Sultan Knish On The PLO--The Perpetually Dying Terrorist Group

Sultan Knish writes about The End of Palestine--and the end of a terrorist group that has been postponed for far too long:

...From its founding, the PLO had always been a tool of larger movements in the Arab Muslim world. It began as a tool of Arab Socialism, and Pan-Arabism, the dream of a single Arab state encompassing the entire Arab world. An Arab socialist Caliphate. Even while agitating for the Palestinian cause, Shukairy went on promoting Pan-Arabism, in which there would be no independent Palestine. But then again an independent Palestine had never been the point.

By the 70's and 80's, the PLO had become a poisoned knife that cut the hands of its wielders. This is the common enough fate of those who create terrorist groups and imagine that they can control them. The PLO had managed to commit a number of terrorist atrocities in Israel, and Arafat, the 3rd successor to Shukairy, had become a household name. But it had achieved nothing except headlines.

In the seventies, the PLO attempted to seize control of part of Jordan, which after all had  comprised the majority of the Palestine Mandate. But the PLO was brutally suppressed by the Jordanian regime of King Hussein, and was expelled from the country. It tried the same thing again in Beirut a few years later, trying to carve a "Second Palestine" out of Lebanon. It failed again, with horrifying results for the entire country.

By the late eighties, the PLO was done. Egypt had made a peace deal with Israel. Jordan had a tacit understanding with Israel under the table. Syria was the only Arab country bordering Israel that was still somewhat supportive of the PLO, but it had little use for the PLO as a terrorist organization inside Israel, because the PLO was Arab, and the Golan Heights which Syria hoped to conquer was Druze. Instead Syria was far more interested in using the PLO to spread chaos in Lebanon for its own purposes.

Read the whole thing.

Only through the unforced errors of others has the PLO escaped irrelevance again and again--which brings us to Abbas's appearance before the UN this week.

Hat tip: Seraphic Secret

Technorati Tag: Israel and PLO and Middle East.