Evolution of P.L.O. strategy for Palestinian revolution

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The recently hailed unification of the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) failed to address the question of the Palestinian "mini-state" vs. a "Democratic Secular Palestine.

The following article, the first of a three-part series, traces the evolution of these counterposed demands and their influence on the course of P.L.O. strategy. Part two will focus on the 1975-76 Lebanese Civil War and the P.L.O.'s reliance on the Arab states. Part three will discuss the meaning of the current Middle East peace conference proposal.

"It is time to rip away the veil of hypocrisy. In the present as in the past, there is no Zionism, no settlement of land, no Jewish state, without the removal of all the Arabs, without confiscation." (Y'ben Poret, Israeli Ministry of Defense, 1982)

The central question confronting the Palestinian revolution is how to overcome the substitutionism which has characterized the strategy of the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) from its inception.

It is inordinately difficult to make a revolution from the outside. This difficulty is compounded by the nature of all the regimes of the surrounding countries, which suppress the Arab revolution within their own frontiers and look upon the Palestinian ferment with fear and trepidation. This is the basic setting within which a revolutionary strategy must unfold.

An exile leadership can provide cogent theory and a support apparatus for the mobilization of the masses within Palestine, but it cannot be a surrogate for mass struggle.

The attempt to bypass the self-activation of the Palestinian masses can lead in one of two directions: maneuvering among the imperial powers and their client states in order to exact favor; or random, symbolic armed "encounters," which leave the masses passive observers and which are disconnected from any coherent political perspective.

In practice, rhetorical tub-thumping aside, random acts of violence become an adjunct to political maneuvering, with the aim of "scaring" the adversary into diplomatic concessions-concessions which depend wholly upon the stratagems of an unimpaired Zionist state and its imperial sponsor.

The actual history of the P.L.O., in its various permutations, painfully bears this out. Much of this is documented in "Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker," a remarkable biography of Yasser Arafat published in 1985 "written in cooperation with Yasser Arafat and the top leadership of the P.L.O."

Soviet bureaucracy and "mini-state"

Hart, citing Arafat and his chief spokesperson, Khalid al Hassan (Abu Said), describes how in 1965, "when Fatah [the P.L.O. leadership current headed by Arafat] was fighting for its existence," the Soviet Union was firmly on the side of those who wanted the file on the Palestinians to be closed.

"The Soviets," disclosed Khalid al Hassan, "were strongly advising [then Egyptian President Gamal Abdal] Nasser to crush us with speed and by any means. They told him that the idea of a Palestine liberation movement belonged to 'folklore. '" ("Arafat," p. 187)

Khalid al Hassan delineates how Nasser sought constantly to induce both Israel and the United States to negotiate a settlement involving a token territory for the Palestinians which would, at once, "guarantee" Israeli security and entail recognition of the Zionist state.

I can add my own footnote to this account. In 1962, while I was forming the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation with Bertrand Russell, Nasser asked us to take a proposal of his to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, President Karim Abdel Qassim of Iraq, Prime Minister Sa'ab Salem of Lebanon, and Prime Minister David BenGurion of Israel.

Nasser proposed to recognize the state of Israel in exchange for a disarmed Palestinian statelet to be set up by the Arab regimes in the West Bank and Gaza with a narrow corridor through the Negev.

Ben-Gurion and his then defense minister, Shimon Peres, dismissed the plan contemptuously, making racial comments about two of the Egyptian interlocutors, Salah Dessouki, governor of Cairo Province, and Ibrahim Hamil Abdul-Rah'man, secretary-general of the United Arab Republic.

In fact, Nasser's attempts at an arrangement for a "mini-state" were aimed at the permanent liquidation of the Palestinian movement, the meaning of which was not lost upon the leaders of Fatah, who opposed the scheme.

Khalid al Hassan was in the right wing of Fatah but he understood, in this period, the consequences of Nasser's "mini-state" proposals for the Palestinians. He told Alan Hart:

"Had the Israelis withdrawn from the territory occupied after 1967, the Arab states would have made their peace, including Nasser, a peace which would have killed Fatah and the Palestinian liberation movement. We would have been finished and our cause would have been lost." (ibid., p. 241)

Democratic Secular Palestine It was precisely because the Fatah leadership registered the disastrous meaning of the "mini-state" formula that it developed, for the first time, a political program for the Palestinian movement.

To counter the mounting pressure on all the Arab regimes to come to terms with the Zionist state, Fatah issued an official declaration in Paris in 1968 which set forth a program for the establishment of a "Democratic State of Palestine."

The PLO leadership of Fatah described their concept as a formula for the dismantling of the Zionist state by politics. The democratic state of Fatah's vision was one "in which Jews and Palestinians would live as equals and without discrimination." Arabic and Hebrew would be the official languages of a non-sectarian state. A Jew, was stated, could be elected president.

What was notable about this brave proposal was not only its challenge to all the regimes of the region and to the Soviet Union's call for the liquidation of the Palestinian "folklore" movement, but its direct appeal to the Jews of Palestine.

Fatah had made a historic turn in seeking to win the Jews away from allegiance to a colonial ideology and a settler state by proffering them the Palestinian revolution and movement as their revolution and movement—no less than it was that of their Arab brothers and sisters.

Yasser Arafat was as eloquent as he was specific:

"What we in Fatah were telling the world, even in those days, was so clear, so obvious. We were saying 'No' to the Zionist state, but we were saying 'Yes' to the Jewish people of Palestine. To them we were saying, 'You are welcome to live in our land, but on one condition—you must be prepared to live among us as friends and as equalsnot as dominators.' "I myself have always said that there is only one guarantee for the safety and security of the Jewish people in Palestine-and that is the friendship of the Arabs among whom they live. It is so clear, so obvious." (ibid., p. 275)

A program to address the masses and to win them "through politics" for the dismantling of the Zionist state and for its replacement by a democratic, secular state is the direct opposite of a "mini-state" dependent upon sanction by both the Israeli state and, above all, U.S. imperialism.

Shift toward "realism"

The Soviet bureaucracy reacted sharply to Fatah's attempt to transform the P.L.O. into a revolutionary movement with a program and strategy aimed at mobilizing the masses and winning them for a revolutionary transformation of a settler regime.

The Soviet leaders told Arafat that they were fully committed to the existence of the state of Israel and that they had not the slightest intention of supporting or encouraging Palestinian militance or military capacity. (ibid., p. 279)

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... Palestinian revolution years or unremitting tragedy for the (continued from page 7)

Two of Fatah's principal leaders, Khalid al Hassan and Abu Jihad, went to Moscow to explain Fatah's program. They left Moscow, to cite Khalid al Hassan, "With the clear impression that the Palestinians would not receive Soviet support for their cause until they were ready to accept Israel's existence inside the borders as they were on the eve of the [June 1967] Six Day War." (ibid., p. 277)

The bitter irony is that it was the Soviet bureaucracy's cynical efforts to eliminate the Palestinian revolution that prepared for Fatah's later abandonment of a political program for the Palestinian revolution and its turn to the very regimes which Fatah had correctly perceived to be antithetical to their cause. [See article by Ralph Schoenman in next month's issue on the P.L.O.'s subordination to the Arab regimes.] "Because we were ourselves beginning to be educated about the reality of international politics," reflects Hani al Hassan, Khalid's brother, "we realized that we couldn't expect to advance our cause without the support of at least one of two superpowers. We had knocked on the door of the United States and its Western allies and we had received no answer, so we wanted to try with the Soviets. We had no choice." (ibid., p. 278)

Retreat to "mini-state" position Fatah's leaders soon lost all confidence in the possibility of sustaining the political program which they had once proclaimed-that of a democratic and secular Palestine for which they had planned to struggle by mobilizing the Palestinian and Jewish masses.

In February 1974, a P.L.O. working paper was formulated which retreated from this program to the formulas of Nasser, Sadat, and Jordan's King Hussein. The paper proposed "To establish a national authority on any lands that can be wrested from Zionist occupation." (ibid., p. 379)

Arafat and the majority of his Fatah colleagues in the leadership were now 'committed to working for a negotiated "settlement" which required the Palestinian people to accept the loss "for all time" of 70 percent of their original homeland in exchange for a "mini-state" on the West Bank and Gaza.

Yasser Arafat openly acknowledged that the entire Palestinian people were opposed to this policy. Alan Hart writes:

"Arafat and most of his senior colleagues in the leadership knew they needed time to sell it to the rank and file of the liberation movement. If, in 1974, Arafat and his colleagues had openly admitted the true extent of the compromise they were prepared to make, they would