For the twenty-five years that the Zionist state has existed in Palestine, the Arab East has been thrown into a permanent state of intermittent war. The whole responsibility for that situation rests on the role Israel plays as policeman for imperialism, combined with the particular aims of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.
The fourth Arab-Israeli war of autumn 1973 is a new phase in the armed resistance of the Arab peoples to the counterrevolutionary policy of aggression systematically practiced by the Zionist state. Even though this war pits the armies of bourgeois Arab regimes against the Zionist armies, its character is that of a struggle against Israeli colonialism and expansionism. It follows that revolutionary Marxists affirm the legitimate character of the struggle of the Arab states against Zionism and call for their victory.
But any illusion about the ability of the Arab regimes to consistently confront Zionism and imperialism would be out of order. As far as Egypt, Syria, and the Arab states that are supporting them are concerned, the aim of the war is a compromise between Israel and the Arab regimes that would be less unfavorable to the Arab bourgeoisies and military bureaucracies; a compromise that would allow them to contain the mobilization of the Arab masses against Zionism and imperialism within limits acceptable from the standpoint of their own 1246 economic and political interests.
Then recognition of the state of Israel, the Zionist colonial presence in Palestine, would become possible for the exploitative Arab owning classes, while at the same time the oppression and expulsion of the Arab people of Palestine would be maintained.
No peaceful solution and no measure appearing as such can ever be found to the Arab-Israeli conflict unless it recognizes the right of the Arabs of Palestine to take back their lands. The origin of the conflict lies in the denial of that right, and so does the root of future conflicts. Because the struggle of the Arabs of Palestine is a basically radical anti-imperialist and proletarian one, it is a permanent threat to the Arab bourgeoisies just as it is to the Zionist state. It requires the destruction of the Zionist socioeconomic structure and state and can be achieved only through the socialist revolution in the region, based on a common fight of the Jewish and Arab working masses.
All the Arab regimes and Israel, along with their respective military and financial supporters, oppose this solution, the only one that can possibly establish real and durable peace in the Arab East.
A so-called peaceful solution imposed by Washington and Moscow would mean acceptance of the Zionist state. Revolutionary Marxists oppose this mystification and denounce the intervention of the great powers in the Arab-Israeli conflict. No accord arrived at by Washington and Moscow can bring peace to the Arab East or to the world. The policy of socalled peaceful coexistence can lead only to partial compromises between the interests of American imperialism and the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, compromises attained at the expense of the revolutionary struggle of the masses for socialism.
While revolutionary Marxists are obviously in favor of the unconditional and complete withdrawal of the Zionist armies from the territories occupied after the Israeli aggression of June 1967, they never separate that demand from the right of the Palestinians to regain their country. They denounce the attitude of the Arab regimes and of Arab reaction, which are prepared to compromise behind the backs of the Arab masses in general and the Palestinians in particular.
They call for the arming and organization of the Arab masses to transform the present war into a revolutionary offensive against Zionism and imperialism, for total freedom of action for the Palestinian resistance to operate from and within all Arab countries. They call for support to the struggle of anti-Zionist Jews within Israel, that struggle being an essential component of the struggle against Zionism. The Arab bourgeoisies have neither the right nor the ability to substitute themselves for that struggle, which must be waged jointly by the workers and peasants of the whole Arab East.
For the defeat of Zionism and imperialism!
Long live the struggles of the toiling masses of the Arab East!
Long live the socialist revolution in the Arab East!