A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  The Arab campaign to keep all the West Bank free of Jews, like the campaign of the 1930s to keep Palestine free of Jews, may have garnered international support, but it is based, now as then, not on justice but on injustice. Thus the Jewish state, which was squeezed by violations of international promises and by Arab conquest to an indefensible coast, that saw Jews forcibly expelled from the ancient Jewish cities they had come to rebuild, that was attacked by Arab forces from the surrounding mountains, is now being told by virtually the entire world that it must accept a confined and stifling existence on the narrow shoreline dominated by a hostile, Judenrein Palestinian state on these same mountains, the very heart of the Jewish home. If Lord Cecil had proclaimed “Judea for the Jews, Arabia for the Arabs,” the world was now saying, ’Arabia for the Arabs—and Judea too.” The Reversal of Causality was now complete.

  5

  THE TROJAN HORSE

  False reductionism is the central technique of the Arab campaign against Israel. Reduce all the Middle East conflicts to the Arab-Israeli one, reduce the Arab-Israeli conflict to a Palestinian-Israeli one, and you are then ready to take the next logical step: Reduce all the various Palestinian communal groupings and points of view to a single, anti-Israel “liberation movement,” the Palestine Liberation Organization. This completes the role reversal whereby Israel is transformed into the heartless villain, challenged by a united band of dedicated, popular, even romantic revolutionaries, Arafat’s PLO—if not George Washington and the Minutemen, then at least the Hollywood version of Emiliano Zapata and his freedom fighters.

  In no time, the PLO became the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” No matter that until the Oslo Accords its officials weren’t actually elected by anyone and then, too, by dubious methods. No matter that its only claim to unchallenged support lay in the fact that it slaughtered any Palestinian opponent who dared dissent. Throughout the Arab world, it was accepted that the PLO had to be pushed front and forward when discussing Israel—so that the attention of Western public opinion would remain focused on the purported sins of Zionism against the Palestinians, rather than on, for example, the Arab states’ feverish arms buildup aimed against Israel and against each other. So obvious was the utility of this strategy that even the PLO’s fiercest Arab antagonists supported its claim to being the “sole” spokesman for the “sole” (or at least principal) aggrieved party of the entire Arab-Israeli dispute.

  Where did this organization come from, and what was its purpose? Was its espousal of terror a result of current political frustrations, or did it have deeper roots? And was its campaign of “armed struggle” against Israel developed in response to the “Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands” after the Six Day War of 1967, as the PLO repeatedly claims, or did it have an earlier genesis?

  The PLO was founded in Cairo in 1964, three full years before the outbreak of the Six Day War. It was established by Egypt’s Nasser as a means of continuing his unsuccessful war against Israel, and of destabilizing Jordan. 1 Since these two states together constituted the territory of Mandatory Palestine, they both readily fell under the PLO Charter’s goal of liberating “all Palestinian lands.” Notice that at that time Israel, the prime target, did not have an inch of what are now termed the “occupied territories” of the West Bank and Gaza. When the PLO was set up to liberate “Palestinian lands occupied by Israel,” this unambiguously meant the State of Israel, especially the coastal plain between Tel Aviv and Haifa, where three-quarters of all Israelis live. It was the coastal plain from which most of the PLO leadership had originated, and it was the coastal plain to which they intended to return.

  Thus, in its founding meeting, the Palestine National Council (PNC), the “legislature” of the PLO, adopted its infamous “constitution,” the PLO Charter, * which laid out the PLO’s most fundamental purpose:

  ARTICLE 19: The partitioning of Palestine [by the UN] in 1947 and the establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void, [and remains so] whatever time has elapsed….

  ARTICLE 20: The claim of a historical or spiritual tie between Jews and Palestine does not tally with historical realities nor with the constituents of statehood in their true sense….

  ARTICLE 21: The Palestinian Arab people, in expressing itself through the armed Palestinian revolution, rejects every solution that is a substitute for a complete liberation of Palestine….

  ARTICLE 22: [T]he liberation of Palestine will liquidate the Zionist and imperialist presence….

  (For the full text, see Appendix E.) While the PLO repeatedly committed itself to amend the charter (first in the 1993 Oslo Accords, and again in the May 1994 Cairo Agreement, the September 1995 Oslo 2 Accords, and the January 1997 Hebron Accord), no changes have been made despite occasional claims to the contrary. So long as it has not formally been repealed by the Palestinian National Council, the charter stands as compelling proof that the basic Palestinian grievance against Israel remains existential and not merely territorial.

  Indeed, this is a central problem with the negotiations with the Palestinians. Whenever there is a major disagreement between the two sides, the Palestinian Authority ignites violent outbursts against Israel. These are often preceded by a wave of incitement in the Palestinian media and by senior Palestinian officials, who invoke language and ideas reminiscent of the Palestinian Charter in an attempt to demonize Israel. Amending the charter, or failing to do so, thus takes on added significance. The charter’s central claim is that Israel is an illegal and criminal entity: “The establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void, whatever time has passed”—that is, regardless of the location of its borders or the size of the territory under its control. The attachment of the Jewish people to the land for thirty-five hundred years, an attachment of unparalleled duration that has left an indelible mark on humanity from the Bible to the Balfour Declaration, is expunged with a wave of the hand: “The claim of a historical or spiritual tie between Jews and Palestine does not tally with historical realities….” And the charter’s central purpose is that Israel be destroyed: “[The] liberation of Palestine will liquidate the Zionist and imperialist presence….”

  The goal of what has been termed policide—the eradication of an entire country—is such a rarity that many people have difficulty believing that it could actually be the motive of organized political activity. That nations fight wars over borders, natural resources, colonies, and even forms of government is well known. But there is hardly a case in modern history in which an antagonist has sought to completely annihilate a rival nation. Not even World War II, the most terrible of wars, resulted in such an outcome. The defeat of Hitler and the capitulation of Hirohito were nowhere understood as opportunities to eradicate Germany and Japan. Yet it is precisely this most extraordinary goal, the erasure of an entire nation and its people, that the PLO had chosen to emblazon on its banner. (For this reason I insisted on the charter’s annulment as part of the Wye Accords.)

  To make sense out of such a movement, it is necessary to go beyond the pretense that 1967 and the “occupation of the West Bank” are the starting point of “resistance” against the Jews. The Arab war against the Jews is in fact as old as this century, and the PLO itself dates the formative period of Palestinian consciousness and resistance to Jewish settlement back to the 1920s and 1930s, the crucial decades before the creation of the State of Israel. Throughout this period, Arab bands launched murderous raids on Jewish farms and villages, assassinated Arab moderates, and rejected Jewish peace overtures and concessions. This ferocious and relentless campaign claimed hundreds of Jewish lives over two decades, yet it cannot be traced to any of the grievances that are offered today to explain the source of Arab opposition. This campaign had nothing to do with refugees, for at the time there were none. It had nothing to do with disputed borders, for there were none of those, either. Moreover, it had nothing to do with Palestinian Arab sovereignty, for the Arabs never claimed to be fighting for it in those days, and they rejec
ted it when it was offered to them under the UN Partition Resolution in 1947. The conflict was driven not by any of these factors but by an irreducible rejection of any Jewish presence in the area.

  Those who pursued this blind obsession trampled anything that stood in their way. Their favorite targets were Arabs who refused to acknowledge the “exclusive representation” of the “Arab cause” that the extremists claimed for themselves. Above all, the extremists rejected anyone who embraced the notions of compromise and coexistence, which are anathema to fanatics everywhere.

  Perhaps the most prominent leader of Arab reductionism before the establishment of Israel in 1948 was the PLO’s revered forebear, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. As we have seen, Husseini was the preeminent agitator of the bloodiest Arab assaults on Jews in the first half of this century. A central figure in the PLO pantheon, he was the founding father of the PLO in both spirit and practice. No other figure has had such an influence on the PLO leadership. Over time, many of the Mufti’s lieutenants and henchmen have assumed near-mythic status in PLO lore, among them Emil Ghouri and Abed al-Kader al-Husseini. In fact, when he was a young radical in Cairo in the early 1950s, Arafat sought to enhance his anti-Jewish image by taking the name Yasser (his real name is Abed al-Rahman) in memory of Yasser al-Birah, a leader of the Mufti’s reign of terror in the 1930s. 2 Nor did it hurt his standing that he was related to the Mufti, being a member of the Al-Qidwah branch of the Husseini clan. Arafat has referred to the Mufti as his mentor and guide. In 1985, for example, during the thirtieth commemoration of the Bandung Conference of 1955 (an international forum of “unaligned” revolutionaries), Arafat extolled the Mufti with great reverence. He said that he took “immense pride” in being able to follow in the footsteps of the Mufti, who participated in the original conference. He emphasized that “the PLO is continuing the path set by the Mufti.” 3 4

  What is that path? And what did the Mufti represent? We can gain an important insight into the goals and methods that the PLO pursued by examining the period of emerging Arab nationalism in Palestine that shaped not only the future course of the PLO as an organization but the path of its leaders, many of whom grew up in the Mufti’s movement. For as in the case of Arabist attitudes toward Zionism, the interwar period proved to be pivotal in shaping the Arab nationalists’ enduring concepts regarding the Jews of Palestine.

  Haj Amin al-Husseini was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921, less than a year after they convicted him for instigating the murderous anti-Jewish riots in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Mufti’s incitement and organization of enforcement gangs to back his ideas led to even more severe anti-Jewish riots across Palestine in 1921, then to the great massacres of August 1929. But the Mufti’s main targets were actually Arabs. With his henchman Emil Ghouri and with funding from the Nazis and Italian Fascists, 4 he organized the torture and murder of moderate Arab leaders, landowners willing to sell to Jews, and anyone else he believed had betrayed his virulent creed. According to one scholar:

  These poor people were not always immediately murdered; sometimes they were kidnapped and taken to the mountainous areas under rebel control. There they were thrown into pits infested with snakes and scorpions. After spending a few days there, the victims, if still alive, were brought before one of the rebel courts, or commanders, tried, and usually sentenced to death, or, as a special dispensation, to severe flogging. The terror was so strong that no one, including ulema [learned men] and priests, dared to prepare the proper burial services. In some cases, the British Police had to perform this duty; in others, the corpses were left in the streets for several days after a shoe had been placed in the mouth of the victim as a symbol of disgrace and as a lesson to others. 5

  Entire clans of Arabs who objected to the Mufti’s policy, like the Nashashibi family of Jerusalem Arabs, were either wiped out or exiled, the total number of Palestinians murdered was in the thousands, and forty thousand Arabs were driven into exile. 6 The result of this consistent reign of terror was that by the end of the 1930s, moderate Arab opinion had been completely silenced in Palestine. When the Round Table Conference of Middle Eastern leaders, convoked by Britain, met in 1939 to determine the future of Palestine, the heads of the Husseini clan could claim to be “the sole representatives of the Palestinian Arabs.” 7

  But for the Mufti all of this was still small change. He sought to tie his campaign to a more powerful, global engine that could ensure the creation of a Pan-Arab empire under his command—and the systematic, final annihilation of the Jews. Such an engine he believed himself to have found in the 1930s with the rise of the Fascist movement in Europe.

  The Mufti first approached the German consul in Jerusalem in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, and he soon began drawing parallels between Nazi Pan-German nationalism and Pan-Arab nationalism. This analogy caught on quickly among many Arabs. Like the Arab world, the German-speaking world prior to Prussian unification had been fragmented into scores of feuding principalities and communities, many of them under foreign rule. The German psyche, too, had been wracked by a century-long crisis of confidence summed up in the question of Was ist Deutsch? (“What does it mean to be German?”) And the profound German resentment of the Western powers for the “dismemberment” of their empire and their state at Versailles struck a sympathetic chord in Arab ears.

  The German crisis of identity finally resolved itself in an emphatic, negative definition of Pan-German nationalism: German meant not Jewish, not Bolshevik, not polluted by the effeteness of the West. This was a formula that many Arabs found compelling as well, as evidenced by the founding of Arab national-socialist movements, parties, and youth organizations in the 1930s, the widespread dissemination of Nazi anti-Jewish literature, and the overall sympathy for Hitler’s cause among the Arabs. Thus, Hitler’s annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland met with jubilation among Arabs as a demonstration of the power of the oppressed. The future King Khaled of Saudi Arabia dined with Hitler on the night of Czechoslovakia’s capitulation, and he raised his glass in a toast in honor of the heroic undertaking. 8 Other Arabs sympathetic to Hitler’s work included key figures such as Nasser, the founders of the Ba’th Pan-Arab nationalist socialism currently in power in Syria and Iraq, and some of the guiding lights of Islamic fundamentalism. Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the fundamentalist Moslem Brotherhood, described the benefits of fascism this way:

  The world has long been ruled by democratic systems, and man has everywhere honored the conquests of democracy…. But men were not slow to realize that their collective liberty had not come intact out of the chaos [caused by democracy], that their individual liberty was not safe from anarchy…. Thus, German Nazism and Italian Fascism rose to the fore; Mussolini and Hitler led their two peoples to unity, order, recovery, power, and glory. In record time, they ensured internal order at home, and through force, made themselves feared abroad. Their regimes gave real hope, and also gave rise to thoughts of steadfastness and perseverence and the reuniting of different, divided men. 9

  One of the early Ba’thist leaders wrote of this time:

  We were racists, admiring Nazism, reading its books.… We were the first to think of translating Mein Kampf. Whoever lived during this period in Damascus would appreciate the inclination of the Arab people to Nazism, for Nazism was the power which could serve as its champion. 10

  In Palestine the Mufti’s clan founded the Palestinian Arab party, which party leader Jamal Husseini asserted was based on the Nazi model. 11 The party youth division was even briefly called the Nazi Scouts. 12 The outbreak of World War II found the Mufti in Iraq, where he organized Arab contacts with the Axis powers and solicited support for pro-Nazi insurrections in Iraq and Syria (the latter with the help of Salah al-Din al-Bitar and Michel Aflaq, the founders of the Ba’th). 13 In 1941 a Pan-Arabist regime allied with the Mufti deposed the British-installed Hashemite monarchy of Iraq and declared war on the Allies. The British army succeeded in propping its man up a
gain, but not in saving the six hundred Jews who were slaughtered in Baghdad before British forces reentered the city. 14

  From Baghdad, the Mufti made his way to Rome and Berlin, where he offered the services of the Arab nation to the war effort on the condition that they “recognize in principle the unity, independence, and sovereignty of an Arab state of a Fascist nature, including Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Trans-Jordan.” 15 In October 1941 the Nazi government issued a formal communiqué in Berlin promising to help in the “elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.” 16 The Mufti then flew to Berlin and met Hitler in person for the first time on November 28, 1941. Husseini expressed his willingness to cooperate with Germany in every way, including the recruitment of an Arab Legion to fight for the Nazis. Hitler told the Mufti that the two of them shared the common goal of the destruction of Palestinian Jewry. 17

  The Mufti proceeded to work energetically on behalf of the Nazis. He made repeated broadcasts over Nazi radio urging Moslems everywhere to rise up against the Allies, and he organized sabotage and espionage in Arab lands. A representative broadcast from 1942 points out the stark relevance of the Axis war effort to Arabs:

  If, God forbid, England should be victorious, the Jews would dominate the world. England and her allies would deny the Arabs any freedom and independence, would strike the Arab fatherland to its heart, and would tear away parts of it to form a Jewish country whose ambition would not be limited to Palestine but would extend to other Arab countries….