The Palestinian Liberation Organization: People, Power and Politics

By Helena Cobban. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 305 pp. $22.95

Reviewed by Larry L. Fabian

"I have confidence that we are a firm Palestinian leadership. We are all shrewd... If we use our shrewdness in the Palestinian arena and in the Palestinian revolution, we can achieve what we want." This is Fateh insider Salah Khalaf speaking to the Palestinian National Council in early 1983. His message can be read as a leit-motif for Helena Cobban's close-up look at the PLO's emergence over the past two decades as the embodiment of the Palestinian nationalist movement. Whether Khalaf's self-appraisal reflects the hubris of a leadership in decline or the strength of a movement once again ascendant after its "Beirut era" is the question that Cobban's analysis pushes to the forefront.

Leading from Strength

To answer it, she leads from her strengths. A former journalist in Beirut with firsthand exposure and exceptional entree to key PLO personalities, she draws upon lengthy on-the-record interviews with the top leadership that gives her narrative a distinctive cachet. Throughout, she is an empathetic interpreter of the Palestinian case—against the Arab states that have manipulated and patronized the PLO, against an Israel bent on destroying it, and against a United States determined over the years either to isolate it or to fit it into Washington's scheme of things.

Her focus, which places the book in a special niche among the handful of worthwhile studies of the PLO, is single-mindedly on the coterie of men whom she describes as the "historic generation" of Palestinian leaders—Yasser Arafat, Khalil Wazir, Khaled al-Hassan, Farouk Qaddumi, and Khalaf. In the 1950s and early 1960s they reconstituted a new Palestinian leadership out of the ashes left by the Disaster of 1948. They established Fateh, then took over the PLO, and all remain at its helm even today. Through their eyes, their words, their maneuvers, their divisions of labor, their disagreements, Cobban tells the story of how Fateh pragmatism became the engine of a Palestinian renaissance, the purveyor of a Palestine-first antidote to a failed pan-Arabism, and the basis for a combined political and military strategy to achieve ever-elusive Palestinian national goals.

Her account, laced with often revealing detail, traces how these Fateh "bosses" coped and groped during a seemingly endless series of crises from the Israeli crackdown on the resistance inside occupied territories to the battle of Beirut in 1982 and its aftermath. Cobban judges that the history of these tumultuous years unfolded in a way that was more or less foreordained by the PLO's multiple vulnerabilities, by the dynamics of its collective leadership, and by the strengths of its adversaries. She concludes that the Fateh-centered PLO has emerged from all this with its cohesiveness and vitality sufficiently intact to carry the movement into another era, one likely to be marked by deepening ties between Palestinians under occupation and those beyond, and probably by a "new stress on developing military aspects of the struggle inside the Israeli-occupied areas."

In its broad thrusts, Cobban's portrayal rings true as an explanation of how things have worked within the Arafat inner circle, and her nuanced portraits of the personalities and frustrations of the central cast of players convey sureness and authenticity. Yet for all its realism, the picture needs finishing.

Cobban settles for telling us what these men have done and failed to do during their stewardship over the Palestinian cause, but she seems reluctant to share her verdict on why they have acted as they have. We learn more about how they behave than about what they believe; more about their positional play on the chessboard than about their private sense of the game; more about their near-overwhelming preoccupations with the frenetic pace of surviving each crisis than about their necessarily imperfect world views, visions, and gut assessments of the historical situation weighing so tragically on their people. Cobban the reporter too often prevails over Cobban the intellectual skeptic, the prober who explores and evaluates the mindset of her subjects and the fateful choices they have made.

What Might Have Been?

For example, readers will be tantalized but not satisfied with her handling of several what-might-have-beens. What if the Fateh leadership had kept the PLO to itself, excluding the smaller groups that became an almost chronic opposition? What if they had been able to muster more concessions and bring off a deal with Washington in 1977 that Arafat so badly wanted? What if they had not become so hyper-stable a group over the years, "to the point of imminent ossification?"

By leaving her audience to draw their own conclusions about these and other fundamentals, Cobban has in effect given Khalaf's confident self-description immunity from challenge. Shrewdness there is aplenty within the Fateh inner councils. But shrewdness, asset though it may be to political leaders, is not a policy. And Cobban's appraisal will leave no reader in doubt that a sustainable and credible policy is what the founding generation of Fateh must now urgently fashion for its successors.

Larry L. Fabian is Secretary of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.