Yasser Arafat: 1929-2004 (WSWS article)

Yasser Arafat: 1929-2004
By Chris Marsden and Barry Grey
12 November 2004

The root of Arafat’s tragedy is the false political perspective upon which his political struggle was based. Even more emphatically today—in a globalised economy dominated by a relative handful of transnational banks and corporations—the fundamental lesson of the twentieth century pertains: the solution to national oppression and social exploitation lies not along a national, but rather along an international and socialist road.

The problem of the Palestinian people is an international problem. It cannot be solved within the existing framework of capitalist nation states in the Middle East, through which imperialism exerts its control. The addition of a Palestinian state to the present equation in the Middle East, even were it to come to fruition, would not resolve the basic problems of the Palestinian masses. The framework itself must be removed, and replaced with a new system that corresponds to the needs of the working masses. That framework is a United Socialist States of the Middle East. The social force capable of achieving it is the working class, uniting behind it the rural poor, in struggle against both imperialism and the national bourgeois classes of the region.

In one of the great ironies of history, the failure of the Palestinian national program mirrors the debacle of another prominent national movement of the 20th century—Zionism. The “success” of the Zionist enterprise succeeded in transforming an oppressed people, who suffered one of the greatest tragedies in human history, into the oppressors of another people—the Palestinians.

The history of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and that of Arafat, demonstrates again and again that the subjugation of the Palestinian people was maintained not simply by Israeli violence and military might, but by the treachery of the Arab bourgeoisie. Arafat, who, on the basis of his nationalist program, sought to pressure the Arab regimes and maneuver between them, was never able to establish any genuine independence from either them or their imperialist masters. Likewise, his attempts to rely on the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Israel and the US inexorably led him to seek the patronage of the most determined opponent of the Palestinian and Arab masses—American imperialism.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/araf-n12.shtml