Workers World, Vol. 12, No. 15, September 30, 1970
September 27 – The fourteen-point agreement between King Hussein and Yassir Arafat calling for an immediate cease-fire and the appointment of a three-man committee to supervise the accord cannot wipe away the vast sea of blood which separates Hussein and his foreign masters from the Palestinian people. The incredible carnage which he committed is of such proportions that it can be truly called a genocidal attempt to liquidate the Palestinian people. Some 15,000 are dead and an almost equal number wounded in the space of only seven days! In an age when the imperialist powers have caused deaths in the millions, the casualties inflicted upon the Palestinians may seem small indeed. However, one has to measure these casualties in relation to the size of the Palestinian nation as a whole, which is only two-and-one-half million people.
The same proportionate number of casualties, if inflicted upon the population of the United States, would be 1,250,000 people killed and an equal number wounded! Such is the measure of the catastrophe suffered by the Palestinians.
The capitalist media took great pains to depict Hussein’s slaughter as a war of “Arabs against Arabs.” They called it a civil war in which the U.S. was only concerned for “its wider effects on the peace of the world.” Nothing could be more false. Nothing could be more hypocritical. To describe the struggle in terms of “Arab against Arab” is superficial and misleading in the extreme.
Who is Hussein and who does he represent? The Wall Street Journal of September 28, 1970, in an extraordinary burse of brutal frankness, quotes an observer on the scene as saying that Hussein represented only that tiny segment of the population known as “the Palestinian bourgeoisie in Jordan.” And it further added that “the bourgeoisie that cooperated with Hussein for twenty years has turned against him in the last couple of weeks because it could smell what was coming.” Thus, even this tiny segment of the population, which lives off the crumbs thrown to it by the royalist cabal and its imperialist masters, has in fact deserted Hussein as rats desert a sinking ship.
Who then supports Hussein? An unbridled military clique, supported in the manner of mercenaries and equipped with arms supplied by the U.S. and Britain. The central command of the Palestinian guerrillas have every right to characterize Hussein as a “fascist, imperialist agent.” The death and destruction he unleashed upon the people is the product of a conspiracy between him and his masters in Washington and Wall Street. The aim of that conspiracy was to unleash a sudden attack on the Palestinian liberation movement with the aim of liquidating it in one swift stroke. It failed. For in spite of all the blood that has been spilled, the liberation movement is alive and more determined than ever to regain the homeland for the Palestinians and to put an end to the Quisling in regal attire who pretends to rule over the Palestinian people.
The horrifying massacre engineered by the Nixon Administration and executed by Hussein and his military camarilla has merely galvanized the Arab commandos and won greater support from larger sections of the Arab Nation. It has also won the sympathy of the world’s oppressed and of progressive, anti-imperialist forces everywhere.
As Nixon embarked upon his European tour, the Palestinian liberation movement had withstood the vicious, treacherous assault and emerged as the most revolutionary, steadfast and determined revolutionaries of the entire Arab world.
It is important to remember that the conspiracy hatched between Hussein and the imperialists has its origins in the so-called 90-day ceasefire maneuver between Israel, Jordan and the UAR, initiated by Secretary of State Rogers on behalf of the Nixon Administration. The purpose of this ceasefire was to impose a settlement on the Palestinian people which would in effect deprive them of ever regaining their homeland. It would have been the death knell for the unremitting and relentless 20-year struggle which they have been waging.
It was absolutely inevitable that the Palestinian people, through their central command, would organize and put up the most determined resistance to any such scheme. And it was in anticipation of just such resistance that Hussein dismissed his so-called civilian cabinet and handed over the reins to a military clique of butchers, who in their madness, as well as obtuseness, thought they would by a sudden stroke liquidate the liberation movement.
The U.S. 90-day ceasefire could not possibly have gotten to first base were it not for one extremely significant development in its favor. The U.S. obtained the agreement and cooperation of the Soviet leadership for this treacherous scheme. And the Soviet leaders in turn exerted severe pressure on Arab leaders who went along with the deal. Thus, the Soviet leaders bear a heavy responsibility for the unspeakable massacre. Without Soviet agreement, Rogers’ phony peace maneuver would have fallen flat. It was the collaboration of the Soviet revisionists, of the Soviet bureaucracy with U.S. imperialism, that gave substance to Rogers’ maneuver. This is an incontestable fact that must be borne in mind. It is a classic example of the role that the Soviet leaders play in stemming the tide of the worldwide revolutionary movement of the oppressed people and the working class. They act as a bulwark, as a conservative pillar, for the maintenance of the status quo in international relations.
This, of course, does not at all erase the sharp contradictions between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet Union. Nor does it negate the socialist foundation of the USSR. It only brings sharply into the open the corrupt politics of the Kremlin leaders and their tendency to accommodate themselves to imperialism, where they can do it without damage to themselves. The fact that they may not succeed or may be unable to accommodate themselves to Nixon’s predatory imperialist policies is something else again.
The Nixon Administration is once more showing that it is supremely conscious of the fundamental class contradictions that exist between U.S. imperialist interests and the Soviet Union. This has led Washington to go to extreme lengths in a show of force in the Mediterranean.
“One of the primary indispensable principles of American foreign policy,” Nixon declared in Rome, “is to maintain the necessary strength in the Mediterranean.” In this way he was not only threatening the Arab world, but also the Soviet Union. Nixon’s visit to Italy, Spain and Yugoslavia and his posturing on the deck of an aircraft carrier are all part and parcel of the same military and diplomatic efforts to reassert the dominance of U.S. monopoly capitalism and oil imperialism, in particular, over all the world.
Nixon’s posturing is also calculated to refurbish the waning fortunes of Wall Street’s oil empire in the Middle East. Madison Avenue also tried to give Nixon the image of a stern, bellicose and determined emperor riding on the Mediterranean Sea as though it was an American lake. This image is bound to go down in history like that of Don Quixote striking at the windmills. For this is the era of the ebbtide of imperialist rule, not its floodtide. It is the era of the revolutionary awakening and relentless determination of oppressed peoples to free themselves from the yoke of imperialism.
Nixon, as the emperor of high finance riding on the waves of Mare Nostrum, will turn out to be a sawdust Caesar, whom the tide of history will sweep away.
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As we go to press, we learn of the death of President Nasser of the UAR. The above article was written prior to his death.
Last updated: 11 May 2026