Arafat: We Are Not on a Picnic

Yasser Arafat, 44, still wears the green fatigues, desert boots and bullet-studded pistol belt of an underground fighter. But the founder of al-Fatah and leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization is now more politician and diplomat than guerrilla commander. He travels almost constantly around the Arab world, shoring up support for his movement. Arafat's zeal for the Palestinians' cause is undiminished, reported TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager after an interview with the P.L.O. chairman in Beirut, but it has become tempered with pragmatism. Excerpts:

MIDDLE-EAST PEACE. Until now, all of the parties who consider themselves involved in finding new equations for a solution have still not touched on the essence of the problem: the Palestinian people's fate. These equations will never solve the problem as long as they continue to ignore the Palestinians. That is why military operations are still taking place on different levels between the military junta in Israel and the forces of the Palestinian revolution.

ISRAEL. We have heard some voices there after the [October] war that speak of the Palestinian people for the first time--something to be noted in comparison with [former Premier] Golda Meir's words after 1967 that there was no such entity as Palestinian people. But they also say that the Palestinians should find their future under the flag of King Hussein, as if they could determine our fate for us.

I cannot forget what [former Defense Minister] Moshe Dayan said before he resigned--that dangerous, barbaric statement that there was nothing left for Palestinians except death. We have to add what [Yitzhak] Rabin said when he became Prime Minister: that there was "no room for Palestinians among us." Recent decisions of the Israeli Cabinet proved beyond any doubt that the designs and the mentality have not changed a bit. They still ignore the major problem.

PALESTINIAN IDENTITY. It is the Palestinian miracle. The problem for us has never been borders or regime or land, but a holy homeland. Moslem and Christian pilgrims come from far away to see the land to which they are spiritually attached. We are the descendants of Christ, and we assume that we must be much more attached to this country than the pilgrims.

PALESTINIAN DISAGREEMENTS. We have had our differences in the Palestinian political field. But you must remember that we are not on a picnic. We are in the midst of a revolution, struggling against vicious enemies: imperialism, Zionism, defeatism. Consequently, we can expect differences to arise.

U.S. POLICY. American officials speak about the Palestinians, but they do not really speak with them. No one has approached us. We are getting killed --our children, our women, our old people--by American arms, American planes, American bombs, American napalm. I wonder how the innocent American taxpayer feels about the tragedy for which he is paying.

A PALESTINIAN STATE. If the Arabs can afford to give loans and invest in the U.S., the richest country in the world, let us expect them to help their Palestinian brothers economically. In the first years of the national authority in Palestine, we will hold elections so that our people can vote for the system of life they want. The P.L.O. will run the country before the elections, and the P.L.O. will run it after the elections, because the P.L.O. is the people.

RECONCILIATION WITH JORDAN. We have set our conditions for reconciliation [chiefly, renewal of operations from Jordan, stopped four years ago when Hussein's army expelled the fedayeen in bloody fighting]; and if King Hussein accepts them, we refuse to be pinned to complexes about the massacre of 1970. The policy of the revolution is pragmatic. After all, the Algerians are now dealing with the French, although 1.5 million Algerian martyrs lost their lives [in the war against France].

* Dayan actually was referring only to armed Palestinian infiltration into Israel. Rabin's objection is to a Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.