Wisdom from a past war

The PLO - like the FLN's government-in-exile and its "external" army, based in the privileged sanctuaries of Tunisia and Morocco - was often ridiculed by younger Arabs as the "establishment institution" or as "tea-drinking bureaucrats."

Arafat's al-Fatah, expelled first from Jordan by King Hussein in 1970-71 and then from Lebanon in 1982 to distant Tunisia, tried to model itself on Algerians, including those who fought inside Algeria until General de Gaulle and such world leaders as US President John F. Kennedy helped to bring them victory.

Other comparisons exist, but they stop at one crucial issue. The European settlers of Algeria had France as a putative homeland to "return" to. Today's 350,000 or so Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories have neither real nor putative "homelands" to return to. As Israelis, most have come to identify deeply with the regions they have settled as part of a God-given, biblical "Greater Israel."

Some of the most determined of them, especially Americans, indicate they will use their own weapons - like those once wielded by the Europeans of Algeria - to fight, rather than leave. This is a really tough part of any peace settlement, involving recognition of an independent national state, mainly composed of Arab Muslims and Christians, alongside the mainly Jewish state of Israel.

Rather than the fractured, "autonomous" Palestinian Bantustans, sandwiched between Jewish settlements and crisscrossed by strategic Israeli military roads, that future state must have well-defined and defensible but open boundaries with its neighbors, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.

To Palestinians, this requires Israeli withdrawal of the occupying Israeli police and military forces. Many settlements would have to go, too. This would involve painful choices by all concerned, as it did during the very different, and largely unplanned exodus of Europeans from Algeria.

Planning now for these Palestinian and Israeli choices, during the heat of the growing guerrilla struggle, would save much grief later.

That later time will be when all parties, including the US Congress and Washington administrations, which have single-mindedly supported Israel's policies and strategies (if not always its tactics), have finally come to their senses and helped craft a lasting peace based on justice, equity, and breathing space for both peoples.

John K. Cooley, an American author, reports for ABC News. He was a Monitor correspondent in the Middle East and North Africa in the 1960s and '70s.

(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society

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