Word: palestinians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Barely visible behind a lectern in Tel Aviv's Yad Eliyahu basketball arena, the diminutive Yitzhak Shamir struggled to make his voice heard. His Likud bloc must agree to share power with Labor, he pleaded, "to be united against the danger of a Palestinian state." But even that potent argument elicited little but jeers from hundreds of angry members of the right-wing Likud bloc's central committee. Cheers rang out only when Ariel Sharon, the big and assertive leader of the party's hard-liners, called for a narrow coalition without left-leaning Labor. "People in Labor...
...Arab states long pledged to the P.L.O., the U.S. move vindicated a trend they have encouraged in recent years: greater moderation and realism on the part of Palestinian nationalists. Even George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh, leaders of two notoriously radical pro-Syrian factions within the P.L.O., hailed the American decision as a triumph for the intifadeh. But the renegade group of Abu Musa issued a veiled threat. "We fully reject the Arafat concessions and will prove our stand practically, in a way that neither Israel nor the United States would expect," said a spokesman in Damascus...
...Arafat, however, the gains made last week far outweigh the risks. Washington in effect recognizes the P.L.O. to be the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The implicit recognition marks a personal triumph for Arafat, who has been down so often but never out. His organization has been splintered by factionalism and scourged by armies from Jordan to Israel but never destroyed. He has promised his people much but ! never delivered. In 1982 he was drummed out of Lebanon, and just a year ago he was all but ignored at an Arab summit that consigned the Palestinian problem...
Most of all, the unexpected and unquenchable uprising in the occupied territories emboldened Arafat to take a chance. He risked losing control of the Palestinian cause altogether unless he could win the "children of the stones" some tangible gain for a year of pain. At the same time, the intifadeh blessed the Palestinians, and by extension even the P.L.O., with a legitimacy Arafat had never been able to earn. Perhaps the past 13 years of diplomatic isolation by the U.S. was simply the necessary learning period for the movement...
...Arafat also made a significant concession of substance in his Geneva speech to the U.N. He rejected absolutism in favor of "realistic and attainable formulas that settle the ((Arab-Israeli)) issue on the basis of the possible." That is new and welcome from the P.L.O. Specifically, Arafat said the Palestinians would settle for two states in the Holy Land, one Palestinian and one Israeli, borders undefined. Those who do not trust him will recall the words of the 1968 Palestinian National Charter, which calls for the complete destruction of Israel. The P.L.O. has not renounced that covenant, but many Western...