In the aftermath of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war (known as the Yom Kippur War), which broke the myth of Israeli invincibility and marked the best achievement of Arab arms against Israel, it was clear to US imperialism and Israeli Zionism alike that the latter could not for too long face with impunity the combined might of the Arab states; that for the survival of Israel as one of the most important instruments for the projection of US imperialist power in the Middle East, a region so crucial for reasons of its oil and gas reserves, Arab unity had to be broken at all and any cost. Through bribery, cajolery and flattery, this is precisely what the US managed to achieve, by getting the late and unlamented Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, to sign a separate Peace Treaty with Israel. Although Israel was obliged under this Treaty to return to Egypt the Sinai peninsula, conquered by Israel during the June 1967 war (the six-day war, during which Israel also conquered the Syrian Golan Heights, as well as the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem), it gained immeasurably by knocking Egypt out of the Arab-Israeli equation.

With Egypt no longer posing any threat to it, Israel felt emboldened to launch its invasion of Lebanon in 1982. During this invasion, Israel killed 30,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, including the 7,000 Palestinians massacred in the Sabra and Shatila camps by the Christian Falange under the supervision of the notorious butcher, Ariel Sharon, currently the leader of Israel's opposition Likud party. Although Israel managed to expel the PLO from Lebanon and inflict enormous material and human losses on that country, it was to reap a bitter harvest from its barbarous war of aggression. In flagrant violation of UN resolutions, and with the full support of US imperialism, Israel occupied the southern fifth of Lebanon as a security zone bordering northern Israel. In doing so it spawned an armed Lebanese national resistance movement, which over a number of years turned Operation Peace in Galilee (the Israeli code name for its barbarous 1982 war of aggression against Lebanon) into the mother of all disasters for Israel. Hizbollah, the armed Lebanese resistance, inflicted a most serious and humiliating defeat on Israel when, in May this year, it forced Israel to quit Lebanon.

In parallel with this, by expelling the PLO from Lebanon, Israel unwittingly repatriated the Palestinian struggle for liberation to Palestine itself, for the liberation movement, expelled from Lebanon (and earlier from Jordan when King Hussein's army, bolstered by Pakistani troops, massacred several thousand Palestinians in Black September, 1970), had nowhere else to go. It was in these conditions that the Palestinian youth, daily humiliated by the conditions of Israeli occupation, rose up in revolt in 1987. Week after week, month after month, and year after year, Palestinian youths, armed with no more than stones, confronted the mighty Israeli army. The latter, notwithstanding its resort to torture, killings and bone-breaking, was unable to suppress the uprising (intifada). While the Palestinians were in no position to defeat the Israeli army outright, equally the Israeli army was unable to suppress the revolt of the Palestinian youth - a revolt which sapped the morale of the conscript Israeli army, with many conscripts refusing to serve in the occupied territories.

The intifada was still continuing when the Gulf War of 1990-1991 broke out. The imperialist coalition under the leadership of the US mobilised more than half a million soldiers to wage war against Iraq for the alleged purpose of 'liberating Kuwait', but actually to safeguard their loot of the Arab people's oil and gas resources. The very same handful of imperialist bloodsuckers, who for so long had ignored the agony of the oppressed Palestinian masses, suddenly transformed themselves into champions of Kuwaiti liberation. The nauseating hypocrisy and double standards of the imperialist powers did not go unnoticed by the masses of the Arab lands who, defying their governments, by and large supported Iraq - as did the Palestinians - in the Gulf War. Imperialism defeated Iraq thanks to the treachery of several Arab regimes and the Gorbachev clique in Moscow in its dying hours. Soon after the Gulf War, the CPSU, as a culmination of three decades of revisionist betrayal of Marxism-Leninism by Khrushchevite revisinists, collapsed. This collapse was soon followed by the disintegration of the erstwhile USSR, the once mighty Land of the Soviets.

In the wake of the Iraqi defeat in the Gulf War and the aftermath of momentous events in the USSR, the Palestinian leadership decided to enter into secret negotiations with Israel, which resulted in the Oslo Accords of 1993. There are divisions within the PLO, as well as among the left, as to whether the PLO was justified in going down the Oslo road. At the time we were of the opinion that it was correct for the PLO to have done so. Nothing has happened since then to convince us otherwise, for by putting its signature on what was nothing short of a Treaty of Tilsit, a very bitter pill for the Palestinians to swallow, the PLO was able to expose the entire fraud of Israel's supposed 'peaceful intentions'. The foot-dragging since then by the Israeli governments - Labour as much as Likud - on the implementation of Oslo, the daily violation of the terms of that accord, have divested Israel of all moral standing and lost it the sympathy, especially in Europe, which the Zionist state once enjoyed, albeit from misplaced emotions and for misguided reasons on the part of the European population. Further, if the Oslo Accords were unpopular among certain sections of the Palestinian population, they were no less unpopular among wide sections of Israeli Jews, brought up as they have been on the ideology, made up in equal parts of religious obscurantism and racism, according to which Jews are the 'chosen people', who have the right, ordained by the Almighty - no less - to rule Judea and Samaria (the whole of Palestine and more - Eretz Israel). Israeli Jews have been told from day one that the Jews were a people without land going to a land (Palestine) without people. Nurtured on a diet of such monumental obscurantism and monstrous racism, it is hardly to be surprised at that large numbers of Zionists should have turned violently against the Oslo Accords, which they perceived as a total betrayal of the Zionist dream. It is a sign of their serious opposition to any agreement with the Palestinians that one of the Zionists went to the length of assassinating in 1995 a fellow Zionist - to wit, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin - who had offended them by being a co-signatory to the Accords. In their own twisted way, the Zionist extremists had a point, for by agreeing to the terms, even though they were so favourable to the Israeli side and correspondingly so unfavourable to the Palestinians, the Israeli government had implicitly accepted the unrealisability of the Zionist project, which today is enmeshed in a tangle of insoluble contradictions.

Consequent upon the Oslo Accords, the Israeli government was pulled in opposing directions. On the one hand it was under pressure from the Palestinians to carry out its commitments under the Oslo agreements. On the other hand it was being pressed by large sections of Israeli Zionism not to implement the Accords. The actions of the Israeli governments ever since have fully reflected these two opposing forces at work. To the defects of the Oslo Accords have been added the defects of their incomplete and mutilated implementation. From 1994, parts of the Occupied Territories were handed over to the Palestinian Authority in such a manner that Palestinian towns and villages were cut off from each other by large bypass roads constructed for the 190,000 Jewish settlers further occupying more than 10% of the land conquered by Israel in 1967. While the settlers had ample opportunities for travel, and limitless access to water for filling their swimming pools and watering their gardens, the Palestinians, hemmed in from every direction, suffered daily shortages of water. The Palestinians were increasingly angry at the failure of Israel to honour its commitments under the Oslo Accords.

Ehud Barak, the current Israeli Prime Minister, was elected in May 1999 on the basis of a platform that promised peace with the Palestinians. While promising peace, his government expanded settlements in East Jerusalem. In flagrant violation of Oslo, Israel has persisted relentlessly with her policy of land expropriation and building of Jewish settlements through demolition of Palestinian houses and forcible removal of their Palestinian inhabitants. Between the signing of the Accords and March 1998, Israel bulldozed nearly 640 Palestinian homes, including 95 in Jerusalem. 42% of these demolitions and forced removals were carried out under Israeli Labour governments, a statistic which gives lie to the assertion that Labour is more peace-loving than Likud. On top of the demolitions and expulsion of Palestinians, Israel continues to confiscate the water resources of the West Bank and, in total violation of the Oslo agreements, it refuses to release nearly 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners rotting in Isaeli concentration camps, where they have been subjected to long periods of solitary confinement and other forms of torture.

Israel's stalling tactics, her failure to implement the Oslo Accords, her continued expansion of settlements and demolition of Palestinian houses, the restrictions on travel which prevent the free movement of Palestinians within the West Bank and between the latter and the Gaza Strip, had brought Palestinian frustration and anger to boiling point - ready to explode at the slightest opportunity.

Amid mounting Palestinian anger, US President Clinton, in an attempt to pressurise the Palestinians into accepting settlement, invited PLO leader Yassir Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister Barak to a summit at Camp David in July of this year. At this meeting, while Barak offered the Palestinians 90% of the West Bank (amounting to less than 20% of the historic Palestine), he refused point blank the right of Palestinian refugees (now numbering 5 million) forced at gunpoint to flee Palestine in 1948 and 1949 to return to their homes and land. For the benefit of those unaware of these facts, let it be stated that in 1948, the land owned by Jews in Palestine amounted to no more than 7%. After 1948, thanks to the destruction of 531 towns and villages, the wholesale expulsion and expropriation of 800,000 Palestinians, and scores of massacres, the newly-created Zionist state grabbed the whole of Palestine except for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (which it subsequently conquered in 1967). Further, Barak refused to remove the settlements and would not recognise Palestinian sover-eignty over East Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, the Summit collapsed amid mutual recriminations, thus paving the way for the conflict which was sure to follow. So as not to provide any pretext to the other side, and in an effort to avoid an explosion, Arafat even delayed his unilateral declaration - originally planned for 13 September 2000 - of a Palestinian state.

Sections of Zionism, however, determined to wreck all chances of a settlement, were bent on resorting to provocation. The fuse was lit by Ariel Sharon's visit, on 28 September, to the Haram al-Sharif compound, which houses the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, Islam's third most holy shrines (the complex is known as Temple Mount to the Jews, who believe it to be the site of their ancient temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D.). By way of a provocative assertion of Israeli sovereignty over the shrines, this butcher of Sabra and Shatila notoriety, accompanied by a 2,000-strong posse of army and security personnel, attempted to enter the Al Aqsa mosque (a move cynically calculated to pre-empt the final status negotiations on the future of Jerusalem), thus sparking widespread political protests among the Palestinians and throughout the Arab world. Not content with permitting this provocation to take place, the following day Israeli soldiers, using helicopter gunships, fired indiscriminately on worshippers, in the process killing 10 and injuring 500 Palestinians, thus causing the cup of Palestinian patience to spill over.

Following the events of 28 and 29 September, Palestinian anger assumed volcanic proportions and, with unprecedented unity, the Palestinian people have risen up against their Israeli occupiers and tormentors, as well as against the latter's imperialist backers, in the second intifada, which promises to be marked by even greater ferocity and determination than the first. This time the Israeli Palestinians, who constitute a fifth of the Israeli population, are not lagging behind. Fed up with their status as second-class citizens, with discrimination and the daily denial of their rights, they too have joined the intifada.

Arabs elsewhere have taken action in solidarity with the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people. The first non-Palestinian intervention came from Lebanon's Hizbollah, the armed resistance movement which chased Israel out of Lebanon. On 7 October, after Israeli soldiers had fired on Palestinian refugees along the Lebanese-Israeli border, Hizbollah shelled Israeli positions in an occupied area on the border (the Shebaa farms, captured by Israel in 1967 and claimed by Lebanon). Hizbollah further captured three Israeli soldiers whom they want to exchange for 19 Lebanese resistance fighters in Israeli jails. Since then Hizbollah has abducted an Israeli colonel in Europe. Hizbollah dedicated its attack to Mohamed al-Dura, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy whose death on 29 September at the hands of the Israeli army in Gaza was so poignantly captured on the world's television screens. Al-Dura, his agonising last moments fresh in the minds of the Arab masses, has become an icon and a symbol of struggle.

In a related incident on 12 October, a suicide bomb attack on a US destroyer in Aden harbour in Yemen killed 17 US servicemen and injured 39 others. The USS Cole, a guided-missile destroyer with sophisticated radar and carrying Tomahawk missiles, had anchored for refuelling before joining the US-led blockade in the Gulf against vessels trying to break UN-imposed oil sanctions on Iraq. An explosive-laden boat rammed into it, ripping a hole measuring 40 feet by 20 feet in its hull. US President, Bill Clinton, responded to the attack on USS Cole by saying that "if, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act". Far from it. The Arab peoples are answering counter-revolutionary terror with revolutionary terror. For far too long, imperialism has terrorised the Arab people and looted their wealth. By their courageous action, the Yemeni patriots, armed with no more than a rubber dinghy and a small amount of explosives, have not merely blown a gaping hole in a US destroyer but more importantly have blown sky high the myth of the invincibility and impenetrability of US imperialist armour. And by doing so, the Yemeni patriots have sent a clear message to Uncle Sam: 'You cannot continue to terrorise the Arab people with impunity.'

The Occupied Territories have witnessed a slide from uprising and repression into a fully-fledged civil war. Spurred on by Israeli brutality, the Palestinian people have responded with unprecedented heroism and resistance increased a hundred-fold. On 12 October, two Israeli soldiers in plain clothes (obviously on a secret mission) were killed by angry Palestinians in a Palestinian police headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Their bodies were thrown to the crowd in the street. Sickening as this spectacle may have been to the human eye, it must be seen in the context of Israeli tortures practised on Palestinians for five decades - and in cold blood. Writing at the height of the First Indian War of Independence, Marx, in his article 'Investigation of Tortures in India', wrote thus:

"… If the English could do these things in cold blood, is it surprising that the insurgent Hindus should be guilty, in the fury of revolt and conflict, of crimes and cruelties alleged against them?"

Israel responded to the incident with characteristic brutality by launching helicopter raids on the West Bank towns of Nablus, Hebron and Jericho. Israeli forces, deploying assault helicopters, unleashed rocket attacks on the residence and office of Yassir Arafat in the Gaza Strip and in Ramallah. Tanks were despatched to the outskirts of Ramallah. Helicopters selected five targets, including the Ramallah police station and the Palestinian television and radio headquarters. In the Gaza Strip, an office of the Palestinian security services was bombed.

The Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, pronounced the peace process to be "at an end". Ehud Barak, with the intention of intimidating the PLO, declared that Arafat was no longer a "peace partner" and invited the opposition Likud Party to join an emergency coalition. Arafat responded to the threat by releasing from jail several dozen members of Hamas - the Islamic militia responsible for suicide bomb attacks in Israel in 1996. Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator, denounced Israeli barbarity as a "cowardly war against a people who do not have an army."

Far from suppressing Palestinian resistance, the indiscriminate use of the Israeli armed might has only served to stiffen Palestinian resistance and further inflame Palestinian anger and passions. Neither missile attacks nor use of rockets, machine-gun and cannon fire, tanks firing artillery pieces, and helicopter gunships against innocent and by-and-large unarmed Palestinians, have managed to extinguish the flames of revolt.

"The young Palestinian stone-throwers", says the Financial Times of 18 October, "are imbued with an extraordinary sense of motivation and mission … They are now incensed by what many in the international community have deemed Israel's use of 'excessive' force. The language they use on the streets is of liberation and of martyrdom, of shaking off the Israeli occupation to gain independence."

Palestinian fury in the Occupied Territories has spilled over to Arab neighbourhoods within Israel. In fact, the entire Arab world is seething with anger at Israeli barbarity and intransigence, and the US imperialist backing for this. A wave of protests has spread across the Arab world, threatening to destabilise the imperialist-contrived status quo in the region. The Middle East has witnessed the strongest expression of discontent and public anger - aimed against Israel and the US - since the Gulf War of 1990-1991. Religious and secular Arabs, men and women, young and old, have joined hands in their millions, burned Israeli flags, battled riot police, called for an end to Arab normalisation with Israel, and demanded that Arab states match their rhetoric with deeds and use the oil weapon against Israel and her imperialist backers, in particular the US.

One million Moroccans demonstrated on 8 October in the streets of Rabat in support of the Palestinian people. Jordan has seen some of the worst rioting in years. Even in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, of all places, demonstrators have hoisted the Palestinian flag. The regimes which have relations with Israel - Egypt, Morocco, Oman and Jordan - have been the ones under most pressure. The wave of unrest is threatening to undermine the conservative and reactionary regimes so carefully installed, nurtured and maintained by imperialism. The Financial Times of 11 October makes the perceptive observation that " in a region where so many autocratic rulers have doubtful legitimacy in the eyes of their people, concern is growing that failure to respond to popular demands could turn the protests against the regimes themselves."

Everywhere in the region, the pressure of the radicalised masses is helping to forge Arab unity and support for the struggle of the oppressed and downtrodden Palestinian people for self-determination and liberation from the yoke of Israeli occupation, with its daily toll of death, injury and torture.

Such is the outrage caused by Israeli brutality that even the UN Security Council, normally so biased in favour of the Zionist state, passed a resolution condemning Israel for the use of "excessive force against unarmed civilians in the West Bank, Gaza and the Israeli Arabs". The Security Council, having made references to its earlier resolution - 194, 242 (1967), 338 (1973), 476 (1980), 672 (1990), and 1073 (1996) - went on to call upon "Israel, the occupying power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and its responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the protection of Civilian Persons". Fourteen of the fifteen members of the Security Council voted for the resolution, while the fifteenth member, the US, abstained. It is significant that the US, which would normally have vetoed such a resolution, was obliged to abstain - such is the total isolation in which Israel and the US find themselves. Even this abstention, biased as it is in favour of the brutal Israeli occupation regime, has angered the Arab masses, within and outside of Palestine.

On October 19, the UN's Human Rights Commission, accusing Israel of 'war crimes', voted in favour of a Commission of Inquiry to investigate Israel's "widespread, systematic and gross violation of human rights".

Morocco, Tunisia and Oman have cut ties with Israel, leaving the latter stunned and adding to its international isolation.

Just as it has reneged on every other agreement, Israel has deliberately refused to comply with its undertakings of the Sharm al-Sheikh accord of 17 October. Under this agreement, Barak agreed to end Israeli violence, to withdraw Israeli forces from Palestinian towns and villages, end the closure of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - a closure which prevents the 120,000 Palestinians who work in the agriculture and construction sectors of the Israeli economy from earning their livelihood. Barak also agreed to the formation of a committee, with UN participation, to look into the causes of the violence. Far from ending violence and withdrawing her forces from Palestinian cities and villages, Israel has reinforced the deployment of heavy armour and increased further still the use of indiscriminate bombardment and firing, which continue to take a heavy toll of Palestinian lives and property.

In the manner of all reactionaries, the Israeli leadership refuses to understand that the laws of history are far stronger than the laws of artillery. Barak deludes himself into believing that by use of massive and disproportionate force, threatening to take a "time out" on the negotiations with the Palestinians, and forging a government of 'national unity' in co-operation with the opposition Likud Party, Israel would succeed in quelling the Palestinian revolt. That this is a pipe dream is recognised even by her well-wishers, as, for instance, the Financial Times, which in its leading article of 24 October has this to say:

"If Mr Barak insists on a 'time out', it should apply as much to the Israeli army as to the peace process. Israel is not adding to its security by deploying heavy armour and helicopter gunships, which provoke rather than deter Palestinian hotheads. Bringing the political heavy armour of Mr Sharon into a coalition would have the same counter-productive effect. A 'national emergency' government might accentuate the very emergency it was supposed to deal with" ('Barak digs deeper').

Quite correctly, Israel is perceived by Palestinians and other Arabs, as well as increasingly by sections of the population even in the imperialist countries, as a state bent on massacring innocent civilians. Palestinians are neither impressed nor cowed down by Israeli armour and daily barbarity. The little Palestinian Davids continue to confront the Israeli Goliath with a cheerfulness and a grim determination for which no lover of humanity can fail to have total admiration. Barak will soon discover that he is "seeking a military solution where none exists" (Financial Times, leading article of 13 October). More than that, the Palestinians may very well turn the tables on Israel through a long guerrilla war which wears down Israel's will to resist. The emergence of honour guards at funerals, formed by a new black-clad armed Palestinian militia, as well as increasingly frequent armed clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youth armed with Klashnikovs, are a significant development in this regard.

The atrocities committed by the Israeli army, supplemented by the atrocities committed by the settler thugs, who regularly run amok attacking Arab houses and shops and killing innocent Palestinians, have turned Palestinian towns and villages into seething cauldrons of revolt against the Israeli occupation. Ramallah, Jenin, Tulkaram, Nablus, Hebron, Jericho and many other places, while being under siege by the Israeli army, have become proud centres of resistance against Zionist settler colonialism and its imperialist backers to such an extent that it has frightened the daylights out of them. Alarmed by the sheer scale of Palestinian resistance, US President, Bill Clinton, recently made this hypocritical statement, with stomach-churning insincerity: "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the gravest tragedies and most difficult problems of our time, but it can be solved. The alternative to the peace process is no longer merely hypothetical. It is unfolding today before our very eyes." He merely 'forgot' to add that the US ruling class, more than any other, is responsible for the continuation of this "gravest [of] tragedies"; that if this "most difficult [of] problems" has not been so far resolved, this is solely due to US imperialism's backing for Zionist aggression and occupation; that Zionist intransigence, brutality and aggression are underpinned by US military, material, political and diplomatic support for Israel; that US imperialism far from being an honest peace-broker, is a rapacious blood-sucker, which manipulates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means of controlling and looting the fabulous riches constituted by the Arab people's oil and gas resources.

The Israeli-Palestinian problem can be solved, but on one condition, namely, that the justice of the Palestinian cause be recognised and the legitimate rights and claims of the Palestinian people be accepted. These are as follows:

• The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, with an independent Palestinian state of their own, in the territories conquered and occupied by Israel during the June 1967 War;
• The right of the nearly 5 million refugees to return to their homes and land;
• The removal of all Zionist settlements from the Occupied Territories; and
• The handing over of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians to serve as the capital of an independent Palestine.

Without the fulfilment of these conditions there will be no peace in the area, for the Palestinians have made as many concessions as it was possible for them to make. The Zionist state has already stolen 78% of the historic Palestine and is now embarked on huckstering over the one-fifth for which the victims of their theft are prepared to settle. But Palestinians will not allow themselves to be pushed any further. Instead of recognising this simple truth, the chief executive of US imperialism blames the Palestinians, as he did in July of this year, for the breakdown of the peace process. When Yassir Arafat refused to bow to US pressure during the Camp David talks in July, Bill Clinton, who now unctuously bemoans the continuation of the conflict, threatened to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (thus recognising sole Israeli sovereignty over that historic city) as a punishment for the Palestinian refusal to capitulate.

US hypocrisy, double-dealing and duplicity is recognised by the Palestinian as well as other peoples in the area. While the US had hoped, after the July Camp David summit's failure, to isolate the Palestinian leadership, the unfolding events have merely served to strengthen it. According to Joel Peters, political science analyst at the Ben Gurion University, Arafat has gained from the latest developments because, "after being pushed into a corner at Camp David, now neither the Arabs nor the US and Europe will try to shove a peace deal down his throat." "Israel," he continues, "has lost a massive amount. It has exposed itself as a country which hasn't come to terms with making peace with the Arab world and hasn't come out from the idea of projection of force" (quoted in the Financial Times of 4 October).

The refusal of the US to condemn Israeli brutality has enraged public opinion throughout the Arab lands. Even if the reactionary Gulf states may not go to the length of an oil embargo, they will be under pressure from the masses not to increase production to ease the jittery market, which went into a panic in the wake of Middle East developments. There is a good chance that the price of oil will reach levels which could plunge the imperialist economies into a recession - even a downright slump.

The strength of public anger at Israeli actions, and the US imperialist backing for Israel, forced the Arab League to hold, after a break of nearly two decades, a Summit on 21 October. Significantly, it was attended by Iraq and Kuwait as well. This gathering condemned Israel and expressed its support for the Palestinians. Relations between Syria and Iraq, as well as between Iraq and Iran, have registered a marked improvement in the face of the common danger confronting these countries. The Anglo-American imperialist attempt at the economic strangulation of Iraq has suffered a severe setback with these developments. Demonstrations of international opposition to the UN sanctions regime against Iraq are growing, with the UN flights ban tested by an increasing number of flights into Baghdad from Russia, France, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, UAE, Algeria and Syria.

As if all this were not enough, Turkey has decided to start pumping Iraqi oil through the pipeline in Turkey. As a further thorn in the US side, Turkey has threatened to deprive the US of the use of its air bases by US warplanes to enforce the illegal no-fly zone over northern Iraq.

Thus it is clear that with the latest developments US policy in Palestine, and in the wider Middle-East region, is ending up in smoke - delivering a blow to the imperialist-contrived status quo and stability.

As for Israel, she has threatened retaliation against Lebanon, and Israeli helicopters and artillery have attacked (on 20 October) a broad region in southern Lebanon. In reply, Hizbollah have shelled settlements in northern Israel. In desperation, Israel has threatened to attack Syria. Should the Zionist state go ahead with this mad plan, it will be cruelly disappointed with the results of such an attack. Even if one were to grant, for the sake of argument, that no Arab army is a match for the Israeli army in a conventional war, supplied as the latter is with the most sophisticated armaments by US imperialism, one would nevertheless have to admit that Israel is no match for the Arab masses. Just as Hizbollah fighters have inflicted a most humiliating defeat on the Israeli army which occupied southern Lebanon for nearly two decades, the Arab masses in other countries too will doubtless deliver deadly blows against the Zionist invaders. As things stand, a people's war on the part of the Arab masses stands the best chance of defeating Israel and its imperialist masters. From a long-term point of view, Israel is threatened with disintegration if she makes peace; she is equally threatened with disintegration if she does not make peace. In the latter case, the burden of carrying on a ceaseless war of oppression and occupation is bound to exhaust her treasury and sap the morale of her soldiers and civilians alike, leading to collapse in the end. If she makes peace, the absence of the common Arab foe, the only factor which gives some cohesion to Israeli society, would make for disintegration and prepare the ground for conflicts between secular and religious Jews and, more importantly, between rich and poor Jews. In the words of the Financial Times, written just before the outbreak of the second intifada, Israel's "… pace of fragmentation has accelerated as the threat from the Arab world, so long a unifying factor, recedes" (18 September, 2000). There is no coherent, rational or historical rationale for the existence of this artificial creation of imperialism. In the end, only a secular Palestinian state, in which Jews and Arabs live as equals, with neither side oppressing the other, is the proper solution. That, however, can only come about through separation and the creation, as a preliminary to it, of an independent Palestinian state, side by side and next to Israel.

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