Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

I am not in a position to comment upon the details of what took place in England with regards to the outcome of the 26 May special vote within the Association of University Teachers, and its result of rolling back a previous resolution calling for a selective boycott against Bar Ilan and Haifa Universities. Nor do I wish to engage in the propriety of the boycott itself, especially when there have already been sufficient articles written explaining why indeed a boycott against these institutions is necessary °© the most convincing of which have actually emerged from Israeli academic and activist circles. I do however wish to delve into the question of what the lessons of today's reversal are for the Palestinian national movement and what the salient questions it poses for future activism are.

First, let it be acknowledged that the attempt to selectively boycott a particular manifestation of Israeli colonialism through the avenue of a Western trade union cannot be understated. Although critics might argue that though the cause of solidarity with the Palestinian national movement has made small advances through this campaign, the end result places us squarely back in the position we were in before the boycott °© perhaps even a step back, considering the demoralization that might emerge amongst activists given the result of today's election. But it is important to cut against such sentiment. The process of attempting a boycott in the first place, whatever its final results, have exposed a veritable panoply of strategic questions which the activists in solidarity with the Palestinian question are long overdue in addressing, and which I will argue, are necessary to take up if the Palestinian national cause is to make real tangible advances.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the attempted boycott in the first place was its efforts to link the just cause of the Palestinian national movement °© its right to self-determination, for return of refugees, and for freedom from racism, exclusionism and colonialism practiced by Israel - to the domestic struggles of the Western working class, in this case, the struggle of university lecturers in the UK. No doubt the enormous mobilization witnessed by pro-Zionist forces to help overturn the vote is evidence of the degree to which Israel and its allies perceive the strategic threat of initiatives like this in the future. This cannot merely be attributed to the conspiratorial powers of Zionist lobbies or the arm twisting that may or may not have taken place behind closed doors, and which are yet to be exposed. Rather, Israel and its allies perceive attempts to build an international boycott campaign against them as a strategic threat, precisely because it mobilizes a force that has largely been absent from the traditional theatre of struggle °© the working classes in the West.

Though university lecturers are hardly the stereotypical representation of working class struggles, they do represent a sector with considerable moral weight in setting the agendas of class struggle in their given social, political and economic manifestations. Furthermore, the possibility of selectively boycotting Israeli institutions, organizations, and universities, remains a possibility amongst wider sectors of the Western working class, including amongst its productive/ industrial/ service sectors. Here lies a crucial strategic weakness of Israel and its US partners. UK and US complicity in the crimes of Israel can indeed be threatened if "industrial quiet" which facilitates profit making, is disturbed and interrupted domestically. This relates to the classic power of the working classes whose interests °© distinct from any other class °© are to resist its own exploitation and the machinations of its capitalist elites.

Though the discourse of class struggle has largely receded in the modern era, too often eschewed as a defunct atavism, this does not take away from its relevance. Whether in regards to the daily exploitation suffered by billions of workers around the world at the hands of their own employers, or the broader political oppression which results as a consequence of imperial practices in Palestine and else where °© class analysis and struggle remain crucial frameworks for actualizing real goals. Unfortunately, the weakness of genuine Left forces throughout the world, and the towering disaster of the legacy of Stalinism have left their impressions upon all sectors of progressive activism. In the Palestinian context, this has objectively resulted in the expunging of the discourse of imperialism, capitalism and class struggle, even from the Palestinian national movement actors themselves, not least amongst the Palestinian Left. When combined with a similar expunging of this lexicon and organizing from many progressive circles in the West, the net result has been the restricting of Palestinian solidarity activism within the confines of liberal discourse and forms of activism. Though incredible energies have indeed been invested since the onset of the Intifada in exposing the crimes of Israel, at times resulting in fiery demonstrations witnessed throughout the world, the net result of these actions have not resulted in significant tangible losses to the US-Israeli hegemony. This is not to discredit the fact that indeed great advances have been made in delegitimizing Israel and its practices, or in stressing the underdog, oppressed nature of the Palestinians who are fighting for their rights. But allowing Palestinian activism to stop in the realm of public opinion °© though necessary - is clearly not sufficient in ending US-Israeli practices themselves.

The fact remains that US, and more broadly speaking, Western imperial interests in supporting Israel stem from the crucial significance these capitalist elites have attribute to the region and the role Israel can play in this regard. It is long overdue that Palestinian solidarity activism does away with conspiratorial theories about the power of AIPAC or of "world Zionism". Though no doubt Zionist forces are organized and have considerable powers, this is not sufficient to explain why the US, and the EU as well, support Israel as a "Jewish state". If indeed these forces were the reasons for US or EU policy, why is it that a famous anti-semite like Richard Nixon would ensure that Israel was airlifted supplies during the 1973 October War? Or why Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard is still in prison? Or why the US has at times directly intervened to stop Israeli arms sales to India and China? Egypt receives the second largest amount of US foreign aid °© almost comparable in size to Israel - but nobody has ever raised the question of "the Egyptian lobby". It is finally time to do away with these ideas as they actually tend to play into the hands of the Zionists who can then paint Palestinian solidarity activism as a re-articulation of genuine anti-Semitism °© something we must be vigilantly opposed to both morally and organizationally.

Recently the Israeli press has been especially candid about the fact that Israel is deeply emerged in providing services for its main Western backer °© the US, and which compose the main reasons for this support in the first place. Top Israeli political commentator Aluf Benn openly acknowledges that Israel has been cast in "the role of the rottweiler", particularly with respect to its regional role in policing the rise of anti-US imperialist currents across the region : "Washington is using Sharon's renowned image as an unscrupulous bully in an effort to intimidate the Iranians and put pressure on the Europeans. It is hard to explain otherwise the statements of Vice President Dick Cheney and others who are publicly warning of an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Their message is simple: If diplomacy fails, Sharon will run amok."

Harel continues: "The administration's announcement last week that it was supplying 100 "bunker-buster" bombs to the Israel Air Force was the most blatant sign that America is likely to sanction an Israeli attack on the underground uranium-enrichment facilities in Iran. For now, it's only a deterrent: It will be months before the bombs arrive in Israel and the pilots are trained to drop them. But everyone is fully aware of the intended use of such armaments, which until today have not been supplied to any country outside the United States."

Yoram Ettinger, writing for the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot was even more frank in revealing the role of Israel as an essential part of US hegemonic control in the region: "Statements made by and the conduct of Israel's leaders since 1993 create the false impression that Israeli-American ties constitute a one-way relationship. The presumption is that America gives and Israel receives, leading to Israel's inferior position and the alleged compulsion to follow the State Department dictates. However, Former Secretary of State and NATO forces commander Alexander Haig refuted this claim, saying he is pro-Israeli because Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security."

Ettinger continues: "On our 57th Independence Day, Israel and the United States enjoy a two-way relationship. Israel is like a start-up company that enjoys the kindness of the American investor, but yields much greater profits than the investment. Every day, Israel relays to the U.S. lessons of battle and counter-terrorism, which reduce American losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, prevent attacks on U.S. soil, upgrade American weapons, and contribute to the U.S. economy. Senator Daniel Inouye recently argued Israeli information regarding Soviet arms saved the U.S. billions of dollars. The contribution made by Israeli intelligence to America is greater than that provided by all NATO countries combined, he said."

For Ettinger, the list of services Israel provides goes on and on, and is a matter to be spoken of with pride. Palestinian solidarity activism must therefore internalize this strategic priority of Israel in the architecture of US imperial objectives, when it assesses what it will do to attempt to counter this. Attempting to force a wedge between US capitalist interests and Israel is all but impossible if we struggle to lobby Washington. Both the Democrats and the Republicans (not to mention Tony Blair's Labor party) are structurally tied to the interests of their domestic capitalist classes. A moralistic argument exposing the arguments of the brutality of Israel is insufficient and structural contradictory, as it demands that these parties break away from the class interests which they represent, and which indeed were brought into power to defend.

Here lies the significance of the latest boycott campaign. The working classes in England or the US, have structurally different interests than those of their ruling capitalist elites. While their labor creates the profits for their capitalist classes, they are also fundamentally exploited in this regard, and therefore have strategic interests in opposing both their domestic capitalist elites, and in supporting the efforts of others engaged in this battle (in Palestine or Iraq, for example). This means that on all fronts of Western capitalism, any advance or retreat from working class opposition domestically, or anti-imperialist activity in the periphery, are dialectically related to one another. Exposing the connections provides the blue print for building an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist movement which can genuinely challenge both the domestic and international crimes of US capitalism (and EU capitalism in secondary fashion).

Admittedly this is a simplification of strategies for class struggle, and surely many questions remain which need to be answered. Furthermore class struggle is not always embodied in classical work-place frameworks. There is no avoiding understanding on a deeper level the interrelationship between racial, gender, ethnic, religious, and sexual oppression within the context of a broader framework of class struggle. But with this said, an understanding of capitalism and US imperialism must be the basis from which Palestinian solidarity activity emerges if it is to wage effective struggle.

What does this look like on the ground? The recent boycott attempt represents the opening salvo in what must be a long term "war of position" and "war of movement" (to use the Gramscian terminology). There will be more such attempts in the future, which must have at their backbone the direct connection between the fights of Western workers against their employers and elites, and the fights of Palestinians and Iraqis to live free from colonialism and occupation. The same company which sells military bulldozers to Israel (Catepillar) is the same company which bulldozed its union (the UAW) in the mid- 1990s. These kinds of connections are crucial to building real solidarity for both just causes, and the responsibility lies upon us to "connect the dots" between "the war abroad" and the "war at home". They are one struggle and one fight, and the sooner solidarity forces make these connections and internalize them in their organizing and propaganda routines, the more effective we will be in all these fights.

To close, there can be no room for Palestinian solidarity forces to conclude from the reversal of the AUT boycott, that boycotts, and making links between what happens in Palestine and Western class struggle is ineffective. On the contrary, it represents the best chance that Palestinians have to be able to stop the sociocide and slow transfer waged against them. Furthermore, organizing and mobilizing Western workers in this struggle will be no easy task, as the AUT efforts have shown. Within this analysis, the state of the Western Left and the union movement in particular, become immediately thrust into the forefront of our minds. Building working class solidarity with union rank filers, both for their just fights against their bosses, and for the Palestinian cause, is crucial if we are to build a movement that cannot be decapitated, or reversed as easily as we have just seen. There is no substitute for patient explaining, and the elbow grease of fighting in solidarity on the picket lines, shop floors, and in mass mobilizations in the streets. We must promise the US capitalist classes and the Israeli government, a thousand battles on a thousand fronts. No doubt they are organizing and preparing for this battle. The question then is, are we?

This article appears in the International Socialist Review Issue 36, July–August 2004

Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian-American activist and writer who edits the radical journal Between The Lines, published from Jerusalem and Ramallah. He is also a frequent contributor to the International Socialist Review and ZNet. He can be reached at toufic_haddad@hotmail.com.

THE U.S. antiwar movement recently adopted the issue of Palestine as a point of unity, prominently declaring that on March 20, 2004, protesters across America would march beneath the banner, "End colonial occupations from Iraq to Palestine to everywhere." This came in large part as a result of a letter addressed to the broader antiwar community on behalf of Arab and Muslim organizations announcing that these groups would no longer accept the de-linking of Palestine and the occupation of Iraq in the U.S. antiwar movement. The statement declared that the struggle in Palestine must be "central to any peace and justice mobilization."¹

However, the letter is notably vague about the relationship between the struggles in Palestine and Iraq beyond proclamations that "both peoples have paid dearly in confronting war and occupation." This article seeks to clarify what indeed are the connections between the Palestinian and Iraqi struggles, situating both within the framework of current U.S. imperial objectives. This is necessary because both occupations are key components of the U.S. Middle East strategy. The American ruling establishment has already invested billions of dollars in both, and has shown a willingness to sacrifice the lives of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The U.S.-funded Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been underway for almost thirty-seven years, and has cost U.S. taxpayers around $5 billion a year. As for Iraq, top U.S. officials have no qualms about declaring the occupation–the cost of which is already running into the hundreds of billions–a long-term endeavor. As former occupation chief in Iraq General Jay Garner [Ret.] recently put it, "One of the most important things we can do right now is start getting basing rights.… Look back on the Philippines around the turn of the 20th century. They were a coaling station for the Navy.… That’s what Iraq is for the next few decades: our coaling station that gives us great presence in the Middle East."²

Understanding how Iraq and Palestine fit together is made all the more important by the fact that after September 11, and the more recent U.S. occupation of Iraq, the architecture of U.S. imperial policies has entered a significant new era that Bush administration officials are heralding as the advent of "a new Middle East." Though the classic U.S. imperial objectives in the region remain unchanged, new methods and tactics are being devised to consolidate these objectives, which in part are aimed at addressing both old and new structural weaknesses and threats to U.S. hegemony. Clarification of these issues is thus of utmost necessity so activists know best how to strategize and focus their energies for the task at hand.

On one level, the comparison between the occupations is straightforward. Indeed, all occupying armies, if their occupations are to last, must inevitably develop certain techniques of "counter-insurgency." But there is more than coincidence in the techniques both the Israeli and U.S. occupying armies are using to suppress popular resistance. U.S. techniques in Iraq are unmistakably similar to Israeli techniques in the 1967 Occupied Territories because of the active cooperation between Israeli military advisers and the Americans on the ground. It is worth mentioning some of these common techniques while not forgetting the terribly destructive effect they have on the daily lives of Iraqis and Palestinians. They include: the use of aggressive techniques of urban warfare with an emphasis on special units, house-to-house searches, wide-scale arrest campaigns (almost 14,000 Iraqis are now in prison), and torture; the erecting of an elaborate system of watchtowers, military bases, checkpoints, barbed wire, and trenches to monitor, control, and restrict transportation and movement; the clearing of wide swaths of land next to roads; the use of armored bulldozers to destroy the houses of suspected militants; the razing of entire fields from which militants might seek refuge; the heightened relevance of snipers and unmanned drones; and the attempted erection of collaborator networks to extract information from the local population about resistance activities–both military and political.

Indeed, the techniques Israel has developed over the years in suppressing Palestinian resistance, and most recently in urban warfare throughout the course of the Al Aqsa Intifada, have proven invaluable for many states attempting to crush insurrections–Colombia (leftist guerrillas), Turkey (Kurds), India (Kashmir), Sri Lanka (Tamil liberation movements), and Indonesia (East Timor), to name just a few. The U.S., anxious to rid itself of the hangover of the "Vietnam syndrome," and more recently the "Somalia syndrome," value this expertise just as highly. Cooperation in urban warfare techniques with Israeli military generals both on the logistic level and on the ground in Israeli training camps pre-dates the most recent Iraq campaign. For example, a detailed lecture on urban warfare is featured by Brigadier General Gideon Avidor in a Rand Corporation publication entitled "Ready for Armageddon" in which other top military brass (both U.S. and international) seek to learn from the Israeli experiences of urban warfare. As the Iraqi occupation continues, increasing evidence of this cooperation is surfacing. Pulitzer prize winning author Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine writes, "According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq." One of the operations formulated with the "ad-hoc Israeli commandos advisers" is "called ‘pre-emptive manhunting’ by one Pentagon adviser" and has "the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program"–a reference to the counter-insurgency program the U.S. adopted during the Vietnam War, in which Special Forces were sent out to capture or assassinate Vietnamese believed to be working with or sympathetic to the Vietcong. Operation Phoenix resulted in the killing of at least 60,000 victims between 1968 and 1972.³

The similarity between the two occupations isn’t limited to one of mere technique, but also includes the way in which U.S. actions are framed and justified. As Palestinian thinker (and Israeli member of Parliament) Azmi Bishara has noted, the "war against terror" and particularly the recent invasion of Iraq was waged using the logic of "globalized Israeli security doctrines. For example, ‘the pre-emptive strike’ or the ‘preventative war.’ These conceptions are actually Israeli conceptions, including understanding ‘terrorism’ as the ‘main enemy.’" Bishara explains, "Israel’s central doctrine was to divide the world into ‘terrorists’ and ‘anti-terrorists’…so that it could be on the side of Russia, India and the United States together. ‘Everybody is fighting terrorism.’ This enables Israel to break its isolation. Israel is on one side, the entire Arab world is on the other."⁴

Despite all these similarities, it is important to understand that differences exist. The U.S. occupation of Iraq is by no means a carbon copy of Israeli practices against the Palestinians. Each occupation plays a different role in U.S. imperial objectives. Moreover, limiting the discussion to occupation does a disservice to what is actually taking place in both cases, and obfuscates the clarity needed for real action.

To start with, the word "occupation" is commonly used to refer to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that began in 1967. Though Palestinians actively resist this occupation (and have since it started), they also actively reject the limiting of their cause to the question of this occupation alone. In fact, the Palestinian national liberation movement began in the Ottoman era (pre—First World War) and crystallized in the years of the British mandate (1920—1948). The modern national movement (embodied in the Palestine Liberation Organization, PLO) was established in 1964–three years before the 1967 occupation, and began as a movement of refugees, expelled by Zionist armies from Palestine in 1948, who sought to lead the return of the Palestinian people back to their lands and homes. The word "occupation," in this instance, bears no reference to the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 in which 530 Palestinian cities, towns, and villages were depopulated. Nor does it shed any light on the nature of the Zionist movement or the exclusive Jewish state it established, which is discriminatory and racist by its very nature against non-Jews. Furthermore, occupation bears no reference to the struggle of the more than one million Palestinians inside Israel who are citizens of the state, and who today are at the very heart of the anti-Zionist struggle, as the non-Jews in the Jewish state struggling for equality and their national collective rights as the indigenous people of Palestine.

In fact, occupation has become a very slippery word used for disingenuous political purposes. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told the Likud Central Committee on May 27, 2003, "I also believe that the thought and idea that we can continue keeping under occupation–we might not like the word, but it is occupation–3.5 million Palestinians, is very bad for Israel, the Palestinians and Israel’s economy."⁵ Likewise, Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu both proclaimed during the Oslo years that Israel no longer occupied the Palestinians. Their claim was that the direct occupation of Palestinians by the Israeli army was over (because of Palestinian Authority, or PA, autonomy in "Area A" during Oslo) or needed to end, but without mentioning the occupation of Palestinian land.

Thus it is evident that the term "anti-occupation" is a political catechism that cannot be allowed to go unqualified if it is to be used in defense of Palestinian rights. This is the precise mistake large parts of the European Left have made vis-à-vis the Palestinian struggle, and the American Left must be careful not to fall into this same trap. This has come about largely as a result of them taking the lead from the Zionist Left which forms the Israeli "peace camp" (and includes groups from the more "establishment" Meretz Party and Peace Now movement, to the more "radical" Gush Shalom and Women in Black).

The Zionist Left’s critique of Israel and the occupation is limited to Israeli practices only after 1967. It categorically rejects the Palestinian refugees’ right of return (which has been passed by the UN General Assembly more than 110 times since 1948). Furthermore, the Zionist Left has no intention of raising the question of the racist and discriminatory nature of Zionism, the formation of the Israeli state, or for that matter, even the recognition of the rights and struggles of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. This misleading line taken by the Zionist Left, or rather its intentional gerrymandering of the "problem," is made worse by the negotiating tactics of the Palestinian Authority, which has promoted an approach that only focuses on the 1967 occupation.

This ambiguity surrounding the term "occupation," and its use to obscure what is at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, has been terribly destructive to the Palestinian cause. In fact, it was precisely the illusion that the problem was the occupation and that the "occupation was ending" during the Oslo "peace process" between 1993 and 2000 that allowed much of the international community to absolve itself of responsibility to the Palestinian cause, at a time when in fact the Israeli occupation was deepening. The present Intifada arose as a rejection of both the occupation and the falsity that a peace process was taking place.

Limiting criticism of Israel to the occupation continues to be a disservice to describing what is happening to Palestinians both in the West Bank and inside Israel. Since the Al Aqsa Intifada began at least 3,000 Palestinians have been killed (as of the writing of this article), of whom more than 550 are children and 200 are women, while 310 have been killed in political assassinations. Almost 39,000 Palestinians have been wounded, and more than 6,000 are in prison (437 of whom are children). More than 5,100 homes have been completely destroyed and an additional 55,119 have been damaged. Forty-three schools alone have been transformed into military bases. More than 15,000 acres of land have been leveled, 982,000 trees uprooted, 12,848 sheep and goats killed or poisoned, and 257 water wells destroyed completely. If we compare in scale the American population of 280 million to the Palestinian population of three million–a ratio of about 93:1–you begin to get a sense of the enormity of devastation taking place. As a proportion of their total population, four times the number of Palestinians have died than Americans were killed in Vietnam.

This is to say nothing of the 370 kilometers of wall that Israel is erecting around the West Bank. In fact, the wall is a series of 8-meter-high concrete slabs, electric fences, trenches, barbed-wire, patrol roads, and tracking paths. Its ultimate purpose is to enforce what Israel terms "demographic separation," while unilaterally annexing large swaths of Palestinian land and water to Israel. Architects of the wall seek to consolidate the long-held Zionist plan of establishing separate islands of Palestinian autonomy similar to the South African Bantustans on no more than 40 percent of the West Bank–a plan both Labor and Likud governments have been united in implementing since the 1967 occupation began.

The 1948 Palestinians (who are citizens of Israel) have also witnessed a sustained assault against their livelihood. They too were brutally repressed at the outbreak of the Intifada, with the Israeli police killing thirteen of them before demonstrations in solidarity with their brethren in 1967 Palestine were quelled. Their second-class status also means that they are subject to having their land confiscated, and their houses demolished without recourse for the purpose of erecting Jewish-only settlements. They have already had 97 percent of their land confiscated from them, and they are unable to purchase land that is now owned by Jewish Israelis due to sophisticated state laws that discriminate against Arab ownership of land. Furthermore, not a day goes by in Israel when Israeli politicians don’t refer to them–not the 1967 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza–as the existential threat Israel faces, the so-called "demographic time bomb." During the course of the Intifada, Israel has accelerated its attempts to ghettoize them, too. It is presently engaged in trying to force 70,000 Palestinians who live in unrecognized villages in the south of the country by spraying their crops with defoliants. Israel has also issued demolition orders against more than 6,000 homes of Palestinian citizens of Israel, claiming the homes were built "illegally."

What the limited framework of occupation fails to capture is that Israel is presently engaged in an all-out war against the entire Palestinian people, located across historical Palestine. At minimum, this plan aims to erect an overt form of apartheid, and in the worst-case scenario, could result in "transfer" (the Israeli expression used for ethnic cleansing)–be it by force (i.e., physical expulsion at gunpoint), or "willful" (by preventing access by Palestinians to the necessities of life–health care, education, work, water, food, family, etc.), forcing people to leave.

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, the inadequacy of the term "occupation" is made clear not only vis-à-vis what is taking place on the ground in Palestine (the micro level), but also vis-à-vis what Israel’s historic and present day role has been in relation to Western imperialism (the macro level).

Israel’s role, in the words of founding Zionist thinker Theodore Hertzl in 1896, is to be "a bulwark against Asia…an advance post of civilization against barbarism."⁶ All Zionist leaders from the pre-state days to the present have understood that loyalty to the objectives of Western imperialism would guarantee support to the state, and domination over the Arab world. Co-founder of the World Zionist Organization Max Nordau explicitly declared this in a July 12, 1920 speech delivered at Albert Hall in London. Describing the event, Nordau writes:

After the 1967 war, U.S. imperialism replaced Britain and France as Israel’s backer. But the nature of this relationship and of Israel’s role has never changed, but rather has expanded to include not only the protection of the Suez Canal, but most importantly, the protection of Western access to Middle East oil. As the establishment Israeli daily paper Haaretz wrote,

Israel’s principle purpose–indeed its specialization–has been to subvert, suppress, uproot, and destroy the forces of Arab nationalism to secure Western access to Arab oil, once described by Washington as "the greatest prize in human history." Arab nationalism was and continues to be such a threat to the interests of Western imperialism, because it is the sole force that calls for the self-determination of the Arab peoples and their natural resources, thus threatening to call into question the false divisions created by Western imperialism which divided the Arab peoples into twenty-two states at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In this endeavor Israel has worked tirelessly. Though its most striking and best known accomplishment was its surprise attack and defeat of the Pan-Arab movement of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1967–a demoralizing defeat that the Arab world has yet to recover from–this is only the tip of the iceberg of what Israel has undertaken to do away with any and all traces of the Arab national movement. It is worth here briefly mentioning some of this expansive and elaborate policy, as it is rarely given due exposure.

Since its creation, Israel has engaged and defeated different Arab regimes in major wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. In all cases, with the exception of 1973, Israel initiated the attacks. Israel has consistently supported non-Arab states on the periphery of the Arab world in Turkey, Iran, Kenya, and Ethiopia as a way to make sure that Arab states engage in resource expenditure and defense against their neighbors. This is known in Israeli "defense" lexicon as "Encirclement Theory."

Israel has consistently supported both ethnic and religious minorities within the Arab world, as a way to break down Arab nationalism from within (known in Israeli lexicon as the "Theory of Allying the Periphery"). It first targeted Arab Jews (particularly in Iraq, Egypt, and Morocco), even going so far as to plant bombs in synagogues and on Jewish-owned property to provoke a wave of Arab Jewish immigration to Israel in the early 1950s.9 Israel has also attempted to foment the rebellions of other minority groups in Egypt (the Copts), Lebanon (the Maronites), Iraq (the Kurds), and Sudan (Christians in the south) as a way of weakening Arab nationalism. Israel even refuses to recognize the Arab nationality of the more than one million Arab citizens of Israel, instead officially registering them as Muslims, Christians, and Druze.

Israel has come to the aid of pro-Western Arab regimes, helping them defend themselves from internal Arab nationalist movements. The most well-known example of this is that of Jordan in 1970, when Israel threatened to intervene to shore up the Jordanian monarchy in its attempts to suppress the PLO. The Syrian army thought to put a stop to the massacre of Palestinians by the Jordanian regime, but opted not to because of Israel’s threat that it would bomb Damascus. But this is not the only case of Israel supporting a reactionary Arab regime to put down the forces of Arab nationalism. Former head of the Israeli Mossad, Shabtai Shavit explicitly confirmed that Israel supported royalist forces in Yemen in their war against republican forces throughout the 1960s. The Israeli aid consisted of parachuting weapons to royalist forces and sending instructors to train them. The Israeli motivation was the desire to weaken Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser who supported the republican forces. As Haaretz noted: "The Pan-Arab project of Nasser threatened the rule of Imperialism in the region and, as Shavit explains: ‘We did it in order to be able to struggle against the worst of our enemies.’ Moreover, the interference in the civil war [in Yemen] was part of a comprehensive strategic perception of the Mossad which endeavored to divide the Arab world and find allies in the region."¹⁰

Israel has directly and indirectly been involved in the assassination of prominent and progressive Arab nationalists for years, including senior Moroccan revolutionary Mehdi Ben Barakeh in 1967, leaders and members of the National Liberation Front in Algeria, as well as dozens of prominent revolutionaries in the Lebanese and Palestinian national movements.

Israel has worked closely to prevent any Arab regime from challenging its military advantage and hegemony in the Middle East, particularly seeking to prevent the Arabs from developing nuclear capabilities. Israel destroyed the Iraqi reactor during its assembly in France in 1977, and assassinated an assortment of scientists who worked in the Iraqi nuclear program–most notably the Egyptian scientist Yahya El Mashd, in Paris. Israel also assassinated the brainchild of the Iraqi Super Cannon project in Brussels, and bombed the Osiraq Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.

Israel has repeatedly attempted to weaken or destroy the Palestinian national movement–particularly in 1970 in Gaza, 1982 in Lebanon, 1987 in the first Intifada, and most recently in the current Al Aqsa Intifada, which began in September 2000. More than any other movement, the Palestinian national movement has collectively symbolized and united Arab nationalist aspirations, and has acted until recently as the main front of Western imperialism’s attacks and control of Arab nationalism.

Israel’s relentless war against Arab nationalism has made it an indispensable ally of the U.S., far and above the value of any pro-Western Arab proxy regime, regimes whose instability derives from their illegitimacy in the eyes of their own people. For these reasons, American military expert–Major General George Keegan and former air force intelligence officer–has been quoted as saying that it would cost U.S. taxpayers $125 billion to maintain an armed force equal to Israel’s in the Middle East, and that the U.S.-Israel military relationship was worth "five CIAs."¹¹

Current Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalon recently confirmed the strategic significance of Israel for U.S. objectives in the Middle East, in an interview he gave to Charlie Rose on PBS.

Having established Israel’s role as the protector of Western, primarily U.S., imperial objectives, it is easier to determine how and where the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq fits into place. Deputy Defense Minister Paul Wolfowitz himself acknowledged to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore in June 2003 that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. When asked why the nuclear power of North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, Wolfowitz commented: "Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."¹³

Of course it is no secret that oil is at the heart of the occupation’s objectives. American and world dependence on Gulf oil will increase precipitously over the next twenty years. Veteran Middle East analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)–well connected to the U.S. intelligence community–describes this dependency in a document written before the occupation of Iraq:

In this regard, Iraq’s possession of the second largest oil reserves in the world (with prospects for more), its weakened position after twelve years of sanctions, and the openings for the U.S. created after the September 11 attacks and subsequent "war on terror," all made the invasion of Iraq a strategic necessity. As the Gulf’s share of worldwide petroleum exports increases to almost 60 percent by 2020, the U.S. has perceived the need to keep these strategic reserves in a strong U.S. grip–to ensure not only American access to oil, but also U.S. domination and leverage over potential European and Chinese competitors, and over world oil markets as a whole. Securing Iraq’s oil thus represents a lynchpin of U.S. imperial objectives. These objectives were summed up well by Paul Wolfowitz as early as 1992: The U.S. "must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor…. [W]e must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."¹⁵

The fact that the U.S. now occupies one of the Arab world’s largest and most historically influential countries positions it well to not only control Iraq’s oil resources but also to remold the entire region as it sees fit. Bush recently declared in his weekly radio address, "The establishment of a free Iraq will be a watershed event in the history of the Middle East, helping to advance the spread of liberty throughout that vital region…as freedom takes hold in the greater Middle East, the people of the region will find new hope, and America will be more secure."¹⁶

Details of what precisely the Bush administration has meant by its version of a new Middle East have been noticeably vague beyond the predictable rehashed "white man’s burden" rhetoric about bringing freedom and democracy to the people of the region. But based on what the U.S. is doing in Iraq, together with other ongoing trends and phenomena in the region, it is now becoming clearer as to what precisely the U.S. has in mind. These plans are aimed at addressing both old and new structural weaknesses and threats to this hegemony, which are increasingly likely to reveal themselves in the post-invasion of Iraq Middle East.

For some time, the Middle East has been a veritable cauldron of economic, social, and political discontent for the Arab working classes, particularly within the U.S.-backed Arab regimes (Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt, and the entire Gulf region which includes Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, in addition to Yemen). Many of these problems were more publicly exposed after the publication of the 2002 and 2003 UN Human Development Reports on the Arab world. These reports, written by prominent Arab scholars and academics, reveal how far down the corrupt regimes of the Middle East have driven their peoples.

Of nine world regions surveyed, the Arab world topped the list of those populations who most supported the statement that "democracy is better than any other form of government," and expressed the highest level of rejection of authoritarian rule. The UN report is rife with shocking examples of where the negligence, corruption, and despotism of the Arab regimes has led: The combined gross domestic product of the twenty-two Arab League countries is less than that of Spain. Approximately 40 percent of adult Arabs–sixty-five million people–are illiterate (two-thirds of whom are women). If current unemployment rates persist, regional unemployment will reach twenty-five million by 2010, representing at least 15 percent in most Arab countries. Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Fifty-one percent of older Arab youths expressed a desire to emigrate to other countries. The Arab world already suffers from a "hemorrhaging" of large numbers of qualified Arab professionals who emigrate to the West in search of job opportunities. Roughly 25 percent of the 300,000 graduates from Arab universities in 1995—1996 emigrated, and more than 15,000 Arab doctors emigrated between 1998 and 2000 alone.

U.S. think tanks for years have been warning of increasing "troubling trends" throughout the Middle East, which if allowed to fester for too long could be potentially explosive. But their concern is not with what has been done to the peoples of the Middle East, but rather the impact of these trends on U.S. hegemony in the region and on global markets as a whole. In a remarkable series of documents published by CSIS entitled "Peace is Not Enough,"¹⁷ Anthony Cordesman outlines how these issues simply cannot be ignored. These issues include "massive economic and demographic problems" whereby "no Arab country has economic growth that solidly outpaces its rise in population"; "Population momentum rates" that "represent a major threat" requiring "massive birth control programs" (referred to as the "Population Momentum Bomb"); "Gross over-population and over-urbanization" which may become "critical threats by 2010—2030"; "Extremely high under and un-employment" which create "a generation with nowhere to go"; and a "Youth Explosion Problem" whereby over 40 percent of the population is 14 years or younger." In the era of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Cordesman raises these issues because they will increasingly threaten the stability of U.S.-backed regimes across an Arab world which is incensed about U.S. imperial policies in the region–particularly its backing of Arab dictatorships, its support for Israel, and the brutal Iraq occupation.

The U.S. also has other incentives behind rearranging the economic, political, and social landscape of the Arab world: neoliberalism. As one analyst from the Cato Institute Daniel T. Griswold bemoans, "The Arab world is a land that globalization has largely passed by," suffering from an isolation that "is largely self-imposed. Average tariff barriers in the Arab Middle East are among the highest in the world, and as a consequence the region suffers from chronically declining shares of global trade and investment."¹⁸

Over the past two decades, the Middle East’s share of world trade has fallen from 13.5 percent in 1980, to less than 3.4 percent in 2000. Similarly, foreign direct investment in the Arab world has also steadily declined during this period, going from 2.6 percent of the world total in 1975—1980, to only 0.7 percent during 1990—1998.¹⁹ Average tariffs in Algeria are 24 percent, 30 percent in Tunisia, and more than 20 percent in Egypt–much higher than the average tariffs in the United States, which hover around 4 percent. Griswold’s solution is predictably clear: "Free trade is not a panacea, but it is a necessary building block for a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East. Free trade has helped to reduce poverty in those countries and regions of the world that have progressively opened themselves to the global economy. Free trade can till the soil for democracy and respect for human rights by creating an economically independent and growing middle class."

It is with this underlying framework that U.S. policy wonks are approaching the post-invasion of Iraq Middle East, with the expressed intention of "draining the swamp" according to one analyst.²⁰ The U.S. is looking at ways to push through its "vision" of how the Middle East is to be remolded economically, politically, and socially–with Iraq proving to be an important testing ground for these policies.

Details of the U.S. administration’s designs first emerged in May 2003 when Bush outlined a plan to create a U.S.-Middle East free trade area within ten years "to bring the Middle East into an expanding circle of opportunity, to provide hope for the people who live in that region."²¹ When a reporter from the Economist asked U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick where Iraq stood in the U.S. vision of the Middle East Free Trade Agreement (MEFTA), Zoellick was amazingly forthcoming as to exactly how the U.S. will proceed on this front.²² After making the necessary disclaimer, "The decisions for Iraq ultimately have to be made by the Iraqi people and a new sovereign government of Iraq," Zoellick continued by outlining exactly what the sovereign government is likely to do:

The erecting of a Middle East Free Trade Area takes its inspiration directly from the experience of the past ten years on the Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian front, where a NAFTA-style maquiladora system was established by creating tax-free industrial trade zones for local and international capital. The Palestinian component, though once off to a "healthy start," was largely scuttled due to outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada in September 2000. Yet the "Jordanian experience" continues to this day, building on the peace treaty it signed with Israel in 1994, the Qualified Industrial Zones Jordan erected in 1997, and the free trade agreement it signed with the U.S. in 2000.

By law, only 15 percent of the industries and companies located in the Jordanian industrial zones are required to have Jordanian partnership. A full 85 percent of the industry and its profits therefore go directly to international capital. Furthermore, investors have the freedom to exploit local cheap labor and utilize Jordan’s land and infrastructure without paying any taxes or tariffs, thereby destroying local industries that do not share these perks. The Jordanian industrial zones are also used as means by which pressure can be applied to other regional Arab industries to get them to follow a similar neoliberal agenda. For example, the opening of the Jordanian free trade zone and the signing of the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement forced the Egyptian textile industry to engage in a competitive race to the bottom.

Not surprisingly, the free trade zones are also ways through which Israeli investors can move their industries in search of cheaper labor costs and weaker labor regulation, while simultaneously enforcing economic normalization. This has already begun to take place. A main investor in the Prince Hassan City

Industrial Complex ($15 million) is the Israeli textile giant Delta Galil Industries, best known for its underwear business.²⁴ Delta Galil’s CEO Dov Lautman explains frankly, "There’s no way you can sew in any western country, not even in Israel where labor costs are too high." The average monthly salary of $1,000 in Israel is incomparable to the $100—$150 that capitalists like Lautman can pay Jordanian women in the industrial zones. Lautman explains the convenience of the trade zones for Israeli capitalists like himself, who can leave Tel Aviv by car at six in the morning, arrive at Irbid in northern Jordan by nine, and be back in Haifa on the Mediterranean coast by three in the afternoon. The trade zones are also thought to alleviate the "population momentum bomb," owing to the fact that the Arab women who work in the zones for slave wages will be less likely to have large families if they are employed.

Jordan is the model for the Bush administration’s vision of MEFTA. U.S. trade representative Zoellick has been spearheading these neoliberal agendas, initially unveiling plans at the World Economic Forum meeting held in Jordan in June 2003. Zoellick missed no opportunity at orientalism by declaring,"The United States aims to brighten the Middle East with as many success stories as stars in the desert sky. To do so, we are charting a new constellation: shining lights of trade and investment that offer a clear course for countries in the region wishing to embark on a journey of economic openness and reform."²⁵ He even went so far as to use the verse from the Koran, "Let there be trading by mutual consent," in an op-ed for the Washington Post to shamelessly justify U.S. neoliberalism across the region.

At the same time, Zoellick did not hold back from what it "was going to take" to get those "stars in the desert sky" to start shining: "Capital is a coward. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. Frankly, investors have opportunities all over the world. What does that mean? It means that people in this region have to make it a hospitable environment, they have to show people that they can get good returns on the investment. Is this possible? You bet."

Zoellick continued:

The U.S. free trade zone model is thus likely to extend from Israel through Jordan, and into Iraq–representing an uninterrupted chain of U.S. neoliberal regimes from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Gulf. Free trade agreements similar to the one signed between Jordan and the U.S. are in the process of being worked out in Bahrain (to be used as the agent of change in the Gulf region) and in Morocco (for North Africa).

In November 2003, the Bush administration unveiled a plan entitled the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), "founded to support economic, political, and educational reform efforts in the Middle East and champion opportunity for all people of the region, especially women and youth."²⁷ These ideas were elaborated on in a draft of a leaked U.S. working paper due to be submitted to the Group of Eight (G8, composed of the U.S., France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Britain, Japan, and representatives from the European Union) for its upcoming summit on Sea Island, Georgia in June 2004, and published in the London-based Al Hayat newspaper on February 13. The document calls upon the G8 (and not just the U.S.) to "forge a long-term partnership with the Greater Middle East’s reform leaders and launch a coordinated response to promote political, economic, and social reform in the region." It does so based upon the claim that "So long as the region’s pool of politically and economically disenfranchised individuals grows, we will witness an increase in extremism, terrorism, international crime, and illegal migration"–a situation which threatens "the national interests of all G-8 members."

Predictably, the thrust of the draft document deals with more "economic reforms" aimed at "unleashing the region’s private sector potential," the "primary engines of economic growth and job creation." The U.S., through the G8, is attempting to push for "the growth of an entrepreneurial class in the Greater Middle East [GME]" which "would also be an important element in helping democracy and freedom flourish."

The economic initiative calls for the G8 to "commit to an integrated finance initiative" consisting of sponsoring microfinance projects (primarily designed to engage women in the workforce); establish a Greater Middle East Finance Corporation modeled on the International Finance Corporation (to "help incubate medium and larger-sized businesses, with an aim toward regional business integration"); establish a Greater Middle East Development Bank (GMEDBank) which would act as a "regional development institution modeled on the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)," a kind of regional World Bank; create a "Partnership for Financial Excellence" designed to "advance reform of financial services" to "better integrate the GME into the global financial system"; promote accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO); create trade hubs "focused on improving intra-regional trade and customs practices" and "Business Incubator Zones (BIZ)."

Complementary to the economic and financial aspects of these initiatives (which essentially amount to variations of structural adjustment policies), the U.S. also plans to draw up a new architecture for political and social infrastructure as well. Of course, neither the U.S. nor the G8 is serious about implementing any genuine democratic elections to remove from power its most trusted allies like King Abdullah of Jordan, King Hassan of Morocco, or Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Rather, the plans are designed to implement some form of nominal democratic reforms (like the present Jordanian or Moroccan parliaments, which are totally powerless) that can serve to better buffer genuine democratic sentiment and popular opposition to governmental policies, while true power remains with the same kings, princes, emirs, and presidents. At the same time, social and economic programs are put in place to foster and promote local "organic" adherents to U.S. neoliberal political and economic ambitions. Thus, U.S. proposals include focusing on "promoting democracy and good governance"; encouraging "parliamentary exchange and training programs"; establishing "women’s leadership academies"; encouraging the growth of "civil society," "educational reform," "literacy," and textbook translation.

Here too, Iraq and Palestine are proving to be the training grounds for implementing similar plans across the entire region. The political and social reforms proposed to the G8 are similar to the policies implemented in the West Bank and Gaza during the peace process. During that time (1993—2000) millions of dollars of international aid poured in from a host of Western governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), on projects that ranged from "promoting democracy and good governance," to "civil society and women’s empowerment," "media independence," and "grassroots youth programs."

Though there is not enough space to go into the many levels of what they entailed, an important net effect of many of these projects was to alienate the grassroots movements from some of their most capable activists, who were drawn to high paying jobs (based on the euro or dollar currencies) in various NGOs and PA ministries, and civil society bodies. The drift of free-floating organic intellectuals away from grassroots movements and the political parties they were involved in played a significant part in destroying much of the Palestinian Left. The absence of these activists from the Palestinian parties and grassroots organizations had a damaging effect on the intellectual and organizational infrastructure of the Palestinian national movement as a whole. Clearly, similar plans are to be implemented across the Middle East–the U.S. draft to the G8 calls for an increase in "direct funding to democracy, human rights, media, women’s, and other NGOs in the region" through bodies like the CIA-created National Endowment for Democracy and the British Westminster Foundation.

We already have an indication of how these plans are being implemented within Iraq. Though much attention has correctly been focused on the "corporate invasion of Iraq" by large U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel, scarcely enough attention has been given to how the U.S. intends to privatize Iraqi political structures. This is primarily taking place via a North Carolina-based NGO known as the Research Triangle Institute (RTI), which was asked by the U.S. Agency for International Development to bid on a contract to play a formative role in the creation of Iraq’s future local governance, two weeks before the invasion began. Upon winning the contract, RTI was charged with setting up 180 local and provincial town councils, a $466 million contract worth $167.9 million in the first year alone.

As Naomi Klein recently pointed out:

The U.S. seeks to raise these concerns at the G8 because it wants to ensure that the major capitalist countries of the world are united in understanding that their collective interests lie in subverting any revolutionary tendencies that could emerge in the Middle East. In this regard, the U.S. is actively soliciting the enlistment of NATO sponsorship for its plans. "NATO is going to be part of this conversation about change in the Middle East and NATO has something very important to offer," U.S. Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman told reporters in Brussels after a tour to Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and Bahrain. "We want to go forward in supporting ideas for reform, economic reform, political reform, educational reform...[and] all of those things would be so much more successful if there’s also security and I think NATO has some role to play in that." Grossman however was quick to allay any fear of neo-imperialism. "The best ideas will come from the region," he said. "This is not about the United States or Europe or anyone else imposing reform on people."²⁹

It is no mistake that the unveiling of U.S. economic, political, and social objectives in the Middle East comes on the heels of the display of enormous U.S. military strength witnessed in the invasion of Iraq, and which was designed to deter any and all who might think of resisting. Nor is it coincidental that it comes at a time when the Arab Left is in shambles, and where one of the only organized centers of social, political, and military resistance to American ambitions throughout the Middle East exists largely in the form of various Islamic movements. These appear to be easily disqualified and–due to racism–are categorically unacceptable to any U.S. neoliberal capitalist order by large parts of the U.S. establishment, but also by large sections of the antiwar movement, too. But this reticence must be quickly overcome. The Islamic movements–which arose out of the great defeats of Arab nationalism and the secular Arab Left, by Israel, the U.S., and U.S.-backed dictators over the last thirty years–are becoming umbrellas of resistance of all types–nationalist, Islamic, and even remnants of the Arab Left. They have correctly placed resisting U.S. imperialism in Palestine and Iraq as their first priority, and fighting for the self-determination of their peoples.

In this respect, these Islamic movements need the unconditional support of the U.S. antiwar movement, which must reject any hair-splitting regarding the nature or character of this resistance.

Despite the sobering enormity of the challenges at hand, U.S. activists must not be deterred from taking up the struggle of resisting U.S. imperialism in Iraq, Palestine, and throughout the entire Middle East. Before it proceeds however, it is imperative that the movement engages in this battle with a clear vision of the issues at hand, and where its responsibilities lie.

There is no connection between Iraq and Palestine and their respective occupations unless one can see them within the framework of U.S. imperialism, and as the product of U.S. capitalism and its policies around the world. If the U.S. antiwar movement is to make any gains in resisting the U.S. war machinery in the Middle East and elsewhere, it is necessary that the Left of this movement–its anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist backbone–harden itself and set the agenda for change and for resistance.

In this struggle, we must draw inspiration from the heroic struggles of the Palestinian and Iraqi peoples who are actively engaged in resisting this war machinery on a daily basis. At the same time, it is our responsibility to wage a similar daily battle against this behemoth that creates victims not only outside the U.S., but also includes the U.S. working class. Indeed, it is an illusion to think that the American people do not pay a price for this war as well.

Take for example, the well-publicized case of Halliburton, the company that has been awarded some of the most profitable contracts in Iraq to develop its oil infrastructure and build U.S. military bases there. Halliburton is the same company that aggressively pushed its tort reform plan designed to cap asbestos lawsuits in the U.S. by victims of the cancer-causing asbestos it used in its buildings.³⁰ Its subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), which is in the process of building the U.S. bases and forward military posts in Iraq, developed its "skills" during the prison construction boom of the 1990s, becoming the second-largest player in prison design and construction in the United States. Caterpillar, the same company which produces contracting equipment used today in the demolition of Palestinian and Iraqi homes (and which killed U.S. citizen Rachel Corrie in Rafah) also attacks its own U.S. union workers. Likewise, the same skills used to smash popular large-scale demonstrations developed by the Israeli military are being utilized by police chiefs of major U.S. cities, through exchange programs organized by the influential JINSA think tank, of which Vice President Dick Cheney is a board member.

It is not enough to calculate the price paid in lives lost and the amount of tax money spent on the military industrial complex that could be used for education and health care in the United States. Nor is it enough to single-out a handful of corporations that are profiteering off the death, destruction, and rapacious exploitation of the world’s working classes and the earth’s resources. Rather, our resistance must go deeper to the very fabric of the capitalist system that alienates and exploits, imprisons, and excludes, bombs, kills, and lies. We must accept nothing less than the categorical rejection of this system, supporting the full self-determination of the people in Iraq, Palestine, and around the world. We must work to build the only alternative that sets as its goals the end of exploitation and the development of equality, freedom, and fulfillment of humankind. A socialist world is possible–and necessary.

1 The full text of the statement can be found at http://_www.internationalanswer.org/news/update/011204openletter.html.

2 Eric Ruder, "From Iraq to Palestine: No to Occupation!" Socialist Worker, February 27, 2004.

3 Seymour M. Hersh, "Moving Targets: Will the Counter-Insurgency Plan in Iraq Repeat the Mistakes of Vietnam?" New Yorker, December 15, 2003.

4 Interview with Azmi Bishara, "On the Intifada, Sharon’s Aims, ‘48 Palestinians and NDA/ Tajamu Stratagem," Between the Lines, available online at http://www.azmibishara.info/interviews/btl_sharonaims.htm.

5 "Pledges for Peace," AIPAC, Near East Report, June 9, 2003.

6 Quoted in Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (New York: Pathfinder Press, 2002), 41.

7 Max Nordau, "Zionist Works," vol. 4, The Zionist Library, The Executive of the Zionist Organization, Jerusalem, 1962, 203.

8 Phil Marshall, Intifada (Bookmarks, London, 1989), 76—77.

9 This was known as the Lavon affair, after Israeli Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon. In 1954, Israeli agents working in Egypt planted several bombs, including in a United States diplomatic facility, and left evidence behind implicating Arabs as the culprits. The failed when one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to capture and identify one of the bombers, who it turned out was part of an Israeli spy ring. For an account of the Lavon Affair, see David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (London: Futura Publications, 1984).

10 Excerpts from Yossi Melman, Haaretz, February 21, 2000.

11 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms and Why (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 196—98. Quoted in Paul D’Amato, "U.S. Intervention in the Middle East: Blood for Oil," International Socialist Review 15, December 2000—January 2001.

12 Interview with Silvan Shalom on "Charlie Rose," PBS, March 23, 2004. It should be noted that the latter half of this quotation (beginning with "Just try to imagine…) was deliberately cut from the transcript of the show published by the Israeli foreign ministry Web site, and was only retrieved by the author by listening and transcribing it from the original recording.

13 George Wright, Guardian, June 4, 2003.

14 "The U.S. Military and the Evolving Challenges in the Middle East," Anthony Cordesman, Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 9, 2002, 5.

15 Quoted in Phil Gasper, "Imperialism: Washington’s Gamble for a New Middle East," International Socialist Review 27, January—February 2003.

16 David Morgan, "Bush Underscores U.S. Interests in a Sovereign Iraq," Reuters, February 21, 2004.

17 Anthony Cordesman, "Peace is Not Enough: The Arab-Israeli Economic and Demographic Crisis," Center for Strategic and International Studies, February 1998, available online at http://www.csis.org/"mideast/reports/"peaceai1.pdf.

18 Daniel T. Griswold, "Can Free Trade Promote Peace in the Middle East?" Cato Institute Capitol Hill Forum, June 20, 2003.

19 "U.S. Initiates Ambitious Plan for Middle East Free Trade Area, " Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 31, 2003.

20 Edward Gresser, "Blank Spot on the Map: How Trade Policy is Working Against the War on Terror," Progressive Policy Institute Policy Report, February 2003, available online at http://www.ppionline.org/_ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=108&subsecID=127&contentID=251254.

21 "Bush Calls for U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area," May 9, 2003, State Department Web site at http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/summit/"text2003/"0509bushfta.htm.

22 See "Roundtable With Robert B. Zoellick U.S. Trade Representative," Marriott Hotel, Dead Sea, June 23, 2003.

23 Ibid.

24 Ali Hattar, "Evaluation of the Industrial Zones", Kan’an #116, January 2004 (Arabic, translated by the author).

25 Robert B. Zoellick, "Global Trade and the Middle East: Reawakening a Vibrant Past," United States Trade Representative Remarks at the World Economic Forum Dead Sea, Jordan June 23, 2003.

26 Robert Zoellick, "Q&A Following Speech at World Economic Forum," Dead Sea, Jordan, June 23, 2003, available online at http://"www.ustr.gov/"releases/2003/06/2003-06-23-jordon-qanda.PDF.

27 See the Middle East Partnership Initiative Web site at http://"mepi.state.gov/"mepi/.

28 Naomi Klein, "Hold Bush to His Lie," Nation, February 5, 2004.

29 "Ideas for Middle East Reform Will Come from Region," March 8, 2004, available online at http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/"press/"2004/"march/090303.html.

30 Vijay Prashad, "Halliburton’s Ancient Scandals," February 15, 2004, Znet, available online at http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-02/"15prashad.cfm.

I'm writing from day 5 of the solidarity tent in Ar Ram where at least 17 people have joined in on the hunger strike protesting Israel's apartheid wall. Despite the heat wave (36 centigrade) there is a good atmosphere in the tent, and the hunger strikers - though visibly more weary are in high spirits. Today there were questions regarding Dr. Azmi Bishara's health. Bishara was the first to go on hunger strike, but he is also a kidney transplant receiver (via his brother). Since there haven't been so many kidney transplant receivers who have gone on hunger strike, his doctors are especially worried. Despite this, he is bravely pressing on and even comes off as one of the stronger hunger strikers never refusing interviews and always active on the tent grounds.

Throughout the day, delegations of people in solidarity come to visit and get information, while journalist are busy hounding the hunger strikers looking for an interview. The tent where the strike is taking place is equipped with a couple of computers (one with a DSL line), information packets on the Wall, a couple of fans, chairs and tables, mattresses (where the strikers sleep), a satellite-linked television and two water coolers where everyone including the hunger strikers drink from. The tents' walls are decorated with maps, Palestinian flags, posters and banners with slogans on them that read: "Resisting the wall: a duty of all people of conscience", "Israel's wall = Apartheid - Wrong in South Africa, wrong in Palestine" and "Israel's wall (does not equal) security; Israel's wall = land theft, racial discrimination and Palestinian dispossession". At night, when the temperature has cooled off and people have gotten off work, the tent becomes a collecting ground for people in the neighborhood as well as people from farther off who come to share their solidarity, and where events take place. Yesterday night, a local children's summer camp came around and did a performance, a few people read their poetry and organizers read solidarity greetings aloud.

As I write these words, a delegation from Nazareth has come and different representatives from popular grassroots committees are extending their greetings. This is significant because there is a sense of inclusiveness about the whole event, with a recognition on both sides of the Green line that the wall affects all Palestinians and must be resisted likewise. Less than 50 yards from the tent, groundwork on the wall is taking place. Beneath uzi- totting armed guards with bullet proof-vests on (security contractors, not even soldiers), construction equipment is busy at work digging trenches, pouring concrete and trying to get a good 'level' base upon which the leggo-like 8 meter high concrete blocks will eventually stand. It is also about 300 meters from the second checkpoint that is the gateway into Jerusalem from the north. Once the wall is built, where the tent now stands (together with the entire neighborhood of ar Ram (about 40,000 people) will be in a sort of twilight zone with a wall on one side and caught between two checkpoints about a mile and a half apart.

I will try and write continuous updates regarding what goes on here in the tent and the state of the hunger strikers. In the mean time, I am taking this opportunity to make a loud and clear appeal to all those who read this to organize and mobilize all resources at their disposal to draw attention to the racist colonialist Israeli practices embodied in the wall and all that it stands for, in parallel with the courageous attempts to resist it on behalf of the Palestinian people. This hunger strike is not about a few individuals, but is about the historical dispossession of the Palestinian people in their and their attempt to resist Israel's dispossessive and racist policies backed by the US government. We are at a crucial stage where we are calling upon the broadening of solidarity work both locally and internationally. To begin with, tomorrow (Thursday) is a general strike where all Palestinian shops will be closed in protest. We also hope to get more solidarity tents erected and more hunger strikers on board throughout the entire occupied territories, inside the green line and throughout the Arab world as well as internationally. We will update you of our progress. The aim is to have continuity in the struggle so that this issue (and all the Palestinian rights it so negatively effects) will not be lost or forgotten, but can lay the basis for a new movement against Israeli apartheid.