Democratic Palestine : 31 (ص 33)
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- Democratic Palestine : 31 (ص 33)
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common good. Call no. 2 assigns the
leading role to the workers in view of
the impact of their strike, while also
singling out for special mention the
revolutionary role of the camp masses.
Successive calls assign progressively
more specific tasks to different sectors
in accordance with their ability. For
example, from call no. 1, doctors were
called on to mark their cars, so that
they could be easily identified for help-
ing the injured; they should be on alert
along with the pharmacists. Call no. 3
proposes specialized health committees
to aid those under siege. By call no. 14,
these committees are charged with
conducting first aid and preventive
medicine courses. Indeed, the in-
dependent Palestinian medical sector
has mushroomed under the uprising.
One example is the Medical Relief
Committees which date back to 1979,
and now encompass 800 health care
professionals. While in 1982, their
mobile clinics saw 2,000 patients, in
1987, they served 50,000; in the first
five months of the uprising alone, they
served 28,000.
Another case in point is that of
students. Call no. 3 advocates making
the Zionist policy of closing educa-
tional institutions backfire by mobiliz-
ing all students «in the school of
revolution.» As the uprising became a
permanent phenomenon, students were
directed to contribute by organizing
their own life, in this case popular
education. Students were urged to
coordinate with mass organizations and
the staff of educational institutions to
force the reopening of the schools, to'
struggle for the release of their detained
collegues, and above all not to leave the
country in search of an education, as
happened in the past.
«LET US BE OUR OWN
MASTERS» —
COLLECTIVELY
Starting with call no. 4, one finds the
guidelines for self-sufficiency: tilling
the land, vegetable gardening, keeping
livestock, frugality, encouraging the
national economy and full capacity at
local production sites, for as noted in
call no. 8, the Vietnamese defeated US
tyranny not by guns alone, but also
with their small farms. By striving for
self-sufficiency, the people of the
uprising are simultaneously revitalizing
the cooperative traditions of the
peasantry, and creating new social pat-
terns. A biproduct of this is a tendency
towards class solidarity and in some
cases, Class leveling.
Women are being affected by the new
models for production. The best ex-
ample is cooperatives for processing
and preserving local produce as a con-
tribution to self-sufficiency. At the
same time, this provides employment to
rural women. One cooperative, which is
called Our Production is our Pride, lists
among its aims: «The transformation
of women’s traditional role in the
domestic economy into a positive role
in the national economy.» Our Pro-
duction is our Pride is run on a truly
democratic basis, with the general
membership making all decisions.
Through the successive calls, one can
distinguish a new mode of social rela-
tions in factory work. The UNL calls
for doubling production at local
workplaces, but at the same time warns
factory owners against dismissing
workers, deducting for strike days or
prolonging working hours; rather
working conditions should be improved
and the maximum number of workers
employed. On this basis, workers are
encouraged to enter into labor con-
tracts in line with the national interest.
Along the same lines, landlords are
instructed to reduce rents by 25%,
while tenants are urged to pay without
evasion; doctors are also required to
reduce their fees (of course, many are
treating the wounded of the uprising
free). This is part of a deliberate policy
to make a relative redistribution of in-
come for the sake of bolstering stead-
fastness, as became clear in call no. 29.
This directed the popular committees to
form national levying committees to
collect from those who were able to give
(merchants not harmed during the
uprising, factory owners, employees
and academics) «in order to achieve
social solidarity.» This money should
be distributed on a regular basis, at the
end of each month, to the needy. In
this, the popular committees, the
backbone of popular authority and the
seed of the Palestinian state, have taken
over another «state» function. The oc-
cupation’s illegal taxation has been
superceded by the revolutionary tax
and welfare system.
SEMILIBERATION
Call no. 22 of July 21st states: «Our
masses’ new lifestyle and the many new
forms of confronting the occupation’s
repression, .are indications that the
uprising has entered a qualitatively new
stage.» The same call stresses that all
problems should be referred to the
popular committees (a situation that
already exists in most places), in order
to replace the occupation authority
with popular authority. This state of
semiliberation is also reflected in the
battlefield; features, though not the
general character, of liberated areas,
can already be discerned. Since the ear-
ly days of the uprising, especially in the
Gaza Strip, there were repeated in-
stances of the occupation troops being
driven out of camps or quarters, if only
for a short period; curfews were suc-
cessfully defied. This phenomenon
soon spread to the West Bank where the
Occupation was forced to send large
contingents of soldiers to recapture
villages and camps. It has been steadily
escalated since. Call no. 20 of June 21
notes that in the foregoing week, there
had been a «new transition» with large
confrontations, molotovs, facing set-
tlers and forcing the occupation to an-
nounce its weakness. The calls of this
period emphasize collective defiance of
curfews, arrests, house demolitions and
tax collection. By the autumn, evading
arrest had become a mass phenomenon.
Call no. 29 notes that: «All the wanted
and pursued are participating in the
confrontations against the enemy
forces; they are masked and know to
withdraw at the right moment, lest they
be assassinated or detained... we will
prove to the enemy that none of their
many varied attempts to use force will
be successful. Our people have broken
the harness; they are not ready to ac-
cept anything less than freedom and
independence.» @
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