If the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) can be said to exist at all anymore, it can only be as a political fiction. This has been the case for some years now, but until a few months ago it suited the interests of many states, both Western and Eastern, to believe in it the way older children still let themselves believe in Santa Claus--and for the same reason: most of them still hoped it might bring them a present, namely, peace negotiations.
The PLO Before 1982
The PLO was never a cohesive organization. Before its ultimate disintegration in 1982, it consisted of eight groups, supported by different Arab powers. These were inimical to each other, and within the PLO the enmities were fought out, frequently and with bloodshed, group against group, so representative were they, not of the Palestinians, but of their masters.
The largest group was Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat, who from February 1969 had the title of chairman of the PLO. He received money chiefly from Saudi Arabia, some from other Arab oil producers, and some from taxes levied on Palestinian workers in a number of Arab states.
The second biggest was Saiqa, supported by Syria, whose interest in "liberating" Palestine was to acquire it as a Syrian province. Another was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), led by a Greek orthodox Lebanese doctor, George Habash, whose first patron was President Nasser of Egypt.
From his group two others had broken off in the late 1960s and become constituent factions in their own right: first, the PFLPGC (General Command), led by a Syrian named Ahmed Jibril, supported by Syria; and then, the PDFLP (the Democratic Front), led by a Jordanian Bedouin Christian named Nayef Hawatmeh, who developed a closer relationship than the others with the Soviet Union.
Hostility between the three groups remained intense through all the years that they were nominally associated with each other under the PLO umbrella--from which, at times, the PFLP all but totally severed itself.
Then there was the ALF (Arab Liberation Front), an Iraqi group with few Palestinian members, which positively did not seek a Palestinian state since its declared aim was a single, unified Arab state under Iraqi hegemony.
In 1977, another group broke off from the PFLP-GC, naming itself the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF). Its main backer was Iraq, but it was also partly financed by Libya. One of the smallest groups was the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, formed by Palestinians of the West Bank and consisting of about 100 members.
What bound them together just sufficiently was the 1968 covenant, which declared that the aim of the PLO was the total annihilation of Israel through armed struggle only.
After the 1973 war, which the Arabs claimed as a victory, the possibility arose of a Palestinian state being established by negotiation at a multinational peace conference presided over by the United States and the Soviet
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