6--THE BULLETIN—Thursday, January 27, 1977
BY ANAN SAFADI
JERUSALEM—The year 1976, which began as the "Year of the Palestinians," ended with the Palestine Liberation Organization bloodied militarily and staggering politically. ,
The recent statement by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat that any projected Palestinian state must be linked formally to Jordan has knocked the props out from beneath the PLO's declared objective for setting up its own state independently of Amman.
£gypt> Syria and Jordan, now consolidating a joint front, were seen promoting a new "Cooperative" Palestinian leadership designed to take over the PLO. The latter movement has unquestionably lost much of its standing and sympathy in the immediate Arab region as a result of its involvement in Lebanon's 20-month civil war and its continued political conflicts with the Arab states neighboring Israel.
The PLO now faces one of two alternatives: either a far-reaching reshuffle favoring cooperation with Egypt, Syria and Jordan or preservation of its current establishment with the risk of renewed confrontations, if not showdowns, with those countries.
In the meantime, the PLO, which was named as the sole representative of the Palestinians by a 1974 Arab summit in Rabat, is losing much of its political role to Jordan. The latter, in turn, has already embarked on reviving its association with the West Bank by building up communication with local dignitaries including Hebron's influential ex-mayor Sheikh Ali Ja'abari, who was recently in Amman.
Ja'abari challenged the PLO*s claim over the West Bank by stressing that Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip must be provided with the right self-determination under the auspices of either the Arab League or United Nations.
Ja'abari received a "red carpet" reception by King Hussein, demonstrating Jordan's bid to shore up an alternative Palestinian leadership to the PLO with a view to participation in any resumed Geneva conference on the Middle East.
This was Sheikh Ja'abari's first visit outside the West Bank since 1967. Although Sheikh Ja'abari was largely regarded as a "dead duck" politically after failing to stand in the West Bank municipal elections in April, King Hussein sent his uncle, Sherif Nasser ben Jamil, to welcome him at the Allenby Bridge.
Observers see this mark of favor as an indication that Sheikh Ja'abari has a part in the Jordanian bid to resume her role as protector of the Palestinians. Such develc^ments would neatly
LONDON — Distrust of IsraeU intentions and doubts about the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization were emphasized in the "Analysis" program broadcast on BBC Radio recently. The program dealt with Arab opinion on the Palestinian question.
Spokesmen in both Egypt and Jordan voiced doubts that Israel really wanted a peace settlement which, they claimed, the Arabs were now ready to negotiate. The Arabs agreed that the United States had a crucial role to play, but the Jordanians were sceptical whether President Carter would insist on a settlement against Israeli wishes.
Moderator Peter Mansfleld commented that the PLO was now ready to establish a State on the West Bank and Gaza — a claim which was supported by Said Hammami, tha PLO representative in London.
Hammami remarked: "Only a fool would say that Israel does not exist. . . We are ready to live with the bitter realify."
JCNS
PRESIDENT CARTER ... target of Arab diplomatic offensive to reconvene Geneva conference at early date.
fit in with Israel's insistence that while she . will not accept PLO participation at Geneva, she is prepared to talk to other Palestinian leaders, including those of the West Bank, as, part of a Jordanian delegation to the conference.
Attempts to sidetrack the PLO in its present' setup came as Egypt, Syria and Jordan sought to give an impetus to their dip-' lomatic offensive mainly aimed at convincing U.S. President Jimmy Carter to reconvene the Geneva Middle East conference at an early date to lay the groundwork for a comprehensive and decisive settlement of the Israel-Arab conflict.
The three Arab "confrontation" states were being assisted in their offensive by oil-rich Saudi Arabia, or rather by the strongman behind the Saudi throne, Crown Prince Fahd.
The Egyptian President expressed his confidence that the Americans would respond to the Arab diplomatic offensive. "Believe me when I say that we stand on the threshold of a decisive, overall peace settlement.''
Sadat accused Israel of attempt-
ing "to squirm out of the peace offensive," claiming that Prime Minister Rabin's recent resignation was "a manoeuvre in the first place" aimed at stalling the process of negotiations.
The Egyptian President was seen rebuilding his image as a chief spokesman of the Arab world after having lost much of his credibility to Syria's President Hafez Assad. The fact that Assad stole a march on Sadat with Syria's political thrust intp Jordan and military intervention in Lebanon was one of the most distinct features of 1976 in the Arab arena. Other features included:
• Jordan's comeback to the Middle East arena by virtue of its projected federal union with Syria and the simultaneous decline of the PLO.
• Crown Prince Fahd's revival of the leading role Saudi Arabia played in Arab politics until the death of King Faisal in March 1975.
o The virtual settlement of the Lebanese civil war and the neutralization of most of the inter-Arab discords ranging from the Gulf states to the North African countries;
(Jerusalem Post)
ARAFAT'S LIFE SCARRED BY FAILURE
BY ROBEiRTM. STEIN
JERUSALEM — Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yassir Arafat emerges from a new biography as someone quite different from die highly-publicized myth he and his followers have sought to propagate.
Part thug, part buffoon, Arafat is depicted at various times in his life as a violent man habitually alienated from those around him; a pseudo-intellectual with little or no understanding of political processes.
His life has been scarred by failure and frustration: a grade school loner; a weakling gang member; an unsucessful guerrilla fighter in the 1948 war against Israel; a pawn in the Egyptian secret service. That Arafat has attempted to make a mystery of this past is well-known; enigma is essential to his popular mystique.
After meeting the PLO leader while researching an earlier book, Thomas Kiernan, an American journalist and author, resolved to discover the man behind the myth. "Arafat: The Man and The Myth," recently published in the United States, is a highly readable biography that combines interviews with the subject's relatives and acquaintances. Middle Eastern history, aiid an analysis of Arafat's own peculiar version of his life.
ACCORDING TO KIERNAN, Arafat, who has always been imaginative in recounting his life, is a man who could lament that his single-minded dedication made him "unknowable," and then systematically destroy all records of his youth.
A favorite myth has been that he was born in Jerusalem within yards of the Western Wall, in a house that has since been "bulldozed down'' by the Israelis. But Kiernan documents considerable evidence to show that the self-styled Palestinian spokesman was almost surely born Rahman al-Qudwa al-Husayni in Cairo, and duly registered as such at the Egyptian Ministry of Interior.,
His schoolmates say Arafat "was fat, soft, ungainly and completely unimpressive. He had a very high voice, and was beginning to suffer from comparisons to girls. . ." His father, a wealthy Gazan merchant, was forced out of business by Arab nationalists for trading with Jewish merchants. Years later, a brawl with Jews in ttie streets of Jerusalem ended with a serious bedting for the father at the hands of the British riot police.
Despite Arafat's' deep, often
violent alienation from his father — a relationship that Kiernan emphasizes at great length — it is obvious that the elder al-Qudwa's animosity towards Westerners, and particularly Jews, was readily transferred to his son.
DURING THE late 1940's, when Arab gangs mounted almost daily assaults against the "Zionist devilsj" Arafat joined his first "military expedition." Its targets Jewisli shops on the Old City of Jerusalem. A member of that , gang recalls what happened after they came under fire from the British police.
"Yassir pulled out his gun to shoot back, but pulled the trigger too soon. He shot himself in his thigh. . . He was yelping with fright. . . but it turned out to be only a flesh wound. Abdul Khader Husseini (the local guerrilla leader) took the pistol away from him, patted him on the head and said: *No more fighting for you, young man. From now on" you will stay in headquarters and make the coffee."
Returning to Caird in 1948, Arafat joined the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, where he displayed talent for manufacturing bombs and dir<;cting gang attacks. In one episode, in which his small squad was ambushed and beaten, Arafat, casting about for a scapegoat, decided that a young follower named Hamid had been an informer for a riyal gang. Amin Hegoub, a member of that squad recalls: .
"Yassir kept looking accusingly at Hamid, I guess we all did. We wer(^ all thinking to ourselves that he was the one who had forewarned the Nashashibisof our mission. Finally, in a very soft voice, Yassir spoke what we were thinking. Hamid vehemently denied it. Yassir stood up and we all noticed he had a pistol behind his back. He walked over to Hamid, who was by now in tears over our accusations, and shot him in the head."
Other witnesses explained to Kiernan that Arafat had, in fact,
been mistaken and that the^real -informer was discovered /later to be Arafat's superior officer. When Arafat learned this, Hegoub says: "It did not bother him in the least. . . I remember him saying that Hamid had been the first person he had ever personally killed, and for that reason Hamid had served a valuable purpose."
JINAN AL-ORABY, Arafat's first and only girlfriend, now a Cairo housewife, painfully describes how, upon discovering that her two closest friends were Jewish^ Arafat murdered their father and then almost beat her to death for crying in grief.
Former acquaintances also recount Arafat's consuming vanity over the loss of his hair, which explains the habitual 'kaffiyah' of later years.
With the rise ofNasser in Egypt and his policy of arming and training Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, Arafot turned his venom towards Israel, but he soon^'grew disenchanted with Nasser's grand designs. The Egyptian humiliation in the 1956 war convinced Arafat of the necessity for an "independent liberation army" drawn from the Palestinian "generation of revenge."
ARAFAT, of course, has never been popularly elected to anything. As British historian David Pryce-Jones points out in a recent issue of "The New Republic," it is the Western journalists and diplomats who mysteriously take the titular head of the PLO at his word, who project the false image of Arafat as a popular ispokesman.
HoWs long will.they. and Third World statesmen.be able to keep a straight face in dealing with this parody of ia popular nationalist leader? As documented in this book, Arafat's past will remind those who have forgotten that he is a bogus revolutionary, a former follower of the Moslem Brotherhood and Haj-Aminists, two of the moist reactionary movements in Arab history.
A singular geniuis for hard-sell public relations, along with the bizarre circumstances of international polities, brought Arafat die prominence and "power" to instigate the war in Lebanon — a murderous culmination to his maleficient career.
If diis tragedy has not finally buried Arafat's pretensions to vision and statesmanship, Kier-nan's inveistigation provides another nail for the coffin.
YASSIR ARAFAT
Towards this goal, Arafat coerced funds from the Kuwaitis, preached in coffeehouses from Stuttgart to Bierut, and travelled to China, where his demands for interviews with Mao and Chou En-lai were brusquely ignored. Back in Kuwait, Arafat boasted of "secret interviews" with the Chinese leaders and even published spurious accounts of these meetings in his sheet, "Our Palestine."
Kiernan's book . concentrates on Arafat's early years, with only the final chapters recounting the rise of Fatah and the Syrian-engineered raids and publicity that brought him prominence. Kiernan dates Fatah's "real success" from 1965, when "experienced" Syrian terrorists taught Fatah members a simple and highly effective means for over-c6ming the resistance of Palestinian refugees to its recruiting efforts. This "strategy" is still used by the PLO with striking success; uncooperative leaders are swiftly murdered, along with a random assortment of others, to remind the camps of the absolute mthlessness of their "representatives." Through such means, Arafat won control in both the refugee camps, and the originally Egyptian-sponsored PLO.
(Continued from Page 1) ,
1976 as an important first step" against boycott compliance..
But, the report added, "unless diis policy is buttressed by legislation prohibiting compliance and by administrative directives of a specific character, the policy itself stands to be undermined."
Cotler said that without legislation "we are in danger of creating two kinds of corporate citizens in Canada: those th^ slowed government policy arid are rewarded for it and those diat respect jgoyernmentiiblicy and are penalized for it."
The eight corpbratidnis identified are: CAE Electronics/Ltd.; Cansult, Ltd.; Great Wiest Steel Industries; The Cnadiah Mideast Consulting Group; Industrial Sus-tainers; International Harvesters; ATCO Industries, Ltd.; and Petei-Sheffield, Inc.
The Commission's legal advisory panel ^ composed of lawyers in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver, prepared their report on various areas of Canadian law. A researcher compiled documentation relating to Canadian trade in the Middle East as well as information on actual boycott operations in Canada. Letters of inquiry were sent out to several hundred Canacfian corporations.