Enver Hoxha: On Palestine, Zionism and Arab Liberation

WEDNESDAY
JULY 29, 1970

We Have Sympathy & Respect for the Arab People of Palestine

A delegation of «Al-Fatah», Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine, is coming to our country these days for an official visit. Yasser Arafat personally asked our embassy in Cairo for permission to send a delegation.

We have sympathy and respect for the Arab people of Palestine, because they are a brave people who are suffering. At the moment they are the only Arab people who are fighting all round the borders of Israel, while some Arab leaders, from those of Egypt to those of Lebanon, are merely talking, holding conferences, preparing… for compromises, etc.

The Palestinians, expelled from their land by the British colonialist government and from UNO in favour of Israel, are living in tents, in great hardship, in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. The latest Israeli aggression increased the number of Palestinian refugees, so the only road of salvation left to them was that of the partisan war. And they began it, attacking the Israeli aggressors from outside, from Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and from inside, in the territory occupied by Israel.

Thus, thanks to the struggle of the Palestinians, the Palestinian question has become an important national and international issue, which both the friends and the enemies of the Palestinian people are compelled to bear in mind and cannot fail to take into account.

Despite its nationalist tendencies, the «Al-Fatah» organization is progressive and democratic and the biggest and most powerful organization which, at the moment, has a correct line of struggle for the liberation of Palestine and the defeat of the anti-Arab, annexationist policy of the state of Israel, concocted by international Zionism and supported by the imperialists. This organization is not against the masses of the Jewish population whom, in its program, it accepts as citizens of the new Arab state of Palestine.

However, although the representatives of the feudal bourgeois cliques ruling in some Arab countries pose as pro the Palestinians’ struggle, they do not look kindly on this movement of resistance and, since they are unable to liquidate it, want to have it under control.

The resistance of the Palestinians has become a serious political and military obstacle, which these cliques are obliged to take into account. The King of Jordan, an agent of the British and the Americans, has made two or three attempts to liquidate the Palestinian partisans, who are stronger than this sold-out king. At these dangerous moments for the Palestinian guerrillas they ought to fight him to the end, to unite with the people of Jordan, in order to continue the war against Israel and American imperialism.

The Soviets and the Americans are making the law in the Middle East. The Egyptian leadership has fallen completely under the influence of the Soviets. Hussein of Jordan is a dyed-in-the-wool traitor, the Syrians are posing as somewhat «concerned», while the Lebanese trim their sails to the wind.

Nasser agreed in general to discuss the «Rogers Plan», which means to enter into negotiations and compromises and, in the end, «to make the peace» so greatly desired by Israel, in favour of that country and its American patron and in disfavour of the Arab peoples, especially the Palestinian people, against whom the savage attacks of the gendarmes of the ruling cliques sold out to foreigners, will commence later. With the signing of the «peace» the Soviets will turn this into a «colossal victory» for themselves. They will try to remain in Egypt and to dominate it. There is the danger that the Egyptian ports may become the ports of the Soviet Mediterranean fleet which emerged from the Black Sea. From the Mediterranean the Soviet revisionists intend to extend their colonies in Africa «in peaceful ways», in order to cross the seas and reach India. This is how they dream of achieving the empire of Alexander the Great, by conquering the peoples through the threat of arms from land and sea, through rubles and through their demagogy of a falsified socialism.

The «Soviet-American peace» in the Middle East will be a defeat for all the Arab peoples and an especially great obstacle for the Palestinian people. This kind of «peace» is a victory for the Soviet-American imperialists in general and for Israel in particular.

What will happen with the Palestinian people will be what happened with the Albanian people before the First World War. As is known, at that time large parts of Albania were divided by the imperialists of Europe among Serbia, Montenegro and Greece. And after they had thoroughly dismembered our Homeland at the Conference of London and through secret treaties, the Tzar’s Minister, Sazonov, in order to satisfy the appetite of Prince Nikola of Montenegro demanded that the city of Shkodra be handed over to the latter. On this occasion, one of the other wolves, the representative of French imperialism, said something which went down in history: «Sazonov wants to set fire to Europe to fry an omelette for Montenegro».

The enemies of the Arab peoples, the American imperialists and Soviet revisionists, will act and speak in a similar way when it comes to the question of the territorial rights of the heroic Palestinian people.

Only the armed struggle through to victory settles accounts with the wolves who attack peoples.

From “Reflections on the Middle East”