Israeli state terrorism
THE ZIONIST leaders have portrayed the murder of the
PLO's number two leader, Khalil Al-Wazir ("Abu Jihad"), as a reprisal for the Fateh commando operation at Dimona, the
Israeli nuclear center, at the beginning of March.
The latter operation was unquestionably inopportune, coming in the midst of a continuing uprising by the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, whose moral strength has lain in part in the fact that they are confronting Israeli forces armed to the teeth with nothing but stones. But the murder of
Abu Jihad was as great, if not a greater error by the Zionist leaders.
NABIL HAITHAM
Y KILLING Fateh's main military
B leader and the chief of the PLO's department of the occupied territories, the Israeli state terrorists thought that they were striking a major blow to the Palestinians involved in struggle. The result was the opposite. The murder of Abu Jihad only provoked a new upsurge of the Palestinians, helping to revive the momentum of the uprising and to further radicalize it.
The Zionist leaders' notion that this uprising is "manipulated from the outside"
reflects a blindness that comes from their failure to suppress it by forceful means.
You have to be blinded by a police conception of history not to realize that the power of the uprising lies mainly in the forms of mass self-organization that it has the celebrated "people's generated, committees."
Uprising's effects on PLO leadership
The uprising is beginning to affect the political behavior of the traditional PLO leadership. Up until 1982, this was determined by an equilibrium between the pressure of the organization's money suppliers, the reactionary Arab oil monarchies and the pressure of the Palestinian masses. The
Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, by forcing the evacuation of the Palestinian fighters from their autonomous power bases in South Lebanon and Beirut, qualitatively shifted this balance to the advantage of the reactionary states.
By creating a powerful mass movement, which for the first time in the history of the