Goal of the PLO Has Not Changed

Jerome Segal’s article (Editorial Pages, Aug. 24), “Mideast Policy Is Snagged on Semantics,” plays an empty tune we have been hearing for years.

Segal would have us believe that fundamental changes have occurred within the Palestine Liberation Organization and it is ready to accept the realities of the 1980s.

During the heyday of oil politics in the 1970s when Western diplomacy seemed preoccupied with placating the Arabs, two observations were frequently offered about the Palestine Liberation Organization:

1--The organization was becoming more moderate.

2--The way to make it even more moderate was to talk to the PLO rather than to isolate it.

Experience proved that neither observation was true. No matter how many times stories circulated about a change in the PLO’s posture toward Israel, reality always turned out to be otherwise.

No negotiations; no recognition; no acceptance of U.N. Resolution 242; no end to terror; no change in the National Covenant; no peace. PLO policy remains the same.

Moreover, recognition of and talking with the PLO, rather than generating a new moderation, reinforced PLO extremism.

Now, once again, we are hearing from certain quarters that the problem in the region is that Israel and the United States will not deal with the PLO and if only . . .

Why, despite repeated evidence that the PLO is incapable of fundamental change, do some in the West seek to resuscitate the PLO? The answer is to be found in a false and dangerous assumption that there cannot be peace in the Middle East without the PLO.

The leaders of the PLO do not come from the West Bank or Gaza. They come from the areas that are Israel pre-1967. It is no coincidence that the PLO came into existence before the 1967 war (when Israel did not hold the West Bank) because the goal of the PLO leaders, the vast majority of whom are the same today as in the 1960s, is to take over Israel proper.

What is often described as PLO change through the years are primarily tactical moves to win international, particularly U.S., support, but not reflecting any real change in the PLO goal of destroying Israel.

ALEXANDER L. KYMAN

Los Angeles

Kyman is president of the Pacific Southwest Regional Board of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.