MIDDLE EAST tion of such recognition goes without saying. But this view is equally shared by the vast majority of those living in the West Bank (of whom less than half are refugees from 1948). This was shown in a poll conducted among them on the eve of the PNC's last session?: 98.6% of those questioned approved the creation of an indepenbackwards dent state of Palestine, but 78% said they were against the creation of such a state if the precondition for it was the recognition of the state of Israel.
So if this decision did not meet the aspirations of Palestinians, it nevertheless certainly replied to other expectations. Firstly,
ON NOVEMBER 15, 1988, Yasser Arafat proclaimed the "institution of the state of Palestine". The president of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) made his announcement at the end of the nineteenth session of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the broadest leading body of the PLO.
It came just three weeks before the first anniversary of the heroic and still uninterrupted uprising of the Palestinian masses in Gaza and the West Bank; it came also three-and-a-half months after the official renunciation by Jordan's King Hussein of any claim on the West Bank — a territory that his kingdom had annexed following the first Israeli-Arab war in 1948 and which was subsequently occupied by Israel in 1967.1 The PNC's proclamation of the Palestinian state was doubly necessary.2 SALAH JABER
N THE ONE HAND, this proclamation was necessary to fill the juridical vacuum created by the brusque decision of the Jordanian monarch. It was also needed in order to reply to the expectations of the majority of inhabitants in the two territories of the uprising, whose immediate objective is to free them from the Zionist occupation and to set up an independent state. However, although the proclamation itself was indispensable, it was accompanied by other decisions that were absolutely not. The most remarkable was the explicit acceptance of Resolution 242
(1967) of the United Nations Security
Council. This, coupled with the acceptance of the UN General Assembly's Resolution 181 (1947 — see box p.7), was equivalent to the recognition of the Zionist state in the frontiers established before the June 1967 war. This decision is contrary to the beliefs and sentiments of the vast majority of Palestinians in Palestine or in
For the refugees - that is, most of the Palestinian people — expelled from 80% of their territory on which the Zionist state has established itself since 1948, the rejecthose of the reactionary Arab regimes, notably Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, who over the past few years have never let up the pressure for a move in this direction. Second, those of the Soviet bureaucracy, whose current chief was careful to make his counsels public during his meeting with Arafat in Moscow last April. Third, those of imperialist Europe, in particular the French government acting in concert with Mubarak's Egypt. And finally, and most importantly, the US administration who, after obliging the PLO leader to spell certain things out, considered themselves satisfied, and decided on December 14 to start a direct dialogue with the Palestinian organization.
A new and major political turn
Without doubt, the PLO has just made a new and major political turn. In order to measure its significance and consequences, it has to be situated in the long trajectory of which it is the outcome for the time being.
The PLO was created in 1964 by the first summit of heads of the Arab states, meeting in Cairo in January. In Jerusalem at the end of May that same year, the first session of the PNC was held, whose members were designated under the control of the Arab states. It was inaugurated by King Hussein. The PNC was then composed essentially of representatives of the bourgeoisie and notables, including religious figures. An army (the PLA) was founded, linked to the armies of each of the states where its brigades
A National Charter was also adopted, reflecting the Palestinian and Arab nationalist consensus. It stipulated that "the partition of Palestine in 1947 and the creation of Israel have absolutely no validity, whatever time has elapsed since then, because they are contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to its natural rights to its home1. In the second part of this article, which will be published in the next issue of /V, we will explain why the recognition of the state of Palestine by the world's govemments should be demanded. 2. After 1948, the Gaza Strip passed under Egyptian administration without being formally annexed. 3. Al-Hayat (London), November 12-13. Published in the joumal of the Sons: of the Country Movement (Abna El-Balad), printed in Nazareth: Al-Kaid, November 25, 1988.
International Viewpoint #156 • February 6, 1989
MIDDLE EAST land." On the other hand, this Charter excluded the Palestinian territories not occupied by Israel — the West Bank and Gaza - from the PLO's sphere of sovereignty. In the Charter, the liberation of Palestine was envisaged as the responsibility of "the entire Arab nation, governments and peoples, the Arab Palestinian people being in the front rank." Lastly, vis-à-vis Jewish inhabitants in the Israeli state the Charter only proposed a distinction between Jews of Palestinian origin entitled to live in Palestine and the others - that is, the overwhelming majority, for whom it offered no perspective.
El Fatah profited from wave of radicalization
From 1964 on, however, the PLO was challenged by diverse Palestinian factions and by the left of the Ba'ath party.* The criticisms they made, which were entirely correct, centred on two basic themes relating to the autonomy of the Organization. First was the method by which the PNC was designated, to which they counterposed the demand for direct elections by Palestinians of their representatives. Second was the nature of the PLA, in place of which they put forward the project of an army independent of the Arab states.
The idea of autonomous and immediate Palestinian armed struggle was concretized by a petty bourgeois group whose nationalism was strongly mixed with Islam, El Fatah. Launching its first commando raid against Israel on January 1, 1965, before all the other groups, it won a great deal of prestige. Such prestige that, when the Arab armies suffered their crushing defeat by the Zionist state in June 1967, El Fatah was the best placed to profit from the extraordinary wave of radicalization that swept the Palestinian people, extending to the young people in the countries where they were concentrated, as well as to the other Arab countries. It was under the pressure of this radicalization that, on September 1, 1967, the Arab Summit in Khartoum adopted the famous three "no's" in relation to Israel: "No to peace, no to recognition, no to negotiations". Less than three months later, Egypt and Jordan betrayed this triple pledge by approving UN Resolution 242.
Unable to contain the Palestinian radicalization, much less confront it, the Arab states set to work to take it over. Faced with the emergence of a far-left Palestinian current with the founding of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in November 1967, and a Ba'athist current, Egypt and Saudi Arabia chose to support Yasser Arafat's El Fatah. Egypt offered them control of the PLO, which was largely in its hands. Saudi Arabia started showering petrodollars on the Palestinian movement, which very quickly had at its disposal money that no liberation move6 mene adever dreamed of possessing The fourth session of the PNC, meeting
Labanan Labane
Syria
Halla
Nazaret
Tel
Avy
Jerusalem
• Gaza
Beersheba PALESTINE BEFORE 1947
Egypt Trans- Egypt jordan in Cairo in July 1968, amended the National Charter according to the wishes of El Fatah, so as to prepare the way for its integration into the PLO. The Charter was made more radical, but in terms of the ideological limitations of El Fatah: "The armed struggle is the only road for the liberation of Palestine". Now it applied to the whole of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza, all the more because these territories fell to the Zionist occupation in 1967. The accent was put on an "armed revolution" of the Palestinian people that the Arab states had a duty to support, notably by giving
Belief in a "democratic"
solution
The nationalist maximalism that characterized El Fatah at the time shows up in the Charter's new Article 21 that "rejects all solutions substituting for the total liberation of Palestine". It combined with an explicit rejection of any inter-Palestinian class-struggle perspective, or of political struggle against the Arab regimes. This socio-political conservatism, a meeting ground between the bourgeois PLO and the petty bourgeois El Fatah, was the essential reason for the support given to El Fatah by most of the Arab states. "The PLO will cooperate with all the Arab countries" stipulates Article 27 of the Charter; it "will not intervene in the internal affairs of any Arab state".
On the eve of the fifth session of the PNC, in January 1969, El Fatah adopted a complementary platform that it got the PLO to ratify. It "categorically rejected" Resolution 242 and put forward, for the first time, the programmatic perspective of a democratic state "all the citizens of which, regardless of their religion, will enjoy equal rights". It was undoubtedly a step forward in relation to the Charter, but its
### Lebanon
Syrin Syria
Jordan Jordan
UN TITION
PLAN TODAY
1947
Arab Israeli areas state Jewish Egypt Occupied areas territories limitations were obvious: belief in the possibility of a "democratic" (bourgeois) solution to the Israeli-Palestinian question; of a solution in the limited territorial framework of Palestine (which meant, in the most generous hypothesis, the cohabitation of more or less equal numbers of Arabs and Jews in a Palestinian state); and, finally, a solution that only envisaged the Israelis as a relig ious community, ignoring the national character of the new society created in Palestine by Zionist colonization.
When the fifth session of the PNC met a month later in Cairo, it sealed the integration of El Fatah into the PLO, El Fatah taking the leadership with the blessing of the Arab guardians. It was the fusion of a petty bourgeois movement, in the process of bureaucratic and bourgeois degeneration under the impetus of a corruption accelerated by Arab petrodollars, with a bourgeois institution where the Palestinian bourgeoisie was largely and directly represented.
Organization closest to revolutionary Marxism
For a while, the PFLP, a left, petty bourgeois nationalist organization, refused to join the PLO, challenging its undemocratic makeup. Boycotting the PNC, where it had been offered some minor positions, the PFLP organized 40 mass meetings among Palestinians in Jordan, presenting them as so many "national councils". However, they ended up joining the PLO, while iemanding that it be transformed into a parity front of the Palestinian armed-struggle organizations. Subsequently, and until this day, they demanded in vain that the PNC's composition be revised by taking into account the real representativity of its members. 4. This faction was ousted from power in Syria and repressed by Hafez El-Assad in November 1970.
Also in February 1969, a left split led by Nayef Hawatmeh left George Habash's PFLP to form the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP, today the DFLP). During its first two years of existence, the DFLP was the Palestinian organization closest to revolutionary Marxism, not hesitating even to quote Trotsky, but not without eclecticism and theoretical confusion. It put forward the programmatic perspective of a revolutionary socialist solution to the Palestinian question in the framework of a socialist, federal Arab state, a unitary Palestinian state where Jews would enjoy the right to "develop their national culture". Although stopping short of developing a consistent internationalist programme such as the one adopted by Trotskyist groups in the region in 1974, the theses of the DFLP were far in advance of other tendencies in the Palestin-
Starting from an approach inspired by the theory of permanent revolution, the DFLP criticized the Palestinian and Arab policies of El Fatah, notably its conception of "national unity" and its principle of "noninterference in the internal affairs of the Arab countries". It explained how harmful this principle was, even from a narrow Palestinian-centrist point of view, since the Palestinian resistance was developing on the territories of Arab states that did not hesitate to "interfere" in its affairs. Crushing defeat in Jordan
1970-71
As for Palestinian "national unity", the DFLP noted that this was established "under the leadership of feudal lords and millionaires... up to the PNC, which grouped together many representatives of the Palestinian reaction led by a clique of millionaires, bankers and big businessmen, to which were added the representatives of the fighting organizations after the fourth session". This radical critique of the PNC did not prevent the DFLP, in its revolutionary phase, from using it and other PLO bodies as a propaganda platform.
El Fatah's hegemony over the Palestinian movement and its political line of rightist self-limitation led to the crushing defeat of the movement in Jordan in 1970-71, in spite of the exceptionally favourable conditions at the outset. The Palestinian left has explained at length the right-wing's responsibility for this defeat, suffered under the double aegis of "non-interference" and "unity of Arab ranks against Zionism".
The scale of the catastrophe — a massacre of Palestinians and their vanguard and the loss of the main mass base of the Palestinian resistance — found expression in a rightward slide of the entire movement and the retreat to Lebanon. Starting in 1972, Hawatmeh's DFLP turned progressively and definitively towards an alignment with the pro-Soviet Stalinist current. But this was small fry in comparison to the qualitative completion of the double degeneration (bureaucratic and bourgeois) of El Fatah, which became so fully integrated in the PLO that it became hard to tell the two apparatuses apart.
From this time on, we explained that the El Fatah/PLO had become a "state apparatus without a state looking for a state at the least cost". " A report on the "PLO's structures"?, edited by "Yasser Arafat's office head", after describing at length the different legislative, executive and judicial bodies of the Palestinian organization, including its courts, prisons and departments as various as those of any state administration, concluded: "The PLO differs in nature from other organizations who have represented, or who still represent, their respective peoples in their struggle for national liberation. The PLO is not a political party, it is bigger than a liberation front. It is an institution with a state-like nature."
Denunciation of peaceful coexistence perspective
This transformation of the E1 Fatah/PLO inevitably demanded a programmatic adaptation. The maximalism of the early years, suited to its social base of refugees in the camps — an impoverished and marginalized population — was no longer suitable to the enormous bureaucratic apparatus and its summit with their considerable privileges. A shortcut had to be found to provide the state apparatus with a territory, even if at the price of an accommodation with imperialism and the Zionist state. The DFLP prepared the ground politically: aligning with Moscow — which had always recognized the "legitimacy" of Israel and had until then therefore considered the Palestinian organizations as dangerous leftists — they were the first to propose a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
They were fought by the rest of the Palestinian left: the left of El Fatah and the PFLP. These currents denounced with just cause the implications of this project, that is the perspective of a negotiated settlement and, in spite of the denials of the DFLP, of peaceful coexistence with the Zionist state. In short, a way of eliminating the Palestinian question, which is a long way from being reduced to just 20% of Palestine occupied in 1967. But the maximalism of these same currents prevented them from formulating counter proposals with a transitional content, such as "the total and unconditional withdrawal of the Israeli 5. Resolution on the "Arab revolution" published in an IMG "Red Pamphlet" (London). It foresaw, after the destruction of the Zionist state, in the framework of the right to self-determination of "the Jewish national minority in Palestine, including their right to form an independent state on a part of Palestinian land". This was under the proviso that the exercize of this right in no way harms the Arab Palestinian people. 6. See Inprecor (English edition) 19, February 13, 1975. 7. French translation published in Revue d' Etudes Palestiniennes 21, Autumn 1986.
MIDDLE EAST United Nations Resolutions 181, 242 and 338 Resolution 181: Adopted on
November 29, 1947, by the UN
General Assembly, It divided
Palestine Into two states on the eve of the British retreat from this territory under Its Mandate, The
Jews, mostly Immigrants who had arrived during the previous 15 years, at that time constituted one-third of the country's population, and only possessed 6% of the area. Nevertheless, the Jewish state obtained more than
55% of Palestinian territory, on wnich nalt the population was
Arab! The Palestinians supported by the Arab states, rejected this partition. After the
British withdrawal in May 1948 the first Arab-Israell war broke out during which the Zionists selzed in total nearly 80% of the territory of Palestine, the overwhelming majority of Arab Inhabitants being forced to flee never to be allowed to return. In
June 1967, during a new Arab-Israell war, the Zionist state seized the remainder of Palestine
(the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip), as well as the Egyptiar
Sinal and the Syrian Golan Resolution 242: Adopted on November 22, 1967, by the
Security Council, it proposed that, in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal "from occupled territorles" In 1967 (not all the territories), there would be a "termination of claims or states of belligerency", a recognition of all the states in the region and their
*right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundarles, free from threats or acts of force" - Including vla
*the establishment of demilitarized zones* The Palestinian people were not ever mentioned. The resolution was content to advocate "a just settlement of the refugee problem".
Resolution 338: Adopted by the Security Council on October 22, 1973, to stop the Arab-Israel war triggered off 16 days previously. It confirmed Resolution 242 and decided that "negotlations be begun between the Interested partles under the appropriate auspices and with the goal of establishing a just and lasting peace". *
United Leadership of the Intifada
Four-point programme from Communique 26, September, 1988.
Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian and Arab [Syria, Lebanon] territories occupied since 1967, including Arab Jerusalem;
2 Rescinding all measures of a occation tard tre ike, and elimination of
• the colonies established in the occupied territories;
International Viewpoint #156 • February 6, 1989
MIDDLE EAST army from the territories occupied in
1967" 8
El Fatah/PLO seals alliance with Moscow
3 Placing the occupied Palastini an tre misses or the Palestini of people.
However, the El Fatah/PLO remained dein order to give a guarantee to the masses of the Palestinian people.
pendant on its social base grouped in the
This should not last for longer than several months, and should prepare the
Lebanese camps, without which it would way so that the Palestinian people can freely exercise their right to selflose its usefulness in the eyes of its Arab sponsors. In order to adapt its official programme it was necessary to wait for propit-
Holding the International Conference with full powers under the auspices
A of the UN and on the basis of its resolutions relating to the Palestinian ious political circumstances. They were furnished by the October 1973 question. [Point 4 refers to the resolutions of the General Assembly underlinlaunched by Sadat's Egypt, and described ing the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, and not Resoluby the Arab and Palestinian revolutionary tion 242, which does not even mention this people.] * left as a "war to open the way for a settle-
Source: Al-Raia (Nazareth), September 30, 1988 ment". The so-called Arab victory in October gave Sadat the political means for embarking on a course that would lead to
Camp David five years later. The first initiative in this direction was the Geneva
Conference, under the auspices of the US and the USSR, which opened up negotiations for a settlement of the Israeli-Arab
The El Fatah/PLO had to put itself in a position to profit from an eventual settlement. In expectation of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, in direct competition with the PLO was King Hussein, who laid claim to the same territory. So it was necessary to proclaim the demand for an independent Palestinian government in this territory. However, pressure of the mass base - the 1948 refugees — was such, at the time, that the new programme had to be formulated with extreme delicacy so as not to appear to be betraying the cause. The result was the "ten-point programme" of the June 1974 PNC, a revolutionary programme in comparison to the
PLO's recent positions.
Reaffirming the "strategic objective" of the "democratic state" and the rejection of
Resolution 242, the 1974 programme stipulated that the PLO would establish "a national, independent and fighting government, in any liberated part of the Palestinian territory". It added: "The PLO will fight against any project for a Palestinian entity whose price is the recognition (of Israel), peace, secure borders, the renunciation of our national rights" and so on. In addition, against the Jordanian butcher of the Palestinian people, the 1974 programme formulated the objective of installing in Jordan a national democratic government, closely linked to the Palestinian entity, which will be created thanks to our struggle".
However, beyond these good resolutions, the inter-Palestinian debate became concentrated on the question of the Geneva correctly denounced it as being incompatible with the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Nevertheless, the leadership of El Fatah/PLO openly looked
8 for ways to participate in it, sealing an alliance with Moscow that had been made posdetermination; sible by the PLO's turn. Condemning this "historic deviation", the PFLP organized a "Rejection front against capitulationist solutions" and withdrew from the leading bodies of the PLO.
PLO recognized by UN
General Assembly
Having become acceptable to Moscow and for the legitimacy defined by the United Nations, in October 1974 the PLO was recognized by the UN General Assembly as "the representative of the Palestinian people" by a big majority that included the vote of the French. A few days later, the Rabat summit of Arab heads of state recognized the PLO as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people". The Arab states had opted for the PLO against King Hussein, whose narrow interests — that had temporarily been submerged — did not correspond to theirs. The Arab states needed the PLO, as was clearly explained by George Habash in a long interview/balance sheet given to the organ of his Front, Al-Hadaf, in December 1987:
"The policy of settlement has been followed by the rightist leadership hegemonic in the PLO for a long time, particularly after 1973, and it continues the same today...This policy was a cover for the official Arab capitulation. The reactionary Arab regimes, incapable of confronting the Zionist entity, waited until the leadership of the PLO gave them the chance by proclaiming the possibility of coexistence with this entity in order to commit themselves to a defeatist peace with it, as the Egyptian re-
"The alliance between the Palestinian right leading the PLO and the Arab right is an organic alliance. There are many reasons for this of which the main one is, certainly, the need of the Arab right for a Palestinian cover for its capitulatory politics. This alliance meant, of course, that the Palestinian right got a great deal of support, both financial and in armaments, which contributed to tipping the balance in its
At the beginning of 1977 — having missing the second historic opportunity for the Palestinian movement after Jordan, offered at the onset of the Lebanese civil war in 1975-76 — the PLO leadership accelerated its rightist course: in February it made an official reconciliation with the Jordanian butcher and adopted a relatively watereddown programme at the March PNC, which, of course, did not mention any task in Jordan. The 1977 programme explicitly demanded that the PLO should "participate, independently and as an equal partner, in all conferences, meetings and international attempts to discuss the Palestinian question and the Arab-Zionist conflict". However, it specified that the aim was to liberate the oc cupied territories "without peace with, or recognition of, Israel". The only positive consequence of the 1974 turn still reflected in the 1977 text was the greater attention given to mass mobilization in the West Bank and Gaza. The PLO leadership had understood that it was on this that its project for a Palestinian state rested.
### Sadat begins direct negotiations with Israel
In November of the same year, 1977, Egyptian president Sadat began direct negotiations with the Zionist government with his famous visit to Israel. Under the patronage of the United States, they led to the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978 and later to the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty in 1979.
In reaction, a "Steadfastness front" was set up, in which the PLO found itself side by side with Algeria, Libya, Syria and South Yemen. Under pressure from this Front, the most reactionary Arab regimes broke with Egypt against their will. Because of Jordan's scheming to get involved 8. A demand that figured in the 1974 programme of Trotskyists in the region, linked to the perspective of a "Palestinian or Jordanian/Palestinian government, as that of a national revolutionary workers' and peasants' goverment" in these territories
----- photo credits and running heads -----
1
February 6, 1989 • #156 International Viewpoint in the negotiated settlement discussions opened by Sadat, the "Steadfastness front" - including the PLO - boycotted the Arab summit meeting in Amman in November 1980. The influence of the Iranian revolution made itself felt. The "Rejection front", led by the PFLP, returned to the leading bodies of the PLO in 1981.
The invasion of Lebanon by Israel, in June 1982, was a fatal blow to the relative rectification of the PLO's policies during the previous five years. But while the leadership of the El Fatah/PLO, after the evacuation from Jordan in 1971 needed more than two years to make its political turn, it undertook its new right turn immediately after the evacuation of Beirut.
On September 1, 1982, while the last contingent of fighters was leaving Beirut, Ronald Reagan threw out a line to the PLO leadership by proclaiming a peace plan that establishment of government by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan" after an Israeli withdrawal. Calling on the Palestinians to recognize Israel and its "right to a secure future", and lauding the merits of Resolution 242 as a basis for negotiation, Reagan added: "I wish fervently that the Palestinians and Jordan would seize this opportunity".
Prevailing climate of defeat
The US president's wish was soon granted. On September 20, while the blood of the Sabra and Chatila martyrs was still not dry, King Hussein called on the PLO to discuss with him the establishment of a future Jordanian-Palestinian "confederation". Arafat arrived in Amman on October 9, in response to an invitation from the king. A few months earlier, such a gesture would have been unthinkable. Nevertheless, a climate of ‹lefeat prevailed, while the dispersal of the combative Palestinian rank-and-file to the four corners of the Arab world left the PLO chief with a free hand.
Meanwhile, Arafat wanted the PNC to ratify his new policy. Meeting in Algiers in
...THEN, SUDDENLY I WAS FORTY AND
February 1983, the Council adopted a political resolution that marked a new slide to the right for the PLO, in spite of the efforts of the nationalist factions and the left to tone down its formulations. PNC won over to support
Brezhnev plan
By way of a compromise, the resolution stated that "future relations with Jordan must be established on a confederal basis between two independent states", at the same time explicitly rejecting the idea of a common delegation with Jordan (whilst not being explicitly mentioned, this meant a joint delegation to negotiations for a settlement). Skilfully, the Arafat leadership won the PNC to emphatic support for the Brezhnev plan, published a few days after Reagan's. They knew perfectly well that the PLO left could not oppose it - neither could the DFLP, aligned with Moscow for a long time, or the PFLP which, since the beginning of the 1980s, had followed slowly but surely in the footsteps of the former, its pace accelerating after 1982.
The Brezhnev plan already contained all the ingredients that made such a sensation at the PNC in November 1988. It affirmed Israel's "right" to existence and security, advocating peace between Israel and its neighbours, including a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. All this was to be realized by an "international conference on the Middle East" under the aegis of the big powers — "the permanent members of the UN's Security Council".
In fact, Arafat acted more in the framework of the Reagan plan chosen by King Hussein. This demanded that he adhere to the principle of a common delegation — the inclusion of Palestinian delegates in a Jordanian delegation — to the peace negotiations. On this point - which the PNC had already rejected — the El Fatah chief ran up against the veto of the Palestinian left and Syria (whose Golan Heights were occupied in 1967 by Israel, but were not even mentioned in Reagan's speech), and with a section of his own movement. He
MIDDLE EAST decided to fight it out with all these opposing forces.
Evacuating the north of Lebanon after battles with his Syrian-backed opponents, Arafat went directly to Egypt to meet President Hosni Mubarak, thereby breaking the official Arab boycott of the Egyptian regime that had begun after the signing of the Camp David peace treaty. George Habash demanded — vainly! — that Arafat be deposed. Following on from this, the El Fatah/PLO organized the seventeenth session of the PNC, again in Amman, in November 1984.
This session was boycotted by all the other Palestinian organizations, with the exception of two tiny pro-Iraqi groups. It was opened by King Hussein, who had already inaugurated the very first session of the PNC twenty years previously. Meanwhile, he had massacred some tens of thousands of Palestinians. The 1984 PNC ratified Arafat's policy — both "joint action" with Jordan as well as relations with Egypt. In February 1985, the PLO chief concluded the Amman agreement with King Hussein. It involved a "common delegation" to the "peace negotiations" in the framework of an "international conference" on the basis of UN resolutions "including Security Council resolutions" (an allusion to Resolution 242). The accord also foresaw the establishment of an "Arab confederation between the Jordanian and Palestinian states". King Hussein puts Amman accord on ice
This honeymoon did not last long. Parallel to this the Jordanian monarch was finalizing a plan with his old Labour Zionist friends, who were back in business in Israel under the leadership of Shimon Peres, to "share out functions" in the West Bank. Labour are partisans of an agreement with Jordan and of a partial restitution of the territories occupied in 1967, but they did not want anything to do with the PLO. Judging that the latter had become impotent, and using the pretext of its hesitation to openly and explicitly recognize Resolution 242
- an indispensable condition for any peace negotiations with Israel, Hussein
IT'S LIKE I DIDNT KNOW MYSELF
ANY MORE, AND SOMETIMES LIKE
I WAS TWO PEOPLE AND THE
OTHER PERSON KEPT GETTING
BIGGER... AND BIGGER.
WELL! WHAT
MOLD YOUR
MONER SAY?
suddenly sent the PLO packing in February 1986. He decided unilaterally to "freeze" the Amman agreement.
Following this total and lamentable failure of its policy, the leadership of the El Fatah/PLO came under growing pressure - including inside its own movement - to back-pedal and to make up with the groups aligned with the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, for an entire year they tried to reestablish links with the Jordanian government through the intervention of their allies, the Saudi, Iraqi and Egyptian regimes. When these initiatives failed, the PLO resigned itself to accepting the good offices of Moscow for 9 the "reunification" of the PLO — that is,
International Viewpoint #156 • February 6, 1989
MIDDLE EAST the reintegration of the PFLP and the DFLP in the unified DAMNED body. TURKS
The "reunification" was sealed by the PNC in Algiers, in April 1987. However, the nationalist factions linked to the Syrian regime kept their distance, including the dissident wing of El Fatah. This meant that, despite the Pales- DAMNED
LJORDANIANS tinian right's very negative bal-
La. ance-sheet, there was not purely and simply a return to the positions previous to Arafat's Jordanian adventure. Rather, in the framework of a relationship of forces that was even more favourable to the right than at the 1983 PNC, the outcome was a new compromise including new concessions by a left led to do this by Moscow. The most radical faction of this left, the PFLP, is ending up progressively lining up with the "homeland of socialism". (According to George Habash's formulations, this is the final phase of the "transformation" of his Front from a "petty bourgeois" to a "proletarian" party.)
So, on the two key disputed points in 1983-86 — relations with Jordan and Egypt — the PNC's 1987 resolution virtually left the leadership of El Fatah/PLO with a free hand, while noting the obsolescence of the Amman Accord, repudiated by King Hussein. On the other hand, the resolution reaffirmed "the unrelenting rejection of Resolution 242", while reiterating support for an "International Peace Conference in the Middle East...with the participation of the permanent members of the UN Security Council". In exchange for its good offices, Moscow obtained the following clarification: the PNC "stresses that the International Conference must be invested with full powers".
Under the joint pressure of its Arab clients — Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — since 1985 Washington had actually abandoned direct references to the Camp David accords as a framework for a settlement in order to take back on board the principle of the International Conference. Shimon Peres had followed suit. Only the Likud continued to cling to the Camp David accords, which had been signed by their historic chief, Begin, himself.
Period of rupture with the
Palestinian left
The 1985 Arafat-Hussein agreement, in the period of the rupture with the whole of the Palestinian left and icy relations with Moscow, included the principle of the Conference. But the absence of any precision regarding procedure made this agreement entirely compatible with the Shultz/Peres interpretation of the Conference as a "fig 10 leaf (as Newsweek called it) for direct bilateral negotiations between Israel and a
DAMNED BRITISH DAMNED SRAELIS A LIFETIME ON THE WEST BANK Jordanian/Palestinian delegation - the goal of Shultz and Peres being to keep Syria and the USSR out of the real process. On this point, therefore, the PLO gave Moscow satisfaction in 19879
But hardly had the 1987 PNC ended when the Arafat leadership renewed its contacts with Egypt, to the great displeasure of the DFLP, PFLP and the Palestinian Communist Party. (The PCP, former West Bank section of the Jordanian CP, was brought into the PLO at the same PNC meeting to please Moscow. By way of compensation, a fundamentalist Islamic faction was also brought in, with twice the representation of the PCP.)
Palestinian masses begin the intifada
The PLO seemed about to repeat the scenario that led to the 1983 split. The El Fatah/PLO leadership launched itself once again into deals with its reactionary friends in Baghdad, Cairo and Riyad, hoping for a reconciliation with Amman. At the Arab Summit that met in the latter capital in November 1987, Arafat, although treated as an underling, met with the Jordanian king in the presence of the Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein. A little later he declared that he had agreed with "His Majesty" to "begin where we had left off" (Al-Yom Assabeh, November 23, 1987).
The following month, understanding that from now on they had to count primarily on themselves and their own struggles, the Palestinian masses in the West Bank and Gaza began the intifada, without needing any signal from the outside. Very quickly it proved to be the most formidable episode in the Palestinian anti-Zionist struggle since the uprising of 1936-39. Before the PNC meeting in 1988, the Unified Leadership of the Intifada never at any time expressed any inclination to recognize the Israeli state and Resolution 242. On the contrary, during the first few months of the intifada many of the leadership's communiques explicitly rejected the recognition of Israel and Resolution 242, and described the regime in Jordan as an "agent" [of imperialism]. As for the state of mind of the population itself in the occupied territories, the poll cited at the beginning of this article - carried out on the eve of the last PNC - gives a good indication. In view of the massive and undeniably majority nature of the intifada, its radical character in many respects and the downright hostile position to the Jordanian regime reflected in its communiques, King Hussein could see how badly compromised was the project that he had nurtured for two years AUTH along with his crony Shimon Peres. Hussein moves quickly to stop spread of uprising
The breadth and the strength of the insurrectional fires blazing in the West Bank and Gaza — that the Israeli army could not extinguish in spite of its impressive deployment - took away from the monarch any desire to recover these territories. Of course, King Hussein had already demonstrated in his own kingdom that he was ready to crush a mass movement by methods far bloodier than those to which the Zionist government limited itself through the pressure of international public opinion and of a section of the Israeli public. But, taking everything into account, the two territories would now cost Jordan much more in repressive outlay than it would yield.
Moreover, it was necessary for Hussein to act quickly to contain the fire and prevent it from spreading to his own kingdom, where nearly 60% of the people are Palestinians. He had to prevent the insurrectional blaze from crossing the Jordan river. His repressive apparatuses had already greatly increased their activity to put out the first sparks of agitation in support of the intifada. On July 31, 1988, Hussein announced his decision to "break legal and administrative links between the two banks of the Jordan" — in other words, to abandon his claim to the West Bank, which his kingdom annexed in 1949. One week later, he explained: "By opting for their own state, our Palestinian brothers have opted for independence vis-a-vis Jordan. If there is a split, therefore, it corresponds to their wishes...
These oily phrases could not hide his real attitude, exposed even by the way in which the July 31 decision was taken — brutally, with no previous consultation with the PLO, such that it created a dangerous jurid. ical vacuum and an economic problem. The legal vacuum could have been filled by the Zionist government, if it had been politically prepared to annex the territories concerned, as the Israeli extreme-right had 9. For a detailed analysis of the period 1983-87, see IVs 121 and 122, June 1 & 15. 1987.
already proposed since the beginning of the [1967) occupation.
Extracts of an article from the daily As-Safir (Beirut), October 29, 1988, by Abdel-Sattar Qassem, a professor of political sciences at the Al-Najah
University in Nablus, West Bank. Since February 1988, he has been detained in the "Ansar-3" camp in Negev. *
February 6, 1989 • #156 International Viewpoint demanded. The economic problem — the wages of some 21,000 functionaries in the West Bank whose salaries had been continued to be paid by the Jordanian state — was partially resolved by Libya's promise to take them in hand. Of course, there was still the problem of the PLO being able to send in funds ($5 million per month.
PLO had to proclaim Palestinian state
However, the most urgent problem was the legal vacuum. It became imperative for the PLO to proclaim a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. It could have done this without the least recognition of the state of Israel. (In 1949, Jordan did not recognize Israel and has still not formally recognized it.) The PLO could have combined this proclamation so fervently wanted by the vast majority of people in the two territories with the political programme outlined in September by the Unified Leadership of the Intifada in its 26th
This Communique, expressing a broad consensus of Palestinians inside the territories and among the PLO's various factions, included a series of immediate demands as well as four more long-term objectives (see box p.8). The first three of these, which repeat the elements of a platform adopted by the Arab Summit in June 1988 in a more radical way, are absolutely correct. The fourth objective includes an evident contradiction between the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the principle of an "International Conference with full powers" to decide their fate. This is evidence of the confusion that reigns in the minds of most Palestinians concerning this principle, which even the left of the PLO hotly defends, dear as it is to Moscow's
Moreover, a revolutionary PLO acting from the outside would have launched an appeal urging the Jordanian and Palestinian masses in Jordan to rise up alongside the intifada in the occupied territories to overthrow the hireling monarchy. This is the sole, indispensable means to break the repressive vice encircling the West Bank, to say nothing of the tyrannical yoke around the necks of the masses in Jordan, among whom there are at least as many Palestinians than in the West Bank and Gaza put together. The overthrow of the Amman monarchy is also a necessary step for the establishment of a Jordanian/Palestinian state free from imperialist and Zionist domination that would really be viable, unlike the project of a mini-state in the 1967 territories consisting of roughly 6,000 square kilometers divided into two parts by
PLO leadership chooses not to fight
But without asking too much from the leadership of the PLO, simply adopting the programme in Communique 26, in the continuity of the PNC's 1987 resolutions, would have represented a decision to fight, a decision of a leadership based exclusively on the mass struggle and understanding that a just right is not something to be begged for. Sadly, this was not the approach of the PLO leaders. For a long time they opted for a strategy of a negotiated settlement with Israel, whose number one objective was to win recognition from American imperialism.°
However, the US government's conditions for establishing a dialogue with the
MIDDLE EAST PLO were well known: they were fixed by Henry Kissinger in 1974. George Bush cited them in an interview given to The Jerusalem Post: "The PLO must not only clearly accept Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which recognize Israel's right to exist, but also renounce terrorism and the article in its founding charter advocating the destruction of Israel". (June 28, 1988.)
In an article in Le Monde on September 23, 1988, then Israeli minister of foreign affairs Shimon Peres added this clarification concerning his government, or at least his party: "The PLO must, in the final analysis, choose between two options: support from Syria...or dialogue with Jordan....It is only with the latter country that the PLO can work out a policy of negotiation with
Arafat had already received this message a long time ago. But the radical pressure of the first months of the intifada, the communiques from the inside and the PLO's leftwing partners — as well as the USSR and Libya — all pushed in the direction of reestablishing an alliance with Damascus. The beginnings of negotiations with the Syrian government, following the assassination of Abu Jihad by the Israeli services in April 1988, delighted all the parties mentioned previously, but not for long.
Indeed, Arafat intensively explored the Jordan/US road leading to negotiations with Israel. In March, he had pushed two PNC members who have US citizenship to meet with American Secretary of State George Shultz, in spite of the Unified Leadership of the Intifada's explicit veto of any such meetings. Following the Reagan/ Gorbachev summit in Moscow at the end of May - during which the chief bureaucrat of the Kremlin matched his views with Washington's on the Middle East question — Arafat, relieved, shifted into higher
"A crime towards ourselves and others" THOSE WHO try to disengage from the criteria set by the intifada, trying to get around it and turn it away from its objectives, are going to harm it definitively....There is every reason to fear that the intifada be exploited to support some latent political objectives that were just waiting for an occasion to express themselves. The situation is, very largely, similar to Sadat's use of the limited military exploits of the Arab
"Sadat exploited the widespread moral support given by the war to Arab opinion to say that he was going into the political battle from a position of strength. The result was that Egypt left the terrain of confrontation and recognized Israel....
"If what certain people are now demanding is correct, then we have certainly committed a crime towards ourselves and others. We should have been able, for example, to spare ourselves the tens of thousands of deaths over the years and avoid all kinds of persecution and suffering, if we had accepted King Hussein's concept of peace....
"After all this suffering, it turns out that in practice, what certain Palestinian leaderships are proposing today, King Hussein had
"Bilateral peace talks with
Israel"
Boosted by the encouragement of the leading lights of Arab reaction meeting in Algiers at the June 1988 summit, the PLO chief published a feeler article by Bassam Abu Sherif, a renegade from the PFLP and now Arafat's official counsellor. Everything was already there: acceptance of Resolution 242 and "bilateral peace talks with Israel" in the framework of an International Conference (in short, the "fig-leaf"). The article provoked a general outcry from the left of the PLO, but it was very well received by those to whom it was addressed, in the United States and Israel.
Following the Jordanian measures on July 31, the PNC was convoked for September. The right projected the setting up of a "provisional government" speaking in 10. See the June 1986 resolution of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, "The crisis of the balance sepublished in International Marxist Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 1987.
International Viewpoint #156 • February 6, 1989
MIDDLE EAST the name of the Palestinian people and composed of personalities acceptable to Washington. The left opposed this loudly and forcefully. Moscow intervened to pour oil on the waters. The PLO's Executive Committee met in Tunis at the beginning of October. It decided to postpone the governmental question, to call a meeting of the PNC at the end of the month and to proclaim a Palestinian state. The right-wing and Moscow's followers, the DFLP and the PCP, proposed to do this on the basis of the 1947 Resolution 181. Arafat wanted to add Resolution 242, but he was ready to reconcile himself to this provisional compromise, which amounted to recognizing the state of Israel without making a decision about its frontiers. George Habash made a sour face. "Balancing the interests of concerned parties"
Moscow received a delegation from the PLO on October 10-11. Two messages came out of this. First, the PNC should be delayed so as not to proclaim the Palestinian state before the Israeli elections due on November 1 — in this way the "good Zionists" of Shimon Peres would not be upset. Second, the state of Israel should be recognized.
On October 11, the TASS press agency reported that the discussions had underlined the necessity for "concrete steps that must be founded on balancing the interests of all the concerned parties", that is, the oppressors and the oppressed. Habash resigned himself to accepting Resolution 181 as the lesser evil in a logic of the permanent compromise that governed the slide to the right of all the PLO factions via a series of
With less and less to fear from his left, Arafat went to Akaba in Jordan to meet with King Hussein and President Mubarak on October 22. Le Monde commented: "There is no doubt that, by thus displaying himself together with these two close allies of the US who are favourable to a negotiated settlement, Mr. Arafat wanted to reinforce his image as a man searching for peace....(He) has clearly shown the hardliners in the PLO that the way forward must be that of negotiation and compromise". From Akaba, Arafat and Mubarak went to Baghdad, this time to display themselves with Saddam Hussein.
The political choices made by the PLO leadership are clearer than ever: full steam ahead towards a capitulation à la Sadat. After all, Sadat, who has been called every name under the sun by the PLO, has only done what they are preparing to do. He recognized Israel in exchange for the recovery of Egyptian occupied territory, the Sinai, with a demilitarization clause guaranteeing the security of the Zionist state. The two capitulations are based on moral victories, 12 the October 1973 war in one case, the intifada in the other — contrary to the previous shifts of the PLO (1974, 1977 and 1983), which happened on the basis of defeats. This was eloquently highlighted in an article by Abdel-Sattar Kassem, one of the prisoners from the intifada (see box p.11).
Of course, at its meeting of November 12-15, the PNC proclaimed "the state of Palestine". This decision, in itself a challenge to the Israeli occupation, was impatiently awaited by the masses of the intifada. It galvanized them, reinforcing their hopes of seeing the day approach when the Zionist army would withdraw from their land. But if the proclamation of an independent state by the masses strug gling under the occupation is an act of bravery, the same thing is certainly not true for the PNC meeting in Algiers. (They did not forget to salute "the fighting president, Chadli Bendjedid" barely one month after he had bloodily crushed another intifada!).
One could legitimately ask why it was necessary to wait until after the Israeli elections and leave the "judicial vacuum" caused by Jordan's July withdrawal decision to continue for three and a half months. Moreover, why was the proclamation not made long before, at the beginning of the intifada? Or in 1976, when the mo. bilization in the 1967 territories was already intense and the municipal elections there, although under Israeli control, resulted in the victory of PLO supporters? Or from 1974, when the PNC adopted the transitional principle of the Palestinian state in one part of Palestine?
Let us entrust the reply to Bilal El-
La close collaborator of Arafat's and chief editor of the unofficial journal of El Fatah/PLO: "Why was the state proclaimed at this particular time...? The crucial point regarding this is Jordan's (July 31) decision... which created a vacuum that someone had to fill. It was natural that the Palestinian leadership should take the initiative in this respect, given that this measure is a natural right as far as they are concerned. Jordan's decision helped the Palestinian side to take this step, given that it came at a time when it would not raise any conflict or problem with Jordan. Implicit recognition of the state of Israel
"The PLO has always pushed to the fore the idea of the state as a militant and political objective, without accompanying this with any practical measures in order to avoid any premature and pointless conflict with Jordan. Now that Jordan has disengaged, the practical Palestinian measure could be implemented without raising any problem among Arabs". (Al-Yom Assabeh, November 28, 1988.)
In other words, this measure no longer had "the character of a challenge to the monarchy of Amman and its reactionary allies that it would have had if it had been made earlier". (IV 153, December 12, 1988)
This is why a newspaper like Le Monde, for example, was right a few hours after the end of the PNC when it devoted its headline not to the proclamation of the state but to the following point: "The PLO has implicitly recognized the existence of Israel". Indeed, it was well and truly the shock decision of the PNC: the acceptance of Resolution 242, decided at the last moment and motivated as far as Arafat was concerned by Shimon Peres' circular to Israeli embassies just before the PNC meeting. This circular explained that only the acceptance of Resolutions 242 and 338 — and not Resolution 181 — would amount to a recognition of Israel within secure and recognized boundaries. (Le Monde, November 13-14,
The text proclaiming the Palestinian state was based on Resolution 181, after 41 years and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Arab deaths in the struggle against the state that this resolution had established in the most iniquitous way. This same text, read by Arafat himself, declared that the Palestinian state rejects "the use of force, of violence or of terrorism against its own territorial integrity...or that of any other Little importance attached to real self-determination
The PNC's political resolution goes even further. It reiterates the principle of the International Conference, but this time the phrase "with full powers" is replaced by "effective", in spite of opposition from Habash and others to this far from innocent change. Above all, the resolution specifies that such an International Conference "will meet on the basis of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338" — this after 21 years of total rejection of Resolution 242 by the whole Palestinian movement at the cost of tens of thousands dead. Only 15% of PNC members voted against this part of the resolution, including the members of the PFLP and some independents and Islamics.
Following in the footsteps of the resolution of the June 1988 Arab Summit in Algiers and Communique 26 of the Unified Leadership of the Intifada partly inspired by it, the PN's resolution demands that the occupied territories be put under the auspices of the UN for a limited period. But while the two first texts envisaged this as a transition towards the exercise of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, the November 1988 PNC saw this simply as the means to "create a favourable climate for the success of the International Conference, the reaching of a political settlement and the realization of security and peace for all, by mutual agreement and consent, and to allow the Palestinian state to exercise real powers over its territories".
This just shows what little importance the PLO leadership attaches to the free, real, direct and democratic exercise of the population's right to self-determination in these
February 6, 1989 • #156 International Viewpoint territories. Equally significant in this regard is the total absence from the PNC's resolution of the central political demand contained in the communiques of the Unified Leadership of the Intifada, from the beginning of the uprising up to the eve of the
PNC: that is, free elections in the West
Bank and Gaza.
It should be noted finally that, in spite of
Jordan's July 31 decision and the sentiments expressed by the rebellious Palestinian masses'!, the PNC resolution reiterates the principle of the "confederation with
Jordan". This is despite the fact that King
Hussein himself had told Arafat, at their
Akaba meeting, that he would prefer not to make any premature announcements on this question.
So it is understandable that the imperialist powers unanimously awarded top marks to the last PNC session;
just as there were grandiloquent praises for the
PLO's "flexibility" and
"realism" by many of those who had described it the day before as "terrorist", and who still proclaimed their undying attachment to the state of Israel. The leadership of the El Fatah/
PLO believed they had scrupulously adhered to the conditions laid down by Washington before they would sit around the same table with its representatives. Arafat had just played his "last card" for the mess of potage represented by recognition from Israel's guardian.
But to general astonishment, Shultz even refused to give Arafat a visa for the UN General
Assembly in New York.
However, the American secretary of state turned out to be much shrewder than those who accused him of lacking in judgement at the time appreciated — as if this old fox was as dullwitted as a Shamir.
In fact, Shultz knew perfectly well that he had Arafat mesmerized with his carrot of recognition, but he wanted to squeeze out of him an even clearer, sharper and more precise support for the American conditions.
What happened next is well known: the mediation of the Swedish social democrats, and Arafat's speech on December 13 to the
UN General Assembly meeting specially in
Geneva. Here, Arafat again confirmed the acceptance of Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for an International Conference and for a settlement, and again condemned terrorism. Nevertheless, Washington once again turned a deaf ear. Shultz demanded that the PLO chief declare explicitly, and with no ambiguity, that he recognized Israel de jure and renounced terrorism (a way of forcing him to admit that the PLO had been "terrorist").
Having decided to grovel to the enemies of the Palestinian people, Arafat went to the bitter end - the bitter end of humiliation. In a press conference on December 14 called to do just that, without beating around the bush Arafat pronounced himself in favour of the "right of all the parties to exist in peace and security, including the state of Palestine, Israel and their neighbours". He added: "We totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism, whether it be by individuals, groups or
Shultz was then able to consider himself satisfied and to declare that in future the US would be "ready for a substantial dialogue with representatives of the PLO". Even the B'nai B'rith League, an American Zionist organization, said now that they understood that "the PLO having accepted the conditions set by the United States, it was proper to respect the commitments". (Le Monde, December 16, 1988.) Grateful, a few days later Arafat offered the help of his intelligence services to Washington in the inquiry into the Pan Am Boeing explosion.
If the American decision to establish direct contacts with the PLO was a "victory" for the latter, it would be interesting to know what constitutes a defeat! Of course,
Arafat — a grand organizer of defeats and grand master in the art of going through them making a V for victory sign - did not hesitate to explain that the American
MIDDLE EAST decision was obtained thanks to "the tenacity of the militants of the intifada" (in sharp contrast to his own "flexibility"), and to "their natural and principal allies, Iraqi soldiers who defended the eastern door of the Arab nation". (Al-Yom Assabeh, January 2, 1989.) Only fools could believe this.
Abu Iyad, number two in the PLO, is more forthright. In October he confessed to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas that: "We must recognize that the Zionist movement has succeeded in convincing the world of what it calls the basic principles for a political settlement, encapsulated in the recognition of Resolution 242....Some people say:
Why must we give in to this blackmail? My opinion is that the Zionist movement is not so much blackmailing us, but Europe and the world".
Leaving aside the misplaced boasting,
Abu Iyad acknowledges the capitulation. But he presents it as inevitable in the face of an all-
"the powerful enemy,
Zionist movement" that
"succeeded in convincing the world". This is an old refrain of rightwing Arab nationalism and serves as an alibi for all the surrenders. The
Zionists (if not to say the "Jews") "manipulate" the United States, and not vice-versa. And this is at a time when, precisely, the strength of conviction of the Zionist movement is at its lowest ever historical level faced with the intifada.
At the same time as the struggle of the Palestinian people against the had
Zionist state reached its highest ever level for half a century.
George Habash was right when, addressing the leaders of the Palestinian right who are hegemonic in the PLO, he asked them: "Is this the time to make new concessions? We are in a period where the
International Conference has not yet begun, and they already want us to take off our jacket.
"That's not enough for them, they want us to take off our trousers. And that doesn't satisfy them either they want us to take off our underclothes. They want us to go to the International Conference totally naked!" (Al-Qabas, reprinted in Al-Raia,
August 5, 1988.)
The PLO's trajectory indeed resembles a political striptease. *
11. According to the poll already cited, only 22% of
Win Lordan, inhabitanis approved of a confederation 13 with Jordan.
The growing problems facing immigrant workers
IMMIGRATION and the super-exploitation the protection of the labor and social of foreign-born workers are new problems security laws, they risk losing their in Italy. The recent legislation, Law 943, is similar to that adopted by the Union of the
Left government that came to power in The following article from the January
France in 1981. It offers immigrants 1989 issue of Bandiera Rossa, the paper of certain possibilities to regularize their the Italian section of the Fourth status, but does not attack the problem of International, discusses these problems.
super-exploitation, with the result that if immigrants acquire legal residence andIGOR ZECCHINI
ITALY
T HE DEADLINE for foreign
workers filing requests to regularize their status, in accordance with Law 943, ran out on October 30. This law was adopted by the Italian parliament in 1986, with the support of the entire parliamentary left. Since that time, the noose of this legislation, vaunted as Europe's "most democratic" immigration law, has been slowly tightening around the necks of thousands of immigrants from non-EEC countries.