Why Syria wants to crush the PLO
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-11-10Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 16 →
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WHEN we have finished with Arafat, the Syrians will try to finish with us, Abu Musa is reported to have said. At present his troops, backed by Syrian arms and Syrian soldiers, stand ready to attack Yassir Arafat's last strongholds in the north Lebanese city of Tripoli.
If Abu Musa's forces, who broke away from Fatah, the main organisation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, some months ago, crush the resistance of the Arafat-Fatah loyalists, they will be altering the political map of the Middle East.
For nearly twenty years after the establishment, of the state of Israel, in 1948 the Palestinian people seemed completely disorientated by their defeat. The world that the victory of Zionism had revealed to them negated all the old certainties.
In 1965 Al Fatah began its first military operation. This did not open a new era in which Israel was threatened by a dangerous military oponent.
But it did signal the beginning an era in which a defeated Arafat and disorientated people found their identity again.
It also signalled the opening of an era in which that people, the Palestinains, would represent not only their own national cause, but the cause of radical Arab nationalism as a whole.
In this sense, the Palestinians became a bigger threat to Arab reaction in the states bordering Israel that they were in a military sense to the Zionist state.
The Arab League tried imposing a thoroughly reactionary leadership on the Palestinians, but, following the shattering defeat of 1967 in the June War, the PLO threw off this restraint and organised themselves in a militant political Yassir Arafat led this front and its principal component, Fatah, from the beginning. From the beginning there were signs of a personality cult around Arafat, and gradually he built around himself a hand-picked band who never challenged his political authority.
After the 1974 Rabat Conference, which conferred on the PLO the sole right to represent the Palestinian people, Arafat's authority grew enormously.
The diplomatic successes which followed - appearing at the UN, with the Pope, etc. -Continued on tants and their fellow trade unionists and socialists to meet this challenge head-on. GROUP Brent Cardiff Sheffield Hull Leeds % achieved eved 49% 13% 13% 12% 12%