The Brooklyn Rail

This interview was conducted during October–November 2024 by members of the group Organisation Communiste Libertaire. The conversation is translated from Courant Alternatif, December 2024.

First a brief clarification about the position “I am speaking from,” as is customary. I’m not Palestinian, though over the past two decades I regularly spent several months a year in the West Bank, playing the usual role of the left-wing Westerner visiting the Occupied Territories: engaging in solidarity and activism, making short documentaries, conducting studies that didn’t get anywhere. It was most certainly some form of activist tourism, with an autonomous-Marxist bent to it.

Soon enough I tried to avoid the usual social pitfalls of pro-Palestinian activism, i.e. spending all my time with the professional purveyors of the oppression narrative in pre-determined encounters. Depending on the moment, the context, and my energy, I more or less managed to avoid these pitfalls, though I met unemployed and petty criminals more often than workers (not to mention female workers): the unemployed have spare time, and thieves and thugs love to share their stories of struggles against the repressive apparatus (Israeli but also Palestinian), of jail time and torture (endured in Israeli and Palestinian prisons alike).

Insisting that “there is such a thing as social class in Palestine” might seem out of place when Gazans have been drowning under bombs for more than a year. No doubt I would refrain from doing this, or I’d do it in another way, had I been hanging about in Gaza and not in the West Bank. But I don’t insist on class in order to downplay the current massacre, but to combat the idea of a radical otherness, of an exteriority, of what is currently happening in relation to capitalist social relations, here as there. –E.M.

Organisation Communiste Libertaire (OCL): You insist that Israel-Palestine constitutes a unity in the global and regional capitalist space. Would you explain this point?

Emilio Minassian: At first, the Zionist project conceived of a separate Jewish society in Palestine. This project led to the ethnic cleansing of 1947–48, which, although not completed, did produce a “Jewish” space, with most of those Jews being of European origin at that time. In 1967, with the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, previously annexed by Egypt and Jordan, the population managed by the Israeli state ceased to be mainly Jewish. Around the same time, a specifically Palestinian—no longer only “Arab”—nationalism started to emerge. One could get the impression that two “nations” were facing each other on the same land. But, up until today, no separate state entity emerged from this Palestinian nationalism, except for the administration of tiny pockets of land in Gaza and the West Bank. The territory controlled by Israel, on the other hand, is not made up of Jewish zones and Palestinian zones. A lot of majority-Palestinian zones exist within the borders of the state established in 1948, and there is a massive population of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. This territorial entity is a patchwork in which national distinctions, if we drop subjective affiliations for a moment, are themselves subject to multiple subdivisions, which, although ethnicized (including on the “Jewish” side), are social in nature and are today all part of the Israeli economy.

Starting with the “spatial unity” of Israel/Palestine is thus a way to avoid an analysis of the Palestinian question in terms of “a people without a state,” unified by a common sense of belonging and of dispossession. This reading tends to essentialize national categories which are the products of social processes, and to root the violence of the Israeli state in a strict continuity from 1948 on, which does away with the place of this state within global dynamics.

What’s been happening during the past year is neither a war between two national spaces, nor a project of conquest for resources and markets. It’s not “the” Palestinian people which is drowned under bombs, in an existential struggle between two nations. Gaza is not outside of Israeli society. It has been integrated into the Israeli market and Israeli capital for sixty years. The Palestinians living there are, for the most part, proletarians without any resources of their own. They consume Israeli commodities paid for with Israeli currency, but are not exploited as workers. They are a surplus population ejected from the labor market by Israeli capital during the nineties, now concentrated into a vast “reserve” only a few dozen kilometers from Tel-Aviv, following the logic of animalization familiar from colonial history.

OCL: Could you give us some details about the integration of this space (and its labor force) into the capitalist market?

Minassian: From the point of view of the market, the “Palestinian” zone emerged from the partition of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. At the time, feudal structures dominated, though there were seeds of a merchant bourgeoisie. The British Mandate and the Zionist project marked the early stages of the proletarianization of Arab Palestinian peasants, but the real watershed was 1948 and the Nakba. Feudal lords and bourgeois fled the territory now under Israeli control, with all their belongings; while Palestinian farmers, most of them sharecroppers, were expelled from their land and packed into camps.

We can identify three cycles in the course of Israeli colonialism. During the first period (1948–67), we have a typical case of settler colonialism, directed against the Palestinian peasantry: ethnic cleansing, land grabbing, “Jewish” labor and capital. There was a corollary to this, as I said earlier, which was the import of Jewish proletarians from the Arab world, ethnicized and caught in a colonial relationship of exploitation/animalization. During this period capital accumulation unfolded under the auspices of an all-powerful planner-state controlled by the socialist Ashkenazi elites. This included a form of labor unionism integrated into the state.

During the second period (1967–90s), starting with the conquest of Gaza and the West Bank, we get to a colonial situation that includes the “exploitation of the native labor force.” Israeli capitalism enters a phase of intensive integration into international capital, also through military industry. During those twenty years, the proletariat of Gaza and the West Bank camps was integrated into wage labor on a massive scale, predominantly in the least qualified sectors: construction, agriculture, etc.

The Oslo Accords opened a new phase, in which the colonial relation came to figure the Palestinian as surplus and was structured by the subcontracting of the management of this surplus. Israel kept control of the territories, went on with its offensive to destroy any remnants of the peasantry and delegated the management of the Palestinian proletariat, concentrated in closed-off urban zones, to a national leadership born out of the liberation struggle.

In this context, there was an integration between a merchant bourgeoisie who escaped the Nakba—based in Hebron and Nablus, they had fled the territories annexed by Jordan between 1948 and 1967—and the managerial class originating from the Palestine Liberation Organization. This latter class, embedded in the security apparatus of the Palestinian Authority, has a double origin: first the “overseas” cadres, arriving in Arafat’s luggage between 1994 and 1996, and then the “domestic” ones, born out of the first Intifada and the Israeli jails. It’s a composite class, divided into competing factions. They benefit from an “international security” rent, so to speak, but they also control entire sectors of the local economy: construction, infrastructure, telecommunications, and, last but not least, trade with Israel. All of these different sectors are linked to the Israeli market and investments.

OCL: Doesn't the war in Gaza signal the beginning of a new phase?

Minassian: There are reasons to think that. The post-Oslo period was characterized by the development of techniques of control deployed by Israel against this increasingly unproductive proletariat: the division of the territory into micro-zones; the introduction of a delirious system of permits that controls access to work, healthcare, and travel; generalized record-keeping; surveillance of social networks; automated facial recognition, but also the systematic and massive deployment of seemingly random screenings (during arrests, at checkpoints, during the processing of applications for permits) in order to “test” behavior patterns. These technologies and the knowledge gained through them are exported on a massive scale and produce a lot of value for Israeli companies. It seems to me that last year we entered the military phase of this logic of experimentation. The ongoing practice of mass destruction and massacre not only has no limits: it is meticulous, reflexive, and controlled, though it is hard for us to tell what “victory” it is aiming at. My hypothesis is the following: the massacres in Gaza are a sequence of experimentation, and they have value for global capitalism—reminiscent of the “stop and go” logic of the global economy during COVID, with its strong “biopolitical” dimension. But this is not to be understood as a postmodern claim—the so-called logic of domination is not autonomized from capitalist relations. The surplus proletarians in Gaza have no productive function for Israeli capital, except as guinea pigs for high-tech, high-end technologies of control with their large amount of added value going straight into the international circulation of capital. Thus, bombing and profiling is being tested with the help of AI, famine is managed with meticulous attention, keeping Gazans on the verge of malnutrition (at least until now) and the procedure is similar in regards to epidemics, etc. The Western powers back this logic of military aggression to the hilt and there is no end in sight: all the political posturing calling for moderation is just that (you only have to compare the arms deliveries to Ukraine to see that no limits are imposed on Israel's war machine by its allies).

OCL: You’re talking about both a bourgeoisie and a proletariat in Palestine. Could you sketch a portrait of the class composition in Gaza and the West Bank and of the conditions of struggle between those two classes? How does their status vis-à-vis Israel determine their class membership?

Minassian: The Palestinian bourgeoisie is not a firmly constituted national class: it is, of course, dependent on its subjugation to the Israeli state and capital. As soon as they are free to do so, Palestinian capitalists (in the sense that they are of “Palestinian background”) will spontaneously direct their investment outside the Palestinian territories—which means also outside of the Israeli national framework. It is certain that the Israeli occupation constrained the development of a “territorialized” Palestinian capitalist class. An American scholar, Sara Roy, popularized the notion of “de-development” to describe the way in which Israel fettered the creation of a “free” market economy—i.e. one embedded in the global market—in the occupied territories. The occupation channeled the development of capitalism in Gaza and the West Bank towards an exclusive and subordinated complementarity with the Israeli economy, shaped by the logic of subcontracting, while Israeli capitalists tailored the captive market to their own products in the territories. The Palestinian entrepreneurial bourgeoisie has every reason in the world to hate the occupation: they are trapped in the sphere of circulation as a comprador bourgeoisie, to use a Trotskyist expression. Does that mean they share the same struggles as the proletarians from the territories? We should doubt it, unless we are naive enough to believe in trickle-down economics.

Also central to the social dynamics in the territories is the “political” bourgeoisie formed in the context of the Oslo Accords, whose destiny is linked to the management of the Palestinian proletariat. Even socially this bourgeoisie is closely linked to the latter: most of these new bourgeois ascended from its ranks. They impose themselves against the traditional ruling class (what we call the ”big families”). Those “big families” pledged allegiance to this “political bourgeoisie” and had to let them into their world. The intermediate cadres (Hamas in Gaza and above all Fatah in the West Bank) constitute a management authority over the surplus proletariat “on the ground.” They situate themselves at the crossroads between militant activism and the rents from their international patrons. They are simultaneously highly contested (because they do everything to “close the door behind them”) and relied upon for access to wages. They used to embody a form of social advancement and class revenge by means of political struggle.

To speak of a surplus proletariat is to say not that these people do not work, but that they are restricted to the very fringes of capitalist exploitation. Most of them work occasionally, in tiny structures, mostly linked to trade, earning low-end wages and without contracts (earning around ten dollars a day, while the cost of goods is indexed to those on the Israeli market). Others, in the West Bank, manage to continue working in Israel, in construction, restaurants, or agriculture. Their situation is highly precarious and they either cross the border illegally or rely on intermediaries for access to permits that may be rescinded at any time (all of them have been suspended since October 7, 2023). These contracted workers are paid around 1400 euros, from which must be deducted the prohibitive costs of “crossing” and, often, the acquisition of work permits. In the West Bank, a peasant economy also persists, often on a “supplementary” basis and under the pressures of the colonization process. Since the inception of Zionism, there has been a continuous tendency towards proletarianization among the farmers as a direct consequence of land grabs and the profit-maximization of the land.

And then, there’s the world of political rents, emerging out of the cash flows coming from international patrons to maintain some semblance of stability. These rents support the livelihoods of something like a quarter to a third of the population, keeping in mind that forty percent of the public servants working for the Palestinian Authority do so as security forces. They are paid according to the legal scale of ”formal” wages, something like 450 euros a month, but the Palestinian Authority’s funding by its patrons and by Israel (through a tax retrocession) is under constant threat of cutting, causing the frequent freezing of wages. Moreover, some of this political rent is hijacked by political cadres for their own use, or to support their clientele and develop their investments in the informal sector. A big part of the surplus proletariat survives thanks to these funds. This segment of the population, massively integrated into the workforce and Israel during the seventies and eighties, has become socially explosive, as when they took to the streets en masse during the two Intifadas. This population is concentrated in refugee camps, historically and to this day the reservoirs of the “dangerous classes.” In Gaza as in the West Bank, from Jabaliya to Jenin, these “ghettos within the ghetto” are under constant fire from the Israeli army.

The social structure in the Occupied Territories is therefore highly unstable. The political bourgeoisie and especially its cadres are always under threat of being forced to take a step backwards, i.e. by Israel downgrading their status from collaborator to resistance fighter, and therefore of being imprisoned.

OCL: And what about Gaza?

Minassian: In Gaza, during the period of Hamas leadership (since 2007), the centrality of the comprador bourgeoisie, integrated into the political circuits, and of political rents, has remained unchanged, but within a state of siege, meaning with even weaker investments and an exacerbated instability. The rents arise from the control of the circulation of commodities and from international patronage from Qatar and Iran. The entrepreneurs who have built up fortunes in recent years (in the tunnel economy, for example) have done so in partnership with the Hamas security apparatus.

Can we even talk of a class structure in the current situation in Gaza? Even in this kind of situation, where the future is almost completely uncertain from one day to the next, there are always groups of individuals (linked to Hamas, to clan-based military organizations, or as independent rackets) that manage to do business. But this doesn’t constitute a proper class structure—or else it’s the class structure of a concentration camp, with no prospects for social reproduction over time.

To Be Continued