Middle East: Heading for a Showdown

• Share

Syria expels Arafat as the fight within the P.L.O. grows bloodier

The two-month-old rebellion within the Palestine Liberation Organization reached the crisis stage last week, with the future of Chairman Yasser Arafat in serious jeopardy. All week long, P.L.O. rebels, who consider Arafat's policies too moderate, attacked P.L.O. military positions in and around the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. In a spectacular ambush, aimed at killing or capturing Arafat himself, the rebels stormed a convoy of twelve P.L.O. vehicles in the western Syrian town of Homs. Arafat, who was safely in Damascus, declared that a dozen of his men had been killed or wounded in the attack. Hours later, the long-smoldering feud between Arafat and Syrian President Hafez Assad broke into the open as the Syrian government brusquely expelled Arafat, advising him that in the future he would be unwelcome in either Syria or the Bekaa Valley. He left immediately for Tunis to hold emergency meetings with his top lieutenants. By week's end he was in Czechoslovakia, presumably in search of support from the Soviet bloc.

The split within Fatah, the P.L.O. mainstream group that has always been Arafat's power base, is largely a reaction to last year's forced evacuation from Beirut. It is also the result of a wide range of complaints by some of the rank and file that the P.L.O.'s leadership has been corrupt and ineffective. But these grievances would probably not have sparked an active rebellion without the interference of Libya and, more important, Syria. The P.L.O. has always relied heavily on Syria for military and political support, although relations between Arafat and Assad have been cool for a long time.

The strains were exacerbated earlier this year when Arafat talked at length with Jordan's King Hussein about the possibility that Hussein would, in association with the Palestinians, enter into negotiations with Israel and the U.S. on President Reagan's proposal for a confederal relationship between Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Assad bitterly opposed the U.S. initiative. His objections: it did not envision a significant negotiating role for the Syrians, nor did it address itself to the problem of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 war and annexed in 1981.