MIDDLE EAST: The Palestinians: Hopes for a Homeland

• Share

They are realistic, they very much want recognition from Washington. They are trying to present the best face they can.

This observation, made last week by one of the Ford Administration's senior Middle East analysts, referred to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group that Arab states have recognized as the sole legitimate bargaining agent for the 3 million Palestinians scattered throughout the Middle East. Although badly battered from its losing role in the Lebanese civil war, the P.L.O. remains an important force. A delicate diplomatic problem facing the new Carter Administration is whether, how and in what capacity Palestinian representatives ought to be invited to any Middle East peace negotiations that take place in 1977.

Initial Ministate. Many Israeli officials agree that Palestinians should eventually be involved in any peace talks, but they also insist that the P.L.O. must be excluded−even though its leaders are currently talking in unexpectedly moderate tones. Last week P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat told a meeting of his 42-member Central Committee in Damascus that the Palestinians are now prepared to accept as their initial goal the creation of a Palestinian ministate. As most Palestinians now envision it, the state would consist of the

Jordan West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Arafat also warned that any Palestinian group that rejected the idea−meaning primarily George Habash's Marxist, uncompromising Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine−must read itself out of the P.L.O.

As a kind of counterpoint to Arafat's decree, Palestinian students in the West Bank last week took to the streets once more in rock-throwing demonstrations. Later, Arab storekeepers called a general strike that closed down West

Bank shops for a day. Ostensibly, the protests were directed against a new 8% sales tax imposed on occupied territories as well as Israel itself. Basically, though, the Palestinians were acting out their anger against Israeli military authorities, who have been their rulers since the 1967 Six-Day War. Says Bethlehem's Arab mayor, Elias Freij: "Until a Palestinian state is established on the West Bank, there cannot be any peace between us and the Israelis."

Israel has always insisted that any West Bank-Gaza entity must exist in some kind of political and economic federation with Jordan. The Israelis have a legitimate security worry about having a new confrontation state on their borders, dominated by the hated P.L.O. They are also mildly concerned about the threat of 2 million exiled Palestinians coming to join a million kinsmen who live in the West Bank and Gaza.

National Identity. That fear is somewhat unrealistic, since "home" for most of the Palestinians means not the West Bank but towns within Israel that they might expect to visit some day but certainly not to liberate. Actually, what the Palestinians want most of all is the sense of national identity that would arise from statehood. Just as many Jews in the Diaspora were given a new sense of pride and hope by the creation of Israel; so also would the Palestinian refugees escape from the tarnish of being second-class citizens of nowhere if a state of their own were founded.