Palestinians Had Cause to Side With Iraq : Middle East: Before the Kuwait invasion, Baghdad offered their last best hope; now it lies in how the war is settled.

Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was as abhorrent to most Palestinians as to other Arabs or Westerners. But the Palestinians, along with the majority of Europeans, considered that, for the sake of regional and world peace, a concession should be made to Iraq and an international peace conference convened with the aim of addressing all of the region’s problems.

They also kept their reservations about Saddam Hussein to themselves and supported Iraq, primarily because believed they had no other choice.

Since 1948, unable to defend themselves alone, the Palestinians have rallied behind any Arab leader with any potential, real or imagined, to return justice to their cause. They rallied behind Nasser in 1967 and lost what had remained of their homeland--the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, a loss that also created hundreds of thousands of new refugees. They then took matters into their own hands, carrying out attacks against legitimate military targets, and later against such counterproductive targets as airports in the West and civilian targets in Israel.

Palestinians, the incontestable victims of Israel’s creation, became known as terrorists to the wide majority of Western opinion. Israelis, who massacred Palestinian civilians at Deir Yassin and Kafr Qasim and bombarded refugee camps with phosphoric bombs, could pose and be perceived as champions of peace.

The violence of Israel’s bombardment of Beirut in 1982 and the massacre of civilians at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps created more bitterness, more homelessness, more despair. In the occupied territories, Israeli repression of the Palestinian intifada exceeded all imagination.

Thus battered, the Palestine Liberation Organization decided in December, 1988, to give Israel the concession it had always demanded: recognition. Yasser Arafat pronounced what were supposed to be the magical words and a burst of hope followed. Soon, representatives of the P.L.O. were engaged in direct negotiations with U.S. representatives. But Arafat was asked to accept responsibility for acts that he could not control. The inevitable happened and the talks came to a complete breakdown in July, 1990.

The Palestinians once again looked around for help. They saw in the ancient land of Mesopotamia a forceful leader who claimed to have built a huge and potent military machine, comparable to that of the Israelis. He offered Palestinians their only opportunity to conduct peace negotiations from a position of strength. Yes, they had strong reservations about his style of governing. The Americans, who have and do align with all sorts of governments when interest is at stake, should easily understand this. Or the Israelis, who maintained close economic and military ties to South Africa.

Then, for his personal and national reasons, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

The Palestinians panicked. Any action or response that could shift the focus away from their conflict with Israel was to be shunned. An array of Palestinians barged into the offices of Arafat in Tunis. Some told him that the new crisis must be resolved through Arab mediation. Others told him that he should side against Iraq in order not to lose financial backing from the gulf states. When the time came for him to choose, Arafat chose the only powerful counterforce for Palestinian rights.

The Iraqi call for linkage between a resolution of the Kuwait crisis and the Arab-Israeli conflict was a logical one, not in the sense that Kuwait had anything to do with the Palestinian debacle, but because Palestine and Iraq were organically linked. Their peoples shared a history, a language, religion and aspirations.

No sophistry could convince the majority of Arabs that their destiny and that of Israel is not objectively linked.

The Israelis have known that the requisition of what once was Arab Palestine and their existence in the midst of the Arabs for the last 40 years has given them political but not legal rights. Hence their security remains threatened. This sense of insecurity, accentuated by a Jewish history punctuated by horror and persecution, lent a great deal of cohesion to an essentially diverse Israeli society. Its strength was enforced by almost unlimited moral, financial and military support from the West.

As Israel became stronger, other states of the region were exposed as pathetic structures unable to protect their own populations or industrial centers. A country with less than 5 million people brought 200 million Arabs to their knees. Blinded by its own might, Israel has rejected not only U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for a settlement of the Palestinian problem, but turned down U.S. peace plans and even reneged on its own proposals.

That is why many Arabs and Europeans were willing to overlook defects in the Iraqi position and see the gulf crisis as an opportunity to give life to the stalled peace process with an international conference.

Alas, rather than exploiting the opportunity that the crisis offered for bringing overdue justice to many peoples of the Middle East, the Bush Administration opted to polarize an already explosive region, with the certain outcome that its fragile structures will give way under the rain of bombs and missiles. Governments of the region, already desperately lacking in legitimacy, will fall like autumn leaves.

When the dead of this apocalypse are buried or swept away, the Middle East will be left with its cities in ruins but its problems still standing. In order to solve them, an international peace conference will have to be held. How rational and shorter it would have been to hold it without war, without creating fertile ground for further bitterness and humiliation, with all the instability that such feelings are bound to produce.