The outbreak of the armed conflict in Lebanon between the Palestinian forces and the army of that country is part of a systematic policy followed by the reactionary Arab states of liquidating the. danger that extension of the Palestinian resistance creates for them. The conflict represents a new and more acute stage in the repeated attempts of the proimperialist Lebanese government to destroy the fighting vanguard of the Arab revolution — the Palestinian resistance.
Of the four Arab states bordering on the Zionist state— Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanonthe latter two have never supported the struggle against Israel. However, they have been the theater of a gradual but powerful establishment of the Palestinian resistance.
This effectively armed and strongly motivated force is eluding the control of these regimes and confronting them with an increased and permanent risk of reprisal from the Zionists.
These two governments fear such an eventuality above all else. The Jordanian army has never protected or aided the resistance fighters when they have been the target of bombings. or harassment by the Israelis. 1054
When the Beirut airport was attacked by Israeli special commandos in December, 1968, the Lebanese army, while taken by surprise, made no attempt at a response.
Each of these governments has conducted a policy of undermining the Palestinian resistance. Since November, 1967, when the Palestinian resistance first began to develop a mass base, Jordan has sought to smash it or at least keep it within the framework of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, as it was led and defined at the time of Ahmed Shukeiry.
But on two occasions, in November 1967 and November 1968, mobilizations by the popular masses in Jordan, an essential support for the resistance, blocked the counterrevolutionary maneuvers of the Jordanian King Hussein. In face of the mobilization of the people, he retreated. The establishment of the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon assumed a massive character at the beginning of this year. The attack on the Beirut airport was intended by the Israelis to intimidate and pressure the Lebanese government to take action against the resistance, which was conducting operations directed at the Israeli border areas from south Lebanon.;
The attack achieved its objective, but the consequences of the Lebanese leaders' maneuvers were to prove very serious for all of the Palestinian organizations, revealing the real positions of the Arab states.
The events in Lebanon have farreaching importance because they have exposed the real political nature of the governmental forces directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The insurrectionary wave spread from the Palestinian refugee camps, despite their systematic isolation from the surrounding population by the authorities. The refugees responded with an energetic offensive against the attempts at encirclement and surveillance by the Lebanese army, which presumably intended to bring the fedayeen to heel or to liquidate them outright. As a result of this, the situation in Lebanon was transformed. As in the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan,. the Palestinian commandos almost totally escaped the control of the official institutions such as the army, and built up a parallel military and administrative apparatus alongside them.
As in Jordan previously, the growth of resistance in Lebanon stirred the masses into mobilizing, and lifted the young, combative elements in the Palestinian refugee population to a higher political level. The intermixing of the Palestinian refugees and the Lebanese population, as in the case of the Jordanian people before, made it possible to draw broader Arab mass\ es into supporting the resistance.
Intercontinental Press Because support for the Palestinian resistance arose from the people and drew its power and determination from the exploited masses, it assumed a marked class character. And, in an objective sense, it opened up a seriod of class struggles against those Arab regimes, which, like the Lebanese, had clearly unmasked themselves as counterrevolutionary by trying to stab the Palestinian resistance in the back.
The Lebanese crisis highlights the rapid spread of the Palestinian revolutionary enthusiasm among the Arab states which border Israel and which are thus most directly affected by the resistance.
This crisis confirms the eminently revolutionary role which the dynamics of the Palestinian resistance is playing in the Arab world. The resistance organizations collectively constitute the present driving force of the Arab revolution, even though this is unconscious on the part of some of their components, since certain resistance movements do not pose the extension and culmination of the resistance in terms of an international socialist revolution.
The Palestinian insurrectionary spirit, which is now rife in Lebanon and which will soon spread to other parts of the Arab world, threatens the bourgeoisie and the parasitic "comprador" elements. As a result, this development disturbs the American imperialists, for whom Lebanon occupies a strategic and economically decisive place in the Near East.
Contradictory international forces are converging to smash the resistance. The Soviet Union is intervening in the Arab world through the states over which it has a measure of control, Egypt principally, and obstructing every extension of the resistance. The proposal which the Soviet Union advanced for a peace plan to be underwritten jointly with Egypt illustrates this policy.
Nasser's hypocritical policy of operating on two levels, that is, supporting the resistance and the search for peace, has just been demonstrated once again. The Lebanese events brought the revolutionary process to its highest stage. Nasser's proposals for negotiations, putting the Palestinian resistance fighters and the Lebfnese army on an equal footing, show the erosion of the Nasser who helped November 24, 1969 to revive the Palestinian mobilization. As the arbiter between the fedayeen and the Arab bourgeoisie, Nasser is striving to halt the revolutionary process. He clearly represents a middle ground between revolutionary dynamism and proimperialist conservatism. He can only continue to play this game with the support of the Soviet bureaucracy. Without their support he would not amount to very much today.
On the other side, in accordance with their customary counterrevolutionary policy, the imperialist forces wanted to strike a blow by forcing the Lebanese army to act. This advice was given publicly by an American representative, Sisco, when he declared his support for the Lebanese government. The American Sixth Fleet is in the Mediterranean ready to intervene, as it did in 1958, to prop up the ruling classes.
But the state of Israel, which comes within the American orbit, remains the force that refuses to subscribe to any peace. As a result, the East and West, which are collaborating to freeze the situation in the Near East, find themselves obliged to control and restrict totally the activity of the belligerents.
But the Soviets and Egypt find themselves unable to block the resistance completely. And the Americans and the British at present find themselves incapable of getting Israel to accept a peace.
The British minister of foreign affairs declared that Israel should return the occupied territories. The peace plan is taking form around a pseudo solution that would consist of considering only the situation since June 1967 and not since 1948.
The aim of this approach would be to remove the general problem by concentrating on some of its individual aspects. The objective would be to force Israel to return the occupied territories in exchange for recognition by the Arab states. In this way, the Zionist state would get what it has sought for twenty years and what the Arab states have refused to give.
But today this situation is reversed. Israel does not want to make peace and the Arab states are waiting in conjunction with the "Big Four." Making peace would be dangerous for the Zionists today. They cannot keep up their massive collecting of funds in the imperialist homelands except by shouting about the dangers of "war" and "genocide" that threaten the Jewish people. The Zionist leaders create this situation deliberately.
This peace operation of the Arab states and the Big Four is a perilous undertaking. And everything indicates that it is impossible on the basis of the present situation unless there is a massive repression of the Palestinian resistance or capitulation by its leaderships. The expansionist and militarist inner logic of the Israeli state is a stumbling block for this policy and objectively benefits the Palestinian resistance fighters, who have understood how to exploit this factor. But with the events in Lebanon, a higher stage of struggle opened in the resistance. The Palestinian liberation struggle assumed a new international dimension with the Lebanese crisis. In this sense, the liberation struggle turned into a conflict with the proimperialist Lebanese government which assumed the social form of a class struggle for which the resistance was not yet prepared. The Lebanese crisis represents a revolutionary awakening of the masses in Lebanon within an_internationalist frame that reveals the real face of the Arab revolution.
The Cairo agreement between Arafat and Bustani, the commander of the Lebanese army, is a compromise between the resistance and the Lebanese government. Given the nature of the Lebanese government and army, its durability remains limited. Sooner or later, presumably sooner, these mainstays of American imperialism will recommence their counterrevolutionary maneuvers.
After their attempts to corrupt the Lebanese regime, going as far as to threaten armed intervention, the American imperialists will now increase their pressure. The period we are now entering will see the revolutionary forces of the resistance and the forces of the Arab and imperialist counterrevolution prepare for new clashes. Thus, the Palestinian resistance fighters bear a considerable responsibility for the development of the Arab revolution, whose vanguard they are today. Nothing in factwas settled at Cairo. The so-called progressive Arab states, headed up by Nasser, have 1055 done nothing but temporize and gain a new reprieve by playing the conciliationist card.
The revolutionary Marxists must give firmer political support than ever to the Palestinian resistance, defend the historic and inalienable rights of Brazil the Palestinian population, and assist the new advances of the Arab revolution.
Down with the Arab reactionaries and the intrigues of imperialism!
Long live the Arab socialist revolution!