'Peace agreement': Threat to Palestinians

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The Palestinian struggle is under heavy attack from all quarters, but the resistance movement has not been broken.

In late May, the Syrian-backed Shi'ite Amal militia carried out an attack on the Palestinian camps at Sabra and Chatila that was at least equal in scale and ferocity to the massacres in those camps carried out by Israeli-backed Christian militia in September 1982.

But the resistance of the Palestinians was truly heroic. In the "Daouk ghetto" in the Sabra camp, for example, it took the Lebanese Army and the Amal militia 12 days to dislodge the poorly armed Palestinian combatants.

It must be remembered that in 1976, just after civil war had erupted and the impoverished masses of Lebanon threatened to take state power, the Syrian army joined with the Maronite Phalange in the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians in the Tel al-Zataar refuge camp in East Beirut.

The Israeli government has also continued to rain terror on the Palestinian refugee settlements in northern and southern Lebanon. Since the withdrawal of Israeli troops in early June, Israeli jets have raided numerous camps, killing dozens of men, women, and children.

Now a new attack is underway against the Palestinian cause. It is the "peace agreement" put forward by Jordan's King Hussein with the support of PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat.

This peace plan is based on Arafat's acceptance, for the first time since the PLO was founded in 1964, of U.N. Resolution 242, which is based on the recognition of the Zionist settler-state and the rejection of a Palestinian nation on Palestinian soil. The plan also calls for a Jordanian-Palestinian federation— essentially a Palestinian ghetto under Hussein's tutelage.

It was the very same King Hussein who massacred and drove out the Palestinian fighters from Jordan in the "Black September" war of 1970.

The peace plan, if implemented, would represent a tremendous blow to the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination and national liberation; the struggle for which the PLO and Arafat's Fatah were created in the first place.

But the Palestinian masses, despite the decades of persecution and massacres, have not been crushed. The Palestinian people and the PLO cannot be erased. The Palestinian struggle will continue to provide the backdrop for all the convulsions in the region. No plan put forward by the imperialists and their bourgeois Arab allies can offer a solution to the Palestinian question.

The only road forward for the Palestinian movement is the revolutionary struggle for a democratic secular Palestine-incorporating both the Jewish and Palestinian masses—over the entire Palestinian territory.

tive was the alliance with the Syrian regime, have been as much under attack as the pro-Arafat wing in the camps.

Syria's Shi'ite clients have their own interests as well. The result has been that the pro-Syrian faction has also been forced to fight for its life. The conclusion must be that the choice of alliances between bourgeois Arab regimes is no choice.

For the Palestinians, unless their fundamental interests are placed above those of the ruling groups in those regimes, there will be no victory.