A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  But if, on the contrary, England loses and its allies are defeated, the Jewish question, which for us constitutes the greater danger, would be finally resolved. 18 [emphasis added]

  The Mufti also recruited Moslems from the Soviet Union and the Balkans for Arab units of the German army being organized by a fellow Palestinian Arab named Fawzi Qawukji in Berlin. The Mufti’s tour of Yugoslavia won six thousand recruits, who were eventually reorganized into a Waffen SS mountain unit that served in the campaign to destroy Yugoslav Jewry. “Kill the Jews wherever you find them,” he said. “This pleases God, history and religion.” 19

  Basing himself in Berlin from 1942 to 1944, the Mufti worked to prevent the rescue of Jews from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia, countries which, although allied with Hitler, were willing to let Jews flee to Palestine and elsewhere. He protested that not enough Nazi resources were invested in preventing the escape of Jewish refugees from the Balkans. 20 A Nazi official, Wilhelm Melchers, said in evidence taken during the Nuremberg trials on August 6, 1947: “The Mufti was making protests everywhere—in the offices of the Foreign Minister, the Secretary of State and in other S.S. Headquarters.” 21 These protests had the aim of urging the Nazis to greater thoroughness in preventing the escape of Jews from Europe. For example, on May 31, 1943, the Mufti personally delivered to German foreign minister Ribbentrop a letter protesting the plan to arrange the emigration of four thousand Jewish children from Bulgaria. 22

  But the Mufti was again not satisfied. He had a larger objective in mind than merely preventing the escape of some Jews. He wanted, as Melchers pointed out in the Nuremberg trials, to see “all of them liquidated.” 23 As in the case of the Balkan Jews, he worked feverishly toward this goal. Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, said that Husseini

  played a role in the decision to exterminate the European Jews. The importance of this role must not be disregarded… the Mufti repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he was maintaining contact, above all to Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this an appropriate solution to the Palestinian Problem. 24

  Eichmann’s deputy gave eyewitness testimony about Husseini’s involvement:

  The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say that accompanied by Eichmann he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz: 25 [emphasis added]

  How did such a war criminal escape punishment? Throughout Europe, Nazi war criminals were exposed and brought to justice. Not so in the Arab world, where Nazis and Nazi collaborators were greeted as heroes. Hundreds of German Nazis found refuge, and employment as advisers in murder, in Arab capitals. This was especially true of Egypt, which was a fierce rival of the South American dictators in trying to attract Nazis to its service, 26 netting such prizes as SS General Oskar Dirlewanger, who murdered thousands of Jews in the Ukraine and became Nasser’s bodyguard, and Dr. Heinrich Willerman, who experimented on live human beings in Dachau. The notorious SS killer Alois Brunner spent decades in Damascus as a guest of the Syrians until his reported death there in the summer of 1992. The PLO, too, has avidly continued the Mufti’s tradition, consistently collaborating with neo-Nazis (and often with paleo-Nazis, as well), who have naturally found its goals and methods appealing. *

  Nazism may have been defeated in Europe, but it was very much alive in the Middle East. After the war, the many Arab soldiers and agents who had fought for Hitler were warmly received back into the Arab world. 27 The Mufti himself set up shop as a guest of the Egyptian government, and went back to work spreading his poisonous doctrines throughout the Middle East. He and his cousin, the Palestinian Arab military leader Abed al-Kader al-Husseini, organized units that sought to liquidate Israel in 1947 and 1948, led by such veterans of the Nazi war effort as Fawzi Qawukji and Mahmud Rifai, a Syrian who had fought in the German paratroops 36 and was inspired by the Mufti’s famous plea: “I declare a Holy War. Murder the Jews. Murder them all!” In September 1948 they assembled a “Government of all Palestine” whose seat was to be in Gaza. This Palestinian “government” was supported by the Egyptians as a rival to King Abdullah’s government in Transjordan—which also claimed all of Palestine. 37 Yasser Arafat’s brother Gamal, who had served with Abed al-Kader al-Husseini’s forces, became secretary in the Mufti’s “government.” Arafat himself claims to have fought alongside Husseini, and there is a report that he served as his personal aide. 38 When, after the Arab defeat, Abdullah of Jordan showed signs of a willingness to make peace with Israel, he was murdered by the Mufti’s agents in 1952. 39 This was an important escalation of the earlier practices of assassination, for the targets now were not merely prominent men but the leaders of whole countries. This ultimate system for intimidating entire nations, perfected by the Mufti and his disciples, is still very much with us.

  Determined to keep the Mufti’s radicalism firmly in line, King Farouq of Egypt allowed his guest little room to maneuver. When the Mufti actually tried to go to Gaza to take the reins of his “government,” Farouq quickly had him shipped back to Egypt. 40 The Mufti eventually fled to Beirut, where he died, but he lived long enough to see his revenge. King Farouq of Egypt was overthrown in 1952 and replaced by the Arab world’s first totalitarian state: the Pan-Arab nationalist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, which set the vast machinery of government to work inculcating the hatred of the West and the dream of vengeance. Through Nasser and his pupils, the Mufti’s legacy of hate was transferred intact to the most extreme quarters of the Arab world, especially to the radical Palestinians who matured in the intense political heat of Nasserist Cairo.

  Such radicals, whose families had left Israel before or during the War of Independence, were plentiful in Cairo in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some of them, like Arafat, claimed not only spiritual but genealogical kinship with the Mufti, sprinkling, so to speak, the dust of royalty on their family tree.

  It did not take much or long for such men to be harnessed to the Pan-Arab cause. Nasser, a would-be Saladin, daily promised Israel’s destruction, having quickly realized that leading the crusade against Israel’s was a sure means of securing his place at the head of the Arab world. The youths who later constituted the leadership of the PLO—including Arafat, Abu Iyad, and Abu Jihad—all received their first military training in special anti-Israel Palestinian units assembled and indoctrinated by Nasser in the early 1950s.

  In 1964, Nasser invited the heads of state of the Arab world to Cairo for the first-ever Arab summit to discuss the only thing they were likely to agree on—how to eliminate Israel. Nasser’s proposal was the creation of an organization of Palestinian Arabs who would agitate internationally for the eradication of the Jewish state. The Arab states responded enthusiastically, agreeing to bankroll the group and to have it led by Nasser’s tool Ahmed Shukeiri. It was Nasser’s original intention that the PLO be a mindless implement in the hands of his Pan-Arab nationalism, slinging Palestinian slogans but otherwise under tight control, to prevent a backlash from Israel. Nasser needed time for a military buildup, and some bluster over Palestine seemed a good way of bolstering his image after his invasion of Yemen in 1962 had ended in disaster. For this job, Shukeiri—whom the Irish diplomat and writer Conor Cruise O’Brien called “the windbag’s windbag” for his earlier performances as the Saudi ambassador to the UN 41 —was ideally suited.

  But the PLO soon developed other ideas. Nasser’s relatively inert creation was quickly upstaged by the active terrorism of Arafat’s Fatah faction (sponsored at the time by the Syrian Ba’th regime and named after an earlier Syrian Pan-Arab nationalist group), which was involved in scores of raids into Israel from Jordan. The acclaim that these largely unsuccessful raids earned forced Nasser’s hand, first pushing him to allow Shukeiri a s
tring of terrorist attacks of his own, and finally causing him to reconstitute the PLO with the Fatah as its nucleus and Arafat as its head.

  Gradually, the PLO was able to cut itself loose from Nasser and pursue a far more radical strategy. Under Arafat, it hoped to be not a spearhead but a tripwire. By staging raids calculated to elicit Israeli responses against the Arab states, the PLO believed it could produce an escalating cycle of violence leading inexorably to an all-out war to wipe out Israel—whether or not the Arab states decided they were ready for it at any particular moment. Thus, for the next two decades Arafat believed that while the Arab states might be deterred from going to war because they feared defeat, the PLO could force their hand. Arafat became the Arab world’s perennial advocate of war: “The war of attrition against the Zionist enemy will never cease.… It is in my interest to have a war in the region, because I believe that the only remedy for the ills of the Arab nation is a true war against the Zionist enemy” 42

  Accordingly, up to 1967 the PLO terror campaign was directed at penetrating Israel’s borders and igniting a new Arab-Israeli war. This strategy was based on the results of the fedayeen terror raids, which were encouraged by Nasser in the early 1950s. The fedayeen were Arab marauders who periodically crossed into Israel from Egyptian-controlled Gaza and from Jordanian-controlled Judea and Samaria, murdering civilians and bombing vehicles, then returning to their bases across the border. Israel responded with daring retaliatory raids against the terrorist bases. The escalating fedayeen attacks, combined with Nasser’s move to block Israel’s southern shipping lane through the Red Sea, triggered Israel’s Sinai campaign against Egypt in 1956, which succeeded in wiping out the bases.

  The PLO carried out its early terrorist attacks with the aim of triggering a larger war against Israel. Nasser, whose army was decimated by Israel in 1956, proved unwilling to permit the PLO the freedom to conduct these raids from Egypt. As a result, the PLO moved its staging area to Jordan, which in any case it considered to be part of Palestinian territory. King Hussein found himself unable to refuse their presence for fear of retaliation from the Pan-Arabist regimes in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, all of which were clamoring for the presence of a “Palestinian liberation army” in Jordan. But it was also clear that these states fully intended that this Pan-Arabist Palestinian army should replace the Jordanian monarchy at the first opportunity. Nasser had already been responsible for an attempt on Hussein’s life in I960 that had left the Jordanian prime minister dead. The president of Syria had openly called for Hussein’s overthrow, saying that “the liberation of Jordan means the liberation of Palestine.” 43 And Shukeiri himself had pronounced Hussein to be a “hired lackey” of the West and threatened the destruction of the “Jordanian entity,” which was still “under colonial control by the Hashemite family,” if Hussein did not allow the PLO to establish itself in Jordan. 44

  The PLO made its forays into Israeli territory from the then Jordanian-held West Bank. These attacks prompted progressively fiercer Israeli responses against Jordan, most notably the Israeli raid on Es-Samu in late 1966. Thus PLO terror, while by no means the sole or decisive factor, contributed to the escalation of tensions that culminated in the PLO’s hoped-for war of total annihilation against Israel—the Six Day War.

  But obviously the war did not go as the PLO and the Arab states had expected. Far from being destroyed, as Shukeiri had confidently predicted days before the war, 45 Israel had dealt the Arab armies a stunning defeat and was now in possession of the former PLO staging areas of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza. This meant that new raids had to be staged from the East Bank of the Jordan, bringing the PLO into direct conflict with Hussein’s authority in Amman.

  Hussein found himself too fearful to reject the presence of these gunmen on Jordanian soil. The more he acquiesced in the PLO buildup, the bolder the terrorists became, encouraged in their belief that the “liberation” of the East Bank (Jordan) would be a stepping-stone to the “liberation” of the West Bank (Israel). By 1968, the PLO had entered into an open alliance with three organizations outlawed in Jordan—the pro-Nasser Arab National Movement, the Ba’th, and the Communists—with the aim of taking control of the country. 46 The great flaw in this plan was that Hussein was not particularly enamored with the idea of losing his kingdom, and clashes erupted as Jordanian troops resisted the occupation of pieces of the country by armed and uniformed PLO cadres who exacted their own taxes, conscripted civilians, and issued demands concerning the composition of the government. In the summer of 1970, Arafat’s men finally went too far. In response to the jailing of a number of terrorists, they rampaged through the Jordanian capital of Amman, seizing hotels and taking hostages, murdering the American military attaché, and raping several women. 47 In September, King Hussein announced war on the PLO. In the civil war that followed, Hussein’s army slaughtered ten thousand Palestinians, including many women and children in the refugee camps, and utterly eradicated the PLO in Jordan. Many Palestinian gunmen and noncombatants who survived the ordeal voted with their feet and tried to flee to the Israeli side of the Jordan River, begging to be taken prisoner by the Israeli soldiers. Some succeeded in reaching Israel, where they received food and medical attention. The rest were gunned down en route by the Jordanian army. 48

  Having failed to destroy Israel by seizing Jordan, the PLO moved on to the easier task of seizing Lebanon. (The PLO has proved remarkably flexible as to the location of the territory it seeks to liberate.) With the other Arab states all but closed to PLO operations, Lebanon appeared to be the ideal stage for its renewed assaults against Israel. Unlike the exposed terrain of the Sinai and the natural divide of the Jordan River Valley, southern Lebanon forms a geographic continuum with the north of Israel; its hilly terrain, covered with lush vegetation, affords good cover and good escape routes. As early as 1969, the Lebanese army had fought PLO units that were trying to carve out a “Fatahland” in southern Lebanon, and the conflict had spread as far north as the capital. Arafat announced that he had no wish to interfere in the internal affairs of any Arab state (a cruelly laughable pledge, given the PLO’s track record in Jordan, Lebanon, and later Kuwait); the Syrians threw their weight behind the terrorists in the hope of undermining the Lebanese government; and by 1975, the PLO had established a de facto state, extending from West Beirut south to the Israeli border.

  From there, PLO terrorists launched repeated missions against Israeli targets, almost none of them military. The massacres of 1974 in Kiryat Shemona, in which eighteen Israeli civilians were murdered, and Ma’alot, in which the terrorists gunned down twenty-six Israelis, most of them schoolchildren, originated in southern Lebanon. So did the Coastal Road massacre of 1978, in which a PLO hijacking of an intercity bus ended with the deaths of thirty-five Israeli hostages. So did the Nahariya slayings of 1974 and 1979. (In the latter attack, a PLO “fighter” crushed the skull of a five-year-old girl in front of her father, then murdered him as well.)

  In addition, the PLO used the territory of its de facto state to shell Israeli cities and towns. For years, the entire population of the northern border towns and villages was regularly driven into underground bomb shelters by barrages of PLO-launched Katyusha missiles, the little brothers of the Scud missiles that Iraq launched against Israel in 1991. By 1982, the population levels of Kiryat Shemona and Nahariya had fallen ominously; factories, schools, and beaches were being closed repeatedly to avoid mass casualties during the shellings; and fear of economic ruin and depopulation had spread. 49

  As in Jordan, this buildup had two consequences. The first was an internal Lebanese civil war, in which Shi’ites and Christians did battle with the PLO in an attempt to expel the Palestinian overlord from their midst. More than anyone else, they could testify to what a PLO state would be like, since they lived in one: unbridled confiscation of property, wanton murder, wholesale rape, and the forcible induction of children as young as twelve into the PLO’s service. Those who sing the blessings of a PLO state would
do well to refresh their memories as to how the dress rehearsal went by reading the documentary material assembled in The PLO in Lebanon by Raphael Israeli. 50 The tab for the imposition of this PLO dominion and the subsequent civil war came to more than a hundred thousand lives, paid for by the Lebanese.

  The second consequence of the rise of the PLO in Lebanon, as it had been on the Egyptian and Jordanian borders, was an Israeli response. Israel took action to defend its northern towns and kibbutzim in the form of armed intervention in PLO-controlled Lebanon, first in the Litani Operation in 1978 and later in Operation Peace for Galilee in 1982. Much maligned at the time, this latter operation indeed lived up to its name. Since the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut in 1982 and the establishment of the security zone in the south of Lebanon thereafter, there have hardly been any successful terrorist penetrations from southern Lebanon into the north of Israel. And though the Peace for Galilee Operation did result, as the PLO had long hoped, in a war with Israel by at least one Arab state, Syria, it was a limited war, waged on the soil and over the skies of Lebanon (and Lebanon alone) during June 1982. While Israel’s aim was the uprooting of the PLO bases, it encountered resistance from the Syrian armed forces that were, and still are, occupying most of Lebanon. Israel destroyed Syrian missile batteries and almost one hundred Syrian fighter aircraft, while losing only a single plane. (These successes decisively demonstrated the inferiority of the weaponry upon which the Soviet bloc was relying for its air defenses, and foreshadowed the techniques that were to be used by the United States in the Gulf War nine years later.) But even though Israel was pushed to commit what in Arab eyes was a most egregious sin, entering an Arab capital (West Beirut was the head of the PLO octopus in Lebanon), the oft-promised mobilization of the entire Arab world to assault Israel, or even to save the PLO, never materialized.