[GCI-ICG] The West-Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem,... in response to the proletarian struggle the bourgeoisie is once again preparing a massacre!! [1988]

The world bourgeoisie and all its mixed factions – from the PLO to Reagan, via the States of Israel, Syria, Egypt, etc. – whatever position they hold and whatever solution they propose for the conflict, all want to make a strictly “Palestinian” problem out of the riots in the Gaza Strip, the West-Bank and East Jerusalem. Their speeches on “the right, or otherwise, of the Palestinian people to self-determination” drown the sound of their tanks, beatings and bombings.

But in Gaza, the West-Bank, in the Lebanon and elsewhere, when the so-called “Palestinian refugees” (who not only come from Palestine, but also from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or even Pakistan) begin to shout cries of revolt and to rise against the appalling living conditions imposed on them, it is the struggle of a class, of a class whose proletarian condition has flared up there more than elsewhere, but which can be seen in all the concentration camps of the capitalist world, be they death camps, prisons, law courts, cattle pens so nicely referred to as “homes for immigrant workers”, shanty-towns, or even our hard-labour camps, commonly known as factories, companies,… for those who have not yet been banished to the “camps of surpluses”.

Historic Palestine, this strip of land squeezed between sea and desert, has been a strategic zone for capital, coveted by the rival bourgeois factions throughout the world for centuries. It has known various waves of conquest, bitter, plundering wars which always took place in the trenches or on the backs of proletarians bent double by work and it was stemming from these wars that treaties, pacts,… were signed to ratify the power struggle established between the different powers present at the time. One of the most recent to date was that which created the State of Israel. Its role as policeman was confirmed and extended by the Six-Day-War, guaranteeing capitalist order throughout the region by annexing the West-Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and Golan, and bringing the Mashreq under its control.

Historically the region has been marked by various waves of expropriation in which increasingly large chunks of the population were stripped of everything, chased, deported and packed into camps under permanent military control… if they had not simply been massacred straight away! There has been a large intermixing of the population, provoked by these various waves of migration and the forced concentration of these proletarianized masses. This centre of the Middle East has also been marked by a tradition of intense proletarian struggle (‘21, ‘25, ‘29, ‘33-‘36,…).

The bourgeoisie, the world bourgeoisie combined, is supporting the State of Israel (which widely exceeds the frontiers of ex-Palestine and which existed well before the ruling of 1948) to an ever-increasing degree and has, to the best of its ability, responded systematically to the struggle with vicious repression.

For example, in 1936, after six months General Strike which had been widely followed by the ports and had paralysed them up to the Haifa petrol refinery and also after three years of struggle against the landowners, as much Palestinian as English or Zionist, the Iraqi, Jordanian,… Heads of State began to get alarmed at the almost insurrectional development of the struggle and exhorted “the proud Arab Nation in Palestine to return to peace and put an end to the strike and the troubles”, a speech which was put into action by way of the assassination of more than 5,000 strikers and the arrest of 6,000 others by Arab, English and Zionist armies.

Stemming from the Arab-Israel war, in 1948 the Israeli army occupied, forced the general evacuation and destruction of entire villages… making way for Zionism! From the start of its consecration, the Israeli State set the tone for the future with the massacre of Deir Yassin in 1949: the proletarians on whom the bourgeoisie could not count to defend their interests and to sacrifice themselves to the Zionist cause were got rid of in a forced exodus beyond the boundaries of the new State. Families were scattered and shoved towards the West-Bank and the Gaza Strip. Those who refused to abandon everything were massacred.

The expansionist designs of the Israeli State did not stop here. In 1967 more than 10% of the population in Israel (96,000/950,000) were unemployed, and capital and capitalists were deserting the country. The neighbouring states were watching with glee as their rival weakened, but the Six-Day-War put an end to their covetousness. The Israeli army occupied the Gaza Strip and the West-Bank. Driven out once more and forced into exile, many proletarians fled to the Lebanon and Jordan. But, unwanted everywhere, they were packed into camps and placed under military guard. These proletarian ghettoes, screaming with misery, overpopulated and under the constant fire of repression were, from then on, a grenade with the pin already taken out, being thrown from state to state. But there was one solution that all states agreed with: Genocide.

For want of being able to do away with it immediately, it was a question of keeping a workforce in store, a work-force which they were at liberty to drain and dispose of at little expense, depending on the needs of production and the workforce required.

Whether under Egyptian, United Nation, Syrian, Lebanese or Israeli “administration” these living conditions have only managed to be maintained due to a practically permanent state of siege and rapid recourse to mass killing, all the more so since the mass of proletarians produced and reproduced in these camps exceeds capital’s needs for a reserve army and because this enormous concentration of proletarians constitutes a potential for struggle, dangerous for the bourgeoisie.

And as we have been able to see in the application of State Terror against the proletariat, all the bourgeois armies, supporting Israeli troops, were prepared for the job of preventing the extension of the struggle at all costs, working especially to prevent the hatred in the camps from transforming itself into class hatred by all proletarians – “Palestinian” and others – against the bourgeois order and to quell the upsurge of class confrontation at every stage.

In 1970, whilst Israel amassed its troops on the Jourdan, the Jordanian State undertook what was the later to bear a name of sinister memory: Black September, that is when the riots were put down by the extermination of the rioters. In Amman alone, nearly 20,000 were killed by the continual bombardment of schools, mosques, churches, and hospitals – places in which people had taken refuge because their houses had been destroyed. Meanwhile, speaking in the name of the “Palestinian people”, organizations, resistance and national liberation fronts were keeping well away from these events and Arafat was visiting the various Arab Heads of State, ensuring them of his good conduct and his innocence regarding the confrontations which preceded massacre.

In 1971, in the name of an “Anti-Terrorist campaign”, the reservists who had been posted to maintain order in Gaza, were replaced by the crack parachute unit. Gaza was split into sectors and each one was passed over with a fine tooth comb. Plantations impeding full control of the city were mowed down, houses in narrow alleyways preventing the access of armoured vehicles to the refugee camps were demolished, yet forcing tens of thousands of expropriated inhabitants to cram themselves into other parts of the city. The paras combed the houses. Every basement in which terrorists could possibly be sheltered was sealed with concrete.

In June 1976 there was an outbreak of a whole wave of strikes, demonstrations and riots in the confines of the Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian and Israeli States. After making various fruitless attempts to disarm the movement, the different factions of the PLO withdrew and left the Syrian and Lebanese armies to organise the Tal-el-Zaatar massacre. The proletarians of the camps resisted the military offensive for 52 days. This was only made possible by proletarians from Jordan and the Lebanon who organized solidarity action, sabotaging the rear of the lines which were closing in on the camps and providing water to the proletarians under siege. After paying homage to the various Heads of State, Arafat – vulture amongst vultures – returned and told the proletarians, who were attending to their dead, that they only had themselves to blame for the deaths as they refused to follow his orders.

When the Israeli army invaded southern Lebanon in 1982, it was with the clear objective of crushing the new flare-up of violent demonstrations which had sprung up concomitantly in all major camps of the West-Bank, Gaza and Lebanon. The Lebanese State had become the dumping point for all the Middle Eastern tensions and was weakened, torn between the various factions who, without attempting to compete with Israel, nevertheless tried to carve themselves out the best place behind it in the power struggle in the region. This was in anticipation of negotiations that were due to take place in an attempt to impose a period of stability on the region. Competing shows of force took place, particularly to illustrate the capability of various forces to carry out a massacre in the remaining centres in which there was still a risk of an explosion of the struggles. This is illustrated by the mass graves of Sabra, Shatila, and Bourj el-Barajneh, camps which are still continually bombarded today. It is a war in which Shiite, Christian and Druze militiamen – some supported by Syria, others by Israel, not unlike the shady alliances of the PLO members – fight over the privilege of amassing the greatest number of proletarian corpses, not only “Palestinian”, but any ethnic or religious identity. The vultures do not even hesitate to make a show of their meat. For example, General Rabin’s response to criticism from the “right” in the Knesset was “I’ve expelled three times more Palestinians than you, the Likud, have!” (Dec. 1987).

Today an even increasing number of bourgeois of the world is realising that the issue of the camps is no longer bearable. This is not because a grain of humanity has softened their hearts, which have only ever responded to the cold call of money, but because it has become clear to all that the situation could well get “out of control”, even out of the PLO’s control. An Israeli soldier member of the Beit Guvrin Kibbutz, who had been posted in Jabalya, declared “an explosion is inevitable. This shameful situation of poverty amounts to the ingredients of a time bomb.”

Today, nearly 120,000 workers leave the “occupied territories” daily to work in Israel. It is still dark when the lorries come to pick them up in the morning and it is dark again by the time they get home at night. They are forbidden by law to stay overnight in Israel. Their wages are half those of a worker of Israel nationality and more than 40% of their earnings return immediately to the Israeli State in the form of taxes.

Jabalya, a camp in Gaza of 45,000 refugees is a maze of alleyways, none of which are wider than 80cm. The sewers are overflowing and, as a place which is more densely populated than anywhere else in the world, the streets are constantly overrun with people. Children run barefoot amongst broken glass and scrap iron. At the beach camp all the fishing boats have to be painted bright yellow so that they may be easily spotted. The fishmen are forbidden to sail further than 12km from the coast. In Deishe, in the West-Bank, and also in Nablus the camp alleyways have been sealed off with concrete blocks, thus forcing everyone to use the same road for access to the camp. At night the camps are lit up by searchlights and the roads are closed by barbed wire. New ruling prohibiting people to leave the camp, forcing them to remain standing for hours on end without water and in the blazing sun, surprise raids on the houses, body searches and nighttime interrogations are all daily occurrences. Hospital, homes and schools are regularly bulldozed or blown up in “acts of retaliation”. And settlers have been carrying out ever more frequent punitive expeditions, 22 inch rifles slung across their shoulders, against those who have dared to throw stones at, or pilfer from, their property!

Today is the first time in the history of the confrontations in the “occupied territories” that the participation in demonstrations has been so massive, so widely exceeding the boundaries set by the PLO, the main force in the region attempting to turn this fight against the appalling conditions endured by this proletarians into a fight for territorial conquest, the defence of a state, national liberation with an anti-imperialist tone, that is, into fratricidal war in which “Palestinian” proletarians and “Israeli”, “Lebanese”, “Syrian”, “Jordanian”, “Egyptian”, “Iraqi” proletarians kill each other for the greater benefit of capital.

It is also the first time that demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian fight in Gaza and the West-Bank have crossed frontiers and spread from East Jerusalem to Cairo. In the Lebanon too, where the bourgeoisie had thought that it had got rid of the proletarian threat by the systematic liquidation of the proletarians packed into camps, tens of thousands of proletarians from all origins (all denominations and all nationalities combined) were united by last summer’s riots and the present strikes. This illustrates the internationalist reality of the proletarian fight, that it is by no means a “Palestinian” problem, but class conflict, conflict between:
• those who line their pockets more than ever throughout the war, boosting the fortunes in the Lebanon – “the Switzerland of the Middle East” –
• and those who for the duration of the war have only known of air raids, famine,…, who only inherit rubble and debris and whose wages are paid in a currency which is now worthless.

The distance between these two classes – bourgeoisie and proletariat – has become so blatant that during the riots of last summer, the proletarians lynched those who had been nicknamed “the dollarized” and demolished banks, exchanges,… everything which symbolised money, riches so cruelly amassed on their labour and of which they are always so cruelly deprived. When the proletarians fight in the Lebanon, be it against edifices of capitalism or for wage increases, they are also defending the interests and the fight of the proletariat in the West-Bank, in Gaza and East Jerusalem; because it is the same fight against the drastic conditions that have resulted from so many years of war, of perpetual war waged by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat TO GAIN MAXIMUM profit from the exploitation of the workforce and TO DESTROY its struggle, its class force. The bourgeoisie is no longer opposing docile sheep who let themselves be sheared without flinching, but rather proletarians united in their condition as an exploited class.

In this article we are illustrating the proletarian internationalism which exists in these fights and the reality of a worldwide capitalist system of production and hence the reality of the worldwide proletariat. But the weakness of the struggle is precisely in failing to recognize common interests and to centralize forces. As one can see, once more, there is no lack of readiness to fight, nor lack of numbers to do so. What is lacking is a clear determination of the object of the fight, a clear-cut definition of the class enemy, to which the bourgeoisie of course belongs and fudges its true nature by way of its democracy and various other systems – parties, unions, resistance groups,…

Thus in response to each radicalisation of the movement, the PLO subdivides itself into as many political leanings as necessary – left and right, pro-Syrian or pro-Iraqi, Islamic or Christian – each one more extremist than the other. In this way they ensure that every move away from the direction of the PLO, from the objectives of its fight, stays within the sphere of the defence of the Palestinian State. And if, despite this package of different political leanings well worthy of the parliamentary representation so dear to the bourgeoisie, class tendencies still arise, split with all nationalist approaches to the fight and attempt to organise themselves outside of and against the PLO, it is certain that the PLO itself which has its own army and prisons like any self-respecting state, will hunt down, imprison, torture and assassinate the perpetrators.

Today, after weeks of confrontation, no real tendency towards class autonomy has emerged out of this democratic-nationalist paralysis of resistance or liberation. This is apparently because the only news and information that we get is that distributed by the bourgeoisie. The confrontations remain uncoordinated, without precise objectives apart from attacking the immediate enemy, that is those in uniform, the Israeli forces who are also serving as a screen to cloud the real issues. In the face of systematic repression this lack of perspective is at risk of exhausting the readiness to fight. The PLO’s calls for passive resistance are clearly aimed in this direction. This weariness could, in the medium term, lead to a “settlement of the conflict” by way of a further massacre. Despite these weaknesses of the fight, the fear of all states seeking stabilisation of the capitalist order in the region is that Jerusalem, like Beirut, may become a focal point of all the conflicts in the Middle East. This would, considering the position of the State of Israel in the area, be very serious for the world bourgeoisie. The role of policeman attributed to Israel can only be preserved as long as cohesion is maintained within, as long as there is a reasonably well established social peace – a social peace historically assured by the fact that Israel was built on the base of Zionism and was, from the beginning, a state of volunteers, new arrivals always being carefully selected. The result of this, as we have already seen, is the expulsion of populations who, because of their history, found it difficult to identify with the Zionist cause. Nevertheless, Zionist cause is kept very prominent, particularly by the arrogance of the settlers in the “occupied territories”.

If with the extension of the movement to East Jerusalem, the proletariat of Israel were to begin to recognize the struggle of their class brothers in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West-Bank as their own struggle, the specific function of the State of Israel would be brought to an end. Already the two-year long military service that the young in Israel have to slog through is becoming less well accepted. With the development of the conflicts the State is beginning to fear that “the citizen will oppose the soldier” and “the civilians will oppose the military”, that the army – historically one of the strongest in the world, but recently strongly put to the test – may start to show insubordination and refuse to fight. The problem for the world bourgeoisie is that today no other state is really capable of taking over.

Historically, it was Israeli’s “firmness”, “aggression” and ferocious repression, notably during the Six-Day-War when its function as policeman was confirmed and extended throughout the whole region, which brought a tightening of national unity and the influx of Capital. Today it is pursuing the same politics.

Today there are dissensions in the midst of the Israeli government between the hard – and the soft – liners because, despite all the benefits drawn from it, the administration of the “occupied territories” is becoming too heavy a load. Secret suggestions have been made to Egypt that it should possibly take over the control of the Gaza Strip (as was the case before 1967) but it has refused. No one wants anything to do with this mass of proletarians of whom 51,3% were born under the occupation and brought up in the hatred of the Israeli State and who are ready to direct this hatred against any occupying force. The United Nations have singled out the Israeli State on a few occasions and made a few reprimands, but their intentions couldn’t be further away from condemning the suppression of the riots. On the contrary, the real crux of the debate is: who is going to take on the job of finally doing away with these perpetual threats of outbreaks of the struggle concentrated in the camps without letting an upsurge of repression itself give rise to a strengthening and extension of the struggle throughout the region?

The more the bourgeoisie talks of peace, the more it prepares for war. From one conference to another, from Hafez-el-Assad to Amman, from Damascus to Alger,… by its plans for “peace” the world bourgeois confirms the State of Israel in its role of policeman for the middle eastern region. Peace clearly signifies peace for the capitalist order and, for the proletariat, the peace of the graveyards. For the bourgeoisie, the long term destruction of all the proletarian bastions in the region is a prerequisite for the stabilisation of the situation in which incompetence was beginning to hamper the valorisation of capital. The ratification of the balance of power set up between all the bourgeois factions, of the capitalist peace, of the social peace, would allow the bourgeoisie to recommence its frantic race for profit. Starting with an ever more violent exploitation of the proletarian workforce which – to this purpose – it would like to see defeated – and for a long time.

The PLO’s role in these horrific negotiations over human flesh was not negligible. The deals were made at the top of ever higher piles of human corpses, as had already been seen during the massacres of Black September and Tal-el-Zaatar.

The so-called occupied territories have a population of more than 1.5 million people, 60,000 Zionist settlers, i.e. 4% of the population, own 28% of the land (employing more and more downtrodden proletarian as labourers) and benefit from all sorts of state subsidies. The rest of the population see the little that they do earn return immediately to the State in taxes. The former have 27,000 m³ of water per person per year but the latter only 200 m³ and have to pay four times as much for it; the former go around armed, whilst the latter have arms pointed at them; the former, for whom all these class privileges are reserved, are almost exclusively of Israeli nationality and the latter, who stagnate in misery, are “refugees”; in short, the division into classes confirms a voluntary separation of the bourgeois into a national identity and in these circumstances it is easy to turn class hatred into a-classist hatred, to turn the hatred of all these proletarian “refugees”, “Palestinians” and others into a hatred of the Israeli, be he bourgeois or proletarian, without class distinction.

The same goes for South Africa where the majority of proletarians are black and the bourgeoisie white. The bourgeoisie exploits this situation, talking only of racist apartheid in order to camouflage class antagonisms by polarisation, in this case, by racial polarisation. In the Middle East, the bourgeoisie and its vanguard the PLO, are attempting to transform class antagonism into a nationalist polarisation, into a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, into a problem of the feasibility, or otherwise, of the coexistence of two “peoples”.

For the population of the “occupied territories” their polarisation has corresponded with being exiled and it is therefore easy for them to believe that being stripped of everything and crammed into camps is due to the fact that they have been denied a nationality.

For this population, whose struggles have been handed over to “foreign” armies by the kind efforts of the PLO in order to be repressed by them, it is easy to think of the frontiers separating the social classes as being territorial frontiers and consequently, to identify the fight against the imposed conditions as being a “national liberation” struggle. In the camps, the kids, from the earliest age, shout “Long live the PLO”, “Victory to Palestine”, etc., at the sight of Israeli soldiers. In the Gaza Strip a refugee showed his pass to a journalist and pointed to the “Nationality” section where the word “UNDEFINED” had been stamped and said: “I am nothing. I don’t exist.”

But what these “undefined” proletarians should realize is that what is stamped on their passes really means “non-profitable proletarian – to eliminate”. Effectively, they don’t exist for capital. Capital is pissed off with them because these proletarians, whose workforce is no longer of any interest to them, are demonstrating in a new light, are expressing the other pole of contradiction: that of the struggle, and are expressing the existence of the proletarian class which lives for and by its struggle against the perspective of death given to it by Capital.

“The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.”
– Marx –

To the proletariat all over the world we say: Whatever national identities you are given, all States, whatever their flag, only represent our exploitation. What bloody difference does it make whether we are exploited by Palestinian bourgeois rather than Israeli bourgeois??? All States in the world deport, imprison, and assassinate proletarians according to the needs of Capital. Profit is the only thing that guides them. The State in Palestine, with its ex-frontiers or new ones in the future, was and will always be a bourgeois State against the proletariat, like all world States. If the “refugees”, the “undefined”, were to acquire a nationality tomorrow, the right to vote, etc., citizenship would not have changed and would only have camouflaged the fact that the proletariat only have the right to remain silent, to produce, to sweat value in order to enrich a world from which they will always be excluded.

The world bourgeoisie is now thinking seriously about the possibility of giving the “refugees” of the Gaza Strip and the West-Bank citizenship because it fears that the essentially proletarian riots which are going on may develop further and threaten the existence of all States in the region; (of course, the alternative action carrying out another massacre cannot be excluded by this); it fears extension of the movement, that the proletariat of Israel, Palestine, the Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere may realize that they share the same struggle, that everywhere they slave and die for the profit of the same class which, by way of its various States, is waging a perpetual war against the proletariat.

The world bourgeoisie is only considering giving citizenship rights because they know that this would silence class antagonisms for a while and would give the proletariat the illusion that it has something to gain from this world. But the only thing that would really have changed would be the flag under which they continue to slave, to live in poverty, to be dispossessed from everything and to die in wars which are not in their interests.

When the proletarians shout national liberation slogans and hope for the day when they will be allowed to elect their own executioners, they are shouting against themselves, against their fight and against their own class interests which are antagonistic to all States: they are burying their own struggle.

The PLO and its various factions is one of the major bourgeois operating forces in this struggle. By organising its own committees of proletarian defence in the struggle and by taking part in confrontations, the PLO is attempting to take control of the movement in order to be better able to lead it astray, to drive it into dead ends, to exhaust it, to wind it and TO ISOLATE THOSE PROLETARIANS MOST READY TO FIGHT AND TO HAND THEM OVER TO REPRESSION, if possible to Israeli repression… in order to maintain the polarisation. It is significant to see that the PLO is not arming the struggle despite having the means to do so. Arafat and other democrats all over the world find it preferable, in view of the size of the movement, to talk openly about it, even to make a show condemning the repression and to turn their attention to the fate of little boys who have been beaten to death rather than to silence such information. They know that silencing information runs the risk of letting the movement speak for itself, letting its class nature and its internationalism speak. The bourgeoisie prefers to give its own version of events.
The bourgeoisie want to legitimize the revolt of a “people” against blatant “social injustice” and thus preserve the majoritarian and martyrish image of the fight. To this aim, image of a stone thrown at a tank is very effective but only until the proletariat goes a step further and starts to organise and arm their fight, to go further than a simple outburst without perspective. Until they progress to this stage, they will allow the bourgeoisie to continue to encourage the weaknesses of the movement and to vindicate everything which goes against the movement, including all democratic, pacifist and nationalist delusions. As long as this image is preserved, as long as the bourgeoisie hold the monopoly on arms, it is perfectly prepared to shed a few tears for the sad lot of its proletarians.

The PLO also responds to this. First, it is not arming the struggle because to arm people so ready to fight could be really dangerous for the bourgeoisie and also because Arafat is, once again, extracting political advantage out of the situation. On the one hand he fraternizes with Heads of States to show that he too, as a good Head of Stale who has already widely served capitalist interests in the region, is capable of taking the control of the struggle into his own hands. He is illustrating how he can bring all these proletarians into line and at the same time lets one or other of his colleagues slip away to carry out nocturnal massacres to put the finishing touches to the crushing of the struggle. In short, Arafat takes pride in being able to ensure social peace, in being able to earn his piece in this cake. On the other hand, in his role as a weight in the balance of negotiations, he makes it clear that arming the fight is a possibility and thus makes his competitors understand that he not only has words to use in the conflict, but also the strike force to enforce them.

In the face of all this politically scheming deceit, in which every advance is synonymous with the massacre of hundreds or thousands of proletarians Islam is also recruiting more people. By way of radical perspectives an increasingly large number of young proletarians are being recruited. They have never known any horizon other than the barbed wire surrounding “their” camp and find the perspective of claiming their “ancestral land” difficult to identify with. Since birth, they have mixed with immigrants from all over the Middle East and hence give less value to nationalist speeches, being attracted more by the universal dimension that Islam puts forward.

By its media campaigns, the bourgeoisie is attempting to attract pity for the “poor disinherited” people of the “occupied territories”. The United Nations commission for human rights, amongst others, is taking part to make sure that it never comes to light that the situation in Gaza, in the West-Bank,… is the same as in Soweto, South Africa, or in the mining villages of Bolivia and as… oh great myth of history which may never be questioned… the concentration camps of the WW2, so sadly notorious in Germany, but which also existed in France, England, and in which States from all over the world played a part. Wherever it is, Capital produces this type of camp. No proletarian “nationality” has had the monopoly on genocide, it is the fate that Capital reserves for all superfluous proletarian masses, according to its needs and whether they are of “Jewish”, “Armenian”, “Palestinian”, “Algerian”, etc. origin.

The Stateless proletarians of the West-Bank and Gaza are a concentration of the whole proletarian condition, all its history of expulsion, migration, imprisonment, dispossession, exploitation and extermination the world over. The bourgeoisie are trying desperately to give these proletarians a country to defend, because this proletariat, through its tradition of struggle, represents the future of the proletarian movement. This is what the bourgeoisie fears, hence its media campaign and the failure of the PLO to arm this movement.

Descriptions of the proletarians living conditions in the camps throughout this text were not used to arouse pity – contrary to the ploys commonly used by the bourgeoisie – nor to cause people to shed a few tears… These descriptions were given because what these proletarians live is merely a caricature of what we are living here and what the proletarians live all over the world.

Although the bourgeoisie has had to recognize the spontaneity and the enormity of the movement and the fact that it far surpasses the framework of the PLO, they will always accuse the PLO of stirring up the riots. By making a martyr out of the PLO it pushes people to identify their struggle with the PLO’s cause. This image is especially easy to maintain due to the fact that the bourgeoisie is, in reality, divided into competing factions and Israel is, in reality, waging war with the PLO.

But despite what the bourgeoisie wants to make of it, the proletarian struggle movement represents the future of the proletarian movement, because it exceeds the framework of the PLO, because it carries perspectives with it which run over the frontiers of the “occupied territories”, because it can develop its class autonomy outside of and against all the PLO and bourgeois state tendencies and because it is, in this region of the world, an expression of the proletarian struggle AGAINST the world bourgeoisie.