A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  Although the Phased Plan was formally adopted by the PNC, it was often disputed within PLO ranks. There were those, like the PFLP’s George Habash, who thought that fussing with an interim phase was an unnecessary bother, since the force of an escalating campaign of terrorism in and around Israel, and especially spectacular terrorist action worldwide, would ultimately be sufficient to achieve the PLO’s aims. But Arafat and Abu Iyad clung tenaciously to the view that bombs and diplomacy were infinitely more potent than bombs alone—a view reinforced by the growing Western resolve, led by the U.S. secretary of state, George Shultz, to take concrete action against terror. After the American air strike on Libya in 1986, the powerful American message that governments and organizations would henceforth be held responsible for the terror they spawned was registered in Damascus, Teheran, and other terror capitals of the Middle East, but most especially in PLO headquarters in Tunis. The PLO quickly circumscribed its field of terror operations. By 1987, the organization was fading fast.

  Then came the intifada. Though it was not started by the PLO, it gave the organization new life and purpose. Equally important, the nightly bashing of Israel on the world’s television screens created enormous pressure on Israel to vacate the West Bank and Gaza, and it gave the champions of the Phased Plan within the PLO a supreme advantage over the doubters. The dispute finally ended in the PNC conference in Algiers in 1988, when Arafat and Abu Iyad lined up all the main PLO factions behind the concept of the gradual destruction of Israel.

  Abu Iyad in particular was celebrating a personal victory. More than anyone, even more than Arafat, he had tirelessly advocated this strategy. A year earlier, for example, he had explained:

  According to the Phased Plan, we will establish a Palestinian state on any part of Palestine that the enemy will retreat from. The Palestinian state will be a stage in our prolonged struggle for the liberation of Palestine on all of its territory. We cannot achieve the strategic goal of a Palestinian state in all of Palestine without first establishing a Palestinian state [on part of it]. 88

  Days after the PLO’s supposed recognition of Israel at Geneva, Abu Iyad spelled out PLO strategy: “At first a small state, and with the help of Allah it will be made large, and expand to the east, west, north, and south.… I am interested in the liberation of Palestine step by step.” 89 On other occasions he was even more concise: “The Palestinian state will be the springboard from which to liberate Jaffa, Acre, and all of Palestine.” 90

  As the leading ideologue of the PLO, Abu Iyad painstakingly explained that the Phased Plan in no way contradicted the PLO Charter seeking Israel’s elimination. On the contrary, it was merely a tactical response to changing geopolitical circumstances and would provide the means to implement the charter. As he put it, “the Phased Plan reflects the current situation… and does not require the casting aside of the charter.” 91 On December 6, 1988, he said:

  We swore that we would liberate even pre-’67 Palestine. We will liberate Palestine stage by stage…. The borders of our state as we declared it represent only part of our national aspirations. We will work to expand them in order to realize our aspirations for all the land of Palestine.” 92

  Noting that a gradual approach was indispensable for worldwide acceptance of PLO moves, he basked in his victory after Arafat’s statement in Geneva: “The armed struggle must be accompanied by a strong political basis which will help the world accept the results of the armed struggle. The PLO acts through the rifle and diplomacy.” 93

  Terror and duplicity had won out over terror alone. This view was not limited to Abu Iyad. In the heady days after the PLO’s supposed recognition of Israel, its leaders lined up to spell out exactly what it was that they were now committed to. Thus, in 1990 Yasser Arafat again gave voice to the same sentiment that all PLO leaders have continuously stressed:

  The Palestinian people’s struggle will continue until the complete liberation of the Palestinian land…. The Palestinian people’s struggle ought to be assisted until the complete liberation of Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the Sea. 94 [emphasis added]

  Once more—in Arabic, of course—we see that Arafat did not limit the Palestinian Arabs’ goal to recovering the West Bank, the territory from the Jordan River to the old Israeli border, but the territory right on through to the Mediterranean. Farouq Kaddoumi, head of the PLO’s political department and in charge of its foreign affairs, had this to say: “The recovery of but a part of our soil will not cause us to forsake our land…. We shall pitch our tent in those places where our bullets shall reach…. This tent shall then serve as the base from which we shall pursue the next phase.” 95 This was echoed by Sheikh Abdel adb-Hamid al-Sayah, speaker of the PNC:

  Even if the PLO succeeds in establishing a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, this would not prevent a continuation of the struggle until the liberation of all of Palestine.… If we succeed in gaining a part of Palestine upon which we will establish a state, we can later ask the world at large, while standing on Palestinian soil, to act so we may obtain our right as a nation and as a people.… We are working to achieve what is possible in the present phase, and later we will demand more. 96

  And Sayah again: “The PNC has accepted an interim solution, implying that we will accept whatever territories we can get. Then we will demand the rest of Palestine.” 97

  Every one of the PLO’s recalcitrant factions lined up behind this “moderate” policy of liquidating Israel by stages. Here is the statement of the PFLP, the PLO’s second largest faction, formerly a stubborn opponent of the Phased Plan:

  The establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza will be the beginning of the downfall of the Zionist enterprise. We will be able to rely on this defeat in order to complete the struggle to realize our entire goal, which is the complete liberation of the national Palestinian soil. 98

  The PFLP’s Al-Hadaf publication put it squarely on April 9, 1989: “We seek to establish a state that we can use in order to liberate the other part of Palestine.” 99 So did Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the DFLP, another “extreme” constituent PLO organization: “The Palestinian struggle should now be aimed at creating a state in the West Bank and Gaza. This will not prevent us from achieving our final aim of liberating all of Palestine.” 100

  Thus with the adoption of the Phased Plan, the divisions between the “extremists” and the “moderates” in the PLO vanished. Now, with such unprecedented harmony among the PLO’s constituent parts, the ideological rift between the “one-steppers” and the “two-steppers” shifted elsewhere: It shifted in fact to the split between the PLO, led by Arafat’s Fatah, and the Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that was quickly gaining ground among Palestinian Arabs. Noticing this trend, many in the West urged Israel to hurry and cut its deal with the PLO “moderates,” lest the Jewish state find itself having to deal with the religious extremists instead. The well-wishers could have been usefully tutored by Rafiq Natshe, a member of the Fatah central committee and PLO representative to Saudi Arabia, who succinctly summarized the difference between the rival movements:

  [Hamas says] all of Palestine is ours, and we want to liberate it from the river to the sea in one blow. But Fatah, which leads the PLO, feels that a Phased Plan must be pursued. Both sides agree on the final objective. The difference between them is on the way to get there. 101

  There are those who claimed that an exception to this bleak landscape of extremism could be found among those West Bank Palestinian Arabs whom the PLO first designated as its spokesmen in the Madrid Peace Conference. While it was certainly hoped that moderates will eventually assume positions of leadership among the Palestinian Arabs, these PLO media-workers regrettably do not deviate one iota from the PLO line. Among the most prominent is Feisal al-Husseini, the son of Abed al-Khader al-Husseini. Just weeks before being received by President Bush at the White House in December 1992, Husseini explicated the Phased Plan for destroying Israel at some length in a Jordanian newspaper:
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  A “grand strategy” is the product of dominant interests and principles, which are unrelated to the political slogans of the movement or to any particular period. Thus Russia, for example, has had a permanent interest—which still holds true today—in attaining “warm water [ports].” In the same manner Germany has had a permanent interest in dominating Europe, for which reason it embarked on the two world wars in which it was defeated; but it has not given up on this strategic aim, and still holds fast to it.

  The stage in which we are living—as Palestinians, as Jordanians, and as Arabs—is an historic opportunity which will not repeat itself for a long time. It is similar to what occurred after World War I and World War II, periods when nations and countries were wiped off the map of the world. It is incumbent upon us… to work with all possible diligence in the face of these new historic circumstances to position ourselves… to form new alliances which will bring us closer to [realizing] our grand strategy….

  We must bear in mind that the slogan of the present phase is not “from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River.”… [Yet] we have not and will not give up on any of our commitments that have existed for more than seventy years.

  Therefore, we must bear in mind that we have within the united Palestinian and Arab society the abilities to contend with this uncompleted Israeli society…. Sooner or later, we must force Israeli society to collaborate with a greater society, our own Arab society, and later we will bring about the gradual dissolution of the Zionist entity. 102

  Thus, according to Husseini, the Arabs must not lose sight of what is really meant by the slogan demanding “only” a West Bank state. For just as the Russian Czars and Soviet leaders never gave up on extending their empire to the Mediterranean, and just as the Kaisers and the Nazis never gave up on ruling Europe, so too the Palestinian-Jordanian-Arab people can never give up its seventy-year-old “commitment”—“the dissolution of the Zionist entity.”

  What emerges from all this is that the PLO produced not one but two basic documents that guide its long-term activity. Both were adopted in pivotal PNC meetings in Cairo—one at the PLO’s founding in 1964, the second ten years later. The first is the PLO Charter, which set the political goal of destroying Israel. The second is the Phased Plan, which spelled out the political method of achieving that goal. Though many people in the West are familiar with the charter, it is only in conjunction with the less familiar Phased Plan that the overall PLO strategy can be understood. Thus, explains Ahmed Sidki al-Dejani, a member of the fifteen-man PLO executive: “We in the PLO make a clear distinction between the charter and the political programs. The first includes the permanent political objective, and the second includes the step-by-step approach.” 103 And Rafiq Natshe sums it up: “The PLO Charter is the basis of the political and military activity of the PLO. Our present political approach is rooted in the Phased Plan.… We must aim at harmonizing the various political decisions with the Charter and the Phased Plan.” 104

  Thus, far from breaking with the virulent hatred of the Mufti, ending decades of terrorism, and giving up on its dream of an eventual war of annihilation, the PLO did precisely the opposite. Its commitment to the Phased Plan merely united the PLO’s warring camps as never before, permitting even the most fanatical among them to justify partial gains from Israel as a step toward the land war they hoped to ignite in the not-too-distant future from their sovereign, if initially truncated, State of Palestine. It remains to be seen whether the leadership of the Palestinian Authority is genuinely and fully prepared to break with the past.

  But the land war launched from a future West Bank state was not the only poisoned arrow being prepared for the PLO’s quiver. The PLO has also maintained at the top of its list of demands what it refers to as the “right of return” of all Arabs who lived in Palestine before 1948 to the cities that they abandoned. Teaching this futile dream to the generations of children who are trapped in the refugee camps has been one of the cruelest and most cynical of schemes in the entire PLO palette. In the camps, the wretchedness inflicted by the Arab states that refuse to absorb the refugees is blamed on Israel, ensuring that the pain of 1948 is not allowed to heal. While many refugees have left the camps and been assimilated into the surrounding Arab populations, others have been forced to remain in the camps by Arab pressure. There the PLO teaches them that the only way out is to return to Haifa and Jaffa— thereby guaranteeing itself another generation of recruits for acts of terrorism.

  If there has been any effort to alleviate the refugee problem since 1967, it came not from the Arab governments but from Israel. As part of an ongoing program, Israel attempted to dismantle some of the worst camps in Gaza, spending Israeli government funds to build modern apartment buildings for eleven thousand families so far. 105 But if the refugees have apartment buildings in which to live, this means that they are no longer homeless, no longer refugees, and no longer the embittered people the PLO prefers them to be. This rehabilitation was violently opposed by the PLO. In the end, Israeli security had to be brought in to protect families that wanted to move into apartments against PLO threats.

  About a year after the outbreak of the intifada, I learned firsthand of the power of this PLO stratagem when I visited the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza. By then, the large-scale riots had subsided and there was relative calm. I left behind my military escort and strolled with an interpreter through the alleys of Jabaliya. Next to one cement structure I found an elderly Arab, with whom I struck up a conversation.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Majdal,” he answered, using the Arab name for the Israeli town of Ashkelon, a few miles north of Gaza.

  “And where are your children from?” I asked.

  “Majdal,” he answered again. Since his children were probably my age, it is conceivable they had been born there. On a hunch I queried him further.

  “Where are your grandchildren from?”

  “Majdal,” he answered.

  “And will you go back to Majdal?” I asked.

  “Insh’allah,”—“God willing”—he replied. “There will be peace, and we will all go back to Majdal.”

  “Insh’allah,” I repeated. “You’ll go to Majdal, and we’ll go to Jabaliya.”

  His smile vanished. “No, we’ll go back to Majdal. You’ll go back to Poland.”

  With tens of thousands of refugees ready to repeat this Palestine liberation fantasy to any journalist or diplomat who asks, these camps have become a political weapon used to fuel a desire for a right of return that does not exist, and to fan Western opposition to Jewish immigration to Israel. After all, the Arabs often ask Westerners, how can it be that an Arab born in Jaffa cannot return there, while a Jew from Odessa who has never before set foot in Israel is welcomed with open arms? Rather, as Hani al-Hassan, an aide of Arafat’s, recently explained, the return of the Arabs should be the world’s priority:

  Americans and Soviets interested in the Middle East peace process have to understand that the problem requiring solution is not the immigration of the world’s Jews to Palestine, but how to return Palestinian refugees to Palestine…. The Arab states will not be willing to settle the Palestinian refugees…. Every refugee from 1948 or 1967 must be allowed to return to Palestine. 106

  Thus, the “right of return” is intended to mimic, counteract, and annul the Jewish dream of return by means of a false symmetry: The Jews have returned, and now the Palestinian Arabs must return. Yet the Arab refugees of 1948 cannot be viewed without considering the Jewish refugees of 1948, who were expelled in roughly equal numbers from the Arab states. (Most of the Arab refugees left voluntarily, out of fear or because of the exhortations of Arab leaders to “clear the way” for the Arab armies, as noted in Chapter 4.) At a cost of $1.3 billion, the fledgling Jewish state took in Jewish refugees from Arab states from Morocco to Iraq and housed, educated, and employed them, so that today they are no longer distinct from any other Israelis. 107 For the vast, oil-glutted Arab states to no
w demand that tiny Israel also resettle all the Arab refugees is preposterously unjust. There was, in fact, an even exchange of populations between the Arab and the Jewish states as a consequence of the Arabs’ war against Israel and their expulsion of the Jews from their lands. Such exchanges of population have occurred a number of other times this century: Millions of people were exchanged between Bulgaria and Greece in 1919, between Greece and Turkey in 1923, between India and Pakistan in 1947, and so on. In none of these cases has anyone ever seriously suggested reversing the exchanges, let alone reversing only one side of them.

  That half a century later the Arab regimes say that they refuse to accept their side of an equation that they themselves formulated is particularly telling. For the Arab leaders are well aware that if Israel were to agree to such a Palestinian “right of return,” the country would be demographically overwhelmed and destroyed. The “right of return” is therefore nothing but a subterfuge to undermine the Jewish state. As Qaddafi himself has said: “By then [i.e., the return of the refugees], there would be no more Israel…. If they accept, then Israel would be ended.” 108

  Nevertheless, the demand of the “right of return” has never been renounced by the PLO, and it remains at the top of its list of preconditions for any step toward a permanent peace settlement with Israel. Arafat has made this clear: “The Palestinian uprising will in no way end until the attainment of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return.” 109 Likewise, the PLO’s acceptance of Israel’s right to exist (as required by Resolution 242) is predicated on the Palestinian “right of return,” which Qaddafi says would destroy Israel. As the PLO’s representative to Saudi Arabia, Rafiq Natshe, confirms: “all members of the [PLO] executive committee reject [Security Council Resolutions] 242 and 338 if the declared rights of the Palestinians are not understood to include… return of the refugees to their birthplace.” 110 In the same vein, Arafat also sets the “right of return” as a precondition for peace in the entire Middle East. In 1991, he said: