Throughout the first two weeks of December 1986, PLO-organized West Bank Arab and Muslim students from the University of Bir Zeit engaged in anti-Israel riots and demonstrations. It was another salvo in the latest attempt of Yasser Arafat and his version of the Palestine Liberation Organization to reestablish themselves as the sole representatives of the Palestinian cause.
Bir Zeit, which operates out of a converted high school, is headquarters for some of the most radical fundamentalists and would-be terrorists in the area. Disguised as an educational institution, it is basically nothing more than an agitprop center. There are few, if any, genuine academic activities at Bir Zeit. The riots were an outgrowth of this atmosphere.
An Israeli policy of educational laissez faire and a policy of limited interference with the Arab press has allowed the rise of a highly volatile, sometimes informative, and rabble-rousing Arab press, which incited the students at Bir Zeit.
The recent outbursts of rioting were connected to the efforts of Arafat to lure dissident PLO members in Syria and in the West Bank to his movement. In a shift of strategy, the PLO under Arafat decided, in a meeting in South Yemen in November, to give armed struggle against Israel a renewed priority over the peace process. The change became apparent in the same month, when PLO terrorists in Jerusalem attacked a military ceremony for young recruits at the Wailing Wall, wounding several soldiers and members of their families. A PLO spokesman in Baghdad claimed responsibility and said that "the PLO has decided to escalate the armed struggle to recover Palestinian rights."
The prompt claim of responsibility for the attack in Jerusalem demonstrated the opening shots in a new war of terror and armed struggle within Israel and the West Bank by the PLO.
The decision to pursue this course sprang out of a feeling on the part of Arafat's PLO that history had bypassed them; they were not wrong in this feeling.
The devastating Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon effectively destroyed Arafat's state-within-a-state and ousted the PLO from its political capital in Beirut. This was followed by a crunching dismemberment of what remained of the PLO by Syria's Hafez Assad, ousting Arafat from Tripoli, Lebanon, and splitting the movement into fragments. The remnants of Arafat's PLO were centered 3,000 miles away from Palestine and Israel in South Yemen, as well as in Iraq and Tunisia.
The PLO subsequently caused the collapse of the Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian U.S.-sponsored peace process along the lines of the Camp David negotiations by its unwillingness to surrender the senior Palestinian negotiating position to Jordan.
A forgotten group
Thus, war, devastation, schisms, a lack of unified Arab support, and Syria's alliance with Arafat's radical foes all left the PLO a forgotten group, without influence and without a coherent political, diplomatic, or military policy.
Today, isolated by King
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