response A good part of Comrade Jaber's remarks about the article "The Turn of the PLO" appear to be based on differences that are largely semantic. In responding to the comments, it would perhaps be useful to begin by clarifying the areas of agreement in the two positions. First, there is no suggestion in my article that the leadership of the PLO has not made a turn in accepting the establishment of a Palestinian rump state on the West Bank of the Jordan. In fact, 1 clearly characterized (more than once) the current policy of the PLO leadership as being one of betrayal, which certainly implies a turn. Second, we both agree that the practical essence of the turn (and the betrayal) is the PLO's abandonment of the struggle to destroy the Zionist state. Third, Comrade Jaber's suggestion that | "pass in silence over the whole dominant national aspect of the Palestinian struggle"
is rather an exaggeration. In fact, one of the central points of the article was the argument that the current betrayal of the PLO "is the inevitable betrayal by a bourgeois leadership of the struggle for national liberation in the era of imperialism. " Fourth, we agree that the project of establishing a Palestinian ministate is in total contradiction with the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people." We agree, then, that the PLO leadership has made a turn; that the turn represents a betrayal of the national struggle of the Palestinian people; that the Palestinian ministate "implies halting the Palestinian armed struggle, the fundamental aspect of this struggle for liberation"; and that it is the duty of revolufionaries in the Arab world not only to denounce this turn, but also to counterpose to it a revolutionaryMarxist program capable of mobilizing the workers and peasants of the entire Arab region. In fact, we even agree on the essential aspects of the weakness of the program of the PLO: that it creates illusions in the possibility of liberating Palestine under a bourgeois-democratic leadership and that it projects the possibility of liberating Palestine solely through the forces of the Palestinian people. I may add here that the Munadil article describing the bureaucratic degeneration of the leadership of the resistance pinpoints the concrete process of transformation of the resistance leadership - the material causes of the transformation and the mechanism through which it occurred. Where, then, does the disagreement, if there really is any, lie? Comrade Jaber describes the (previous) fundamental goal of the resistance organizations as the liberation of Palestine rather than the construction of a democratic secular state in Palestine, which he says is a slogan designed almost exclusively for external consumption. There is certainly truth in this. But it does not seem to me to be the whole truth. Liberation of Palestine fundamentally means the destruction of the Zionist state. But the destruction of the Zionist state immediately raises the question of what will replace that state after its destruction. The answer given to that question determines to a great extent not only the sort of documents that will be written (whether for internal or external consumption), but also the manner in which the strug gle will be conducted. (To paraphrase Comrade Jaber, we see here once again the dialectical unity of means and ends.) One of the major differences between the post-1967 resistance and the earlier PLO lay precisely in the fact that the "new" resistance took its struggle seriously. It proved this by actually mobilizing the masses to a significant degree - which is something the old PLO never did. (To deny this would be to deny that the resistance leadership was ever for the liberation of Palestine, which would be to deny that there has been any turn at all.) The fact that the resistance was serious about its struggle to destroy the Zionist state meant that it had to project what sort of society would replace the demol-
ished Zionist structure. The answer that was given to that question was the "democratic secular state, which, I would maintain, was and still is something real exactly in the sense that it was and still is the genuine answer given by the resistance leadership to the question of what sort of society they intend to rule over after the destruction of the state of Israel. (It should be noted, incidentally, that by itself the "democratic secular state" says absolutely nothing about the number of Jews who will theoretically be allowed to remain in the liberated Palestine.) The "democratic secular Palestine" was never - and never could be - a slogan capable of mobilizing the Palestinian people. On this Comrade Jaber is absolutely correct; there is nothing in my article that suggests the contrary. But it can be - and is -an expression of the political consciousness of the leadership of the resistance, an expression that is in its turn an expression of the class origins and aspirations of that leadership. In terms of consciousness, the formula "democratic secular Palestine" is an articulated resumé of the outlook of Palestinocentrism; it directly implies both isolation of the Palestinian struggle from the more general Arab struggle and the limitation of the Palestinian struggle to bourgeois-democratic tasks. Given the changes in the objective situation in the Arab world (which are excellently described in the Munadil article), 3.the resistance: