Urgent: To build a Jewish-Arab leftwing alternative!

and represent them in parliament. It must also protect democratic rights to freedom of expression and association, women’s rights, and minority rights.

The Arab Spring never came to Palestine

As the Arab revolution gathered steam at the beginning of last year, Palestinians began calling on their leadership to put an end to the divisions in the Palestinian arena. Despite the agreement reached in May between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Cairo, and despite the fact that the PLO held an expanded session with Hamas in December, the agreement is not being implemented in practice. It included the agreement to establish a temporary government, the release of prisoners from Palestinian jails, and preparations for elections in the middle of the year. But no progress has been made; the internal schisms remain, and the two sides continue to assail each other and try to enforce their control – Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The struggle between them is not only over the regime, but also over the political program of the Palestinian nation. The Fatah movement sees links with the US as the strategic basis for its policies and the key to a Palestinian state; it holds to cooperation with Israel via negotiations. Hamas rejects negotiations with or recognition of Israel, and calls for a popular intifada as an alternative to armed struggle.

The truth is, the “reconciliation” between Fatah and Hamas stems from the failure of both sides. The Arab Spring shuffled the pack. With the fall of Mubarak, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) lost his main ally. Hamas too lost its ally, with the uprising in Syria. Thus each of the two sides has lost its political axis and program. We have noted many times that the path chosen by Fatah – futile negotiations with Israel – would not lead to any achievement, but merely provides Israel with a fig leaf for continued settlement in the occupied territories. On the other hand, Hamas, which offered suicide bombing as an alternative to a realistic political program, also led to complete failure, isolation, destruction and poverty. Thus the agreement is a refuge for both sides, which had reached a political dead end and lost credibility in the eyes of the people.

Despite the PA’s commitment to the Oslo Accords and to all American and European guidelines and dictates, it failed to achieve any political breakthrough. A reverberating slap in the face came when Israel’s opposition to the Palestinian bid for UN recognition received support from the US, which claimed it was against “unilateral steps.” Today, despite all the PA’s declarations that it will not negotiate with Israel unless settlement construction is halted, the PA leadership has once again begun a new round of talks in Amman, in response to American requests. The PA claimed, as many times before, that it wanted to prove that the obstacle to negotiations was PM Binyamin Netanyahu.

Hamas too understands that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt will not continue its oppositional policies which supported armed struggle, and that as soon as it gets into government it will be compelled to compromise and draw nearer to the US, with all that this entails.

But despite all efforts at reconciliation, and despite the adoption of nonviolent resistance, neither movement has the vision, the program or the impetus to start a popular, civilian intifada, one which would unite the youth, the workers and the activists, as well as the middle classes, toward overcoming the occupation and forming a new Palestinian society – a society that rejects the religious extremism of Hamas and the corruption of Fatah. It seems that the fate of the Palestinian nation, like that of the other Arab nations, depends on the rise of youth who will build a revolutionary alternative, different from the traditional and religious parties who dominated regional politics in the past and led their peoples to a dead end. Today the Palestinian people requires a third option – revolutionary, democratic and civilian, able to deal with the occupation and cleanse society from the grime remaining from Fatah and Hamas rule.

Israel’s social protest movement:
hostage to the Zionist consensus

The Achilles heel of Israel’s social protest movement was, and remains, its refusal to present an alternative political stand against the right wing. The immediate expression of this was the freedom Netanyahu enjoyed in continuing to reject peace, the continued discrimination against Israel’s Arab citizens, and the continued economic policies which favor capital above labor. The most prominent aspect of the movement’s discourse was its attempt to retain a Zionist consensus and not to lose the Right.

Netanyahu himself deflected the flames. He succeeded in dividing the movement by appointing the Trajtenberg Committee. Meanwhile, Sheli

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