Palestine: Turning the Jihad into a Class War

Yasser Arafat's shadow is still felt on the people of the West Bank and the Gaza strip. The former leader of Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization may have intended in creating a secular socialist republic out of the occupation of Israel, but he, along with the organizations that he led, went rotten. Graft and corruption were rampant, and while leaders of the resistance movements were gaining prominence in the third world anti-colonial stage, the people of the Palestinian territories were left in poverty and without an infrastructure that could deliver aid. Out of this rose new movements that capitalized on the discontentment with the secular movements: Hamas and the Islamic fundamentalist movements rose to prominence. Hamas actually delivered aid and some protection to Palestinians, and it helped their popularity enough to win them a majority vote in the Palestinian Authority. However, ever since 2006 it is clear that Hamas is just as ambitious and corrupt at the PLO, enacting religious laws and refusing to cooperate with Israel at all and deepening the poverty by provoking Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip. I am totally opposed to the actions that Israel took in late 2008/early 2009 in the Gaza Strip, for the military strike killed mainly innocent civilians who had nothing to do with Hamas. While Israel continues to bury its head in its paranoid neoliberal rectum, Hamas is continuing its theocratic takeover of Palestine. What needs to happen now, not only in Palestine but in all places of the Middle East where America sets its eyes upon and where Islamic fundamentalists prey on the poor peoples, is a new movement of secular Middle Easterners who wish to see new nations created not by religious authority or by nationalistic ideals, but nations that are formed with the concepts of economic equality, social justice, equal rights, and international cooperation. Too long has the Middle East been ruled by corrupt royal families (Saudis), religious demagogues (Iran), or kleptocratic dictators (Syria, Iraq, Libya). Democracy must be formed over there, but not by imported American neoliberal democracy, but radical socialist democracies where individuals and indigenous peoples retain rights while workers and farmers own their own means of production. And with leftist secularism embedded in the culture of Palestine, new movements can spring up which challenge the lies of neoliberalism and theocracy. Freedom must be won for Palestine, and the movement will be led not by despotic clerics, but by the people.