These guerrilla groups, forming the Palestine Liberation Organization and other militia groups, would bring negative worldwide attention to this issue. With every terrorist act that happens, not much effort is put into finding why it happened but on finding who did it. And most of the

Jillian Becker, author of "The PLO: the rise and fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization", is highly critical of the PLO. Becker lays out the history of the PLO and does not fail to mention how Egypt's Nasser and Syria used the guerrilla groups for their own political gain. "The history of the PLO is a chronicle of wrong judgments, of repeated mistakes, of lessons never learnt, of faith in wishes. It is full of cruelty, wretchedness, atrocity, violent deaths and the destruction of a country, all proceeding from the follies of fanaticism and self deception." (Becker 5) Nasser founded the PLO in 1964 for the purpose of crushing the monarchy of Kingdom of Jordan, but King Hussein successfully expelled the guerrilla groups from his country. Nasser's goal was to bring all Arab nations under Egypt control. The cruelty of the PLO was also demonstrated through the use of units of fedayeen who raided Israel from Lebanon and Jordan. The PLO proved successful in not only bringing attention to the Palestinian question but it also succeeded in putting Arabs against Arabs. Terrorist raids that were meant to frighten the Israelis instead threatened the very lives that the PLO claimed to be fighting for. Becker argues that peace is not possible with PLO involvement. "If hope lay anywhere it was in the very dissolution of the PLO. From its inception the Organization had been nothing but a savage instrument of Arab politics. It had not been designed or used as a means to liberate the Palestinians. Its business was to keep them in misery and to waste their lives, generation after generation." (Becker 228) It seems apparent that the very existence of the PLO would hinder any peace that may be found between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Becker would have been surprised with the PLO's change in tactics. Yasir Arafat has recently spoken to both the United States and Egypt's current Prime Minister to speed up "the peace process." It seems apparent that Becker was sure that the PLO's only means of getting a Palestine State would only be through terror. "PLO power was free of all checks and accountability, secular or religious." (Becker 141) However, by 1988 the PLO accepted Resolution 242 that recognized Israel's right to exist. The PLO is finally recognizing more diplomatic means of negotiating.

The Palestine Liberation Organization in its birth in 1964 called for the destruction of Israel in its charter. More than thirty years later, Palestinian President Yasir Arafat seems close to arriving at a peace settlement with Israel. How can this political group that was responsible for the civil war in Lebanon (according to some literature) and blamed for various attacks on the Israeli population allowed to be involved in the Middle East peace process? Have they changed their tactics of killing to more diplomatic means of obtaining peace? My main quest is to know if the PLO has changed and how has it changed since its birth in 1964 until now?

The Palestinian Liberation Organization found immense power in the beginning stages of its existence but that power has slowly

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Approximate Word count = 2094
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)