Palestinians: Return to Terror

Arafat says, "There is nothing greater than to die "

"They are calling for blood donations," said a Palestinian doctor with satisfaction as he hunched over a radio tuned to an Israeli station during a dinner party in Jordan's capital, Amman. As he passed on to the other Palestinian guests the news about the fedayeen attack near Tel Aviv, he exclaimed: "What courage those boys and girls have!"

Indeed, however the rest of the world may regard their bloody deed, the 13 young Palestinians involved in the suicide mission against Israel were sorely needed heroes to most of the estimated 3.8 million Palestinians dispersed around the world. Even in what a majority of Palestinians regard as the heart of their lost homeland, the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River, Palestinian schoolchildren defied Israeli orders against political demonstrations by parading in tribute to the Sabbath terrorists and against the Begin regime's incursion into Lebanon. Says Mahmud Abu Zalaf, 53, editor of the West Bank Arabic newspaper El Kuds: "These attacks and counterattacks will go on until we get at the roots of the problem."

That problem is how to satisfy the Palestinian demand for some form of nationhood. They remain a homeless people, "the Jews of the Arab world." They have their freedom fighters: the fedayeen. Palestinian guerrillas divided into six major groups that form the Palestine Liberation Organization, a kind of shadow government headed by Yasser Arafat. But they have little else. Israelis maintain that, as former Premier Golda Meir once put it, "there is no such thing as a Palestinian." Many of them carry no more proof of citizenship than the laisser-passer that have been issued to residents of the refugee camps supported by the United Nations but actually governed by the P.L.O. Still, they endure. Says Palestinian Writer Raymonde Tawil: '"We are like grass. The more you cut it, the more it will grow."

Strictly speaking, Palestinians are Arabs who live or have lived in the area now consisting of Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, all of which was once called Palestine, after the Philistines who lived there (along with the Jews) in biblical times. The largest number of modern Palestinians still remain in that territory: 693,000 in the West Bank, 447,000 in Gaza and 574,000 more in Israel proper, where they have become citizens of the Jewish state and a long-range worry to Israeli authorities because their birth rate is much higher than that of the 3.6 million Jews. Many more live in neighboring states such as Jordan and Lebanon, the poorest among them in refugee camps that were first established in the late 1940s. Other Palestinians, many of them well-to-do, are spread from Libya to the Persian Gulf. There are also an estimated 50,000 living in Europe and an additional 60,000 in the U.S., where they have recently become more vocal defending their cause against a much larger body of American Jews and resident Israelis.

For a people so widely scattered, the Palestinians remain remarkably cohesive. One reason is that they have been driven inward by enmity toward them, not only on the part of Israelis but also on the part of other Arabs. Although Arab governments support Palestinian organizations--Saudi Arabia alone contributed $26 million last year--their motives are at least as much anti-Israeli as pro-Palestinian. Indeed, the P.L.O. cause was probably strongest in the Arab world after the disastrous Six-Day War in 1967, when Arab armies had been roundly defeated and the underground Palestinians emerged as the most heroic and effective anti-Israel group around. But the Arab dislike of Palestinians arises largely from the fact that under the British, who ruled Palestine through a League of Nations mandate for 30 years after World War I, they became the best-educated people in the region. They have produced more doctors, lawyers, teachers and scientists (Arafat is an engineer by training) than any Arab nation, and their women are the most liberated in the Arab world.

What unifies the Palestinians most of all, however, is the endless battle against Israel. By now the fight has become almost a mockery of itself: the typical Palestinian longing for the orange groves of Jaffa has become ludicrous in a time when Jaffa itself has disappeared before the encroachments of Jewish Tel Aviv, and whatever orange groves remain are almost blotted out by industrial development. But the Palestinian dream has been kept alive, thanks to sophisticated political work by Arafat and other Palestinian leaders and the willingness of Arab governments to support (however grudgingly) a nearly lost cause.

At times, the Palestinians almost seem determined to keep that cause lost. A year ago, President Carter first spoke of U.S. support for a Palestinian "homeland." This was a considerable achievement, the best the Palestinians have ever had in 30 years of warfare, but they failed to respond. The quid pro quo in American eyes was Palestinian recognition of Israel's right to exist, something that Arafat and other "moderate" Palestinian leaders wanted to do. However, there was too much pressure to the contrary from more radical P.L.O. members like Marxist George Habash.

The P.L.O. is not much closer now to any sort of productive settlement. According to Beirut sources, the P.L.O. leadership last week decided to return to underground warfare against Israel. The Palestinians even announced that they were resurrecting Black September, the dread group named after the month in 1970 when King Hussein brutally kicked Palestinian commandos out of Jordan. In the past, Black September has carried out assassinations of other Arabs as well as American diplomats. If the group seriously returns, it would mark a black day. for both the world and the Palestinians.

What is most troubling is that even moderate Palestinians have become distressed by the stalling of peace negotiations and Jerusalem's tough stand on the West Bank. Says Bethlehem's Arab mayor Elias Friej: "Israel is not willing to give up occupied territory. We've known this for many years. But the Sadat initiative has forced them to unmask their cruel intentions." Unless there is some sign of give on the Israeli side to prove that peace can be made without the P.L.O., more and more members of a new Palestinian generation may be persuaded that there is truth in Yasser Arafat's rallying cry: "There is nothing greater than to die for Palestine's return."

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