Word: plo
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...Syrian initiative, described as an attempt to keep the peace, succeeded in taming the Palestinians. But Assad, who has recently supported Iran against Iraq in order to tip the scales of the balance of power to his advantage, was not sated. He joined the PLO and betrayed the Christian minority. Today more than 30,000 Syrian troops are entrenched in Lebanon; surface-to-air missiles are aimed at northern Israeli cities; 100,000 Lebanese citizens have died...
...fighting continues. Israel has bombed PLO enclaves, and though it is cavalier to compare casualties inflicted, those attributable to Israel do not begin to approach those attributable to Syria and the PLO. For its consistent opposition to the PLO, Israel has been branded the main obstacles to peace; for its persistent inflammation of a tragie civil war, Syria has escaped condemnation because it is not an ally of the United States but of the Soviet Union...
Besides his hegemonic ambitions and fear of the PLO, there is another reason for Assad's adventurism in Lebanon. As minority ruler, he is under siege from his Moslem opponents domestically. When he ventures into Lebanon to divert attention from his problems at home, an American mediator negotiates a cease-five which allows him to keep his missiles trained on Israel. When Menachem Begin ventures into Lebanon in pursuit of terrorists who oppose his state with every means at their disposal-partly to divert attention from the painful operations in the Sinai necessary for peace-he is accused of ignoring...
...unilateral removal of the elected mayors on the West Bank and the unnecessary annexation of the Golan Heights. But it seems evident from this admittedly brief discussion of the Middle East's complexity that the source of the Arab-Israeli conflict is not primarily the Arab support of the PLO and the Israeli opposition to it as Khalidi argues...
Instead, the one issue that unites Arabs is a common hatred of Israel, apparently reinforced by a common fear of the PLO. Jordan and Lebanon have suffered from the PLO's presence, with Hussein scarred and Lebanon gutted. Syria and Saudi Arabia have no desire to follow in those menacing footsteps. With the Palestinian problem solved through the involvement of Jordan, Egypt. Israel and the PLO, the common fear of the PLO may attenuate. But the internal difficulties of these Arab regimes and the growing pan-Islamic tide led by Iran will not simply disappear. Neither, will Israel, nor presumably...