A Durable Peace
Page 28
There will be no peace and stability in the region as long as the inalienable national rights of the Palestinian people are ignored, including the right of return, self-determination, and the establishment of its independent state whose capital is Jerusalem. 111 [emphasis added]
This last statement is revealing in itself. If all the PLO wants is an independent state on the West Bank, why bother to include the redundant terms “self-determination” and “right of return”? After all, an independent West Bank “Palestine” ought to satisfy the supposed yearnings for self-determination of all Palestinian Arabs and absorb the remaining refugees. But in separating these terms, as it habitually does, the PLO is indicating to an Arab audience in a well-understood code that a West Bank state is merely one part of its plan to bring an end to Israel. The term self-determination is intended for the Arab communities inside Israel who, after the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, will claim the right of self-determination (that is, independence) in regions with an Arab majority in Galilee and the Negev. And if these multiple amputations are not enough to finish Israel off, the “right of return” will ensure that the Jewish remnants are asphyxiated by a flood of Arab refugees.
This trinity—West Bank State, Self-Determination, Right of Return—alongside the PLO Charter, the Phased Plan, and the Armed Struggle, form the PLO’s catechism. This doctrine gives direction and guidance to its disciples as they pursue under changing circumstances the unchanging goal of a holy war, a jihad aimed at Israel’s ultimate destruction. Even in the midst of peace negotiations between Israel and the Arabs, Arafat continued to extol the same holy war he has espoused since the founding of the PLO in 1964. Thus, on March 15, 1992, the chairman of the PLO exhorted:
Through the peace negotiations… the creative Palestinian mind has created the third side of the triangle of [which the first two are] the Palestinian struggle and jihad toward certain victory. We are involved in a political-cum-diplomatic battle.… We have to intensify the struggle and continue the sincere and honest jihad…. The jihad is our way and Palestine is our road. 112
Scarcely a word about this PLO strategy reaches the newspapers and television news programs of the West, which almost never bother to report on the PLO’s actions inside the Arab world or PLO statements made in Arabic. Little more reaches Western leaders. When they are asked why no attention is paid to the PLO’s incessant promises to destroy Israel and its elaborate laying of plans to do so, Western political leaders and media figures, if they can be persuaded to address the issue at all, habitually shrug it all off as meaningless “posturing” or even as a kind of joke or game, certainly an irrelevance—with an implied, condescending message: “Never take anything an Arab says seriously if he’s only speaking to Arabs.” But this stands logic on its head. Dictatorial regimes and organizations will tell foreigners any lie that suits their ends; it is only what they say to their own followers that in any way reflects their designs. To understand this is to understand much about the PLO, which continues to peddle peace in the West while ceaselessly promising terror and the annihilation of Israel to Arab audiences in the Middle East.
How can it be that the PLO’s fabrications are understood in the West to be truth, while the truth itself, no matter how often rehearsed in word and deed, is taken to be of not even the slightest consequence? In fact not even “believing” Westerners believe everything the PLO says to them. For instance, not even the most avid consumers of PLO lies were willing to swallow Arafat’s infamous “secret map” that supposedly proved Israeli designs on the entire Middle East—which a few years ago he announced he had discovered on the back of an Israeli coin. In a specially convened press session at the United Nations in Geneva, Arafat presented to a crowded hall of journalists a map of an Israel encompassing most of the Middle East, reaching as far as the Nile and the Euphrates and into Southern Turkey. Arafat explained that this “map,” appearing in rough contour, comprised the lands that the territorially expansionist Israel intended one day to claim as its own. It had been etched on Israeli coins so that every Israeli could share in the unspoken conspiracy every time he fumbled through his pockets.
As Arafat was leaving his press conference, surrounded by an army of aides (in all my years at the UN, where I encountered most of the world’s leaders, I had never seen such a huge procession), I walked into the conference room he had just vacated. I produced the coin (a ten-agora piece, roughly equal to a nickel in value) and explained that the pattern imprinted on it is the impression of an ancient coin from the reign of the Jewish king Mattathias Antigonus (40–37 B.C.E.). Most modern Israeli coins include impressions of such ancient Jewish coinage. I showed a photograph of the original coin that had been used to make the impression: Arafat’s “secret map” was nothing more than the outline of its corroded edges.
Although Arafat’s attempt to manufacture yet another lie met with immediate failure in this case, what struck me was that so many of the PLO’s other lies are just as outrageous, even if they don’t lend themselves to instant visual puncturing. Yet most people in the West receive the overwhelming majority of these falsehoods as either the truth or else a reasonable approximation of it. Uncontested, this particular flight of fancy might also have become a regular part of the PLO’s web of slanders and falsifications—just like the PLO’s purported recognition of Israel, and its alleged willingness to be satisfied with a state on the West Bank.
It therefore seems that the ignorance of both the media and the politicians about the basics of PLO politics is not merely due to the facility with which the PLO spews forth its fabrications. It is at least as much due to a profound Western desire to believe what the PLO is saying. Westerners deeply wish to believe that everyone can be reformed and that even the worst enemies can eventually become friends. This is why, despite the termination of the American talks with the PLO on the grounds of its continuing terrorism in 1989, the view that the PLO must be engaged persisted in Washington and European capitals. Ways were constantly sought to bring the PLO back into the fold openly. Behind the scenes, feverish maneuvers took place, through PLO-approved middlemen, to get the PLO’s agreement to this or that American move. The goal was ultimately to restore PLO legitimacy in the eyes of the American public and Congress and to ensure its continued participation in the political process.
Schooled in compromise, Westerners found it difficult to realize that the PLO’s obsession with destroying Israel was not a passing “interest” or “tactic.” In fact, this goal defined the very essence of the PLO. It is the PLO’s reason for existing, the passion that has united its members and wins their loyalty. This is what distinguishes the PLO from the Arab states, even the most radical ones. While these states would clearly prefer to see Israel disappear, neither Libya nor Iraq, to take the most extreme examples, sees its own national life as dependent on Israel’s destruction. But the PLO was different. It was constitutionally tied to the idea of Israel’s liquidation. Remove that idea, and you have no PLO.
Indeed, if Western governments genuinely wanted to test whether the PLO was interested in reforming itself, they would have to ask it to take practical steps to stop being the organization for the “liberation of Palestine.” They would have demanded that the PLO formally abrogate its charter and the Phased Plan, as well as the various other PLO resolutions calling for steps toward Israel’s destruction. They would have demanded that the PLO dismantle its terror apparatus and accede to international monitoring to ensure that it has done so. They would have demanded that it cease its organized inculcation of hatred in Palestinian youngsters in refugee camps, and that it quit obstructing the rehabilitation and resettlement of the Palestinian refugees. Such elementary demands were seldom made because it is intuitively clear to even the most befuddled observer that the PLO would find it hard to accept all of them, let alone implement them. What must be asked is why. And the answer is that many of the PLO leaders are committed, sinews and flesh, tooth and nail, to the eradication of Israel
by any means.
Can there be no deviation from this line? Are there no dissidents? There were, but they didn’t last long. They met the fate of PLO dissidents like Issam Sartawi, who was cut down in cold blood in 1983 for calling for negotiations with Israel, or of the Moslem religious leader Imam Khossander, who was murdered in Gaza in 1979 during a spree of PLO killings of Arabs who had supported Sadat’s arrival in Israel. 113 Farouq Kaddoumi, Arafat’s “foreign minister,” explained the rationale behind such executions in chilling terms:
The PLO and the Palestinian people in the occupied territories and outside them know very well how to use such methods to prevent certain personalities from deviating from the revolutionary path. Our people in the interior recognize their responsibilities and are capable of taking the necessary disciplinary measure against those who try to leave the right path. 114
Hundreds of other, lesser-known Palestinians who tried to deviate “from the revolutionary path” by advocating a genuine peace with Israel received “the necessary disciplinary measure” and were summarily cut down—a practice that the intifada death squads enthusiastically took up in murdering over seven hundred Palestinian Arabs, including nurses, teachers, and students accused of “collaborating” with Israel. 115
I have spoken with quite a few prominent Palestinian Arabs, mostly in discreet meetings. Invariably, they said that they would seek a genuine compromise and coexistence with Israel but were afraid to say so openly for fear of PLO or Hamas terror. These people were not pro-Israel by any stretch of the imagination. But they had given up on the PLO’s wild fantasies of drowning Israel with returning refugees or of conquering Haifa and Jaffa. Most of all, they would like a negotiated solution that would enable them to throw off the ideological yoke, initially imposed from the PLO base in Tunis a thousand miles away, and to take charge of their own destiny.
This is why it is so ironic to hear some people speaking in such lavish terms about the “new local spokesmen” who emerged as “Palestinian leaders” during the intifada and while accompanying the Palestinian negotiators at the Madrid Peace Conference. Seeing Western-educated West Bankers on television sporting the latest in verbal accessories has given many in the West the impression that these are Palestinian Arab leaders who have built their own independent base of power and are rising to challenge the unpolished Arafat and his coterie. Precisely the opposite is true. The intifada was a highly efficient instrument of intimidation for the PLO, and left in its wake there were virtually no Arabs in Judea and Samaria who were willing to deviate from Arafat’s bidding (unless, that is, they were even more intimidated by the fundamentalist Hamas, or “protected” by it Mafia-style). As was first demonstrated at Madrid when these new spokesmen left the conference in midcourse to fly to Tunis and confer with Arafat, they were spokesmen for no one but the PLO.
That the West found this so hard to accept is a symptom of the much deeper problem underneath: No matter what the evidence, the West is entirely confounded by fanaticism if it wears a suit and tie. Equally, it cannot seem to comprehend the fact that the PLO genuinely likes and admires totalitarianism—despite its own extraordinary openness on this point. While the nations of the free world condemned China when Chinese government tanks massacred thousands of defenseless nonviolent, pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989, Arafat sent a public message of congratulations to Beijing:
I take this opportunity to express extreme gratification that you were able to restore normal order after the recent incidents in the People’s Republic of China. 116
While Saddam Hussein devoured his Arab neighbor Kuwait, Arafat cheered him on:
I say welcome, welcome, welcome to war…. Iraq and Palestine represent a common will. We will be side by side after the great battle, God willing, we will pray together in Jerusalem…. The Iraqi fighters and the Palestinian stone-throwers have an appointment with victory. 117
And as the neo-Stalinist coup seemed to end democracy in the Soviet Union in August 1991 and plunge the world back into the Cold War, the PLO praised the putsch:
The PLO has always viewed this experiment in perestroika with great skepticism, and with trepidation mingled with sadness. 118
In midcoup, the official PLO organ, Radio Palestine, added further clarification: “What happened in the USSR proves that the [struggle against the West] is natural and inevitable, and that perestroika was the anomaly.” 119 In the West, those few commentators who even noticed that the PLO was evincing such a sweet tooth for oppression insisted on lamenting that it “always seems to back losers”—just another bad roll of the dice.
But it is not luck that is responsible for the PLO’s choice of friends. It is its chronic affinity for the goals and methods of tyranny, which has consistently allied it with the likes of the Nazis and the Soviets, terror organizations of almost every description, and Arab despots from Nasser to Saddam. The PLO pedigree of tyrannophilia goes all the way back to June 1940, on the occasion of the Nazi dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France, when the Mufti sent his personal congratulations to Hitler:
[I wish] to convey to his Excellency the Great Chief and Leader my sincerest felicitations on the occasion of the great political and military triumphs which he has just achieved…. The Arab nation everywhere feels the greatest joy and deepest gratification on the occasion of these great successes…. The Arab people… will be linked to your country by a treaty of friendship and collaboration. 120
It is impossible to escape the perverse but utterly consistent logic that has compelled the PLO and its progenitors to follow the path from the Mufti’s pact with Hitler to “destroy the Jewish National Home,” to Shukeiri’s pact with Nasser to “drive Israel into the sea,” right down to Arafat’s pact with Saddam to “burn half of the Jewish state.” They may all have failed, but their legacy of hatred persists, following a straight, unbroken line.
Someday, it will be one of those famous historians’ riddles how terrorists and totalitarians who murdered Westerners for decades were able to manipulate the Western democracies into besieging the solitary democracy in the Middle East on their behalf. But we can solve the riddle with a myth—the myth of the Trojan horse. For the PLO is a Pan-Arab Trojan horse, a gift that the Arabs have been trying to coax the West into accepting for over twenty years, so that the West in turn can force Israel to let it in the gates. The Arabs paint their gift up prettily with legitimacy, with the pathos of its plight, with expressions of love for the cherished ideas of freedom, justice, and peace. Yet no matter how it is dressed up to conceal the fact, the ultimate aim of this gift remains: to be allowed within Israel’s defensive wall, to be parked on the hills overlooking Tel Aviv, whence it can perform its grisly task. Every inch of Western acceptance—the cover stories, the banquets, the observer status, the embassies, and any territory the PLO has ever been able to get its hands on—it uses to push it ever closer to its goal. And while it is difficult for uninitiated Westerners to imagine the Arabs destroying Israel as the Greeks laid waste to Troy, it is all too easy for anyone familiar with Israel’s terrain to imagine, precisely as Arafat has promised, that a PLO state implanted ten miles from the beaches of Tel Aviv would be a mortal danger to the Jewish state.
That the West has succumbed to such a ploy is a remarkable failing, of memory and of a sense of justice. For how long ago was it that Yasser Arafat had Americans and Europeans murdered? That Israel, which knows the PLO, has not averted the increasing acceptance of this Trojan horse is also a remarkable failing: of communication, of concern for the importance of ideas, and of common sense in seeing that it must take the truth straight to the people who count—the citizens of the democratic nations. Israel has no choice but to begin, even at this late date, to explain what the Trojan peace proposed by the PLO means to Israel, and what it means for the world. And Israel must explain what kind of a peace it demands instead.
The above chapter was written (with very few amendments) one year before the Oslo Accords, in which Israel signed a prelimina
ry peace agreement with the PLO. The basis of the Oslo agreement was that Israel first would hand over the areas populated by Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza to the control of the Palestinian Authority headed by Arafat. The Palestinian Authority in turn would suppress in these areas anti-Israel terrorism, annul the PLO Charter, and fulfill other commitments, such as ceasing anti-Israel propaganda, thus heralding a new era of peace between the two peoples. While Israel kept its part of the bargain, the Palestinian Authority did not. While the PLO itself eventually refrained from terrorist attacks, the Palestinian Authority enabled the enormous expansion of the terrorist organizations of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others in the areas under its jurisdiction. Contrary to the specific promises given to Israel in the Oslo Accords (and yet again in the Hebron Accords of 1997, which I concluded with Arafat, with the United States underwriting the agreement), the Palestinian Authority did not dismantle the terrorist organizations, did not collect their illegal weapons, did not extradite terrorists to Israel, did not stop incendiary incitement to violence in the Palestinian-controlled media, and did not cooperate consistently and systematically with the Israeli security agencies to fight terrorism. In fact, on many occasions, Palestinian Authority leaders, including Arafat himself, engaged in vitriolic calls for violence, gave the green light for terrorism to the Hamas terrorists, and lionized the suicide bombers who murdered scores of Israeli civilians, calling these killers “heroes of the Palestinian nation” and naming public squares after them.