Nikos Kanellis
From the 19th century to the Oslo Accords (1993–1995)
Read the introduction and part I here and part II here
The First Intifada
On 7 December 1987, the First Intifada (uprising) broke out in Gaza and the West Bank. It began spontaneously and completely unexpectedly for both the PLO and the State of Israel. The immediate trigger was the killing of four Palestinian workers who were run over by an Israeli military vehicle in Gaza. The causes, of course, ran much deeper.
Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza had largely lost hope that ending the occupation and achieving national independence could be brought about either by PLO fighters or through intervention by the Arab states. As mentioned earlier, the PLO had lost much of its prestige after its defeat and withdrawal from Lebanon. At the same time, the Arab regimes had repeatedly betrayed the Palestinian movement and, on several occasions, had committed massacres against Palestinian refugees and PLO fighters. For the Palestinian masses in the occupied territories, daily life was a combination of poverty, a constant struggle for survival, and ethnic oppression, with no prospect of improvement.
It was in these conditions that the fuel was found to sustain the First Intifada for six long years.
From the outset, the State of Israel responded with brutal repression. The Israeli army used plastic and live bullets, tear gas, water cannons, blockaded Palestinian towns and villages, and carried out mass arrests, imprisonment, and torture. Yet it was unable to crush the movement. On the contrary, the uprising quickly gained mass support and involved the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as significant mobilisations by Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The iconic image of the First Intifada is that of young Palestinians—often still children—wearing the kufiya (Palestinian headscarf) and throwing stones with slingshots at heavily armed Israeli soldiers and tanks. Protests, street clashes, and barricades were indeed a defining feature of the uprising. The heroism of Palestinian youth facing Israeli fire with nothing but stones sparked a wave of international solidarity and moved a significant section of public opinion within Israel itself.
But the Palestinian masses also adopted other, equally powerful forms of struggle. General strikes (both in the occupied territories and within Israel) and civil disobedience—such as refusal to pay taxes to the state or to comply with official shop opening hours—played a decisive role in giving the uprising the scope and depth it achieved.
The First Intifada also gave birth to a new form of organisation, initially outside the control of the PLO leadership, which expressed more directly the mood of the Palestinian masses in the occupied territories: the Popular Committees. These committees organised demonstrations and other mobilisations, distributed food and supplies during general strikes, and were responsible for guarding Palestinian neighbourhoods. In early January 1988, the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising was formed to coordinate the movement. Although the PLO leadership had played no role in launching the uprising, it soon took control of it—while a new generation of leaders also emerged from the movement.
The Intifada achieved in a matter of months what decades of armed struggle had failed to accomplish: Israel’s ruling class began to realise that it was impossible to defeat an entire people through military means. Moreover, a significant section of Israeli public opinion began to look more sympathetically at the Palestinians and to call for a political solution to end decades of bloodshed. Internationally, a broad and important solidarity movement with the Intifada emerged, with large demonstrations taking place in many countries.
The first Intifada also brought significant changes to the Palestinian movement and its organisations.
Arafat and the PLO leadership in exile saw the Intifada as a way to put pressure on the “international community” and Israel to begin negotiations for a political solution.
In 1988, the Palestinian National Council met in Algiers, acting as a parliament-in-exile, and declared Palestinian independence.
Arafat, on behalf of the PLO, renounced terrorism and “methods of terror” as a form of struggle — in practice, he abandoned armed struggle in general. At the same time, the PLO dropped its aim of destroying Israel, recognised it as a state, and set the goal of establishing a Palestinian state in the territories occupied in 1967.
These were very important changes in the strategy of the PLO — the historic leadership of the Palestinians — which, having reached an impasse with guerrilla warfare, turned to diplomacy and negotiations. This process would, within a few years, lead to the Oslo Accords, limited autonomy in parts of the Palestinian territories, and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (1993–1995).
In the opposite direction to these developments, one of the most important events during the Intifada was the establishment of Hamas (an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya – Islamic Resistance Movement). In its charter (August 1988), Hamas declared itself part of the Muslim Brotherhood, described the land of Palestine as an indivisible Muslim waqf, and set the goal of liberating all of historic Palestine and establishing an Islamic state.
In practice, this meant not only the destruction of Zionism but also the denial of collective national rights for Israelis throughout historic Palestine — a position from which it stepped back somewhat in its 2017 revised charter.
Hamas built its social base by drawing on the poorest layers of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, creating a network of social services centred on religion and the mosques. Following the methods of Khomeini’s Islamists, Hamas organised soup kitchens, built schools and hospitals, supported the families of fallen Palestinian fighters, and identified religious faith with the goal of national liberation.
It is now well documented that the State of Israel viewed the creation of Hamas positively and supported it in its early stages, with the aim of undermining the influence of the PLO and Arafat.
Soon after its founding, Hamas formed its armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and began carrying out suicide bombings intended to cause the greatest possible number of Israeli civilian casualties.
During the First Intifada, Hamas refused to join the PLO-controlled “Unified National Leadership of the Uprising” and rejected the strategy of negotiations, recognition of the State of Israel, and the goal of establishing a Palestinian state in the territories occupied in 1967.
The Oslo Accords and the 2nd Intifada
The late 1980s and early 1990s brought new, world-historical changes to the international situation. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 opened a process that led to the collapse of the planned, nationalised economies and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc.
As Leon Trotsky had predicted in 1936, in his book The Revolution Betrayed, the privileged layer of the bureaucracy decided at some point that it was more advantageous to take ownership of the means of production rather than simply administer them. Thus, within a few months, the USSR and the other deformed workers’ states collapsed like a house of cards, enabling the US to emerge as the victor of the historic period of the Cold War.
The repercussions of the restoration of capitalism in Russia and the Eastern Bloc were global and affected every level. As far as the Palestinian question is concerned, the effects can be summarised as follows:
- The Arab regimes and the PLO lost the ability to exploit the rivalry between the US and the USSR for their own benefit and to put pressure on Israel.
- The balance of power in the Middle East changed abruptly and radically, and the US sought to exploit this shift for its own interests.
- By launching the Pax Americana narrative (the New World Order under American hegemony), the US aimed to show that, as the sole superpower, it could provide solutions to various international issues and bring stability to the Middle East—either through military force (as in the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1991) or through diplomacy.
- Within the Palestinian movement, the left-wing organisations (PFLP, DFLP, CPP, etc.) lost influence as the vision of revolution and socialism suffered a major blow.
- The PLO leadership, under Yasser Arafat, turned even more decisively towards “realism,” i.e. rapprochement with the US and diplomatic negotiations aimed at some form of political settlement and agreement with the state of Israel.
It was in this environment that the US organised the Madrid Conference in October 1991, with the aim of reaching some kind of agreement on the Palestinian question. The conference was attended by dozens of countries, including the USSR—just a few months before its formal dissolution. The Madrid negotiations did not produce a final agreement, but they opened a process of discussions with the US acting as coordinator.
Alongside the formal negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis in the US, the PLO and Israel began direct, secret talks in Norway. In the summer of 1992, the right-wing Likud party lost the elections, and the Labour Party, led by Yitzhak Rabin, returned to government.
The Labour Party had no organic connection to workers’ interests, and Rabin was a Zionist who had fought against the Arabs for decades. In 1948, he fought in the First Arab–Israeli War; he was Chief of Staff during the 1967 Six-Day War and served as Defence Minister from 1984 to 1990. He faced the First Intifada with harsh violence and repression. Consequently, his change of stance had nothing to do with humanitarian motives, but rather with a shift in the attitude of a significant section of the Israeli ruling class.
The First Intifada continued for six years, despite the brutal repression of the Israeli army against the rebellious Palestinian masses. A section of the Israeli ruling class concluded that the direct and indefinite occupation of the Palestinian territories was too difficult to sustain.
Moreover, it was concerned about the effect the Intifada had on the internal dynamics of Israeli society. Inside Israel, a growing segment of the population began to oppose the army’s violence against unarmed Palestinians. There were also significant international reactions to the Israeli repression of the uprising.
As a result, the section of the ruling class represented by Yitzhak Rabin began to see a political–diplomatic settlement as the best way to serve their interests. Rabin’s election also reflected the popular demand for peace, which was gaining support among a growing part of Israeli society.
Although formal negotiations in the United States stalled due to major differences, secret talks between the PLO and Israel in Oslo led to an agreement in August 1993. On 13 September 1993, in Washington, D.C., Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed the “Declaration of Principles for Provisional Self-Government Arrangements” and performed the historic handshake in the presence of U.S. President Bill Clinton.
The signing of the Declaration became known as the first Oslo Agreement. The second Oslo Agreement was signed in Taba, Egypt, in 1995.
The main points of these interim agreements were:
- The Palestinians would be granted autonomy in parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, administered by the newly created Palestinian Authority (PA) but with limited powers.
- The Israeli army would partially withdraw from the Occupied Territories but retain the right to intervene “for Israel’s security.”
- The Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 would be divided into three zones:
- Zone A (most of Gaza and 14 enclaves in the West Bank – about 18% of the total): full control by the Palestinian Authority.
- Zone B (about 22% of the total): political control by the PA, military control by Israel.
- Zone C (about 60% of the total): full Israeli control.
- Movement between the Palestinian enclaves and Israeli territory would be controlled by Israeli police and army at multiple checkpoints.
- The PA would establish a Palestinian police force responsible for maintaining order in the autonomous Palestinian areas and for preventing armed attacks on Israel by groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This force would have no authority over Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories.
- The PLO would recognise the State of Israel and renounce “terrorism” (i.e., armed struggle).
- Israel would stop considering the PLO a terrorist organisation, recognise it as the official representative of the Palestinian people, and allow Yasser Arafat to return from exile in Tunis to the occupied Palestinian territories.
- After the implementation of the interim agreement, a prolonged negotiation period (at least five years) would follow, aiming for a final agreement that might eventually lead to an independent Palestinian state—at some undefined point in the future.
The Oslo Accords did not address a number of critical issues, including:
- The status of authority in Jerusalem, the eastern part of which had been under Israeli occupation since 1967.
- The future of the approximately 116,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel made no explicit commitment to withdraw them.
- The release of tens of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails.
- Most importantly, the return of the millions of Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967 who had lived for decades in squalid camps across the Middle East.
Israel’s concessions under the Oslo Accords in no way led to the national liberation of the Palestinians or the establishment of an independent state. Nevertheless, according to polls at the time, over 70% of Palestinians in the occupied territories said they accepted the agreements.
On the Israeli side, the accords were enthusiastically received by the majority of society. To ordinary people, they promised peace and stability after decades of endless bloodshed and constant fear of war.
However, the Oslo Accords were inherently doomed. As several Marxist organisations pointed out at the time, the agreement—brokered by the Zionist ruling class in Israel, the Palestinian leadership, US imperialism, and reactionary Arab regimes—left the fundamental contradictions of the national question unresolved. The national oppression of Palestinians by the state of Israel would continue, albeit in a different form. Moreover, under capitalism, it would be impossible to raise the standard of living for the Palestinian masses, while the Palestinian authority would tend to become a new privileged, bourgeois, and oppressive power.
These contradictions were bound to surface and could be exploited by extremist forces on either side, triggering a new cycle of violence. In fact, challenges to the agreement began immediately after it was signed. The right-wing opposition in Israel organised continuous demonstrations against the accords. In 1994, an Israeli nationalist opened fire during Ramadan at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, killing 29 Palestinians. Simultaneously, Hamas and Islamic Jihad—both strengthened by the first Intifada—launched suicide attacks and bombings targeting buses, restaurants, and bars, killing hundreds of Israeli civilians.
The climax of this cycle of violence was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by Israeli nationalist Yigal Amir on 4 November 1995, in Israel’s Kings Square during a rally supporting the Oslo Accords.
The years that followed dashed the hopes created by the Oslo Accords. Israel continued to maintain tight control over the Palestinian territories, with the army free to intervene at any time. The Palestinian Authority, along with its Palestinian Police, increasingly came to be seen by Palestinians as a traitorous force, carrying out the occupiers’ orders and managing the “dirty work” on behalf of Israel.
The Fatah leadership and officials took control of the Palestinian Authority, which they began to run without any accountability to society, in an undemocratic and authoritarian manner. The repression of Fatah’s political opponents was harsh, particularly targeting Hamas supporters. This process gave rise to a corrupt and wealthy elite, with a client network living in stark contrast to the masses, who continued to face poverty and unemployment.
The alienation of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority from the people allowed fundamentalist organisations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad to gain considerable strength.
Israel’s extreme Zionist right exploited this situation to further consolidate its power. After prolonged and ineffective negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, and as violence escalated and expectations of the Oslo Accords collapsed, the second Intifada erupted on 28 September 2000. This second Palestinian uprising differed significantly from the first: Hamas played the dominant political role. Unlike the 1987 uprising, the second Intifada was characterised far less by mass mobilisation and organisation of the masses and much more by Hamas rockets and suicide attacks.
After the 2nd Intifada
The end of the second Intifada marked the effective “burial” of the Oslo process, as negotiations largely ceased and violence steadily escalated.
Israel began construction of a massive barrier around the West Bank. The wall, together with countless checkpoints, isolated Palestinian enclaves and made daily movement to and from them a constant nightmare.
Hamas won the Palestinian Authority elections in 2006. This triggered a civil war for power between Hamas and Fatah, culminating in Hamas taking control of the Gaza Strip while Fatah retained control of the West Bank.
In response to Hamas’ takeover, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, effectively turning it into the largest open-air prison in the world. The Israeli army controlled the movement of people, water, and energy, as well as the supply of medicine, medical equipment, and food.
The ongoing blockade, the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners, the daily humiliation at Israeli army checkpoints, the extreme poverty, and the lack of future prospects created the conditions that led to the 7 October attack and the subsequent war launched by Israel against Gaza and the West Bank.
What is the way out?
As the above analysis has shown, the Palestinian question—that is, the national oppression and genocide of the Palestinian people and the vicious cycle of violence—was the result, first and foremost, of the policies of US and British imperialism and the Zionist ruling class.
The Arab regimes—reactionary and authoritarian in their politics, capitalist with feudal remnants in their class character—also bear significant responsibility in the historical development of the problem. Although they have long appeared as allies of the Palestinians, they have many times not only betrayed them but have also committed massacres against them.
For decades, the bourgeois governments and ruling classes of the West, Israel, and the Arab countries have attempted to “settle” the conflict and impose “solutions” serving their interests. These attempts have failed miserably, as the war that began after 7 October 2023—and which today threatens to engulf the entire Middle East—demonstrates.
A large part of Israeli society, particularly the working class, has historically rallied behind the Israeli ruling class. The Zionists promised Jews a country that would guarantee their safety after countless persecutions, the most tragic of which was the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis and their allies in Europe. The economic support of the US and the West enabled the Israeli ruling class to pursue decades of welfare policies and benefits that ensured national unity at home and led many Israeli citizens to strongly identify with the state and the military. The absence of a left-wing political force offering a genuine alternative in Israel played a key role in creating this climate of national unity.
History—and the current war—shows that this promise of security is a lie. No sense of security or lasting peace will be experienced by Israeli citizens as long as the oppression and genocide of the Palestinian people continues. Every military victory of Israel over Palestinian organisations has historically led to the emergence of new, even tougher opponents. The “safe haven” promised by the Zionists has instead become a country in perpetual war, where no one feels safe.
At the same time, Israel remains a bourgeois-capitalist society. As such, it is subject to the general course of capitalism, its contradictions, and the multiple crises it faces, and it cannot provide a permanently high standard of living. The Israeli working class bears the consequences of these crises and of neoliberal attacks on their living standards and also the constant encroachment of rights and liberties.
As history teaches us, and as we have written, “capitalism is incapable of solving the Israel-Palestine problem. Neither a “two-state” nor a “one-state” solution are possible under capitalism; in fact, no solution is possible at all.”
For their part, the Palestinian masses have waged countless heroic struggles and made enormous sacrifices in their long fight for independence and freedom. For a long time, they based their hopes on the national unity of all Arabs and the support of neighbouring Arab regimes.
The political line of the PLO leadership—a combination of leftist, pro-Soviet Arab nationalism and guerrilla warfare as a method of struggle—showed its limits and failed to deliver freedom and independence to the Palestinian people. The turn to diplomacy and Western imperialism by Arafat and the PLO also proved to be a dead end and ultimately disastrous.
The rise of Hamas, with its Islamic fundamentalism and attacks (often suicide) against political and civilian targets inside Israel, has produced no positive results. Quite the opposite.
As we have seen, after Hamas’ largest attack on Israel, the Palestinian people have paid a terrible blood toll, but the Israeli army and state have not been weakened at all. The Palestinian people are no closer to achieving an independent state, freedom, or solutions to their social problems. This does not mean that anyone other than the Israeli regime is responsible for the massacre and devastation in Gaza. However, the programmes and methods of struggle adopted by Palestinian leaderships must be debated and critically assessed in terms of their effectiveness.
For these reasons, Marxists have a responsibility to explain that only a class-internationalist approach can provide a real solution to the Palestinian problem—a solution that satisfies the Palestinian masses’ demand for freedom and independence while also addressing their enormous social problems. At the same time, it must ensure security and prosperity for the working class of Israel.
For this to happen, the national unity between the majority of Israeli society and the Zionist state must be broken. Simultaneously, the working class and the masses on both sides must come together in a common struggle against the Zionist ruling class, against Western imperialism (without illusions in the rising Chinese-Russian imperialist camp), and against the reactionary regimes in the region.
This cannot be achieved through uncritical support of Hamas (or Hezbollah, Iran, ect). The central task is to build independent workers’ parties with a revolutionary-socialist programme in Palestine and Israel, as well as similar parties in neighbouring countries of the Middle East, the South-Eastern Mediterranean, and internationally.
Internationalist Standpoint aims to contribute to this goal. Our main political proposals, adopted at the 2nd ISp Congress in March 2024, can be summarised as follows:
- Fight against the war; build a mass anti-war movement; exert maximum pressure on the Western allies of the Israeli state.
- Defend the right of the Palestinian people to have their own state – the “right of self-determination”.
- Defend the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
- Expose the nauseating hypocrisy of the West and the attempts on their part to suppress the democratic right to protest against Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing, labelling all protests as “anti-Semitism”.
- Mobilize trade unions to block export and transfer of military equipment in support of Israel’s offensive.
- Call for a selective and targeted boycott against Israeli or multinational corporations that are involved in Israel’s military machine, finance the war or exploit the occupied territories, in the context the of the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanction) movement; but have no illusions that it can lead to the end of the war and a just solution to the Palestinian problem, as (at least some of) its instigators believe.
- Encourage Israeli citizens to refuse serving their mandatory military service, becoming conscientious objectors. Encourage Israeli citizens already enrolled in the IDF to refuse participation in military activities in Gaza and the West Bank.
- Fight against anti-Semitism wherever it is encountered in order to show that Israel is not the only “safe haven” for the Jewish people as per the Zionist propaganda.
- Reverse the policy of expanding Israeli settlements, i.e., of expanding Israeli settlements, now numbering 700,000, in the occupied territories (considered as a war crime by the Fourth Geneva Convention).
- Defend, at the same time, the right of the Israeli people to have their own homeland.
