For this week's cover story on the people who hold the key to any lasting Middle East peace, the Palestinians, TIME'S editors drew on reporting by many of our bureaus, especially those in the region itself. From Jerusalem came files not only from Bureau Chief Dean Fischer but also from two people who, Fischer says, help make his post a "private seminar on the Middle East dilemma." One is Correspondent David Halevy, a native Israeli who has reported for TIME since 1969; the other is Nafez Nazzal, a U.S.-educated Palestinian who was born on the West Bank, heads the Middle East studies department at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah and advises TIME on West Bank affairs. Naturally, much of the reporting came from the correspondents who head our two bureaus in the Arab world, Beirut-based William Stewart and Cairo's William Drozdiak.

Stewart took up his post in Lebanon's battle-scarred capital just two months ago, but his arrival was a kind of home coming: he had reported from that city in the mid-1970s, shortly before Lebanon's civil war erupted. Says he: "The most startling change I've seen has been the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which now functions here as a state within a state." Also filing from Beirut was Abu Said Abu Rish, a Palestinian who has reported for TIME since 1950; he joined Stewart in interviewing P.L.O. Chief Yasser Arafat.

Drozdiak's reporting took him to Jordan and the West Bank, where he met with top officials as well as a variety of Palestiniansdoctors, lawyers, teachers, bankers, farmers. While he assumed his Cairo post in January, he was not new to the Middle East: as one of TIME'S State Department correspondents in 1978 and 1979, he traveled to the region with U.S. envoys. He first visited the area in the early 1970s, after he went to Belgium to pursue graduate studies in political science and economics; on the side he managed to play pro basketball in the European Cup League, which brought him a number of playing junkets to the Middle East. As a reporter, he finds that his beat reminds him less of his basketball days than of another sport. "Any eventa bombing in Baghdad, a riot in Syriacan have repercussions elsewhere," he says. "You have to assess the angle and spin of developments, as if the area were a giant billiards game."

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