The Cause That’s Being Hindered by Its Leader : Arafat’s support of Iraq sets back Palestinians

Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and nominal president of a nonexistent Palestinian state, was jetting around the gulf recently and decided to drop in on one of the oil-rich sheikdoms that until now had always been pleased to receive him. This time things were different.

Arafat’s plane was flatly denied permission to land; only when its fuel began to run dangerously low was it finally allowed to put down in a nearby state. There was, however, a condition attached. Arafat was ordered not to leave the plane. His former friends, it seems, no longer wanted to see him.

The story defines how Arafat’s--and the PLO’s--standing has sunk since the organization refused to condemn Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, an act of aggression that repelled most of the Arab world and terrified Kuwait’s immediate neighbors.

The PLO was one of only three members of the Arab League--Iraq and Libya were the others--that voted against supporting the U.N. embargo on Iraq and endorsing Saudi Arabia’s invitation to American forces.

It has long been noted of the PLO that it seldom misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. By casting its lot with the most aggressively radical of the Arab regimes and simultaneously alienating some of its most important backers, the PLO has committed a major and perhaps crippling blunder.

Arafat himself has probably thrown away whatever claim he had left in the non-Arab world to be accepted as a serious and responsible--not to say trustworthy--leader. When he issued his disavowal of further terrorism in Geneva in December, 1988--an essential prelude to the opening of a U.S.-PLO dialogue--Arafat solemnly promised to respect the integrity and sovereignty of every Middle East state. The declaration was aimed at Israel, though Israel was never named, but its wording clearly covered all countries in the region.

Well, almost all. As events showed, Kuwait was to be made an exception. The question is almost too painfully obvious to ask: If the PLO is ready to see Kuwait’s borders violated and erased, how can its pledge to respect the borders of Israel ever be trusted?

The PLO’s siding with Iraq has of course done more than give those suspicious of the organization’s intentions a new chance to say I-told-you-so. It has also done direct economic and political harm to Palestinians, those living in the gulf area--300,000 in Kuwait alone--as well as those living under Israel’s West Bank rule.

By gratuitously putting itself in opposition to its longtime benefactors, the PLO has probably sacrificed most of the hundreds of millions of dollars a year in financial aid that it had been able to solicit or extort from Saudi Arabia and the other gulf states. Some of that money went to subsidize high living by PLO executives. But much of it went to needy Palestinians--whose serious needs now seem certain to become all the more intense.

The PLO, for all of its internal divisions and for all it has lost by offending its gulf bankers, along with Egypt and other moderate Arabs, remains the dominant voice in Palestinian affairs. The question is whether its unseemly and eager embrace of Saddam Hussein’s aggression leaves it the Palestinians’ most effective voice. The answer clearly seems to be no.

Arafat and his colleagues have chosen to put themselves morally and politically on the wrong side of not just a dispute among Arabs--as some Arabs would have it--but of a confrontation that pits Iraq’s despotic expansionism against the norms of international law. That’s not going to be forgotten.

Arafat can go on claiming to be the Palestinians’ leader. The Palestinians, who have a case that deserves the respectful attention of the world, deserve better than that.