[News] The ‘Principal Threat’: Time to Talk about the Palestinian Class Struggle

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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<https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/10/the-principal-threat-time-to-talk-about-the-palestinian-class-struggle/>
The ‘Principal Threat’: Time to Talk about the Palestinian Class Struggle
Ramzy Baroud - Romana Rubeo - November 10, 2022
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On Monday, October 31, Palestinians in the town of Al-Eizariya, east of
Occupied East Jerusalem, observed a general strike. The strike was declared
to be part of the community’s mourning of 49-year-old Barakat Moussa Odeh,
who was killed by Israeli forces in Jericho a day earlier.

This is not an isolated case. General strikes were observed throughout the
Occupied Palestinian Territories in recent weeks as a form of civil
disobedience, and protest of the Israeli attacks on the cities of Nablus,
Jerusalem, Jenin, and Hebron, as well as to mourn Palestinian fighters who
were killed, following shooting operations against Israeli soldiers of
illegal Jewish settlers.

Historically, general strikes have been declared and observed by
working-class Palestinians. This form of protest often represents the
backbone of popular, grassroots resistance in Palestine, starting many
years before the establishment of Israel on the ruins of the historic
Palestinian homeland.

The return of the general strike tactics suggests that the new revolt in
the West Bank is a direct outcome of working-class resistance. Indeed, many
of the young Palestinian fighters hail from refugee camps or working-class
population centers. Their revolt stems from the growing realization that
the political tactics of the elites have resulted in nothing tangible, and
that Palestinian freedom will certainly not be achieved through Mahmoud
Abbas and his self-serving politics.

The budding revolt seems to also have many similarities between the
Palestinian anti-colonial revolt in 1936-39, as well as the First Intifada,
the popular uprising of 1987. Both of these historical events were shaped
and sustained by working class Palestinians. While the interests of wealthy
classes often negotiated political spaces that allowed them to exist
alongside various ruling powers, working class Palestinians, the most
disaffected from colonialism and military occupation, fought back as a
collective.

Palestinian writer and historian, Ghassan Kanafani – himself assassinated
by the Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, in July 1972 – analyzed the events
leading to the 1930s Palestinian revolt in his essay ‘The 1936-39 Revolt in
Palestine’, published shortly before his untimely death. Kanafani argued
that there are three enemies that pose “principal threat” to the
Palestinian national movement: “the local, reactionary leadership; the
regimes in the Arab states surrounding Palestine and the
imperialist-Zionist enemy”.

“The change from a semi-feudal society to capitalist society was
accompanied by an increased concentration of economic power in the hands of
the Zionist machine and, consequently, within the Jewish society in
Palestine. (By the late 1930s, Palestinian) Arab proletariat had fallen
victim to British colonialism and (Zionist) Jewish capital, the former
bearing the primary responsibility.”

Expectedly, Palestinian workers are, again, at the front line of the
struggle for liberation. They seem perfectly aware of the fact that Israeli
settler colonialism is not only an agent of oppression, but also a class
enemy.

Settler colonialism is often defined as a form of colonialism that aims at
settling the colonized land, exploiting its resources while simultaneously
and methodically eliminating the native population. The work of historian,
Patrick Wolfe, has been particularly illuminating in this regard. He argued
in his seminal work ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’
that “Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory”. However, according to
Wolfe, “The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary liquidation
of Indigenous people, though it includes that.”

The longevity of settler-colonial societies is predicated on key factors
that allow these societies to be sustainable over long periods of time. One
of these factors is for settler-colonial projects to maintain complete
hegemony over natural resources, including the systematic exploitation of
the native population as a cheap workforce.

Sai Englert argues in ‘Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by
Dispossession’, that, “in settler colonial societies, internal settler
class struggle is fought not only over the distribution of wealth extracted
from settler labor, but also over the distribution of the loot accumulated
through the dispossession of the indigenous population.”

Englert’s logic applies to the Zionist settler-colonial model in Palestine,
starting long before the establishment of the State of Israel over the
Palestinian homeland in 1948. Englert highlights the Zionist dichotomy by
citing the work of Gershon Shafir, who describes early Zionism as a
“colonization movement which simultaneously had to secure land for its
settlers and settlers for its land.”

However, since the settling of Jewish migrants – mostly from Europe – in
Palestine was a long, protracted process, settler Zionism felt compelled to
carry out its colonial project in stages. In the early stage, starting in
the late 19th century till the 1930s, Zionist colonialism centered on the
exploitation of indigenous Palestinian Arab labor and, eventually, on the
exclusion of this very labor force in preparation for the ethnic cleansing
of the Palestinian people altogether.

Explaining the Zionist model at that historical stage, Israeli historian
Ilan Pappé writes,

Early Zionists were fully aware of this process, that of the exploitation
of Palestinian labor as a mere stage – as in ‘temporary exploitation’ – in
the development of what Zionist leaders, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak
Ben-Zvi, described as “avoda ivrit”, or ‘Hebrew labor’. “My hope is that,
in due course, we (meaning ‘Hebrew labor’) will grasp the decisive place in
the Palestine economy and in its collective and social life,” Ben-Zvi said.

“It is obvious who was to occupy the marginal role in the economy: the
Palestinians who formed the vast majority of the population at the time,”
Pappé elaborates.

“Yaakov Rabinowitz (one of the founders of Agudat Israel Orthodox party),
saw no contradiction in heading a seemingly socialist movement, such Hapoel
Hazair, and arguing for a segregated, colonialist labor market: ‘The
Zionist establishment should defend the Jewish workers against the Arab
one, as the French government protects the French colonialists in Algeria
against the natives’.”

The legacy of those early Zionists continues to define the relationship
between Palestinian labor and Israel to this day, a relationship that is
based on racial segregation and exploitation.

The nature of Israel’s settler colonialism has not fundamentally changed
since its inception in the early 20th century. It remains committed to the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the usurping of Palestinian resources,
including Palestinian labor. All attempts at circumventing this ongoing
exploitation have largely failed because Palestinian workers remain equally
vulnerable in other workspaces as well, whether in the limited,
semi-autonomous economy operated by the Palestinian Authority or by the
equally exploitative Arab regimes.

Despite all of this, Palestinian workers continue to resist their
exploitation in many ways, including unionizing, striking, protesting, and
resisting the Israeli occupation. It should come as no surprise that the
various Palestinian uprisings throughout the years were fueled by
working-class Palestinians.

Such reality compels us to rethink our understanding of the Palestinian
struggle. It is not a mere ‘conflict’ of politics, geography, or
narratives, but one that is predicated on several strata of class struggles
within and without Palestine. And those struggles, as experiences have
shown, have stood at the very core of the history of Palestinian
Resistance, manifesting itself clearly in the Palestinian strike and
rebellion of 1936-39, all the way to the present.

*Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He
is the author of five books. His latest is “**These Chains Will Be Broken*
<https://www.amazon.com/These-Chains-Will-Broken-Palestinian/dp/1949762092>*:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity
Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the
Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU).
His website is **www.ramzybaroud.net* <http://www.ramzybaroud.net/>  *Romana
Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine
Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic
journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature,
and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation. *
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