The PLO: The challenge and the response
AFIF SAFIEH
This paper was presented in a symposium held in Colombo - Sri Lanka in August 1981 and was first published in 'Monday Morning' a Lebanese weekly.

Strategically located at the crossroads of three continents, Palestine was throughout the ages coveted by external powers. Only during the 20th century, British colonialism was only a transition between Ottoman (Turkish) domination and Zionist penetration.

Yet Zionism has its specificity. Unlike previous occupations, it has imposed on Palestine a double human migration: the massive expulsion of the Palestinians to the periphery of their homeland was coupled with the massive arrival of settlers to replace them.

It is an irony of history that all settler colonies were demographically composed of persecuted individuals and groups who migrated in search of more hospitable shores. They were Catholics from predominantly Protestant societies or Protestants fleeing an intolerant Catholic environment. They were republicans from the European monarchies or royalists from newly-born republics. To take Algeria as an example: the ‘pieds- noirs’ were mainly the descendants of migrants from regions of Alsace and Lorraine annexed by Prussia (i.e. nationally oppressed), or descendants of the defeated revolutionary communards from Paris (i.e. economically exploited or ideologically persecuted).

In each case, a reversal of roles was operated, the needs of the newcomers gradually trespassing on the rights of the indigenous population until totally negating their existence.

Israel is no exception. Zionism has transformed the oppressed of one continent into oppressors of another continent. The State of Israel to which it gave birth had, from its very first day, an elastic conception of its frontiers resulting from an insatiable territorial appetite. Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, explaining the absence of a constitution and any delimitation of frontiers, stated that the borders of Israel will go as far as ‘the Israeli defense army’ will reach.

Today, the Palestinians are the heirs of the Jewish sufferings, the sufferings of Treblinka, Dachau and Auschwitz. The Jews were the direct victims of Nazism. The world recently discovered that the Palestinians were the Nazis’ indirect victims: Zionism took advantage of the Nazi atrocities and from a minority tendency within the Jewish communities, it emerged as a hegemonic organization systematically exerting moral and intellectual terrorism on reluctant Jews.

But each hegemonic movement secrets its own dissidents. I should say fortunately, because Jewish, and later on Israeli, dissidents helped the Palestinian people to reject all the theories abusively assimilating Zionism with Judaism. The role of those dissidents, in spite of their numerical weakness, is potentially great.

By denouncing the long-term strategy of the State of Israel as well as its daily practices, they prove that there is no Jewish collective guilt vis-a-vis the ordeal of the Palestinians and thus they save the future possibilities of pacific cohabitation.

Pacific and harmonious cohabitation in Palestine has been the objective of the Palestinian revolution since its inception. Rebellious against the intolerable prevailing situation in which the Palestinians had become ‘the Jews of the Zionists’, the Palestinian freedom-fighters pledged that the Jewish community would not, when the balance of power inevitably changed, be transformed into ‘the Palestinians of the Palestinians’.

This is how the project of a democratic, secular, pluri-confessional and multi-ethnical state in Palestine should have been perceived. By recognizing the accomplished demographic fact, the PLO demonstrated that it was not seeking any historical revenge but, on the contrary, was sincerely yearning to break the dialectics of oppression.

Arnold Toynbee has explained human history in its unity and in its diversity through the individual and collective responses to the challenge of the environment, the natural and the human environment.

A homeland occupied, a people diasporized, a capital, Jerusalem, mutilated, a civilization at the same time denied and plundered, an Arab nation balkanized into multiple states which imperialism constantly tries, often successfully, to antagonize: these are the challenges that the PLO has to cope with.

From 1948 until 1965, the Palestinian people resorted to what can be called the arms of criticism. But their complaints, expressed through petitions or street demonstrations, gave birth only to compassion and charity. It is only when the Palestinians opted for armed struggle , criticism by arms, that their national identity and aspirations were recognized and the claim for their necessary satisfaction endorsed by the international community.

The battle of Karameh in March, 1968 was a turning point. Only months after the humiliating defeat 1967 and the Arab armies’ discredit because of their poor performance, the Palestinian resistance movement proved its military credibility by heroically facing a massive Israeli attack intended to wipe it out of existence.

The next day, ‘Le Monde’s’ main article was on the political resurrection of the Palestinians. In fact, that very day the people joined its vanguard. In February, 1969, even the classical political elite admitted the radical changes that had occured in the Palestinian scene, and Yasser Arafat, leader of the major guerrilla movement, Fateh, was elected chairman of the PLO. The Palestinians had recuperated the historical initiative; no more a mere object of history whose destinies were decided upon in foreign capitals, they had become the subject of their own history.

Before seeking international recognition, the PLO had already obtained internal legitimacy. It unified the political expression of a geographically/demographically dispersed people and began channelling their struggles towards the common goal: the right of return and independent statehood. If the intoxicating Israeli propaganda has emphasized the military aspect of the Palestinian struggle, the PLO’s non-military fields of interest are not of lesser importance in the Palestinian revival, survival and - some day, hopefully soon - victory.

Today, the PLO is a pre-governmental organization which is already assuming the responsibilities of a state. Each Executive Committee member is in charge of a specific department: the political department, economic department, information department, health department, cultural department, department for the occupied territories, etc.
As a political system, the PLO carries the following characteristics:

• It is a multi-party system,

• with freedom of expression for all its components,

• in which eventual internal opposition is not only tolerated but legal.

It is to be noted that decisions are rarely adopted by a unanimous vote. The supreme decision-making organ in the PLO is the Palestinian National Council, the parliament-in-exile.

Its last session, the 15th, was held April 11-20, 1981 in Damascus. It current composition is as follows:  (Since 1981, three other PNC sessions took place in 1983, 1984, and 1987. The membership has increased but according to the same criteria.)

The representatives of the guerilla movements, of the trade unions and of the Palestinian communities in the diaspora (i.e. 207 members) are directly elected by their respective constituencies. The others (108) are co-opted by the elected members of the PNC.

There are 122 additional members from the occupied territories. The Israeli military governor having threatened each of them with expulsion if they ever took part in any session of the PNC, the Palestinian leadership advised them not to attend. However, they regularly send their evaluation of the prevailing situation to the leadership and petitions are addressed to the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations reaffirming that the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. This unfaltering national unity has foiled all the attempts aimed at promoting an ‘alternative leadership’ for the Palestinian people.

If, and perhaps I should say because, Zionism as a colonial movement had its specificity, the Palestinian national liberation struggle is unique. In the game of nations, up till recently monopolized by states and only states, the PLO (‘a non-territorial state’ - Hisham Sharabi) emerged as a dynamic actor. Contrary to the claim of the Zionists, the PLO was not propelled on the international arena by the energy crisis but because it had proved, on the terrain, that it was an irreversible political and military factor.

It is today a full, active and effective member in the League of Arab States, in the Conference of Islamic States and in the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries. All the socialist countries have officially recognized the PLO and successive presidents of the European Council of Ministers, in preparation for an eventual European initiative, met with the chairman of the PLO as a major party concerned in any endeavor for the solution of the Middle Eastern crisis. Last but not least, the PLO enjoys an observer status in the United Nations Organization and in its specialized agencies, having all the privileges of a full member except the right of voting and of directly submitting project-resolutions or amendments.

In the last four sessions of the Palestinian National Council (1974, 1977, 1979, 1981) resolutions were adopted calling for the implementation of international legality. Regarding the international body as capable of reconciling ethics with politics, the PLO considers that the United Nations is the most adequate forum for the solution of the conflict.

Today, it seems to me that an acceptable mechanism could be the following three-phased formula:

1. The speedy withdrawal of Israel from all the territories occupied in 1967.

2.  In the Palestinian territories evacuated, and in coordination with the PLO, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, the United Nations assumes responsibility for an interim period between Israeli occupation and Palestinian sovereignty.

3. An international conference is convened under the auspices of the United Nations to which are invited all the parties concerned, including the State of Palestine, to agree upon all pending issues.

Alas, the impotence of the United Nations on the one hand, and first the complicity, then the complacency and now the abdication of Western Europe on the other hand are part of the answer. So is the insufficient mobilization of Arab potentials. But the unlimited and so far unconditional support, military and financial (from flour to Phantoms) abundantly delivered to Israel by the United States remains the determining factor. Israel is in crisis. The promised land has not kept its promises. But the economic and social vulnerability of Israel is for the moment largely compensated for by an overwhelming military superiority.

Yet, just a few weeks ago, the Palestinian guerilla forces, in a direct Palestinian-Israeli war (July 10-24, 1981) successfully confronted this huge war machine equipped to defeat all the Arab armies combined. One might now expect the American administration to draw some evident conclusions, and this dialogue by arms to inaugurate another phase in the confrontation, that of the arms of dialogue.

All Middle East specialists and observers have underlined the realistic approach of the PLO. The Israeli leadership knows by now that it is totally erroneous to confuse between realism and resignation.

My personal hope is that the international community, friends and foes alike, will act in a manner to contradict Hegel’s pessimistic vision - pessimistic yet so often justified: From history we learn that we have not learnt from history.