Palestinian ‘Homeland’

I would like to add several footnotes to Charles Wallace’s article (March 29), “Palestinians Succumbing to Despair in the Quest to Return to Homeland.”

1--Palestinians living in Jordan do not live in the Palestinian “Diaspora.” Historical Palestine and the Palestine of the British Mandate included what is now Jordan, Israel, and Judea and Samaria (or the West Bank). (Thus, when the Palestine Liberation Organization claims that it wants to “liberate Palestine,” it means this entire area.)

2--If a mini-state on the “West Bank” would satisfy Palestinian Arab nationalist dreams, why was one not established during Jordan’s occupation of that area from 1948 to 1967? That occupation, by the way, was illegal, and was recognized by only two nations in the entire world--Great Britain and Pakistan.

3--Yasser Arafat is no George Washington. Washington led the Americans to independence; Arafat has provided his people with a bankrupt leadership. Where was Arafat after the 1977 Camp David Accords, which promised Palestinian Arabs autonomy if they would sit and negotiate with Israel? The answer: the same place he is today when the subject of negotiations is broached--nowhere to be found.

4--The most important point, however, may well be why 65,700 Palestinian Arabs are living in cinder-block and concrete houses in a Jordanian shantytown, which is the country’s fourth largest city. Saudi Arabia, Libya, Kuwait, and other Arab states have been rolling in billions of dollars of oil money for years. They are somehow able to provide tens of billions of dollars worth of advanced weaponry to the PLO and Syria, not to mention their own armies. Why have they been so loathe to spend a few billion dollars to improve the living conditions of their Palestinian Arab brethren?

While Arab leaders claim every day that they are concerned about the plight of individual Palestinian Arabs, tiny Israel with its endangered economy has shown the difference between talk and action, bringing in some 800,000 impoverished Jews from Asia and Africa, including most recently 15,000 black Jews from Ethiopia.

Wallace’s concluding paragraphs may contain the answer to these questions: While more than 65,000 Palestinian Arabs live in a dusty shantytown a few miles north of Amman, Khalil Wazir, the deputy PLO military commander, “lives in a fashionable house in Central Amman.”

ROBERT M. SMITH

Los Angeles

Smith is assistant to the director of the Pacific Southwest Region of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.