Evidence that the Soviet Union may have inspired last weekend’s terror attack by units of the Palestine Liberation Organization emerges from the record of Yasir Arafat’s visit to Moscow last week when he met President Leonid Brezhnev, Premier Alexei Kosygin and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.
At each public meeting with Arafat, the Soviet leaders strongly urged the PLO to stop its own internal bloody feuds, in which a number of Palestinian leaders have been killed, and to concentrate on its struggle against Israel. The Soviet leaders also threw their full weight behind the criticism of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s peace policies which are believed to have prompted the wave of internal PLO killings.
There is an even more intriguing link between some of Arafat’s own remarks in Moscow and last Saturday’s raid. On Sunday, a Palestinian statement in Beirut, quoted by the Iraq news agency, said that the raid was carried out in memory of Kamal Adwan and other PLO chiefs killed by an Israeli counter-terror squad in Beirut on April 13, 1973.
ARAFAT SUPPLIES THE LINK
Two days before the raid, Tass, the Soviet news agency, published a long interview with Arafat, in which he compared the latest inter-Palestinian killings with the killing of Adwan and other PLO leaders by the Israelis five years ago.
Zionist and imperialist circles, and Arab “lackeys,” were striking at the Palestine revolution by various methods, he said. One was to involve it in clashes with the Jordanian and Lebanese authorities, the others were “the physical elimination of Palestinian leaders” and incidents such as that in Cyprus on Feb. 18 where Palestinians murdered a leading Egyptian, Youssef el-Sabai, editor-in-chief of the semi-official Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram.
The most important tasks of the Palestine resistance, Arafat concluded, were “the further strengthening of national unity, the strengthening of the front of staunchness and rebuff, and a resolute struggle against a capitulatory settlement.” He also called for stronger links between “all fighting progressive forces in the Arab world and the socialist countries led by the friendly Soviet Union.”
Judging by Palestinian and Arab delight at Saturday’s raid, by Egypt’s embarrassment, by the threats that more are on the way, and by the fear of Israeli reaction which it has provoked, it was designed to serve precisely the goals which Arafat, with full Soviet encouragement, proclaimed in Moscow.
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