http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?id=53128&mador=4
Ha'aretz, August 9, 1999
Pleasing the PLO at the people's expense
By Danny Rubinstein
Abu Ali Mustafa, deputy leader of George Habash's
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,
announced over the weekend that arrangements have
yet to be made for his return from Damascus to the
West Bank. Palestinian Authority sources speculate,
however, that the Israeli authorities will approve
Mustafa's return if Arafat requests it.Most of the
leaders of the PFLP, once the strongest opposition
group in the PLO, are already residing in the Gaza
Strip or the West Bank. Among these are Tayasir
Quba'a, who lives in Nablus and is deputy chair of
the Palestinian National Council, Abed Rahim
Malouh, PFLP representative to the PLO's executive
committee, and Kais Abd Karim (Abu-Layla), who is
of Iraqi descent but who joined Habash's movement
years ago, in Lebanon.
Many PFLP leaders and activists have returned to
the Palestinian territories in the years since the
signing of the Oslo Accords and the establishment
of the Palestinian Authority. They are among tens
of thousands of PLO members, from all its different
factions, who returned from the Arab diaspora to
their homeland.
Some 30,000 joined the Palestinian defense
establishment and other government institutions.
Together with their family members, they constitute
a body of some 150,000 people. To this day, the
Palestinian newspapers occasionally carry greeting
advertisements to welcome the new arrivals.
Ahead of the Palestinian National Council's
gathering in the spring of 1996, Israel allowed
hundreds of the Palestinian organizations' central
activists into the territories, and since then they
can come and go as they please.
In Palestinian political jargon, the return of
thousands of PLO activists and their families has
been dubbed "the small return."
In numerical terms, the retun of 150,000 people out
of approximately 1.5 million refugees in the Arab
world is a drop in the ocean (another 1.5 million
refugees live in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and
inside the State of Israel). But those who have
returned since 1993 make up the political elite of
the Palestinian national movement.
And "the small return" has an ironic aspect in
terms of Israeli policy, since everyone knows who
Abu Ali Mustafa and his colleagues from the PFLP
leadership are, just as everyone knows who the
30,000 defense and administrative officials who
have returned to the homeland are.
These are the leaders of the Palestinian armed
struggle. They are the terrorists of the past, the
airplane hijackers, the bomb planters, the Katyusha
firers - commanders and foot soldiers alike.
Only they and their family members have been
permitted to exercise the "right of return," while
hundreds of thousands of other refugees who did not
take up arms are forced to continue in their
miserable lives of exile in refugee camps across
the Arab world.
Every now and then, Israeli public opinion is
awakened all of a sudden - because airplane
hijacker Leila Khaled is coming for a visit, or
because the German government and Interpol issue an
arrest warrant and request extradition of Abu
Dauod, who masterminded the 1972 terrorist attack
on the Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympics and
recently returned to Ramallah.
But the basic principle behind the issue is clear -
the return of the PLO's central activists is, to a
large degree, a legitimization of the Palestinians'
violent struggle through the past years.
But things look different from the refugee camps in
Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, where sharp criticism of
the "small return" can be heard. From the camp
dweller's point of view, Arafat and his men -
pretending to be a national liberation movement -
have in the final analysis liberated only
themselves and their relatives, at the expense of
the masses of refugees remaining in camps in the
diaspora.
Similar charges can be heard in the territories
themselves. In private conversations ahead of Abu
Ali Mustafa's possible return from Damascus to
Arabe, his hometown near Jenine, Palestinians claim
that Israel is once again buying off the PLO's
leaders, who are solving their own problems while
abandoning their people in exile
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