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September 21, 1990 - Image 41

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Detroit Jewish News, 1990-09-21

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

BACKGROUND

HELEN DAVIS

Foreign Correspondent

I

srael stands on the brink
of a new year that is filled
with more uncertainty
than any in its 42-year his-
tory. Yet while the coming
year is replete with potential
hazards and dangers, it also
carries the seeds of fresh op-
portunity and renewed hope.
The end of the Cold War
has been accompanied by a
massive exodus of Soviet
Jews to Israel — some
100,000 so far this year —
and by a dramatic retreat of
Soviet influence in the re-
gion.
While this has removed
the old menace of Soviet am-
bitions being realized
through military assistance
to its regional clients —
notably Iraq, Syria and the
PLO — it has also served to
remove Moscow's restrain-
ing hand.
This has produced two
quite separate, quite diff-
erent and quite unpredic-
table results:
On the one hand, it opened
the way for Iraq's Saddam
Hussein to seek a quick
military fix to his economic
problems and a shortcut to
leadership of the Arab world
by invading Kuwait, with all
the consequences that have
flowed from that brutal act.
On the other, it appears to
have brought states like
Syria closer to the edge of
reason; to an awareness that
the steady flow of sophisti-
cated weapons systems from
Moscow really was over.
Facing this chilly reality
abroad and a critical econ-
omic crunch at home, the
regime of Hafez Assad ap-
pears to have concluded that
Syria cannot, as his former
Soviet patrons advised,
defeat Israel on the
battlefield.
For those reasons — and,
no doubt, motivated by his
own profound animosity
toward Saddam — he has
lined up behind the United
States in the Gulf crisis (a
move that was rewarded
with a visit to Damascus last
weekend by Secretary of
State James Baker) and is
now holding out something
that looks suspiciously like
an olive branch to Israel.

Yassir Arafat

Hussein of Jordan

Dangers And
Opportunitie

The new year for Israel poses pitfalls and
promise. Yassir Arafat and King Hussein
may fall, but the outcome of the Persian Gulf
crisis is far from clear.

Syria is Israel's most
powerful neighbor and its
intentions are a key deter-
minant of Israeli planning
and actions. In light of the
Gulf crisis, however, the fate
of Jordan's King Hussein
and the PLO's Yassir Arafat
are also emerging as matters
of immediate importance.
Both have extended support
to Saddam, and both now
face the threat of extinction.
The plight of these two
men was briefly joined last
week when the PLO leader
flew unexpectedly to the
Jordanian capital of Amman
in a desperate bid to plot
strategy with King Hussein,
his former arch-enemy, and
rescue his leadership of the
PLO from the wrath of other
Arab leaders.

Arafat Alone

The greatest threat to Mr.
Arafat's political survival
today comes not from Israel
but from the leaders of
Egypt, Syria and Saudi
Arabia — the emerging new
axis in the Arab world —
who appear determined to
replace him and his loyalists
with a new PLO leadership.
The reports were given
credence by the Egyptian
daily Al Wafd, which last
week accused the PLO
leader of causing grave
damage to the Palestinian
cause by supporting
Saddam. It added that
discussions were underway,
aimed at creating a Cairo-
based Palestinian govern-
ment-in-exile under an

-

alternative leader.
Syrian President Hafez
Assad has long been the
most virulent of Arafat's
critics, openly supporting
and sponsoring Palestinian
rivals who had broken with
the PLO because of their op-
position to its chairman.
One possible future PLO
configuration now being
made moot by the anti-
Arafat coalition involves a
broad Palestinian front con-
sisting of Hamas, the
Islamic fundamentalist
movement which has grown
up in the shadow of the Pa-
lestinian intifada, and a col-
lection of Syrian-backed Pa-
lestinian rebels.
Mr. Arafat's political dex-
terity has enabled him to
maneuver himself out of

tight political corners in the
past, but the essential ele-
ment in his survival kit has
been the need to rely on the
support and patronage of at
least one major Arab leader.
He has been in deep polit-
ical trouble since June,
when the United States
abruptly suspended its offi-
cial dialogue with the PLO
in the wake of the abortive
May 30 seaborne attack on
the Israeli coast by Abul
Abbas, a member of the
PLO's executive committee.
With his controversial two-
year-old diplomatic offensive
in shreds, Mr. Arafat then
lost the support of his prin-
cipal Arab patron, Egypt's
President Hosni Mubarak.
Having long since fallen
out with Mr. Assad — he is
officially persona non grata
in Syria — and without the
Soviet Union to fall back on,
he gambled everything on
Iraq at the start of the Gulf
crisis. It is a gamble that has
cost him his credibility
within the corridors of power
through much of the Arab
world and one that may
ultimately prove to have
been fatally miscalculated.

King Hussein
Trapped

Like Mr. Arafat, King
Hussein's essential
weakness is that he, too, has
been compelled to maneuver
between powerful neighbors
to maintain his balance
—and his grip on the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jor-
dan.
And like Mr. Arafat, he
put his money on Saddam
Hussein (no relation),
leading Israeli military
sources to reluctantly con-
clude that there is little pro-
spect that he will survive the
effects of the current Gulf
crisis.
They believe that an
imminent threat to his
throne is being posed by his
own radicalized Palestinian
majority, which has been in-
flamed and emboldened by
the rhetoric emanating from
Baghdad.
King Hussein, who has
ruled Jordan for the past 37
years, has always been
regarded as the most
moderate, pro-Western of

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

41

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