[The following is an excerpt from an interview with Abu Khaled el-Amleh, a leader of the dissident current within Fatah. The interview was originally published in the January
15 issue of the Arabic-language weekly el- Mufik el-Arabi. Excerpts were reprinted in the February 6 issue of the Paris fortnightly Inprecor. This translation from Inprecor's French version is by Intercontinental Press.]
Question. Some say that it was the tightening of the siege and the fighting in northern Lebanon that forced Arafat to go to Egypt. That, deceived and stabbed in the back, he was obliged to go there. What do you think?
Answer. That is absolutely not true, since, as we explained immediately, Arafat had already gone to Egypt politically right after the evacuation from Beirut [in August 1982), through delegations that he sent there. After Beirut, Arafat went even further than the meeting with Mubarak. He took up the Reagan Plan, met with Zionists, and went to Jordan. These political moves all complement one another; it is wrong to look at things in a fragmentary way. It is well known to all Palestinians and Arabs that Arafat and his Central Committee decided in Tunis after the Fez Conference to put an end to the armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon and Syria in order to concentrate his troops in Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. On more than one occasion he requested facilities for evacuating the Palestinian fighters. One of the conditions for concrete integration into the Reagan Plan is willingness to halt the combat and leave the field of battle in Lebanon, in face of our imperialist and Zionist enemies, in order to line up with the forces of counterrevolution. ...
Arafat returned to Lebanon at the moment when the Palestinian revolution, alongside the National Salvation Front and other Lebanese patriots, was fighting in the mountains. He returned saying he had come to finish a task. We saw that this task amounted to dealing blows to the patriotic Lebanese and Palestinian forces in order to make northern Lebanon an area opposed to the Lebanese-Palestinian fighting efforts. Arafat has succeeded, thanks to his information apparatus and the Arab and international mass media, in overlooking all these realities and in accusing the rebellion [i.e., the Fatah dissidents] of being responsible for the fighting in the north. The truth is that it was Arafat who wanted this armed conflict and this Palestinian bloodshed in order to appear as an honorable fighter who resisted the dissidents, the Syrians, and the Libyans.