THIS IS THE third time that the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, is being expelled from an Arab city, leaving behind hundreds of dead Palestinians.
In 1970 he and his forces were expelled from Jordan after first having dragged it into a civil war that had led to Palestinian blood being spilled like water. Arab leaders, like Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser and the Sudan's Jaafar Nimeri, came to Arafat's aid, preventing a total Palestinian defeat. Arafat recovered, and in 1976 sent his people into another civil war, in Lebanon.
In 1982, the PLO was expelled by the Israelis from Beirut. This time the United States came to Arafat's aid. The Arab countries, however, refrained from making any real gesture to help him -- as did Arafat's main supporter, the Soviet Union.
Arafat probably does not know to this day that Israel's former prime minister, Menachem Begin, saved his life at the time, according to Israeli military sources. Begin rejected a proposal from the Israeli army to kill the PLO leader with a sniper's bullet while embarking on one of the last ships to evacuate his forces from Beirut.
And now, in Tripoli, Arafat is being expelled again -- this time, however, by other Palestinians, with active support from the Syrians, ostensibly the "protectors of the Palestinian cause."
As was the case in Beirut, so it is in Tripoli: the Arab states have done nothing, nor even said anything, about the fact that Palestinians are killing each other. It took American and French pressure to convince the Egyptians to supply Arafat's besieged forces with ammunition -- ammunition that was allowed to pass unhindered into Tripoli by Israeli naval vessels blockading the northern Lebanese port.
The recent bloodbath in Tripoli is not a new phenomenon among the Palestinians. For five decades they have been preoccupied with civil war and coups d',etat, even though they are yet to attain nationhood or self- government.
Even before the establishment of the state of Israel, in the period known as the Arab Revolt (1936-39), thousands of Palestinians killed each other. In fact, many more Palestinians have been killed by Palestinians and other Arabs than in all the years of conflict with Israel. It is difficult to refute the argument that the Palestinians are their own worst enemy.
This history has had a profound impact on Israeli public opinion. Many Israelis ask themselves what they could expect from a people that has been so self-destructive. Too many Israelis, unfortunately, have started to ask whether there is any prospect of living with these people in peace. Israelis also ask themselves what they can expect from the next generation of Palestinians -- the future leadership -- who have grown up amid bloodshed and death.
The Palestinians have been afflicted by another tragedy -- their failure to produce any leaders endowed with a sense of >realpolitik. If this is the end for Arafat, it represents the third time the Palestinians have deposed their leader: Haj Amin el-Husseini, who led the Palestinians from one disaster to the next in the 1930s and 1940s, was replaced; so was Ahmed Shukeiri, the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who gained international attention when he coined the phrase: "Throw the Jews into the sea."
And now Palestinians are getting rid of Arafat and his supporters, who have been at the helm of the PLO since 1967. Though Arafat can point to several impressive diplomatic achievements, he has failed. He could satisfy the demands of neither the radicals nor the moderates within the PLO. He provided the radicals with military defeat, and the moderates with no clear way to either direct or indirect talks with Israel. In his desire to keep the organization unified, he dared not move at all. And then, it turned out, there was no unity.
This latest Palestinian civil war in and around Tripoli cannot be blamed entirely on the consequences of the PLO's defeat in Lebanon. It was produced primarily by Arafat's visible flirtation -- and it was no more than a flirtation -- with the idea of negotiations with Israel.
When Arafat agreed to speak to Jordan's King Hussein to explore the possibility of the Jordanian king representing the Palestinians in pursuit of President Reagan's peace plan, Syria's President Hafez Assad regarded this as unforgivable. Assad considered the Reagan plan to be nothing but a mechanism to isolate Syria in the Arab world, and here was Arafat flirting with it.
The fact that Arafat pulled back at the last minute and withdrew from even considering the Reagan proposals made little difference to Assad: The die was cast.
Probably Arafat's only hope now is to pick up where he left off with Hussein, and to enter into partnership with the king on either the Reagan proposals or another peace plan.
Cooperation with Hussein is the best way for Arafat to translate the support he still enjoys on the West Bank into political achievement. If he had exploited this opportunity last April, he would have enjoyed wide international support, and placed Israel-American relations under strain, since the Israeli government flatly opposed the Reagan plan.
But to grasp this last opportunity now, Arafat will need more courage than he has displayed in the past, and vision that one must doubt he possesses.
The present situation gives both Hussein and Arafat a real chance to test the true intentions of the incumbent Israeli government. In my opinion, Israel is far more fearful of a diplomatic challenge by the Jordanians and the Palestinians than of any military challenge by them.
The present situation also gives King Hussein an opportunity to prevent Syria from gaining total domination of the PLO, and thus preempt the threat to his kingdom by Palestinians loyal to the radicals and to Syria, who claim that Jordan is part of Palestine.
Unfortunately, we cannot be very optimistic about Hussein. Israeli governments did not ease Hussein's way to the negotiation table. He wants peace, but has studiously avoided discussing it in the past. The chance that Hussein will diplomatically challenge the government of Israel is slight indeed, and not only because Hussein is no Sadat, and Jordan is not Egypt. To stay in power Hussein has to remain part of the Arab consensus, not veer from it.
Perhaps another reason for Hussein's reticence is the sorry lesson of recent history: Every Arab leader who has tried to live in peace with Israel until now has been assassinated. This is what happened to Hussein's grandfather, King Abdulla, and more recently to President Sadat and Lebanon's Bashir Gemayel.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's government in Israel considers the split that has developed in the PLO to be the major achievement of the Lebanese war. This view is myopic.
Though the PLO's military infrastructure may have been destroyed in southern Lebanon, its human infrastructure remains alive and discontent in refugee camps and the West Bank. For these people no solution has been found, and for these people -- in terms of their long-term problem -- the revolt within the PLO means nothing.
For Israel the basic problem remains unsolved as well. In fact, it may have only been compounded. The radicals in the PLO will probably continue terrorist activities directed against Israel from Lebanon in the future. If former defense minister Ariel Sharon is correct in his claim that Syria has become the main "address of terror," we can expect a cycle of action and reaction, ultimately escalating into full-scale war with Syria.
No, the achievement Israel claims in Lebanon will only become real if the split in the PLO can be translated into political movement. But this can only happen if Israel decides to pursue the Reagan plan -- rejected out of hand by Menachem Begin -- or tries to revive the autonomy talks with Egypt within the Camp David framework, leading to full and meaningful autonomy to Arab populations on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
But there is little realistic possibility of Shamir's government choosing either of these options. Instead, Israel will stand by, self-satisfied as the PLO fights itself, and assume that strategic cooperation with Washington will allow it to continue its policy of tightening Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza.
So it is most likely that the parties concerned will cling to the status quo, despite its dangers. If they do, all sides will lose: the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Lebanese, the Syrians and the Jordanians. There can be no winners.