Terrorism and Palestinians

...Politicians who are not in the least moved by repression of the Kurds or the Turkish occupation of much of Cyprus are urging the EEC and the United States to press Israel to agree to a Palestinian state of some kind...

...should threaten Israel with an oil embargo, and a London report says the Carter Administration has studied a project of this kind...

...A senior Saudi told European friends recently: "We are forced by Arab conventions to lobby for a Palestinian state, but we are not sorry to be able to blame the West for its continued inexistence...

...Palestinians have never in the past constituted a "nation," but neither have the Jordanians, the Yemenis, the Libyans and many other peoples whose largely self-appointed rulers have the right to sit in the UN...

...All three killings were, of course, attributed by PLO spokesmen to Israeli agents...

...In fact, of the small groups of terrorists employed by the PLO and its subcontractors, many-perhaps the majority-of the participants in their most important operations have been mercenaries, misfits and drifters of half a dozen nationalities, notably Germans, South Americans, Levantines, and Japanese...

...A Spanish official says he was told by an Arafat aide that the PLO wants South Lebanon included in a Palestinian state...

...The man, who turned out to be a lawyer named Adolfo Cotelo who lived in the same building as Mazin, died instantly...

...This well-tried PR backup was, as usual, effective, and the anti-Israel allegation was duly headlined in the Spanish press...

...Then, tragically, it fell under politically incompetent, ruthlessly self-serving leaders drawn mainly from the Husseini clan, whose best-known member was the pro-Nazi Moslem fanatic Haj Amin...

...The Palestinian leaders' refusal to negotiate with Jewish organizations before 1948, and their rejection of all partition plans, preference for intrigue and terrorism, and ferocious intimidation of Arab moderates, left the Arab community without positive direction and without viable institutions...

...Having defeated and rolled back successive Arab attacks, the Jewish State found itself in possession of more territory than it might have been allotted under a peaceful partition of the country...

...Could any sane American President give his agreement to the transformation of Judea and Samaria into a launching-pad for Marxist subversion in Egypt and the oil states...

...Unhappily, it didn't stand a chance against Palestinian and other Arab propagandists who insisted on all or nothing and got nothing...

...Actually, they sold land to Jewish settlements while harassing and sometimes murdering small Arab landowners who did so and failed to pay them a rake-off...

...The authors of such attacks may be able to pose as daring guerrilleros in Beirut or Baghdad, but to most Europeans they are simply thugs...

...Modern terrorism is essentially media-oriented: Its success is measured in column inches and TV minutes...

...And, it is argued, since these peoples have sovereign states of their own, so, logically, should the Palestinians-As should the Armenians, the Kurds and others with longer and greater claims to the world's attention...

...In exchange for the highway concession, Israel would have received frontier adjustments to broaden its wasp waist...

...Yasir Arafat and his closest colleagues might well be satisfied with the mastery of a small state of their own...

...The shop, in the Gran Via, displays the only Star of David I have seen in Madrid and has been attacked by neo-Fascist "students...

...Before and after Hitler's war they campaigned for a ban on trade with and land sales to the Jews...

...The struggle for control of the Palestinian movement is warming up again...

...Indeed, they killed more Arabs than Jews or Britons...

...its numbers were increased by a soaring birth rate, improved sanitary conditions and an influx of job-seeking Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians and others...

...Unskilled and jobless, in 1976 he joined al-Fatah, the "military" wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization...

...We tend to ignore the Armenians, the Kurds and other forgotten peoples because we consider them harmless...

...The British Foreign Office believes that the PLO consults Moscow regularly on strategy and is committed to bringing in the Soviet Union when negotiations are ultimately held on an Israel-Arab settlement and Middle East security...

...This is, of course, unfair...

...Could Israel tolerate PLO bases located within hit-and-run distance of Tel Aviv...

...Some are genuine revolutionaries...

...But the PLO's lack of credibility has added still another dimension to the tragedy of the Palestinian people...

...The French and Germans," said a PLO representative in Vienna last year, "will clamor for a Palestinian state when they are as scared of us as the Jew Kreisky...

...Suddenly, though, doubts are stirring...

...Salman kept watch on the apartment and noted the time a man he took to be Mazin drove his daughter to school every morning...

...Yasir Arafat is under pressure from three extremist leaders (George Habash, Ahmed Jibril and Nayif Ha-watme), and the Syrian and Libyan authorities are intriguing on behalf of men they want to see advantageously placed in the Palestinian administration that may emerge from current international bargaining...

...some simply hate Jews and are angry they missed the Hitler Youth...

...By chance, two plain-clothes policemen were walking along the street down which Salman fled, and they arrested him...

...PLO Notes The PLO's "foreign minister," Faruk Kaddoumi, declared in mid-January that the Soviet Union had given Afghanistan "disinterested aid," and that this aid was "particularly irritating to United States imperialism because America wanted to continue exploiting the natural wealth of Iran and Afghanistan...

...There have even been suggestions that the U.S...

...Insofar as there is a debate in "progressive" circles in Europe on Palestine, it is between those who think Jordan should be handed over to the PLO and those who favor a PLO state wedged between Jordan and Israel with the right to take over Jordan "in due course...

...The PLO office in Madrid immediately denied that it had any connection with the murder and blamed Israeli secret services...

...others have used the Palestinian cause for ego-trips: kicks, maybe instant fame, possibly wealth and a life of ease in one of the villas provided by Libya's Colonel Qaddafi and some Gulf rulers for their foreign hirelings...

...We do, however, take notice of those who can harm us...

...In Madrid an Arab contact gave him a Polish automatic pistol and a Russian grenade, and showed him Mazin's apartment and handicraft shop...

...Sadly, the PLO and its offshoots are converting the word "Palestinian" into a synonym for "thug" and "terrorist...

...his daughter was wounded in the head...

...He was probably right...

...In the mid-1950s I published a plan for a Palestinian-Jordanian state in which I suggested an Egyptian withdrawal from the Gaza strip, the political incorporation of Gaza and most of eastern Palestine in Jordan, and the building of a highway to link Gaza with Jordan (like the autobahn between Federal Germany and Berlin...

...He says he was sent to the Abu lyad base, near Ramadi, in central Iraq, for political indoctrination and training in the use of Eastern European small arms...

...Well-dressed, soft-voiced PLO representatives assure Westerners that a Palestinian state would not become a base for terrorism and subversion...

...Austria's President Bruno Kreisky has just given diplomatic recognition, of a sort, to the PLO...

...In the late 1930s the Husseinis launched a campaign against Jewish immigration and British rule-And also against Arabs who resisted their domination...

...Whatever settlement the PLO now obtains will be much more restricted, less satisfactory and less viable, because undermined from the start by far greater mistrust than existed a quarter of a century ago...

...On March 3, he fired several shots into the car...

...But other Palestinian militants are Marxist revolutionaries who want to overthrow the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt and help radical movements in the Gulf emirates, Oman and Turkey...

...The oil-thirsty EEC is moving in the same direction...

...Last February 10, he was called to a Fatah office in Baghdad and ordered to go to Spain to kill "a big capitalist," a Jew named Max Mazin, whose photograph he was given...

...In the 1930s and '40s they were much less nationalistic than the Egyptians and Syrians...

...they have failed to acquire headline-conscious terrorist organizations or to scare oil-producers into backing them...

...The Palestinians are not a mass of terrorists...

...A settlement of this kind could have saved a lot of lives, anguish and resources...

...Jewish immigration and the British Mandate benefited Palestine's Arab population...

...In addition, the mindless warmongering, intensified by the manipulation of neighboring Arab rulers for whom anti-Jewish agitation was a welcome distraction from domestic problems, boomeranged: It made battlefields of Arab as well as Jewish villages, and ultimately favored Israel...

...Arafat has invited Spanish and Portuguese politicians to visit PLO bases in "liberated areas of South Lebanon...

...If the operation is now rounded off in what has become the conventional pattern, the killer will serve only a short prison term or be handed over to the PLO for "punishment"-And reappear in Baghdad or Beirut wearing a hero's laurels...

...In terms of political achievement and public sympathy, though, it can be counterproductive...

...Although occupying embassies and humiliating diplomats are considered legitimate in some trendy circles, little admiration is evoked nowadays by attacks on private citizens like Adolfo Cotelo or Max Mazin or Joseph Sieff (the British businessman shot, while in his bath, by the KGB-trained Venezuelan "Carlos" on the orders of a PLO offshoot...

...Very many Palestinians would be pleased with such a state today, but the irresponsibility of their leaders continues to make it unrealizable...

...In the last few months the struggle has cost the lives of two Fatah officers in Cyprus (thought to have been been shot by Libyan agents) and the head of the Saiqa, a Syrian-controlled Palestinian force, who was murdered in Nice (supposedly by Fatah hitmen...