Marxist Lesson of States Formation and Social Struggles in the Middle East

2023 Introduction

With the ongoing brutal war between Israel and Gaza in mind, we present our old study of the question of Palestine and the Middle East titled Marxist Lesson of States Formation and Social Struggles in the Middle East from 1983. Our Party has published one article and one General Meeting report in the The Communist Left since then, titled "Social and Class Issues Underlie the Israeli-Palestinian Tragedy" (CL 18, 2003), "Economy and Society in Israel and Palestine" (CL 46, 2020). We will rely on these party texts to explain our understanding of the important events that have transcribed after the publication of our study from 1983.

The Palestinian question was finally officially “resolved” in 1993 following secret negotiations between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel during the First Intifada mass protests against the Israeli occupation which had begun in 1987. With the agreement, Israel and the PLO officially recognized each other as the legitimate representatives of their respective peoples. In 2003, we wrote:

“The Oslo Agreement was very advantageous to the Israeli bourgeoisie, and satisfied it as regards its territorial, economic, social and economic demands and indeed left it with very little more to wish for. This agreement, accepted by the timid and corrupt Palestinian bourgeoisie, provided for the creation of a puppet State, an out and out “Bantustan”, where it promised to confine its own proletariat, for use on the spot or in Israel as cheap labour.

The bourgeois National Palestinian Authority, equipped with a strong repressive apparatus supplied and trained by the Israelis and Americans, took on the job of maintaining order in exchange for being able to carry on its business affairs in Israel’s shadow. The deal would also ensure a fair share of the easy profits to the Arabic countries and to Europe, all of whom have been interested in dividing up and maintaining control over this highly strategically important region for the last fifty years; keeping the peace by keeping the Palestinians (and the Israelis) as perpetual war hostages.

The defence of the Oslo Agreement has been taken to ridiculous lengths by the Palestinian leadership, whose submissive collaboration with the Israeli bourgeoisie and its State is now complete. The Palestinian police and secret services have collaborated fully with the Israeli police and secret services and with the secret services of the United States by providing information damaging not only to their current opponents, but also to the most combative proletarian groups: that is when they haven’t succeeded in repressing them themselves, or machine-gunning them down in the streets. And it wouldn’t be long before the leaders of the Palestinian trade-unions became a subject of interest to their own “autonomous” police force.

Even on the economic front, collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian employers is close: “Beyond the links formalised in the Agreement – writes N.Pacadou in Le Monde diplomatique in March 2001 – the reality of the economic dependence of the Palestinian territories on the Jewish State maintains networks of interests that unite the neighbouring “military-commercial complex” of the Palestinian National Authority to Israeli officials, without whom the monopoly on imports of raw materials enjoyed by the Palestinian public societies wouldn’t be exercised”. The article continues: “The initial ambiguity about what constitutes autonomy thus condemns the Palestinian Authority to an impossible task: to carry forward the national struggle by collaborating with the occupiers”.

The reason for the failure of the Oslo Agreement is that the Palestinian machinery of repression hasn’t been up to the police duties assigned to it by international capitalism, and nor could it be.

Knowing this full well, the Israeli State, as well as it being in its own interests, has never ceased pursuing its expansionist policies, planting new colonies, expropriating land and water, and opposing any argument for the return of the millions of refugees still living in camps dispersed throughout the Middle-East.”

As the Palestinian Authority grew more and more collaborations, other bourgeois currents emerged to replace it as the leading organization of Palestinian nationalism. The organization that filled this role more than all the others was Hamas, section of the Muslim Brotherhood. As we wrote in 2020:

“Hamas is a movement strongly tinged with religion which was set up by the Israeli secret services to oppose the uncontrolled proletarian movement of the intifada and the secular PLO. Hamas has rolled out a network of social services, with money from the Shin Bet (the Israeli Security Agency, Israel’s internal security service) and it has become the representative of the Palestinian resistance. Israel has spent more than twenty years organizing Hamas, with excellent results as far as they are concerned.

This fundamentalist, anti-worker movement has undoubtedly obtained a notable consensus among the Palestinian population. It has allowed the propaganda for the unity of the Zionist State to be kept up, and has justified the continual massacre of the “religious fanatics” and “terrorists”. All of it, of course, is to conceal the real war that is going on: the class war against the proletariat, and especially against the Palestinian proletariat.

The Islamist phenomenon in the Middle East isn’t a regressive peasant or petty bourgeois movement, but a creature of the financial and petroleum imperialisms emanating both in the region and the cursed West. It is certainly not a movement of bourgeois nationalists, who are set on revolution. It is a tool used by the predatory financial imperialists to prevent and stamp out proletarian revolt, and any organizational forms the workers come up with in the course of their regroupment. Its base for the most part is composed of members of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, of merchants, students, the unemployed and professors from the region’s Islamic universities.”

Following the Oslo Agreements, Hamas and Fatah switched roles, the legitimacy of the latter being contrasted with the terrorism of the further. Hamas’ 2006 electoral victory over Fatah lead to a civil war between the two Palestinian nationalist parties and resulted in the current situation of a Palestine divided by a Hamas controlled Gaza and a Fatah lead puppet State in the much larger West Bank. In any case, capitalism was rapidly reshaping Palestine in those years.

“In both Israel and Palestine capitalism has rapidly destroyed all traces of the old societies, and after transforming them in its own image, both are now firmly tied in to the world market. Capitalism, leaving in its wake thousands of dead, has radically moulded the lives of millions of people in order to put them at its disposal… Agriculture increasingly has less weight whereas the service sector, construction and industry are growing. Unemployment, which in Gaza has reached the extremely high level of 44%, in the West Bank is only around 14%. In Gaza, the scarcity of drinkable water, electrical energy, cuts in economic assistance, and unemployment have produced an explosive situation which will inevitably fuel the proletarian revolt.”

It would be in order to repeat the summary of the history of the trade union movement in Palestine from our 2020 report:

“The Palestinian proletariat has always struggled alone, and the countless massacres it has endured over the last seventy years are evidence of that. Its main enemy is its own government, which talks about revolution but capitulates to the Israeli bourgeoisie and receives money from it.

The Bantustan which the PLO has created, combined with the macabre Israeli torture of the expulsions and settlements, is responsible for the miserable situation on the West Bank.

Before the creation of the Israeli State and the annexation of the West bank by Jordan, the largest trade union organisation in Palestine was the Arab Worker’s Association. Before the Nakba it had almost 35,000 members.

With the creation of the Israeli State, the focus of trade union activity passed to Nablus, with an eventual merger with the Jordanian trade union movement. In Gaza, however, when it was under Egyptian rule, the Palestinian trade union movement went its own way and the Palestinian trade union federation was formed. In 1969 it became an integral part of the PLO.

Once Jordanian law came into force the trade unions were subjected to rigorous control. Afterwards, with the occupation of the West Bank by Israel all trade union activity was forbidden until 1979. Nevertheless the trade union grew in a way that was quite surprising. It is estimated that at the end of the seventies it had around 12,000 members.

In the eighties the trade union movement fractured into more than 160 separate unions, organizing in all less than 6,000 workers. The reasons for this division can be found in the sectarian struggle between the various bourgeois organizations who want to control the proletarian movement and replace the class demands of the growing urban proletariat with the nationalist demands of the reformist movement, which at that time was preparing to negotiate the setting up of the Palestinian Authority. The latter, once in place, brought into being a unitary trade union centre, called the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, allied to and led by Fatah, and later by the Palestinian Authority itself.

In 2011 and 2012, during the Arab Spring, the proletariat took to the streets in violent manifestations of anger to defend their standard of living, in the face of a hike in taxes and the cost of petrol, and came into direct confrontation with the Palestinian Authority. The revolts were harshly repressed by the Palestinian forces of order who availed themselves of the logistical support of the Israeli occupation forces.”

In the current conditions the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions has to be considered to be an organization of the regime, not just Palestinian but indirectly Israeli too. Although work within it may still be necessary for future Palestinian internationalists communists, it can not be conquered by the proletariat. In the meanwhile, base union federations like the Federation of Independent & Democratic Trade Unions & Workers’ Committees in Palestine founded in 2004 will likely be a more important focus of future class struggles despite the reformist and democratic ideology of its current leaders.

In the meanwhile, Israel has become a more diverse society. The functioning of this diversity is determined by the needs of Israeli capitalism and reflects the reality of the situation of the proletariat in Israel. It would be in order to repeat the summary of the history of the trade union movement in Israel from our 2020 report:

“Palestinians working in Israel and within the settlements of the Israeli colonists tend to get the most tiring and tedious jobs assigned to them, in general those that the Israeli proletariat doesn’t want to do. For the most part they work in the building sector, many of them in the Jewish settlements helping to build the colonies!… There are almost half a million non native proletarians working in Israel, in the building sector and in agriculture. And this section of the proletariat is growing. They are mainly from Sudan, Eritrea, Eastern Europe, South America and South-East Asia. They are highly exploited, and can generally be found working in particularly dire conditions, but they receive no support from the regime’s unions.”

“The trade union confederation Histadrut, for a long time virtually the sole representative of the Jewish working class, is a pillar and faithful adherent of Zionism. It was formed before the creation of the Israeli State, and is historically linked to MAPAI, the Zionist labour party in parliament.

Throughout its existence Histadrut has fomented racial hatred between Jews and Arabs. An Arab section was created only in 1943 but it took until 1959 before Arabs were accepted into the main organization. It nevertheless continued to put obstacles in the way of any kind of proletarian solidarity between Jews and Arabs.”

This being said, there were “spontaneously arisen organizations which included both Jews and Arabs in 1919 along with the strikes in 1924. Despite Histadrut’s numerous betrayals of the working class there have been encouraging incidences of proletarian solidarity between Jewish and Palestinian workers. Well known episodes are those of the postal workers and railwaymen in 1946, which went on to become a general action with 23,000 out on strike; the maritime workers in 1951, and the dockers in 1969.

But the Israeli proletarian movement is changing rapidly, and almost half a million non-native workers are now included in their ranks. Along with this there is also the rapid demographic growth of the Palestinian proletariat, and the intolerance that Jewish workers are showing towards orthodox Jews. A certain number of trade unions have therefore emerged which are independent from Histadrut, and although these still have only a small influence they have nevertheless managed to organize a couple of sensational strikes in the important transport sector.”

The Jewish communists in Israel can not work within or join the Histadrut. The proletarians of Israel will have to destroy this union federation from the outside. When moment of final struggle comes, all the Jewish proletarians who could leave this regime syndicate will have done so.

The workers movements in Palestine and Israel have to create an international trade union front from below on a wave of struggles that will swipe away the regime unions, above all Histadrut but also the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions and the rest.

To conclude only the proletariat can end the bloody tragedies that have haunted the Middle East for decades and it can only do so by strengthening its International Communist Party which, based on its Marxist understanding of the situation in Palestine opposes all sorts of national oppression and class collaboration at the same time.

“The party predicted, and history has confirmed, that all national-bourgeois movements in the zone are destined to capitulate before imperialism, regardless of the bellicose and ultra-revolutionary actions undertaken by Pan-arabism. There is no more space for a double revolution, only for the development of the class struggle and of the organizations it needs to wage that struggle; which when the time is ripe will be become a revolutionary struggle, leading up to the insurrection whose guide will the historical doctrine of the liberation of the proletariat: communism.”

1983 Preface

The following text reintroduces for the attention of readers and proletarians who follow our press the party’s past and present work on social struggles, the process of State formation and the wars between them that have affected over the past half-century the Middle East area, the crossroads of three continents and the inevitable point of contact and clash of the opposing imperialist alignments.

The text traces the thread of events, which we briefly summarize.

Post-World War I, collapse of the Turkish empire and installation of French and British imperialisms in the whole area, partly due to the weakness-let us not say of the Arab bourgeoisie, a nonexistent class-of the tribal ties among the various Arab sheriffs, princes and kings, but of pan-Arabism!

In the 1930s, Jewish immigration to Palestine, then under British mandate, grows enormously, immigration a result of the European and world economic crisis and the anti-Semitic policies of Germany and Russia. International Jews begin first the economic then also the armed the expropriation of Arab peasant populations from the backward pre-bourgeois agricultural management systems: bourgeois "Jewish" property crushes the barely pre-bourgeois forms of "Arab" property.

Inevitably – not only at the behest of international imperialism and U.S. imperialism, the new overlord of the area – but as an expression of modern capitalism – after World War II the State of Israel is formed, easily beating the Arab States, which were weak, disunited and not at all an expression of anti-imperialism and revolutionarism.

After World War II pan-Arabism, prophet Nasser, is reborn to ephemeral life, but the young Arab bourgeoisies in a thousand ways tied to and dependent on the world market are capable only of paltry "national" enterprises, afraid of their poor plebs and proletariat. This second wave of pan-Arabism is also a non-starter.

The forcible expulsion of Arab population from the territories of Israel, the 1967 war with another major military defeat of the Arab countries, and the territorial and economic expansion of the Tel Aviv State are the facts that combine to determine what will be called the "Palestinian question". The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is constituted and the anti-imperialist and barricading dianas of the false "left" groups begin to exalt and incense the "fedayin fighters". The Party curbs the easy pietisms as well as the illusions, of the Guevarist and Maoist kind, that imperialism can be beaten on the periphery of its economic system, in the "Third World", and that this task can be accomplished by the people. Even then it sounded that the resolution of the problem of the Arab poor plebs expelled from Palestine was absolutely not within the reach of nation or race factors, but of purely class forces that repudiated all war and all national, ethnic or religious frontiers.

This is sharply repeated even in the face of the third Arab-Israeli war in 1973.

In between the two wars there is – in 1970 – the "Black September" with the Arab State of Jordan massacring the dispossessed Palestinians. It is the practical proof that what we wrote was nothing but the real representation of social and class relations: nationality and race have accomplished their historical task and now it is the turn of class struggle!

The massacre of plebs and proletarians of "Black September" will be tragically repeated with increased ferocity in 1976: Tel El Zaatar, another tragic confirmation of the end of all national and racial space and conversely of the counter-revolutionary role that the PLO must play, inevitably, in the whole area.

The latest events are known and unfortunately bring no new lessons; they are only further confirmations of truths already traced, already known, they are thus only manifestations of how firm and grandiose the "bourgeois counterrevolution" is. But if this is the undeniable strength of the adversary, can the Revolutionary Party desert the combat post that history has reserved for it? A thousand times no!

The events in the Middle East read not only as a periodic and timely reoccurrence of the counterrevolutionary power of international imperialism, the State of Israel, the Arab States, the PLO itself, but also as a manifestation of the inability on the part of all the individual actors in the drama to neutralize the social forces they themselves evoked and provoked: wars, economic crisis, misery and bestial exploitation have fed and are still feeding the anger and despair of poor and proletarian plebs, today curbed with the myths of nationhood and religion, but which will constitute tomorrow the great army of the unreserved that will overwhelm nationalisms, frontiers and progressive and reactionary States.

This will be possible on the sole condition that the Party of the Communist Revolution keeps faith, without deflection, with its own task of studying and propagating what are-our old position-the "lessons of counterrevolution", of reiterating with sharpness and vigor all the organizational and tactical deliveries of the Left. This study, this propagandizing, this reiterating is the only way to shorten the unnecessary dripping of the suffering of the poor plebs and the proletariat of the Middle East, chained like the Western proletariat to the false myths of Homeland, Peace and Antifascism.

All the other more "romantic," more successful, more "mass" roads that differ from this arduous one are further hindrances to the resumption of international class motion, different roads that diverge from the Revolution never to meet it again, just the Left’s first delivery: those who are not with us are against us!

1. BASIC ELEMENTS OF MARXISM AND COMMUNIST ADDRESS IN THE FACE OF NATIONAL AND ANTICOLONIAL REVOLUTIONS

In dealing with all questions relating to the world revolutionary process, the Communist Party distinguishes itself from every other party and grouping by the fact that it declares that every question is solvable with the data of principle, and denounces as opportunism the opposite claim to solve it with the data of the last moment, a fashion as dumb as ever that goes so far as to claim that it cannot say anything about any question unless the "last of the night" is known. This way of dealing with issues goes back to the basic characteristic of opportunism, which is that of not wanting to bind one’s hands with any principle in order to be able to act freely in practice ("freedom of tactics") and which in doctrine means devaluation of theory, or at least affirmation of the separability of practice from theory.

This dual way of dealing with social issues ultimately corresponds to the opposition between the bourgeois-opportunist and Marxist methods. The former gives an interpretation according to abstract principles, evaluating social phenomena as an emanation of these abstract principles (the only difference between the bourgeois and the opportunists is that the bourgeois consciously affirm this and the opportunists arrive at it without being aware of it); the latter, Marxism evaluates them in relation to class relations and thus to modes of production and forms of State; so, too, the National Question, which opportunism and openly bourgeois currents evaluate abstractly, and which Marxism instead considers in close relation to all other questions, and, above all, hinges in its peculiar theory of the State, defining first of all the national fact related to the formation of a territorial market characterized by the same positive law.

"The nation is a geographical network within which economic circulation is free, positive law is unitary and where, in general, there is a community of race and language. In classical antiquity, the nation excluded the mass of slaves, recognising only free citizens; in the modern bourgeois sense, the nation includes all who are born within it. If we have found States that were not nations before the great historic Greco-Roman step forward, and if we find such States in the period before the end of classical antiquity and the beginnings of the bourgeois stage, we never find a nation without a State. This whole materialist review of the national phenomenon is entirely and consistently founded on the Marxist theory of the State, and this is precisely what separates us from the bourgeois view. The formation of nations is a historical fact every bit as real and physical as others, but when the unified nation is constituted with its State, it remains divided into social classes; the State is not, as the bourgeois would have it, the expression of the totality of the nation in the sense of an aggregate of individuals, or even of districts and municipalities, but rather the expression and instrument of the interests of the dominant economic class" (from Factors of Race and Nation, 1953).

From these principled considerations follows directly and necessarily the affirmation of a fundamental and historical position of ours: the support that Marxism has always claimed to have to give to national movements has never descended from abstract and aprioristic considerations, but from evaluations closely linked to revolutionary historical facts.

Today it is fashionable to see Revolutions in every fluttering of the fronds, especially in the countries of the so-called Third World: super-opportunist Third Worldist ideologues claim that the "revolutionary spirit" would be historically decanted from the world proletariat to the popular movements of the Third World, as an expression of the struggle for "development" against the oppression exerted on these peoples by the imperialist States, especially Western imperialism. To the materialistic and scientific analysis of the historical evolution of modes of production and the clash between classes they substitute the struggle between two emanations of the "spirit": the idea of "development"-the good in itself-against the idea of "underdevelopment"-the evil in itself. These idealists disguised as Marxists constantly talk about revolution and have ended up turning this mighty concept into an undifferentiated jelly. Marxism uses the term revolution only in reference to well-defined historical facts: anti-slavery revolution, anti-feudal bourgeois revolution, anti-capitalist communist revolution.

Only in certain historical epochs do classes struggle openly with each other unfolding their full potential for confrontation. On the contrary, in very long historical epochs the classes seem to have disappeared from the scene and their antagonistic forces act only underground, preparing for the future explosion: in such epochs it would be vain to look for those upheavals in the economic basis of society that alone give the right to call such events by the term revolution. Opportunism, speaking of revolution at even the slightest hint of "movements", has ended up forgetting altogether the fundamental nexus and set of relations between economic base and superstructure. More: it has now lost on the way even the meaning of such terms.

To avoid any possible confusion even of terminology, it must then be remembered that Marxism speaks of productive forces referring to material human and natural physical forces; relations of production are the social relations determined by social production and vary according to modes of production (Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois). With an expression reflecting not the economic but the legal aspect, and perfectly analogous, the relations of production are called property relations (over land, over the slave, over the product of the servant’s labor, over commodities) and express the same social relation between classes. On this economic basis stands the legal-political superstructure (judiciary, central power), which has its own material aspect in that it constitutes the instrument of the use of violence and changes radically in the alternation of the various modes of production.

This material change in the direction toward which social violence is used has nothing to do with the consciousness that is produced of such changes in the minds of men and even in those of the members of the ruling class: this distorted consciousness is represented by the culture of the time and is condensed into the ideology of the ruling class, which therefore constitutes a superstructure of the superstructure.

With bourgeois revolutions, the revolutionary transition is presented as the passage of power from the old castes to the bourgeoisie through the new juridical-political superstructure represented by elective-parliamentary democracy. The old relations of production and forms of ownership are shattered during the revolutionary events: serfdom is succeeded by wage labor and free domestic trade, including of land. Productive forces are enhanced with the absorption of former serf farmers and artisans into the factory workforce. Not as quickly does the ideological superstructure change, which rather undergoes a slow evolution that begins even before the revolutionary fact and will only end with the communist revolution. It would be perfectly useless, therefore, to ask the bourgeoisie’s self-consciousness for an explanation of its revolutionary function: only Marxism can go beyond the ideological limits of bourgeois culture to analyze the material relations between economic structure and legal-political superstructure. That is why for the bourgeoisie the very events associated with its revolution are determined not by material forces, but by the affirmation of eternal principles, the expression of "human nature", the affirmation of "Reason", the recognition by all men of absolute values derived from "natural rights".

The "right of nations" to their freedom and autonomy fully sums up the self-consciousness of the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary phase. For the bourgeoisie such a right is a manifestation of "natural right", for Marxism such an aspiration corresponds to the revolutionary fact of the creation of the national market within certain territorial limits which, subjected to the same positive law, allows the productive forces to develop to overcome the bourgeois revolution itself in the direction of proletarian revolution. So any national claim is supported by Marxism in an entirely transitory way, as a momentary phase of the double revolution.

"The bourgeoisie is everywhere national in character, and its programme is aimed at giving society a national character. Its struggle is national, and to lead this struggle it forms a union which extends to the proletariat itself, insofar as it uses the proletariat as an ally. The bourgeoisie begins its political struggle by establishing itself, in each modern State, as a revolutionary national class. However the proletariat is not national in character, but international.

This does not translate into the hypothesis that the proletariat does not participate in national struggles, but rather into this other one: the revolutionary programme of the bourgeoisie includes the national demand; its victory destroys the non-national character of medieval society. The programme that the proletariat will achieve with its revolution and through the conquest of political power does not include the national demand, which it opposes with that of internationalism. The expression bourgeois nation has a specifically Marxist sense and, during a specific historical phase, it is a revolutionary demand. The expression nation “in general” has an idealist and anti-Marxist sense. The expression proletarian nation makes no sense whatsoever, neither Marxist nor idealist" (Factors...).

The most rotten opportunism arrives at these same conclusions as we do, but argues that such positions are valid only on the theoretical and historical level, while on the tactical level it is necessary to supplement them with the necessary mediations, which precisely provide for the physical participation of communists in support of those movements fighting for national claims even when they no longer have the meaning of those supported by the bourgeoisie in the epoch in which it performed a revolutionary function.

To such a breed of opportunism we retort, first of all, that we would repudiate the whole of Marxism if we could come to the conclusion that between positions of principle and material activity there could be contradiction or, in other words, if practice could deny theory: to mediate does not mean to act in the direction opposed to principles, but to use in practice those means which on the surface may sometimes seem to contradict principles, but which evaluated dynamically are perfectly consistent with them.

Moreover, support for bourgeois national claims-understandably when they are placed on the revolutionary terrain-has always had the significance of fostering the strengthening of proletarian organization for the purpose of overcoming the bourgeois revolution itself and thus its national scope.

Historically, therefore, even the tactical problem of support for national claims arises, for Marxists worthy of the name, in dialectical terms, that is, denying any aprioristic validity to such claims, at the very moment when the proletariat cannot fail to struggle alongside the national bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements, thus reconnecting with its specific program, which is not national, but international.

"The dialectical crux of the matter lies not in identifying an alliance in the physical struggle for revolutionary anti-feudal ends between bourgeois and class States and the workers’ party with a repudiation of the doctrine and politics of the class struggle, but in showing that even in the historical conditions and geographical areas where that alliance is necessary and inescapable, the theoretical programmatic and political critique of the ends and ideologies for which the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements fight must remain intact and indeed be carried to the utmost" (Factors...).

The national question today appears difficult to solve because it poses tactical tasks for the Party that its meager social consistency prevents it from fulfilling, just as difficult as solving the trade union question and in general any problem of tactics appears. However, just as the Party though reduced to the lowest possible level does not voluntarily renounce its union action as far as possible, so it has always declared and declares that it does not renounce indicating in the right terms its practical function in the eventual national revolutions that history may yet put on the agenda.

"It would be the gravest error not to see and to deny that in the present world ethnic and national factors still have the greatest effect and influence, and the exact study of the limits of time and space in which upheavals for national independence, linked to a social revolution against pre-capitalist (Asiatic, slave, feudal) forms, still have the character of necessary conditions of the transition to socialism, with the foundation of national States of the modern type (e.g. in India, China, Egypt, Persia, etc.)" (Factors...).

In order to carry out this task consciously and always keeping the goal of international proletarian revolution in view, it is first necessary to realize which classes are really struggling for a revolutionary solution to the national question. For Marxism, the distinction between bourgeois Revolution from below and radical and bourgeois Revolution from above is of fundamental importance, because while the former can be transformed into Proletarian Revolution insofar as the proletarian party is effectively strengthened during its process, the same cannot be said of the latter. In this regard, it is Marxism’s historical position that the bourgeoisie, after the English and French revolutions, no longer constitutes a revolutionary class in the radical sense even from the point of view of the bourgeois revolution: this historical retreat in a conservative sense has already been noted both by Marx, in reference to the German Revolution of 1848, and by Lenin in reference to the Russian Revolution.

"The revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not English and French revolutions: they were European-style revolutions. They did not mark the mere victory of a particular class of society over the old political order, but the proclamation of the political order for the new European society. In them the bourgeoisie won, but the victory of the bourgeoisie was then the victory of a new social order (...) In the Prussian Revolution of March none of this (...) The Prussian bourgeoisie was not, like the French bourgeoisie of 1789, the class representing the whole of modern society before the exponents of the old society: the kings and nobles. It had plummeted to the level of a kind of order directed against the Crown no less than against the people, anxious to resist both, indecisive toward each of its opponents because it always saw them ahead or behind; inclined from the beginning to betray the people and to compromise with the crowned symbol of the old society because it itself belonged to the latter; embodying not the interests of a new society opposed to an old society, but renewed interests within an aged society (...) The French bourgeoisie began by liberating the peasants. And, with its peasants, it conquered Europe. The Prussian bourgeoisie was so ensnared in the narrowest and most contingent interests, that it mocked these direct allies of its own, and thus made them implements in the hands of the feudal counterrevolution" (Marx, in a series of articles in the Neue Reinische Zeitung, dated Dec. 10, 16 and 31, 1848, under the title "The Bourgeoisie and the Counterrevolution").

"Does not the concept of bourgeois revolution mean that only the bourgeoisie can carry it out? On this opinion the Mensheviks often deviate. But this view is a caricature of Marxism. Bourgeois because of its economic-social content, the liberation movement is not such because of its driving forces. Its driving forces may be not the bourgeoisie, but the proletariat and the peasantry. Why is this possible? Because the proletariat and the peasantry suffer even more than the bourgeoisie from the survivals of serfdom; they need freedom and the destruction of the yoke of the big landowners even more. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, sees itself threatened by complete freedom (...) Hence the aspiration of the bourgeoisie to bring the revolution to an end with a half-freedom, with a transaction with the old power and the big landowners. This aspiration has its roots in the class interests of the bourgeoisie and was manifested so vividly in the German bourgeois revolution that the communist Marx then concentrated all the mordant of proletarian politics in the struggle against the conciliatory bourgeoisie. Here in Russia the bourgeoisie is even more vile, and the proletariat is instead much more conscious than the German proletariat of 1848. With us the complete victory of the bourgeois democratic movement is possible only in spite of the conciliatory liberal bourgeoisie, only in the event that the democratic peasant masses follow the proletariat in the struggle for complete freedom and for all the land" (Lenin, The Agrarian Question and the Forces of Revolution, April 1, 1907; reported in Communism No. 8).

There is a fundamental economic root that makes the bourgeoisie a class that is no longer revolutionary in a radical sense on the historical scale, and that root consists in the fact that a radical bourgeois revolution means the complete destruction of the old feudal or archaic forms of land ownership, a solution to which the bourgeoisie as a class can no longer reach because it has now become "territorialized", as Marx noted in Theories of Surplus Value, and this phenomenon now affects even those countries where the bourgeois revolution itself is yet to be accomplished.

So only the proletariat and the poor peasantry can fight for a revolutionary-radical solution to the national question. This is important because it explains the need for us to conduct the sharpest critique of the national programs of bourgeois parties, even when it comes to having to justly support the equal rights claims of oppressed nationalities. Such liberal-bourgeois parties used to support with ideological arguments the need for the "cultural" separation of nationalities. This need was advocated, for example, by Ukrainian nationalists and the Jewish Bund in Russia in the years before the First Great War. To such parties Lenin fiercely responded by reproposing, in principled arguments, the Communist revolutionary program in its entirety.

"The conclusion is that all bourgeois liberal nationalism sows the deepest corruption in the working-class milieu and does the most serious damage to the cause of freedom and the proletarian class struggle. And this is all the more dangerous as the bourgeois (and bourgeois-feudal) tendency entrenches itself behind the watchword of "national culture". In the name of national culture – Belarusian, Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, etc. – the centrists and clerics, as well as the bourgeois of all nations, do their dirty, reactionary business. This is the reality of contemporary national life, when one looks at it as a Marxist, that is, from the standpoint of the class struggle, when one compares the watchwords with the interests and politics of the classes, not already with empty ’general principles,’ with declamations and fine phrases" (Lenin, Critical Remarks on the National Question, Oct. 1913, pp. 14-15).

The right of nations to self-determination, i.e., the right of nations to establish independent States, is always defended by Marxists as being directly related to the revolutionary function of the bourgeoisie, but this defense is incompatible neither with the process of assimilation of various nationalities carried out by the most advanced States with equal rights among themselves, nor even less with the organizational unity of all workers to whatever nationality they belong. Those who argue to the contrary, that is, that workers should be organizationally separated according to the principle of nationality, because the workers of the oppressed nation would have class interests in contradiction to those of the oppressing nation, openly become advocates of bourgeois ideologies.

Lenin continues: "Against the assimilationism of the Russian Orthodox Marxists those who are screeching the loudest are the Jewish nationalists of Russia in general, and among them, in particular, the Bundists. Now, as is evident from the data referred to above, out of ten and a half million Jews living all over the world about half live in the civilized world, in conditions of maximum assimilation, while only the Jews of Russia and Galicia, hapless, oppressed, disenfranchised, crushed by the Purisckevics (Russians and Poles) live in conditions of minimum assimilation, maximum isolation, with fixed residence, numerus clausus and other Purisckevic-style delights. In the civilized world Jews are not a nation, because they have assimilated there to the maximum, say K. Kautsky and O. Bauer. In Galicia and Russia Jews are not a nation; unfortunately (through no fault of their own, but through Purisckevic’s fault) they are still a caste. Here is the unquestionable judgment of men who undoubtedly know the history of Judaism and who take into account the facts quoted above. What do these facts prove? That against "assimilation" only reactionary Jewish petty bourgeois can screech, eager to turn the wheel of history backwards, forcing it to move not from the regimes of Russia and Galicia to those of Paris and New York, but vice versa. Against assimilation the best Jews, who played a world-historical function and gave the world some progressive leaders of democracy and socialism, have never screeched. Against assimilation only those who continue to venerate the "Jewish past" are screeching (...) Those who have not become mired in nationalistic prejudices cannot fail to see in the process of assimilation of nations, carried out by capitalism, a great historical progress, the destruction of the national backwardness of the various remote corners, especially in backward countries like Russia.

"Take Russia and the attitude of the big-Russians toward Ukrainians. Of course, every democrat, to say nothing of the Marxists, will vigorously fight against the unheard-of humiliations of the Ukrainians and demand their complete equality of rights. But it would mean openly betraying socialism and conducting a foolish policy, even on the side of the bourgeois "national tasks" of the Ukrainians, to weaken the bond and alliance between the Ukrainian and the big-Russian proletariat that exists today within the framework of a single State. Lev Iuskevic behaves like a genuine bourgeois and, moreover, like a short-sighted, limited, obtuse bourgeois, that is, like a petty bourgeois, when he throws overboard the interests of unity, fusion, assimilation of the proletariat of the two nations in the name of the momentary success of the Ukrainian national cause. The national cause first; the proletarian cause next: say the bourgeois nationalists and Messrs. Iuskevic, Dortsov and the other pseudo-Marxists with them.

"The cause. proletarian first, we say, because it secures not only the permanent and radical interests of labor and humanity, but also the interests of democracy, and without democracy an autonomous and independent Ukraine is unthinkable (...) If a Ukrainian Marxist will allow himself to be carried away by the entirely legitimate and natural hatred and for the big-Russian oppressors to such an extent that even a small part of this hatred, even if only in the form of extraneousness, will fall upon the proletarian culture of the big-Russian workers, this Marxist will thereby itself slip into the swamp of bourgeois nationalism. Similarly, the big-Russian Marxist will also slip into the swamp of nationalism, not only bourgeois, but even of the Black Hundred, if he forgets even for a moment the claim of the complete legal equality of Ukrainians or their right to constitute an independent State" (ibid.).

We can thus summarize in these positions the Marxist attitude to bourgeois revolutions and related claims to national autonomy; from these positions also result the limits within which these claims are supported:

1) Support for all those claims tending to push the bourgeois revolution all the way down, favoring revolution from below against the prospect of the top-down introduction of capitalist relations of production (Junker and Stolypin method). To this end Marxists point to the nationalization of land as the measure that best favors the total rupture of the old relations of production in agriculture the destruction of ancient land ownership, and develops the specifically capitalist mode of production.

2) At the same time that one decisively supports every national claim capable of pushing the bourgeois revolution all the way through, one also proceeds to a ruthless critique of the utopian national programs of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, moreover as classes that are no longer revolutionary today. Proletarian organization must be quite distinct from that of other classes and unique among proletarians of different nationalities. The proletarian struggle must always be put in the foreground over the national struggle itself, declaring that the revolutionary bourgeois-nationalists are considered momentary allies in anticipation of overcoming all national arrangements for the international union of the proletarian struggle for communism. Today only the poor peasants can be revolutionary, as was already the case in Russia; however, this is something that must be studied with reference to each particular condition, keeping in mind the historical judgment of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie as a class that is no longer revolutionary and that the small peasants themselves are part of the bourgeois class.

3) With regard to the legal-political claim of self-determination and national autonomy, no aprioristic prejudices are given either toward the so-called "right to self-determination" or toward a possible process of "assimilation" of different nationalities. In any case, one must always emphasize, on the one hand, the struggle for the abolition of all national discrimination and, on the other hand, the connection of this struggle with the international proletarian struggle.

In this regard, the attitude of Marx and Engels toward the anti-English struggle of the Irish and Indians, or of the Young Turks toward the Ottoman Empire, is illuminating. They, over a period of several years, advocate in this regard positions that seem contradictory: sometimes that the national problems of the oppressed nations can be solved only by the proletarian revolution in the developed nations, at other times that the proletarian revolution itself in the developed nations will be possible only as a consequence of the complete liberation of the oppressed nationalities. During the crisis of the Ottoman Empire in 1853 Marx and Engels argued that "the solution of the Turkish problem was reserved for the European revolution". Similarly, Marx, in an August 1853 article, judged the results of English rule in India: "Whatever the English bourgeoisie may be induced to do will neither emancipate nor materially improve the social conditions of the masses, which depend not only on the development of the productive forces, but on their appropriation by the Indian people. But what it cannot do without doing is to lay the material premises of the solution of the one and the other problem. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever taken a step forward without dragging individuals and peoples through blood and filth, misery and brutishment? The Indians will not reap the fruits of the elements of a new society sown in their midst by the British bourgeoisie until in England itself the ruling classes are brought down by the industrial proletariat, or until the Hindus themselves are strong enough to shake off the yoke of British rule" (The Results of British Rule in India).

The same positions were held in the same years regarding the struggle for Irish independence. Lenin cites in his December 1913 article on the right of nations to self-determination a letter from Marx to Engels dated December 10, 1869, from which it appears that Marx "had changed his opinion" on the relations between the national struggle of the Irish and the class struggle in England, arguing that only the complete liberation of Ireland would enable the English working class to struggle against the English bourgeoisie itself. "Abstracting from any "justice for Ireland" phrase whether "international" or "humanitarian"-phrases that at the International Council go without saying-it is the direct and absolute interest of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland. This is my deepest conviction for reasons which in part I cannot communicate to the English workers themselves. For a long time I believed that it was possible to bring down the Irish regime through the ascendancy of the English working class. I have always held this view in the New York Tribune. A deeper study has now convinced me otherwise. The English working class will never do anything, before it has got rid of Ireland (...) The English reaction in England was rooted in the subjugation of Ireland" (Reposted in Lenin, The Right of Self-Decision of Nations).

Marxism-it is an axiom-does not tolerate contradictions especially in such vitally important matters as these; its whole doctrinal scaffolding would collapse if diametrically opposed positions could be argued; nor were Marx and Lenin such men as to decide every morning what policy to follow. It is therefore a matter of grasping the dialectical nexus that unites these two only seemingly contradictory positions in order to grasp the inseparable unity of the authentically Marxist position in the question. It is in fact the fundamental position valid throughout the historical period that will lead to the world victory of communism: indeed, our thesis says that the victory will be possible on the sole condition of uniting in a single world struggle the proletarian movement of the metropolises directed by the World Communist Party and the nationalist anti-imperialist movements.

In fact, it is no coincidence that such a position will be the banner of the Communist International against those (Serrati) who rejected such an alliance in the name of the fig leaf of the "purity" of the proletarian struggle that should not mix with other "barbarian" movements. The fact that Marx in certain epochs attaches greater importance to the proletarian movements of the metropolises and in others to the nationalist movements of the oppressed nationalities should not obscure the fundamental fact of the indisputable assertion that a final victory will be possible only on the terrain of world struggle. It is Lenin who explains this in the same article by attributing these variations in practical direction arranged by Marx to the difficulty of calculating in advance and in practice the possible reciprocal relations between proletarian and national struggle.

"Marx’s policy in the Irish question should now be completely clear to readers. The "utopian" Marx is so "impractical" that he is for the separation of Ireland, which proves unworkable even half a century later. This policy of Marx’s was due to what? And was it not wrong? Marx thought at first that Ireland would not be liberated by a national movement, but by the labor movement of the nation that oppressed it. For Marx, national movements are not an absolute, because he knows that only the victory of the working class can lead to the complete liberation of all nationalities. To calculate in advance all possible reciprocal relations between bourgeois liberation movements of oppressed nations and proletarian liberation movements of oppressing nations (and this is precisely the problem that makes the national question so difficult in present-day Russia) is an impossible thing to do. But changing circumstances cause the English working class to fall for a fairly long period under the influence of the liberals, queuing up with them and decapitating itself with liberal working-class politics. The bourgeois liberation movement in Ireland grows stronger and takes a revolutionary form. Marx revises his own opinion and corrects it. "It is a calamity to one people to have subjugated another". The working class, in England, will not free itself until Ireland has freed itself from the English yoke. Ireland’s subjugation strengthens and fuels reaction in England (just as the subjugation of several nations fuels reaction in Russia). And Marx, by introducing into the International’s resolution the expression of sympathy for the "Irish nation", for the "Irish people" (the clever L.V. would probably have disqualified poor Marx for forgetting the class struggle!), advocates the separation of Ireland from England, "although after the separation may come federation". What are the theoretical premises of this conclusion by Marx? In England the bourgeois revolution had long since ended. But in Ireland it was not finished; only today, half a century later, do the reforms of the English liberals bring it to an end. If capitalism in England had been got out of the way quickly, as Marx hoped at first, there would have been no place for a national, bourgeois democratic movement in Ireland. But, when this movement arises, Marx advises the English workers to support it, to give it a revolutionary impulse, to push it all the way, in the interest, of their freedom".

Moreover, it should not be forgotten that the tactical problem of how to practically evaluate such relations really faced Marx, who was visibly confronted with both the revolutionary workers’ movement organized in the First International and the Irish nationalist movement, and even more decisively faced in the period of the reconstruction of the International after the October victory. In order not to fall into gross blunders, which attract all those who turn away from Marxism into bourgeois nationalism, it must be borne in mind that the tactical question today cannot be resolved in the same terms as it was for Marx but also for the Communist International, at least until a genuine proletarian and communist movement is resurrected in the Western metropolises. To realize how important this is one need only reread our positions of the 1920s on the national question, which had nothing to object to Lenin’s classical positions made their own by the programs of the International.

"The Communist International’s political thesis on how the global communist proletariat, and its first State, should direct the rebellious movement of the colonies and of the lesser peoples against the metropolises of capitalism, appears, therefore, as the outcome of a vast examination of the situation, and of an evaluation of the revolutionary process which is totally in keeping with our Marxist programme. This serves to sharply distinguish it from the bourgeois-opportunist proposition according to which the resolution of national problems has to be “prioritised” before it is possible to talk of class struggle, the consequence of which is that the national principle can be used to justify class collaboration, both in the backward countries and those of advanced capitalism, whenever national integrity and liberty is reckoned to be in danger. The communist method is not so trivial as to say: communists must oppose the nationalist tendency everywhere and at all times. This would be meaningless and would be merely a “metaphysical” negation of the bourgeois criterion. The Communist method counters it “dialectically”, that is, in order to evaluate and resolve the national question it sets out from the class factors. Support for the colonial movements, for example, smacks much less of class collaboration, when – at the same time as recommending the autonomous and independent development of the communist party in the colonies, so it is to ready to surpass its momentary allies, with an independent work of ideological and organisational formation – support for the rebellious movements in the colonies is above all required from the communist parties of the metropolises... Communists utilise forces whose aim is to break the patronage of the great States over the backward and colonial countries, because they consider it possible to overturn these fortresses of the bourgeoisie and to entrust to the socialist proletariat of the more advanced countries the historical task of driving the process of modernisation of the economy of the backward countries forward at an accelerated pace; not by exploiting them, but by pressing for the emancipation of the local workers from both internal and foreign exploitation" (from Prometo, 1924, Communism and the National Question).

It is an axiomatic position of Marxism that "standing still in our place" while everyone is moving and agitating in the face of every non-revolutionary movement, and working on the revolutionary preparation of the Party, that it be enabled to be able to fulfill its revolutionary tasks in the rare moments when the class struggle explodes, is a prerequisite for being able to lead with clarity and decisiveness of purpose the revolutionary class itself, the world proletariat. In moments of amorphous social stasis, such as we are still experiencing, it seems that the Communist Party is bypassed to the left by all those running behind so-called "movements". When really the social situation becomes more radicalized then we shall see as if by magic all the ex-worshippers of the "last cry" movement move decisively to the right, setting themselves against the real revolutionary movement which by organic and natural means cannot fail to find its only conscious leader, the Party.

2. COLLAPSE OF THE TURKISH EMPIRE AND NEW BRITISH AND FRENCH INFLUENCE

The Middle East area, the node of communications and trade between Europe and Asia and a veritable oil sea, came to the forefront of international politics with the First World War, although it had already been the object of the attentions of the greatest imperialist powers for some decades, which, especially after the cutting of the Suez Isthmus accentuated their pressure on the area, interested first in the control of that important route to their colonies in Asia and later in the oil fields, which were discovered in 1908 in Iran.

By the outbreak of World War I, the territories west of Suez that had once been under Ottoman rule had passed into the hands of the European powers. "In North Africa the Maghreb countries (which in Arabic means ’west’) were subject to France: Algeria as a colony since 1930, Tunisia as a protectorate since 1881, Morocco and Mauritania as protectorates since 1912 and 1904 respectively. Italy had taken Libya from Turkish rule, occupying it since September 1911, while in Egypt Britain had been firmly established since 1882, which also controlled Sudan. East of the Suez Canal, on the other hand, Turkey had managed to retain most of its possessions: indeed, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq and part of the Arabian Peninsula remained in its hands. Along the coasts of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, however, Turkish sovereignty had been progressively replaced by British sovereignty" (from "The Arab Countries" by P. Donini). Britain therefore controlled the territories of present-day South Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain etc.

The Ottoman Empire, which had already been showing signs of its deep decay for some time, became one of the most coveted prey of the great powers: England in the first place was interested in defending its lines of connection with India and in control of the oil fields that, after they had been discovered in Iran, were supposed to exist in Iraq; France, for its part, feared English overpowering and was banking on its ties with the Christian communities in Syria and Lebanon to gain political influence over the area and perhaps get its hands on the wells; Russia made no secret of its desire to take advantage of the breakup of the Turkish Empire to conquer Istanbul and thus gain control of the straits connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean; Germany had invested huge sums in public works and loans to the Turkish government (such as for the construction of the famous Baghdad railway) and intended to guarantee itself through its influence over the allied country that its investments would pay off.

When the war broke out, the Ottoman Empire sided with the Central Empires. England, strong from its positions in Egypt, Sudan and the Arabian Peninsula itself, was the most solicitous to intervene; but the Turkish army, thanks in part to German aid, proved to be an adversary not to be overlooked and twice Ottoman troops reached the Suez Canal threatening British control of it while the flow of Persian oil through the Persian Gulf was also endangered with the interruption of the pipeline reaching the Abadan refinery.

The British, as old colonialist foxes, then thought of involving the Arab princes in the war by promising them, in exchange for military aid, the establishment, when the war was over, of a large free and independent Arab State. England therefore made initial contacts with the Sheriff of Mecca, Hussein, who had gradually subjected the tribes of Higiaz to his authority, exploiting the weakness of the central government, and thus combined political power with his prestige as a religious leader. Hussein proved responsive to British offers; moreover, his cooperation with London would soon prove to be of utmost importance because it would lead to the failure of Constantinople’s calls for Jihad, for holy war against England, causing the people of Arabia to side with London, thus determining the outcome of the war in the region.

Writes L. Gaspar in his "Histoire de la Palestine", "Armed forces recruited from among the tribes of the Higiaz were important to both sides. Revolted against the Turks, this force could strike them at a nerve point, considering their positions in the Arabian Peninsula. On the other hand, the Turkish garrisons on the peninsula could, with Hussein’s support, have threatened the Suez Canal, the more distant Aden and even the Persian Gulf".

Hussein also sought alliance with the weak Arab nationalist groups that were active mainly in Syria and agreed to present as a basis for negotiation to the British a manifesto, drafted by nationalist groups in Damascus that called for the establishment of an independent Arab State, allied to Britain. Of course, the document makes no mention of the political form to be given to the future State. In January 1916, after lengthy negotiations, an agreement was reached between Britain and Hussein. A few months later a Turkish-German expedition left Damascus bound for Yemen via the Higiaz. This maneuver tended to establish a stronghold in the southern Arabian Peninsula to threaten both Aden and the Red Sea entrance.

Hussein, having obtained from England the promise of an independent kingdom that was to extend from Syria to Mesopotamia, from Palestine to the Arabian Peninsula, hurled his Bedouins at the Turkish garrison in Mecca (10/6/ 1916). "Despite rudimentary and insufficient armament in the face of Turkish garrisons well equipped with heavy weaponry, including artillery, within a month the Bedouins conquer all the Turkish strongholds in Higiaz, except Medina. They take 6,000 prisoners including the Turkish governor-general" (L. Gaspar; op. cit.). By now the outcome of the war is decided. Allied with all the tribes in the region, Hussein conquered Aqaba and then headed for Damascus where he would make a triumphal entry, on October 1, 1918, along with British General Allenby.

How sincere the British promises were is shown by the fact that in May 1916, a month before Hussein proclaimed holy war against the Turks, by the famous secret Sykes-Picot agreements, England and France had agreed to partition the coveted Middle Eastern prey between them: France would be given control of part of Syria, northern Iraq, Lebanon and part of the coast of Anatolia (present-day Turkey) and England control of central and southern Iraq, Transjordan and part of Palestine; the rest of Palestine would be placed under the authority of international control outside British and French influence. As for the Arab State promised to Hussein, its northern part would have been considered an area of assistance and preference for France and its southern part for Britain. That things did not actually turn out that way is one more demonstration of the imperialist greed of the two European powers that spared no means to attack each other.

One of the first acts of the victorious revolution in Russia was the publication of the secret treaties that the imperialist States had signed on the backs of the proletariat and the oppressed peoples. The Sykes-Picot Agreements were then also published; the British succeeded for the time being in convincing Hussein that this was a propaganda move and with new promises persuaded him to continue fighting but they knew well that at the end of the war, the deception would be exposed and would arouse a wave of anti-English hostility throughout the Arab world. In anticipation of this reaction, "it was necessary to take precautions by creating in the heart of the region a base that would itself be the object of Arab hostility and therefore forced into a firm alliance with Britain" (P. Donini; op. cit.).

Thus already in November 1917, British Foreign Secretary A. J. Balfour promised the Zionist movement a "national hearth" in Palestine, where a few colonies of mainly Russian Jews had already been established for several decades, failing in his commitments to France and providing the Zionists with the most consistent diplomatic foothold to achieve the creation of the State of Israel. At the end of the conflict, of course, these knots came to a head but the British were now ready for any eventuality, "they had concentrated a very high number of troops in the area, 160,000 soldiers, in the spring of 1917 had, for example, begun in Mesopotamia a great offensive that led them to conquer Baghdad and occupy Mossul and the oil-rich area at the conclusion of the armistice, after which the country was in effect transformed into a kind of Indian province and onerous taxes were imposed on the populations: the British military regime proved little different from the Ottoman one and the national movement, oppressed and persecuted, began to turn against the newly occupants. Tens of thousands more British soldiers, after a series of ill-fated actions, had conquered Palestine, occupied Jerusalem, crossed the Jordan to Amman with the (unsuccessful) aim of joining Feisal’s men who had taken the port of Aqaba in the Red Sea and arrived in Syria, as far as Damascus and Aleppo pursuing the crumbling Turkish army" (from "The Arab Revolution" by G. Valabrega).

Despite the fact that in a new letter to Hussein in February 1918, and despite the British government confirmed Britain’s "sympathy" for the Arab peoples’ desire for independence, as promised in 1916, with a series of international agreements, the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the Treaty of Sévres and San Remo (1920), Lausanne (1923) and with the solemn sanctions of the League of Nations (1922 and 1924), through the so-called mandate system, the British assumed effective control of Mesopotamia, Palestine and large slices of the Arabian Peninsula, while the French were reserved Syria, occupied, however, by Hussein’s troops, and Lebanon. On the right bank of the Jordan, the kingdom of Transjordan was carved out at London’s wish and granted to Abdullah, one of Hussein’s sons so as not to break bridges with him altogether and to disturb the French, who in Syria came immediately to blows with Hussein’s other son, Feisal, who intended to make Syria his own kingdom and enjoyed wide popular support. But Feisal, as a good feudal prince, was not so much concerned with the struggle for the independence of the Arab nation as he was with the struggle to obtain, like Abdullah, a kingdom of his own, and constant bargains with the French and betrayals to the masses’ movement finally allowed Paris, after a full nine years of fierce fighting and ruthless repression, to have the upper hand. Feisal, back under British tutelage, was granted the kingdom of Iraq.

Between ’24 and ’25, apparently with the support of the British, who were in favor of getting rid of an overly greedy, and admittedly disgruntled, ally, Ibn Saud, ruler of the Negev led a successful campaign against Hussein and occupied Hejaz; in ’30 he then occupied Asir whose union with Hejaz and the Negev enabled him to found the Kingdom of Arabia, named in his honor "Saudi".

3. THE DISPOSSESSION OF THE FELLAHIN

So with the 1st Imperialist War, England firmly takes hold in the Middle East while the whole area, occupied not only by foreign armies but also by Western capital and technology, is taken from its economic backwardness and thrown into the hell circle of capitalism.

The other consequence of the war, which more directly relates to our work, is the new order imposed on the region by the imperialist countries that emerged victorious from the war, an order that, after several centuries, comes to break the unity of the "Arab nation" (with the term "nation" understood in the pre-Bourgeois sense) by dividing it into several State entities, among them also the region geographically called Palestine, which, as we have said, is placed under British mandate.

These then are the premises that will lead, a little over twenty years later, to the establishment of the State of Israel and the insuperable divisions among the various Arab States.

Even before the British Mandate, as we have seen, international Zionist organizations had already implanted some Jewish colonies in Palestine, but, as the following table shows, the number of Jews immigrating to the region remained very low until World War I:

It was precisely during the Mandate period that Jewish immigration experienced an unprecedented expansion, peaking in the years between 1932 and 1938, in parallel with the growth of anti-Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany. Indeed, Britain calculated to exploit to its own ends the ideology and capital of the Zionist movement by favoring the establishment of a State linked inseparably with Western imperialism that would aid in the work of containing and suppressing the vast anti-imperialist movement that threatened to develop under the aegis of a great independent and united Arab State.

The first Jewish colonies settled in Palestine where, they had acquired a few farms; it had not resulted in any clash with the local populations, whose backward farming methods and misery the Jews shared, but when Jewish immigration became massive the situation was evidently to change; as Theodor Herzl had stated, the Jews needed "a land without a people for a landless people", and he identified this bleak with Palestine, but in that region, already at the beginning of the century hundreds of thousands of Arabs were living!

"At the beginning of the century there were about 600,000 Arabs and 50,000 Jews in Palestine. Until 1900 Palestine lived mainly from its agriculture. Trade there has an essentially local character. As for industry, it is essentially artisanal. Agricultural production and the distribution of land and its product remain of the "feudal type" until the mid-19th century. The dominant feature is the existence of large estates.

"The gradual decline of this traditional system will be brought about on the one hand by the introduction of the Land Property Code by the Turkish Empire in 1858 and on the other by foreign penetration. The Code introduced several measures designed to encourage the development of merchant capital. Taxes that fellahs pay in kind will now be collected in currency, a fact that introduces them into the monetary economy. On the other hand, these taxes will be considerably increased, indebting peasants who will often have to abandon their land, thus creating a layer of landless peasants. Moreover, the code will reinforce the State’s right to land ownership and promote a process of dissolution of collective property for the benefit of private property, large and small. Lands abandoned by fellabs crushed by debt are forfeited by large private landlords and urban capitalists.

"In this era we also observe an important penetration of foreign capital, essentially to acquire landed property, brought by religious congregations of all orders, who came to Palestine to "protect Christian minorities". Thus the Christian churches, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, make major real estate purchases and investments. Priests and monks put fellahs to work (...) Jewish immigration began with the founding of Petakh-Tikva in 1878.

"At the beginning of the century the large landed property consists of lands belonging to the effendi (large Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian and Turkish landlords), State domains (domains belonging to the Sultan or simply confiscated by him), waqfs lands (religious property affected by inalienability) and the lands of the Christian churches. But Palestine is not just a country of large holdings. There is mainly collective small and medium property: these are essentially ’mucha’ lands, that is, lands whose ownership belongs to village communities and on which periodic lot rotation is applied. Parallel to this land regime, there is, especially after 1860, under Ottoman pressure and due to capitalist penetration a development of private property.

"The integration of agricultural activity into the capitalist market continues according to a process similar to that in neighboring Arab regions between 1860 and 1920. Agricultural production is increasingly commercialized and exports develop. The value of exports of Jaffa oranges, for example, rises from 26,500 pounds sterling in 1885 to 297,700 pounds sterling in 1913. Thus it is explained that next to a still largely dominant traditional system, an urban capitalist sector and thus new social classes appear. The dispossession of peasants throws toward the cities a large labor force, a true "reserve army" available for industrial development. This development, and this is what characterizes Palestine vis-à-vis the other Arab countries, is abruptly halted at the end of World War I by the Zionist immigration that accompanies the British Mandate over Palestine" (from "Textes de la revolution palestinienne" by Bichara and Naim Khader).

During the British Mandate period therefore, the vast majority of Palestine’s population was still peasants or fellahin, some owning small plots but mostly tenants or wage earners in the estates of the agrarian aristocracy. In 1930, 250 large landowning families owned as much land as 60,000 smallholders. Some families owned between 30,000 and 60,000 dunams (1 dunam = 1/10 hectare) while 30 percent of peasant families were landless. About 2/3 of the land was leased and belonged to large absentee landlords. Among the peasants who owned their farm, 54 percent had less than one feddan of land (feddan corresponds to the area that can be worked with an ox hitch). A statistic from a few years later confirms these figures:

The purchase of land by the J.C.A. (Jewisch Colonization Association) to install there the thousands of refugees from Europe could therefore only mean the expulsion of the populations already residing in the country, that is, the Palestinian sharecroppers and laborers who made up the majority of the population.

In fact, if the land titles were held by the large absentee landlords who sold the vast majority of them without difficulty to the Zionist associations, as the following table shows, the land to which these titles referred was the indispensable basis for the existence of the poor Palestinian peasants.

Thus the dispossessed fellahin first became wage laborers in the employ of Zionist capital and then, when immigration became more massive, were even driven out of their jobs and reduced to the blackest misery.

This situation could not be prolonged without resulting in violent social shocks because the expelled peasants were left with no option but to croak while watching Jewish settlers settle in their place. Hence the desperate uprisings that followed in 1921, 1925, 1929, 1933, 1936.

4. THE REVOLT OF 1936: FIRST BETRAYAL OF BOURGEOIS AND LANDOWNERS

These revolts culminated in that of 1936, which lasted for a full three years and was marked by a great six-month general strike.

By 1935 by then the Jews from 84,000 that they were in 1922 had grown to 320,000 and the flow of immigration showed no signs of abating while Jewish capital invested in Palestine in those years amounted to Palestine P.L. 6,000,000 for 1933, P.L. 10,000,000 for ’34, LP. 11,000,000 for ’35, injections of capital that not only brought no benefit to the Arab population, but on the contrary contributed to increasing its misery.

In this situation of extreme social tension, some clashes between Arabs and Jews sparked the uprising: on April 20 an Arab National Committee was created in the city of Nablus, which immediately proposed a general strike. The following day a Supreme Arab Committee was formed, composed of representatives of the major Arab parties, all linked to the landed aristocracy, and even chaired by the Mufti of Jerusalem. This Committee decided to continue the general strike by first demanding from the British a halt to Jewish immigration and further a ban on immigration itself, a ban on selling land to Jews, and the establishment of a responsible national government before a national assembly. But faced with the continuation of the strike and the sharpening of the struggle, which was increasingly taking on a class character under the impetus of a young but already fairly substantial urban proletariat, the Supreme Committee decreed an end to the strike by adhering to a call for appeasement coming from Britain’s three Arab princely pawns: Saud of Arabia, Ghazi of Iraq, and Abdullah of Transjordan; the text explicitly stated to "adhere to the appeal of their Majesties and Highnesses the Arab kings and emirs and call the noble Arab nation in Palestine to return to quiet and to put an end to the strike and unrest". The peasants’ revolt, observes scholar George Antonius (The Arab awakening, London 1938), is not only revolted against the British and the Zionists, but against the Arab political leaders, almost all of whom belonged to the landowning class, that is, the class that had sold land to the Zionists thus causing, on the one hand, the strengthening of the Zionist presence in Palestine and, on the other hand, depriving the Arab peasants of the work of those lands that the Zionists bought to entrust to Jewish farmers. On the same issue L.Gaspar in his "Histoire de la Palestine" (Paris, 1968), writes: "The peasant anger also accused the Arab landed bourgeoisie as well as the Mandate administration and the Zionists of its dispossession. The sale of land had certainly enriched the landowning class, not without depriving the peasant of the land he had been cultivating for centuries without, moreover, owning it".

After the end of the strike, the movement, which had also given itself an embryo of armed organization, fell apart, and the struggle was continued by guerrilla bands that gave the British army and the Zionist armed organizations, which supported their repressive action, a hard time for many months to come.

The end of the uprising was followed by a very harsh repression by democratic and liberal England: from these very years date the laws on the collective responsibility of Arab villages and towns and the practice of dynamiting the houses of those suspected of belonging to or sympathizing with the uprising, methods still in use today by Israel’s army. During the uprising 3,000 to 5,000 Arabs were killed, 110 of their leaders were executed, 6,000 were imprisoned, and 30,000 British soldiers were deployed to restore order.

The terrible isolation in which the international situation confined the revolt of the proletariat and the Arab exploited masses, the lack of a class-based leadership and direction capable of defending the movement from the devastating influence of the feudal and religious aristocracy that took its head, Stalinism now prevailing internationally, prevented the fire of the revolt from spreading beyond Palestine and led to its defeat. In 1939, the British acceded in part to Arab demands by banning Jewish immigration and Arab land purchases by Zionists for ten years; in practice, however, while the Arab population was sorely disappointed by the defeat and weakened by the extremely harsh repression, Zionist organizations continued to strengthen now also in an anti-English function with a view to the establishment of an independent Jewish State.

5. THE STATE OF ISRAEL

World War II showed the whole world the power of the American imperialist colossus, which was about to replace the British colossus as the highest stronghold of imperialism. After the war, the British empire was rapidly crumbling and one of the first positions it was forced to surrender was Palestine itself, while Zionist organizations, linked ever more closely to American capital, were conducting a tough anti-English guerrilla war. In fact, it was precisely the representatives in the American Zionist movement who, as early as 1942, at a meeting in New York, adopted the "Baltimore program", which called for the establishment in Palestine of a "Jewish commonwealth", unlimited immigration and the creation of a Jewish army.

But in the difficult international situation that had followed the end of the war, the establishment of a Jewish State over all of Palestine seemed impossible to achieve given the opposition of the Arab States, still supported by England and the U.S.A., which only in ’43 had made a pact with Riyadh declaring that "the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States of America". Thus the 22nd Zionist Congress meeting in December ’46 proposed that Palestine be divided into two States, one Jewish and the other Arab. The plan was made its own by the UN (the new name assumed by the "League of Nations" referred to by Lenin as "den of thieves"), under joint pressure from the United States and Russia. The partition, decided on November 29, 1947, brazenly benefited the Jewish capital, which, owning 6 percent of the territory, was allocated 56 percent of the area of Palestine.

The region still remained under the British Mandate, which would not expire until May 15, 1948. The League of Arab States did not recognize the partition and Britain naturally washed its hands of it, eager only to pull out of the fray. The State of Israel was proclaimed eight hours before the British Mandate expired on May 14, 1948.

The US recognized it "de facto" 11 minutes later; the USSR on May 17, de facto and de jure, probably because it saw the State of Israel as a means of attacking British and US influence in the Middle East. It even appears that much of the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah’s weapons came from Czechoslovakia via a semi-clandestine airlift that forced the British blockade.

6. THE WAR OF ’48 – DEFEAT OF THE ARAB LEAGUE

The State of Israel, drawn on paper by the great strategists of the UN, was a political absurdity; with respect to area it had very extensive borders and was indefensible from a military point of view; moreover, its area was too small for the needs of the Jewish capital. The war that broke out a few days after the establishment of the new State, if it was desired by the Arab States that were unable to assess the actual power of the Israeli army, it was no less desired by the government in Tel Aviv aware of its strength and the international support it could count on. However, there was no lack of separate negotiations between Arabs and Israelis, such as the contacts Golda Meir had with the King of Transjordan, Abdullah, in November 1947, which led to agreements to partition the country.

Indeed, if the Arab governments needed to wage war in order to divert the attention of the agitating masses in their countries and to justify their iron dictatorships by trying to restore their political virginity in the struggle for the "rights of the Palestinian brothers", they had no intention of jeopardizing their power and class privileges in this war; their greater concern was to defend their armchairs and perhaps to increase their territories at the expense of the Jewish State or even some "brother" Arab countries should the opportunity arise.

Thus the joint strategic plan that had been adopted on May 1l in Cairo had to be modified several times, shifting, by Jordanian will, the key point of the invasion from Haifa, a port of great strategic importance, to Jerusalem while, for example, the Egyptian army focused its offensive effort more on conquering the Negev desert, to contain Abdullah’s appetites, than on Tell Aviv, the main Jewish city. Moreover, "organizational inefficiency and corruption, together with the feudal ways in which governments often treated commanders, and generals and officers treated soldiers, dealt a decisive blow to the hopes of the Arab League" (G. Valabrega; op. cit.).

The crushing defeat suffered by the Arab countries in this war demonstrated the political incapacity of the ruling classes, which were inextricably linked with imperialism, while among the ranks of the military, officers and soldiers, thrown into the war "without precise tasks, without adequate armaments and supplies, without valid coordination with the troops of the other sectors, a dull resentment matured for those who were responsible for such very serious errors, at the same time that enthusiasm waned" (G. Valabrega; op. cit.).

This war therefore, while it strengthened the Israeli State, both from a political point of view and by allowing its considerable territorial enlargement, brought about a weakening of the reactionary Arab regimes, a weakening that will contribute to the strengthening in these countries of democratic-bourgeois movements that will soon give rise to uprisings and real revolutionary attempts that in a few years will completely change the Middle Eastern political order.

7. THE PALESTINIAN EXODUS

The Israeli bourgeoisie, unlike the corrupt Arab ruling cliques, had a precise plan for conducting the war and a precise strategy for annexing new territories in Palestine. This plan (the Daled plan) in addition to the conquest of territories included vicious acts of reprisal and terrorism that, by massacring Arab populations and sowing terror would cause their flight, leaving the way clear for the Israeli occupation; "There was increasing pressure", Zionist historians Jon and David Kimche recount in their work "The Clash of Destinies", from military commands, such as Ben Gurion and Dalili, against limiting reprisal actions.

These massacres culminated in the April 9, 1948 massacre when "during the night men of the Irgun and the Stern gang (Zionist armed groups) attacked and captured the village of Deyr Yasin, near Jerusalem. 254 people are massacred and the village is destroyed. Among the dead were: 25 pregnant women, 52 mothers with babies a few months old, 60 other women and girls". Menachen Beghin, future Nobel Peace Prize winner who led the assault on the village, wrote of this massacre, "Not only was it justified but if the victory of Deir Yassin had not been achieved the State of Israel would not have been established... panic overcame the Arabs... the impression created by the Deir Yassin massacre was equivalent to the strength of six military regiments. The Arabs began to flee full of terror even before they clashed with the Jewish forces... The Deir Yassin massacre particularly helped us liberate Tiberias and invade Hazfa" (from: Palestine Dossier; various aut.).

The Israeli government thus succeeds in achieving its goals: the territory of the State increases from 56 to 78 percent of the entire area of Palestine; of the 1.380 million Arabs residing in Palestine as many as 750,000 have been forced to flee by abandoning all their possessions and being reduced to living, of course the lower classes, in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, assisted by UN "charity". From here, from these camps of despair, from these hundreds of thousands of uprooted, unemployed, underemployed, true proletarians, will arise the force that must disturb and still disturbs the sleeps of the Israeli bourgeoisie as well as the Arab ones.

Part of the Arabs (about 350,000) remained in the West Bank occupied by the Transjordanian army and another (about 70-100,000) in the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. In Israel, despite the threats and massacres, 170,000 Arabs continued to reside. The manner in which they fled also reflected the class differences that existed; in fact, between the end of ’47 and the beginning of ’48, already 30,000 Arabs had fled Palestine, but the vast majority of these, who thus escaped Israeli State terrorism, belonged to the middle and wealthy classes who possessed assets or capital that they could count on to settle in the neighboring territories.

8. THE CONDITION OF THE ARABS IN PALESTINE

The policy of the Israeli bourgeois State toward the Arabs remaining in Israel followed these directives: a) Maintenance, of a permanent state of siege toward the Arab communities to prevent any attempt at rebellion. b) Progressive expropriation of land abandoned by Arab peasants who had taken refuge in other countries and their assignment to Jewish agricultural colonies. (c) Expropriation of land still occupied and cultivated by Arab peasants and transformation of small peasants into proletarians. (d) Employment of Arab labor for the hardest, low-skilled jobs at starvation wages.

Of course, these goals were achieved in full compliance with legality through the enactment of special laws, just as always happens in any State that wants to be considered sincerely democratic!

(a) The emergency laws

Immediately after the proclamation of the State of Israel "the Provisional Government decided on 14/5/1948 to keep in force a substantial body of provisions introduced by the British authorities beginning in 1936 and revised in 1945. These Defense Emergency Regulations (which at the time had been violently attacked by Zionist jurists when applied against their organizations; ed.) allowed the Jewish State to maintain military tribunals with jurisdiction over the civilian population and to intervene in virtually every aspect of daily life, authorizing censorship of the media and private correspondence, restriction of freedom of movement, opinion and political activity, arrest, expulsion from the home village or even from Israel, confiscation of property and demolition of homes. These provisions, combined with a later provision, represent the legal basis on which Israel built its regime of military administration in the predominantly Arab-populated regions: the "Defense regulations" in fact theoretically covered the entire population, whether Arab or Jewish, but since the areas in which they were applied were delimited at the discretion of the military authorities, it was easy to manipulate them so that they affected only Palestinians. It cannot, therefore, come as a surprise that 88% of the Arab population was under military administration, while 95% of the Jews suffered no restrictions whatsoever; even the remaining 5%, moreover, enjoyed quite different treatment than that inflicted on the Arabs: one of the most vexatious provisions was the prohibition of travel to the regions under military administration without a special permit, which of course was not denied to Jewish citizens (...) The British regulations of ’45 were not officially suspended until December 1966, only to be introduced, less than a year later, in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza where they still form the legal basis for such measures as imposition of curfews, detention, house arrest, confiscation and destruction of property" (from International Politics: March 1979).

(b) Laws for the expropriation of property

The first exodus of Arab populations after the ’48-’49 war made available to the Israeli State more than 16,000 sq. km. of abandoned land (equal to 80 percent of Israel’s total land area) of which about 1/4 was arable, and which housed 350 of the 370 agricultural settlement nuclei established by Israel between 1948 and 1953.

"In 1954, more than one-third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on abandoned Arab land and more than 250,000 people, including one-third of new immigrants, lived in urban properties abandoned by Arab owners (...) Altogether Israel’s economy absorbed 300,000 hectares of abandoned Arab land that was recultivated and developed. Despite the large amount of economic assistance it received from abroad in the form of U.S. aid, German-Western reparations, Israeli bond sales, and contributions from philanthropic organizations, Israel certainly could not have doubled its population in the first three years of its existence without utilizing the abandoned Arab property" (from International Politics; March ’79).

In order to seize these Arab properties, the Israeli State used a whole series of legislative instruments: "At the first stage, the government established closed zones according to Article 125 of the colonial legislation enacted by the British in ’45 to combat Jewish terrorism (Defense Emergency Regulations). Arab owners of the lands included in these zones were not allowed to return after the ’48 war and their fields remained abandoned. In October ’48 the "official newspaper" published new ordinances authorizing the Ministry of Agriculture to confiscate any untilled and unseeded land for one year. These measures covered land left abandoned after the application of Article 125; the Ministry of Agriculture was authorized to transfer it to third parties, i.e., Jews. Later ordinances (which became laws in 1950) on absentee owners appeared. These were not only the properties of Palestinian refugees, but also those of some 20,000 Israeli Arabs bizarrely qualified as "absentee-present". The latter were in fact Arabs with Israeli identity cards but regarded as absentees, thus deprived by law of rights to their land and real estate, because between November 29, 1947 (the date of the UN decision on the partition of Palestine, five and a half months before the creation of the State of Israel) and September 1, 1948 they were either outside the territory of Palestine or in an Arab-controlled region of Palestine, and this whatever the reason for their absence, flight, business, exodus or expulsion.

"In 1949, a new law establishing "security zones" authorized the Minister of Defense to expel villagers located within a 10-kilometer zone along the borders. These laws did not, like the earlier laws and ordinances mentioned earlier, threaten the property rights of Arab inhabitants but prevented them from accessing their property. In 1953 the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) adopted a law under which the government became the owner of all land that, as of 1/4/’52 had not actually been in the hands of their owners. The compensation paid to the former owners was set according to the value of the lands as of January 1950, at a very low rate. Another law, authorizing the government to requisition land and property for "the defense and absorption of new immigrants", was also used to expropriate Arab owners. Later an amendment clarified that lands occupied under the terms of this law after 1/8/’58 would be considered as belonging to the State (...) Finally, in several cases ordinances dating back to the time of the mandate were used to "acquire land in the interest of the population". Thanks to these laws, the Jewish towns of Upper Nazareth and Karmel, for example, were built on land confiscated from the Arabs" (from Le Monde, Juin 1, 1976).

Thus, of the 200,000 hectares they owned before the creation of the State of Israel, Arab villages are now left with only 50,000 hectares. This figure does not include the Negev, where the Bedouins, who make up 20 percent of Israel’s Arab population, had to wage a bitter struggle during 1975 to prevent the expropriation of 150 of the 190,000 hectares of land on which they have lived for centuries. "The government claims that the Negev lands are not registered in the name of Arab inhabitants, most of them Bedouins who have turned into farmers. Formally the government is right, but in practice it is well known that the Bedouins of the Negev never bothered to register with the land registry. This was the custom, as much under the Ottoman Empire as under the British Mandate; when the Bedouins understood, after the creation of the State of Israel, that the authorities coveted their land, they tried to regularize their situation, but this right was refused them" (Le Monde; 12/13/75).

The land issue is still very much alive in Israel both for those few small Arab peasants who have managed to keep it and for those who although now proletarianized were deprived of it in the past. "It is no coincidence that the most massive mobilization of the Arab population in Israel in recent years (February-March 1976) arose precisely from the decision to expropriate Arab land in the Galilee in order to build residential quarters and military installations there" (from International Politics; March ’79).

(c) The proletarianization of Arab peasants

The census taken by the British in 1931 showed that 80 percent of Palestinian Arabs lived in the countryside; by the end of the British mandate this percentage had dropped to 70 percent, but according to the 1973 census, urbanized Arabs were 56 percent. The expropriated former peasants, as is the natural process of capitalist development, were forced to move to the cities where their labor force was employed in the most menial and strenuous jobs and bought at the lowest price. The Arab proletarians mainly supplied labor in construction and the service sector. The following table shows the evolution of the sectors of activity of Arab labor from 1954 to 1972:

% distribution of Arab labor among major sectors of activity
	1954	1966	1972
Agriculture Industry	59.9	39.1	19.1
Construction and public works	8.4	19.6	26.6
Other sectors	23.5	26.4	41.8

(Source: Annuaire statistique d’Israèl, 1955-1973)

Arab workers are discriminated against on wages, which are significantly lower than those of Israeli workers for the same work; they are subject to being fired; they continuously suffer high unemployment; they are often employed in "black labor". they have no union protection since they are subject to constant police control and even the official trade union organization the Histadrut, "until 1966 was officially the general confederation of Jewish workers in Heretz Israel and even after the programmatic abolition of this form of ethnic discrimination it cannot be said that the union was overly committed to its Arab members" (Pol. Int, March 79).

But conditions for Palestinian refugees in "Arab" land were certainly no better either, despite various Arab governments and leaders filling their mouths with "the noble Palestinian cause". The refugees lived in camps on the outskirts of Arab cities or along the Israeli border, with subsidies from UNRWA, a UN body, subsidies that largely ended up in the pockets of local rulers. "As if refugee life was not hard enough, Palestinians were discriminated against at all levels in Arab society. Before the Palestinian refugee could get a job, he had to obtain a work permit. In Lebanon, where discrimination was particularly heavy, it was virtually impossible to obtain such a permit" ("The Palestinian Diaspora"; Monthly Review, Nov. 1972). On the other hand, refugees who, once hostilities ended, attempted, as had always been the case previously, to return to their villages in Israeli territory were often shot at or beaten and sent back.

9. THE MYTH OF ARAB UNITY

The years following World War II, were years of profound upheaval for all Middle Eastern countries that saw almost all governments shaken by crises, coups, and social uprisings. The special geographical situation of the area, which acts as a hinge for three continents and thus increases its strategic value, and the enormous oil wealth constituted a weakness rather than a strength because they aroused the attention of the world’s top powers, drew the attention of even stronger marauders than those who had settled there after the first great slaughter: in place of France and England, who also did everything they could to remain there to defend their economic-strategic interests, the power of the dollar was firmly installed, while the lesser power of the ruble forced every opening.

"Thanks to the combined intervention of the two greatest victors of the Second World Carnage, the anti-colonial revolution in the Middle East-as indeed elsewhere-recorded less revolutionary effects than would have been desirable for general historical reasons and for the very development of the countries concerned.

"A bourgeois revolution ’all the way through,’ in the age of imperialism, is even more unrealizable than in the past if the new powers succeeding the old ones are not born on the wave of grandiose movements of the exploited masses and do not rest on the armed force of the same. In Middle Eastern countries many feudal monarchies have thus been transformed without great shock into bourgeois monarchies and continue to rule in new guises. But even there where monarchy has been replaced by republic the event is rather to be regarded as the result of narrow military revolts than of mass political movements" ("il Programma Comunista", 12/1965).

Following the thread of the events of the early 1950s, which saw numerous workers’ strikes in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Sudan, it is in July 1952, after several months of large popular demonstrations and major workers’ strikes culminating in the general strike in January of that year, the Egypt’s King Faruk abdicated, forced by the uprising of the army led by the "Free Officers" group. In June 1953 Egypt is declared a republic, Nasser’s star begins to shine.

Also in 1952, Camille Chamoun, a character with close ties to the West and a close friend of King Abdullah of Jordan, assassinated a year earlier by a Palestinian Arab, comes to power in Lebanon.

But it is Nasser’s rise to power that is the important fact: the whole policy of nationalization of the Egyptian republic takes up the banner of pan-Arabism, of the great united Arab homeland, tries to revive the Arab league formed since 1945, between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, a league that had shown all its impotence, all its ineffectiveness, all the limits of federalism in the 1948 war against Israel. The first blow to the reborn pan-Arabism was dealt by Iraq when it allied itself in 1954 with Turkey, which had joined NATO two years earlier, and then joined, in 1955, the Baghdad Pact, which extended the Turkish-Iraqi pact to Iran, Pakistan and Britain, and which found approval and support mainly in the United States.

To this "Baghdad pact", Egypt responded by signing an arms-for-cotton deal with Czechoslovakia.

In February ’54 an uprising overthrew the Shishakli dictatorship in Syria, opening a period of political instability. In Jordan in 1955 there were broad popular movements against joining the Baghdad pact, and elections in ’56 resulted in a pro-Nasser government.

On July 26, 1956 Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal after yet another American refusal to grant him a loan to build the Aswan Dam; on October 29 of that year the Israeli army began its invasion of Sinai while, a few days later, Anglo-French troops attacked the canal area with aerial bombardment and paratroop drops.

The aggression ended after nine days, on November 6 after joint Russian-American intervention to end the fighting.

In early 1957, the United States again stepped forward to consolidate its influence over that increasingly important area in the inter-imperialist contention: on January 5, President Eisenhower presented to Congress a plan for U.S. policy in M.O. "This plan consisted of 3 points: in the decision to intervene with massive aid in support of friendly governments in the area; in the intention to provide, at the president’s own discretion, military support to States or groups of States that requested it; and in keeping ready American military forces to intervene directly alongside friendly Middle Eastern States threatened by international communism" (Valabrega; op. cit.).

This policy would come to fruition in the following months in Jordan and Lebanon. In Jordan, an army coup backed by the Sovereign liquidates the pro-Nabulsi government, while the U.S. VI Fleet, stationed in the Mediterranean, declares itself ready to intervene to save Jordan’s integrity and independence. Ten million dollars is the prize granted by Washington to the Hashemite ruler in exchange for his loyalty to the West.

In Lebanon in May ’58, as a reaction to Chamoun’s dictatorial rule a general strike broke out that turned into a full-blown insurrection that set the entire country ablaze. When the insurgency was now turning in favor of the forces of the "left", on July 14 a military strike swept away the Iraqi monarchy amid popular enthusiasm. This episode convinced the United States to intervene directly: the next day a fleet of about fifty American ships, including two aircraft carriers, landed 10,000 soldiers in Lebanon, while strong contingents of British paratroopers arrived in Amman, called by King Hussein of Jordan. Order is in a few days restored.

We thus commented on these events in our newspaper, "The target of the cowardly U.S. act of force is not so much the salvation of the fractious Chamoun regime as Arab unification. It is no coincidence that the U.S. armed intervention was decided within hours of Iraq’s anti-monarchist revolution that did justice to the pro-British monarchy and its bloodthirsty servants. The dollar gangsters are most concerned with preventing the formation of the great unitary State that is in the aspirations of the pan-Arabist movement and thus saving the military alliances that are the greatest obstacle to the political unification of the peoples of the Middle East. By executing the Hashemite monarchy, overthrowing the regime of the tyrannical Nuri-es Said, a traitor to Arab unity, abrogating the provocative Jordanian-Iraqi federation, withdrawing from the Baghdad pact, the Iraqi nationalist revolutionaries are vibrating a most severe blow to the interests and prestige of American imperialism (...) The Arab countries are currently in the condition in which Risorgimento Italy found itself. One and the same people speaking the same language, professing the same customs and traditions, having behind them an indivisible historical evolution is broken up into a dozen States (...) The claim to State unification, reunification which was at other times the banner of the Garibaldis, Kossuths and Bolivars, the suppression of political divisiveness and separatism, is a claim not communist, not proletarian, but national and democratic. It lies entirely within the national bourgeois democratic revolution. The conscious proletariat is not interested in the formation of the nation-State per se, but in the content of social transformations that the transition entails. It is interested in the dialectical unlocking of the "powerful economic factors" that Lenin saw as constrained and immobilized by the anachronistic political structures perpetuated in the semi-feudal and backward countries" ("il Programma Comunista"; no. 14-1958).

The prospect of Arab unification seemed at that time still feasible, and as we have seen was believed by the party, though unlikely, to be progressive, and a first step in that direction seemed to be the union of Egypt and Syria, by then passed into the Russian area of influence, a unification that gave rise to the R.A.U. on February 1, 1958, but the sluggish Arab bourgeoisies, having come too late to the arena of history, the expression of weak economies totally dependent on the world market feared far more the exploited and starving masses of poor proletarians and peasants whose upheavals had favored their coming to power, than the old tribal classes whose place they had taken and the international imperialism so oft condemned in words. The conclusion was that in all countries the new bourgeois governments immediately repressed any spontaneous mass movement and agreed either with the old ousted classes or with imperialism of the West or East, depending on their contingent State interests.

In fact, as early as September ’58 we could write, "As we easily predicted, the Middle Eastern question, transferred to the plane of diplomatic negotiations, found its denouement in the most cynical and laughable pastette. Pasty among the young Arab States above all. Worried about losing buyers (which is particularly true of commodity producers of global importance, such as Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, and so on) divided by conflicting interests and historical traditions, anxious not to lose control of the unleashed and malphides masses ready to kowtow to the first "charitably" willing banker to provide oxygen in cash (which applies to all), the young and greedy bourgeoisies swearing by the Koran have set aside their "anti-colonial" mannerism by bartering the withdrawal of "foreign soldiers" against the triumphant entry of no less foreign money, by making their own – they who claim to be the bearers of the revolutionary holy war – the principles of "non-interference", "mutual respect, integrity and national sovereignty", in short, the defense of a status quo that is also the expression and product of imperialist domination, the reverse of the vaunted aspiration for a unitary Arab State extended from West Asia to all of North Africa" ("il Programma Comunista; n. 16/1958).

In these years, any possibility of a radical bourgeois revolution closed because of the complete victory of the imperialist strategy that wants the maintenance of the political division of the Middle East into several weak States in perpetual conflict with each other, a solution that is certainly favored by the weakness even in numbers of the proletariat and the exploited masses in that region.

Precisely in the wake of this defeat, in January ’64, the summit of top Arab leaders meeting in Cairo, among the many issues and contrasts between the various States that it brought to light without resolving them, took the important decision to recognize the Palestinian entity, the first step toward the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization that would officially take place a few months later. The timing chosen for this important decision confirms even more decisively that it was not dictated by the will of the various Arab governments against Israeli imperialism to solve the problem of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees expelled from their lands, but by the fear that all the Arab States had of the potential for social revolt that was building up in the camps and that had already given rise since 1958, in the camps of the Gaza Strip, to the first guerrilla nuclei, Al Fatah and its armed wing Al Assifa (The Storm).

Although the Palestinian movement was born with a moderate, pro-Nasser and pan-Arabist agenda, it was from the beginning violently opposed by Arab States that feared its possible radicalization given the terrible conditions of refugee existence. The first guerrilla groups, as we have said, had been formed in the early 1950s in the Gaza Strip since this territory, although placed since ’49 under Egyptian administration, was never formally annexed to Egypt, and some freedom of action was therefore possible there.

This is how the birth of Al Fatah is described in International Politics: "It thus enjoyed a wide autonomy, within which the future elites of the Palestinian national movement could be formed. At first Nasserism gathered a very broad consensus among the Palestinians of Gaza, which soon resulted in the establishment of fedayin groups, whose activities were constantly controlled from Cairo. The Suez crisis, as a result of which for a few months the region fell under Israeli control, and more so the blockade that the Egyptian authorities subsequently imposed on any guerrilla activity moving from Gaza against Israel, made the more politically conscious Palestinian elements realize the serious limitations involved in a strategy aimed at the liberation of Palestine entirely based on the supposed revolutionary capacity and military potential of "progressive" Arab regimes. It was during this period that Yassir Arafat, like many other future Palestinian leaders, operated a real reversal of optics; while holding to the basic perspective of pan-Arabism, they nevertheless understood that the path to Arab unity had to pass through the struggle for the liberation of Palestine and not vice versa. The Palestinian national movement therefore had to make a qualitative leap; it had to cease being in tow of the various Arab countries and become itself, through its own autonomous strategy of struggle, the real engine of Arab unity.

"For the Nasserians, no less than for the Ba’athists, the quest for autonomy that was emerging among the Palestinians constituted a serious involution of a separatist type, as if they wanted to detach themselves from the unification process that then involved not a few Arab countries; a provincialistic retreat that not only had to be fought ideologically, but also repressed concretely. Thus were implemented by the Arab States the first police persecutions of those Palestinian leaders who did not intend to bend to the political directives coming from Cairo or Damascus and who, a fortiori, contested the Palestinian policy of Hussein of Jordan. Arafat, Abu Jyad and other Palestinian leaders thus found themselves forced to seek refuge in the Arab countries of the Gulf and particularly in Kuwait, where the climate of anti-Palestinian repression dominant in other Arab States was not present. It was precisely in Kuwait that Al Fatah was founded, the Palestinian organization that more than any other would develop in the future, which did not fail to reiterate in the pages of its theoretical journal Filastinuna (Our Palestine) whose first issue was published in 1959, the concept that the struggle of the Palestinian people should follow a completely – autonomous direction with respect to the wishes of the various Arab regimes".

The tragic fact that would weigh terribly in future events was that Pan-Arabism could in no way be resurrected, neither from below – that is, by resting on the Arab refugees from Palestine, scattered somewhat throughout the Middle East – nor even less from above as Nasser had tried to do.

Pan-Arabism was over, the historical appointments it had had resoundingly missed, and Palestinian irredentism could not now resurrect him. The thousands of Palestinian refugees crammed into camps thus reflected the whole tragedy of the Middle East, a mosaic not of nations (which exist neither in a minor format nor, as historical facts have shown, in a single major format of a single Arab nation) but of feeble States attached to their special interests, each tied hand and foot to this or that power, each ranting about an economic and political independence denied them by their real dependence on the world market for oil or cotton or on the arms supplies of one or another world power, each as proud and haughty as they are prone servants of the big companies, each ruled by greedy and sucking pseudo-bourgeoisies or even by relics of a millenary past not even feudal but barely tribal.

The path taken by Al Fatah could not but lead where it has led could not but repeatedly sacrifice the material interests of the Palestinian proletariat on the altar of an impossible national emancipation now discarded by history. These proletarians often herded into refugee camps had only one chance: that of succeeding in fixing before their eyes the enemy of class, not of "race" or "nation", and, huddling together in a single army of the unreserved, and equip themselves to wipe out local and foreign cops and masters, all equally interested in their miseries and misfortunes.

In fact, it was precisely by virtue of the national and racial road taken that the Arab regimes, in September 1964, recognized the PLO founded in Alexandria at the Second Arab Summit, and placed it under their tutelage, since, despite all the declarations of pan-Arabism from below, it was they who enabled with aid, money and arms the life of the nascent organization, which, in their vows, was to have in the interests of the Arab States the limit of its action, so that the dangers of social uprisings would be neutralized by Arafat’s anti-Jewish guerrilla framing, a guarantee that the falling and corrupt Arab regimes would survive their flaccidity and weakness.

Another consideration must be made: the PLO by favoring this state of affairs was making cast of its own pan-Arabism from below, which, taken literally, should have beaten the existing Arab regimes to the forehead, but the reason of State applied to the PLO itself: the breaking of the umbilical cord that binds it to the existing regimes was one of race and nation, and this breaking would have been worth taking another path, but in that case no PLO, no Arafat!

10. THE PROOF: THE SIX‑DAY WAR

In June 1967 once again the word was to arms, once again workers and peasants and poor plebs, by Yehaweh-Allah’s inscrutable decree slaughtered each other.

The war was blessed on both sides: if the State of Israel unleashed the offensive both to gain territorial gains and to postpone an internal economic and political crisis that was already beginning to manifest itself quite severely, nevertheless the Arab States with the conflict were able to dust off hypocritical anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian buzzwords, simply for internal use to grip in the emergency of the state of war the exploited masses to their corrupt regimes, thus offloading the causes of misery and oppression onto Israeli expansionism.

It was only six days, but Tel Aviv’s troops made it in time to conquer Gaza, the West Bank and Sinai (70,000 sq. km.), while the Arab States demonstrated all their military weakness and political inconsistency. For thousands of proletarian Palestinians, the tragedy that had befallen their brothers in the remaining Palestine in 1948 was repeated. The Gaza strip was inhabited in 1967 by 450,000 Palestinians of whom more than two-thirds were refugees from the fertile plain of Jaffa from which they had been driven out in 1948. More than 100,000 Gaza residents, of whom many were taking the exodus route for the second time, were forced to take refuge in neighboring countries. The West Bank, which had a population of about 850,000 in ’67, i.e., before the occupation, had but 650,000 three years later, meaning that 200,000 Palestinians had had to abandon everything in this region to go to the camps of misery called refugee camps and from which the PLO guerrillas will draw militia after militia, given the military ineptitude of the Arab regimes to contain the modern Israeli army.

Without the slightest doubt and without any concession to anti-imperialist posturing and aesthetic admiration for combatantism, we commented in the heat of the moment thus: "What ’independence’ and what ’peace’ can countries hope for through which run the pipelines that pump blood into the arteries of world capitalist piracy and whose ’regents’, – bourgeois arrivals, new rich or semi-feudal lords – have every interest in selling themselves to those who hold the keys to the coffers all over the globe, stealing from their neighbors – perhaps brethren – what their financiers and masters wave before their eyes of insatiable jackals? Not at stake these days in the Middle East was a ’socialism’ that exists only in the lying mouths of Nasser and Kossigin, or another ’socialism’ financed in Israel by the big bankers on this side or across the Atlantic: at stake were imperialism’s national and international economic and strategic interests and positions of strength. Arab and Israeli proletarians have the same enemy against them: either they will fight TOGETHER to unhinge it, and the proletarians of the great imperialist metropolises who have erected their own fortunes on their skins will be THE FIRST to give them the example of a battle that has no frontiers of race, State or religion, or it will be war again, there and everywhere, today and tomorrow" ("il Programma Comunista", 11/1967).

11. GUERRILLA IMPOTENCE

It is since the "six-day" war, with the number of Palestinian refugees enormously increased, with their massive framing in guerrilla formations that these begin to play first a military then a diplomatic role in the troubled area of the Middle East. The military debut of the guerrillas is in March 1968: the Israeli army invades Jordanian territory with 15,000 men, tanks, armored cars and guns, supported by helicopters and planes with the aim of destroying "terrorist" bases. The attack, a veritable "retaliation" operation, as the Tel Aviv government officially calls it, lasts 15 hours, the armed Palestinian guerrilla organizations fight fiercely forcing the Israelis to retreat with heavy losses (Battle of Karameh) and Hussein himself "is forced to pay tribute to the partisans’ combativeness and declare that it is no longer possible for him to oppose their action".

In addition to Jordan, commando groups were also present in southern Lebanon from where they departed to carry their attacks against villages in the upper Galilee; the Israeli army responded to the terrorist actions with massive and indiscriminate repressive interventions against the southern Lebanese populations while the Lebanese army was too weak to enforce border sovereignty. The Lebanese State also feared that the presence in the country of strong Palestinian organizations with their political and military weight could pose a serious danger to the Christian ruling classes by strengthening leftist organizations. Thus in November 1968 the Lebanese armed forces surrounded guerrilla bases in the south; tensions continued in the following months also leading to serious armed clashes in April and October 1969. These clashes were smoothed out with the signing of the Cairo Accords, which recognized the presence of commando bases in southern Lebanon and the independent status of the Palestinian guerrilla movement, which could then have another slice of territory beyond Jordan from which to target Israel.

Also during this period, numerous other organizations proliferated alongside Al Fatah, often created by this or that Arab State in an attempt to exert influence over the movement. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is founded in December 1967 with the blessing of Damascus and Cairo; Syria sponsors the creation of the Saika (the thunderbolt) in 1968. In the same year, from a left-wing split in the PFLP, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) is formed on "Marxist-Leninist" or "Third Worldist" positions; the following year Iraq creates the Arab Liberation Front (FLA). In March 1970, the communist parties of Jordan, Syria and Iraq formed the "Partisan Forces".

Al Fatah remained the largest and most influential organization, however, and in 1969, with Nasser’s help, secured effective control of the PLO.

But the Al Fatah movement, the strongest Palestinian resistance movement, though born out of the will to struggle that existed in the refugee camps is the expression of the Palestinian petty bourgeoisie, as evidenced by a January ’69 policy document where although it states that 1) "Armed struggle and comprehensive revolution are the only way forward to liberate Palestine and liquidate the Zionist entity", it declares that 2) "The Palestinian revolutionary vanguard does not intervene in the internal affairs of the Arab States, as long as the Arab States do not intervene in any way in the internal affairs of the Palestinian revolution".

With this political strategy Al Fatah enshrines the character of not only not being class-based but also not struggling on the radical national level alone. Such a perspective would have forced the PLO into immediate and permanent confrontation against the reactionary federalism of the region’s small Arab States, not just Israel. It is in the acceptance of non-interference in the "internal" affairs of individual States that is the premise of the subsequent events that would see the loose cannon of the Palestinian plebs defused with weapons not by Israel but by the Arab regimes themselves, further confirming that the issue was no longer one of race or nation but of class.

12. BLACK SEPTEMBER: ANY SOLUTION OF RACE OR NATION CLOSED

The political situation in Jordan had already been tense for some years. The Hashemite kingdom, like all the States in the region-from the Turkish borders up to Suez and the Red Sea in the south, from the Mediterranean in the west and to the borders of Iran in the east-is an artificial State, created by the British with a stroke of a pen to further their Middle Eastern interests, "nor is its economic structure any less artificial. Its feudalism is land-based; it has not built its wealth on oil. Unlike the majority of the Arab States in the region, it has not expressed a commercial bourgeoisie of any significance: all you have is only puny and asphyxiated ’bourgeois’ class, employed in purely intermediary and externally dependent tasks. Poor in resources, Jordan lives only on the oxygen of American and British aid so the social group with the most substantial and stable privileges is the administrative and military apparatus, gravitating around the court" (from The Battle of Amman by R. Ledda). Jordan also has a population of two-thirds Palestinians, 800,000 as opposed to 400,000 Transjordanians, half of whom are nomadic Bedouins from among whom soldiers are recruited.

The issues facing the Jordanian regime were twofold:

(a) The Palestinian movement was creating a mass base in Jordan, especially in the cities. It had weapons, published newspapers, organized schools and hospitals, and represented for the Jordanian exploited masses the illusion of raising their heads again, of opposing the monarchy, the regime of starvation and exploitation.

Arafat, true to his policy of "non-interference in the internal affairs of Arab regimes", naturally did not intend to organize the Jordanian masses on this ground at all. Shortly before the massacre, on September 9, he had declared, "The Palestinians do not want power and do not have the strength to take it (...) By defending ourselves we are not trying to undermine Hussein’s regime, nor Jordanian power. We defend only the existence of the Palestinian revolution, which is threatened with political annihilation and physical destruction" (R. Ledda; op. cit).

Nor will the other resistance organizations (PFLP and DFLP) ultimately hold a different attitude despite their "revolutionary" declarations. The tendency is always toward compromise with the Jordanian regime, a compromise that would allow the struggle against Israel to continue in exchange for neutrality in domestic politics. But the masses do not slavishly follow the directives of their purported leaders, and the danger of a social uprising grows ever closer.

(b) Nor could the Jordanian regime tolerate guerrilla actions against the Israeli State starting from its territory. Since the beginning of ’68, when the guerrillas were forced to set up permanent bases outside the occupied territories and set off their commandos from Jordanian territory, there had been a trickle of incidents between Jordanian army units and fedayins preparing to cross the cease-fire line. The reason for this is clear: the Hashemite regime is tied hand and foot to American and British imperialism, and is vitally dependent on aid from these countries whose Middle Eastern interests Israel safeguards; Jordan therefore cannot be Israel’s enemy.

Moreover, in this regard there is a long tradition of cooperation between the two States dating back to 1949 when Hussein’s grandfather, Abdullah, agreed with the Israelis to authorize the Jordanian feudal lords to liquidate for a fair price the property they owned in the former Palestine, which became the State of Israel, and gave up the corridor to the sea through the Negev in exchange for a green light for the annexation of the West Bank.

For the Hashemite regime, there is only one solution to the two problems: liquidate the Palestinian guerrilla bases in Jordan, teach the proletariat in Amman a lesson, and break any vague desire for revolt.

Thus begin secret negotiations with Israel to agree on the modalities of the liquidating action, then await a favorable international moment that would minimize the reactions, including verbal ones, of the other Arab States and that would also see the two superpowers US and USSR consenting to the police operation. The auspicious opportunity comes with yet another American proposal for a "peace plan", the so-called "Rogers plan", which entailed the following points:

• (a) The appointment by each State concerned of a representative for negotiations, under the leadership of Jarring, on the basis of the UN Security Council resolution of November 22, 1967 (always rejected by the guerrilla organizations).
• (b) The recognition of Israel.
• (c) The Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories during the June war.
• (d) The re-establishment of a cease-fire for a period of not less than three months.

This is on the condition that Jordan, Egypt and Israel before the start of negotiations sign a document containing the above points.

Egypt and Jordan accept the American plan while the PLO resolutely rejects it.

The Rogers plan foundered, however, even before Hussein’s troops were able to go on the attack. Indeed, the Israeli government denounces Egyptian violations of the truce, consisting of the movement of some Sam-2 and Sam-3 missile batteries, and on Sept. 16 declares that it "will not be able to participate in Dr. Jarring’s conversations until the military status quo included in the cease-fire is respected and the previous situation is restored".

In the meantime, however, Hussein has reached direct agreements with the U.S. "The Baltimore Sun Times and the influential Sawt El Uruba in Beirut would later reveal that the U.S. agreed with him on four specific points. 1) Intervention if the confrontation (with the Palestinians) should result in the danger of a collapse of the monarchy, thanks to external military interference (no one yet believes that the resistance can somehow pose problems of a certain seriousness to the fierce Jordanian army); 2) guarantees that the West Bank will remain an integral part of the Hashemite kingdom; 3) support for a separate negotiation between Jordan and Israel over Jerusalem; 4) economic and military aid worth more than $200 million" (R. Ledda; op. cit.).

While, with perfect synchronicity Israel amasses troops on the Jordan and Hussein prepares the repression, the guerrilla organizations, although fully aware of the blow being prepared, maintain a defensive posture and refuse to organize the masses against the attack from behind, limiting themselves to demanding that the regime respect the legitimate government and purge the army of the "most reactionary elements.

On September 16 Hussein unleashes the offensive: a government of military men is created with Habes al Majali, a Bedouin leader, at its head. The latter orders the Palestinians without delay to surrender their weapons, imposes martial law and declares that he will crush any attempt at popular reaction.

The guerrillas continue in their capitulation policy and give very strict orders not to provoke incidents. "It is forbidden for anyone to fire on any position of the Jordanian army in the towns, villages and fields", says Order 70/71 of Sept. 16, "except in the case where these positions initiate fire. In this case the firing must be limited to those military positions that have opened fire". At the same time in a Joint Communiqué, a general strike is proclaimed which is very successful: "Immediately Amman empties, while armed to the teeth the Palestinian militias, and this time also Jordanians adhering to trade unions, the Communist Party and other progressive groups, arm themselves and prepare to fight" (R. Ledda; op. cit.)

Again, while now only waiting for the massacre to begin, the PLO does not want to break ties with Hussein and accuses the extremist sectors of the court and the American embassy. Once again agreement and compromise are sought, thus setting the stage for a military defeat that was all but inevitable, as the Jordanian army will only prevail several months later.

The attack is unleashed on the morning of the 17th. First the city of Amman, where the bulk of the proletarian force was concentrated, is attacked. "From the hills in the vicinity 155-mm. heavy artillery with phosphorus shells is firing, from closer distances are 75-mm. guns and 80- and 120-mm. mortars, 105-mm. recoilless guns, Centurions with their 105-mm. pieces. The Wahdat camp, the Hussein and Ashrafia jebels are the main targets, but the attack is on the whole city, no but a few neighborhoods are spared" (R. Ledda; op. cit.).

After 48 hours from the beginning of the attack, despite its enormous superiority of means, the Jordanian army has just managed to lap up some of the city’s outlying neighborhoods without succeeding in entering them. "Popular mobilization prevents infantry from getting into action and armored vehicles cannot climb the jebels" (R. Ledda; op. cit.). From the first day of fighting, water is cut off from the city, all supplies in food and medicine are prevented, hospitals, schools, refugee camps are bombed and will be razed to the ground by phosphorus bombs and napalm. The war also flared in Jordan’s northern cities; on Sept. 18 the fedayin controlled Ramtha, Irbid, Zarqa, which will also be razed, and Mafraq.

No one expected this resilience from the guerrilla organizations, which numbered at most 30,000 men, without heavy weapons, opposed by 60,000 Bedouins of Hussein, perfectly armed and supported by artillery, aviation, and armored vehicles; even the guerrilla leaders did not expect such combativeness, but the explanation lies in the intervention in the struggle of the oppressed Jordanian masses who from the first day participate en masse in the fighting, despite the opportunistic leadership of the PLO does not encourage their organization in the slightest and always refuses to break national unity. Writes B. Valli in the Day of 14/10/70: "The Palestinians realized, to their amazement, that the popular militia, not framed like the fedayin, but scattered in all corners of the city, composed of poorly trained men and women, played a decisive role in the battle. It was even able to organize the population, distributing bread and ammunition".

A "free zone" under guerrilla control is being established in the north of the country, while, concerned about the turn of events, the U.S. announces that units of the Atlantic Fleet are heading to the Mediterranean to reinforce the VI Fleet. "Moscow also intervenes heavily in Baghdad, Iraqi troops stationed in Jordan, withdraw from the city of Zarqa and let Hussein’s troops move on to attack Ramtha" (Quad. of MO.; Nov. ’70).

Only from Syria do the Al Saika organization and the Hittine brigade, i.e., Palestinian troops framed in the Syrian army, enter Jordan with armored vehicles to help the guerrillas, but their intervention has a limited objective "to allow, by remaining in Jordanian territory for 36 hours, the political and military consolidation of the "free zone". The brigade in fact beats the Jordanian army in Ramtha on Sept. 20 and 21, but does not advance toward Jerash and Amman, settling on the Irbed line" (R. Ledda; op. cit.).

Al Fatah addresses a message to the Arab kings and presidents meeting in Cairo stating: "Losses in Amman alone have reached about 20,000 dead and wounded, the majority of whom are women and children who have fallen as a result of the continuous shelling of schools, mosques, churches and hospitals in which they had taken refuge since their homes had been destroyed". The battle continues in the city, and Hussein’s troops now control the center of the city while the Fedayins strengthen their positions in the north of the country and move closer to the capital by capturing the Gerash region.

On the 23rd Al Saika’s armored units are driven back into Syria. On the 25th General El Nimeiri, head of the Arab conciliation mission established by the Heads of State Mission in Cairo, meets in Amman with Arafat. An understanding is reached and by late morning Amman radio announces that an agreement has been reached between Arafat, Hussein and Nimeiri for a total and immediate cease-fire throughout Jordan. But despite the agreement Hussein’s Bedouins continue the massacres and carnage in the following days. On Sunday 27 a new agreement is reached in Cairo.

The agreement provides a series of noble and solemn commitments on the part of the Jordanian government, restores some basic freedoms for the guerrilla movement (organization, movement, etc.), but establishes the places where the fedayin will have to narrow their bases while it does not say a word about the future governmental set-up of Jordan and thus completely betrays the expectations of the Jordanian poor masses who, by taking to battle alongside the fedayin hoped to impose the improvement of their conditions of existence.

It is necessary for the Arab States for the PLO to maintain organizational and military control of the region’s many plebs, diverting their desperation in a national, anti-Israel, a-classist direction. This task is consciously – statutorily as seen – accepted by the entire PLO.

The agreement could not fail to provide for the territorial and social delimitation of the role of the PLO, which must maintain its character as an "irredentist" and not general movement of all the exploited, not even just Arabs. This was not betrayal, neither by the States nor by Arafat, but confirmation of their necessary role. This agreement separates the guerrilla organizations from the Jordanian masses while serving Hussein to reorganize himself for a decisive blow not far away. Nor is executioner Majali, directly responsible for the Amman massacres, torpedoed; although he has to give up his position as military governor, he retains that of commander of the armed forces. According to the agreements, the Palestinian camps are removed from the cities and moved toward the West Bank border.

The meaning of the events was described as follows in "il Programma Comunista" 17-1970: "The fedayins express the sacrosanct anger of plebs mangled under the steamroller of bourgeois ’peace’. But what can they expect from the heroism of their own despair?

They themselves are the product of an infamous game conducted on the backs and skins of populations conquered or lost at the dice by capitalism in the frantic race for world domination: perhaps that ’Palestine to the Palestinians’ would redeem them more than Jordan has ’redeemed’ them? They are the martyrs of the collective drama: they cannot – it is not their fault – solve it within the framework and means of the society that wanted and will it. They have neither ’brothers’ nor ’cousins’ in the neighboring or distant States on which they had the naiveté to rely on, not in Cairo and not in Damascus, not in Moscow and not in Beijing. They will have brothers the day when the proletarians of EUROPE and AMERICA, of the ’metropolises’ of world thievery, have ceased to prostrate themselves shamefully behind their false shepherds of the myth of ’peace,’ of ’dialogue,’ of a ’solidarity’ made up of miserable prayers and tearful petitions, and, having freed themselves from the double yoke of capital and its opportunistic servants, they will take up with fraternal joy the task of giving, they who have inherited not the too many infamies but the few lasting achievements of the finally defunct bourgeois society, to those they never had. They will have them on the day when the Middle East will no longer know Jordanians nor Lebanese, nor Syrians, nor Iraqis, nor Egyptians, nor Saudis, but proletarians who have blown up any frontier, have recognized every homeland as false and a lie".

September’s defeat provokes bitter debates among the various Palestinian groups, but, "while Palestinian organizations exhaust themselves in useful but interminable debates", Bichara and Naim Khader write, "the Jordanian authorities are preparing for a second major offensive. At the head of the Jordanian government sits a fist man, Wasfi Al-Tall, at the head of the army of intransigent leaders who blame the kingpin for being too soft on the commandos. Draconian measures are taken: torpedoing Palestinians from important posts in the State administration, extending the powers of the Police Intelligence Services. Hussein’s firmness is not only explained by the army’s pressure on him.

"The king has become aware of working hypotheses, formulated by certain American and British diplomats, according to which the creation of a Palestinian State in Jordan – to which the West Bank would one day be added – could be a solution to the Middle East problem; it is obvious that this would be the end of the Hashemite monarchy. Hussein’s behavior during the months following the 8th Palestinian National Council would thus be guided by a vital imperative: to appear before the Arab States and the great powers as the only valid interlocutor. This is what he explains on the long journey that will take him from Riyadh to London, Washington and Paris. Comforted by the encouragements or ’complicit silences’ that will characterize his journey, aware of the paralysis of the Arab countries, Hussein may try to get it over with the fedayins. The first clashes take place in April ’71. To remove any pretext for the king, the fedayins evacuate Amman between April 8 and 15, but they intend to keep the forested areas that had been assigned to them in northern Jordan (Jerash, Ajlun, Irbid). In May, Hussein’s forces demanded that the fedayins abandon their bases in the north and reach the Jordan Valley. Faced with Palestinian refusal, the army takes positions in front of Jerash and Dibbin. In early June, rumors circulate of the possible creation of a Palestinian government-in-exile. The king reacts by ordering Wasf Al-Tall to break these "plotters who want to create a separate Palestinian State" without hesitation. The Battle of Ailun, which takes place July 13-17, ’71, brings a severe blow to the resistance. The fighting claims hundreds of casualties".

Arab countries attack Hussein with words but do not move a finger. The summit urgently convened in Tripoli by Qaddafi sees the absence of Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Sudan and Lebanon.

As a result of this defeat, the fedayins lose all their bases in Jordan.

In March the 8th Nat. Pal. Congress, meeting in Cairo, had reiterated opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza. In October Arafat went to Moscow; since ’69 relations with Russia had in fact improved markedly; by now Moscow, too, understood that the O.L.P. was willing to negotiate and was far from being a den of revolutionaries.

1972 is the year of the terrorist attacks carried out by the "Black September" organization. They are the logical result of the desperation and anger that had seized the Palestinian fighters after the Jordanian events. Meanwhile, the fedayins moved from Jordan to Lebanon, the last Arab State where it is still possible for them to organize independently; however, serious problems soon arose in Lebanon as well.

On April 10, ’73, in a quick raid, Israeli troops attack some neighborhoods in Beirut and Sidon, the headquarters of some guerrilla movements, and kill three of their leaders in their homes. The responsibilities of the Lebanese government are denounced: "The Lebanese government had the telephones of the Resistance leaders cut off and also suspended the supply of electricity in the Beirut neighborhoods affected by the Israeli attack, thus facilitating the Zionists’ retreat" (from "Al Sharara", periodical of the DFLP). A situation similar to the Jordanian one was also being created in Lebanon and the Lebanese government had begun to question the 1969 Cairo agreements with the PLO, prohibiting the guerrillas from carrying arms, guarding the camps etc. But the funerals of the three PLO leaders are attended by 250,000 people including many Lebanese proletarians. This is a grave warning to the government, so it is decided to move on to direct attack against the refugee camps, dangerous concentrations of proletarians and underproletarians. In the first two weeks of May, serious clashes occur between guerrillas and the army; on May 7, martial law and curfews are decreed throughout the country. The air force is also deployed against fedayin bases, but attacks are repulsed and a precarious truce is reached on May 12.

13. THE 1973 WAR AND THE DIPLOMATIC RECOGNITION OF THE PLO

On October 6, ’73, Egypt and Syria attack Israel. The purpose is evidently to force Tel Aviv, by achieving even partial military success, to soften its positions on the territories occupied in ’67 and bring the issue before a negotiating table. Jordan also takes part in the war along with symbolic Iraqi, Moroccan and Tunisian units. The PLO participates in the war inside the occupied territories. Tens of thousands of workers from the occupied territories and Israel itself, under instructions from the Palestinian National Front, go on strike for the duration of the war, putting many Israeli industries in serious difficulty.

The war, which began with a victorious advance of Egyptian troops into the Sinai, ends after a couple of weeks with the victory of the Israelis who conquer new territories on the Golan and also manage to cross the Suez Canal encircling the Egyptian III Army. The war had shown, once again, the inconsistency of the myth of Arab unity: the participation of the Jordanian army had been almost nil; there had been almost no coordination between the action of the armies of Egypt and Syria, and one attacked when the other was in retreat, and even the disengagement agreement between the parties is signed on January 18 by Egypt and only on May 31 by Syria. However, the psychological impact on the Arab world is remarkable because for the first time "Arab" armies had managed to defeat, albeit partially, the Tel Aviv army.

“This war", comments Le Monde Diplomatique in June ’78, "presented as a victory by the Egyptian and Syrian regimes, was to enable them to negotiate from a position of strength; moreover, it was to serve to rehabilitate classical warfare at the expense of popular warfare. The PLO leadership was thus able to use these two elements to justify, within the organization, its participation in such a political settlement. The results of this strategy were not long in coming: on November 27, at the Arab summit in Algiers, the PLO was recognized as "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people".

On Oct. 26, ’74, the Rabat Arab Summit officially recognizes the PLO as "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people on any liberated part of Palestinian territory". On the previous June 2, the 12th Nat. Pal. Council had recognized the possibility of the establishment of a Palestinian State on part of the liberated territory. On Oct. 14, the U.N. invites the PLO to participate in the assembly’s deliberations on the Palestinian question; on Nov. 13, Arafat addresses the U.N.; on Dec. 16, the PLO Central Committee announces the cessation of the anti-Jordanian propaganda campaign.

Only the Popular Front (PFLP) reject the "mini-State" hypothesis by leaving the PLO Executive Committee in September ’74 and forming the so-called "Rejection Front", together with the PFLP – General Command and the Arab Liberation Front (FLA).

The emergence of the "Mini-State" position, a position fiercely condemned until a few months earlier, and which directly relates to the recognition of the PLO by the Arab States and the UN itself, as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, is further proof of the insubstantiality of the Palestinian "national question", at least in the progressive national sense.

The acceptance of the "Mini-State" perspective confirms that the guerrilla chooses to place itself definitively within the imperialist order in the region and that the path of diplomacy and negotiation is now taking the place of that of arms as its methods of action and struggle must adapt to its politics.

14. THE NEW LEBANESE "BLACK SEPTEMBER": THE TELL EL ZAATAR COMMUNE

The Lebanese events come to break the plans for peaceful conquests that had been brewing in the heads of the PLO leadership.

The attempted physical elimination of the guerrillas in Jordan had resulted in the geographic displacement of the same problems for more aggravated by the inevitable and spontaneous contact of the Palestinians with the exploited Lebanese Muslim masses. Uprooted from the land, forced to sell themselves for derisory wages or to take up arms in organizations that were not only not classist but not even revolutionary, the former Palestinian laborers, peasants, artisans, and small traders gradually moved toward an unwritten, spontaneous, and entrenched alliance with their Lebanese class brothers despite the opportunist directives of their leaders. The Palestinian refugee finds himself exploited on par with his Lebanese or Jordanian brother, whether by the Arab landlord or the Israeli capitalist; whether by the progressive Libyan or Syrian regime or the Hashemite monarchy, his refugee status frees him from patriotic responsibility to frontiers he does not possess (and which they would like to give him), his labor force is quoted on the Tel Aviv market as far as Kuwait; thousands of proletarians cross the borders south of Lebanon daily to go to work in Israel; thousands more travel from Gaza or the West Bank; he is now no longer a Palestinian but a landless proletarian. The Lebanese State is aware of the danger posed by the presence on its territory of as many as 400.000 refugees, given the extremely critical social situation in the country, which sees on the one hand amassed vast wealth in the hands of the Maronite Christian minority, i.e., the large commercial and financial bourgeoisie, landowners, and the political and military caste, on the other, the majority of the Muslim population, poor peasants, laborers, unemployed, crammed often into the bidonvilles on the outskirts of large cities such as in Beirut where one-third of the entire population of Lebanon gathers in conditions of real misery or even in makeshift camps.

"The special interest that the Christian right was pursuing", writes S.Turquie in "Le Monde Diplomatique" of Dec. 1976 – “was the preservation of its power threatened by the presence of the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon: the action of the fedayins on the Israeli frontier challenged its pre-eminence and provoked a tension that risked dragging the country into a regional conflict from which the Lebanese bourgeoisie had always known how to remain outside; the PLO’s military autonomy broke the monopoly of arms on which the domination of the ruling classes is based".

After unsuccessful attempts in previous years to forcibly dispose of the Palestinian militia presence, in January 1975 the Phalanges (a Christian right-wing organization) denounced the fedayin presence in the south and called for a referendum on whether or not they should continue to remain in the country. On April 13 a bus of Palestinians and Lebanese is attacked on the outskirts of Beirut and 27 passengers including 18 fedayins are massacred. From this incident begins open fighting between guerrilla organizations and the fierce militias of the Christian-Maronite right. The fighting causes a serious government crisis, and with the mediation of Syria a "government of national salvation" is formed, which announces a program of socio-economic reforms and manages to maintain the truce for two months (July and August ’75). In late August serious incidents erupt in the Bekaa plain in eastern Lebanon between Christians and Muslims, among whom are agricultural laborers employed in large numbers in the area. The incidents also spread to northern Lebanon and unfolded with extreme harshness culminating, in Beirut, with the slaughter of 200 Muslim civilians by Christian militiamen. Syria’s diplomatic intervention nevertheless succeeds in December in bringing the fighting to a halt. These ceasefires, of course, serve no good purpose since they do not remove the causes that led to the fighting; their only function is to allow the right-wing organizations, well decided on what to do, to reorganize their forces and proceed to new attacks. Indeed, in January ’76, the Phalangists organize a blockade of the Palestinian camp of Tell El Zaatar on the outskirts of Beirut. On January 14, the Christian right took over the Dbaje camp (north of Beirut) and attacked the Lebanese-Palestinian Quarantine slum in Beirut. Palestinian guerrilla organizations combined with Lebanese leftist organizations counterattack. The intervention on a few occasions of the Lebanese army alongside the right-wingers provokes a rebellion in the army whose senior hierarchies are composed mainly of Maronite Christians, while the lower-ranking officers and soldiers are largely of proletarian and peasant and Muslim extraction. The rebellion spreads like wildfire across the country, and the Arab Lebanon Army is formed, siding with the guerrilla organizations.

At this point the situation becomes very delicate for the Christian forces and the danger of a victory for the Palestinian militias becomes real. Therefore, external intervention is required to help the State forces.

It is Syria this time that takes on the task of restoring order. By intervening in Lebanon, the Syrian regime is pursuing its own particular goals. "Whatever regimes have succeeded Damascus, Syria has never really admitted the existence of an independent Lebanon. The dream of its domination, or rather, of its return to ’Greater Syria,’ has been a constant element in Syrian politics. By the time President Assad’s wagons crossed the Lebanese border in early June ’76, the dominant fraction of Lebanese power, the Christian right, is in no position to oppose the venture. It is an unhoped-for opportunity for Damascus, which has another reason for intervening in the conflict: it cannot allow, in neighboring Lebanon, a Palestinian-progressive victory that would risk pushing its own regime to the left" (Le Monde Diplomatique, Dec. ’76). In addition to these particular motives of the Syrian State, there is, as we have already mentioned, the general will of the Arab countries: "The defeat of the Lebanese right wing would have been a counter-current event in the perspective of a negotiated settlement with Israel and would have led to a decrease in the Palestinians’ dependence on Damascus. Thus, beyond verbal protests, the Arab States most directly concerned let Assad’s troops do their thing, at least up to a point" (Le Monde Diplomatique, Dec. ’76).

At first Syria brought in the Saika troops, i.e., Palestinians organized in the Syrian army, but these units deserted en masse, switching to the guerrilla side; in early June then the Syrian army intervened directly with 13,000 men and 800 tanks; it laid a tight siege on Beirut neighborhoods in the hands of Palestinian militias and opened a new front in the south of the country. The Syrian intervention finds no opposition; it comes with American approval and Israeli consent, which has, however, set the Litani River as a frontier insurmountable by Damascus’ troops; it is approved by Russia, which welcomes a strengthening of Syria and is negotiating arms sales to Jordan; and of course it is accepted by the Arab League, which, however, calls a summit to arrive at a "peace" agreement.

In August, after a 52-day siege, the Palestinian camp of Tell El Zaatar falls; calling the population to leave the camp by promising the protection of the Red Cross, the Phalangists and Chamoun militias (another Christian organization) then begin the systematic massacre of the population claiming thousands of victims.

We wrote, angrily commenting on those tragic events, "The action and the very existence of the poor Palestinian masses was A WANDERING MINE, in that troubled part of the world, a mine that could burst at any moment: the Palestinians clashed against the interests of all, they had to be eliminated, and it was the Arab States-Israel-Imperialism coalition that did it, moving in a compact reactionary front.

"L’Unità" in its disgusting comments lectures everyone on moderation and frontism, blithely trying to dilute and conceal the class clash that erupted in Lebanon, brazenly using the misleading myths of Palestinian people and nation to gloss over the contradictions tearing apart the unity of this same people. News agencies report that Tell El Zaatar more than a real refugee camp had become a giant suburb, a slum like so many of the African, Asian, and American cities, slums in which Lebanese and Palestinian proletarians and semi-proletarians recruited as cheap labor force in the factories of Beirut lived shoulder to shoulder; capital, an anonymous and gigantic force, first unites races and nationalities and then dissolves them into class! (…)

"These are the existing social and political relations. This the only real revolutionary perspective: Tying the Palestinian national problem to the class problem, which means autonomous framing of the Palestinian proletarians and poor peasants and not common front, in antithesis to any national, interclass organization; program of radical agrarian reform, ceaseless effort to link the strength and movement of the Palestinian and other Arab proletarians and poor peasants, the emancipation of which will have to win against the Assads, the Husseins, the Sadats, the Qaddafis, the Arafats and not only against the State of Israel.

"Of course, also against the PLO which sabotages the action of the proletariat of Palestine which will have to give itself a class, workers’ organization instead. This became crystal clear with the massacre of Tell EI Zaatar during which the PLO pretended to beg from all Arab States, including Syria, promises never kept, as was inevitable, of truce and peace conferences, with the only result of increasing the mass of chatterers and priests who always, when facts give the floor to arms and direct action of the masses, stubbornly cling to petty-bourgeois pacifist illusions (…)

"Prerequisite for the victory of the Arab and Palestinian proletarians and poor peasants is to break the cohabitation of opposing classes and programs, amend themselves and give themselves an autonomous discipline, first of all military. Only such freedom of movement can also allow the same threadbare banner of bourgeois pan-Arabism to be twisted into the red banner of the Middle Eastern proletarian masses.

"The opportunism that chains the proletariat of the advanced countries to reformist, gradualist, pacifist and electoralist illusions is the other enemy to be beaten: it is our certainty that the gigantic economic, political and social upheavals heralded close by by the current crisis of the world capitalist system of production will make these illusions melt like snow in the sun, and that the proletariat will be reunited with its party and its revolutionary program of attack on the bourgeois regime, throwing its formidable weight on the scales of class struggle at the scale of the world. Tell El Zaatar is a defeat of workers everywhere, but there are defeats that are worth more than a thousand victories ... electoral, defeats from which the revolution rises anonymously and tremendously more than before, with its cry: I was, I am, I will be! The defeated of today will be the victors of tomorrow" (from "il Partito Comunista"; September 1976)

After the Beirut massacres, Syrian troops’ offensive comes to a halt: "The offensive launched by the Syrian army in the Lebanese mountains against Palestinian-progressive forces was abruptly halted in mid-October by the diplomatic initiative of King Khaled of Saudi Arabia. The halting of the fighting came at a time when the Damascus army was proving its military superiority, but also when the fierce resistance of the Palestinian-progressive fighters portended particularly bloody clashes that were likely to end, at the cost of heavy Syrian losses, with the crushing of the Palestinian resistance. Under these conditions, a purely military victory would have led to open Syrian occupation and undoubtedly to the replacement of the PLO leadership with Saika leaders, enfeebled with Damascus. The Arab States could admit neither too spectacular a liquidation of the PLO nor too obvious a strengthening of Syrian influence alone" (Le Monde Diplomatique.; Dec. ’76). Syria’s acquiescence to the will of the Arab States and especially Saudi Arabia, which conducts its policy at this time, is easily explained: "About a quarter of Syria’s resources ($1 billion out of the $4.5 billion Damascus spends in ’76) come from oil countries. Syria’s excessive financial dependence on Saudi Arabia in particular shows very well that Assad’s intervention in the internal affairs of Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance was at least tolerated by Riyadh" (Le Monde Diplomatique; Dec. ’76).

15. DURING TRUCES IMPERIALIST CAMARILLAS MANEUVER STATES AND GUERRILLAS

Significant fact: After massacring its best fighters in Lebanon, on Sept. 6, just three weeks after the Tell El Zaatar massacre, the Arab League recognizes the PLO as a full member, with voting rights. As we have already seen after the "Black September" massacre, again the PLO’s disciplined behavior, which was limited to negotiation to "stop the slaughter", earns it promotion on the diplomatic field: the massacres of Arab plebs tragically punctuate the "political progress" of the "Palestinian national cause".

On Oct. 17, the Arab summit in Riyadh convenes: Arafat attends it along with the executioner Assad, his Lebanese straw man, Sarkis, the collaborationist Sadat, the Emir of Kuwait and King Kaled of Saudi Arabia, who seems to be the strong man of the situation – that is, Washington’s man. Opened under the auspices of reconciliation between Cairo and Damascus who had been at loggerheads since Sept. 2, ’75, the date of the Egyptian signing of the second Sinai agreement with Israel., the summit is maneuvered, albeit in their absence, by the U.S. and is part of their plan to resolve the Middle East crisis based on peace and mutual recognition between Arab States and Israel, once the hotbeds of tension represented by the Palestinians have been forcibly eliminated. It is agreed that a cease-fire will go into effect throughout Lebanese territory by Oct. 21; that a 30,000-strong Arab peacekeeping force will be charged with enforcing the peace; to get all combatants to return to the positions they occupied at the beginning of the war; and to withdraw their heavy weaponry from them. The PLO agrees to abide by the Cairo Accords of ’69 and withdraw to its bases in southern Lebanon. The plan does not make a word of the fact that right-wing militias with the support of the Israeli army, are gaining strong positions in the south, casting very serious doubt on the possibility by the Palestinians of returning to their old bases; it practically formalizes the presence of Syrian troops in Lebanon and indeed paves the way for the reinforcement of the Damascus contingent from 12 to 30,000 troops and even demands the disarmament of guerrilla organizations which, without heavy weapons, would remain at the mercy of the butcher of the moment.

If Riyadh’s compromise succeeds in establishing an uncertain truce, it leaves a situation no less explosive than the one that existed before the war: after months of civil war, Palestinian-progressive forces have been hard hit but certainly not eliminated from the scene; nothing has changed in Lebanon, and the only guarantee of "peace" is the massive presence of occupation soldiers; Israel on the other hand does not seem at all willing to be subjected to the new American strategy, which, in preparation for Camp David, no longer intends to limit its presence in the region on the State of Israel alone, but also wants alliance with moderate Arab countries and thus aims to reduce the grounds for confrontation between the parties in order to achieve regional "pacification" in an anti-Russian function. The Israeli State thus intends to take as many advantages from the civil war as possible to strengthen its position, and the occasion is among the most favorable to gain positions in the north.

At this time the situation of the Palestinians, who have just returned from the bloody civil war, is particularly critical: in the south, as we have seen they are hunted down by the Israeli army and its mercenaries; in the center and north they have to reckon not only with the Phalange militias, which are also well fortified and armed by the Israelis, but above all with Syria, which is trying in every way to subject their organizations to its direction.

But Syria’s attitude is set to change with Egypt’s further rapprochement with Israel, spectacularly confirmed by Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in November 1977.

While Israel, as ties with Egypt strengthened, secured peace on its southern frontier and could confidently shift its military potential northward, Syria was in danger of finding itself completely isolated, opposed both to the PLO and to moderate Arab countries that effectively accepted Egypt’s conciliatory policy.

The massive Israeli attack on southern Lebanon in March ’78, an attack that shows the power of Tell Aviv’s army and poses a serious threat to Syrian territory itself; the signing of the Camp David Accords in Sept; the intransigent attitude of the Phalangists who, despite the support they had from Damascus are unwilling to tolerate its occupation for long and set their sights on Israel; all these facts will lead the Assad regime to change its flag again and to seek an alliance with the PLO once more, at the same time strengthening ties with Moscow.

In March ’78, as we have said, taking as a pretext a serious terrorist attack against Israeli civilians, 30,000 Tell Aviv soldiers, with the support of air force and armored vehicles, invaded southern Lebanon, investing Palestinian bases, defended by a few hundred guerrillas.

But the situation is evidently not yet ripe to deal the decisive blow to the fedayin military force; the Israeli troops, after several months of occupying southern Lebanon, withdraw, settling for only partial success. The Palestinians, for their part, despite the massive Israeli intervention which, precisely because of its power could not have occurred by surprise, emerged from the battle without serious losses, having been able to retreat in good order.

In the following September just as Israeli planes were strafing and bombing Palestinian camps and villages in southern Lebanon, the famous U.S.-Israel-Egypt agreements were being signed at Camp David under high President Carter direction that would lead to Egypt’s decisive move into the U.S. orbit, the signing of the peace treaty between Jerusalem and Cairo, and the return of the Sinai to Egypt. These agreements, which imperialist propaganda agencies around the world will claim as a decisive step toward peace in the Middle East, will, on the contrary, be the indispensable precondition for the Israeli attack on Lebanon, Tsahal’s occupation of Beirut and the complete elimination of the Palestinian presence in southern Lebanon.

Meanwhile, the intervention of UN forces, desired by the Arab States and the PLO itself leads to the internationalization of the Lebanese conflict and paves the way for the "global political settlement" that is in the plans of U.S. imperialism; the precarious alliance that had been formed among the Arab countries against the Camp David Accords and against Egypt is also rapidly crumbling, and after the fall of the Shah in Iran and the coming to power of Komeini in early ’79, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan clearly distance themselves from Syria, Libya and South Yemen, which remain the only countries to oppose negotiations with Israel.

In southern Lebanon, meanwhile, the policy followed by Israel tends to take away from the Palestinians, taking advantage of their defeat, the support of the population, which consists mostly of Shiites, the largest and poorest ethnic group in Lebanon. For a long time the Shiites have been allies of the Lebanese left; they suffered the greatest losses in the ’75-’76 civil war and their region in southern Lebanon, has been the most bombed out. They had always suffered Israeli reprisals along with the Palestinians and a de facto solidarity tended to be established between the two communities, in the south as well as in the bidonvilles on the outskirts of Beirut. But neither the Palestinian organizations nor the Lebanese "left" parties could ever offer anything to this community and the proletarians of the bidonvilles in exchange for their solidarity, or rather, the lack of a social program of emancipation of the oppressed, on the part of the PLO and its allies, abandoned them to the Israeli and Phalangist propaganda that could make inroads by pointing to the Palestinians as the real perpetrators of war and misery. It is the reactionary policy of the PLO then that, even in this situation, isolates the Palestinian proletarians and fighters from their natural allies and exposes them to the attacks of the wealthy classes.

In August 1980, the Israeli army decided to strike a new blow at the fedayin positions in southern Lebanon. Two armored columns, about 1,000 strong, with the support of about 20 helicopters, attack the Palestinian positions, aiming at the capture of the stronghold of Beaufort Castle; the attack is repulsed by the guerrillas, but Israeli engineer divisions prepare, in Haddad-controlled territories, the necessary works for a full-scale operation.

Faced with the increasingly pressing danger of a massive Israeli attack on Lebanon, and spurred also by the newly heightened tensions with Iraq, feeling strong from the treaty of friendship and cooperation signed in the previous October with the USSR, Syria decides to go on the offensive again in Lebanon in an attempt to strengthen its positions threatened by some initiatives of the Phalangists who in December had begun to install themselves in the city of Zahle, pushed probably by the Israelis who wanted to test the regime in Damascus. Assad’s army therefore attacked Phalangist positions in Zahle and managed to break communications between the besieged town and the region under Maronite control.

During this battle, the Syrians massively bombard the eastern sector of Beirut, where the Palestinians and their allies had taken the field against the Phalangists to support them; the bombardment of the Maronite town provokes an immediate reaction in the international press against the "massacre of the Christians". Intervention by the Israelis and then by the major imperialist powers will bring back the truce, but a number of Russian-supplied Sam-6 missile batteries will be placed on the Zahle Heights, now passed into Syrian hands, which should serve to counter the almost total domination of the skies possessed up to this point by Israel’s air force.

Three months later, in July, the Jerusalem army will again go on the offensive against Palestinian bases in southern Lebanon, and the Star of David air force will ruthlessly bomb Palestinian neighborhoods in Beirut and refugee camps in southern Lebanon. The carnage would cease only after a new U.S. intervention, which, by engaging in negotiations for the first time, albeit indirectly, between Israel and Palestinian leadership would lead to an agreement providing for "an end to all hostile operations between Lebanese and Israeli territory"; Syria, however, did nothing to oppose the Tsahal attack.

Two weeks after the cease-fire was reached on the Lebanese front, Saudi Arabia proposed a peace plan for the Middle East (the Fahd plan, named after the reigning prince); the significant points of the plan are these: 1) Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories; 2) Creation of a Palestinian State; 3) Recognition of the right of all States in the region to live in peace, i.e., implicit recognition of the State of Israel. In October, the plan gained Arafat’s support. The intent of the PLO leadership is to achieve formal recognition by the United States. Contacts with Reagan’s emissary, Philip Habib, during the July negotiations to arrive at a cease-fire with Israel were of great importance to the Palestinian leadership in this regard, and according to Palestine magazine, a PLO newsletter, they represented "an act of recognition, if not of the PLO, at least of the political reality of the PLO". "For the political leadership of the PLO", writes Samir Kassir in Le Monde Diplomatique (12/’81), "the interest of such a plan is precisely that of building a solid gangway in the direction of the U.S., with the intermediation of the Front of Silence, (Saudi Arabia, Gulf countries, Jordan) on condition that its promoters obtain from Washington a more effective support for the tacit agreement behind which the U.S. administration hides. The plan, however, is opposed by Syria, which is increasingly at loggerheads with Iraq and its Silent Front allies. Also arrayed against the plan are the Damascus-controlled PLO fraction and the Front of Denial, which succeed in outvoting Arafat. "The Palestinian leadership thus disavowed the Fahd plan, a fact that led to the resounding failure of the Fez summit on November 25" (Le Monde Diplomatique, 4/’82).

Of course, these divisions within the leadership of the PLO do not stem from the clash of two different class tendencies, one more favorable to the wealthy classes and the other to the dispossessed class, within the Palestinian "people", but, siding fully with the bourgeois camp, both represent two different parties of it foraged by one or the other imperialism. Within this framework, Arafat’s position is undoubtedly still the stronger one and therefore his policy, beyond momentary mishaps along the way, is the one that is bound to prevail. "Arafat’s presence at the head of the Palestinian movement", reads Le monde Diplomatique (12/’81), "plays a reassuring role for conservative Arab regimes. It is precisely this function that allows the PLO to continue to receive important subsidies, essential to its survival. Properly Palestinian sources of funding, reserved for major trials, are not sufficient for the needs of the important apparatus political-military apparatus of the resistance. Material assistance from rich Arab countries and, individually, Saudi Arabia, is needed more than ever". Even Russia, which had at first opposed the plan after a trip by Arafat to Moscow, reportedly decided to no longer oppose it, apparently in exchange for assurances of its future inclusion in the plan and normalization of diplomatic relations with Riyadh.

One of the central points of the Fahd plan, however, calls for Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories and in particular from the West Bank, which increasingly appears to be the territory envisaged for the establishment of the Palestinian State-ghetto, but the Israeli State has no intention at all of returning these territories and to leave no doubt as to its intentions, in mid-December ’81 it extends Israeli legislation to the Syrian Golan, sealing in practice, its official annexation. Meanwhile, the time is approaching for the planned return of the last part of Sinai to Egypt, in accordance with the Camp David Accords. The Israeli government is taking advantage of this to mount a propaganda campaign against the withdrawal by trying to arrive at new negotiations that include, in exchange for complying with the pacts with Egypt, assurances of continued occupation of the other territories; it also appears that Jerusalem intends to attack Lebanon again so as to raise tensions with the Arab States, but the intervention of the U.S., determined to save the Egyptian regime, which would suffer a severe blow from non-compliance with the Camp David Accords, curbs the Israeli initiative, and on April 26, ’82, Sinai is duly returned to the Cairo government.

16. THE ECONOMIC DOMINANCE OF ISRAELI CAPITAL

Israeli capital, already grappling with a severe economic crisis, is therefore not at all willing to withdraw from the West Bank. In recent years it has continually accentuated its efforts to annex this fertile region; since ’67 as many as 152 Jewish colonies have been established in the occupied territories, 85 of them in the West Bank, and last November an Israeli civil administration was established in the West Bank. "A series of general strikes and demonstrations immediately began in the occupied territories, followed by the traditional response: dynamite-blasted houses, curfews, closure of Bir-Zeit University, arrest of many Palestinian leaders, censorship in the press" (Le Monde Diplomatique, 12/’8 1). The reasons for such profound opposition of the populations of the occupied territories to the Israeli occupation and, on the other hand, Israel’s firm resolve not to give up, despite strong international and even American pressure, can be explained by the economic importance that these territories and their people represent for Israel and the policy of outright robbery that it practices there.

The West Bank and Gaza respectively occupy an area of 5505 sq. km. (like our Liguria region) and 363 sq. km. The West Bank has about 700,000 inhabitants with a density of 127 inh./sq.km. and Gaza almost 300,000 (825 inh./sq.km.) to which we must add 72,500 and 195,000 refugees crammed into camps, respectively. The West Bank economy before the ’67 war was essentially a subsistence economy; the bulk of the population, about 50 percent was engaged in agriculture versus only l5 percent employed in a still rudimentary industry consisting almost entirely of small workshops with 4 or 5 workers. Somewhat more developed was the Gaza Strip with 33% employed in agriculture. The Israeli occupation profoundly affected the economy of these areas having the Israeli State sought to exploit every resource for its exclusive benefit, as is the practice of any imperialism.

The Israeli bourgeoisie, has tended above all to exploit its large reserve of cheap labor, provided by the masses of refugees and the expropriation of peasants, by exploiting it on the spot or in the State of Israel itself, while simultaneously seeking to displace the surplus population to prepare the ground for eventual annexation.

"Of the spare Palestinian labor supplied cheaply from the occupied territories, Israeli capital decided to import some of it, while exploiting the remainder on the spot. The limiting number of Palestinian Arab immigrants to Israel was increased every year. Thus, while in ’67 there were but 1,000 workers from the occupied territories working in Israel, in 1973, before the October War, they numbered about 80,000 (laborers and others) officially employed by Israeli labor offices. And how many were those employed illegally? Other data show us that in ’73 about 36 percent of the active labor force in the occupied territories-which amounted to 195,000 people-were directly employed in the Israeli economy. Of the 100,000 manual laborers in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, 60,000 were working in Israel, or 60 percent of the working class in these regions" (from "Palestine en marche"; no. 5/’75).

"Seventy-four thousand Palestinians cross daily and in both directions (they are strictly forbidden to spend the night in Israel) the limits of the territories occupied in 1967. To these must be added 10 to 15 thousand "irregulars" who are not employed through the intermediary of Israeli labor offices and therefore are not officially counted; these are often young people, employed in contravention of Israeli law, or adults doing illegal work. In total, more than a third of the working population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Relegated to the lowest level in the scale of workers and wage earners, better paid than in the occupied territories but less than Israeli workers (according to data from "Palestine en marche", a Palestinian’s daily wage was 22.9 Israeli liras compared to 42.8 for an Israeli) these workers are clustered in construction (47 percent in 1980), industry (20.5 percent) and agriculture (14.3 percent). (from Le monde Diplomatique, Sept. ’81). This is while the industrial sector in the occupied territories has stagnated when it has not regressed; in fact, the number of industrial workers in the West Bank declined from 17,000 in ’69 to 15,000 in 1980. "The Israeli government has placed the occupied territories in a state of increasing dependency. Some call it ’planned stagnation,’ hoping that increasingly difficult living conditions for Arabs will prompt them to leave. In fact about 200,000 have emigrated since ’67 and the rate of departures in recent years is 10-20,000 per year according to some estimates" (ibid.).

Trade relations between Israel and these territories are also one-way: "From the first year of occupation, the Israeli authorities decided to open these territories to Israeli products. The effect was traumatizing; today you cannot find manufactured consumer goods there that do not come from Israel. For Israeli exporters, the occupied territories constitute a veritable hunting ground. Protected by the same customs barriers as their own domestic markets, they constitute their second largest market, after the United States and before West Germany: on average, 90 percent of imports come from Israel (only 1 percent from Jordan and 9 percent from the rest of the world). In contrast, access to the Israeli market is closed for products from the West Bank and Gaza, with the exception of a few agricultural products, construction materials and a very limited number of manufactured goods, and the trade balance of these territories is chronically in deficit as exports cover only 35% of imports, nor are the wages of Palestinians working in Israel sufficient to cover this deficit. The occupied territories can rebalance their balance of payments only through remittances from emigrants abroad, especially to the Gulf countries and their active trade balance with Jordan where they export agricultural products" (ibid.).

The traditional agricultural structure has also been heavily altered by the Israelis especially through the massive land confiscation that is a decisive step toward annexation:

"According to Jordanian sources, the Israelis have confiscated or expropriated, since the Six-Day War, as many as 203,000 hectares in the West Bank, or 37 percent of the territory. So for example, in the Jordan Valley 40 percent of the arable land, is now in the hands of Israeli settlers. For fourteen years the Palestinians have not been able to dig a single well lacking permission from the military government (...) In contrast, the Israeli water company, Mekorot, has dug 17 wells in the valley for the use of the settlers. Equipped with powerful pumps they supplied, as early as ’78, more than 14 million cubic meters of water per year to less than 16,000 settlers, while 690,000 Arab inhabitants have only 33 million cubic meters (...) Currently only 4 percent of the land cultivated by Arabs in the West Bank is irrigated (...) In 1970 agriculture still employed 38 percent of the working population in the occupied territories; today it employs less than 28 percent. Small landowners, small farmers, agricultural workers, form, with the population of the refugee camps, the bulk of the troops who daily take the road to Israel, seeking employment that local industry cannot offer them" (ibid.).

In June ’80 wrote A. Kapeliouk in Le monde Diplomatique: "The struggle for land becomes the central theme of a now daily confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians. The policy of implantations directed by Gen. Ariel Sharon, Minister of Agriculture, has a clear and distinct purpose: to create accomplished facts in the West Bank so as to make the new status quo irreversible and prevent the creation of a Palestinian State (...) In all, 122 Jewish colonies have been installed in the occupied territories and bring together a population of 20,000 settlers (not counting 60,000 Jews living in the new neighborhoods built in the Arab part of Jerusalem). The Israeli colonies have been established on State-owned land that the Israeli government claims to inherit, or on other plots that belonged to Palestinian refugees and on private individuals’ land confiscated for "security reasons" (...) The methods of expelling Palestinian owners are varied (intimidation, recourse to various laws, etc.) and also unaccustomed: recently planes spread defoliants on many hundreds of hectares of crops (wheat, barley and olive trees) that belonged to Palestinian farmers from 4 villages in the Hebron region; a method that had already been successfully used in 1972 in the West Bank village of Akraba whose lands were later assigned to the new neighboring colony of Gitit". "Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation, the Arab population of the Golan has fallen from 130,000 to 13,000. Affected by the land confiscation policy some 200,000 Palestinians have been forced to leave the West Bank. Even in the superpopulated Gaza Strip, where 450,000 Palestinians are massed, the Israelis have confiscated land and established 4 colonies (5 in 1980)". There are currently 1.3 million inhabitants in the occupied areas, 850,000 of whom live in the West Bank.

Thus in these territories the Israeli State oppresses not only the proletarians and the dispossessed, but also the other social classes by preventing Arab capital from developing its own industry, trade, agriculture.

But even if, albeit with different weights, the Israeli State crushes under its heel the entire Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza as well as of the Golan, it does not at all follow from this observation that the proletariat should struggle, in the name of a claimed national independence to be regained, alongside the other "popular" classes that have exploited and are exploiting them even more harshly than the Israelis.

In the entire Middle East area, as we are proving, there is no solution to the problems of the proletariat within the framework of a national struggle; the solution lies only in the resumption of the class struggle, and in this sense the Arab proletarians, including those of the occupied territories, must reject all collaboration with the other classes and form their own organizations of struggle and combat.

APPENDIX

Not impossible Palestinian nationalism but world proletarian revolution will avenge the extermination of the Fedayn

A new tragedy is having its epilogue in Lebanon. Once again thousands and thousands of proletarians, poor peasants, refugees, have been attacked, shelled, machine-gunned; 14,000 dead, 20,000 wounded, thousands missing, tens of thousands homeless.

The army of the State of Israel that proceeded with Operation Peace in Galilee had, in the implementation of this task the unconditional support of international imperialism, from the Western camp to the Eastern camp and the Arab countries themselves, because the Palestinian proletariat and poor masses, numerous, combative, scattered in all the countries of the Middle East represent a danger to all the ruling classes of all the States and a factor of instability in a key area for world imperial balances.

Our hearts go out to the hundreds and thousands of our class brothers and sisters, massacred by the bombs and machine-gun fire of imperialism, who are resisting to the death against an overpowering and ruthless enemy, but we cannot fail to point out that the primary responsibility for this umpteenth massacre falls squarely on the PLO and other Palestinian resistance organizations. Whether one decides for surrender or for all-out resistance in Beirut the counterrevolutionary function of the PLO is clear and the sacrifice of its military organization cannot serve to give it a new license of "revolutionism".

The Palestinian resistance organizations, PLO in the lead, in recent years have increasingly focused on a "political solution", of the Palestinian problem, that is, they have reduced their goals to the demand for the establishment of a politically independent Palestinian State to be achieved through agreements and bargains with the States in the region and the two imperialist camps.

This goal, responding to the expectations of the Palestinian petty and middle bourgeoisie has always considered the armed organizing of the poor masses a real enemy, both because this would spontaneously tend to unite and influence the super-exploited proletariat in the Arab countries (a mortal danger to the ruling classes), and because this organizing, putting on the agenda the social question, the land question, the end of exploitation, would certainly not be satisfied by the establishment of a Palestinian State, in nothing different from the other Arab States.

As early as six years ago we recorded how the PLO had abandoned to itself the thousands of proletarian fighters, Lebanese and Palestinian, from the ’heroic commune of Tell El Zaatar, massacred by the joint attack of Lebanese right-wing militias and Syrian army troops, and we assessed that this defeat of the proletariat and its betrayal would strengthen the international prestige of the PLO. In fact, in recent years it has increasingly abandoned its barricadian aspect and transformed itself into a full-fledged State, albeit without a stable territory, taking over all its organizational and repressive functions. Its armed militias have increasingly been transformed into a "police and gendarmerie apparatus" (Republic, June 26) while Arafat, a "guerrilla leader" behaves like a head of State.

This PLO policy has, yes, received the support of all the Arab States in the struggle against Israel, which refuses to concede the West Bank and Gaza territories to the future State, but-inevitably, given their national and bourgeois base-it has destroyed the only possibility of victory against imperialism and exploitation, a victory that could only come from the union, in a single front, of the Palestinian proletariat with the dispossessed masses of the Arab countries, whose sufferings have so often erupted in bloody revolts in recent years, and from union with the proletariat of Israel itself, which, already hard hit in its conditions by the capitalist crisis, a sincere revolutionary proletarian movement could have wrested from collaboration with its own bourgeoisie and State, overturning the present relations of force in the region that point to Israel as the main pillar of imperialism.

Another linchpin of the issue lies in the still almost complete absence of the Western proletariat from the field of revolutionary class struggle and thus in the indifference or impotence with which the tragic news of the massacres of our comrades and class brothers are greeted.

Indeed, it is evident that the PLO policy has for long years and currently finds its support and nourishment in that of the opportunist parties that are at the head of the working class of the West, which for more than half a century now have been pushing the proletariat not to rebellion but to collaboration with Capital and the State, thus working, while preaching about peace and collaboration among peoples, on the preparation of the third world slaughter, just as happened in Israel where Labor gave its full support to the war, then, of course, condemning its "excesses".

But this "pacification" achieved with the blood of thousands of proletarians will not bring peace to the Middle East. This war fought against the dispossessed Lebanese-Palestinian masses has served imperialism to prepare the ground for the next war between States that will see the Middle East area as one of its crucial targets.

We communists have always said and written in no uncertain terms that we are not pacifists, that we do not want to defend bourgeois peace, but never before have we so hated this "peace" that only demonstrates the oppressive force of this infamous regime so much.

So we welcome the war to shake proletarian minds and hearts numbed by fifty years of dominant counterrevolution on the world scale. We welcome the imperialist war if it will set in motion again the process of international proletarian revolution.

The terrible revolution of the oppressed will avenge the extermination of the Palestinians plotted by the bourgeoisies all over the world

So now it is known to all: the extermination of thousands of women, old men, children in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila was planned, agreed upon, carried out with full knowledge and with ruthless lucidity and decision by the State of Israel, which used to carry out the massacre prezzured mercenaries who acted at night, in the light of flares fired by Israeli soldiers. The Italian-French-American peacekeeping force left the city of Beirut before the deadline set by the "Habib plan" precisely to allow this massacre.

The responsibility for this new carnage of proletarians, of our class brothers and sisters, however, falls not only on the imperialist States, on Israel, on the Arab States, on Russia, which when they have not directly collaborated in it have passively stood by and watched, but also, and it is a duty to say this if one does not want to be confused with the bleating chorus of pacifist and democratoid opportunism, on the counterrevolutionary leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The camps were concentrations of proletarians, the jobless, the homeless, the masses who had nothing to lose; in the camps it was easy to organize, to hide, to arm; in the camps an underground proletarian organization could grow and strengthen; the camps were the refuge-ghetto of the dispossessed and a permanent threat to anyone who had to ensure bourgeois order in Beirut. The camps were also a threat to the bourgeois leadership of the PLO, which directs the Palestinian armed movement toward the counterrevolutionary goal of the ghetto-State in the West Bank and Gaza and fights the formation of an autonomous organization of the Palestinian proletariat capable of linking not only with the Lebanese and Arab proletarians but with the Israeli proletariat itself, above national and religious divisions against what increasingly proves to be a single enemy, the supra-State alliance of the hegemonic classes of the Arab countries and Israel.

The proletarian deaths at Sabra and Chatila were the price paid by Arafat to have the American partisan recognition that is indispensable for him to carry out his political program successfully.

The abandonment of Beirut without any concrete guarantee for the safety of the camps is the most tragic confirmation of the anti-proletarian function of the PLO, whose militiamen were not defeated in the field by the enemy army, but chose retreat because it was the most favorable move for their diplomatic games.

The Israeli army, despite its best efforts, never managed to enter West Beirut, but the PLO leadership, like the Lebanese leftist parties allied to it, were very careful not to call the entire proletarian population of the battered city to arms, not to attack East Beirut, where the Lebanese bourgeoisie continued to enjoy the sunshine while in the west they were dying of hunger, thirst, and bombs.

Compromise was desired, also desired by Israel because it too was afraid of engaging in a no-holds-barred battle against a city of proletarians, who, in that case, might perhaps have broken discipline to their traitorous parties and risen up compactly against the slaughterers; and then yes, Israel’s soldiers would have found bread for their teeth.

In the early days of fighting, one of the PLO leadership had declared that the Palestinian fighters would never leave the city unless the right-wing militias, sworn enemies of the Palestinians and the Lebanese left, super-armed, experts in massacres of defenseless civilians, were also disarmed first. The demand was dropped in the course of negotiations.

The Habib plan itself provided that the mandate of the international interposition force would be for one month, renewable only at the request of the Lebanese government: so what could be the guarantees, obtained by Arafat from the American side, for the security of the camps? A "word?" Or the forces of the Lebanese army, notoriously linked to right-wing militias?

Public opinion and democratic governments all over the world have been outraged by the massacre, forgetting that Israeli officers and their thugs learned these normal techniques of repression precisely from their German, French, British, American or Italian colleagues and vent their irritation by calling for the heads (resignation that is) of Begin and Sharon, now "war criminals" and until yesterday Nobel laureates and national heroes.

After the massacre, while world public opinion was still reeling from this "regurgitation of the Middle Ages", mass searches and arrests of Lebanese and Palestinian fighters quietly continued in the city, an action in which the Lebanese and Israeli armies collaborated. With the work finished, a new representative of the Gemayel lineage elected, also a fascist, but "honest" and "good-natured", the dead buried, there was nothing lacking now to put one’s heart in peace again, a peace protected by the new multinational force, which this time is back wanted by all, even those who, on the first tour, had somewhat criticized it.

But it will not be enough, gentlemen, for 3,000 multicolored merceneries to restore the superior imperial order either in the Middle East or elsewhere, just as Israel’s super-armed army has proven not to be enough. The camps of Sabra and Chatila are destroyed and razed to the ground, their population terrorized and dispersed, but the nightmare of the millions of proletarians who suffer and moan and hate this infamous regime will continue to hang over your heads. The economic crisis in which your world is struggling will also set in motion again the working masses of the West, today still absent from the struggle and indifferent even to the fate of their brothers in the Middle East.

Only one way forward for the Palestinian proletariat: Class warfare

Once again we had to helplessly witness yet another tragedy of Arab refugees from Palestine. Certainly on several occasions our movement has pointed out how difficult it is to resolve the Palestinian question in the light of current power relations, since, since the time of the first Arab-Palestinian diaspora at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s, the basic conditions for such a solution were and are lacking.

First – and that is, it will make the babblers of Marxism’s hair stand on end – the destinies of the Palestinian people are largely being played out in the great metropolises of imperialism, Moscow, New York, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Paris, Milan, etc. And, as long as the proletariat remains indifferent to reproducing the hellish cycle of capitalist production, in these metropolises it will be very difficult for the Palestinians to address themselves to a path other than defeat. The emancipation of the Palestinian refugees, as armed refugees, as unreserved proletarians in struggle, will only be in joint action with the international proletariat in struggle for its own emancipation. Outside this perspective we may see the wiping of Palestinians off the face of the earth but not the emancipation of Palestinians. We may have generalized massacres, deportations, relocations, absorption of Palestinians by the emerging Arab industry and by Israel itself (a phenomenon that has largely already begun), depending on whether the Palestinians persevere or give up the armed struggle.

Especially in the event of the complete disarmament of the most combative bangs, one could also witness the creation of the much coveted Palestinian State, which would be nothing more than a gigantic lager under the control of one or another imperialist gendarme, in which the various national bourgeoisies would pick up cheap labor.

Should the Palestinians then continue to maintain their armament, remaining as today’s thermometer of revolution in the "rich" countries, we would be forced to witness more repressions similar to those that have sadly filled the history of recent years. States in the area would think in turn to act as "peacekeeping" executioners, as Jordan did in Black September ’70, Syria’s "Arab Deterrence Force" in Tell El Zaatar in June ’76, and Israel in Beirut in July ’82.

These slaughterers, "Arab brothers", have never really been opposed, indeed have been their accomplices to this day, by the petty-bourgeois leadership of the PLO, which has done nothing but manage defeats, has gone begging for the world’s help from one or another imperialism, has sought political recognition, as if it were the government-in-exile of a future State, which no one, however, wants.

The PLO has always directed the class hatred of the Palestinians only against Israel, which it regards as the only enemy of the Arab cause, and has thus mystified the fact that all Arab States have repeatedly turned their backs on the Palestinians in the name of their superior national interests. An example of this is the fact that no Arab country has lifted a finger to prevent the Jewish punitive "peace in Galilee" expedition, an example that lines up with a thousand others. In this regard, the most original "moral" help came from Qaddafi, who called on the Palestinians to commit suicide en masse in order to leave an example for history: we hope that soon the world proletariat will force all heads of State, including Qaddafi, to commit suicide, thus making its own original contribution to human history.

In principle, the Palestinians cannot be denied the possibility of creating a State, only that due to the smallness of their numbers and forces they have so far failed to express a State entity.

The PLO believed it was overcoming this stumbling block by allying itself with Russian imperialism, which made it a pawn in its own maneuvers in the Middle East by foraging the Palestinians because they were destabilizing an arena hegemonized by the US. But the Palestinians, precisely because of their proletarian nature, have always been an uncomfortable ally for the USSR; it has always treated them with distrust, refusing to arm them in a heavy and modern way, which it did with anti-American States and movements that gave greater guarantees. The Russians were always afraid that the proletarian part of the Palestinians would get out of their control, but in doing so they also prevented the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois part of the Palestinians from territorializing themselves in Lebanon, because they were continually at the mercy of the moods of one or another of the States in the area. This uneasy situation had been seized upon by the PLO leadership, which, by nature far from correcting itself to embrace the communist cause, had well thought of turning to rival imperialism. Lately, therefore, the PLO had discovered that the horse to tempt was no longer the USSR but the U.S., and today, despite the latest drubbing given it by America’s major ally in the Middle East, the PLO continues to eye Washington. Indeed, it seems that the transfer of the remnants of the Palestinian population will be handled precisely by the U.S. military: the marines will occupy Beirut and everyone will be happy and content.

But at this point the problem arises, which is then the problem always: where to kick out these tens of thousands of refugees? Because it is since the Jews began expelling Arabs from Palestine that the jackals of international diplomacy have been asking this question. And they can’t come up with an answer. This is the problem: No one would mind having Palestinians on their territory if the Palestinians, instead of being armed and combative, would sit quietly in their tents ready to make themselves available to the productive needs of their host country. Even Israel would be the prime guarantor of such a solution, suffice it to say that an Arab agricultural laborer coming down from southern Lebanon to the Galilee to grow Israel’s renowned grapefruit is paid up to one-fifth of a corresponding Israeli laborer. That is why we are not surprised that Ariel Sharon, the great exterminator of Palestinians in the siege of Beirut, has invited Palestinians to move to Israel, since no one wants them: "Let the ’terrorists’ come", he declared at an oceanic gathering held July 18 in Tell Aviv to celebrate yet another victory for Zionism, "as long as they come unarmed and can prove that they have not committed crimes against Israeli citizens.”

Diplomacies around the world therefore are trying to somehow resolve the issue, or rather are negotiating the partition of Lebanon once the Palestinians are gone or reduced to helplessness. But we know that more than a thousand negotiations is worth a cannon shot, especially at this stage of preparation for a third imperialist slaughter. We are living through the preparation of a generalized war, and every local conflict, it becomes less and less resolvable by negotiations, therefore tends to escalate immediately into a waged war.

In the Middle East, where, after all, war has never ceased since the 1940s, it will be impossible to enucleate new balances between the various States in the area in which the Palestinians in arms are included. Israel intends to end it with the Palestinians and will not stop unless faced with something bigger than its own army. But driving the Palestinians out of the Middle East could cost the Jews dearly in the future, not so much because of Arab retaliation, which they have already proven they can withstand, but because of Russian retaliation. The USSR, ever since Egypt shifted from its orbit to the American one, has seen its influence in the area increasingly waning. Lately on several occasions it has intimated to Israel to take it easy in Beirut because the Middle East is very close to its borders, as it is a vital area for it. But such warnings, given the cautious attitude of the Reagan administration, seem to have worried the U.S. more than Israel, which is for the ultimate solution, i.e., the extermination of the armed wing of the Palestinians or its ouster from Lebanon.

Misty clouds therefore are gathering over what now looks to the Jewish bourgeoisie like a rosy future. The political situation in the area is becoming increasingly complicated with the resumption of the war in Shat El Arab and the ensuing Iranian counteroffensive. This war if it somehow comes to interfere with the one in Lebanon could be the spark that blows everything up. He has a good point Begin makes that if the Iranians, who ironically but not by bourgeois commerce have been able to counterattack thanks to Israeli spare parts for their tanks, march on Jerusalem to liberate it from Zionism, the Jews will send them back home on foot. In the facts, if this happened, the Middle East balance would be so compromised that direct intervention by the two super powers would be necessary; it would no longer be a matter of "settling a few rowdy refugees" but of control of the most important energy supply zone on the globe.

Would this finally be the occasion of the proletarian giant’s awakening from a semi-secular slumber? That is what we hope for. The war, which is before us today even though we cannot predict its place or time of beginning today, is as necessary and determined by historical and economic development as the revival of the class movement in the metropolises, the one is linked to the other in a necessary process. And it will be on such glowing ground that the class party will be able to reorganize its ranks and finally see the number of its adherents swell. On such a ground it will also be possible to correctly set up the Palestinian question and attempt to resolve it consistently with the communist perspective, so that the movement of the Palestinian masses will also dialectically contribute to the success of the proletarian revolution from West to East.

Firm Points on the Middle Eastern Question

1) The origins of the Palestinian question are to be sought first of all in the strategy of the imperialist powers who, in an attempt to settle their conflicting interests, planned the political map of the Middle East.
     After World War I, France and England carved up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, creating a patchwork of subservient statelets, relying on the reactionary semi-feudal castes who held land ownership.
     After World War II, the old Anglo-French imperialism had to – not without contrasts – give way to the two superpowers the United States and the Soviet Union imposed as the new world gendarmes.
     The result was a new arrangement of the Middle East area, the crux of which was the founding of the State of Israel.

2) While the establishment of the State of Israel responded to imperialism’s need to create a solid bridgehead for itself, it was also a decisive factor in breaking the region’s backward political balance and economic structure.
     The Israeli bourgeoisie, rich in capital, technical knowledge, and highly skilled labor, moved in obedience not to a purported "Zionist doctrine" but to the iron laws of capitalism. A young capitalism that unfolded its characteristic cycle well known to the Marxist school: forcible expropriation of poor peasants, complicit with the Arab landowning classes; aggression toward neighboring backward States and conquest of new strategically and economically important territories; emergence of modern industry and formation of a mass of pure proletarians.

3) Historical unfolding, political and economic pressure from imperialist powers on the one hand, economic backwardness on the other, prevented the rise of a single Arab nation. Pan-Arabism collapsed miserably and had its greatest expression in the establishment of military dictatorships that by palace revolts came in some countries to depose the old and reactionary land oligarchy. These military hierarchies, which although they are expressions of progressive forces insofar as they represent the tendency toward the establishment of modern States, have been very careful not to mobilize the poor masses and deal a decisive blow to land ownership, nor have they been willing to step outside the framework of the political and social order imposed by international imperialism in which they are subservient to one or another power.
     Alongside these military regimes, there still remain today a series of States ruled by land oligarchies enriched by rent, compressing the productive forces into a reactionary scaffolding of pre-capitalist forms.

4) The dispossessed Palestinian masses, concentrated in the camps and bindonvilles in Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank, the Palestinian proletarians working in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are now uprooted from the land, struggling not for a homeland but for survival, for humane living and working conditions.
     The dispossessed Palestinians tend spontaneously wherever they are to join the urban proletariat and poor peasants, overcoming the artificial and anti-historical national barriers between exploited. That is why they represent everywhere a danger to the social order.

5) The Palestine Liberation Organization does not represent the interests of the dispossessed masses but those of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. It has its own State-like organization, accredited ambassadors in the main countries, its own representative in the UN, it has regular relations with the most reactionary Arab regimes; like any bourgeois State it moves on the terrain of international diplomacy where the big thieves coldly decide the fate of millions of men.
     The PLO with its military organization does indeed provide for the defense of the refugee camps, but only subordinate to its policy of compromise and only if it coincides with its own aims and is always ready to abandon the defenseless masses to slaughter in exchange for diplomatic success.

6) The claim to a homeland for the Palestinians corresponds on the one hand to the desire of the bourgeoisie to create its own State and directly exploit its proletarians, and on the other hand to the need to divert the masses from the terrain of struggle against the social order by keeping them separated from the native proletariat with artificial national barriers. This claim is anti-historical and reactionary: the national cycle has had its turn and the facts place on the agenda the war of all the oppressed against the possessing classes.

7) There are three turning points in the Palestinian proletarian struggle: Amman 1970, Tell El Zaatar 1976 and Beirut 1982.
     In Amman, the PLO leadership not only refused to take over and direct the struggle against King Hussein’s regime but, in the midst of the fighting, concluded a compromise with the enemy by evacuating the city and allowing the Black September massacre.
     In Tell El Zaatar, Palestinian and Lebanese proletarians together resisted for several days against the onslaught of Syrian and Phalangist troops while Israeli ships implemented the blockade by sea. Here, in this police operation, bitter enemies stood united against the proletariat. Here, the PLO watched the massacre impassively so as not to jeopardize its international relations.
     In the Battle of Beirut, the PLO validly defended the city with its small regular army, but it never tried to mobilize the masses for an all-out struggle because its goal was to open the doors of international diplomacy. And in fact, although the Israelis failed to penetrate the city one saw the PLO forces leave upon the arrival of the so-called "peacekeeping force", leaving the population of the camps defenseless and, soon after, while Arafat was being received by the Pope, the terrorist massacre of Sabra and Chatila.

8) The Palestinian proletariat, in order to defend its conditions of existence, its physical survival, must stand, in every State, against the social order, against the order of the possessing classes and international imperialism.
     On this road it must, freeing itself from the control of the bourgeoisie represented by the PLO, connect with the oppressed classes in every country beyond national and racial divisions. Only the poor proletarians and peasants of the Arab countries and the modern Israeli proletariat are the allies of the dispossessed Palestinian masses.
     Herein lies the only chance to prevent the oppressed masses of the different countries from being launched into a fratricidal war. Organizing the masses exploit outside the control of the bourgeoisie and international imperialism, breaking up the patriotic fronts, no to wars between States, yes to civil war against the rich classes.