Workers World, Vol. 9, No. 13, June 24, 1967
Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin in his speech at the General Assembly of the UN this week attacked U.S. imperialism and the Israeli aggression against the Arabs. This was all well and good and under different circumstances might have served a useful purpose. But not now.
Actually, the Soviet leadership, which has for a long time represented itself to the Arab people as an ally, friend and even revolutionary guide, shamelessly deserted the Arabs at the moment of their greatest need.
No amount of carefully-worded “militant” statements at the General Assembly can erase this enormously significant fact.
No matter how many fine-spun condemnatory resolutions the Soviet delegation may introduce at the UN General Assembly now, it will not obliterate what it did on the fateful day of June 6, 1967. That date will forever remain one of the most infamous in the long, sordid career of the Soviet revisionist group and the neo-bourgeois restorationist stratum it represents.
Millions of people, who are now listening to radio and TV and hearing the Soviet leaders roundly condemning the U.S. and Israel, should not be deceived by these speeches. Nor should they be taken in by other diplomatic maneuvers of the Soviet leaders. Their present militant words must be balanced against what the Soviet leaders did on June 6 in the Security Council.
On that day they stabbed the Arab freedom struggle in the back. The wound is still too fresh to be forgotten. It certainly will not be forgotten by the million-fold Arab liberation movement, particularly in the countries which are the most immediate victims of the U.S.-directed Israeli attack.
Because the Soviet leadership took the initiative in calling for an emergency General Assembly meeting to take up the issue of the aggression against the Arab people, it is all the more necessary to set the record straight and see what the leadership of the Soviet Union actually did – as against what its official pronouncements pretend to do. The deeds, it will be found, belie the militant posture it is now putting up in the General Assembly to deceive the people of the world.
All the politics of the Soviet revisionist group, its real orientation and real perspective are all concentrated in what it actually perpetrated on June 6.
On that day the Soviet UN delegate got together with the U.S. UN delegate and they jointly sponsored a resolution in the Security Council which temporarily sealed the fate of the Arab freedom struggle and validated the fruits of U.S.-Israeli aggression against the Arab people. It is well to recall the resolution in its entirety. For it is a remarkable document both from the point of view of content and the manner in which it was contrived.
It reads:
“The Security Council, noting the oral report of the Secretary General in this situation, having heard the statements made in the Council, concerned at the outbreak of fighting and with the menacing situation in the Near East, The Security Council:
“1. Calls upon the governments concerned as a first step to take forthwith all measures for an immediate cease-fire and for a cessation of all military activities in the area. (Our emphasis)
“2. Requests the Secretary General to keep the council promptly and currently informed on the situation.”
As a reading of the resolution readily discloses, the key paragraph – paragraph 1 – is the only operative part of the resolution. The resolution does not assail or denounce the Israeli Government as the aggressor, nor does it call upon the Israeli Government to immediately withdraw to its previous position, as was the demand of the Soviet leaders when the Israeli attack began. By dropping these points, the Soviet leaders acceded in toto to the demands of the U.S. imperialists.
It in effect was a sweeping capitulation to what the U.S. delegate had demanded – that is, a cease-fire, under circumstances in which the Israeli forces had occupied all the territory they were prepared to take. It also should be noted that the resolution, while making the cease-fire mandatory as a first step, leaves out any mention of any mandatory second step – such as withdrawal.
The cease-fire was an order. It was a command by the Security Council, which is run by the great powers who established the UN.
What takes place in the UN General Assembly can only be a recommendation, and that by no less than two-thirds of the Assembly. The General Assembly debate was contrived to be a mere talkathon, where the Security Council measure was an action. The action, of course, was directed at stifling the Arab people’s struggle. This was done by ordering their governments to stop the people under their control from fighting the foreign invader.
It should be noted that the joint resolution, which was secretly arrived at between Washington and Moscow, was never submitted to the Arab governments for approval before being presented to the Security Council for a vote. The Soviet leaders did not previously consult their Arab allies on this crucial matter. On the contrary, the Arab governments have given every indication that they were opposed to the cease-fire agreement.
What the Soviet leaders did in this situation was merely a repeat performance of their Cuban missile crisis conduct, when, it will be recalled, they did not consult the Cuban Government on their agreement with the U.S. to remove the missiles from Cuban territory.
The cease-fire order, apologists for the Kremlin leaders will say, was made necessary by the swift military defeat inflicted upon the Arab governments and the need to salvage what could be salvaged before any further military advance could be made by Israel’s army.
This line of argumentation is false to the core. In contemporary imperialist wars upon oppressed nations, a military defeat inflicted by the imperialist government upon a government of an oppressed nation is not at all synonymous with the defeat of the people. It is one thing for an imperialist government to achieve a military victory but it is something else to defeat the people. The Arab people were not, and are not now defeated – by any means.
A military defeat over a conventional army is merely one battle lost in a long war for national liberation.
The Israeli military leaders have admitted that holding the territory which they occupy is the real problem for them. In this connection it is not irrelevant to ask what would the Soviet people have thought if when Hitlerite hordes were literally at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad, some outside power had imposed a cease-fire order on the Soviet people?
Isn’t it a fact that some elements of the Soviet army were initially crushed and other elements overrun by the Nazis? And were not huge chunks of territory seized and occupied by the Nazi invader? Is this not an analogy to the Mideast war?
Much nonsense has been said about Mideastern conditions being unfavorable for guerrilla warfare, almost all of it by apologists for the cease-fire. The Arab people themselves however are showing every sign of wanting to organize on a mass scale for armed, sustained warfare.
That is precisely what the invader cannot long withstand.
But aside from all these considerations, there was no obligation on the part of the Soviet Union as a member of the Security Council of the UN to go along with the U.S.-sponsored resolution on the cease-fire unless it met with the conditions of the Arab governments. The Soviet Union could have vetoed any U.S. move in the Security Council.
But as noted above, the Soviet leadership threw overboard its obligation to the Arab governments and behind the scenes it conspired with the U.S. to present a fait accompli to the Security Council. This stunned not only the Arab peoples, but the world at large.
It should also be noted that at no time did the Soviet Union recommend the indictment of the U.S. as the aggressor or instigator of the Israeli war upon the Arab peoples. The U.S. is mentioned only indirectly or by innuendo. The Soviet spokesman at no time made it clear that the relationship between the Israeli government and the U.S. is strictly one of a satellite and its master.
For all the glib talk about legality and international law, neither Fedorenko nor Kosygin made it clear that the actual relationship which exists between the U.S. and Israel is strictly one of a principal and its agent. The Soviet resolution should have properly indicted the U.S. as well as the Israeli government. By directing its main attack against the puppet rather than against the master, the Soviet Government deliberately distorted the actual political and social relations between the U.S. and the Israeli regime.
The motivation for this distortion lies in the fact that the Soviet leaders not only wish to continue the global alliance they have with the U.S. against the People’s Republic of China but also against any real revolutionary movement that would disturb the world status quo.
However, because of the contradiction in which the Soviet leaders exist as usurpers of a revolution in a socialist country, they have a special mission at the UN. They hope they can somehow squeeze out a resolution from the General Assembly that can save face for them in the world revolutionary movement, while at the same time they work behind the scenes to solidify an agreement with the U.S. imperialists. That’s the reason for all the maneuvering about a Johnson-Kosygin meeting.
The Johnson Administration is very much in favor of such a meeting to help cover U.S. imperialism’s bloody role in the world. The question for Kosygin, of course, is whether too open and friendly a meeting might further damage the already shaky position of the revisionist leadership.
Finally it should be said – not only in the interest of revolutionary optimism, but of current objective political reality – that the military victory of imperialism and its agents over the Arabs is one thing. But the state of the Arab revolution is another. In spite of the military defeat, the masses have been galvanized with revolutionary fervor and determination.
Kosygin and his delegation hope to reduce this great new mass determination to the small coin of diplomatic bargaining to get some sort of concession and thus save their reactionary leadership from the wrath of the liberation movement throughout the world.
The Soviet leadership is a pillar of conservatism in world affairs, and a more effective and substantial one, because it has its roots in a socialist country. Any revolutionary movement and any revolutionary government that it cannot control is anathema to it.
This explains in part the tacit understanding between the U.S. imperialists and the Soviet revisionist clique.
However, this fact does not supersede the basic class antagonism between the USSR as a socialist country and the imperialist system. But it does whet the imperialist appetite for aggression and expansion to the detriment of the world liberation movement and the proletarian class struggle.
That is why the revisionist grouping in the USSR should be replaced with genuine revolutionary leaders.
June 20, 1967
Last updated: 11 May 2026