The following interview, granted by Lotfallah Soliman to Guy Desolre, has been translated from the May 4 issue of the Belgian socialist weekly La Gauche.
Lotfallah Soliman was in Brussels in March at a seminar on the Palestinian problem sponsored by the Arab Student Union. He also participated at the time in a discussion on the Arab revolution conducted by the Etudiants Arabes [Arab Students] and the Etudiants Socialistes [Socialist Students].
[A well-known Arab intellectual, Lotfallah Soliman began his political life in the International League Against Anti-Semitism in 1937. In 1946, he founded the Workers and Students Committee which participated in the struggle against the regime of King Farouk. Following the victory of the Algerian revolution over French imperialism in 1962, he worked in Algiers on the paper El Moudjahid. At present he lives in Paris where he writes for the magazine Trois Continents [Three Continents]. In a special issue of Les Temps Modernes dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, he contributed an essay entitled "Le Transfer de Culpabilité." (Transfer of Guilt.)]
Question: Although you are Egyptian, you insist on speaking as an Arab militant. Why is that?
Answer: Never has the feeling of being Arab shown itself as strongly as since June 5. As a result of the June crisis, people from geographically distant places, who used to see questions in terms of their country's separate, parochial development, found themselves to be Arabs. Today they are discovering themselves to be Arabs.
For example, before June, Moroccan friends of mine spoke of Mehdi Ben Barka as a tricontinental hero, as a Third World martyr, a Moroccan martyr, but not as an Arab. Today this is no longer true. In Algeria, there used to be a lot of talk about "Algeria's special character." Today Algeria defines itself as Arab.
This consciousness, or rather this acquisition of consciousness, is becoming a reality today. I can cite examples of meetings in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and elsewhere in France in which I have taken part. The participants in these meetings no longer felt themselves Egyptians, Yemenites, or Tunisians, etc.... but Arabs, and they approached questions as Arabs.
People used to talk about "solidarity" with Palestine. Today that is a thing of the past! They can feel solidarity with the revolutionaries in Bolivia but the problem they feel in connection with Palestine is one of engaging in a fight. How can we be of use to El Fatah? That is how they pose the question.
Q: Why do you believe, Lotfallah Soliman, that this Arabism must be accepted?
A: I accept Arabism because I accept the objectives of the Arab revolution. There are classes in the Arab countries which live off the existing fragmentation, which want to maintain the status quo, and which profit from it. But, taken separately, our countries cannot be independent.
Q: You mentioned El Fatah. Could you tell me what this organization is?
A: El Fatah is the reversed initials* of "Palestinian Liberation Movement" [HTF in Arabic].
El Fatah and its paramilitary organization El Assifah were created well before the June 5 war with the aim of liberating occupied Palestine. As an organization, El Fatah arose around 1963-64. E1 Assifah began its activities toward the end of 1964 or the beginning of 1965. Initially, its objective was to prevent the Palestinian problem from being forgotten or from being used simply as a political pawn by various Arab countries.
The instructions which were given to the commandos told them never to attack the Jewish population or to attack it as little as possible. At the beginning, E1 Fatah worked by infiltration, since the Arab population had largely been driven from the Israeli-occupied territory.
Israel based itself on the principle that the Palestinian problem had been completely eliminated. Palestine was wiped off the map. It was replaced by Israel and Jordan, the latter being only an outgrowth of Transjordan, which moreover had itself been carved out of Palestine by a British decision. Having become refugees, the Palestinian Arabs were to be both absorbed and policed by the countries in which they took refuge.
This was the Israeli view; but it must be said that certain Arab countries took the same view of this problem. El Fatah was created precisely to remind both of them that a national community cannot be wiped off the map by a decision of alien authorities.
By reminding them of the existence of the Palestinian community, E1 Fatah found itself in conflict with these countries, so that it had not only to combat Israel and the Israeli view but also some if not all of the Arab countries and their view of the Palestine problem. And this was true up to June 5.
Before June 5, El Fatah lost more men to the Arab security forces than to the Israeli security forces. And even recently (this interview was given at the end of March), King Hussein of Jordan tried to act against El Fatah. He was not able to do so because, in the eyes of the Arab masses, El Fatah represents the will not to capitulate. King Hussein's own apparatus did not respond to his orders.
After two months and a new aggression, the whole world could see that dual power existed in Jordan. On Friday, March 22, it was the militants of El Fatah, armed and in uniform, who guarded the approaches to the Karameh camp and maintained security within it.
That same Friday, it was also the commandos of El Fatah who carried the coffins of the Karameh victims to Amman. The dignitaries of the Hashemite regime were obliged to follow the cortege; and, changing his mind after a few weeks interval, King Hussein found himself compelled to declare himself "the first of the Fedayeen."
Q: Has this also had repercussions in other Arab countries besides Jordan?
A: The development of the Arab resistance removed any inclinations toward compromise which might otherwise have appeared in the other neighboring countries and which did show up following the June war. More precisely, there was in my opinion a cause-and-effect relationship between the development of the resistance movement and the radicalization in the UAR and Syria.
In the case of Syria, it is a clear fact that the present governmental team, which constitutes a radical elite, was not completely representative of the society. It is apparent that there are pressure groups in Syrian society, the bourgeois and merchant classes, which, helped by the June defeat, had regained sufficient strength to challenge the team in power. There is no doubt that the growth of the resistance caused these groups to lose ground. They can no longer offer any opposition except by wearing a false mask, by presenting themselves as more intransigent still; and this is the phenomenon which is occurring.
In Egypt, there is a possibility that if the resistance had not developed at the rate it has Nasser would have had to yield and the pro-American wing represented by Zachariah Mohieddine would not have been eliminated.
Q: Lotfallah Soliman, you are the author of an essay entitled "Transfer of Guilt," which deals with shifting onto the Arabs the responsibility for the Hitlerite genocide against the Jews.
This transfer of guilt is subjectively and even unconsciously at the root of the sympathy which Israel has enjoyed in Europe, including in progressive circles.
Do you think that Israel's present reprisals and its attacks on the refugees can open their eyes today, open their conscience?
A: Israel cannot attack the resistance of the commandos without attacking the population and without incurring the guilt of genocide. But this fact is not new. Israel and the Zionist movement in general were always by nature racist. The Zionist movement knew nothing of the Arabs' existence and when it discovered it, it realized that it could not live [except by getting rid of them] that it is a question of "them or us."
During what they call the "war of independence," the Zionists and the embryonic state of Israel consciously pursued a policy which could be termed genocide. But instead of committing cold-blooded murder like Hitler, they forced an exodus.
From the outset, Israel pursued a policy of liquidation; but instead of making the Palestinian Arabs into soap it made them into refugees. There is not a great deal of difference. Sociologically speaking, it is the same phenomenon, except that they kept 250,000 Arabs -- whose activities were kept under close surveillance to assure their harmlessness -- just as the Americans kept some Indians on reservations.
Today, the policy is the same but the situation is different because Israel has "inherited" Arab-occupied territories. In these circumstances, the resistance cannot but be a popular phenomenon. The only way to eradicate it is to attack the people. Thus, this genocide will continue.
In a few days, on April 10, we are going to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the massacre of Deir Yassin, a Palestinian village where women, old people, and children were massacred along with able-bodied men. This Palestinian Oradour had the same objective as its historic predecessor in the rise of the term "genocide," forcing the people to flee by a few such small operations.
Q: Where will the struggle to liberate Palestine end? You know that in Europe this struggle has often been understood as a holy war to "drive the Jews into the sea." Certain statements by Palestinian leaders like Shukeiry have been quoted in this regard.
A: Many of us fought against Shukeiry. You know that today he no longer heads the Palestinian Liberation Organization. It is true that these threats had a very great psychological role. But this is primarily because they wanted this to be so. Such irresponsible statements have been made in every war. During the war against fascist Germany, Ilya Ehrenburg said, "The only good Germans are dead Germans." Yet this was by no means a reason to give up supporting the Soviet Union against the Nazis.
We are agreed that Palestine will belong to all those who want to live there and are willing to share the fate of the country as Palestinians. But there are few who accept this idea in Israel. The example of the "petits blancs" [poor whites] in Algeria shows that those who do will not be numerous.
Q: In your essay published in "Les Temps Modernes," you wrote before the June war that victory by the Arab revolutionaries was becoming POSSIBLE. You explained to me that you think that the June war and the Palestinian resistance can serve to speed this victory. But how do you conceive of the victory of the Arab revolution?
A: I must first define the objectives of the Arab revolution. I have an international view of the revolution, a conception which flows from an analysis of the present stage of capitalist development. The capitalist world market and the laws which govern it are a reality. These laws can only be combated and replaced on a world scale. Until these laws can be changed internationally, the immediate objective of revolutionaries and revolutions is to strengthen those international forces which seek to replace these laws.
On the basis of this analysis, then, I define the short- and intermediate-term objectives of revolutionaries in the Arab countries not as building socialism -- an objective I consider impossible except on a worldwide basis -- but as strengthening those forces which in power or opposition seek to combat these laws. Thus, in the short- and midterm, the objectives I attribute to the Arab revolution and to Arab revolutionaries are those of anti-imperialist struggle.
But when I say "anti-imperialist struggle," I am not indulging in metaphysical or moralistic phrases. Since imperialism is an economic, political, and social reality, we must define the imperialist interests in our region precisely and exactly and define ourselves in regard to these interests.
You must not simply verbally declare yourself anti-imperialist. You must combat the economic and political interests of imperialism in the region in practice. It is impossible to call yourself anti-imperialist and at the same time defend or plead neutrality toward the oil interests or the Arab groups or social classes which profit from these imperialist interests.
If the Arab feudalists and bourgeois layers could successfully lead the struggle against imperialism, I would be ready to consider them sincere and honest anti-imperialist forces. But they are incapable of this because their interests are bound up with those of the imperialists. Arab revolutionaries can combat imperialism effectively only by successfully struggling against the Arab allies of these interests.
Therefore, after defining the objectives of the Arab revolution, we can come back to the question of its nature and say that its characteristics will be: that it will be Arab, because it will be a popular revolution; it will be unifying, because it will be opposed to the classes which live off the present fragmentation; and it will be socialist, because in opposing imperialism and the interests linked to it, it will challenge the laws governing the capitalist system and the world market.
When I say that possibilities exist for the victory of the revolutionary forces in Egypt and Syria and in certain other Arab regions, this is precisely because in the historical development of the class struggle in these countries over the last twenty years the process of eliminating the Arab allies of the imperialist interests has been begun with a certain success. This success is still not complete, however, and that is why I have not spoken of victory but only of possible victory.
Notes
* Arabic is written from right to left and in general only the consonants are written.