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> The Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine is led by Jordanian Christian Nayef Hawatmeh, 40. He and his 500 Marxist followers split from Habash's organization in 1969, complaining that the P.F.L.P. was not vigorous enough in combatting right-wing Arab governments like Jordan's. Their most notable recent operation was the Ma'alot raid in Israel last May, in which 21 schoolchildren were killed. The attack prompted a massive Israeli retaliation by air on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
> The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command is another militant splinter from the Habash group. Led by Ahmed Jebreel, 45, a onetime Syrian army officer, the General Command's hard-core force of 150 guerrillas was responsible for the Qiryat Shemona raid in Israel last spring in which an apartment house was attacked and 16 occupants were killed.
>Al Saiqa was established by Syria in 1967 and is still largely funded by Damascus. Led by Zuheir Mohsen, 45, Saiqa (Thunderbolt) consists of possibly 2,000 men, including about 1,000 full-time guerrillas. Most of them are Palestinian refugees who fled to Syria. More military than political, Al Saiqa is little more than an unofficial auxiliary of the Syrian army.
> The Arab Liberation Front is composed of Palestinians sympathetic to the radical Iraqi Baath Party. Commanded by Abdel Wahab Kayyali, 37, the A.L.F. has only about 100 full-time fedayeen and is seldom involved in terrorist raids.
That this disparate collection of militant groups has maintained a facade of unity over the years is due largely to the energy and political skills of Yasser Arafat. Invariably dressed in fatigues and a kaffiyeh, he usually sports dark glasses and a five-day beard. The balding, pudgy P.L.O. leader, one of the best-known figures in the Arab world, is an engineer by training and he has a straightforward view of the organization's function: "As a refugee, I have no time to spare for arguing over the left and the right. What is important is action and result."
Arafat, 44, was born in Jerusalem, the son of a textile merchant. He was a member of one of the city's best-known clans, the Husseinis, and a distant relative of the Grand Mufti, the Moslem spiritual leader who led the first revolt against the British mandate. As a youth, Arafat was involved in the Arab-Israeli fighting of 1947-48 and became a refugee when his family fled to Gaza. While studying at the University of Cairo, Arafat became president of the local Palestinian Students Federation, and served in the Egyptian army during the 1956 war. Later he moved to Kuwait, where he worked in the Ministry of Public Works and operated a profitable contracting company on the side. A co-founder of Al Fatah, he quit his Kuwaiti jobs in 1964 to devote his full-time energies to the cause.
Complete Devotion. Arafat has never married. "Palestine is my wife," he once remarked, and those who know him well agree with the judgment. "It is his complete devotion," says one Palestinian friend, "24 hours a day, 30 days a month, 365 days a year. There is no stop—ever." He eats on the run, neither smokes nor drinks. He has no home to speak of; one night he will sleep in the P.L.O. office in Beirut, the next at a friend's home. Even