Word: palestinians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Middle East. Capitulating to the hard-line right of his Likud bloc, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir fettered his own plan for elections in the occupied territories with stiff conditions that seem to doom the peace initiative. Almost before the players could grasp the political implications, a fanatic Palestinian wrenched an Israeli bus over a cliff, killing 14 passengers in what was described as an act of vengeance. Those civilian deaths will only harden hearts against thoughts of peace. Once again the small steps being taken toward peace were shoved rudely backward...
...welcome quickly ran out. Friedman maintains that Israel's hidden agenda -- wiping out Palestinian agitation once and for all and playing midwife to a friendly or at least neutral government in Lebanon -- was the stuff of fantasy. The dispersal of their leadership would not stifle Palestinians' aspirations; and there was no force in splintered Lebanon capable of uniting the country...
Stopping in Cyprus on his way home to England, a Palestinian traveler fell into conversation with the distraught Ahmed and alerted the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in London of Ahmed's plight. Ahmed was soon assured by UNHCR that he would receive assistance in Cairo, so he flew back to Egypt. But when the Egyptians tried to send him to Somalia, Ahmed kicked and screamed. The Somalian Ambassador was called in, and he acknowledged that Ahmed would be imprisoned if he landed in Somalia. So the Ethiopian was returned to Cyprus...
They are not. Publicly, Israeli officials are noncommittal. "Privately," concedes a senior Israeli army commander, "we are apoplectic. Acknowledging that moderate Palestinians actually exist in the middle of the intifadeh and that they are unafraid to meet Israelis when they know we can jail them on the flimsiest of pretexts means it might really be possible to achieve a peaceful solution -- which is exactly what Shamir is against. To him, calm talk can lead only to the thing he fears most, a Palestinian state in the West Bank...
Given their meager influence on Israeli public opinion, which is moving furiously rightward, these interlocutors are strengthened by such criticism. At one meeting in Bardin's Jerusalem home, Jad Isaac, a Palestinian biology professor imprisoned after urging West Bank Arabs to plant vegetable gardens to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency, put it simply: "Even if all we do is talk, it is good...