The leader of the second largest faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization has called on Arab nations to join in an all-out assault against the “Israeli enemy.”
Dr. George Habash, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, described the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a prelude to the “complete liberation of the national Palestinian soil.”
He said that effort must now be assisted in the form of assaults on Israel from “all Arab borders.”
Habash, whose faction is the second largest in the PLO after Yasir Arafat’s Al Fatah, made the remarks in an interview last Friday with “Voice of the Mountain,” a Druse radio station in Lebanon.
The Palestinian uprising, he explained, is a new phase in the armed struggle against Israel. Its goal, “the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza,” will be “the beginning of the downfall of the Zionist enterprise,” he predicted.
In the meantime, Israel’s Arab neighbors must lend the Palestinians a hand, Habash said, “by raining blows upon the Israeli enemy army on all Arab borders.
“That means to expand the operations now being carried out from Lebanon to the Jordanian, Syrian and Egyptian arenas,” he said.
He added, “We expect of our masses within the occupied land that they will inflict deaths among the enemy, since it was this action which brought about the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon in 1984-85.”
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