The Palestinians: Hopes for a Homeland

They are realistic, they very much want recognition from Washington. They are trying to present the best face they can.

This observation, made last week by one of the Ford Administration's senior Middle East analysts, referred to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group that Arab states have recognized as the sole legitimate bargaining agent for the 3 million Palestinians scattered throughout the Middle East. Although badly battered from its losing role in the Lebanese civil war, the P.L.O. remains an important force. A delicate diplomatic problem facing the new Carter Administration is whether, how and in what capacity Palestinian representatives ought to be invited to any Middle East peace negotiations that take place in 1977.

Initial Ministate. Many Israeli officials agree that Palestinians should eventually be involved in any peace talks, but they also insist that the P.L.O. must be excluded -even though its leaders are currently talking in unexpectedly moderate tones. Last week P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat told a meeting of his 42-member Central Committee in Damascus that the Palestinians are now prepared to accept as their initial goal the creation of a Palestinian ministate. As most Palestinians now envision it, the state would consist of the

Jordan West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Arafat also warned that any Palestinian group that rejected the idea -meaning primarily George Habash's Marxist, uncompromising Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -must read itself out of the P.L.O.

As a kind of counterpoint to Arafat's decree, Palestinian students in the West Bank last week took to the streets once more in rock-throwing demonstrations. Later, Arab storekeepers called a general strike that closed down West

Bank shops for a day. Ostensibly, the protests were directed against a new 8% sales tax imposed on occupied territories as well as Israel itself. Basically, though, the Palestinians were acting out their anger against Israeli military authorities, who have been their rulers since the 1967 Six-Day War. Says Bethlehem's Arab mayor, Elias Freij: "Until a Palestinian state is established on the West Bank, there cannot be any peace between us and the Israelis."

Israel has always insisted that any West Bank-Gaza entity must exist in some kind of political and economic federation with Jordan. The Israelis have a legitimate security worry about having a new confrontation state on their borders, dominated by the hated P.L.O. They are also mildly concerned about the threat of 2 million exiled Palestinians coming to join a million kinsmen who live in the West Bank and Gaza.

National Identity. That fear is somewhat unrealistic, since "home" for most of the Palestinians means not the West Bank but towns within Israel that they might expect to visit some day but certainly not to liberate. Actually, what the Palestinians want most of all is the sense of national identity that would arise from statehood. Just as many Jews in the Diaspora were given a new sense of pride and hope by the creation of Israel; so also would the Palestinian refugees escape from the tarnish of being second-class citizens of nowhere if a state of their own were founded.

Some Palestinians, of course, are already thinking about their prospective new homeland in practical economic terms. These "Jews of the Arab world." as other Arabs haughtily refer to Palestinians, are already involved in tourism, real estate, banking and engineering elsewhere in the Middle East. They envision a Palestinian state that would become a kind of Middle Eastern Liechtenstein, offering a corporate base at easy tax rates for companies that wanted to operate in the Middle East. They assume that wealthy Arab states like Saudi Arabia would underwrite the costs of building a new country.

Whatever economic problems face a Palestinian state are nothing compared to the political one. Most of the West Bank's mayors and community leaders, like Freij, support the goals of the P.L.O., but they also feel they have earned the right to power for having endured and survived under the Israeli occupation. Arafat and other fedayeen leaders, meanwhile, consider themselves the genuine representatives of the Palestinian spirit for having fought abroad. A conflict between the two different views is inescapable.

Skeptical Doves. Israeli military governors are already warning West Bank leaders who might be expected to attend a P.L.O. parliament meeting scheduled in Cairo next month that they will not be allowed back if they go. Even Israeli doves are skeptical about whether Arafat, who once threatened to throw the Israelis into the sea, can be trusted with peaceable statecraft. For that reason, the Israelis will insist in any negotiations over the West Bank's future that they be allowed to maintain military posts along the Jordan River, which separates Israel proper from the West Bank. As an added protection against the future, they have so far established 68 settlements in the occupied territories, spotted roughly along the geographic lines that Israel hopes will become its borders in the future.

The Israeli timetable for relinquishing the occupied territories, according to TIME Correspondent Donald Neff, is between ten and 20 years. During that time, if the Palestinians demonstrate their peaceful intentions, the Israeli occupiers will gracefully and gradually withdraw. But the timetable has been speeded up now that the Lebanese civil war has been settled, and Arab states, at least, are once more moving toward broader peace negotiations. Not only in Damascus, Cairo and Riyadh but even in Washington, Middle East observers are now saying that sizable steps toward peace must occur in 1977. If they do not, Palestinian leaders now receptive to a settlement may be replaced by less moderate ones who are still determined to destroy Israel in what they see as the only solution to the Middle East's problems.

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