"The late 1970s and early '80s were Palestinian people."

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have been repudiated and rejected by an easy majority of the Palestinians." (emphasis added; ibid., p. 379)

Concealing secret diplomacy Arafat was now embarked upon a course in which he could not tell the truth to his own people about the political line which he and his colleagues had taken. The words are those of Yasser Arafat:

"Our tragedy at the time was that the world refused to understand there were two aspects, two sides, to the question of what was possible. First, there was the question of what it was possible for the Palestinians to achieve in practical terms-given the fact that the two (emphasis added) superpowers were committed to Israel's existence...

"But there was also the question of what it was possible for the Palestinian leadership to persuade its people to accept. When a people is claiming the return of 100 percent of its land, it's not so easy for leadership to say, 'No, you can take only 30 percent." (ibid.)

The disparity between the public posture and the private practice became the touchstone of P.L.O. political practice in this period, with considerable confusion and demoralization among the masses arising from it. Yasser Arafat is frank about this:

"You say to me and you are right, that our public position on the compromise we were prepared to make was ambiguous for many years while we were educating our people about the need for compromise. But I must also tell you that our real position was always known to the governments of the world, including the government of Israel.

"How? From 1974, even from the end of 1973, certain of our people were officially authorized to maintain secret contacts with Israelis and with important people in the West. Their responsibility was to say in secret what at the time we could not say in public." (emphasis added, ibid.)

Outwitting and isolating the "left"

This clandestine policy was carried out for five years, from 1974 to 1979, with neither awareness nor endorsement by the elected members of the Palestine National Council. It required diplomatic maneuvering and lobbying.

It also required, to quote Alan Hart, "outmaneuvering and outwitting those [in the P.L.O. "left"] who were opposed to the mini-state." Hart explains:

8 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1987 "If he had been put to the test of actual negotiations by Israel between 1974 and 1979...Arafat could not have delivered peace on the basis of the mini-state formula without splitting the P.L.O." (ibid.)

But inducing the "left" to acquiesce proved to be like pushing on an open door. And by the time of the 1979 Palestine National Congress, George Habash and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had endorsed the "mini-state" plan.

During these five years, as well, the P.L.O. became dependent upon the Saudi regime for its finances and its political base. Khalid al Hassan's account is revealing:

"It was on a train journey from Alexandria to Cairo that I convinced King Faisal [of Saudi Arabia] to be the mediator between us and the Jordanians. There were four of us in that compartment-Sadat, Faisal, Arafat, and me.

"We [Arafat and al Hassan] didn't need to tell Faisal that if we lost control [to the "leftists and radicals in the P.L.O."], it would lead in time to the collapse and defeat of Arab moderation and, eventually, the downfall of the pro-Western Arab regimes. That's what is at stake-and still is. And Faisal knew it." (ibid., p. 342)

Khalid al Hassan's political views could not have been made any clearer when he told Alan Hart: "I am an...unashamed rightist. I'm an anti-communist." (ibid., p. 380)

Sending signals to Israel The late 1970s and early '80s were years of unremitting tragedy for the Palestinian people. Tens of thousands were slaughtered by King Hussein in Jordan in the "Black September" days of 1970. Many more were to perish later in Lebanon, while 300,000 youth in the occupied West Bank passed through Israeli prisons under conditions of sustained and institutionalized torture.

"Today," Yasser Arafat told Alan Hart in 1979, "my people are prepared to live...in a mini-state of their own. It is a miracle. How we have (ibid, p. 380)

Khalid al Hassan reinforced the theme. Detailing the progress, he informed Alan Hart that 1974 "was such an important year." He continued:

"In the leadership we were committed to an accommodation with Israel, and as leaders we were already working to convince our people that there did have to be an accommodation with those who had taken our land and our homes.

"It is true that we could not declare our real hand in public; but in politics... the moves that matter never take place in the open. So there was nothing unusual about the fact that we were using secret channels to tell the world about our real positions.

"In that context, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Said Hammami's [Arafat's personal foreign emissary] work. If the Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin had responded to the signals we were sending through Hammami, we could have had a just peace in a very few years." (ibid., p. 392)

Yitzhak Rabin is the current Israeli minister of defense. He is the author of the "Iron Fist" policy in the West Bank, the presumptive site of Khalid al Hassan's "mini-state."

Rabin has presided over the dramatic increase in Israeli settlements, the deportation of Palestinian intellectuals and political leaders, the mass arrest and torture of students, and the declaration that "Labor [one of Israel's rulihg-class parties] will never surrender Judea and Samaria [the Biblical names for the West Bank]."

"What were we hoping for from Israel?" Khalid al Hassan continues, "I'll tell you. In 1974 we were hoping the Israelis would say the following, or something like it: 'We hear you, and we are interested... Let's keep in touch and...we might one day find ourselves talking about an accommodation with you." (ibid., p. 393)

Alan Hart informs us that, "Unfortunately, Rabin's

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government was not remotely interested."

Special envoys murdered

In January 1978 Said Hammami was shot to death in his office in London. He was the first of Yasser Arafat's special envoys to be murdered. From January 1978 to December 1983, over 20 more would be assassinated. These were people who sustained contact with Israeli officials and with various European governments.

Hart writes: "Most, if not all of those who were eliminated, had one thing in common: They were generators of support for the P.L.O. in places where successive Israeli goverments had previously enjoyed a complete and unchallenged freedom of influence. " (ibid., p. 394)

The assassinations were attributed to Abu Nidal, who had broken with Fatah when he ascertained that its leadership had undertaken a policy of negotiating an acceptance of the Israeli state.

The decision to conduct this policy in secret, concealing it from the members of the Palestine National Congress and from the Palestinian people, facilitated the gruesome attempt to resolve political differences regarding the future of the Palestinian revolution by cold-blooded murder.

Fatah leader Abu Iyad reveals, however, that the Mossad—the Israeli intelligence agency responsible for countless assassinations of Palestinian intellectuals and political leaders—had, together with the CIA, wholly penetrated the organization of Abu Nidal. Abu Iyad tells Alan Hart:

"Mossad was the agency which actually selected...many of Abu Nidal's targets. Mossad agents, two or three to start with, penetrated Abu Nidal's organization... The actual operation to make the penetration was organized by the Moroccan intelligence service and the CIA." (ibid., p. 396-7)

An extraordinary meeting Khalid al Hassan proceeds to tell Alan Hart about an extraordinary meeting with the personal envoy of President Nixon, General Vernon A. Walters, who was then deputy-director of the CIA.

Richard Nixon had made it "perfectly clear" to the P.L.O. that Walters was coming as his special representative. The two P.L.O. spokespersons were Khalid al Hassan, identified as "Fatah's leading rightist," and Majid Abu Sharar, regarded as a prominent Fatah "leftist." Khalid al Hassan explains:

"First we told General Walters about the background to our thinking on the need for a political settlement. But the main business was to brief him fully and in detail about the reality of our commitment to peace with Israel.

"We were also very honest with him about our internal problems. We said we were leaders who were leading from the front, and that we had many obstacles to overcome before we expected to convince our people of the need to make peace with those who would still be occupying 70 percent of our homeland when the peace was made." (ibid., p. 398)

Walters proceeded to grill the Palestinian representatives about their relations with the Soviet Union and "leftists." Khalid al Hassan continues:

"Yes, we have some so-called Marxists, some so-called radicals, and some so-called leftists in our ranks [but] most of what he had heard about our relations and involvement with the Soviets was bullshit." (ibid., p. 399)

General Walters then pressed Khalid al Hassan on how a Palestinian "mini-state" would perform and project itself in the Arab arena. "Are you going to speak the Palestinian language or the Pan Arab language?" Walters asked:

The reply assured the U.S. general that the Palestinian state would be nobody's puppet. It would have its own voice and a determination not to be dominated by any Arab regime.

Overthrowing Jordan's, shrussein!

But Walters, it became clear, was mainly concerned about how a Palestinian "mini-state" would relate to the established regimes.

Khalid al Hassan stated: "He [Walters] simply said, 'What about Amman [Jordan's capital]?' What he meant was, 'Okay, let's suppose you have your mini-state... what about Hussein? Will it be your policy to overthrow him in due course?' (ibid., p. 401)

"We told him," relates al Hassan, "all the reasons why this was another 'bullshit question.' We explained why it had never been our policy to overthrow Hussein and why it never could be." (ibid.)

Alan Hart recounts that General Walters assured Khalid al Hassan that he was impressed by what he had heard and that President. Nixon would be equally impressed. Khalid al Hassan explained: "It was not only what he [Walters] said, but the way that he said it. He told us, 'If what you say is so, and if I am right to be impressed, then we Americans have lost a lot of time.

Khalid al Hassan and Vernon Walters made a "firm agreement" to meet again as soon as possible after Nixon Donald McCullin Yasser Arafat, chairman of the P.L.O.

had been briefed, with a third meeting to meeting was ever to occur.

Yasser Arafat and both Khalid and Hani al Hassan believe that the Israeli government engineered Watergate, the discovery of the break-in, and the Nixon tape disclosures to "break Nixon before he forced Israel to make the necessary withdrawals for peace." (ibid.)

According to Alan Hart, Khalid al Hassan and Yasser Arafat drew the conclusion that the "Jewish lobby in America," through Kissinger, "sabotaged what was effectively a Nixon-P.L.O. dialogue, a dialogue which Nixon authorized as part of his own effort to explore the possibility of a comprehensive settlement on the basis of a total Israeli withdrawal from territory occupied in 1967 in return for total peace, and a measure of justice for the Palestinians." (ibid.)

Arafat and al Hassan singled out Kissinger's role in the "sabotage" effort because of his distorted account of the meeting between the P.L.O. leadership and General Walters. In his book, Kissinger had written that the P.L.O. spokesperson told Walters that the Palestinian state would never be confined to the West Bank and Gaza and that the Palestinians would overthrow Hussein and absorb Jordan.

Desperate illusions

What the brief encounter between Walters and the P.L.O. leadership reveals is that Arafat and al Hassan believe that certain ruling class figures desire "a measure of justice for the Palestinians" and stand ready to reverse U.S. policy and coerce Israel into accepting of a Palestinian state.

This scenario reflects the desperation with which the Fatah leadership clings to the illusion that U.S. imperialism can be induced to scuttle the Zionist state on which it relies for the destruction of every revolutionary current in the region.

The entire political perspective of the Fatah leaders and of the P.L.O. is reduced to pursuing this chimera-appealing to one client leader after another to serve as interlocutor: Mubarak of Egypt, Hassan of Morocco, Hussein of Jordan, and Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

In March 1977, Yasser Arafat sent a 25-page document to then President Jimmy Carter. The Fatah leaders had finally obtained approval of a "mini-state formula in principle" at the Palestine National Council.

The document sent to Carter, according to Alan Hart, "set out the reality of the P.L.O.'s compromise position, and it explained in detail that a Palestinian mini-state, in a confederation with Jordan, would not and could not be a threat to Israel's security." (ibid. p. 432)

After all the decades of suffering at the hands of the Zionists with their relentless program of fragmenting the entire Arab East, their conscious design of "Armenianizing" the Palestinian people, the Fatah leaders asked of Carter what they had already asked of Nixon, only to be rewarded with the Civil War of 19751976. [See next month's Socialist Action for more on the Lebanese Civil War.] In less than a year, the Israelis invaded Lebanon. In 1978 they devasted the villages and camps of the (continued on page 10)

IALIST I ACT ON JU NE 1987

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... Palestinian revolution (continued from page Lebanese South, beginning the countdown to the invasion of 1982.

On October 1, 1977, a joint U.S.-Soviet declaration required the Arab states and the Palestinians to make peace with Israel and formally recognize the Zionist state. Israel was to make withdrawals from territories occupied in 1967.

Here was Yasser Arafat's response:

"I was very happy, very excited. It was an historic moment. For the first time the two superpowers were committed to doing something for us Palestinians. Truly, I believed there would be peace with some justice for my people. I was more optimistic than at any moment in my life." (ibid., p. 433)

Arafat went further. According to Alan Hart, he was "bending over so far backwards to be helpful that he even said the Palestinians did not have to be represented by a P.L.O. official."

Israel remains intransigent

Needless to say, Israel was not prepared to withdraw from the West Bank or to acknowledge any Palestinian right of self-determination. Israel, with U.S. backing, proposed, "a small measure of local authority on the West Bank, under Israeli occupation." (ibid., p. 434)

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sent Moshe Dayan to Washington. Carter tore up the joint U.S.Soviet declaration and issued a U.S.-Israeli document prepared by Dayan. The Palestinian problem was "one of refugees," and Dayan, with Carter's backing, declared that Israel would walk out of any meeting in which the question of a Palestinian state was raised.

Arafat now turned to the Saudis. They produced the Fahd Plan, a variation on the theme of a "mini-state," in return for "complete and final peace and recognition of Israel by all Arab states and the P.L.O."

The plan collapsed. Twenty minutes before the Fez conference was to open—the conference at which the Fahd Plan was to be discussed—Syria walked out. Khalid and Hani al Hassan considered that, despite all their concessions, the conference was sabotaged because no one wanted the P.L.O. to remain a factor as long as the Palestinian people aspired to real self determination.

Once again came the moment of truth.

"Both the Soviets and the Americans," declared the al Hassan brothers, "had a hand in causing the Fez summit to collapse. Neither of the super-powers wanted there to be a major initiative before Israeli Defense Minister Ariel! Sharon had been given his chance to finish the P.L.O." (ibid., p. 438)

Collusion to liquidate P.L.O.

It was Nov. 25, 1981. Six weeks later Sharon was in Christian East Beirut to brief the Phalange on what was to be done when the invasion started. He took the commanders of the Israeli trained killer-militia on a tour of the points they were to seize.

By the end of January 1982 there was a meeting of the Arab Gulf defense ministers, a secret meeting. Arafat stated that when the meeting was over, the ministers sent a message to Washington that they would not "make any military moves" against Israel in retaliation for the prepared Israeli invasion of Lebanon. (ibid., p. 449)

"After that meeting," records Arafat, "I met with a very important Arab leader. I will not tell you which one, but I will tell you what he said to me. He looked me in the eyes and said exactly this: 'We know there is going to be an attempt to liquidate you. You will ask us for help and it will not come. Be careful." (ibid.)

Arafat went even further in his assessment of all the Arab regimes and their relation to U.S. determination to destroy the P.L.O. and the Palestinian movement. He said:

"The Reagan administration was saying, in effect: We are grateful that you will not obstruct an Israeli invasion of Lebanon and we will reward you...when the P.L.O. has been destroyed." (ibid., p. 450)

Arafat now learned that his " Arab brothers" were not intending to help him—they were not even willing to supply him with anti-tank weapons to slow down the Israeli advance. Arafat chose then to meet with Brian Urquhart, under-secretary-general of the United Nations.

Arafat asked the U.N. under-secretary to give a message to Israel's leaders: It was as follows: "Please tell these stupid people in Jerusalem they will be sorry when I'm gone. I am the only one who can deliver the compromise to make the peace." (ibid.)

Israel invades Lebanon The defense of Beirut against the 1982 Israeli siege was a heroic a chapter on the order of the defense of Leningrad against Hitler's army during World War II.

Beirut was ringed by 500 Israeli tanks and subjected to saturation bombing and the cutting off of food, electricity, and water. No sooner, however, had the P.L.O. withdrawn from Beirut than the slaughter began. When the Israelis finished, the Syrians began. And when 10 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1987 the Syrians stopped, the Amal militia continued Throughout the siege of Beirut and the devastation of the Lebanese South, the Palestinian camps were laid to waste. Thirty thousand males—from children of eight to men of 80—were rounded up in concentration camps and subjected to sustained torture.

Meanwhile, the Voice of Palestine radio station was intact in Beirut. Yet no daily message went across the Arab East to be heard by the Arab masses with their transistor radios.

No appeal to the Arab nation was sounded, urging it to rise up and resist the rulers who colluded and lifted neither voice nor weapon in defense of the Palestinian people-but remained silent as an Arab capital was pulverized from the air with impunity. No appeal went out to the Lebanese masses to mobilize as partisans to defend the nation.

The leadership of the P.L.O. occupied itself with advancing one or another diplomatic plan and with seeking the support of the very regimes which have betrayed the Palestinian cause through the long years.

Self-activation of Palestinians

The Palestinian people, however, have shown a keen sense of the terrible inadequacy of the P.L.O. leadership's reliance upon the diplomacy and state power maneuverings of its historic enemies.

Within the Zionist state itself, some 70 percent of the settler population is comprised of Eastern or Sephardic Jews. Jews from Iraq, Morocco, or Yemen have the mores, manner, custom, and appearance of their Moslem and Christian brothers and sisters.

They suffer discrimination. They lack education, since free education ends in the ninth grade. The Ashkenazi, or European Jews, consist of workers, students, and intellectuals. There is nothing inevitable about their allegiance to Zionism.

The Palestinian revolution cries out for the selfactivation of the Palestinian masses. Supporters the world over, prominent persons among them, stand ready to join in the Palestinian equivalent of the salt march of Gandhi.

In the post-1967 occupied territories, a Palestinian may not plant a tomato or eggplant without a military permit. They may not sink wells or repair their homes, or wear clothing bearing the colors of the national flag, or have cassettes in their homes with Palestinian songs.

On the 92 percent of the land of "Israel," administered for the state by the Jewish National Fund, to own it or work it one must prove some three generations of maternal Jewish descent.

The variety of occasions for internally supported defiance of outrageous edicts is manifold. Palestinian mass demonstrations—vast and non-violent, with distinguished international personalities presentcould prepare the way for the unfolding of a movement analogous to that in South Africa or the United States of the 1960s.

A Palestinian revolutionary movement which calls out to the oppressed throughout the Arab East to begin the process of their own emancipation will find a response. For it is difficult to envisage the masses of Arabia observing with pleasure as Yasser Arafat or Khalid al Hassan consort with the Saudi King.

The future of the Palestinian revolution passes through the portals of the Arab revolution.

When a leadership from within Palestine emerges from the struggle, it will know how to employ its anti-Zionist brothers and sisters to address the settler populace with a vision of a democratic, non-racist Palestine for Jew and Moslem and Christian.

The Palestinian revolution will be non-sectarian. The first response to the mobilization of the Palestinian masses from among the most victimized of the settler population will be, "If they can do it, why can't we."

The second response is to look around for allies. This road to a revolutionary alternative to the Zionist state is as real as the struggle of the peoples of South Africa, who will not accept an apartheid state over a smaller rather than larger piece of territory.

Even if the Zionist state were anchored off the port of Haifa, it would be an excrescence and an outrage. For a state is but an instrument of coercion on behalf of a particular social order, and the Zionist social order is racist, ruthless, and predicated upon the dissolution of the organized existence of the Palestinian people.

The politics of Fatah no longer correspond to the needs and perceptions of a new generation of Palestinians, however empathetic they may be to the lifelong sacrifice and dedication of the generation of Yasser Arafat, Khalid and Hani al Hassan, George Habash, or Nayef Hawetmeh [leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine].

Unhe trelidin the ferv-red Padention of the for the Israelis.

Palestinian people can be discerned:

"Student unrest is a recurring feature of political life...but nowhere so much as in the occupied West Bank... Violent demonstrations..are routine.. Occupation authorities treat the campuses like powder kegs. But the universities are more than maelstroms of dissent; they have become training ground for a new breed of Palestinian leader, better educated and politically more sophisticated than the previous generation." (Newsweek, April 6, 1987)

The Newsweek article informs us that even the Israelis are impressed, calling the youth "bright, tough, highgrade individuals." A senior Israeli officer stated, "They've made our work more difficult."

There is now a "grass-root ferment that you won't find in the rest of the Arab world, where institutions are created on orders from above," says Newsweek.

What is particularly noteworthy is the critical intelligence and intellectual independence which inform Palestinian political life.

"Even students who say they follow Arafat denounce him for his byzantine politicking among Arab regimes. 'Arafat's face is the symbol of the Palestinian cause, which is supported by everybody,' says a 23-year-old West Bank student-council member, 'but Arafat's politics belong in the souk [bazaar]." (Newsweek)

The most significant sentiment, which augurs well for the Palestinian revolution, was made by the studentcouncil member, Samir: "Our parents believed that the Palestinian problem would be resolved by somebody else, but...my generation knows that no one will do the job for us." (Newsweek)

This "new breed Palestinian" is changing the West Bank's intellectual climate. Book sales have doubled; newspapers are up 70 percent in the last five years.

"They pay much closer attention to facts," stated Radwan Abu Ayyash of the Palestinian Journalists' Guild. "We used to be a highly emotional society, and an Arab leader could raise our hopes just by making big promises. We've become more realistic." (Newsweek)

The distinguished scholar, Feisal Huseini, recently detained without trial or due process, declared to Newsweek:

"A new generation of Palestinians is only beginning the search for its own answers. These youngsters are completely different from their fathers, and they think nothing of the old Arab ideals. But they are sure about two things: They are determined to build a Palestinian state one day and they insist on making it a democracy."

This generation of Palestinians will replace a moribund, exclusionist social order with a humane and generous vision of what the Arab revolution can be.

It will reach across the Arab East and include in its embrace the new Palestinian Jewish youth, moved by the dedication and fervor of the people of Palestine, the world's soldiers for justice, to whom we all owe homage.

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through force and violence."

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