evolution of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The first consists of some comments on a previous article published in INPRECOR; the second is a response to those comments; the third is a translation of an analysis that appeared in the JanuaryFebruary 1975 issue of el-Munodil, the bi-monthly Arabic journal published by the comrodes in the Arab East affiliated to the Fourth International. 1.comments on "the turn of the plo» The article by Comrade Jon Rothschild published in INPRECOR No. 13, November 28, under the title "The Turn of the PLO" calls for some comments. The principal thesis of the article, contrary to what might be suggested by the title, is the assertion of "the fundamental political continuity of the orientation of the PLO leadership, " a political continuity that the reader is given to understand as programmatic continuity. The axis of this continuity, again 16 according to the article, is the program of the "democratic secular state in Palestine. " We have always criticized this program from two complementary standpoints (apart from the fact that it ignores the national aspect of the Jewish question in Palestine): (1) from the standpoint of the permanent revolution, in that this program creates illusions as to the possibility of liberating Palestine under a bourgeois-democratic leadership; (2) from the standpoint of the Arab revolution, in that the same program creates illusions in the possibility of liberating Palestine solely through the forces of the Palestinian people. This critique does not at all mean - and here is the source of the confusion into which certain sectors of our movement have fallen, in spite of the fact that what is involved is an elementary aspect of Trotskyism - that democratic and secular demands have no value in the struggle against Zionism. On the contrary, they are very important for the struggle of our comrades inside Israel. But the "democratic" program has precisely no mobilizing value outside Israel. It only adds illusions to the real mobilizing goal: the liberation of Palesfine; that is, the destruction of the Zionist state and the restitution of the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people.
Now, the fundamental program of Fateh, the PLO, the PFLP, and so on, a program that is implied by their names, is the liberation of Palestine and not the democratic secular state, which is mainly destined for external consumption (at the UN, for example!). That is what Comrade Jon fails to see when he tries to justify the assertion in his article that "the leaders of Fateh considered the struggle against the Zionist state fundamentally as a struggle aimed at eliminating from Palestine one of the backward social forces that had already been eliminated in countries like Egypt, Syria, Traq. ... " This is a total aberration. The goal of the struggle of Fateh was not at all "to democratize and secularize Palestine in the same way that Egypt was democratized and secularized by the Nasserist revolution. " It was in the first place and above all to liberate Palestine in the same way that Algeria was liberated. Comrade Jon passes in silence over the whole dominant national aspect of the Palestinian struggle. Thus, the turn of the PLO is much more radical than is suggested by Comrade Jon's article. It is true that the final goal has not been abandoned. It is maintained, but in the same way as the communist goal is "maintained" by Stalinist parties; that is, it is abandoned in practice and, more and more, in theory. The leadership of the PLO is trying to spread the belief that the Palestinian state that it is trying to obtain serves the goal of the liberation of Palestine;
Plo in fact, this state, born in the framework of the "peaceful solution" and thus of the guarantees of the security of the Zionist state and its de facto recognition by the Arab states, is in total contradiction with the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian Arab people. If implies halting the Palestinian armed struggle, the fundamental aspect of this struggle for liberation. It is thus not a matter of a simple change in the form of the stfuggle, but very clearly a betrayal in reality of the final goal (in which we see once again the dialectical unity of form and content). Comrade Jon goes so far as to write: "In the past, the leaders of Fateh believed that in the conditions of the Arab East, this goal could be achieved only by people's war. Now they believe it can be achieved through a peaceful evolution beginning with the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank of the Jordan. " It is obvious, in fact, that it is not the "beliefs" of these leaders that have changed, but rather their objectives; and this turn is the result of a transformation that is classical for Trotskyists: the bureaucratic degeneration of the Palestinian resistance, which has become a "state apparatus in search of a state at the cheapest available rate" since the equilibrium of the Bonapartist balancing act (of the leadership) has been changed. This necessary Marx-
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PLO ist analysis of the turn of the PLO is absent from Comrade Jon's article. We will not go into this in any more detail, for it is taken up in the Munadil article. One last remark to conclude: Comrade Jon ends his article with a prognostication of two alternatives that are rather bleak: new conflagration or crushing of the vanguard of the Arab revolution. This is an erroneous interpretation of the "peaceful solution." Even if we consider the Palestinian vanguard as the vanguard of the Arab revolution (which is, to say the least, debatable), the Palestinian state will not mean the crushing of this vanguard but rather the creation of better conditions for its development: the regroupment of Palestinians and therefore of the Palestinian vanguard; the end of the power of mystification of the leadership of the PLO, and therefore the weakening of its grip over a section of the masses; an inter-Palestinian restructuring and therefore the crystallization of the class struggle, and so on. There will not be a significant crushing of the vanguard because the relationship of forces can only give an impetus to the potential oppositionists. Moreover, any confrontation (even limited) can only feed the future struggle within the Palestinian state. In this sense, as el-Munadil has affirmed, the creation of a Palestinian state will only add one more government to those that the Arab revolution will have to bring down.• Januory 4, 1975 -S. Jaber 2. a