah, and imposes a ‘settling’ of the Palestinian ‘problem’ on its own terms.
The Palestinian bourgeoisie is also reacting to the emergence of a huge movement amongst Palestinian workers, youth and the poor against the way that it is enriching itself, while the workers and the poor are facing starvation, because of the massive price rises that are taking place due to Israel’s stranglehold over the Palestinian economy, which it sees as a rival to be destroyed.
The Palestinian workers and youth must now set up their own revolutionary party, a section of the Fourth International, that will strike together against imperialism alongside the Palestinian bourgeoisie where possible, but will march separately for a socialist revolution in Palestine, part of the world socialist revolution, that will unite Palestinian workers and youth with anti-Zionist Jewish workers to drive imperialism and Zionism out of the Middle East and establish a single, socialist Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, and with all Palestinian refugees having the right to return, as part of a Middle Eastern Federation of Socialist States.
