Rethinking Arafat

By Paul N. McCloskey, Jr.

An amazing fact is revealed in the State Department "White Paper" issued January 8 to justify President Reagan's sanctions against Libya.

The State Department presents a carefully documented case for Libyan involvement in international terrorism over the last five years, but in doing so, practically exonerates Yassir Arafat and his mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization of the terrorist acts which have so often been blamed on "the Palestinians."

The White Paper identifies more than 60 major terrorist attacks outside Israel and the occupied West Bank in the last eight years 30 of them in 1984 and 1985 alone but lays responsibility for them not at the door of the P.L.O., but at that of Abu Nidal, a man who has tried to assassinate Arafat himself.

The State Department states unequivocably that Abu Nidal broke away from Arafat eleven years ago precisely because of Arafat's order to his followers in 1974 to cease all violence outside Palestine proper.

The State Department points out that Abu Nidal's stated purpose is to prevent the peace process from succeeding, that his particular focus in assassinations since 1984 has not been against Israelis or Americans but against Jordanians and Palestinians willing to recognize Israel. To Abu Nidal, in the State Department interpretation, an enemy is anyone seeking a negotiated peace.

After even a cursory reading of this documented narrative, one might wonder why the United States has refused for so long to recognize Arafat and the P.L.O. as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian cause in the peace negotiations which have been official U.S. policy since Camp David.

The tragedy is that Abu Nidal has succeeded time and time again in sidetracking the peace process. His attempted assassination of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli Ambassador to London, gave Ariel Sharon the excuse to attack Lebanon in 1982. (Israel falsely charged the P.L.O. then with the attempt, even in the face of evidence disclosed by the British police that the would be assassins had also marked the head of the P.L.O. office in London for elimination.) Abu Nidal's assassination of Isam Sartawi in Portugal in 1983 stilled the voice of a P.L.O. leader urging recognition of Israel, as did his assassination in December 1984 of Fahd Qawasmi, the former mayor of Hebron. Abu Nidal's attacks on the Rome and Vienna airports last month did much to antagonize a newly emerging public sympathy for the Palestinians prompted by the indiscriminate Israeli bombing attack in Tunisia which killed 61 people.

A careful reading of the White Paper seems to force the conclusion that, at least since 1974, Arafat and the P.L.O. leadership have wanted peace, not war, and that the dread epithet "terrorist" is an unwarranted and misleading description of the mainstream P.L.O. today.

Indeed, Arafat might well reflect that of all his foes, his Palestinian brother, Abu Nidal, may be the worst. David Ben Gurion once suffered the same experience with Vladmir Jabotinsky (Menachem Begin's erstwhile protege), whom Ben Gurion often referred to as the "Hitler of the Jews." Begin's admission in his book The Revolt that it was necessary to hang two innocent young British army sergeants in 1947 and to indiscriminately wipe out the men, women and children of Deir Yassin in 1948 as a "message" to the Arabs and British to leave Jewish Palestine was just as repugnant to most Zionist leaders of his day, including Ben Gurion, as has been the indiscriminate violence of Abu Nidal to most moderate Palestinians today, including Arafat.

The State Department's factual report should remind all of us not to jump to conclusions of guilt based on mere association. As the slain American Arab leader, Alex Odeh, said before he too died at the hands of assassins: Yassir Arafat may indeed be a "man of peace."

Above all peoples, we Americans might give Arafat the benefit of the doubt in light of what our own State Department has just revealed. In our intelligence exchanges with the Israelis we should also stoutly resist what are obviously Israeli attempts to pin every terrorist act on the Palestine Liberation Organization. If we don't, we shall have only ourselves to blame for the burden of judgement future historians shall heap upon us.

Paul N. McCloskey, Jr., a former Congressman from California, currently practices law in Palo Alto, California.