STATEMENT BY THE UNITED SECRETARIAT OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
The outbreak of armed conflict between the Palestinian forces and the Lebanese army is part of a systematic policy on the part of the reactionary Arab states of liquidating the danger that the Palestinian resistance movement represents for them. The conflict represents a new and more acute stage in the repeated attempts of the pro-imperialist Lebanese government to destroy the militant vanguard of the Arab revolution, the Palestinian resistance movement.
PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS TO LIQUIDATE THE PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE MOVEMENT
Of the Arab states bordering on the Zionist state—Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon—it is in the latter two, which have never supported the struggle against Israel, that a powerful Palestinian resistance movement has gradually emerged. This political force, well-armed and strongly-motivated, eludes the control of these regimes and confronts them with increasing and permanent risks of Zionist retaliation. This eventuality is what these two governments fear above all. The Jordanian army has never protected nor aided the resistance fighters when they have been the target of bombing or harassment by the Israelis. When Beirut airport was attacked by Israeli special commandos in December 1968, the Lebanese army, somewhat surprised, continued to sit with its arms folded.
Each of the governments of these two countries has undertaken a policy of undermining the Palestinian resistance movement. Since November 1967, when the Palestinian resistance first began to develop a mass base, Jordan has tried to smash this resistance, or at least tried to keep it within the limits of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, as it was defined and established at the time of Ahmed Choukeiry. But on two occasions in November 1967 and December 1968, the mass mobilisations of the people of Jordan, an essential support for the resistance, blocked the counter-revolutionary manoeuvres of King Hussein of Jordan who retreated in face of the mobilisation of the people.
The implantation of the Palestinian resistance movement in Lebanon grew really substantial at the beginning of this year. The attack on Beirut airport was an attempt on the part of the Israelis to intimidate and pressurise the Lebanese government into taking action against the resistance which, based in South Lebanon, was conducting operations against the Israeli border areas. The attack achieved its objective, but the consequences of the Lebanese leaders' manoeuvres are going to be very grave for all Palestinian organisations and are going to reveal the real positions of the Arab states.
The Lebanese events are tremendously important because they have laid bare the political nature of the state forces directly involved in the Israeli-Arab conflict.
THE DYNAMICS OF THE PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE MOVEMENT
The wave of insurrection spread from the refugees' camps, despite their systematic isolation from the neighbouring population by the authorities. The refugees responded with an energetic offensive against the attempts to surround and control them made by the Lebanese army, which doubtless hoped to discipline the fedayeen or even simply to liquidate them.
Revolutionary Marxists must give firmer political support than ever to the Palestinian resistance movement, and help for new developments for the Arab revolution.
[illegible] ARAB REACTION AND IMPERIALIST [illegible]
LONG LIVE THE SOCIALIST ARAB REVOLUTION!