Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Alain Gresh, The PLO: The Struggle Within (London: Zed Press, 1985).
Over the past several years in the Occupied Territories, Palestinian intellectuals and activists close to the PLO mainstream have met with Israelis from a number of political factions represented in the Knesset. Their apparent aim has been to influence the elusive center of the Israeli Labor Party.
Norman Finkelstein is a doctoral candidate in politics at Princeton University. Jim Paul spoke with him in New York in November 1985.
What sparked your investigation of the Peters book?
Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
The New Jewish Agenda (NJA), in its first national convention since its founding meeting in 1980, came out strongly for a policy of mutual Israeli-Palestinian recognition and for inclusion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in peace negotiations. The resolutions represent some of the work done by some local chapters since the 1980 founding convention. Chapters are not required to implement all the resolutions passed. Rather, they are encouraged to utilize those which best assist them in carrying out their ongoing work. The national Middle East Task Force will be offering assistance to local chapters in three areas of work: lobbying, work within the Jewish community, and dialogue with Arab groups.
A scandal erupted in October over covert CIA funding of ostensibly scholarly projects at Harvard University. This has confirmed long-held suspicions that at least some US academic research on the Middle East is only a cover for intelligence work.
The election of Rabbi Meir Kahane was undoubtedly the most traumatic outcome of the elections to the eleventh Knesset. His party, Kach, obtained 25,907 votes, or 1.2 percent of all valid votes, five times as many as in the previous elections. To understand this, we have examined the economic, social and political factors operating within the sectors which provided Kahane with his greatest electoral support.
According to the most recent statistics, 48,702 workers from the Occupied Territories were employed in Israel in July of 1984: 13,879 in construction; 18,423 in industry; 12,804 in services; and 3,596 in agriculture. Given the fact that this estimate was made by the employment office — whose figures only include those workers registered with them — one must reckon this to be roughly half the total sum. Perhaps less.
The great majority of workers from the Territories are prohibited from remaining in the state of Israel after midnight. But even so, many remain. The 800 to 1,000 shekels it costs to take a service taxi to Gaza or the 500-shekel bus ride can leave them with only a fraction of their daily wages by the time they return home.
The last several months have witnessed an intensive Israeli crackdown against Palestinian political activists in the Occupied Territories. Since the summer, at least 21 Palestinians have been deported, and more than 80 arrested. Although the military authorities have attributed their renewed “iron fist” approach to the series of individual and apparently spontaneous assaults on Israeli troops and settlers, they have targeted key political and trade union leaders with valid residence permits and no criminal records. They have not been charged with any specific offense.
Henry Selz was for the last nine years the Middle East representative of American Near East Refugee Aid, based in East Jerusalem. He spoke with Joe Stork and Tom Russell in Washington in late August 1985.
You worked in the West Bank for nine years. How has your assessment of the situation changed from when you first got involved?
When I came, I thought it was a transitional situation. It certainly seems to me that any resolution is farther off now than it was when I arrived nine years ago.
How does Israel’s economic crisis affect the situation for the people under occupation?
In the middle of August 1985, Minister of Science and Development Gideon Pat called on the Israeli public to disregard government declarations that the shekel would not be devaluated. The minister, on national radio, advised the public to purchase American dollars. The broadcast was aired on Friday night, during prime time. Pat’s advice was unprecedented, since trading in US dollars is a violation of Israeli law. Pat is a member of the Liberal Party, which is part of the Likud and represents merchants, industrialists and businessmen. The leader of the Liberal Party, Treasury Minister Yitzhak Modai, demanded that Prime Minister Shimon Peres fire Pat. Pat argued that his statement was taken out of context and he remained in the cabinet.
Gaza is Israel’s Soweto. Each has its own lexicon but similar reference points. The “township” becomes here the refugee camp. Military occupation, like apartheid, means segregation in residence, employment, politics, education and law. In Gaza, the pass card is known as an identity card. Here “removal” becomes “deportation.” In other respects, the vocabulary is identical: labor reserve, arrest, detention, imprisonment, demolition.
In an article written in early 1985, Ze’ev Schiff described the Palestinian and Jewish populations of Israel and the Occupied Territories as “marching…toward a civil war.” [1] Since then, events have only confirmed the accuracy of Schiff’s observation. The escalation of violence and tension in the Occupied Territories has been particularly sharp in the last few months, since the withdrawal in the spring of most Israeli troops from Lebanon. Palestinian efforts to infiltrate guerrillas into Israel have been repeatedly headed off by the IDF. Likewise, most attempts at random violence by the PLO, such as bombs at bus stops, have been thwarted.
Lest anyone be tempted to dismiss the title of this issue as unduly melodramatic, we would like to call attention to an early November meeting of the Council of Settlers of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. According to its bimonthly newspaper, Aleph Yud, the settlers decided to take an “active stand” against the Peres government’s efforts to reach some agreement with King Hussein of Jordan about the future of the West Bank.
I.M. Lewis, ed., Nationalism and Self-Determination in the Horn of Africa, (London: Ithaca Press, 1983).
James Firebrace with Stuart Holland, Never Kneel Down: Drought, Development and Liberation in Eritrea, (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1985).
Fatima Babiker Mahmoud, The Sudanese Bourgeoisie, (London: Zed Press and Khartoum: Khartoum University Press, 1984).
Cairo, July 2. The National Progressive Unionist Party (Tagammu‘) held its second national congress in Cairo on June 27-28, 1985. The Tagammu‘, Egypt’s principal left opposition party, is a united front formation including members of illegal communist organizations, independent Marxists, Nasserists, enlightened religious elements and a number of newer, less politicized members who have joined the party since the parliamentary elections of May 1984. The Tagammu‘ did not win any seats then in the People’s Assembly, due to an undemocratic election law and some falsification of the election results.
I arrived in Khartoum on April 15, nine days after the coup, as soon as the borders opened. In Cairo, I had watched film clips of the noisy, jubilant crowds that had brought down Numairi, but Khartoum was eerily silent now. The high of the revolution” had given way to the sense of crisis that once again grips this country. While political skirmishes went on concerning who would be in the civilian cabinet, the abiding, bedrock realities that pervaded the country were the civil war in the south and the drought and famine in the west and northeast.
Khartoum. The hand-painted sign on Nile Avenue here best captured the attitude of urban Sudanese toward the visit of Vice President George Bush to their country in early March, just four weeks before the popular overthrow of President Ja‘far Numairi. “Vice-President and Mrs. Bush,” read the sign, “are mostly welcome.” The millions of Sudanese starving in the countryside would have been much less hospitable.
Mass demonstrations in Khartoum at the end of March 1985 initiated a series of events which culminated in the overthrow of President Ja‘far Numairi’s regime in Sudan by the Sudanese military. What began as popular protest against increases in the price of basic commodities was transformed within a week into a broad movement of political opposition. The rise in food prices was only one manifestation of the deep economic problems facing Sudan. The outbreak of overt opposition to the regime was a clear indication of the political bankruptcy of Numairi’s economic and social policies.
Ten years ago, Sudan was described in a Food and Agriculture Organization report as a potential “breadbasket of the world.” Hopes for the development of Sudan’s economy were running high at the time: the investment of Arab oil-generated revenues in Sudan's agricultural sector seemed to hold immense promise. Vast quantities of hitherto unused arable land could be brought under cultivation. This would transform the Arab world from an area of food deficit into one of food surplus, laying the basis also for the development of extensive processing industries in Sudan.
