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The Role of the PLO
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11896 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1987 |
2,956 Words |
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Robert J. Hanks
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The April 1987 meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers transmitted a mixed series of messages to the rest of the world. Initially, it appeared that radical Palestinian factions had scored a major triumph by forcing Yasser Arafat to welcome them back into the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fold and to espouse their hardline positions, all in order to promote Palestinian unity. Hopes for an international conference to resolve Middle East problems plummeted. Since then, however, further fallout from the meeting has somewhat altered this original evaluation. Still Middle Eastern waters remain exceedingly murky, and prospects for progress toward peace in the Middle East currently are uncertain at best.
The meeting of the National Council - the Palestinians' "parliament in exile" - is symptomatic of the problems confronting these displaced peoples as they continue to seek release from their diaspora and achieve self-determination in a land of their own. To comprehend what went on at the Algiers gathering and what the results could mean insofar as the future of the Middle East is concerned, one must understand the fractionated nature of the Palestinian movement.
Progressively radicalized by fruitless years of attempting to attract the world's attention to their grievances, Palestinians eventually turned to violence, precisely as the Jews did under the British Mandate. The transformation did not take place overnight, however. It began with Israel's victory over Arab forces in 1948 and subsequent wholesale expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the new Zionist state. From the time of al-Nakba (the Catastrophe), as this period is known to Palestinians, until the late 1950s, the refugees looked to the world community for help. As the years dragged by and their pleas continued to be ignored, more radical elements surged to the forefront of the Palestinian movement, rallying myriad disillusioned moderates to their standards.
By the early 1960s, several guerrilla organizations had been founded. The largest was Al-Fatah, from the reversed initials of its name: Harakat Al-Tahir Al-Falstini (Palestine Liberation Movement). By 1964, Arafat had become the acknowledged head of the movement and, in January of that year, an Arab summit conference had established the PLO with Fatah assuming the leading role. Ultimately, the PLO umbrella expanded to cover, at one time or another, a variety of separate organizations, including the Moscow-leaning Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine under George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh's leftist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Today, the overwhelming bulk of the Palestinian people support the PLO as sole spokesman for their cause, a position ratified by Arab states at their 1974 Rabat Conference.
At present, the organization encompasses a number of resistance groups, some well known and some shadowy. An example of the latter is an outright terrorist band led by Abu Nidal, who is widely suspected of being the mastermind behind the Achille Lauro hijacking. This splintering has led to continuing dissent and numerous armed clashes within the PLO, individual factions going and coming as internal disputes wax and wane. The most significant chasm - especially after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and accompanying decimation of the PLO'S armed units - spawned hatred between Arafat on the one hand and Syria's Hafez Assad along with his Palestinian clients Habash and Hawatmeh on the
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