At the present moment a battle is raging in Jordan between the armed forces of the Hashemite monarchy and the Palestinian guerrillas. The guerrillas are fighting alone. Not one of the demagogic Arab regimes, so prodigal in verbal assurances of solidarity, has offered material aid. The outcome of this struggle, still hanging in the balance, will prove decisive for the next stage of the Arab revolution.
A victory for the fedayeen would touch off a revolutionary rise of unprecedented proportions in the Middle East, changing the balance of social forces there in an even more spectacular way than did the nationalization of the Suez Canal or the revolution in Iraq in 1958.
A defeat would certainly signal the physical liquidation of the Palestinian fighters in Lebanon. It would considerably strengthen the imperialist grip in the area, increase the weight of the Zionist state, and gravely injure the whole revolutionary national Arab movement, particularly the vanguard in Dhofar and South Yemen.
The bloody confrontation of September 1970 is the logical and calculated outcome of the Rogers Plan, which is in reality a Nixon-Kosygin plan. All the participants in these transactions were fully aware that the major obstacle to their aim of liquidating the Palestinian problem was the Palestinian people themselves. The famous United Nations resolution of November 22, 1967, which shamelessly brushed aside the national rights of this martyred people, constitutes the keystone. And the delayed outcome in 1970 of the 1967 resolution is explained in good part by the frantic search by all those involved to strangle the Palestinian revolutionary process in the most expedient way, whether by piecemeal methods or by armed violence.
Thus the fedayeen today face a united front of world imperialism, the Soviet bureaucracy, and Arab reaction (including the radical petty bourgeoisie, whether through affinity with the current regimes or through congenital cowardice.) Not least of the paradoxes is that the dyed-in-the-wool enemies of Arab emancipation—the Zionist authorities and American imperialism—are trying to use the Arabs themselves to carry out their dirty work. The Nasser regime, playing along with this game, will never be able to live down its infamous treachery. In the wings stand the White House and the Pentagon, readying U.S. troops to intervene should Hussein and his generals prove incapable of drowning the fedayeen in blood.
In the general context of the Middle East and even the Arab world as a whole, the fedayeen unquestionably constitute a redoubtable enemy. Not for Israel on the military level, since, despite what has been said, the Palestinian guerrilla forces remain very weak (except in Gaza)—but politically; and not only for Israel but for the Arab regimes, for world imperialism, and for the Soviet bureaucracy.
The Palestinian resistance is undermining the very foundations of the bourgeois state in Jordan, rallying to its side the best elements of the Arab youth. This threatens in the long run to upset the precarious and unstable equilibrium of the region, opening the dikes to the rising tide of the Arab revolution. This is the peril which the enemies of the revolution seek at all costs to eliminate. Hence the determination of the Arab reaction to liquidate the fedayeen.
It is significant in this respect that the head-on assault was preceded by police measures in the United Arab Republic, particularly against the most advanced wing of the Palestinian resistance.
This same process explains the common interest which all the forces hostile to the broadening revolutionary perspectives in the Levant have in supporting Operation Liquidation. Hence the silent complicity of the whole ensemble of Arab states and bureaucratized states. Aware of the dialectical interdependence of the various sectors of the world revolution, the leaders of the Kremlin are acting with a sure instinct to preserve their privileged caste interests.
Unquestionably, the only hope the Palestinians have for victory in the final analysis lies along the road of mobilizing the Arab masses and gaining broad international support, whatever the immediate consequences of the current fighting.
The life-and-death struggle developing today constitutes the most glaring proof of the failure of the policy of "neutrality" in Arab "domestic affairs." The Arab regimes have flagrantly disregarded the most elementary principles of solidarity in order to silence the Palestinians. Today it can be seen what it has cost the liberation movement because the most outstanding leaders sought to avoid combating the hold of Nasserism on the Arab population and for having given up organizing the popular masses of the region. The lesson will not be lost, just as the June 1967 defeat buried Shukairy and his racist ideology.
At the present time the primary task of all the revolutionists in the Middle East and throughout the world is to unconditionally defend the Palestine resistance, the vanguard of the Arab revolution, against all its enemies, above all the main enemy, U.S. imperialism.