Palestinians

RAFAH, Gaza Strip -- A company of 150 Palestinian police crossed into the Gaza Strip from Egypt yesterday, but the expected triumph of their arrival was soured by further delays at the Israeli border station.Thousands of Palestinians who waited for two days along the hot and dusty route of their arrival were disappointed as the police remained at a border terminal late into the night.Only a smattering of the crowd remained to greet the policemen, expected to came by bus from the terminal to set up camp in a base turned over by the Israeli military.

DURING nearly 40 days in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison, I thought about where we Palestinians are as a people and where we are heading in the post-gulf war Middle East.While we might feel that the Israeli security fears are exaggerated, we have to understand Jewish history, especially the Holocaust's effects on the Jewish psyche. We have to deal seriously with the Israelis' security concerns in a manner acceptable to the norms of relations between peoples and states.As bad as the war's outcome has been for our demands of statehood and for Palestine Liberation Organization representation, we can still take advantage of the moral principles that have emerged.

ALGIERS, Algeria -- The Palestine National Council, the ruling congress of the Palestinian movement, was expected to give a qualified "yes" today to participation in an Arab-Israeli peace conference co-sponsored by Washington and Moscow.The Palestinians were the only key players who had not agreed to attend the conference, aimed at ending the four-decade conflict and tentatively planned for next month.Palestine Liberation Organization officials said yesterday that U.S. conditions for Palestinian attendance are still imperfect but that the most recent offers from Secretary of State James A. Baker III showed enough progress for a positive vote.

Emmitsburg -- Yasser Arafat's support for Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf crisis significantly weakened the PLO as an international player and rendered it irrelevant in the Middle East peace process. The decision-making paralysis of Mr. Arafat and his advisers has become an impediment rather than an impetus to peace.It is time for the Palestine National Council to elect a new leadership. The peace process and the Palestinian cause would be better served if the PLO acquires a new chairman and a new executive committee with more representation from the West Bank and Gaza.

Probably the smartest thing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his militants have done in the past 17 months of the uprising against Israel was not to put up the strongest resistance possible to Israel's invasion of Ramallah and other Palestinian centers last week. If they had done so, it would have looked more like a war than what it actually was: one of the most powerful armed forces in the world invading a comparatively unarmed population, rounding up men between the ages of 15 and 45 into public squares and, in a momentary excess reminiscent of what the Nazis did to the Jews, marking numbers on the Palestinians.

An excerpt from a Chicago Tribune editorial Monday: THERE were some stinging disappointments during Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright's recent talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. The main one was her failure to break the stubborn impasse between the two sides, which has left the Middle East peace process on life support.While meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Mrs. Albright scolded them for their failure to make the decisions needed to breathe life back into the peace process.

The ''historical breakthrough'' announced by the PLO and the Israeli government signals a new phase of reconciliation between two enemies. It also leaves Palestinians very much the subordinates, with Israel still in charge of East Jerusalem, settlements, sovereignty and the economy.Although I still believe in a two-state solution peacefully arrived at, the sudden peace plan raises many questions.The plan is unclear in its details, plain enough in its broad outlines. Israel will recognize the PLO. It will allow ''limited autonomy'' and ''early empowerment'' for Palestine in the Gaza Strip -- one of the most miserable places on earth -- and Jericho, a small West Bank town.

As PLO police enter and Israeli troops leave Gaza and Jericho, Palestinians will see that the long-delayed implementation of the Israel-PLO agreement is real. What so many have waited for so long has begun.This ought to raise Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat's standing with Palestinians and the Arab world. It was sinking so long as his people thought he had made concessions about Israel's legitimacy without ridding Palestinians of Israeli rule. It should rise as the Israeli presence begins to recede.

WAYNE, Pa. -- What should Palestinians think when they read, as reported by Israel's largest circulation newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, that Israeli schoolchildren, many of them religious and some of them teen-agers and only a few years away from joining military service, send letters to soldiers in which they write "Please kill a lot of Arabs"? Or when they write, "I pray for you that you return home safely, and kill at least 10 for me"? Or, "Let the Palestinians, may God blacken their name, burn in Hell.

PHILADELPHIA -- Palestinians didn't vote in Tuesday's Israeli elections. But they can take credit for the astonishing win by Ariel Sharon. Eighteen months ago no one would have believed that this aging super-hawk could become Israel's leader. Israelis had just voted in Ehud Barak in a landslide, precisely because of his commitment to peace with the Palestinians. Polls showed that 67 percent of Israelis believed that real peace was possible. But Tuesday, Israelis gave a stunning 60 percent to 40 percent margin to Mr. Barak's polar opposite: a former general notorious for a history of brutal military actions against Arab civilians and known in Israel as a "loose cannon" for his reckless military gambles.