Begin seizes pretext for Lebanon invasion

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IN DETROIT NO-MONY BEST OE REFERENCES Socialist Organiser Alliance In Detroit, the 1980s have brought a return to 1930s-style SOCIALIST Organiser fights to act as a real campaigning paper which can organise ISRAEL's land, sea and air attack• on the Palestinian population in Lebanon has already cost scores of lives and hundreds of injured.

Its final cost is incalculable - thousands will die even it a war between Syria and Israel does not break out.

The Guardian's David Hirst quotes an Israeli Cabinet Minister, Gideon Patt, as saying three weeks ago. - before the assassination attempt on Ambassador Argov in London -''Those bastards on the northern side of the frontier must realise that any attack against Jews anywhere in the world will bring their own annihilation Grotesque That the Zionists should point to the London assassination as justification is simply grotesque. The pavement outside the Dorchester is not on Israel's doorstep; the assassination attempt was in any case not carried out soup kitchens exploited and militant workers as its mainstay.

The • RWL correctly champions the demands and struggles of the speci•ally oppressed - but does not tail-end the often confused, classless politics which can arise in the organisations of blacks, women and gays.

Instead, the organisation both in theory and in practical work points towards the need to build a revolutionary working class leadership if capitalism -and its divisive system of exploitation and oppression - is to be overthrown. As I left Detroit airport - passing visual reminders of the collapse of Braniff and a strike-bound maintenance depot of North West Orient airlines - I realised once again that Reagan's recession is by no means over.

And for socialists in the USA, fighting to establish by the PLO (unless PLO and Palestinian are the same thing - which the Israelis hotly deny); and the scale of the present invasion shows that we are not witnessing one of Israel's ferocious "puniTURKEY EGYPT kms 200 0 mis 200 mass currency for ideas which . at present are vigorously rejected not only by capitalists and bureaucrats but also by most shop-floor workers, the fight for a revolutionary answer is only just beginning.

Despite the great explosive history of trade union organising and the mass struggles led by Communists in the 1920s and 1930s; despite the past echoes of a Communist Party which at its peak in the 1930s reached 4 million members; despite the upsurge of mass militancy which shook the complacency of the post-war US government in 1946, the starting point for socialists in the 1980€ is the fight to win the most advanced workers to a patient struggle for politically independent, revolutionary labour movement. tive" raids.

Begin is not avenging Argov. He is continuing the offensive started in 1978 but halted under pressure from the US who wanted nothing to interfere with the Camp David SYRIA miş 20 kms NON ISRAEL i JORDANI ém.m./ SAUDI ARABIA "peace" process. Now that the ink on the "peace" accord is newly dry, Israel feels free to continue its northward march.

The attack started the bombing (on June 4) of Beirut. The next day over IRAQ Beirute c, SYRIANS Israeli controi SYRIA Area under _Sidont PALESTINIANS Nobotieh Lyre- Beaufort!

Castle SYRIA ISRAEL Acre "Haifa fifty more localities were attacked, mainly along the southern coast, inland around Beafort Castle near the most northerly point of the Israeli border, and in the south-east Lebanese Arkoub province.

UN troops have been brushed aside; Israel's Lebanese allies, the rightwing militias under Col. Saad Haddad which with Israeli support control part of Lebanon south of the Litani River, have played little role; and the Syrian troops occupying the country have stood by passively.

Only Palestinian and Lebanese leftist forces now stand between Isrr-' and a de facto dismemberment of Lebanon and the extermination of the Palestinians.

Restraint

The only other restraining factor might be the US. If the US fears that the Soviet Union might be drawn into the fray through its commitments to Syria, then it will rush to secure another ceasefire.

Like the last one, this will offer no security to either the Palestinians nor the Lebanese masses.

Since the Lebanese civil war escalated in 1976, the Lebanese right has hesitantly contemplated a dismemberment of Lebanon. They seemed to realise that with the change in population (domination by the Christian Maronites was guaranteed by an agreement based on an old census) and with the radicalisation of the Lebanese Muslim masses (in large part as a result of contact with the Palestinians) they might only be able to hold on to power by agreeing to cede territory.

Dead bodies

But to whom? To Syria which has designs on all of Lebanon? No, that would not work and would be opposed by imperialism and Zionism. To the Lebanese Muslims? No, for the same reasons. What the Israelis seem intent on is a de facto division between themselves and the Maronites.

That is a "solution" - over the dead bodies of the Palestinian population! - that would suit imperialism. But it cannot be achieved without a war in which Syria is defeated.

Camp David, we wrote long ago, is not a "peace" formula, but a formula for the murder of the Palestinian people. Having failed to draw more than one Arab government into the talks, the 'peace" process now threatens to drag them all into war.

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