The PLO and the Jordan Option

Abstract

The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) stands at a crossroads. The battle of Beirut has revealed the valiant and tenacious character of Palestinian nationalism and the corresponding paralysis of the Arab state system. But the forced withdrawal of the PLO from Lebanon presented the organisation with the most serious challenge to its cohesion and vitality in its twenty years of existence. There have been discernible and nearly immediate consequences for the Palestinian national movement: first, the institutional infrastructure of the PLO has been dealt a crippling blow; second, the movement has been reduced to a second-level player in the diplomatic configuration of the region; third, long-standing discord within the movement has erupted into a full-fledged civil war.1 As a result, the political gains of the past decade are suddenly endangered. The period since the movement's departure from Beirut in late August 1982 began as a search for readjustment and accommodation, shifting between reconstruction of a shattered consensus and defining a new one more relevant to the tasks of the movement and conditions in the region. A new urgency had arisen to re-examine the politics of consensus, to make hard and unprecedented choices. No longer could the movement afford a cloak of multiple ideological coloration. The future path of the movement needed to be clarified and refined. The announcement on 11 February, 1985, that King Hussein and Yasir Arafat had agreed on a joint approach to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict is bound to sharpen the strategy debate under way within the Palestinian national movement. As the first substantive follow-up to the Seventeenth Palestine National Council (PNC) meeting of November 1984, the accord endorsed the principle of exchanging territory for peace, the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people within the framework of a Palestinian state and a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation, and a comprehensive settlement under the umbrella of an international conference at which the Palestinians would be