Word: plo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lesser offenses, but it steadfastly refuses to free any prisoner ?with blood on his hands.? But it is precisely those prisoners the Palestinians want freed in exchange for a cease-fire, starting with the 237 whose acts of violence were committed before the 1993 Oslo Accords when the PLO ostensibly ended hostilities with Israel. Not only does the very idea of freeing those who have killed Israelis tear at Sharon?s own instincts, but such a move would almost certainly strengthen the hand of those on the right flank of his own party who are looking to unseat the prime...
...creates the very rationale for a ceasefire on the Palestinian side, and Abbas has been hard at work for weeks now forging a common negotiating position among Palestinian factions. In what would be a remarkable shift on the part of Hamas - or a realization, like that experienced by the PLO in the 1980s, that the State of Israel is an intractable reality - the Islamist organization has signaled its readiness to accept the principle of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Not that Abbas necessarily expects to cut a deal with Sharon. He has long argued that...
...only one year after Pan-Arab nationalism's final defeat at Israel's hands, Arafat became the first non-head of government to address the UN General Assembly, and the Arab League anointed the PLO "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," formally transferring responsibility for Palestinian fate into Palestinian hands. And if Arafat's personage became the symbol of this new nationalist voice suddenly recognized in the Arab world as the revolutionary head of state of a stateless people, his mystique was burnished by his uncanny ability to beat the odds...
...Lebanon. There, too, he once again escaped the noose, fleeing into a new exile in far-off Tunis in 1982 after Ariel Sharon's army had vanquished his fighters. Arafat seemed irretrievably doomed in 1991 when his disastrous miscalculation of supporting Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait saw the PLO reduced to pariah status in almost every Arab capital. But within two years, he popped up on the White House lawn shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin under the matrimonial smile of President Bill Clinton. It's not hard to see how his improbable political recoveries have made Arafat a talisman...
...sovereignty. In 1988, for the first time, Arafat led his organization to advocate a two-state solution to the conflict, based on creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza rather than insisting on the implausible goal of ?liberating? all of historic Palestine. This apparent trimming of PLO strategic ambitions was merely an acknowledgment of a new reality on the ground - the "intifada" uprising, that had begun a year earlier, had firmly shifted the epicenter of Palestinian hopes back to the Occupied Territories. In the global political arena, young boys armed with stones and molotov cocktails that highlighted...