STELIO MARCHESE

Dalla «guerra di popolo» alla diplomazia della tensione in Medio Oriente  

N. 3/1985

Summary — The influence of Vietcong pattern and of maoist theories persuaded the Palestinian movement to test, between 1966 and 1970, the "war of people". The experience was sufficient to show the inapplicability of such methods among those peoples, besides it reawoke ancentral types of fight, originally renewed. PLO was rediscovering, first of all, the advantage of being an extra-territorial power, as the ancient piratic factions, and it was also rediscovering the advantage of using terrorism linked with diplomacy, with the shifting of great riches and the international blackmailing. Neither popular revolt, nor war, but improved techniques of internationalized terrorism. Yet the idea to render Palestine a second Vietnam fell down, all the more so as the real obsession of Arabian world is not Palestine in itself, but the interarabian internal order and the diplomatic and political relations with the western world. If on the one hand Palestine assumes a symbolic value and PLO the value of a power without any responsibility, on the other hand the economical and political middle eastern system makes itself concrete as an interdependent and well joined whole. With the intensification of the interarabian relations and the contacts with the western world, due to the very important transactions for refined weapons, the union of terrorism with diplomacy, used as a permanent means of political and economical fight is quickened and it is made institutional. Oil, terrorism and diplomacy constitute a triad much more stimulating than the small State of Palestine, in which one can get lost among the problems of petty administration.