Correspondents'

...In addition, the Kremlin is now quietly aiding a relatively new terrorist organization called the Palestine National Front...

...Captured propaganda material and interrogations revealed that small groups of Palestinian guerrillas had been trained politically and militarily in Russia in the past few months, and that more were being 'processed.' The purpose, according to informants, was to establish a framework of highly trained political and military leaders who would assert their influence from the time an independent Palestinian state emerged...

...To be sure, public opinion here is largely pro-Israel...

...2) active and potential political and economic relations with the neo-independent underdeveloped countries...

...Formed in the aftermath of the October War, this group—which organized the demonstrations that broke out on the West Bank in the wake of Arafat's UN appearance—is nothing more than the West Bank arm of the Jordanian Communist party...

...At that time, of course, any Israeli-Jordanian disengagement agreement would have given Amman, rather than the PLO, control over contested West Bank territory...

...The main factor tipping the government scale against the Israelis, however, is the interplay of interests between influential sectors of the majority Christian Democratic party (DC) and the oil-producing countries...

...For his part, King Faisal is fully aware that a Palestinian state carved out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would not be viable economically and would have to rely for its existence on Arab, and especially Saudi, largesse...

...Therefore, he came for consultations with His Majesty the King...

...Moreover, although the PLO is quite explicit in demanding that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip come under Palestinian control, it is much more ambiguous about Jerusalem, speaking of "total Arab" control...

...For while, on the one hand, it has recognized the PLO as the ''sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,"' on the other, its publications have repeatedly warned that a Palestinian state cannot be governed by "bourgeois circles...

...Joseph Shattan Israel and Italy Rome—If or, alas, when a new major crisis erupts in the Near East, any American diplomatic or military efforts aimed at bolstering Israel and protecting its right to sovereignty and survival are unlikely to find even a modicum of support in Italian government circles...

...As Islam's self-appointed spokesman, Faisal is obsessed with the issue of Jerusalem...

...At the Rabat Arab summit conference last October, he went out of his way to emphasize the Arab (as opposed to the specifically Palestinian) character of the Holy City...

...This state should become the exponent of the revolutionary aspirations of the Palestinian masses...

...By supporting the demands of the financially dependent PLO to supplant King Hussein on the West Bank, he is attempting to insure that he will hold the whiphand in negotiations over the city's future after the Israelis withdraw, as he believes they must...

...and (3) the Catholic Church's ties with the Christian Arab countries, which prevented the second Vatican Council in 1965 from approving a truly modern and courageous declaration on the Jews...

...Using these Jordanian Communists and other agents inside the PLO, the USSR hopes to replace the organization's present leadership with "progressive elements" and thereby convert any new Palestinian state into a Soviet satellite...

...This would objectively encourage the choice of an orientation towards progressive Palestinian national forces—the Arab liberation movement and the progressive regimes of the area on the regional scale, and the world Socialist system, primarily the Soviet Union, on the international scale...

...Years before the worldwide energy crisis, leading Christian Democrats, including current Premier Aldo Moro and party secretary Amintore Fanfani, had striven to steer a pro-Arab course...

...It is likely that in return for Faisal's backing, Arafat has agreed to some form of special status for Jerusalem—a Saudi protectorate?-once it is "liberated...

...Thus the Saudis and the Soviets have been working together to promote the PLO cause for very different reasons...

...These quoted Arafat as saying, "Disengagement [on the Jordanian front] has not taken place up to now because we and the Syrians and the Algerians managed to pressure the Saudis to oppose such a move and we drove them to take action and to pressure the Americans...

...According to Arafat, Saudi opposition to a settlement favoring Jordan over the PLO thwarted U.S...

...Finally, United States prestige is at a new low in Italy at present...

...The application of that approach in the Middle East today was described recently by the Yorkshire Post, a prominent English provincial daily: "Moscow is training militant Palestinians for a Moscow-oriented political and military takeover when a Palestinian state emerges...

...While oil is the key issue, there are others affecting this nation's official stance toward Israel: (1) Italy's traditional and even excessive concern over its "role" as a Mediterranean power and its "legitimate interests" in North Africa and the Near East...

...Even Italy's political Right, the natural habitat of all shades of anti-Semitism in the past, has been unconditionally, in fact aggressively, pro-Israel ever since the Soviet Union started playing the role of supreme protector of Arab nationalism...

...But on the pro-Arab side we find the Communist party hierarchy and, more vocally so, the extra Parliamentary Left...

...In commenting on Arafat's journey to Riyadh last November, for instance, Abu Hisham, director of the PLO office in Saudi Arabia, said: "It was not strange that Brother Abu 'Ammar's [Arafat's nom de guerre] visit to the Kingdom took place immediately after his return from the UN...

...Saudi Arabia's crucial, if surreptitious, role in the current Mideast maneuverings was disclosed by the minutes of the PLO Central Council meeting of last September 23-before Rabat—secretly issued by Fatah and obtained by the respected Beirut daily An Nahar...

...A huge reservoir of good will was squandered by the Vietnam war, and with the current domestic trend pointing increasingly toward a once unthinkable Communist-DC modus vivendi, Washington no longer has the political leverage to bring about a reappraisal of Italian policy and objectives in the Near East.—Silvio F. Senigallia...

...Indeed, its support of Yasir Arafat and the PLO recalls Stalin's 1927 explanation of his cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang: "They have to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then thrown away...

...The reversal of PSI's long-standing friendly attitude toward basically Socialist Israel is a result of both the intense Leftism pursued by the party's maximalistic majority and its ever closer contacts with the pro-Arab nations of the Third World...

...Playing for the PLO New York—The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has been the object of so much attention and diplomatic activity lately, it is often forgotten that the terrorist umbrella outfit's importance derives not from its effectiveness or size (membership of constituent groups totals perhaps 14,000), but rather from the international support it enjoys...

...Jordanian Communist Nairn Asshab detailed the course events are expected to take in last April's pro-Moscow World Marxist Review: "The rise of an independent Palestinian state, if it came about, would lead to bitter resistance on the part of imperialist and Zionist quarters and the Arab reactionaries of neighboring countries...

...Ultimately, their fundamentally antagonistic objectives must bring them into conflict, and whatever the outcome of that clash it will add to the difficulties already bedeviling the Middle East...

...attempts to arrange such a pact...

...Palestine might well become, in effect, a Saudi satellite...

...But on official Soviet maps Israel is still confined to the militarily indefensible boundaries prescribed by the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan...

...The Saudi pressure has been highly beneficial...

...Meanwhile King Faisal, whose ultraconservative, semifeudal regime is the symbol of Arab reaction, has been pulling at the Palestinians from the opposite direction with some success...

...And virtually no curiosity has been aroused by the fact that the PLO's primary patrons, the Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia, occupy opposite ends of the ideological pole...

...In this he is following a family tradition: Just as his grandfather expelled Hussein's grandfather from Mecca and Medina 50 years ago, so Faisal is now attempting to expel Hussein from Jerusalem...

...Clearly, therefore, the Arabs' inevitable version of step-by-step diplomacy, nominally aimed at merely implementing the UN's original intentions, would receive strong Kremlin backing...

...Although its working-class electorate is vastly pro-Israel, the Socialist party (PSI) also has steadily moved in the direction of the Arabs over the last few years...

...The USSR's interest in the "Palestine problem," however, is not restricted to border issues...

...Brother 'Ammar knows that the Kingdom was among the foremost states and forces which contributed to the victory of the Palestine question...

...Moscow, for example, has long endorsed the formation of a Palestinian state consisting of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and presumably it is to coexist peacefully alongside the Jewish State...

...Yet their conflicting motives in this willy-nilly joint endeavor provide significant clues to the further complications that could soon develop in the Middle East...