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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
The PLO was formed in 1964 as an umbrella body for a number of
elements of the Palestinian resistance movement. Its main
constituent force was Al Fatah (Movement for the Liberation of
Palestine), whose head, Yasir Arafat, assumed control of the PLO in
1968. At the outbreak of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Al Fatah
numbered 6,500 armed men organized into regular units. Another PLO
faction was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
(PFLP), ideologically close to the Soviet Union and led by a
Christian, George Habash. The PFLP was bitterly opposed to
compromise with Israel. Numbering about 1,500 adherents in 1982, it
was responsible for some of the most deadly international terrorist
actions against Israel and its supporters. Other leftist groups had
splintered from the PFLP, including the Democratic Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine-General Command (with ties to Syria and
Libya), and the Palestine Liberation Front (Iraq-supported). The
Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), numbering nearly 4,000 men in
1982, was established in 1964 as the military arm of the PLO. In
practice, however, the Syrian general staff controlled the PLA's
contingents of Palestinian troops and the Jordanian army controlled
one brigade in Jordan. The Abu Nidal organization, an anti-Arafat
group supported by Libya and Syria, was responsible for many
terrorist actions in Western Europe and against pro-Arafat
Palestinians.
Initially linked to Syria, Al Fatah came into its own after the
June 1967 War, when the West Bank and the Gaza Strip fell under
Israeli control. Palestinian refugees poured into Jordan, where the
PLO established virtually autonomous enclaves, and from which it
launched guerrilla raids. Israel's retaliation inflicted heavy
damage within Jordan. The PLO refused demands from King Hussein
that it cease operations and, in a sharp conflict with Jordanian
forces in 1970 and 1971, was driven out of Jordan. Shifting its
headquarters to Lebanon, the PLO adopted a more formal military
structure, benefiting from an abundant flow of arms from other Arab
nations. In spite of the danger of Israeli reprisals, the Lebanese
government was forced to accept the independent political and
military presence of the PLO in Lebanon.
Airliner hijackings had been an element in the PLO's strategy
since 1967. In retaliation against an attack on an El Al airliner
in Athens in 1968, Israel mounted a helicopter raid against the
Beirut International Airport, destroying thirteen Arab-owned
aircraft. A number of deadly terrorist incidents and guerrilla
attacks against Israeli West Bank settlements occurred during the
1970s. In an attempt at hostage-taking, the Black September group,
an extremist faction of Al Fatah, killed eleven Israeli athletes at
the Munich Olympics in 1972. A climax in the terrorist campaign
occurred in March 1978, when Al Fatah raiders landed on the Israeli
coast south of Haifa, attacking a bus and cars on the Tel
Aviv-Haifa highway. Thirty-five Israelis were killed and at least
seventy-four were wounded. In reaction to the highway attack, the
IDF launched Operation Litani in April 1978, a three-month
expedition to clear the PLO guerrillas from Lebanese border areas.
Within one week, the strong IDF force had driven back the PLO and
established complete control in southern Lebanon up to the Litani
River.
Nevertheless, the PLO had not been dealt a decisive blow. With
Soviet help, it began to accumulate substantial numbers of heavy
weapons, including long-range artillery, rocket launchers,
antiaircraft weapons, and missiles. Between 1978 and 1981, numerous
IDF raids against PLO installations in southern Lebanon were
answered within hours by random artillery and rocket attacks on
Israeli border settlements. By mid-1981, the reciprocal attacks
were approaching the intensity of full-scale hostilities. Punishing
bombing raids by the Israeli air force included an attack aimed at
PLO headquarters in Beirut that caused many civilian casualties.
Although a truce was arranged with the help of United States
ambassador Philip Habib on July 24, 1981, acts of PLO terror did
not abate inside Israel, in the West Bank, and in foreign
countries. Israel considered the continued presence of long-range
weapons threatening its northern population centers an unacceptable
threat. In June 1982, Israel justified its invasion of Lebanon as
the response to an assassination attempt against its ambassador in
London by the Abu Nidal group. At the outset of the war, the PLO
had approximately 15,000 organized forces and about 18,000 militia
recruited among Palestinian refugees. In spite of the large
quantity of weapons and armor it had acquired, it never reached the
level of military competence needed to meet the IDF in regular
combat. When three division-size IDF armored columns bore down on
the 6,000 PLO fighters defending the coastal plain below Beirut,
the Palestinians fought tenaciously even though they were poorly
led and even abandoned by many senior officers. Effective
resistance ended within a week when the IDF closed in on the Beirut
suburbs (see
1982 Invasion of Lebanon, this ch.).
To avoid the domestic and international repercussions of the
bloody street fighting that an attack on the PLO headquarters in
West Beirut would have entailed, an agreement was negotiated
whereby the PLO troops and command would evacuate Lebanon and
withdraw to other Arab states willing to receive them. By September
1982, more than 14,000 PLO combatants had withdrawn. About 6,500 Al
Fatah fighters sailed from Beirut. Most of the others crossed into
Syria, and smaller contingents went to other Arab countries. As of
1987, it was believed that between 2,000 and 3,700 guerrillas were
still in Syria, 2,000 were in Jordan, and smaller groups were
quartered in Algeria, the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen), the
People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen), Iraq, Sudan,
and Tunisia. By 1988, however, many PLO fighters had filtered back
into Lebanon. About 3,000 armed men aligned with Al Fatah were
located in two camps near Sidon, forty kilometers south of Beirut,
and an additional 7,000 fighters aligned with Syria reportedly were
deployed in bases and refugee camps in eastern and northern
Lebanon.
Much of the Arab terrorism directed against Israel during the
mid-to-late 1980s was conducted by Syrian-sponsored Palestinian
groups that rejected Arafat. To a lesser extent, terrorist threats
resulted from Libyan involvement or from Fatah and its Force 17.
Terrorists made a number of attempts to infiltrate the Israeli
coast by sea and the anti-Arafat Abu Musa faction mounted several
terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. The Damascus-based PFLP waged a
relentless campaign to inhibit the development of moderate
Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories. The shadowy Abu
Nidal was believed responsible for a number of actions in which
Israel was not necessarily the primary target. These included the
hijacking of an Egyptian airliner with the loss of many lives in
late 1985, and shooting and grenade attacks at the El Al counters
of the Rome and Vienna airports a few months later.
The Shia population of southern Lebanon had initially welcomed
the IDF as adversaries of the PLO. By 1984, however, they had
turned against the Israelis because of the dislocation caused by
the Israeli occupation. Protests turned to violence in the form of
hundreds of hit-and-run attacks by Shia gunmen against Israeli
troops. The situation eased with the end of the Israeli occupation
in mid-1985.
Southern Lebanon continued to be a potentially dangerous base
for guerrilla attacks in 1988, following the partial reorganization
of PLO elements in Lebanon and the introduction of hundreds of Shia
radicals of the Hizballah (Party of God) movement supported by
Iran. Numerous attempts had been made by terrorist squads to
penetrate Israel's border defenses. A zone inside Lebanese
territory eighty kilometers long and averaging ten kilometers in
depth was patrolled by 1,000 IDF troops backed by 2,000 SLA
militiamen recruited among Christian Maronites. The IDF conducted
periodic sweeps of this zone to discourage cross-border
infiltration and shelling by the PLO. The frontier itself was
protected by antipersonnel mines, an electronic fence, acoustic,
radar and night-vision systems, fortified positions, and mobile
patrols.
The Palestinian uprising (intifadah) that broke out in
December 1987 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip apparently was
launched spontaneously and was not directly controlled by the PLO.
Burying their longstanding rivalries, local members of Al Fatah,
PFLP, DFLP, the Palestinian Communist Party, and fundamentalists of
the Islamic Holy War faction provided leadership through "popular
committees" in camps and villages. A loose coordinating body, the
Unified National Command of the Uprising, distributed leaflets with
guidance on the general lines of resistance. By August 1988, a
separate Islamic fundamentalist organization had emerged. Known as
Hamas, the Arabic acronym for a name that translates as the Islamic
Resistance Movement, it rejected any political settlement with
Israel, insisting that a solution would come only through a holy
war
(see Palestinian Uprising, December 1987-
, this ch.).
Data as of December 1988
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