The P.L.O. & the democratic Left
Harrington, Michael
ARE SOCIALIST LEADERS COMPROMISING WITH TERRORISM? The P.L.O. & the democratic Left MICHAEL HARRINGTON ESTORIL, a resort half an hour's drive from Lisbon, is a European classic with its casino...
...So it was that the Declaration of Principles adopted by the new International at Frankfurt in 1951 not only attacked capitalism but also sharply counterposed itself to the "new imperialism" of Communism...
...Obviously, Brandt had followed his announced policies with energy and imagination...
...In part that attitude often includes an assessment of the P.L.O...
...The fact that he is Jewish has given rise to the inevitable accusations of self-hate...
...That was the common point of view of the parties most sympathetic and most critical of Israel...
...as an observer to the Vancouver Congress of the International in November_of that year...
...The Palestinian question, El Pais of Madrid reported, was the most heated item on the agenda of the Bureau...
...head without receiving anything tangible—like a clear recognition of Israel's right to exist—in return...
...In Latin America, there are multi-party systems and some illegal and semi-legal socialist parties in de facto oneparty republics...
...In the fall of 1978, the Bureau met in Paris and the Spanish Socialist Partay (The Partido Socialista Obrero Espariol (PSOE) of Felipe Gonzalez proposed to invite the P.L.O...
...The Declaration also stated a generalized solidarity with the Third World but in political reality it was completely Europe-centered...
...His proposal, made in Brown's flamboyant, utterly undiplomatic way, was rejected with little debate...
...Indeed, it is important to note in this context that almost all of Israel's critics at the meeting continue to be principled defenders of the right of Israel to a secure national existence...
...a Latin American mission under Mario Soares...
...Middle East...
...There was an obvious risk involved...
...The really significant change came in 1975-76...
...The Israelis had the opportunity to tell the International of their deep hostility toward the Vienna meeting and of the political damage it had done to them at home in a pre-election period...
...That question was the very center of the debate...
...THE present Socialist International is the fourth incarnation of an organization which dates back to the International Workingmen's Association, the group addressed by Karl Marx at its founding Congress in 1864...
...He did so only after he had received firm promises from the leaders of the major parties that they would personally participate in the International's work and not leave its activities to middle-level technocrats on the party payroll...
...At the same time, I do not believe that any public and official legitimacy should be accorded the P.L.O., whether from the International, the United States or anyone else, until it clearly and openly renounces any intention of destroying the Jewish state...
...Now that there is the possibility of a negotiated settlement of some of the East-West differences, he concluded, we can be much truer to our principles...
...So there is no neat relationship between domestic and international political attitudes, in the International (or anywhere else...
...For that matter, perhaps the most significant development in these discussions was the way in which some of the parties which had been most pro-Israeli—and are still deeply committed to Israel's survival—have moved on the tactical question of negotiations with the P.L.O...
...If it—along with liberals and even conservatives in the West—has changed its attitude on negotiating with the Russians, a shift symbolized in Brandt's Ostpolitik when he was West German chancellor, it has not abandoned its democratic conception of socialism in any way...
...AT THE GENEVA Congress of the International in 1976, Brandt took over as the organization's president...
...Brandt expressed the general sentiment when he spoke of his loyalty to his friends in Israel...
...The problems facing the International at Estoril are very much like those that will face any thoughtful citizens and leaders trying to overcome Cold War legacies, respond adequately to the Third World, and do justice to the dangers and complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...
...The result of the debate typified the semiconsensus character of the International: no vote was taken at all and the P.L.O...
...And they are opposed to negotiations with a terrorist movement which has continued to call for Israeli blood after the Vienna meeting...
...In addition there were invited guests from fifteen Third World countries and movements, including Nicaragua (represented by Eden Pastore, the legendary "Comandante Zero"), the Southwestern African Peoples Organization from Namibia, the African National Congress from South Africa and Frelimo from Mozambique...
...The Cold War, he said, made us do things that we were unhappy about, but which were necessary...
...And yet, in the Third World, particularly in Africa, most anti-capitalist states allow only one party, which rules...
...His most recent book is The Vast Majority (Simon and Schuster...
...Even then there were, to be sure, differences within an International which largely acted on consensus principles, but they rarely came out in the open...
...For the latter must be placed in a context which is much more complex than Cold War abstractions—or Marxist-Leninist ones, for that matter—suggest...
...as what Brandt calls a "roof organization, i.e., an organization containing many different, and even conflicting, political tendencies, rejectionists fanatically committed to Israel's destruction, and moderates who might be persuaded to accept a negotiated settlement...
...This is not simply true of the "Marxist-Leninist'' regimes...
...Whether one likes it or not, it was argued, the P.L.O...
...In late October, it was the site of an assemblage much less in keeping with its slightly faded elegance: a meeting of the Bureau of the Socialist International at which there was a spirited, and sometimes acrimonious, debate over the issue of Israel, the Palestinians, and peace in the Middle East...
...Gonzalez comes from a country which has not yet recognized Israel and from a party with more than a few Third World connections (it supports, for instance, the Polisaro guerrillas...
...I dwell on this complex Spanish background for a reason...
...solidarity work with the Chileans before and after the coup...
...Indeed, as a Swedish socialist friend of mine discovered to his shocked amazement when he first represented his nation at the UN, even Franco Spain had a Third World orientation and enjoyed relatively high status among delegates from the global South who had not heard of, or did not care about, the Civil War...
...Indeed, the immediate cause of the debate in Estoril was disagreement within the International over that meeting...
...Indeed, Shimon Peres insisted on their sincerity even as he vigorously differed with them...
...For those who hold this analysis, Israeli acceptance of negotiating with the P.L.O...
...on their own and in particular to try to find out if the P.L...
...But in Asia, outside of Japan and AustraliaNew Zealand, the very idea of democratic socialism has hardly any roots at all...
...This criticism, it seemed to me, had a considerable resonance at Estoril and was accepted by some who on other counts were more sympathetic to Gonzalez's position...
...A key figure in all of this was, and is, Bruno Kreisky...
...If, then, the International was to develop any relevance to, and relations with, the Third World it...
...Brandt, and Kreisky, are, I am convinced motivated by a sincere conviction that the survival of the Jewish state will be best served by negotiations which will include the P.L.O...
...The actions of the socialists, in any case, have a wide significance...
...Finally, if I do not think that a victory of the Israeli Labor Party in forthcoming elections will solve all problems, that party will be able to respond much more creatively to a difficult situation than the Begin government...
...It was the time Commonweal: 10 of the Moscow Test Ban Treaty and detente was opening up new perspectives...
...These kinds of exchanges are what the International in its present incarnation is designed to facilitate...
...is the de facto representative of the Palestinians and there can be no realistic negotiations unless that fait accompli is recognized...
...I participated in one of those rare occasions, a meeting of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Socialist Youth in Berlin in 1959 where we voted to condemn the French socialist policy against Algerian independence...
...On that last count, Brandt was obviously painfully aware of the dilemmas which such a turn would involve...
...As a result of these moves, the International since 1976 has been much, much more active than ever before and has begun to change its composition dramatically...
...The International was, and is, committed to political democracy, to democratic socialism...
...The International, Shimon Peres said at Estoril, is a "moral and spiritual" body whose authority is not military or economic...
...They would like a resolution of the issue which would involve Jordan (which is, after all, the "natural" Palestinian state...
...it also holds for Julius Nyerere's Tanzania...
...Has Brandt had a change of heart and, in the words of Business Week, "shown an unusual tolerance...
...The debate at Estoril centered on Brandt's report on that meeting...
...And it was urged by some of those who had objected to the way in which Brandt and Kreisky had conducted the meeting with Arafat...
...for movements among the [developing nations] that are nondemocratic...
...A superb politician (the only socialist in Europe who commands an absolute majority), a thoughtful intellectual and a grandfather figure in his own country, Kreisky has been the most outspoken protagonist of a new approach toward the Middle East in the International...
...And in 1969 other changes were visible at the Eastbourne Congress where the International discussed whether, and how, it could bring the New Left youth into a movement dominated by an older generation...
...If that were the case, it would sijgnal.a momentous transition, the desertion of the mass European Left from principles it has defended for more than a century...
...Within his own party, Gonzalez is a moderate and led in the controversial move of taking the official commitment to Marxism out of the PSOE program...
...a Party Leader's Conference in Tokyo...
...And a member of the central committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization who was in Lisbon at the time (but did not attend the meeting) told Portugal Hoje that Yassir Arafat's contacts last July with Willy Brandt, the International's president, and Bruno Kreisky, a vice president, were extremely important to his organization...
...socialist efforts in the UN to limit new investment in South Africa...
...UP UNTIL the early seventies, the Israeli Labor Party (ILP), a member party, was the only Middle Eastern organization with which the International had continuing contact...
...But with the turn toward the Third World—and...
...And later on in that Congress, Golda Meir spokeusing, it seemed to me, the solidarity-laden word, "comrades,' ' more than any other speaker—to a hushed, and obviously sympathetic audience...
...But by not doing so, it would render itself irrelevant to the majority of humankind for the foreseeable future...
...the democratic Left MICHAEL HARRINGTON ESTORIL, a resort half an hour's drive from Lisbon, is a European classic with its casino and aging luxury hotels...
...In July, at the now famous meeting with Arafat in Vienna, they acted on that promise...
...But they reject a "ministate' ' (Gaza and the West Bank) solution because they believe it is not economically viable, and will therefore create an inherently unstable, expansionist nation...
...Indeed, one of the important political moves which led to its rebirth in 1951 was the exclusion of (he Italian Socialist Party of Pietro Nenni in 1949 because of its united front with the Italian Communists (the Italian party has long since returned to the International...
...It had to do with policy and personnel, and it relates directly to the discussions in Portugal about the Middle East...
...Shimon Peres and others vigorously opposed the Spanish initiative in Paris...
...This brings us to the immediate background of the debates at the Estoril Bureau meeting...
...Brandt, Kreisky and the others had established both their bona fides and their particular strategic conception of the best way to achieve peace in the Middle East and to guarantee Israel's existence and security...
...with developments in the Middle East itself—the established attitudes began to shift...
...Indeed, the London Economist has sniped at him by calling him Helmut Gonzalez, i.e., a follower of Helmut Schmidt's cautious, fiscally austere version of social democracy...
...Mario Soares, to cite another case, has tended to agree with Gonzalez on the Middle East, which can hardly be explained by any pro-Communist illusions on the part of the man who defeated Portuguese Stalinism...
...Arafat had been treated as if he were a head of state and Brandt and Kreisky, it was argued, had conferred a legitimacy on the P.L.O...
...I have heard at least some of the recipients of that wrath privately admit that they deserved it...
...would clearly have to enter into dialogue with movements which, to a greater or lesser degree, disagreed with it on questions of basic principle...
...One leader usually thought of as numbered among the severe critics of Israel told me that he had privately raised this point with Brandt...
...support to the Sandinistas before they took power...
...No one offered any resolutions...
...Later, after the Yom Kippur War, Meir was to upbraid her comrades for what she considered their cowardly behavior in that crisis...
...At the same time, Brandt and the International came out for the New International Economic Order, which is why Business Week was concerned...
...One of the bluntest of the participants was Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian socialist who had been Secretary General of NATO...
...In 1963 at the Amsterdam Congress of the International, the delegates were quite frank about the way in which the Cold War had dominated their thinking and actions...
...And he insisted that the International had to break out of the white, European ghetto in which it found itself, demonstrating a relevance to the Third World...
...As a long-time supporter of Israel, I came back from Portugal with a feeling that bringing the P.L.O...
...To explain why requires that I make a considerable historical detour before returning to those discussions on the MICHAEL HARRINGTON is Chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee...
...On the one hand, the Israelis recognize Palestinian rights to self-determination...
...effective pressure to help Antonio Guzman, the candidate of one of the International's member parties, take power after an electoral victory in the Dominican Republic...
...It is quite different from its three predecessors, which is of historical interest— and quite different from what it was at the time of its constitution in 1951, which has political bearing on the Middle East controversy at Estoril...
...This Third World presence represented a response to the International's initiatives in recent years: a mission to Southern Africa led by Olaf Palme...
...would accelerate the internal differentiation within the latter...
...18 January 1980: 13...
...Brandt chose to take the risks—rightly, to my mind...
...The International was organized in the darkest days of the Cold War...
...One can argue with Brandt and Kreisky's view, as the Israelis most emphatically did at Estoril, without caricaturing it as proPalestinian and anti-Israeli...
...I tend to 18 January 1980: 11 distrust all such long-distance political psychoanalysis and it will not figure in my account of the developments within the International...
...O. had changed its long-standing commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state in Israel (which masquerades under the formulas about a "secular, democratic Palestine...
...The opposition to this position was not united on anything except one point: that the Israelis should move toward negotiating with the P.L.O...
...By entering into relationships with parties and movements which rejected, in whole or in part, the very basis of that moral authority, it was risking the loss of its most precious possession...
...I do not think the events at Estoril support that grim conclusion...
...But even though the International changed in those years, it was mainly a paper organization (a drawer in the desk of the British Labor Party's international secretary, one wag dubbed it...
...At the Eastbourne Congress in 1969, George Brown had wanted to invite representatives of the Egyptian Socialist Union to participate, with voice but no vote...
...was thus not invited...
...But Brandt and Kreisky made it clear during the discussions that they intended to explore matters with the P.L.O...
...Or worse, has the International, as one Cold War socialist put it in Commentary, "completely revised its policies concerning the basic issues of Communism, peace, and political liberty...
...The debate was inconclusive and meant to be...
...Do these events mark a basic shift in the orientation of democratic socialists in Europe...
...The Israelis agree that there are different positions within the P.L.O.—but insist that it is the extreme, anti-Israeli wing which calls the tune...
...THERE were a number of themes in the discussion and one of the most important had to do with the way in which the Vienna meeting was organized, not with the meeting as such...
...into the negotiatCommonweal: 12 ing process is politically inevitable and that some of the formulas being raised in the Labor Party—that Israel will regotiate with whatever party is willing to recognize Israeloffer hope...
...Thus for the first time in the International's history there was a majority of nonEuropeans...
...At the Estoril meeting of the Bureau there were thirty-three member parties, eleven of them from the Third World, six more from outside of Europe...
...One of those hotels, the Palacio, is supposed to have been a meeting place for spies during World War II and it looks the part...
...But one unintended consequence was to make the Middle East a volatile issue in the International...
Vol. 107 • January 1980 • No. 1
