A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  As in each of its previous Western-oriented stratagems, the principal aim of the PLO “recognition of Israel” game has been to conceptually conquer Washington. Long before the ultimate collapse of Soviet power, it had become clear to the majority in the PLO leadership that the road to putting real pressure on Israel passed through the White House, the Congress, and the American voting public—a realization that has gradually dawned on all the Arab world, most notably on Syria after the American victory in the Gulf War in 1991. The PLO strategy was thus built logically on Arab propaganda concepts that had already gained currency. Having reduced all Middle East turbulence to the Arab-Israeli conflict, having reduced that to the Palestinian-Jewish dispute, and having reduced the Palestinians to the PLO, the Americans and the West were now to be asked to accept the last link in the chain: The PLO was to be shown as the party of compromise and peace, Israel as the obstacle resisting peace. America would then respond by engaging the “moderate” PLO and pressuring the “intransigent” Israelis.

  Getting this campaign off the ground required that the PLO overcome one major hurdle. In 1975, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had signed a memorandum with Israel that obligated the United States to refrain from negotiating with the PLO as long as the organization did not recognize Israel’s right to exist and rejected UN Resolution 242. The United States subsequently undertook not to deal with the PLO until it had ceased engaging in terrorism. To meet the memorandum’s demands, the PLO’s objective of destroying Israel had to be laundered and ironed into a form that could be worn about Washington without violating this dress code. Gaining acceptance in American eyes would therefore entail that the PLO “moderate” itself enough to meet these two demands, while still uttering nothing but readily retractable doublespeak.

  The PLO achieved this late in 1988, when it finally reached an agreed-upon formula for its absolution with the Americans. Arafat, debating to the last every dotted “i” and every crossed “t,” would finally utter some approximation of a position tolerable to the United States at a Palestine National Council conference in Algiers in November and, with some necessary corrections from the Americans, again at a press conference in Geneva a few days later.

  Leaving aside the peculiar view that words alone suffice for the political redemption of tyrants and terrorists, a view contradicted by a long list of despots in this century who have habitually lied to achieve their ends, it must be noted that these words, which the Americans extracted from the PLO the way one pulls a tooth, did not amount to much. Here is what Arafat finally did say in Geneva about terrorism:

  [The PNC has] reaffirmed its rejection of terrorism in all its forms, including state terrorism…. This position is clear and free of all ambiguity. And yet, I, as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, hereby once more declare that I condemn terrorism in all its forms, and at the same time salute those sitting before me in this hall who, in the days when they fought to free their countries from the yoke of colonialism, were accused of terrorism by their oppressors….

  I also offer a reverent salute to the martyrs who have fallen at the hands of terrorism and terrorists, foremost among whom is my lifelong companion and deputy, the martyr-symbol Khalil al-Wazir [Abu Jihad], and the martyrs who fell in the massacres to which our people have been subjected in the various cities, villages and camps of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and South Lebanon. 66

  Certainly Arafat condemned “terrorism”—but only to slip the meaning of the word out from under our feet in the very next sentence. “Terrorism,” according to Arafat, is what Israel has done to the Palestinians, and this he is willing to condemn. As for the actions of the PLO itself, he “salutes” those who have been “accused of terrorism“: the PLO, and Abu Jihad, who orchestrated the Na-hariya slayings in 1974, the Coastal Road massacre in 1978, the murder of three Israeli merchant seamen in Barcelona in 1985, and more. Nowhere does he agree to alter the policies of the PLO in any way. Most important, nowhere does he renounce “the armed struggle,” the term the PLO has always used universally for what the West refers to as terrorism.

  Likewise, the PLO’s alleged recognition of Israel’s right to exist was achieved with mirrors:

  More than 40 years ago, the United Nations, in its Resolution 181 [the 1947 partition plan], decided on the establishment of two states in Palestine, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish. Despite the historic wrong that was done to our people, it is our view today that the said resolution continues to meet the requirements of international legitimacy which guarantee the Palestinian Arab people’s right to sovereignty and national independence….

  The PLO will seek a comprehensive settlement among the parties concerned in the Arab-Israel conflict, including the State of Palestine, Israel and other neighbors, within the framework of the international conference for peace in the Middle East on the basis of Resolutions 242 and 338 and so as to guarantee equality and the balance of interests, especially our people’s rights in freedom, national independence, and respect the right to exist in peace and security for all. 67

  Nowhere amid these serpentine locutions did Arafat actually say that the PLO recognizes Israel or makes its peace with it. Worse, the prominent position of Resolution 181—the partition plan of 1947—ensured the meaninglessness of the entire performance, since that resolution calls for granting the Palestinians not only the West Bank and Gaza but large sections of pre-1967 Israel, including major Jewish urban centers such as Jaffa, Lod, Ramleh, Beersheba, Acre, Nahariya, Kiryat Gat, Ashdod, and Ashkelon, as well as major portions of Galilee and the Negev—not to mention tearing away Jerusalem and placing it under international control (see Map 5).

  This is in line with the standard PLO practice of talking of peace with Israel “in the context of all relevant UN resolutions.” That formulation is much beloved by the Arabs, because all relevant UN resolutions—some thirty-five of them—include resolutions that tear away the Golan and Jerusalem from Israel, flood its coastal plain with Arab refugees, slap an arms embargo and economic sanctions on it—amounting, in short, to the dismantling of the country. Being offered peace on the basis of “all relevant UN resolutions,” or Resolution 181 for that matter, is like being told that someone will be your friend if you let him yank your legs off.

  Nevertheless, what Arafat said at Algiers and later at Geneva, and which was so painstakingly negotiated by American officials, had been built up by the media frenzy around it into an epoch-making event. The United States and Britain immediately used the speech as a pretext for opening negotiations with the PLO, and French president Mitterrand used it as a pretext for receiving Arafat in Paris. The world’s leading press organizations heralded it as a watershed almost on a par with Camp David—The New York Times, for example: “American perceptions about Arab-Israeli relations are in flux…. Last month [Arafat] renounced terrorism and more or less recognized Israel’s right to exist. He thereby transformed the playing field.” 68

  In analyzing the rhetoric emanating from the PLO, it must be remembered that what counts with the PLO, as with all non-democratic movement, is not what it tells the outside world but what it says to its own people. When I was at the UN, the Soviet representative spoke many times about the fervent desire of the Soviet Union for peace in Afghanistan. Everyone knew these words meant nothing, and the Soviets routinely went on with the business of slaughtering Afghanis. But when the Soviet press started interviewing Soviet soldiers from the front in the Pangshir Valley about the need to end the war, and this was heard in the streets of Moscow and Kiev, everyone knew that a real change was afoot. (In fact, such press reports heralded the beginning of glasnost and perestroika.) The same is true of the PLO. What it says at the UN in New York, and what it whispers to diplomats in the corridors of Geneva is largely meaningless. What counts is not what it proclaims to the West in English or in French, but what it says time and time again to its own people—in Arabic. Here the PLO exposes itself unreservedly for anyone who bothers to look.


  In fact, within days after Arafat’s supposed renunciation of terror and recognition of Israel, the carefully crafted structure of PLO moderation began to wobble. PLO spokesmen were explaining to the Arabic press that Arafat’s statement had been made within the framework of the PLO’s long-standing policies, and that in fact nothing at all had changed. First to go was the notion that the PLO had abandoned its policy of terror. In deliberately equivocating language, Arafat first modified his stance before a Western audience on December 19, 1988—just five days before speaking in Geneva. Speaking on Austrian television, he said that he “did not mean to renounce the armed struggle” 69 (a.k.a. terrorism)—and that he and other leading figures in the PLO had stated that the armed struggle would not end.

  But in the Arabic media, all pretense of defending the supposed intention of the Geneva statement rapidly vanished. A little over a week after Geneva, Salim Za’anoun, deputy PNC speaker and member of the Fatah Central Committee, said, “The armed struggle must continue everywhere against the Zionist enemy and its allies.… We have no alternative but to carry on our armed activity in order to vanquish the enemy and establish our state.” 70 And Arafat’s deputy, Abu Iyad, reiterated: “The PLO has never obligated itself to stop the armed struggle, and it will not renounce it.” 71 As Hani al-Hassan, a close Arafat adviser, averred: “Palestinian armed struggle has not come to an end.” 72 Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the PLO’s third largest faction, said:

  The popular revolution in Palestine is resolved to continue the struggle until the Zionist occupation is abolished, thereby liberating Palestine from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River, and from the south to the north. 73

  He was followed by Abu Iyad again: “We have never interpreted [renouncing] ‘terror’ as meaning a suspension of military operations.” 74 When Farouq Kaddoumi was asked about Arafat’s renunciation, he said: “That is a misrepresentation of Chairman Arafat’s statements…. We denounce terrorism, especially the state terrorism by Israel.” When asked by the interviewer whether this did not empty the meaning from the pledge on which Secretary of State George Shulz had based America’s dialogue with the PLO, Kaddoumi responded, “Shulz can go to hell. I suppose he is already on his way there.” 75

  The same fate met the PLO’s supposed recognition of Israel, which Abu Iyad flatly denied to Arabic-speakers everywhere. On February 11, 1989, he said: “There was no PLO recognition of Israel, neither in the PNC decisions in Algiers, nor in Arafat’s address to the UN in Geneva.” 76 He was supported by the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) splinter of the PLO, George Habash: “The decisions of the PNC did not mention in any manner the recognition of Israel or Israel’s right to exist. We did not recognize Israel.” 77 On August 8, 1989, Arafat’s Fatah adopted a resolution in Tunis calling for the “intensification and escalation of armed action and all forms of struggle to eliminate the Zionist occupation of Palestine,” a resolution that the entire PLO executive committee affirmed on January 31, 1990. 78 This decision underscored a joint statement that Arafat with Muammar Qaddafi made that month in Libya: “The State of Israel was an outcome of the Second World War and should disappear, as the Berlin Wall has, along with the rest of the consequences of that war.” 79

  The entire performance was repeated shortly thereafter with that other famous Arafatism from the days after Geneva—the supposed renunciation by Arafat of the PLO Charter and its explicit mandate that Israel be destroyed. On the rare occasions before Geneva when Westerners had pressed Arafat on the question of the PLO Charter, he had usually changed the subject. But cornered during his visit with Mitterrand in Paris less than six months after Algiers and Geneva, it became impossible for him to evade the question of how he could recognize Israel in outright contradiction of the PLO’s Charter: “As for the charter, I believe there is a French expression which says: C’est caduc,” he announced—using a French word variously translated as “irrelevant” or “null and void.” 80

  As usual, a media circus ensued that flooded the world with reports that Arafat had renounced the PLO Charter. Also as usual, within hours the PLO and Arafat himself had explained that the word caduc has several meanings, that Arafat had been misinterpreted, and that he in any case did not have the authority to abrogate the charter. By mid-January in Saudi Arabia, Arafat had demurred: “[Caduc] was legally the most appropriate description of the current state of this fundamental document…. One of [my] advisers had suggested using the word ‘obsolete.’ I said no, ‘obsolete’ is not the right term.” 81 Hakkam Balawi, a PLO representative in the dialogue with the United States, explained:

  Yasser Arafat’s use of the French word caduc, which means null and void, obsolete and antiquated, when talking about the Palestinian National Charter to the French media, did not at all mean the nullification of the Charter…. The word has various established definitions in the dictionaries, and the West can choose whichever one it wants…. The Palestinian leadership has the right to stick to the definitions which it believes are correct, and which embody the meaning it wants to convey. 82

  As Abu Iyad put it, “Neither Arafat, Saleh Khalef [Abu Iyad], nor any other leader can cancel the charter, because it belongs to the PNC,” 83 which requires, incidentally, a two-thirds majority to repeal it. As for the suggestion that the PLO remove from its charter Article 19, which declares the State of Israel caduc, Abu Iyad responded, “We in the PLO do not accept the removal of Article 19 from our Charter.” 84

  Indeed, the PLO proceeded to back up its claim with a renewed campaign of terror. In the months following Arafat’s December 1988 statement, PLO factions that had participated in the PNC deliberations and that had supposedly accepted its “decision” not to engage in terrorist attacks against Israel launched dozens of infiltration attempts by terror cells across Israel’s border. Most of these raids, as Israel learned by interrogating the surviving terrorists and by looking at the maps of kibbutzim and other civilian settlements that the gunmen were carrying with them, were intended as frontal assaults on civilians. Especially galling was the fact that several of these raids were conducted by units of the DFLP, one of whose top commanders was Yasser abd-Rabbo, a member of the PLO executive and also the PLO’s chief negotiator with the Americans. Israel protested to the United States, but the American administration chose to turn a blind eye.

  The PLO, encouraged in its audacity by American reticence (much as it had been encouraged in 1970 by Jordanian reticence), chose to escalate its attacks. In May 1990, in a sea-borne assault on the Jewish festival of Shavuot aimed at the beaches of Tel Aviv, the PLO’s Abul Abbas faction attempted a spectacular massacre of Israeli civilians. It launched an armada of speedboats, each of which was equipped with a heavily armed terror squad, past the crowded shorefront. The intended targets included not only sun-bathers and tourists but the leading international hotels on the Tel Aviv beach, yards away from the American embassy on Hayarkon Street. Luckily for Israel, the Israeli army foiled this attempt at mass murder in the nick of time. Unluckily for the PLO, this was the final straw, and the U.S. administration finally decided it could no longer play the fool. The American Congress had already passed legislation, the Mack-Lieberman bill, requiring the U.S. administration to make a quarterly accounting of the PLO’s compliance with the commitments it had given the United States. The beachfront attack, and the congressional and media spotlight that was focused on it, prompted the American administration to sever the talks with the PLO, which were then barely a year old.

  Yet the PLO had not convened the entire machinery of the PNC in Algiers and spent long days drafting and adopting resolutions just to mislead Western opinion. Algiers, as the PLO carefully explained in the Arabic press, had been a very real conference, in which an all-too-real decision had been made. As Rafiq Natshe explained on January 8, 1989, just days after Geneva, “Our present political approach is rooted in the Phased Plan.” 85 In this, he was echoing a
statement by Arafat’s deputy Abu Iyad, who had said prior to the convening of the PNC in November 1988: “We must propose a political initiative which is not new in terms of the Phased Plan…. The initiative which will provide new instrument for moving the Phased Plan along.” 86 Days after Algiers, Abu Iyad confirmed that this is precisely what had been done there.

  The PNC decisions… are a refinement of the Phased Plan adopted in Cairo fourteen years ago. As the years passed, this plan remained undeveloped and without a mechanism for implementation. The PNC session in Algiers was meant to revitalize the Phased Plan and to implement it. 87

  And herein, in the activation of the Phased Plan, under the very eyes of the West, lies the greatest feat of PLO double-talk of them all.

  What is the Phased Plan? In the first years after the PLO’s establishment in 1964, the organization believed that it could achieve the destruction of Israel in one fell swoop—if only, as we have seen, it could trigger a general Arab war against the Jewish state. Not even the Arab defeat in 1967, however calamitous, could convince the PLO to modify this strategy. The PLO was confident that the Arab states would rearm, regroup, and resume their attack on Israel, as Egypt and Syria indeed did in the surprise attack on Yom Kippur in 1973. But to PLO eyes, the results of this war were equally disappointing. King Hussein, whose forces had been pushed beyond the Jordan River in 1967, chose to stay out altogether in 1973. With sufficient strategic depth in the Golan and the Sinai to absorb the attacks, the Israeli army quickly took the offensive, within three weeks reaching the gates of Cairo and Damascus. The PLO’s dream of conquering Haifa and Jaffa had never been further away.

  A few months after the Arab failure in the Yom Kippur War, the PNC met in Cairo to consider the situation. It concluded that Israel in its post-1967 boundaries could not be destroyed by a frontal military assault. What was required was an interim phase in which Israel would be reduced to dimensions that made it more convenient for the coup de grace. Thus was born the Phased Plan, adopted by the PNC in that meeting on June 8, 1974. The Phased Plan had two important stipulations: First, create a Palestinian state on any territory vacated by Israel (Article 2); second, mobilize from that state a general Arab military assault to destroy a shrunken and indefensible Israel (Article 9). The precise language of this resolution, in cumbersome but nonetheless clear PLO jargon, can be found in Appendix I.