Riding the surge of popular optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority launched a bid for recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. In this article Kady Tait examines why the UN’s failure to achieve a lasting settlement in Palestine is rooted in its role as a vehicle to maintain the status quo in favour of the imperialist powers who founded it.

With the bid announced in late September, Abbas is playing a dangerous game. On the one hand, his mission at the UN attempts to pre-empt an eruption of the mass movements in neighbouring Egypt  and Syria in his own country, on the other it threatens to expose the futility of sustaining illusions that the United Nations can play a neutral, useful, or progressive role in the struggle for palestinian liberation.

The reactions from the US and Israel were predictable: the US declared that it would veto any vote on the Security Council, while Israel condemned the move, saying it undermined the ‘peace process’. Not a trace of irony from Obama who has attempted to cast himself as a friend of the Arab people, nor from Israeli president Binyamin Netanyahu whose attitude to the ‘peace process’ can be summed up by the 1500 deaths during the 2009 bombardment of the Gaza strip.

Abbas knows that any vote in the Security Council will be sunk by the US, so he has placed his hopes in the UN General Assembly, which has long been supportive of the Palestinians’ struggle. Indeed, countries which have declared their support for the statehood bid represent more than 80% of the world’s population. Since 1948, the General Assembly has regularly passed resolutions condemning Israel’s policy of colonisation, war and ethnic cleansing as illegal under international law.

Why is it then, that the UN General Assembly is incapable of acting upon such an overwhelming majority in favour of the Palestinians’ right to national determination, or to police Israel’s repeated violations of the UN’s mandates, resolutions and international ‘laws’?

Imperialism vs Semi colonies

Since its inception, the United Nations has been dominated by the ‘Great Powers’ of the world – the USA, France, Britain, Russia, and China. And like its predecessor, the League of Nations, it has been handicapped and paralysed by these nations’ antagonistic competition over political and military influence on the world stage.

These 5 nations are the permanent members of the UN ‘Security Council’ – the body which relegates the General Assembly to the status of talking-shop. That the UN does nothing without the agreement of the Security Council demonstrates that the true purpose of the UN is not to promote ‘world peace’ or to achieve the ‘equality of nations’. Instead it’s purpose is much more prosaic. It serves to act as a body by which the powerful imperialist nations can resolve their differences peacefully, by engaging in a game of chess whereby the 100+ semi-colonial countries who sit in the General Assembly are used as pawns, reduced to aligning themselves with one or other imperial power or bloc in the hope of retaining the crumbs from the imperialists’ table.

Imperialism is what the russian revolutionary Lenin described as the ‘highest stage of capitalism’ where financial capital concentrated in advanced nations expands across the world using its financial might to overwhelm the economies of smaller nations and subjugate them to the politics of the imperialist country. An example of this is the IMF, a financial vehicle funded in the main by the principal imperial powers. It sets conditions for lending money to poor countries, forcing them to open up their economies to the big capitalist corporations who strip the assets out of these countries in a constant expansion across the globe searching for profitable sources of raw materials and labour.

Where countries refuse to open up their economies, the power of finance capital is backed up by the armed power of the state they are based in. In this way the world is divided into imperial countries, the centres of finance capital based in the City of London and Wall Street, and the ‘semi-colonial’ countries who are subordinated politically by their economic dependence on the advanced capitalist states. The most obvious and destructive expression of this system is the African debt crisis, where African nations are prevented by the threat of economic and military sanctions from escaping the debt trap which impoverishes their people by transferring their natural wealth into the coffers of Western ‘multinational’ banks and corporations.

The division of the world into imperial powers and semi-colonies ensures the unequal distribution of the world’s resources under capitalism. While semi-colonial countries make up more than 80% of the world’s population, and are the source of the majority of the world’s natural resources, their people own much less than half of the world’s wealth.

The structure of the United Nations is arranged so that the imperial powers have a veto over any decisions which oppose their interests. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hegemony of the USA in world affairs has been unchallenged. This is why it was able to present its invasion of Iraq as a fait accompli and why the UN is unable to enforce its mandates or international laws without the co-operation of the United States.

Why is Palestine important?

The 60-year conflict between Palestine and Israel has been a low-intensity conflict characterised by occasional short-lived outbreaks of open fighting, 1948, 1967, 1988-92, 2001, 2005, 2009. While thousands have died and the situation of millions of refugees has remained appalling, it is worth asking why it is this struggle rather than, say, the devastating war in Congo which has killed over 5 million people in the last 10 years, or the ‘War on Drugs’ which has ravaged the entire South American continent and claims tens of thousands of lives in Mexico every year, which is the subject of a huge international solidarity movement.

The Palestine-Israel conflict has remained a central feature of world politics, because it is a proxy war fought between the dominant forces in global politics since the end of the Second World War – US imperialism attempting to expand its influence in key strategic areas, jostling with French, Russian and Chinese interests in the region. While the wars which blight the African continent are the result of imperialist finance-capital’s ability to practice super-exploitation on a massive scale while the world’s media turns a blind eye, the conflict in Palestine encapsulates imperialism’s character as a union of finance, militarism and geo-politics operating in a region which will make and break imperial powers in the future decades of the 21st century.

This is why the fall of US backed dictators such as Mubarak in Egypt is an historic opportunity – and why we must fight for a genuine democratic revolution to topple Assad in Syria – not an imperialist puppet government like the NTC in Libya but a real people’s government founded on councils of the ordinary workers and youth

Only the working class, poor farmers, unemployed and youth,  have an interest in opposing imperialism in all its forms – whether it is the zionist puppet of US interests or the brutal dictators propped up for decades by western cash and military equipment.

This is why we support the revolutionary overthrow of Gaddaffi, but reject the ex-Gadaffi imperialist puppets in the NTC, and oppose any further NATO or UN interventions in the ongoing struggles in the Arab world.

Arab Spring refreshes resistance

The revolutions and revolts which became known as the Arab Spring, rocked the Middle East status quo, where US-backed dictators in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia ruled their people with an iron fist for decades. The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt was a defining moment in this struggle, because Egypt had long played a crucial role in refusing to challenge Israel’s occupation of Palestine. With his downfall, the Rafah border crossing into Gaza was opened, permitting a flood of supplies and ideas into the territory.

Yet in Gaza, Hamas acted swiftly to disperse pro-democracy demonstrations inspired by the Arab Spring, while Fatah did the same in the West Bank.

Nevertheless, the continuing resistance to the military junta in Egypt shows the way forward. Mubarak was brought down by a General Strike of Egyptian workers, organised through new Trade Unions and popular committees to organise defence in their communities. The continuing struggles of the Egyptian working class shows the way forward for Palestine. Mass strikes and democratic organisation can bridge the sectarian divide in Palestinian politics. The common struggle of workers and youth in Palestine can build links with those in the Israeli anti-austerity movement who also oppose the occupation.

A mass movement of resistance to Israeli occupation would no doubt see both Hamas and Fatah move to try and co-opt and contain it, attempting to pass themselves off as its natural leaders. But such a move is fraught with dangers and threats of new political organisations emerging to lead the Palestinian national resistance struggle. These new organisations can apply the lessons of the ongoing Egyptian revolution and have the potential to go far beyond the failed strategy of negotiation, compromise and guerilla warfare of Hamas and Fatah.

Why we support the vote

Abbas at the UN vote

The vote demonstrates one important principle: should the international community recognise a Palestinian state? The answer is yes. To oppose it would mean to line up, though for different reasons, with the US and Israel in opposing Palestinian national rights.

Any recognition at the UN must be seen in perspective. It will not liberate the Palestinians and it will not end the conflict. It will, however, strengthen the Palestinians’ position internationally, which exactly is why Israel is so opposed to it. But the wider goal must remain a secular, democratic and bi-national state for both peoples.

The 5.84 million Jews in Israel today are now close to being outnumbered by a growing Palestinian Arab population, comprising both those living as a minority in pre-1967 Israel and those in the post-1967 Occupied Territories. There are millions more in exile waiting for the right to return to their historic homeland.

Some Palestinians are opposed to the proposal because they see it as strengthening the corrupt Palestinian Authority and a betrayal of the refugees by accepting the 1967 borders.

Whilst these concerns are important, what is of over-riding importance is that any short term strengthening of the Palestinians’ position is not counter-opposed to the long term goal of a one state solution for Arabs and Israelis. Recognition of Palestine, even along the 1967 borders, would be a step forward, as part of a wider struggle to liberate all Palestinians.

Ultimately what is needed is a mass pro-Palestine liberation, pro-democracy and anti-imperialist movement on the streets right across the Middle East, which would weaken the Zionists’ position and strengthen the Arab revolution as a whole.

Internationally, we must win the labour movement – the trade unions, co-operatives, working class organisations – worldwide to support the Palestinian struggle and boycott and isolate the Zionist state.

We see the Arab spring as opening up historic opportunities to advance the struggle for a secular, democratic state with equal rights for men, women, Muslims, Jews and Christians in Palestine. The vote at the UN is a step towards greater recognition of the struggle, but ultimately we cannot let the imperialists in the UN be the ones to determine who is and who is not worthy of national rights. That question, and the democratic workers’ government that ensures it can only be answered by the workers themselves, in a political, military and above all international struggle against racism, dictatorship and imperialism.

Read more:

• Will the Arab Spring reach Palestine?
  
• Gadaffi killed – revolution continues
  
• How to build a local Gaza campaign