DOCUMENT
The crisis of the
PLO—a balance sheet
(The general line of the following report was adopted at the June 1986 meeting of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.) 1. Even before the official creation of the Israeli state in 1948, the fight against Zionist colonisation of Palestine was a central element of the national Arab struggle against Western domination, particularly after the installation of the British mandate in 1920. The 1948 war between the new state and its neighbours was to lead the Arab states to take direct responsibility for the liberation of Palestine. However, the defeat they suffered led to a first anti-imperialist radicalisation in the region. This led to nationalist coups d'état in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The new regimes all proclaimed their determination to avenge the 1948 defeat brought about by their predecessors. This determination was hardened by the fact that Israel's participation in the Franco-British aggresssion against Egypt in 1956 fully confirmed its role as imperialism's watchdog in the Middle East.
However, the impotence shown by the nationalist regimes faced with blatant Zionist provocations fed the scepticism with which these governments were regarded. Moreover, the victorious outcome of the Algerian national liberation war in 1962 popularised the idea of 'armed struggle' and 'people's war' , and encouraged the use of similar methods for the liberation of Palestine. The different facets of the nationalist movement organised for this objective. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was created, under Egyption protection, by decision of the first Arab summit in 1964, in order to co-opt into the framework of these states the new radicalisation that was developing. The different non-state tendencies of the nationalist movement also got in on the act. It was the most backward ideologically of these currents, the Fateh, inspired by the Islamic ideas of fundamentalist origins, that had the privilege of inaugurating the armed struggle on
76 International Marxist Review 1 January 1965. This practice, despite a fiercely right-wing political ideology-rejecting all social aspects of the struggle-was enough for Fateh to be outlawed by all Arab regimes, except for the most radical among them-the left Ba'athists who took power in Syria in 1966.
The crushing defeat of the Arab armies by the Zionist army in June 1967 ended in discrediting the regimes and allowed a second wave of radicalisation to flourish, this time at the level of the mass movement. The main expression of this new wave, the guerilla organisations, given the generic name of the Palestinian resistance, grew rapidly in 1968-69, particularly in Jordan. In 1969 they took control of the official PLO, which had been completely left behind by events.
These organisations were the Palestinian extensions of the different tendencies of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Arab nationalism. In addition to the Fateh already mentioned, the main ones were the Ba'athis Saiqa, directly dependent on Syria, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) of Habash, a product of the Nasserite Arab Nationalist Movement. The crisis of Nasserism following Egypt's defeat in 1967 led to an ideological radicalisation of the PFLP. The PFLP ended by identifying itself as 'MarxistLeninist' . Its left-wing split, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) —later the DFLP— of Hawatma, preceded it in this path in 1969. The only anti-imperialist current of the region to remain outside the Palestinian resistance was that of the Stalinists-despite one timid and rapidly abandoned attempt. This is explained by two reasons: their original sin in supporting the partition of Palestine in 1947, and their support for the "peaceful solution' proposed in Resolution 242 of the United Nations Security Council in November 1967. Both these positions were exclusively products of their allegiance to the Soviet Union.
The Palestinian resistance organisations' eruption onto the regional and world scene after 1967 was an irreversible fact of immense political significance. It affirmed the existence of a people, the Palestinian people, whose identity the Zionist state and its Jordanian neighbour had spent twenty years trying to obliterate, by turning them into 'Islamic Arabs' on one side of the border, and into 'West Bank Jordanians' on the other. It was, however, amongst the third section of this people-the refugees who had been expelled from the territories occupied by the Zionist state in 1947-48, and who now inhabited the camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria-that the Palestinian organisations recruited the bulk of their forces. The PLO, bringing together all these organisations from 1969 onwards, established itself as the leadership of the entire Palestinian people in their national struggle. and as such became the expression of a national identity and dignity which had been stifled for so long.
The crisis of the PLO-a balance sheet 77 Ideological diversity
Over and above the big ideological diversity of the organisations of the Palestinian resistance-not only between the different organisations but also within the biggest of them, the Fateh, where there co-existed currents from Islamic fundamentalism to Maoism-several political and organisational traits were common to all and constituted in fact their inherent limits. These traits came from two political characteristics: • Maximalism: the liberation of Palestine, the common objective figuring in the name of all the Palestinian organisations, cannot be compared to that of the liberation of Algeria, for example. If, in the latter case, it was an objective that the relationship of forces on the ground made possible, in the case of Palestine, the objective is of such scope that it is way beyond the possibilities of the Palestinian people alone-especially given that 60 per cent of Palestinians live outside their historic homeland and are subject to different Arab governments. Moreover, the attachment to their 'Promised Land' of Israeli Jews-forced out of their countries by racist oppression and implanted in Palestine by the Zionist movement-is of a completely different scale to that of the European settlers in Algeria who had a "motherland': France. In addition, the Zionist state is, aside from the formidable military power that it represents, considered by American imperialism as an integral part of its own territory. Under these conditions, the liberation of Palestine, in the sense of dismantling the Zionist state, is a task of scope that could not be achieved simply by the 'people's war' advocated by all the Palestinian organsations. This is why, given the lack of transitional demands such as the unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the territories occupied in 1967, the hegemony of the Palestinian resistance was limited in the first few years to the population of the Palestine refugee camps, whose marginal social situation made them receptive to maximalism. The very conception of the Palestinian armed struggle was shaped by maximalist illusions. Rather than being conceived as one element in an overall revolutionary strategy, complementing different forms of mass mobilisation, the armed actions of the resistance were conceived, Algerian-style, as an appropriate and adequate means of achieving liberation. This led inevitably to an impasse in the short term—an impasse which explains the increasing recourse of the Palestinian organisations since 1968 to "terrorist' type actions outside Palestine and the Arab region. • Palestino-centrism: the corollary of the maximalism of the Palestinian resistance was its incapacity to see itself within an overall regional revolutionary strategy. Bolstered by the illusions engendered by its spectacular growth in 1968-69, the resistance believed in the possibility, and indeed the proximity, of its own victory against the Zionist state. It thus gave at best only secondary attention to what should have been its priority task: the mobilisation of those allies without whom its struggle had no real perspective of victory.
78 International Marxist Review
The first of these was the working masses of the Arab countries, particularly in those countries in which Palestinian refugees were concentrated and in which the guerilla forces were based. Instead, the PLO-in what turned out to be a completely mistaken choice-favoured the immediate interests of its own actions and accommodated with the established governments, in the name of the holy struggle against the common national enemy, rather than fusing its forces with those of the working masses in order to achieve the revolutionary over-throw of the establised regimes and the coming to power of governments really prepared to support the struggle of the Palestinian people.
The second was the Jewish toiling masses, and particularly the most oppressed Sephardim. The 'de-Zionisation' of a sizeable portion of the Israeli Jewish population requires that the contradiction between Jewish workers' interests and those of the Zionist bourgeois establishment be clearly demonstrated, as well as their common historic interests with all the workers of the region. These two political objectives require an internationalist programmatic approach to the Israeli question, recognising the national entity created by the Zionist colonisation and a political and military practice which takes into account this approach. The militarist behaviour of all the Palestianian organisations and their predominant political and programmatic approach—with the ephemeral and marginal exception of the PDFLP-go directly in the opposite direction.
The most serious consequence of the Palestino-centrism of the Palestinian resistance is its dependence on the Arab regimes. In fact, not only the Fateh, who make a principle out of the 'non-interference in the internal affairs of the Arab states', but also the PFLP and the PDFLP, who talk of Arab revolution—not to mention the Saiqa which is a direct outgrowth of the Syrian regime—all were to immediately attach themselves to one or other state in the region; the PFLP to Iraq, the PDFLP to Syria, and Fateh to the Arab states as a whole and in particular the most backward of them all: the Saudi monarchy. This latter chose to shower its protege fabulous sums for a so-called revolutionary movement, no doubt with the intention of controlling it through the dependence it thus developed to the wealth. All the organisations were financially dependent to one degree or another, despite attempts at armed self-financing by the PFLP. Hegemony of Fateh 3. The Fateh had all these characteristics in an extreme form. Profiting from the elasticity of its ideology, its prestige as the first in the field and, last but not least, its financial means which far exceeded its competitors', Fateh very rapidly established itself as the majority and hegemonic organisation in the Palestianian resistance. This growth was translated into an enormous increase in the size of its army of 'professional fighters' , and in the
The crisis of the PLO-a balance sheet 79 number of people benefitting from assorted subsidies. It was accompanied by rapid bureaucratisation, fed by this abundance of resources that was thrown about with great extravagance. This process was consolidated by the 1969 fusion of the guerilla organisations with the PLO, which thus came under the hegemony of the Fateh. This fusion represented a union with the Palestianian bourgeoisie represented in the Palestine National Council (which since its creation in 1964 has been an appointed body-never elected), as well as Fateh's official integration into the League of Arab States in which the PLO-itself a creation of the League-participated.
The Arab reactionaries as a whole fell back on Yasser Arafat's organisation in order to 'exorcise' the danger represented by the dramatic growth of the Palestinian refugees' armed movement. As a result, Fateh was forever dependent on an eminently precarious balance between the pressure of the masses it led on the one hand and that of its Arab paymasters on the other. In the final analysis, the decisions it took every time it had to choose between these contradictory pressures were determined by its rapid process of bureaucratic "bourgeoisification'
This was particularly the case in Jordan in 1969-71, when the Fateh leadership took it upon itself to put a stop to the involvement by its left-wing rivals in the social or political affairs of the kingdom, in the name of the absolute primacy of the 'main contradiction' with the Zionist enemy. It thus morally disarmed the Palestinian resistance in relation to the Hashemite monarchy, which was obviously preparing to put down an armed mass movement which it had been forced to tolerate, but which was objectively in contradiction with its own rule. Dual power in Jordan could not last forever, despite the Fateh leadership's illusions of co-existence. And the only side determined to resolve this dual power in its own favour was the monarchy. Thus, when the Hashemite monarchy launched its big offensive against the Palestinian resistance in 1970, it found the Fateh leadership wavering and on the defensive, as well as concerned to differentiate itself from its leftwing rivals, even by blaming them for the confrontations. Not only was the Palestinian resistance morally disarmed, it was militarily disarmed, too, when the Arafat leadership agreed to disarm the militias, withdraw the fighters from the towns and park them in isolated areas, from which Hussein's army would have little difficulty in driving them out in 1971, thus putting an end to the armed Palestinian presence in the kingdom. This serious defeat was not the result of the objective balance of forces, but of a policy. This is even more so, given that a majority of both the civilian population of Jordan (the East Bank), and of the soldiers of the royal army, is of Palestinian origin.
The crushing of the PLO in Jordan completed the process of its bureaucratic degeneration, through the death in combat of its best fighters— those most devoted to the cause of their people-by the break in direct links with its main mass base, by the demoralisation that followed the defeat, and by the shift of its institutions to one country, Lebanon, where
4. The bureaucratic transformation (a bourgeois one, for the Fateh leadership) of the Palestianian organisations was inevitably accompanied by a revision of programme. The Jordanian defeat was attributed to 'leftism' and the maximalism of its years of glory, now increasingly put into question.
To this was in theory added, but in practice substituted, a minimalism much better adapted to the aspirations of the new Palestinian bureaucracy. For the latter, having taken on the characteristics of a real state apparatus 'in
', would now seek the shortest route to obtaining a territory of its own, on which to enjoy without hindrance these privileges fed by the 'manna"
of oil. The goal of liberating Palestine was kept as a long-term perspective.
more as the official Utopian dream than as a real programme. The new immediate aim, presented as realistic and achievable, was the creation of an 'independent Palestianian state' on the West Bank and in Gaza, Palestinian territories occupied by the Israeli army in 1967. In the minds of its devotees, this new goal was 'realistic' because it could be won without militarily defeating the Zionist state. That is, that it could be won by political and diplomatic means, combined with the armed struggle which would thus lose its fundamental character and become a supplementary means of pressure (the change had to do with the role of the armed struggle, not its
The PDFLP-whose degeneration took the specific form of Stalinisation and lining up with the Soviet Union-was the first to advocate such a programmatic revision. The Fateh leadership only opted for this revision after the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973. Judging that the new political conditions created by the war-particularly the diplomatic strengthening of the
Arab states due to the tremendous leap in oil revenues, and the Geneva conference of belligerent parties sponsored by the USA and the USSRnow made a 'political settlement' of the Arab-Israeli dispute possible, the
Fateh leadership decided to demand its 'share of the cake"
ed the return by Israel of the Palestianian territories occupied in 1967 as
PLO adopted the programme of the 'Palestinian state' from 1974. This happened in stages, with the adoption of a series of formulae, from 'national power over all liberated territory' (1974) to 'the independent state' (1977).
But however it was formulated, the new programme was based on a false argument. If the aim was really to install a sovereign and independent Palestinian national power, as a partial expression of the Palestinian people's self- determination on the West Bank and in Gaza—leaving aside the totally illusory independence of such a mini-state completely trapped in the Israeli vice, with its back to Jordan on the one side (the West Bank) and to the
80 International Marxist Review bureaucratic privileges could be really enjoyed.
Triumph of minimalism exile' forms. This remains the same to this very day).
an absolute precondition for an 'overall settlement'
. They demand-
. The Fateh-dominated
sea and desert on the other side (Gaza). with Israel stuck in between the iwo-then it would be quite impossible to achieve this through a (negotiated)
Israeli agreement to withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967. At best, the Zionist state would agree to a very partial withdrawal from the West
Bank—where it has already 'appropriated' almost half the land-and Gaza, involving draconian conditions which would render these territories little more than Bantustans, and this at the price of a total political capitulation,
Real Palestinian self-determination, even limited to the West Bank and
Gaza. cannot be 'negotiated' with the Zionist state. It can only be imposed by struggle. In this sense, such a goal, whose purpose is to allow a more intense mobilisation of the Palestinian masses in the teritories concerned, as well as to win support from a not-insignificant part of the Israeli-Jewish population, takes on a transitional character. It completes the demand for the total and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories occupied in 1967, and should itself be completed by that other partial self- determination of the Palestinian people which requires the revolutionary overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy, the second main oppressor of the
Palestinians after the Zionist state. Such partial achievements of self- determination are transitional steps towards the strategic objective of destroying the Zionist state, which would require the conditions described above
Even if the leadership of the Fateh-PLO claimed, in 1974, to stand by the "Transitional' interpretation of the new goal, the political context of the step left no doubt about its real intentions, oriented towards the time. The PFLP proceeded to break with the PLO structures and, together with other organisations formed the Rejection Front. The PLO leadership increasingly prioritised diplomatic activity, profiting from the new conditions created by the October 1973 war. Its new programme, much more
'legitimate' in the eyes of Moscow, the Arab and non-aligned states and even certain sectors of imperialism, enabled it to make some progress on this front. As a result, the more 'reasonable' PLO was recognised by the
Islamic summit in Lahore and the Arab summit in Rabat as the sole had tried to compete with the Palestinian resistance in the anti-Zionist struggle. Once the PLO placed itself within the framework of participating in a negotiated solution, it came up against the very real rivalry of the Jordanian regime. This is the reason for the affirmation of its exclusive right to represent the Palestinian people. The different PLO allies, Arab or Islamic states or others, were all the more ready to recognise the right because they knew that only the PLO could credibly represent the Palestinians in a negotiated settlement. In other words, only the PLO could really contribute to defusing one of the most dangerous problems for imperialist stability in the region and internationally. It was also in 1974 that the privileged
Sadat-style, by the Arab states.
in point 2.
'negotiated solution' legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people'
The crisis of the PLO-a balance sheet 81
. This is, moreover, what the PFLP pointed out at the
'. Since 1967, no-one
82 International Marxist Review relations between the PLO and the Soviet Union were established. The Soviet Union had, only a few years previously, called the Fateh 'adventurist' and 'Trotskyist' (sic). A negotiated settlement 5. The option taken by the PLO leadership of a strategic goal, of a negotiated settlement, even if combined with other forms of struggle, led inexorably to its later political evolution. The objective of an 'independent Palestianian state' itself could not be achieved by the strength of the Palestinian people alone. Between an unconditional withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967, and their formal annexation with the expulsion of the majority of their inhabitants. the Zionist state would not hesitate to choose the second. This is why the achieving of this objective implied a dynamic of forces going in the direction of the maximalist strategic objective. However, the Fateh-PLO leadership was not in the least ready to try and find the means to carry out this policy, in contradiction with its bourgeois bureaucratic nature and its financial dependence on Saudi Arabia. Rather than looking for support from the working masses of the Arab countries and taking its full place in the world-wide struggle against imperialism without any ambiguity, the Arafat leadership looked for a means to carry out its own policy among the reactionary Arab forces, the European imperialists and the 'moderate' Zionist factions. Their primary objective was getting recognition from American imperialism-the only power that would be able to impose a "solution' on the Zionist state against its will.
Nevertheless, the very ambiguity of the PLO leadership's positions, combining anti-imperialist statements and sideways nods to imperialism, and the ambiguity of its socio-political position as a bourgeois leadership acting as the buffer between the mass movement from which it drew its enormous material resources, could in no way satisfy the American imperialists, nor even less the Zionist regime. This is why these two sought constantly, by different means, direct and indirect, to destroy the most radical element in this situation: the armed mass movement of Palestinians, for which Lebanon had become since 1971 the main sanctuary.
From 1973 it became obvious that the reactionary Lebanese army would be unable to carry out this task alone. Washington thought that it would be able to get there by adding in the forces of the reactionary Christian militias. These were thus thrown into the fight in 1975. The only result of this was to provoke a nationalist-religious reaction from the Muslim majority of the Lebanese population, which led to the break-up of the Lebanese state and a considerable strengthening of the PLO's power in Lebanon. Neverthless the leadership of the PLO constantly favoured the various bourgeois Muslim leaderships, Sunni as well as Shi'ite (Amal) or Druze. It even extended a hand—in vain—a number of times to the Christian far-
The crisis of the PLO-a balance sheet 83 right in the hope of reaching a deal. When the reactionary Christian forces came within a hairbreadth of total defeat in 1976, Washington negotiated with the Syrian regime, promising to stop tyring to bypass it by seeking a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace-for which Kissinger had been striving since 1975. In exchange, Damascus undertook to save the Lebanese allies of imperialism and re-establish a bourgeois order in Lebanon. The Syrian attempt, however, came up against very strong resistance from the Palestinian and Lebanese masses. Nevertheless it ended in Syrian control of all Lebanese territory north of the red line fixed by Israel, by virtue of an agreement made with the PLO leadership under Saudi patronage (the Riyadh conference, October 1976). The Arab regimes plumped for a wait-and-see policy, on the eve of the American presidential elections.
It was the Israeli elections that brought about a change in the situation, with the arrival in power of the hard-right Likud, led by Begin. All perspective of a negotiated 'overall settlement' thus becoming out of the question, Sadat went for his celebrated 'peace initiative' which gave rise a few months later, in September 1978, to the Camp David agreement. Syria, finding itself forced into the anti-American camp, re-established its alliance with the PLO and the Lebanese left, to the detriment of the reactionary Christian camp. Direct Israeli intervention remained the last recourse against the Palestinian resistance now allied to the Lebanese left and Syria. There was a first Israeli invasion, in South Lebanon, in 1978—leading to the arrival of United Nations 'peace keepers' in the region. Rather than being a hindrance to the PLO and its allies they in fact served objectively as a shield for them. A much bigger and longer-lasting invasion was necessary. It took place in June 1982 when the conditions were right: Reagan in command in Washington, and Israeli withdrawal from Sinai achieved (April 1982) in a way that would not disturb the Egyptian-Israeli 'peace' The evacuation of Beirut 6. The Israeli army's seige of Beirut left the PLO only one alternative. Either stubborn resistance with all the risks that would entail, but also with a real possibility of victory, the Israeli army being far from invincible as was later shown by its discomfiture faced with the resistance of the South Lebanese masses, or political capitulation and saving its bacon by getting out. It was this latter option—which it had been conditioned to take by its socio-political nature-which prevailed in the first few days of the siege, when the Arafat leadership opened negotiations with Reagan's envoy on the conditions for evacuating the Palestinian fighters in Beirut. After long negotiations, the PLO ended up by accepting all the American conditions (the Habib plan), including the intervention of multi-imperialist troops. In return, the Reagan administration promised to recognise the necessity for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza so that 'Palestinian
84 International Marxist Review' self-government' could be instituted—on the strict condition that this should be linked to Jordan. This new official American position, not present in the Camp David agreement, was announced on the very day that the last PLO troops were evacuated from Beirut, it was the 'Reagan Plan' (1 September 1986).
By evacuating the Lebanese capital, the PLO leadership lost the last territory where the Palestinian fighters could act autonomously—particularly as it had now agreed that they be dispersed to the four corners of the Arab world. By so doing it had also gone along with the essential objective of the American-Israeli offensive: to undermine the destabilising effect of the Palestinian armed mass movement, and thus getting what suited it-freedom from awkward pressure that it had been under until then. The PLO leadership thought it would now have its hands freer to carry through its 1970s political option. Even more than that, as the implacable logic of capitulation had led it to abandon the idea of the 'independent Palestine state' as. after all, almost as unrealistic as the previous maximalism, it was going for the 'Jordanian option' proposed by Reagan. A few days after Reagan's speech proposing a 'Jordanian-Palestinian confederation', Arafat then lost no time in replying positively to this invitation by going to Amman in person to discuss the forms of his new collaboration with the Hashemite king.
Even after Beirut and in the context of a bourgeois policy, the Jordanian option was not the only one that the Arafat leadership had. There was another still possible: the Syrian option. But this would suppose a confrontation with Washington, along the lines of the pre-1982 policy the Reagan plan did not mention by name the Syrian plateau, the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967). This latter option would also mean that the Arafat leadership would have to accept Syrian protection and postpone indefinitely the perspective of a state on its own, even if in cohabitation with Jordan. Arafat believed, with a certain right-wing naivety, in the promises of the Reagan plan. He thus chose to place himself in that.framework, and in April 1983 reached a draft agreement with Hussein. However, Arafat knew that his new line would provoke broad opposition: first from Syria, then from Libya-both opposed to American policy. There would also be opposition from the Palestinian left, including from the radical nationalist wing of his own organisation, Fateh.
Arafat thus deliberately chose to break all links with those most firmly opposed to the Jordanian option since May 1983, so that he would be able to advance in relations with Hussein. The confrontations that followed with Syria and its Palestianian allies led to the evacuation of Arafat's supporters from the Lebanese territory remaining under Syrian control in December 1983. Leaving Tripoli in North Lebanon, Arafat went straight to Cairo to meet the Egyptian president Mubarak-thus breaking the official Arab boycott of the Egyptian regime, in force since Sadat signed his peace treaty with Israel. In this way Arafat indicated clearly and without the least ambiguity that he had chosen to place himself within the framework of
American policy in the Middle East. All that remained for him to do was to hope that the combined efforts of Mubarak, Hussein and the Saudi King
Fahd, would bring about his official recognition by Washington, in
7. The most radical Palestianian opposition to the new policy of the Arafat leadership came from the ranks of Fateh itself. The 'dissidence' as it is commonly called, in fact represents the radical continuity of the Fateh line consistent than the Fateh of that period, which allied itself with Saudi Arabia and kept on good terms with Jordan-regimes that were directly linked to the imperialist power that the whole of Palestinian resistance considered
It also means that the Fateh dissidence, whose chief figure is Abu Musa, does not in the least provide a new path for the Palestinian resistance, but simply reproduces all its congenital defects. This is particularly shown by its attitude to the Syrian regime (and its Palestinian instrument, the Saiqa)
from which it is incapable of differentiating itself politically or in practice, necessity for Palestinian armed organisation operating in Lebanon to establish an alliance with the Syrian regime, such an alliance could be kept at the level of a united front tactic while preserving a political autonomy expressed through clear differences, rather than covering them over as is the case. By avoiding any problems with the Syrian regime, the dissidence is compromising itself not only in the eyes of the Syrian masses but also, and most seriously, in the eyes of the Palestine masses, without whose supp-
As for the traditional left of the Palestinian resistance-the PFLP and the DFLP, reunited in 1983 in a 'joint leadership'—at the beginning of the conflict between Arafat and his opponents it took a conciliatory attitude, along the lines of the Soviet Union, of not wishing to break links with the official PLO leadership and hoping to see it drop the Jordanian-American option, by conviction or by frustration. This attitude was frustrated by the behaviour of the Arafat leadership which arrogantly unilaterally convoked a meeting of the PNC, in which it had been assured a comfortable majority since 1969, given the appointed membership—at Amman (a significant choice in itself) in November 1984. The meeting was to be inaugurated by Hussein, the butcher of 1970. The alliance between the DFLP an PFLP was broken when the latter decided to abandon its conciliatory attitude and join up with the Fateh dissidence, the Saiq and other minor organisations to form the Palestinian National Salvation Front under Syrian protection.
The DFLP, in alliance with the Palestinian CP, remained faithful to the recompense for his stance.
Fateh 'dissidence' of 1968-70. That is an enemy on the same footing as the Zionist state.
on the pretext of a 'strategic alliance' port they have no reason to exist.
The crisis of the PLO-a balance sheet 85
, it has the features already described above, but is more
. However, despite the undeniable
USSR which, although increasingly dissatisfied with Arafat, did not want to give up hope of winning him back, or at least winning back the official
8. The importance of the Arafat-led PLO for the USSR is not simply a question of its status as the "legitimate representative of the Palestinian people'-a status that the USSR has largely contributed to establishing within the UN, and which could make it impossible for Arafat to accept an
American peace. Its importance primarily comes from the undeniable fact that his status goes hand in hand with the support of the majority of the
Palestinian people, particularly in the West Bank and Gaza, for the Arafat leadership. In fact, the only relatively positive aspect of the PLO leadership's turn in 1974 was the increased attention given to mobilising the masses in the territories occupied in 1967, now claimed by the Palestinian leadergramme, despite its right-wing implications (it should not be forgotten that these were not explicit at the start), was much better suited to winning the support of the majority of the population in these territories than its previous maximalism. For the immediate priority of these people is to get rid of the
Israeli occupation. Therefore, apart from a radical, critical minority, particularly amongst young people, they are naturally pushed towards choosing whatever seems to be the shortest route to freeing their lands from the
Israeli yoke, whether this route be Jordanian, Palestinian or, since 1983.
Jordano-Palestinian. In addition to this objective pressure, there are social and material factors that link one section of Palestinian notables to the
Hashemite monarchy, and another section to the PLO leadership, each with
However, despite the Arafat-Hussein agreement, officially sealed in
February 1985, the rivalry between the two parties in the 1967 occuppied territories has continued. More precisely, the Hashemite monarchy has never for a single moment stopoped moving around its pawns just as it chooses, in collaboration with its old partners, the Zionist Labour Party, which came
The collusion betwen these two was demonstrated by the nomination of the pro-Hashemite businessman, Zafer Al-Masri, as mayor of Nablus, replacing the nationalist Bassam Chakaa, who had been dismissed by the
Israeli occupiers in 1982. In addition to this political operation, which it was intended to duplicate throughout the West Bank, Hussein announced in February 1986 that he was breaking off his collaboration with the PLO leadership, accusing them of subterfuge. The assassination of Al-Masri in
March seems to have put the joint manoeuvres of Peres and Hussein into cold storage-for the time being, anyway. This did not, however, stop Hus-
86 International Marxist Review
PLO he leads.
PLO's international relations ship as the site for establishing an 'independent state' its own clientele.
. The PLO's new proback to power in 1984 under the leadership of Peres.
The crisis of the PLO-a balance sheet 87 sein from fomenting a Palestinian 'split' of his own in April, led by one of the most corrupt of the PLO leaders, Abul-Zaim.
The Arafat leadership is thus finding itself losing on all fronts, caught in the trap of its own treason, fed on its own illusions. Algeria, with the Soviet Union's blessing, threw it a line by calling for the reunification of the PLO. This call might appeal to some of Arafat's most reticent collaborators, but he himself has preferred to rely on Mubarak and the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein—his favourite allies of the moment—as well as Fahd, his longtime supporter, to put pressure on the Jordanian regime and force it to make another agreement. Arafat knows that the other Arab leaders, unlike Hussein for whom he is a direct rival, need him as a political ally. Not that this means that they put any less pressure on him to go all the way with his capitulation and officially recognise Resolution 242 of the Security Council (adopted in November 1967) as Washington demands. This would be to give up his last card, a gesture in return for which he demands a formal guarantee of American recognition. Whatever the outcome of all this wheeling and dealing, the balance sheet of the Arafat leadership is already one of total failure along the reactionary path that it deliberately chose. The crisis of the PLO 9. After twenty years of existence, the Palestinian resistance is today going through a very deep crisis. None of its official components, including those on its left wing, gives any sign of being able to overcome this crisis. To do so would demand a radical change in strategy and behaviour, whilst the Palestinian left, at best, represents continuity with the past in both its programme and its forms of existence. Only the emergence of a revolutionary proletarian current within the Palestinian struggle, intimately connected with the revolutionary proletarian movement in the countries where it takes place, will enable this struggle to find a way out of its present historical impasse. The Palestinian people's national struggle cannot triumph unless it links up with the class struggle in the region and takes on an internationalist orientation.
The Fourth International, unlike the world Stalinist movement, has always denounced the Zionist project in Palestine and supported the right of the Palestinian Arab people to their free self-determination. It has always supported the struggles of the Palestinian masses against Zionism, imperialism and its Arab allies, regardless of the nature of the leadership of these struggles. Such support does not prevent it from criticising the reactionary policies of the Arafat leadership or the blind, systematic terrorism practised by groups like that of Abu Nidal, nor in general those features and positions of the Palestinian organisations, which need to be overcome in the interests of the Palestinian people themselves.
88 International Marxist Review
In the imperialist countries in particular, as well as everywhere else. the Fourth International defends the right of all Palestinian organisations to open offices for their representatives and to enjoy complete freedom of expression. It also defends Palestinian activists against bourgeois repression. without necessarily supporting all the actions carried out by these activists. or attributed to them. While criticising these actions which imply indiscriminate terrorism and which damage the interests of the Palestinian struggle, the Fourth International denounces the real terrorists-by far the most murderous-the imperialist states, led by the United States and the Israeli state. The cycle of violence born in Palestine with Zionist colonisation, will only cease when all forms of national oppression have been abolished and all forms of national or religious discrimination are ended-that Is. when proletarian internationalism triumphs. in defence of which the Fourth International was founded.
SALAH JABER