Following the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire at the end of the 19th century, the Middle East, the meeting point of two seas and crossroads of three continents, has ever since been the constant object of imperialist rivalries. In particular, the First World War led to the region being divided up between France and Britain, with Palestine becoming a British protectorate in 1916 and Syria and Lebanon falling under French control. Later on, the necessities of the Cold War and America’s grip over the Mediterranean led the US to support the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 (this also had the advantage of weakening Britain’s hold over the region). While backing Israel at all levels, the US also fought against Russia’s attempts to gain influence over the Arab states who were hostile to Israel. During this period there were three major Arab-Israeli wars: 1956, 1967 and 1973, and behind each one of them could be discerned the deadly competition between the eastern and western blocs.

With the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, the perspective of a third world war contained in this competition gave way to a new imperialist dynamic characterised by a battle of each against all. The efforts of the US to counter-act this dynamic resulted in the huge demonstration of US power in 1991 - Operation Desert Storm - in the Gulf. The real target of this slaughter was not so much Iraq as the USA’s former great power allies, who were forced to line up behind Washington and rein in their independent ambitions. But this action was still not enough to hold back the dissolution of the old bloc discipline. America’s former lieutenants continued to advance their own interests through this or that local state or clique. The wars in ex-Yugoslavia demonstrated this and recent events in the Middle East also confirm it.

America’s difficulty in maintaining control of the situation

The Middle East ‘peace process’ has above all been the work of the US, which has every interest in presenting itself as the only possible mediator in the region. Certainly America has made real gains through this process, in particular in domesticating the PLO. Whereas the PLO was once an agent of the Russian bloc, Arafat’s new ‘Palestinian Authority’ was created essentially to act as an auxiliary force of repression for the Israeli army. But the Pax Americana was never quite completed, not least because both the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisies have more and more been following their own local interests at the expense of the USA. In Israel, Sharon’s role in provoking the conflict - and the fact that he was then offered a government post by the ‘peacemaker’ Barak - shows the increasing weight of openly pro-war factions, who are profiting from the growing feelings of isolation and encirclement within the country.

This situation is exacerbated by the scale of the ‘Intifada’, which has now spread to Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up 20% of the Israeli population. Meanwhile Arafat, also pushed by the more ‘radical’ wings of Palestinian nationalism, has been calling for the support of the Arab nations against Israel, as at the Arab summit of 22-23 October. But he has also been appealing to the European Union to make a more active intervention in the conflict. The patent failure of the US to bring about a ceasefire at the Paris conference (where Madeleine Albright had to run after Arafat to stop him walking out of the negotiations), then at the Sharm-el-Sheikh summit, demonstrate all the difficulties of the White House in keeping control of the situation.

The other powers are trying to take advantage of this situation to strengthen their own position. This is particularly the case with France, which is seeking to destabilise the US by using its traditional links with countries like Lebanon and by making numerous declarations aimed at gaining sympathy in the Arab countries. It supported the idea of an international inquiry into the events, which had been categorically rejected by Israel. Barak even accused France of supporting and encouraging the "Palestinian terrorists" at the Paris summit on October 5.

Naturally, all the imperialist powers present themselves as advocates of peace and reconciliation, but, in fact, their main aim is to slip banana skins under their rivals’ feet. Their intervention in the Middle East situation, far from bringing peace to the tortured populations, is a powerful accelerator of the slide towards even wider and more destructive wars.

CB/Amos

Once again, the Middle East is ablaze, although in truth there has been no real pause in bloody conflicts in this region for over fifty years.

Peace is not possible under capitalism. The ICC has always said this loud and clear. Thus, in October 1993, after the first ‘historic’ handshake between Arafat and Rabin, we wrote:

"there will never be peace in this society…the promises being made to us now in the Middle East will end up the same way as the ‘New World Order’ that the Gulf war was supposed to bring into being: with massacres like the ones in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Georgia, and all the rest" (Revolution Internationale, ICC paper in France, no. 227).

The media are telling us that all this violence is the result of religious fanaticism and the climate of mutual intolerance between two communities; the big powers, we are being led to believe, are doing all they can to bring about peace. What hypocrisy! Under capitalis hypocrisy! Under capitalism, peace is a lie and a fraud, in the Middle East as anywhere else. What the USA is after isn’t peace, but to preserve its imperialist domination over this region. The other big powers aren’t after peace, but the defence of their imperialist interests, which means challenging America’s positions. Once again, it’s the local populations, like in the Balkans or in Africa, who are being taken hostage by the settling of scores between different bourgeoisies. It’s they who are not only the first victims of these killings but are being enrolled into the monstrous machinery of war by the different imperialist and nationalist cliques, and these populations contain important fractions of the working class.

In the Middle East, a tragic lot has been reserved for millions of proletarians. Among these, the workers living in the occupied territories of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip have been subjected to particularly frightful conditions of exploitation in a region where unemployment stands at around 50%. To escape from hunger and keep their families alive, they have to work as migrant workers for derisory wages, and on top of this they are the first to fall victim to the guns of the Israeli soldiers, of the regular sealing off of the territories, of checkpoint controls which compel them to hang around for ages, so that in addition to long hours of travelling and labouring their working day often mounts up to 16 hours, and that’s if they don’t arrive too late to get paid at all. But they are also subjected to exploitation and repression by their own national bourgeoisie in the shape of the Palestinian Authority, which watches over their misery and above all uses them as cannon fodder. From the age of ten the children of these workers are as often as not dying a precocious death after being pulled into the street protests or the armed Palestinian gangs.

These proletarians have absolutely nothing to gain by being mobilised behind their national bourgeoisie for the creation of a Palestinian state that will keep them in the same conditions of ferocious exploitation and repression, and use them again and again as cannon fodder. The struggle for ‘national liberation’ or the ‘Arab cause’ is not their struggle. As for the Israeli proletarians, they must also reject the sacred union with their own bourgeoisie.

Despite the difficulties of this situation, the only way these proletarians can express class solidarity is to reject the capitalist war machine, to refuse to defend one nationalist camp against another. Instead of being led into the slaughter they need to fight tooth and nail for the defence of their living conditions wherever they can.

War has become decadent capitalism’s mode of life and the only future it can offer is one in which more and more regions and populations are plunged into bloody chaos and the barbarity of war. Capitalism has no other way out. Only the proletarian struggle – because it has no country to defend, and has to develop on an international scale – can lead to the abolition of the bourgeois framework of nations and frontiers. It alone can offer a solution to capitalism’s insurmountable contradictions and put an end to national conflicts.

But this perspective will only see the light of day if there is a decisive intervention by the proletariat in the central countries of capitalism. These fractions of the working class have the responsibility of showing the way forward for the proletariat of the whole world, by fighting against the economic attacks being rained on them by their own national bourgeoisies and governments. More than ever the future of humanity depends on the international development of the workers’ struggle.

ICC

In addition to its breadth, an extremely important feature of this movement was that many of the strikes broke out spontaneously, and in some cases there were signs of direct conflict between workers and the trade unions, whose job it is to control the working class on behalf of the capitalist state:

- many of the strikes began without going through the legal palaver of ballots and warnings;

- workers frequently left the confines of the factory or depot to demonstrate in the street and even call on other workers to join the struggle. This is how the urban t. This is how the urban transport strike spread outwards from Charleroi, an extension which encouraged other sectors to come out;

- workers began to raise demands that could be taken up by all categories. This was particularly the case with the demand for a 10,000 franc flat wage increase, which the Charleroi urban transport workers raised and which was then echoed by other sectors and in demonstrations, generally without union approval (for the transport workers and others this would have meant a 20% increase in wages);

- where the unions did call for actions, they were often surprised by the scale of the response. Thus on October 3rd they had envisaged a rally of union delegates in Brussels, but 20,000 workers turned up to march in the streets.

On a more limited scale, there were also cases where workers directly challenged the authority of the unions. At the STIB, the workers had taken up the demand for a 10,000 franc increase, but were dissatisfied by the unions’ handling of the negotiations, so they sent the union negotiators away and called for direct talks between the management and the strikers’ assembly. The unions refused to recognise the strike and the state had to respond with direct repression – judicial injunctions and police dispersal of pickets.

This was however only an embryo of workers’ self-organisation and overall the unions retained control of the movement. They used all their usual manoeuvres to keep the workers divided – emphasising sectional interests, differences between unions and between the French and Flemish speaking parts of the country. They also used another tactic which had the appearance of ‘unifying’ the movement but that in reality aimed at diluting it. In contrast to the unions in Britain, who mainly expressed support for the government against the fuel protesters, the Belgian unions tried to confuse the workers by calling on them to join the fuel protests which had taken place around the same time as the strike movement. They tried to get workers to focus on the demand for linking fuel costs to the price index, and sent them to join the hauliers’ blockades in a demonstration of ‘solidarity’. Not surprisingly, the media outside Belgium gave publicity to the fuel blockade and the workers’ participation in it, but passed in silence over the actual strike movement.

In the struggles of the ‘80s workers had begun to draw many lessons about the real role of the unions and the need to take charge of their own struggles. Many of these lessons have receded from the consciousness of the class as a result of the reflux of struggles that followed the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989. But the movement that has just taken place in Belgium reminds us that these lessons have not been totally lost. The working class everywhere is becoming more willing to fight openly against capitalism’s attacks, and it’s through the development of this resistance that workers will be able to become more conscious of the real aims and methods of their struggle.

Adam