Note
A clear and precise stance on the rejection of a Palestinian State, implicitly proposing the co-existence on the same land of two non-state communities (the Palestinian and Jewish communities) as already existing in the past. The only prerequisite for this to be possible is that neither community claims privileges and a specious moral and cultural superiority.
Source: Published in Provocazione, no. 18, December 1988, pp. 1-2.
On the wave of the popular uprising in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] has established the Palestinian State.
What is certainly seen by many as a positive event can only be considered by us as a step backwards, a deviation from the correct and productive direction that the Palestinian struggles had taken in recent months.
The PLO bureaucracy intervened, and it cannot be said that there was no complicity on the part of those Islamic states that welcome the emergence of a Palestinian State in the Middle East. In this way it has placed the most serious obstacle to the development of anti-state struggles, which would be the only possible development with regard to the Jewish reality established in the same area.
The presence of a Palestinian state, however elusive it may seem today, can only lead to sterile diplomatic agreements, conditioned by international factors, agreements that will make any peaceful coexistence between the two communities – Palestinian and Israeli – impossible. Yet, both of them have the right to live in their own land.
A Palestinian State could not fail to take the same course of action as any other State: military reinforcement, widespread armed intervention, and the transformation of possible diplomatic agreements into instruments of threat and retaliation.
The path now taken by the Jews teaches us how quickly the exploited and oppressed, when regimented by State officials, can become exploiters and oppressors themselves.
The Palestinian liberation struggle, as it has been conducted over the last forty years, may have had its ups and downs, but even at the height of the worst reprisals (such as the attack on Lot airport), it never lost sight of the value of popular uprising. Of course, even in those past conditions, the hand of organisations, and of the PLO in particular, was behind the scenes, but it was essentially an instrumental hand that could be discarded, which did not influence everyone in the name of a precise code, established in the assembly of world nations.
We do not know how much, even in a moment of unanimous consensus, these world nations, led by the US, can really do for the Palestinian people who continue to die and be tortured. They certainly cannot interfere in the internal affairs of the Israeli state, if only for the same reason of international law that makes the States around the world sovereign and therefore unquestionable. Israel is unquestionable in its “right” to continue oppressing the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian people is unquestionable in its “right” not to be oppressed, occupied, destroyed, killed, tortured, etc. Each would have its “rights”, and these could only be defended through the force of its own (and others') weapons. We know where this can lead.
The State thus constituted could be a major obstacle on the long and difficult road to liberation for the Palestinian people. And this because those who suffer find it difficult to understand such things, which may seem like nuances. The establishment of an organisation is often seen as a positive development. It makes one stronger. One can negotiate on equal terms with all other nations of the world. But what if this is precisely the way to provide apparent negotiation and a substantial continuation of oppression? What if allowing Arafat to become head of State is nothing more than a diplomatically valid way of washing one's hands of the matter?
No one can rule out that this is not the case. In the end, the applause that went out in our country [Italy] for the nascent Palestinian State came from contradictory quarters: from the Foreign Ministry and from organisations of comrades who certainly do not move in ministerial circles. What is the reason for this unanimity of purpose? First of all, the fact that both ministers and authoritarian revolutionaries are on the same wavelength: the size of the organisation determines the strength of the struggle, and from this strength comes victory. This reasoning, which has never been ours, cannot therefore lead us to share the joy that so many feel at the birth of the Palestinian State.
There is more. The Palestinian State becomes then an excellent diplomatic interlocutor. Pressure will be exerted through diplomatic channels. Attempts will be carried out to make Israel understand what it does not want to understand, immersed as it is in its State logic. After all, what all the States of the world care about the fate of five million Palestinians?
The same goes for the late-authoritarian revolutionaries in our own country. What else could they propose? Perhaps direct intervention against the Israeli State? Perhaps direct support for the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories? Of course not! Now that the State is in place, even for these last pioneers of the apparatus at all costs, there will be a way to organise support in the shadow of the model we have already seen.
We believe that the situation has not improved with the decision taken in Algiers [*]. Whether this was real or unreal. The only reality on which to focus our support, on which to reflect while acting, is that of the hundreds of young people who are resisting with stones against the Israeli tanks that are occupying their land. A reality that has nothing to do with diplomacy or the State.
Note
[*] The Palestinian Declaration of Independence formally established the State of Palestine. It was proclaimed by Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), on 15 November 1988 in Algiers (Algeria). In April 1989, the PLO Central Council elected Arafat as the first president of the State of Palestine.