Word: palestinians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...after day, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat led motorcades into eastern and northern Lebanon last week for a series of public pep rallies and private meetings with his military commanders. At every whistle-stop along the way he told his Palestinian followers that dissension within P.L.O. ranks was being fomented by Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi and "some other Arab regimes." If Gaddafi did not stop his interference, Arafat warned, he would "cut out his tongue." As a result of such troublemaking, said Arafat, the Palestinians must fight harder than ever to maintain their solidarity and must prepare for another...
Gone for the moment was any thought of an immediate withdrawal of Syrian, Palestinian and Israeli forces from Lebanon, as envisioned by the recently signed Israeli-Lebanese accord. Warned Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir: "We hope Syria won't make a fatal mistake." Later the Syrians said that the purpose of the maneuvers was purely defensive, leading Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens to declare that "if true," the statement was "good news...
...return peaceably to their ranks. Then when Gaddafi gave a speech denouncing Fatah's "reactionary leaders," Arafat lashed out at him for his mischief making and, more important, was able to portray the mutiny as a result of external interference. Gaddafi has been none too popular with the Palestinian leadership since last summer, when he told Arafat that P.L.O. fighters should commit suicide rather than leave Beirut...
Last week, as he barnstormed the Palestinian military outposts and civilian communities of the Bekaa Valley, Arafat was working hard to strengthen his position as well as to demonstrate his continuing support. On one of these excursions, his eight-vehicle motorcade raced over the rutted, dusty roads of eastern Lebanon at 70 m.p.h., with the chairman riding in a dark-blue, late-model Chevrolet sedan equipped with bulletproof windows. At a stop along the way, as a group of bedraggled soldiers stood around him, Arafat said of the mutiny, "It is over. It is over." Again he blamed Gaddafi...
...does no good to argue that these wars failed to crush Polish or Argentine or Palestinian nationalism. A general's dreams are never the same as his intentions, which in these campaigns were more limited: to make possible things that were once thought impossible, to rearrange what the Soviets call the correlation of forces, to change the terms of reality, debate and thus ultimately negotiation. Far from excluding negotiations, a primary purpose of these wars was to alter their terms. When Jaruzelski talks to Walesa, Britain to Argentina, and Israel to the Palestinians, as in the long run they...