1968 Read Online Free PDF Page B

groups used the label
Palestinian,
as in the Palestine Liberation Front, the Palestinian Revolution, the Palestine Revolutionary Youth Movement, the Vanguard for Palestine Liberation, the Palestinian Revolutionaries Front, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. At least twenty-six such groups were operating before the 1967 war. In the leftist counterculture, these groups were termed “nationalist” and were gaining support, though they had little backing from the mainstream in Western countries. The support of such groups by SNCC was further isolating the once leading civil rights organization.
    A week before the year 1968 began, Ahmed al-Shuqayri resigned as leader of one of the dominant Arab groups, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, PLO, founded in 1964. He was most famous for his unfulfilled threat to “drive the Jews into the sea.” Accused by fellow Palestinians of failing to deliver on his promises, and of deceptiveness and sometimes outright lying, a rival organization, Al Fatah, rejected the leadership of the PLO under al-Shuqayri. Al Fatah, which means “Conquest,” was led by Abu Amar, who had become legendary among Arabs as a guerrilla fighter since al Fatah’s disastrous initial raid in 1964 when they tried to blow up a water pump but failed to detonate the explosives and were all arrested when they returned to Lebanon. Abu Amar was a nom de guerre for a thirty-eight-year-old Palestinian whose real name was Yasir Arafat.
    At the outset of 1968, eight of these Palestinian organizations announced that they had established a joint command to direct guerrilla operations against Israel. They said that raids would be escalated but would not be directed toward Israeli civilians. Their spokesman, a Palestinian heart surgeon, Isam Sartawi, said that their organization sought “the liquidation of the Zionist state” and would reject any proposal for a peaceful solution to the Middle East. “We believe only in our guns, and through our guns we are going to establish an independent Palestine.”
    More bad news appeared on the cover of the January issue of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
The hands of a clock on the cover showed seven minutes to midnight. The clock, which symbolically indicated how close the world was inching to nuclear devastation, had said twelve minutes to midnight ever since 1963. The
Bulletin
’s editor, Dr. Eugene Rabinowitch, said the clock had been reset to reflect the increase in violence and nationalism.
    On the other hand, on the first day of the year, Eliot Fremont-Smith began his
New York Times
review of James Joyce’s resurrected
Giacomo Joyce
by saying, “If beginnings mean anything, 1968 should be a brilliant literary year.”
    After considerable debate in 1967, the British announced on the first day of 1968 that they would replace John Masefield as poet laureate with Cecil Day-Lewis, a writer of mysteries and an Oxford poetry professor. The poet laureate is an official member of the queen’s household with a ranking somewhat above caretaker but below deputy surveyor. When Masefield died in May after being poet laureate for thirty-seven years, many said that in the late 1960s the whole idea of an official poet was old-fashioned.
    In the first week of 1968, Bob Dylan was back, having vanished for a year and a half after breaking his neck in a motorcycle accident. His new album,
John Wesley Harding,
was welcomed by both critics and fans because after his foray into “folk rock,” the term used when he started to accompany his songs with electric guitar, he began 1968 true to his folk-singing roots, with acoustic guitar and harmonica, and with piano, bass, and drum backup.
Time
magazine said, “His new songs are simple and quietly sung, some about drifters and hoboes, with morals attached, some with religious overtones, including ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’ and a parable about Judas Priest. The catchiest number is the last, a swinging proposal