tions supporting retention of membership. This appears to give far too much
power to the political leaders who set the options, and leads on to a fear of
manipulation of an electorate by an unscrupulously demagogic political
leadership. The most recent serious example of the use (or misuse) of frequent
referendums to support a political leadership was President Charles de
Gaulle’stendency to put carefully structured options to the French electorate,
backing his own preference with threats to resign were the country not to
support him. Some countries have tried to protect the referendum as a tool by
making some neutral body—in the Italian case theconstitutional court,
responsible for authorizing the use of a referendum and the wording of the
options given.
A refinement of plebiscitory democracy which carries fewer dangers is the
initiative, whereby a certain proportion of the electorate may trigger a
referendum on a certain issue. This mechanism is most used at the local and
regional levels, almost half of the US states make provision for it, and it may
also be used at the national level in, for example, Italy and Switzerland. General
demands for increased popular participation in government seem likely to
extend the use of all forms of plebiscitory democracy.
PLO
The Palestine Liberation Organization was originally one of a series of political
and activist groups that arose from the plight of the Palestinians expelled from
their land when the State of Israel was formed. These refugees settled in UN-
organized camps in most neighbouring countries, but especially in Jordan and
Lebanon. Originally the hopes of the Palestinians were either for resettlement
in Arab countries, or for the Arab League to win back for them their original
homeland. After the Israeli defeat of Arab, and especially Syrian and Egyptian,
forces in theArab–Israeli conflictsof 1956 and 1967 they lost all such hope.
Various groups were created to try, in their different ways, either through
political negotiation or throughterroristtactics, to find a solution. The two
most important were the Fatah organization (the Palestine National Liberation
Movement), founded in 1957, and the PLO itself, founded in 1964. Fatah, as a
militant terrorist organization, insisted on violent means, especially through
trying to make alliances with the left-wing Muslim co-religionists in Lebanon
against the richer urban Christians. It appears that the revolutionary and
terrorist tactics of Fatah were influenced by the way the Algerian anti-colonial
fighters had forced out the French in the early 1960s. The PLO, led by Ahmad
Shukairi, a diplomat who had worked in Syria, took a much more peaceful
line. As the diplomatic solution systematically failed to win the West away from
supporting Israel, it lost credibility, and the masses of Palestinians in the camps
PLO