THE DEAD END automatic right to return i

The Palestinian masses' desperate fear of a sellout Middle East settlement negotiated behind their backs underlies the kidnapping of the Israeli hostages at the Munich Olympic games.

Tha donnar of cuch a cattle. 1 ne aanger o1 such a selutment, carving up Palestine between Zionism and the reactionary Arab capitalist class, has haunted the Palestinians since the proclamation of the state of Israel.

At that time, in 1948, the war between the Arab states and the infant Zionist colony ended with annexation of what remained of Palestine by the Arab rulers of Trans-Jordan and Egypt.

The Hashemite dynasty, grabbed the Palestine Arab unct hank of tha ninar west Dank ul lne nver jurudu and and Egypt took over the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian people's right to a state was ignored and they were made homeless in their own land.

They were robbed of their homeland by the reactionary Zionist movement which has created a racialist state in which the remaining Arabs constitute a kind of internal LUIvuy colonu for ruthlecs exnloitation.

The massacre at Deir Yassin village and a massive terror campaign spearheaded by the extreme Zionist Hagganah movement drove more than a million Palestinians into exile after the 1948 war.

They became refugees, living in hugely overcrowded camps in dire poverty, stripped of all their possessions and relying on hand-outs from the United Nations.

The youth grew camps with a burning hatred of imperialism and Zionism and determined to avenge the crimes committed against their people. They had'no trust in the Arab bourgeois rulers who had contemptuously neglected their legitimate demands.

Since 1948, the Arab states have fought two wars with Israel; in 1956 against the joint Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, which demonstrated Israel's close ties with imperialism, and again in 1967— known as the six-day war.

NO PEACE But between the Zionists and the Palestinians there has never been peace. The Palestinians cannot rest until their right to self-determination is restored and the imperialist excrescence that is the Israeli state is destroyed.

No other programme can satisfy the Palestinian people. for the present state of Israel is directed at the very basis of their existence as a nation. The Jewish colonization of Palestine was encouraged and financed—particularly after the war—by the United States as a spearhead against the Arab revolution.

The founders of Zionism openly talked of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as a bastion of Europe against Asia and their successors have carried out this 'civilizing mission' with all the zeal of latterday Kitcheners.

The formula of the Israeli high command is simple: to stamp out Arab resistance wherever it raises its head and reduce the remaining Arab inhabitants of Palestine to second-class status and discourage them from remaining in Israel so as to make room for more Jewish immigrants.

Those refugees who left their Significantly, the Black September commando at Munich took the name of Birim and Ikrit, two Arab villages whose inhabitants were forced out by the army and have never been allowed to return to their homes. The army for 'security reasons' has overruled a Supreme Court ruling that the villagers should be allowed to return to their lands.

Speaking to her own Labour Party, premier Golda Meir made clear the real reason for the refusal: the main danger was that it would create a precedent. If Birim and Ikrit were restored to their rightful owners, thousands of Arabs would start demanding their lands back—a prospect to terrify any Zionist.

The Palestinian struggle has constantly been betrayed, not only by the Arab governments which have paid lip-service to their cause only to turn round and knife them between the shoulders, but by the Stalinist bureaucracy which originally supported the formation of Israel and now subordinates the Palestinian struggle to its opportunist relations with the Arab capitalists.

In Jordan the Palestinian commando movement was crushed under King Hussein's tanks and the Hashemite monarch now has his eyes on the formation of a separate puppet state on the Israelipressure from Israel, has forced the Palestinians to move their bases away from the border into the northern part of the country.

Repressive measures against the Palestinians in Lebanon have only been restrained so far by the fact that a quarter of the country's population are Palestinian refugees who sympathize with the guerrillas.

In Egypt the movement is right-wing Moslem who considers the struggle against Zionism a Jihad (holy war), provides money for the commando groups and many of them are trained by Libyan personnel.

The most vicious Arab enemy of the Palestinians is King Hussein of Jordan, whose predecessor, King Abdullah, robbed the Palestinians of the West Bank to establish the to terms with the Zionists.

But for the Palestinians, it was a catastrophe. They had been driven into a corner with no means of escape and the combination of political betrayal and the Hashemite bloodbath fed the belief that every man's hand was against them.

The nihilist philosphy of a section of the Palestinian In the Olympic village: lettpolice run to take up their positions. Right: Head of Munich police and German Minister for Interior discuss with Arabs. less Palestinian refugees in the surrounding countries.

The Zionists' vast war machine always operates a terror policy more effectively than the Palestinians.

Most important of all, the terrorist actions of the Black