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IS THE NEWS SYSTEM SOMEWHAT RIGGED
ABC News executive producer Ian Cameron is married to Susan Rice, National Security Adviser.
CBS President David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications.
ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman is married to former Whitehouse Press Secretary Jay Carney
ABC News and Univision reporter Matthew Jaffe is married to Katie Hogan, Obama's Deputy Press Secretary
ABC President Ben Sherwood is the brother of Obama's Special Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood
President Virginia Moseley is married to former Hillary Clinton's Deputy Secretary Tom Nides.
And now you know why it is no surprise the media usually goes very easy on Obama's many errors.
Are any of these (ABC, CBS, CNN) sources for the 'national or world news' you hear each day?
Ya think there might be a little bias in these news sources?
CAROLINE GLICK SAYS THERE WERE NO PALESTINIAN REFUGEES
It is the prime of Caroline Glick. The contributing editor of the Jerusalem Post who grew up in Chicago and moved to Israel after graduating from Columbia University in 1991 had a showdown with European diplomats ten days ago in which she told them that their concern with Israeli settlements was a manifestation of anti-Semitism that goes back to Jesus.
A couple weeks before that, she got to spout three paragraphs of her intolerant ideas in a long piece in The New Yorker on the one-state reality:
Like Netanyahu, Glick sees a Palestinian state as little
more than a staging ground for assaults on Israel. "The border
will be permeable," she said. "Jerusalem will be divided and
people will walk in the Damascus Gate and then through the Jaffa
Gate and murder people. There is no way of securing the country..."
That piece mentioned her book, The Israeli Solution: A
One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. It came out earlier this year from a big US publisher, Crown, with blurbs from the governor of Indiana and former UN Ambassador John Bolton.
I got the book. Glick denies the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948; denies the existence of Palestinian refugees; denies that Palestinians are the "indigenous population" of the land; and denies the existence of the West Bank, which she mentions only in quotation marks– its real name for her is its biblical Jewish designation, Judea and Samaria.
The book affirms the Jewish people's status as the indigenous
people of the Land of Israel." Glick may have grown up in Chicago, but she has a religious view of Middle East history:
[T]he Jewish people's rights to sovereignty over Judea and Samaria–as with their rights to the rest of the Land of Israel– are overwhelming..[D]uring the 3,500 year political history of the Land of Israel, the Jews were the only nation that viewed Israel as a single political unit...
The Temple Mount is... the holiest site in Judaism.
According to Jewish tradition, the Temple Mount is where the world
was created... The destruction of the Temple Mount [by what Glick calls a Palestinian "campaign" today to excavate the site] is a cultural crime certainly no less damaging than the Taliban's destruction of the ancient Buddhist Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan in March 2001...
The people of Israel, and indeed the Jewish people
worldwide, are a community of memory. The reconsitution of the
Jewish state in the Land of Israel is an unprecedented historic
accomplishment. No other indigenous people has preserved its national identity for so long and against such great odds, only to repatriate itself to its historic homeland...
And it was in recognition of this remarkable feat that in 1922, the nations of the world determined that the legal right to sovereignty over the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people alone.
Glick's one straight reference to the "Nakba," is the claim
that it is the Palestinian name for May 15, 1948. In fact the
Nakba refers to a months-long period of expulsion. Glick generally
puts the word "Palestine" inside quotations too. It has never existed as a political entity, she asserts, just a geographical one.
And so there could be no Palestinian refugees from the land of
Israel, because they were interlopers. The refugees in her view are "the so-called Palestinian refugees." She says the refugee problem began after Israel's establishment on May 15, 1948– thereby denying the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing that began weeks before that, including the massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948 and the campaign against the coastal city of Jaffa: Jaffa's Palestinian population went from 75,000 to 4,500 over several months ending on May 13, 1948.
But Glick says the so-called refugees left later than that:
During the course of the war [with Arab armies that
commenced May 1948], several hundred thousand Palestinians had
left the territory of Israel and relocated to neighboring Arab
states. Since they left, the Arab states, aside from Jordan, have denied them and their descendants citizenship...
Today there are several million Arabs whom the United Nations classifies as Palestinian refugees who have lived for generations in the Arab states neighboring Israel...
As for the right of return, Glick never mentions UN Resolution 194, guaranteeing the right of refugees to return. She does say:
"This demand is without precedent in the history of warfare.
There is no precedent of a civilian population, displaced by a war that their leadership started and lost, claiming a right to return to territory that they failed to conquer... In other words, the demand for a 'right of return' of the 'refugees' is a Palestinian — and pan-Arab, and UN– attempt to retroactively achieve the result they failed to achieve in a war of aggression instigated by their ancestors."
Every Palestinian I've ever asked about the right of return has
said that it is a central issue. In part this is because the right
affirms Palestinian history and grievances: their expulsion in
1948 and the refusal to allow them to return to their property. As
endless peace processors have discovered, any resolution of the
conflict must honor and reckon with the right of return. Whether
or not a sizable portion of refugees and descendants would choose
to return is not the question; the issue is one of acknowledgement
of a grave injustice. Imagine how Jews would respond if a
prominent writer denied the Holocaust; that kind of lie has
generated lawsuits and laws. What's more, the Nazi extermination
of Jews resulted years ago in German reparations to Jews and other
goodwill gestures between Germany and Israel, to the point that
Netanyahu has a German car. Yet there have been no reparations to Palestinians for the theft of their property and their expulsion from their lands 66 years ago.
THE MYTH
The myth of "Palestinian" Nationalism andthe reality of Arabic-Islamic Nationalism
The "refugees" were not leaving their homeland, rather the were just migrating to another part of the larger Arab state.
A glaring, and tragic, illustration of the Arabs' loose
territorial affinities was provided by a largely disregarded
aspect of the "refugee" problem. After all has been said of the
pressures that were exerted and the panic that was induced by
their leaders in 1948, something uncanny remains in the picture of
a community, rural as well as urban, not under any physical
pressure -- even, as in Haifa, asked to remain -- nevertheless
removing itself, men, women, and children leaving home and farm
and business, leaving village and town, to go into a self-imposed
exile. The ease of it, its smoothness, is remarkable.
There was no steadfast refusal to leave, as would be
encountered in most of the world, certainly from farmers, from
people attached to their soil. They went into exile in cold blood,
even before there was any fighting. And expecting fighting, they
left their fate in the hands of foreign soldiers. It was not a
question of evacuating non-combatants; here everybody left,
including some 95 percent of the men of military age. A pregnant
description of this phenomenon is contained in the London
Times of June 7, 1948, in a dispatch from its correspondent in
Amman. "Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and even Iraq were filled with
fugitives from Palestine, many of them young men of military age
still carrying arms-- The cafes and hotel lobbies continued to be
filled with young effendis whose idea was that though something
must be done it should be done by somebody else. Some of them had spent a week or so at the front and on the strength of this they felt entitled to return to less dangerous climes."
Were they all cowards? Were they all stupid? They were
neither. They did not, indeed, think long; they decided quickly.
It was not difficult to decide-because they did not see the
invaders from the Arab states as foreign soldiers, nor their own
destination as an exile. They considered the move as being to
another part of the Arab world, to another place where Arabic was
spoken, to a place where they would find their own people, often
their own relatives. To move from Acre to Beirut, from Akir to
Nablus, was like an American moving from Cincinnati to Detroit or
from Trenton to Boston. In all fairness, it must be added that not
all the Arabs went into exile. Some 100,000 declined to move.
Their presumed hatred of Jews and their sense of belonging to a
large Arab people and territory apparently did not outweigh their
love for their homes. These are the Arabs who, despite inevitable early difficulties, prospered and multiplied in Israel, numbering by 1967 (together with returnees permitted by the Israeli government) some 350,000 souls, with the highest birthrate in the world.
The phenomenon of exodus was given a new dimension in 1967.
When the Six Day War was over, without any pressures or promises
from any side, when there was not even the hint or rumour of a
threat to the safety of life or property, some 200,000 Arabs in
Judea and Samaria packed their belongings and crossed the Jordan.
Day after day, the caravans of trucks and buses and private cars
drove down to the approaches to the river. Because the Allenby
Bridge was still a collapsed mass of iron and masonry, the
crossing had to be improvised. The long queues waited patiently
for their turn to cross. Scores of local and foreign newspaper
correspondents, photographers, and a sprinkling of unofficial
visitors mingled and talked with them while they waited. Three
weeks after the war, I was able to visit the area. I watched the
progress of the evacuees to the bridge. I asked a well-dressed
young man where he came from and why he was leaving. He explained
that, as an employee of the Jordanian government stationed at
Bethlehem, he had been instructed to report to Amman. Once across
the river, the Arabs were interviewed by foreign newspapermen. There everyone who told his story claimed to have been driven out by the Jews.
Between 1949 and 1967, when Jordan ruled the West Bank, 400,000 Arabs left for other parts of the "Arab world." - yet these too are called "refugees".
No less significantly, between 1949 and 1967, when the
Jordanian Arab king ruled peacefully in Judea and Samaria, some
400,000 Arabs packed their belongings and left for other parts of
the "Arab world." Today, large numbers of Palestinian Arabs are
living and working as ordinary citizens in Syria, Lebanon, Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, and especially prosperous Kuwait.
All these countries are home to them. There are, of course, cultural differences; even the spoken language has its local idiosyncrasies as does the English of London, Yorkshire, or Scotland, or the American in New York, Connecticut, or Texas.
The "Palestinian" movement and the "Palestinian" nation were
still, in 1972, no more than a myth. The Arabs of Palestine, like
all the other Arabs, have been taught to see as their territory
the vast expanse between the Persian Gulf on the east and the
African Atlantic coast on the west. To the north it borders on
Turkey; to the south its Asian boundary is where the Arab
peninsula meets the Indian Ocean, and its African frontiers are
marked by a line running through the heart of the continent,
beginning with the northern border of Uganda to the east and
ending with the northern border of Senegal to the west. The
existence of a non-Arab state in the centre of "his" territory is
offensive to the Arab, who has been taught to see it as
incomprehensible except in terms of a rampant imperialism. That
is the emotional foundation of the Arabs' attitude. Israel's
existence is therefore out of the question; the new state must
disappear. The status and future of the Arabs living in Palestine
is essentially a secondary matter, to be settled later, or fought
over, among the Arabs themselves. For the time being, the
resources of the Arab world must be concentrated on camouflaging
the reason for Israel's liquidation as a solution to a human
problem--the problem of "homeless" Palestinians. The Egyptian journal Al-Musswar in December 1968 admitted frankly: "'The expulsion of our brothers from their homes should not cause us any anxiety, especially as they were driven into Arab countries...The masses of the Palestinian people are only the advanceguard of the Arab nation ...a plan for rousing world opinion in stages, as it would not be able to understand or accept a war by a hundred million Arabs against a small state."
What quarrel with Israel has Kuwait on the Persian Gulf, or Sudan in the heart of Africa, or Morocco on the Atlantic Coast? What quarrel, indeed, have Egypt, Syria, and Iraq?
Such is the core of the confrontation between Israel and the
Arab people. It stares out, moreover, beyond the sleight of hand
of Arab propaganda. The campaign against Israel is conducted,
after all, by the whole Arab world. Every one of the Arab states
is involved and makes its greater or lesser contribution. At the
least, each state co-operates in the economic boycott, in the
diplomatic offensive, in the propaganda campaign. What quarrel with Israel has Kuwait on the Persian Gulf, or Sudan in the heart of Africa, or Morocco on the Atlantic Coast? What quarrel, indeed, have Egypt, Syria, and Iraq?
The Arab states are, furthermore, divided among themselves on a
number of important problems. The interests of the oil-bearing
states conflict with those that have no oil, the rich with the
poor, the puritanical Moslem states with the more permissive.
Needless to say, the Arab governments, like other governments, are
not altruistic. A glance at their ruling classes suggests that,
in the matter of concern for others, the Arabs are below rather
than above average. They are model members in a world where the
rule, perhaps inevitable, is for every nation to look out for
itself and to pursue its own selfish interest. It is not to help the Palestine Arabs that the Arab states pursue their militant purpose toward Israel.
"If the Arabs could agree on nothing else," wrote one of their
great friends, a British officer who served in the Jordanian Arab
Legion, "they could at least agree that Israel as a State must be
extinguished. Israel delenda est. "1 Such has been the theme ever
since the Arab leaders began to see the Arab Empire as a tangible
aim. In May 1946, when the Jewish state was still only a "threat," a meeting at Inshass in Egypt of leaders of the Arab states declared: "The problem of Palestine is not the problem only of the Arabs of Palestine, but of all the Arabs."
Since the Jewish state was established, Arab political and ideological literature has been filled with a mass of semantic variations on the theme.
"When Palestine is injured," said Abdel Nasser in 1953, "each one of us is injured in his feelings and in his homeland."
Eight years later, the outlook had not changed. "The Palestine
problem," said Nasser in 1961, "has never been the problem of the
Palestinians alone. The whole Arab nation is involved." At its
conference in October 1966, the Syrian ruling Ba'ath Party went to
the heart of the Arab purpose: "The existence of Israel in the heart of the Arab homeland constitutes the main base dividing the eastern part from the western part of the Arab nation."2
"The meaning of Arab unity is the liquidation of Israel." - Egyptian Prime Minister, 1965
Nasser stated it more pointedly on February 2, 1965, at the Festival of Unity: "The meaning of Arab unity is the liquidation of Israel."
The conflict, then, shorn of legend and fiction, is between the "Arab nation," which possesses eighteen states embracing an area of thirteen million square kilometres, and the Jewish people, claiming the right to its single historic homeland, whose territory even today after the Six Day War, constitutes less than 1 percent of the territories ruled and dominated by the Arabs.
That is the moral issue in the clash between Arabs and Jews. On
the one hand is the hunger of the Jewish people for national
independence and physical security in its homeland, a land it has
brought back to life. On the other hand is the huge, unsentimental appetite of the Arab people for the unbroken continuity of a vast empire and for the unique status of a nation which, itself dominating minority populations of millions, arrogantly and violently refuses to accept that status for one small segment of its people.
The ambitions of British imperialists, aiming at their own
domination of the Fertile Crescent through Arab puppet states,
first aroused the idea of a reborn empire in Arab minds as a
serious and practical political proposition. Their aid and
patient support established the nucleus of the modem Arab Empire.
After they had conceived and established the Arab League in 1945,
the British tended and nurtured it for years thereafter. They
first envisaged Palestine as a full partner in that empire, its
Jewish population being given minority status as envisaged in the
British government's White Paper of 1939. No less important, the
British persuaded the Arabs that this plan was feasible. They
looked forward to a tangible reward for their friendship. Later, however, the strategic attractions and commercial opportunities of the Arab states drew the attention of other nations, and Britain had to content herself with only a part of the Arabs' favors.
This change flowed from a development which even the most
powerful Arab imagination had not conceived. It was precisely in
this period that new, unprecedentedly large discoveries of oil
were made in the soil of a number of the Arab states. Their
economic importance and potential increased overnight. Tremendous
impact was now added to their relations in the international area,
and especially with the great powers, who are the chief exploiters
of the oil. The Arabs became a power in the world.
For many hundreds of years, the Arab states had played no part in world affairs.
For many hundreds of years, the Arab states had played no part
in world affairs. (Few of them had played any part even in the
conduct of their own affairs.) Outside the sheikhdoms of Arabia
itself, which pursued the slow tempo of life in the wide spaces
and played out their desert rivalries, there simply were no Arab
affairs. Nor was there any hunger or striving for their revival.
The Arabs warmed themselves and were contented with memories of
past glory. Characteristically, they tended to magnify that glory;
their imagination expanded the 120 years of the purely Arab Empire
in the seventh and eighth centuries and fused them with the
following three centuries of an empire ruled by Moslems, who spoke
and wrote Arabic but, like Saladin, were not Arabs and became
Arabs only in the nostalgic retrospection of later centuries. Nevertheless, the Arabs have genuine memories of glory, of military achievements that were the wonder of their age, of the wide sowing of their language and their faith over vast areas of the earth, of the glittering imperial splendour of Damascus and Baghdad, of a cultural contribution that enriched and dazzled medieval European scholarship.
For a thousand years they lived on that glory. In a prolonged
and continuous stagnation, they ceased not only to rule, but also
to achieve, to create, to build, to strive. Far from reviving
past glories, they sank into a lethargy that brought them into the
twentieth century as one of the most backward, most immobile of
peoples. Students of Arabic history and culture, especially those
well-disposed to the Arabs, cite the characteristics responsible
for that lethargy. "the Arab is preoccupied with his past," writes
the Arab sociologist Sania Hamady. "The pleasant memories of its glory serve as a refuge from the painful reality of the present" (p. 217).
The roots of this condition are deep. As the scholars point
out, lethargy and stagnation are conditioned by Islamic principles
of predestination and fatalism. Nor are there reasonable
prospects of a change. "It is not an exaggeration to say that after so many centuries of immobility the process of agriculture, industry, exchange and learning had become little more than automatic, and had resulted in a species of atrophy that rendered those engaged in them all but incapable of changing their methods or outlook in the slightest degree... It is incapacity rather than unwillingness to learn that characterises Arab society."3
The Arab leaders who themselves enjoyed a modem education have been conscious of the stagnation of their society.
The Arab leaders who themselves enjoyed a modem education may
have been conscious of the stagnation and backwardness of their
society. They were nevertheless not equipped, they were indeed helpless, to effect any of the apparently revolutionary changes that alone might raise their people to the cultural and technical levels of our age.
Yet now, suddenly, they found themselves with little effort
possessed of independence, controlling states with enormous
resources and vast territories important in global strategy,
ruling over millions of non-Arab minorities. Now, too, they were
courted by the great powers of the world. By a little effort of
their imagination they saw themselves bridging the black gap of
the centuries, winning the recognition of the previously
supercilious Western world. Suddenly they could see themselves accepted, with no further cultural effort, as instant full partners in the complex culture of the twentieth-century world, just as they had shared in the building of its foundations during the Middle Ages.4
The power of the Arabs' imagination is such that they soon
forgot that there had been a gap at all. They soon saw unfolding
behind them one continuous stretch of centuries of glory and of
Arab life dominant throughout the whole area conquered by the
ancient Arabic Empire in Asia and Africa. The facts of history between the eighth and the twentieth centuries ceased to exist; and the prospect they induced themselves to see was a direct continuation of what had existed 1000. years ago and more.
Arab population of Palestine sat by while Jewish resistance led to the end of British rule
Now, at last, the time had come for the assertion of a
"Palestinian" Arab entity. The Arabs could theoretically have
joined the Jews in a classic war of liberation from a foreign
ruler and established a claim to partnership in the ensuing
independence. Or, more credibly, the British having already
promised them in fact independence which the Jewish resistance was
endangering, they might have rushed in to help the British in
crushing the Zionists. In fact, faced with the two alternatives,
they chose a third: They did nothing. The Arab population of Palestine sat by while the Jewish resistance movement brought about the end of British rule.
96% of local Arabs of military age sat by and did not fight while the neighboring Arab countries invaded Israel.
When the United Nations General Assembly decided on November
29, 1947, to recommend the partition of Palestine and the
establishment of two states, the Arabs did launch a countrywide
attack on the Jews. But this, too, was carried out only with
considerable aid from the British who maintained their presence in
the country for another six months. Clearly, also, the attacking
Arabs were a minority of the people, while the majority remained
passive or evacuated in order to leave the field to the invading
Arab states, who promised to drive the Jews into the sea. The
Palestine Arabs were truly a people of non-combatants; they
contributed very little manpower to the ensuing full-scale war
that was supposed to be a life-and-death struggle for them. The
British statistics gave the Arabs a population of 1,200,000 in
western Palestine. Even if, as is likely, this figure is an
exaggeration, there must still, at a highly conservative estimate,
have been 100,000 men of military age. The report of the Iraqi
Government Commission, which subsequently inquired into the cause
of the defeat,5established that the total number of Palestinian
Arabs who took part in the war was 4,000. The Jews, altogether some 650,000, lost one-and-a-half times that number.
This confrontation of figures (%4 of Palestinian Arabs of
millitary age fought, while almost 10% of the entire Jewish
population died). is symbolic of the affinity to Eretz Israel of
the Jewish people and of the real Arab relationship to the
country. The Arabs of Palestine were under no physical compulsion
when their vast majority deliberately left their homes unguarded
and exposed and moved off across the Jordan or into Syria or
Lebanon or to those parts of Western Palestine that fell under the
control of the Arab invaders. The Jews--most of them the first
and second generation of the organised return to their ancestral
country-stood and fought and died for every inch of the land. This stark confrontation of affinities has its deep roots in the history of the land and the people.
There was a further reason for the Arabs' confidence: They were
convinced of their superiority over the Jews as a fighting nation.
Had not the Arabs conquered half the world? True, that had
happened 1,300 years earlier since which time they had
distinguished themselves at best in minor in-fighting among rival
Bedouin tribes and in the Laurentian tactic of arriving after the
battle to claim the victory. They had no difficulty, however, in
projecting their seventh-century martial excellence as an abiding
fact in the twentieth. Whoever reads the predictions of the Arabs in 1956, after they had suffered one defeat, and their even more bloodcurdling predictions of victory and destruction in May 1967, after they had suffered two defeats, will recognise the uninhibited, unlimited, early certainty of the Arab states in May 1948 that they were about to win a stunning, historic victory, and that within a few weeks, or even days, Jewish hopes would be in ruins and Palestine would be inexorably enfolded in the embrace of the reborn Arab Empire.
1948 has entered Arab history as the year of the catastrophe.
The Arab states were saved from complete rout by political
considerations: the submission by the novitiate Israeli government
to British and United States pressures. Thus, Transjordan
remained in possession of most of the area allotted in the United
Nations resolution to the Arab states (Samaria, Judea, and eastern
Jerusalem), while Egypt occupied the Gaza district. Israel,
however, was not only not obliterated, she improved substantially
upon the collapsible borders of the UN resolution of 1947 and
emerged from the conflict with the high prestige of courage and
resource in the face of overwhelming odds. Moreover, some 400,000 Arab residents of the area lost their homes.
Soon the shock and the shame of loosing to Israel gave way to the search for scapegoats and for excuses.
Soon the shock and the shame gave way to the search for
scapegoats and for excuses. "The Arab," notes an Arab writer, "is
reluctant to assume responsibility for his personal or national
misfortunes, and he is inclined to put the entire blame upon the
shoulders of others. The Arab is fascinated with criticism--of
the foreigner, of fellow-countrymen, of leaders, of followers,
always of 'the other,' seldom of oneself."6 There is a cultural
reason for this habit. Hamadi explains: "As a result of his
determinist orientation, the Arab finds a good excuse to relegate
his responsibility to external forces. He attributes the ills of his society, his mistakes and failures, either to fate, to the devil or to imperialism" (p. 187).
Thus, as time went by, the material aid and the diplomatic support and military co-operation which their British allies had given the Arabs in the war of 1948 and the loaded American neutrality-which together nearly insured the Arabs' objective of annihilation -- were translated through Arabic literature into a Zionist invasion aided by British and American imperialism.
Some such far-reaching explanation of their failure was
necessary to the Arabs for another important historical reason.
It was unacceptable that the brave, the resourceful, the
chivalrous, the lionhearted Arabs (of the seventh century) should
be defeated by, of all peoples, the Jews-the lowly, the
contemptible, whom they, the Arabs, had long since condemned to
death. The Arabs knew the Jews in Palestine historically as a
minority oppressed, or at least discriminated against, since the
seventh century. The Jews under Moslem rule were second-class
citizens. Social regulations and prohibitions singled them out.
They were subject to special taxes. They were, of course, not
alone-all non- Moslems were so treated. But in the eyes of the
Moslems, the Jews in Palestine lived always in the image of a
defeated people, in the daily shadow of their defeat in 70 and 135
C.E. The Christians, inferior though they were, had in their
background a world of states, of power. The Jews had nothing;
they were outcasts over large areas of the Christian world as
well. Even when the Arab was himself ill-treated or humiliated in
Moslem non-Arab society, he saw the Jew as one grade below him. The confrontation with the Jews in British- controlled Palestine had no doubt amended this attitude, yet now to be defeated in the open battlefield, at such an historic moment and in such favourable circumstances, by the Jews-that was an overwhelming blow to Arab pride
The State of Israel, as the instrument of the Arabs' defeat and dishonour, became the focus of their frustrations.
The State of Israel, as the instrument of the Arabs' defeat and
what they described as their dishonour, thus became the focus of
all their frustrations, of all their hatreds, and of a hunger for
vengeance which, by force of a combination of circumstances, grew
fiercer and deeper with time. Honour and pride could be restored
only by the disappearance of Israel. Again, then, Israel delenda est.
The continuing enhancement of the Arabs' international stature
only increased the frustration. This, after all, was the era of
colonial disengagement. The Dutch, the Belgian, the French, and
the British Empires were disintegrating. Asia and Africa became a
checkerboard of independent states, most of them established with
little or no struggle. One Arabic-speaking country after another
became independent. From seven states at the United Nations in
1948, the Arabs grew to a bloc of eighteen by 1972. The Arab states, though their average illiteracy rate is among the highest in the world, have perhaps more influence at the United Nations any other group of nations.
The years have, moreover, seen a steep increase in oil wealth.
While normally a people labours for years to achieve minor
improvements in the national income and the standard of living,
some of the Arab states have overnight joined the richest
countries in the world in terms of per capita wealth. The ease
with which their wealth and influence-and in most cases their
political independence-were accomplished led them all the more to
think of 1949 as an unhappy accident for which the "imperialists"
were responsible. When the time came, they decided, the Israelis could be beaten and with ease "driven into the sea."
A great new force helped to bolster Arab hopes of victory and
annihilation. The Soviet Union, by its steady stream of arms to Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, and by unstinting political support, replaced Britain as the big brother of Arabism.
1. Peter Young, The Israeli Campaign, 1967 (London, 1967), p. 32
2. Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes toward Israel (Tel Aviv, 1972), p. 93; Fatah in Arab Strategy (Tel Aviv, 1969), p. 30, quoting Anabtawi, Palestinian Documents, II, p. 481.
3. H. A. R. Gibb and H. Bowen, Islamic Society and the West (London, 1950), pp. 215-216.
4. An amusing illustration of the full circle of Arab fantasy
and sense of values is the picturesque claim of the Arab writer
Mahmoud Rousa: "The Arabs invented the wheel, on which modern
civilisation is built and now they supply the oil which turns the
wheel." Palestine and the Internationalisation of Jerusalem (Baghdad, 1965), p. 2.
5. Published in Hebrew translation in Behind the Curtain (Tel Aviv, 1954).
6. F. A. Sayegh, Understanding of the Arab Mind (Washington, 1953), P. 28.
This page was produced by Joseph E. Katz
Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst
Brooklyn, New York
THE HISTORY OF THE PLO AND THE INTERNATIONAL LEGITIMIZATION OF TERRORISM
The Arabs' most spectacular success after 1973, however, has been to turn the international community into accomplices-albeit, passive-in legitimising the instrument designed to destroy what would remain of Israel after that withdrawal.
For the achievement of such complicity by Western nations,
accepted values of culture and civilisation had to be thrown
overboard. The international institutions within the United
Nations that were established to promote, to disseminate, and to
perpetuate those values had to be subverted and prostituted, and
even the formal regulations and norms protecting them in the
Charter of the United Nations had to be abused and undermined. The Arab states, however, encountered little resistance.
Thus, in November 1974, a year after the Yom Kippur War, the world
was treated to the spectacle of Yasser Arafat, the leader of the
Arab terrorists, a revolver showing at his hip, addressing amid
noisy acclaim the Assembly of the United Nations. Fourteen months later, a representative of his organisation was seated as a participant-lacking only the right to vote -- in a meeting of the Security Council.
On the Arab side, these developments were neither sudden nor
the fruit of spasmodic opportunism. They were well and long
thought out. They were the result of a clear change in tactics by the Arab states after the oil and petrodollar weapon had proved its potency., Before the war, the pattern of their propaganda, their pressures, and their strategy had been governed by the logic of geography: first the "erasure of the consequences of the 1967 War"-that is, Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines-and then the concentrated physical attack on the attenuated Israel by a sea of Arabs, all wearing "Palestinian" uniforms and fighting for the "restoration of their legitimate rights": that is, the elimination of Israel.
When the American pressure began to bear fruits, when Israel
had physically given up part of the gains of 1967, and the further
consummation of the Arabs' objective seemed to them no longer in
doubt, they changed the order of priorities. It became possible at
once -- without waiting for the gradual process of Israeli
withdrawal-to establish the diplomatic basis for the most radical
part of their dream: the creation, in the public consciousness, of
the "Palestine State" on the rains of Israel. To this end, considerable diplomatic activity was required-for co-ordination among the Arab states themselves, for co-ordination with the Soviet bloc and with the submissive African states--to test the reactions of the Western states, the degree of passivity with which they would swallow the project.
The terrorist organisations had certainly come----or been
brought-a long way since their crushing defeat in Jordan. The
Arab states had then acted, swiftly to ensure the speedy
rehabilitation of their proteges. Some latitude, to be sure, had
to be given them in executing at least some symbolic revenge on
Jordan. But the promise and the arrangements for their continued existence, for quartering them (mainly in Lebanon), for financing their arms, their training and their propaganda, were necessarily accompanied by the condition that they concentrate their main effort against the Israeli enemy.
Symbolic revenge found expression in the appearance of a new
organisation that called itself Black September, in memory of the
events in Jordan in 1970. The first operation claimed by the
organisation was appropriately a blow against Jordan. On November
28, 1971, King Hussein's Prime Minister, Wasfi el Tal, was shot
down in a Cairo street. The four assailants did not resist
arrest. They were not put on trial but were subsequently simply released by Egyptian authorities.
In fact, Black September was not a new organisation at all. The nature of its operations, the new dimension of brutality which -became its hallmark, made it convenient for Fatah and its leader to avoid identification with it.
Most of its activities in the next two years were carried out
at a distance from Israel. They consisted mainly of efforts to
attack civilian airplanes-on the ground at Rome or Athens
airports-or by means of stratagems. For example, a gift
chivalrously given to an unsuspecting girlfriend flying on an El
Al plane to Israel, contained a time-bomb. Most dramatic of their
exploits were the attacks on unsuspecting groups of people,
related or unrelated to Israel, in airplanes or elsewhere, and
holding them as hostages against the satisfaction of various
demands. Usually these included the release of prisoners, jailed
in Israel or other counties as well as money and safe conduct to
one of the Arab states. Arab terrorism now became also part of an
international phenomenon. Liason and mutual co-operation was widely reported with terrorist groups in Italy, Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere.
Thus, the one major act of terror carried out on Israel itself
was the 1972 attack by three Japanese terrorists at Lod Airport.
Landing from a plane on March 25, they took up positions in the
airport's arrival hall and machine-gunned their fellow passengers.
They killed twenty-seven people, including twenty pilgrims from
Puerto Rico who had come to celebrate Easter in the Holy Land. Eighty others were wounded.1
Black September's own tour de force that year was performed in
Munich, Germany. There, in September, they murdered eleven
Israeli athletes who had come to participate in the 1972 Olympic
Games. They had first trapped them, unguarded and unarmed as they were, in their sleeping quarters.
As though to flaunt its special tactics of warfare, Black
September carried out an act of equal Wantonness six months later.
This time, for reasons unexplained, the chosen field of battle was
inside Arab territory: the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum,
capital of Sudan, where the ambassador was giving a party. The
attackers had no difficulty getting in, nor in subduing five
unarmed diplomats and taking them captive into another part of the
building. They soon released the two Arabs among them: the host,
and a Jordanian. Many hours of negotiations then followed with
Sudanese authorities. To this end, the terrorists reported and
received orders by radio communication with Beirut. Then the
three remaining captives-a Belgian and two Americans-were shot
dead in the chairs to which they had been tied. The killers were arrested.
There were perhaps some valid inter-Arab reasons for the
operation, but the Sudanese authorities, in their anger, now
publicly dispelled whatever doubt may have existed about the
authenticity of Black September. They announced and published
documents proving that Black September was indeed none other than
Fatah, and that the organiser of the killing in Khartoum was in
fact the local official representative of Fatah. Sudan's Vice
President later announced that the order to kill had come by code
on the radio from Fatah headquarters in Beirut. Later, unofficial
reports added that the order had been given personally by Yasser
Arafat. Arafat now admitted that "there are some Fatah members in
Black September." A member of Fatah, captured in Jordan, revealed that the operative leader of Black September was Arafat's deputy, Salah Halef, known as Abu Ayad.
The massacre at Munich had evoked expressions horror throughout
the Western world. The terrorists knew no bounds after the
gruesome event in Khartoum The American government demanded that
Sudan deal with the murderers with due severity, and newspapers
throughout the world called for countermeasures against this new
barbarity. The New York Times expressed the view that it
was "inconceivable" that Black September should be allowed to
exist. Then sentiments failed, or pretended to fail, to understand the realities.
But by the time the Yom Kippur War broke out nobody could continue
to feign ignorance of the fact that Black September was Fatah,
just as Fatah and its sister organisations were a completely
integrated arm of the Arab states. There, each new operation was
greeted with public approval and enthusiasm. The only Arab government that officially announced its active role in the world-wide operation of Black September was.2 In fact, all the requirements of the terrorists were placed at their disposal by one or another of the Arab states as required, and the embassies of the Arab states, in carefree disregard of all international agreements and procedures, became bases for terrorist activities.3
Arab perpetrators of terrorist acts found sanctuary, when they
needed it, in the Arab states (except Jordan). In some cases,
they were given public receptions as heroes; in others, they were
quickly removed from the public eye and returned to their base.
Sudan had reacted to the murder of the diplomats and had responded
to the horror-stricken reactions in the United States by emphatic,
unequivocal, and repeated undertakings to punish the murderers. But in fact, after a while, the Sudanese government packed the murderers off to Egypt where Sadat freed them without fuss.
The Yom Kippur War presented Yasser Arafat and his organisation
with a great opportunity. Suddenly the Israeli Army was engaged
heavily on two fronts and was plunged into dire difficulties.
Large numbers of Israeli Reserve soldiers were being moved to the
fronts, and civilian life in Israel was suddenly in a state of
upheaval. Here was a favourable, even ideal, set of circumstances
for major action-to set up a third front: to divert Israeli forces
to the "Fatah front" on the Lebanese border, to attack Israeli
Army installations and forces behind the lines in Judea and
Samaria and indeed on the roads and in the cities of Israel. This
is what might have been expected by those throughout the world
who, on radio and television and in the newspapers, absorbed the
daily ration of information on the size and prowess of the
Palestinians. Nothing of the sort happened, however. Neither Fatah nor any of its sister organisations played any noticeable part in Yom Kippur War.
It was only after the war, in the gloom and atmosphere of
defeat that had been induced in Israel by the revelation of the
unwarranted shortcomings and blunders at its opening, by its heavy
toll of casualties, and by the crushing cruelty of American
pressure at its conclusion, that the Arab terrorist organisations
mounted a new series of operations. Now they no longer used the
camouflage of Black September, but explicitly that of their
collective identity -- "Palestine Liberation Organisation"---or of
one of its constituent bodies. Now, indeed, they operated, mostly from their bases in Lebanon, against and inside Israel itself.
The onslaught began in the spring of 1974. During that year, in
addition to a number of smaller operations -- such as the flinging
(by two non-Arab allies from abroad) of hand grenades from the
balcony of a Tel Aviv theatre into the crowd below-they launched a
dozen major attacks. Some were nipped in the bud; a number
succeeded. Several places in northern Israel were thus added to
the annals of Arab achievement, gaining a sombre fame throughout
the world: Nahariyah, Beit She'an, Shamir. The pattern of these attacks was exemplified by the events at Kiryat Shmoneh and Ma'alot.
Kiryat Sh'moneh is a village in the mountains of Galilee close
to the Lebanese border. It was there that the PLO opened its
offensive. Shortly before dawn on April 11, 1974, three of its
members, two Syrians a one Iraqi, went into an empty schoolhouse
on the outskirts and, as dawn broke, fired into the street. Upon
the arrival of Israeli soldiers who returned their fire, they
found a way out of the building, crossed a street, and went into
an apartment building. They entered an apartment and, using
Kalashnikov automatic rifles, shot Mrs. Esther Cohen, age forty,
her seventeen-year-old son David, and her daughter, Shula, age
fourteen. They then went quickly to other apartments in the
building. Some they entered, firing at the occupants, most of whom
were eating breakfast; into others they simply threw hand
grenades. In the noise and confusion of the next ten minutes,
they made their way into the adjacent building to continue their
attack. By the time the Israeli soldier's caught up with them and
shot them, they had killed six more Israelis between the ages of
two-and-a-half and eleven as well as eight civilian adults. Sixteen men, women, and children were wounded but survived, and Israeli soldiers were killed.
Even more spectacular was the operation a month Later at
Ma'alot, a village somewhat farther from the Lebanese border.
Here the attackers arrived earlier in the day, at 3:00 A.M., when
everybody was asleep. They knocked at the door of one apartment
and one of called out in Hebrew: "Police! There are terrorists
around!" When the door was opened, the terrorists entered and shot
Yosef Cohen, his wife Fortuna, and their four-year-old son Eli.
They also shot the daughter, five-year-old Beah, but she survived.
From the Cohen apartment, the terrorists went across the road
again to a school. But this school was not empty. Housed in it
were more than one hundred high-school pupils on a hiking tour
from Safed, resting for the night. The attackers woke the
sleeping children and, wielding their Kalashnikovs, herded them,
together with their teachers, into the hallway. Some of the
children and one of the teachers succeeded in slipping and escaped
by jumping out of a window. The rest were held for fourteen
hours. When Israeli soldiers rushed the building, the Arabs fired
into the crowd of children, hitting eighty-four of them. Twenty were either killed instantly or later died of their injuries.
These operations were hailed with enthusiasm by the
communications media in all the Arab states. They were described later that year by Farouk El Kadoumi, leader of the Fatah delegation to the Conference of Foreign Ministers of the Arab States at Rabat, as "great operations of military heroism."
The cries of horror that resounded throughout the West did not
inhibit the great diplomatic offensive maintained by the Arab
states throughout that year. Its first stage was brought to a
successful conclusion by the end of 1974. Arafat himself was
active in the offensive, moving from one Arab capital to another,
and twice visiting Moscow in April and July 4. He had also had an
earlier meeting in March with the Soviet Foreign Minister in
Cairo, after which Mr. Gromyko sounded the keynote of the
diplomatic offensive: He announced that the Soviet Union regarded the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians.
It was on October 14, 1974, that the concentrated effect of
Arab power was dramatically demonstrated. On that day, 105 member
states of the United Nations voted to invite Yasser Arafat to
address the Assembly on the Palestine problem. The moral
significance of the vote was minor. Over the years, the automatic
majority of the totalitarian, the anti-democratic, and the captive
blocs had long turned the United Nations into a forum, pathetic
yet potentially dangerous, whose deliberations bore little or no
relation any longer to its high purpose. Now it was not only
condoning murder and barbarity and legitimising the threat of
politicide and genocide, it was destroying its own formal
legitimacy as an organisation of recognised states with recognised
minimal criteria. Among the 105 states, France and Italy also
raised supporting hands, and of the other Western states, only
three (apart from Israel)-Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, and the
United States-were bold enough to vote in opposition. The rest abstained.5
Now, too, the French government hastened to seek a further
advantage over its fellow Western Europeans in subservience to the
power-wielding Arabs. Foreign Minister Jean Sauvagnargues, paying
an official visit to the Middle East, made his way first to Beirut
and there (October 21) became the first Western Foreign Minister
to shake the hand of Yasser Arafat. He greeted him effusively as
"Mr. President" and, at a press conference, publicly pronounced
his considered judgement of Arafat as "a moderate leader"
possessed of "the stature of a statesman" who was "following a
constructive path." He did not elaborate. These events took place eighteen months after the slaughter of Western diplomats in Khartoum and five months after the massacre of children at Ma'alot
The stage was now set for the Arab states to legitimise formally their intention to replace Israel with a "democratic, secular State." On October 29, 1974, the heads of the Arab states met in conference in Rabat, Morocco, and passed resolutions
(a) Reaffirming "the right of the Palestinian people to return to its Homeland";
(b) Reaffirming "the right of the Palestinian people to set up an
independent national authority, under the leadership of the
Palestine Liberation Organisation as the sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people, in every part of
Palestine liberated. The Arab States are obligated to support this authority, from the moment of its establishment, in all spheres and at all levels";
(c) Expressing "support for the Palestine Liberation Organisation in exercising its national and international responsibility within the framework of Arab undertakings."
The decisions at Rabat were unanimous. Hussein of Jordan who was
deprived by the Rabat resolutions of any backing for his own claim
to western Palestine, had long resigned himself to the reality
that the terrorist movement was the more effective instrument for
eliminating Israel. He could only hope that his acquiescence
Might evoke from the PLO a similar forbearance about leaving
Transjordan in his hands, which, after all, they (correctly)
regarded as eastern Palestine, and where in fact most of the
Palestinian Arabs lived. He had long since been readmitted into the Arab fold. Egypt and Syria had re-established relations with him on the eve of the October war, and he had then released the remaining tefforists-756 in number-from his jails.
The resolutions were passed unanimously. President Sadat of
Egypt, widely advertised by Western apologists as a "moderate,"
did not pretend to try to introduce even a semantic modification
of their plain language Moreover, whoever wished to could find
many pronouncements by him or by other Egyptian authorities on
their identity of purpose with the "Palestinians." What Sadat
intended for the Jews of Israel he had in plain in his widely
publicised oath a year before Yom Kippur War. He had sworn in the
Cairo mosque to restore the Jews to the condition described in
Koran: "to be persecuted, oppressed and wretched." It was Egypt's leading weekly journal, Al-Musswar, that had spelt out in political terms precisely what was intended when the "legitimate rights" had been restored.
"The English word peace," wrote the editor of journal on December 7, 1973, "can be translated Arabic as both sulh and salaam, whereas in Arabic there is a difference between the two."
Israel, he explained, could indeed expect salaam in exchange for a surrender to present Arab territorial demands (that is, to withdraw to the Armistice lines of 1949).
But sulh is another thing altogether. Sulh means that the Jews
of Palestine-and I repeat and emphasize the expression, Jews of
Palestine-will return to their senses and dwell under one roof and
under one flag with the Arabs of Palestine, in a secular state
devoid of any bigotry or racialism, proportional to their
respective numerical ratio in 1948. By this I mean that the
original Palestinian Jews and their children and grandchildren
shall remain on the Palestinian soil will live there with the
original Palestinian Arabs. The Jews who came from abroad will return to their countries of origin, where they lived as did their forefathers before 1948-for these countries bear them no ill will.
This article was a faithful paraphrase of the text the constitution of the PLO-the so-called Palestine Covenant.
A fortnight after the Rabat Conference, clothed now with the
unambiguous authority of the whole Arab world, Yasser Arafat
delivered his address to the United Nations Assembly. His
appearance was timed to coincide with the presidency for that
month of an Arab, President Boumedienne of Algeria, who duly
accorded to Arafat at the podium the treatment previously accorded
only to heads of state. Nobody objected, nobody commented. Arafat
did not disappoint his sponsors. Mounting a Soviet-style attack on
imperialism and colonialism of which Zionism was the handmaiden,
and repeating a fine selection of the calumnies, gathered together
by Arab calumniators of Zionism and the Jewish people, he called
for world support for the elimination of the State of Israel and
its replacement by a democratic, secular State of Palestine. He
did, however, make a concession to Western susceptibilities. Not
all the Jews who had arrived after 1948 would be deported. The Jews living in Israel could stay there, provided they agreed to accept whatever fate awaited them in the "democratic, secular State."
The favouring wind that blew up for Arab ambitions after the
October war had by now reached gale force. The campaign continued
to accustom the world to the Nazistic idea that it would not be
bad for the world if the Jewish state disappeared. Meantime, however, circumstances had made it possible for the Arabs to eliminate two other obstacles disturbing the homogeneity of Arab Moslem domination throughout the area between the Persian Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean.
One of these was the Kurds in Iraq, a Moslem but non-Arabic
nation; the other the Christians of Lebanon. The Kurds, who had
no state of their own, had been fighting for a generation in their
contiguous territory in northern Iraq, not indeed for
independence, but for autonomy within the Iraqi Arab state. Except for the occasions when they made promises (which were never kept) to grant such autonomy, successive Iraqi governments had tried without success to crush the Kurds by force.
Fierce and bloody resistance to Iraqi power was supported by
Iranian arms, with United States backing. Iran's support was a
function of her ongoing dispute with Iraq about the sovereignty
over the waterway dividing them. With the growingly profitable
common oil interest and, presumably, prodded by the Arab League,
the Iraqis, meeting the Iranians at an OPEC meeting in Morocco in
March 1975, made concessions in return for an Iranian abandonment
of the Kurds. The Kurds were accorded one gesture. Those who wished to escape the mercies of the Arabs would, within a brief time limit, be allowed to cross the border into Iran and would be given sanctuary as refugees.
Inside the Kurdish region, the Iraqi government speedily applied plans for a final solution of the "problem." It would be done by degrees.
Nearly 80 percent of the agricultural produce of the region was
"bought" by the Iraqi government at a very low price, thus
reducing the means of livelihood for the population. Moreover, nearly all doctors and medical personnel were transferred from the Kurdish region.
A plan to settle large numbers of Egyptians in the Kurdish region, and the building of three new towns for the purpose, was publicly described in an advertisement in AI-Ahram of Cairo.
Should nothing happen to disturb the process, the Kurdish entity was well launched for extinction.
The assault in Lebanon began a month later. It was not a
walkover. Here was the only Arab state in which the Moslems had
to share power and even to accept a minor share in it. Indeed,
the original raison d'etre and the whole modem history of
Lebanon was primarily of a Christian enclave, of a haven for
Christians in an unfriendly Moslem environment. In recent years
in particular, with the increasing discomforts and unease suffered
by Christians in some of the Arab states, Christian immigrants
from those countries were being absorbed by Lebanon.6 By the
agreed Lebanese Constitution of 1943, the President and the
Commander-in-Chief of the Army were always Christians, while a
Moslem was Prime Minister. A Moslem was also Speaker in the Parliament, but the Christians held a majority of its seats.
The intolerance of Moslems to a status of less than domination
had twice in the recent past led to violent efforts to put an end
to this Christian predominance. On the last occasion, in 1958, order had been restored only after the United States had intervened by sending in Marines.
The Christians, well organised, forewarned by the new spirit of
exhilaration and militancy that gripped the Arab Moslem world
after the Yom Kippur War and by the ominous direction and thrust
of American diplomacy, prepared for trouble. But they were faced
by a coalition of forces. Their own Moslem neighbours, armed with weapons from Syria, were reinforced by the Arab terrorist organisations now filling without inhibition the role of executors of the pan-Arab will.
Incredibly, the fighting went on for months, mainly in Beirut,
the capital. Large sections of the once flourishing westernised
city, banking and business metropolis of all the Arab states, were
reduced to rubble, and day after day tens, and later hundreds, of
people, mostly civilians, were killed. After a year of civil war, at least twenty thousand people had perished.
By then the political objective of the Moslem onslaught had
been accomplished. Whatever the precise future organisation of the
country turned out to be, Christian predominance had been brought
to an end. The army had been broken up into its religious
components, and had in fact disintegrated as a viable force. The Christian President, whose resignation was demanded by the Moslem insurgents, was finally replaced by a cowed majority vote in a besieged Parliament; his successor was a Christian nominated by the Syrians.
The continued shelling and shooting reflected the sense of
desperation of the Christians, who could not reconcile themselves
to defeat. But more incisive was the fact that the Moslems, having achieved the essential political victory, quarrelled over the spoils.
The Syrian government now found the moment ripe to achieve her own
special objective: to take the affairs of Lebanon under her
control as a first step toward the creation of the long-dreamed-of
Greater Syria. Yet the Lebanese Moslems had believed that the
struggle and indeed the sacrifice had been for their benefit. The terrorist organisations, who had-played their full part in reducing the Christians, regarded it as their natural right to play a dominant role in deciding the fate of Lebanon.
The grotesquerie of the events was now made complete. The Christian nations, who with more or less embarrassment had throughout the months kept silent and turned their faces from the slaughter that Syria had generated and sustained, now welcomed her, and the troops she sent into Lebanon, as a "peacemaker."
The precise roles and relationship of the Syrians, the Lebanese
Moslems, and the Palestinian terrorist organisations would soon
crystallise. The reduction of the penultimate vestige of non-Moslem sovereignty in the Arab world would now also bring about, along the southern Lebanese border, a fourth front manned by a variety of Arabs, all in "Palestinian" uniforms, for the final reduction of Israel-the last obstacle to the "unity of the Arab world."
Pending the realisation of their ideal of Israel's physical
elimination, the Arab states pursued with undiminished vigour the
preparatory gnawing and nibbling at Israel's status as a member of
the community of nations. Their tactics were strikingly similar
to those of the Nazis: to disseminate an image of Israel-and of
the Jewish people-as black, as negative, and as hateful as could
be conjured up by their own fertile imaginations and by the
anti-Semitic outpourings of the ages, so that when the time and
the opportunity came to destroy Israel physically, the normal
reactions, even of civilised people, would be blunted and minimal.
At the same time, they accustomed the world to spectacles symbolising the supplanting of Israel by the "Palestinians."
They had as yet no hope of achieving Israel's expulsion from
the United Nations or even of the application of sanctions against
her-both decisions subject to veto by the Security Council-but in
the meantime they secured majority decisions denouncing Israel and
indeed the concept of Jewish nationalism in a number of
international bodies unconcerned with politics. They succeeded
even in having Israel expelled from the regional section of UNESCO
to which she belonged (and to whose work she contributed far
beyond her logical share). The protests and resignations of
intellectuals, artists, and scientists throughout the world were
to no avail. Thus, also, Israel was excluded from Asian sporting
bodies. And, thus, the United Nations Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism.
This last obscenity was indeed too much for the Western nations
to stomach. Not only did they not hide their disgust, but thirty-four of them voted against the solution.
Yet this isolated act of protest revealed all the more sharply the
supine resignation of the Western nations toward nearly all the
other Arab-Soviet orchestrated efforts to turn Israel into a
pariah state, and which had already made a grotesque caricature of
the United Nations organisation. Mr. Abba Eban, the former
Foreign Minister of Israel, once remarked-before the Yom Kippur
War-that if the Arabs were to introduce a resolution at the UN
declaring the earth to be flat, they would get forty supporting
votes. In the now enlarged United Nations, and in today's
circumstances, they would probably muster 110. And the Western
nations would abstain. This is the essence of their record on the
Arabs' hate campaign against Israel. Afraid to offend the Arabs, yet unable to support them in conscience, or where no plausible excuse was available, they would seek discreet refuge in abstention, however absurd, irrelevant, or outrageous the Arab resolution might be.7
On the other hand, the Western nations equally supinely showed no resistance to the seating of the PLO on various international bodies engaged in practical day-to-day activities, treating that organisation as though it were a national authority relating to the territory of Palestine.8
It is weird and depressing to see the rapists of Czechoslovakia
and those who savaged Yemen, the destroyers of the Kurds and those
who murdered South Sudanese, the vicious racists from Uganda and
the begetters of the bloodbath in Lebanon, conferring in the
corridors of the United Nations in amity and parliamentary decorum
with the spokesmen for Western civilisation, wrestling over a
formula for their diverse, selfish (or imagined) interest that
would somehow break the resistance and the spirit of Israel, while
all aver that their only objects are peace and justice. As long as this collaboration continues, there can neither peace nor justice in Palestine, but at best cease-fire with recurring Arab efforts at attrition.
1. Two the attackers were killed or committed suicide. The
third, Kozo Okomoto, was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The three were members of a Japanese organisation called the United Red Army.
2. On June 11, 1972.
3. A comprehensive survey of Black September was published by Christopher Dobson in a series of articles in the London Daily Telegraph in July 1973.
4. Arafat had paid six earlier publicised visits to Moscow in preceding two years.
5. The abstainers were: Australia, Barbados, Belgium, Britain, Burma, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Laos, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and West Germany. Absent from the vote were: Bahamas, Chile, Granada, Honduras, Lesotho, Nepal, Romania, South Africa, and Swaziland.
6. See Bernard Lewis, The Return of Islam, Commentary, January 1976.
7. When Mr. Baroudi, the delegate for Saudi Arabia, announced
that the Holocaust was a Zionist invention, the Western delegates
remained silent and unruffled, except for a belated few words of
correction by the British delegate. When Baroudi added that the
story of Anne Frank had never happened, even the Dutch delegate
remained silent. When Baroudi quoted "an important Swedish newspaper," no Swede rose even to explain that he was referring an obscure neo-Nazi scandal sheet.
8. Much of the time of these bodies is of course now spent debating fantastic charges against Israel.
This page was produced by Joseph E. Katz
Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst
Brooklyn, New York
Contact Yoram Fisher at yoramski@yahoo.com
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