‘Back to the gun’ for P.L.O.

Press, 10 January 1986, Page 13

‘Back to the gun’ for P.L.O.

From

PATRICK SEALE

in London

The attacks last month on El Al counters at Home and Vienna airports mark a return by the Palestinians to the random violence of the 19605. The movement has come full cycle. Moderates have turned radical again, reflecting their despair with the search for a peaceful solution. Israel has made it plain it will give no quarter to Palestinian nationalism or deal with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. “For years most Palestinians believed that if they behaved the United States and Israel would give them something,” an Arab ambassador explains. “Now they feel they have nothing more to lose. It is back to the gun. If they are to die, they will take their enemies with them.”

The P.L.O. has strongly denied any connection with the attacks, but its chairman, Yasser Arafat, is himself having to come to terms with renewed militancy at the grassroots. Sources say he has reluctantly concluded that the only way to regain control of his movement and win back Palestinian opinion is to revert to being a guerrilla leader. Fifteen years of diplomacyhave gone up in smoke. “Moderation has got us nowhere,” says a prominent Palestinian. “Israel, with American support, continues to wage total war against us. If war is what they want they will get it. We will kill Israelis wherever we find them, just as Israel kills us because we are Palestinians.”

Arafat is said to have firmly set his face against making any further concessions and against accepting Security Council Resolution 242, which would imply recognition of Israel’s right to exist. His immediate strategy is to move part of his headquarters to Baghdad, where President Saddam Hussein has offered him a safe haven, and rebuild his shattered organisation. From Arafat’s point of view, moderation has cost him dear. It has split his movement, exposed him to the violent assults of Israel and his Arab enemies, lost him his Lebanese power base, and won him not an inch of Palestinian territory. Nor did it protect him from Israel’s October raid against his Tunis headquarters. In seeking to corner and destroy Arafat, Israel and the United

States have forced him back to extreme positions. Arab sources say it is now pointless to blame such well-known extremists as Abu Nidal for terrorist attacks. The Palestinian movement as a whole, they feel, has become radicalised by Israeli intransigence and American indifference.

A point to current frustrations was given by a leading Palestinian intellectual, Professor Edward Said, in his T. S. Eliot Memorial lectures at the University of Kent in England’s cathedral town of .Canterbury early last month. •/’ His central theme was the continued relevance of Frantz Fanon, the 1960 s advocate of anti-colonial revolution. The search for a common language between the United States and the Arabs, between Israelis and Palestinians, had collapsed, Professor Said semed to be saying. The exercise had proved a painful charade. Arabs expect a violent Israeli response to the latest terrorist attacks. Some believe Israel will hit at Palestinian positions in Jordan to warn King Hussein against fraternising with President Assad of Syria. Others believe Israel’s target will be Syrian missiles in the Beka’a Valley, to demonstrate that Israel remains the master of Arab skies and is not ready to allow Syria to supplant it in Lebanon.

The Syrian-Israeli confrontation is approaching a critical level. Israel is clearly disturbed by Syria’s relative success at moving towards a Lebanese settlement.

Israeli’s repeated overflights of the. country, its uproar at Syria’s missile deployment, and the expansion of its security zone in the south indicate that it has no intention of losing clout in Lebanon. On the wider question of Middle East peace, Israel is still hoping to draw Jordan into negotiations without either the PLO or Syria. It will agree to an international forum for talks only if such a forum can provide a venue for direct Israeli-Jordanian negotiations.

As Syria remains totally opposed to such separate contacts, Arab opinion is more than ever inclined to believe that Israel is planning a strike of some kind against Syria to undermine its regional ambitions.