January
PLO leader Yasser Arafat and its senior member Issam Sartawi publicly meet with Uri Avneri, Matti Peled, and Yaakov Arnon of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. Several weeks later, Arafat and Sartawi are severely criticized during the Palestinian National Council meeting for having met with Israelis. In the following April, Sartawi is shot dead because of his many meetings with Israelis by an assassin from the Abu Nidal organization, which rejects any contact with Israel.January 20
Israel deports thirty-foure lecturers from West Bank universities who refuse to sign a statement declaring that they do not support the PLO.July 26
Members of the Jewish underground attack the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three persons and injuring dozens.———
Israel adopts more stringent criteria for family unification. Requests by residents of the Occupied Territories married to a person from abroad are now examined on the basis of two considerations: governmental considerations, which generally means giving a benefit to families of collaborators and, from time to time, to wealthy Palestinians who promise to invest in the territories, and exceptional humanitarian cases. As a result of the more stringent criteria, the number of approvals for family unification drops by one-third.
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The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC) is founded by a group of Palestinian agronomists and engineers affiliated with the Palestinian Communist Party. PARC strives to reduce agricultural dependence on Israel and to prevent the expropriation of land by helping Palestinian farmers to adopt modern cultivation practices. Its main strategy is to promote the formation and consolidation of local farmers’ committees. PARC and other organizations of its kind will constitute the social infrastructure of the first intifada.