swung behind Yasser Arafat, who combined Fatah and other extremist
organizations with the PLO itself, under his own leadership, in 1968.
Following a series of bitter reverses, in particular the loss of Jordanian
territory on the West Bank (of the River Jordan, regarded as an important
part of the Palestinian ‘homeland’) during the Six-Day War of 1967, the PLO
effectively sought to take over the Jordanian state. Jordan had welcomed, and
indeed benefited, from Palestinian refugees, and it seemed a suitable society to
become the new Palestinian homeland. King Hussein, however, finally lost
patience with the demands of the PLO, and unleashed his army, which had
become more and more disenchanted with having to put up with a ‘foreign’
power inside its own boundaries, especially when terrorist attacks on Israel
regularly brought retaliation against Jordanian settlements. With an incredible
fury they expelled the Palestinians in 1971, some 10,000 being killed, and
Lebanon again became the potential homeland. From the mid-1970s, parti-
cularly after Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly in 1974, the PLO, and
Arafat himself, generally gained international recognition and sympathy—the
Arab League recognized it as the sole legitimate representative of the Palesti-
nian people in that year. However, to counter persistent Palestinian attacks on
Israeli targets, in 1982 Israel launched a massive military invasion of the
southern half of Lebanon effectively controlled by the Palestinians, and drove
them out. By late 1983 infighting between Palestinian factions, particularly the
Syrian-backed forces of ‘Abu Musa’ and ‘Abu Saleh’, led to the complete
withdrawal of forces loyal to Arafat from northern Lebanon. For some time
thereafter the PLO was based in Tunis, although Arafat had also maintained
particularly close links with Iraq. By 1987, when the series of demonstrations
known as theintifada(uprising) began in the Israeli occupied territories of the
Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the PLO had become more united and
appeared to have accepted even more the need for a negotiated settlement.
Indeed, in 1988 Arafat stated that the PLO was prepared to accept Israel’s right
to security in return for Israel’s recognition of an independent Palestinian state.
The PLO was, ironically, forced into political and diplomatic initiatives by the
success of the Israeli war tactics which destroyed the military potential of the
PLO, but also increased the international prestige of the Palestinians at the
expense of the Israelis. The end of thecold warallowed the USA and the
former Soviet Union to co-operate on theMiddle East, and one consequence
was increased pressure on Israel to accept the PLO as legitimate negotiating
partners in the endless search for a peaceful solution; in November 1991 a
Middle East peace conference opened in Madrid, with Israeli, Syrian, Egyp-
tian, Lebanese and Palestinian-Jordanian delegations. Although the PLO lost
some credibility by backing Iraq during theGulf War, international impa-
tience with Israel’s policies on the West Bank, and the continued publicity
surrounding theintifadamovement, allowed the PLO’s standing to continue its
PLO