http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=1DC862A4-B416-4C67-B0A1
-A49FDC3C2164
 
The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror               
By
<file:///C:/Program%20Files/Common%20Files/Microsoft%20Shared/Stationery/aut
hors.aspx?Name=David Meir-Levi> David Meir-Levi
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, December 14, 2007 

The following is chapter from David Meir-Levi's new book,
<http://www.encounterbooks.com/books/history> History Upside Down: The Roots
of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. The
<http://www.terrorismawareness.org/> Terrorism Awareness Project previous
printed his history of the "right-wing" influence on Islamic extremism,
<http://www.terrorismawareness.org/files/NaziRoots.pdf> "The Nazi Roots of
Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad." Taken together (with his entire
book), these chapters show that Islamofascism is a political, not merely a
religious force; and the potent and deadly offspring of the totalitarian
ideologies of the past. -- The Editors.

Although many Nazis found new and ideologically welcoming homes in Egypt and
Syria after World War II, the Grand Mufti’s Palestinian national movement
itself, bereft of its Nazi patron, was an orphan. No sovereign state of any
consequence supported it. On the contrary, most of the surrounding Arab
states, all of them buoyed by postcolonial nationalism and looking for
political stability, perceived the Palestinian cause, especially as embodied
in the Muslim Brotherhood, as a threat. Egypt aggressively suppressed the
Brotherhood. Saudi and Jordanian royalty watched the growth of radical Islam
with suspicion. Syria and Lebanon, trying to move toward more open societies
in the pre-Ba’athist era, feared the Brotherhood’s opposition to
western-style civil rights and liberties and its fierce condemnation of
westernized Arab societies. 

More to the point, each of these states coveted some or all of what was
formerly British Mandatory Palestine and were no more enthusiastic about the
creation of a new Arab state there than they were about the creation of
Israel. As a result of these complex national ambitions and antagonisms, no
state for the Arabs of British Mandatory Palestine was created. Even though
Israel offered the return of territories gained in the 1948 war at the
Rhodes armistice conference of February 1949, the Arab leaders (among whom
there were no representatives from the Arabs of the former Palestine)
rejected Israel’s peace offers, declared jihad, and condemned the Arab
refugees to eternal refugee status, while also illegally occupying the
remaining areas that the United Nations had envisioned as a Palestinian
state—as Arafat himself tells us in his authorized biography (Alan Hart,
Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker?). Egypt herded Palestinian Arabs into
refugee camps in its new fiefdom in the Gaza Strip, assassinated their
leaders, and shot anyone who tried to leave. Jordan illegally annexed the
west Bank and maintained martial law over it for the next nineteen years.

Egypt was particularly conscious of the threat the Muslim Brotherhood posed
to the westernized and increasingly secularized society it was trying to
build, and both King Farouk and later Gamal Abdel Nasser took brutal and
effective steps to repress the movement. They also made sure that the
350,000 Palestinians whom the Egyptian army had herded into refugee camps in
Gaza would develop no nationalist sentiments or activism. Egyptian
propaganda worked hard to redirect the Palestinians’ justifiable anti- Egypt
sentiments toward an incendiary hatred of Israel. Its secret police
engineered the creation and deployment of the fedayeen (terrorist
infiltrators) movement, which between 1949 and 1956 carried out over nine
thousand terror attacks against Israel, killing more than six hundred
Israelis and wounding thousands. These fedayeen were mostly Arab refugees,
trained and armed by Egypt.

As the conflict with Israel hardened throughout the 1950s, Nasser came to
see that Palestinian nationalism, if carefully manipulated, could be an
asset instead of just a threat and an annoyance. Although the fedayeen
terrorism prompted Israel to invade the Sinai in 1956, the Egyptian leader
saw the value in being able to deploy a force that did his bidding but was
not part of Egypt’s formal military; which could make tactical strikes and
then disappear into the amorphous demography of the west Bank or the Gaza
Strip, giving Egypt plausible deniability for the mayhem it had created. But
Nasser’s ability to support such a useful terrorist group was limited by the
failed economy over which he presided; and so, in 1964, he was delighted to
cooperate with the Soviet Union in the creation of the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO).

Brainchild of the KGB

As Ion Mihai Pacepa, onetime director of the Romanian espionage service
(DIE), later explained, the PLO was conceived at a time when the KGB was
creating “liberation front” organizations throughout the Third world. Others
included the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created in 1964 with help
from Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the National Liberation Army of Colombia,
created in 1965 with help from Fidel Castro. But the PLO was the KGB’s most
enduring achievement.

In 1964, the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian
representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Soviet blueprint for a
Palestinian National Charter—a document drafted in Moscow—and made Ahmad
Shukairy, the KGB’s agent of influence, the first PLO chairman. The Romanian
intelligence service was given responsibility for providing the PLO with
logistical support. Except for the arms, which were supplied by the KGB and
the East German Stasi, everything, according to Ion Pacepa, “came from
Bucharest. Even the PLO uniforms and the PLO stationery were manufactured in
Romania free of charge, as a ‘comradely help.’ During those years, two
Romanian cargo planes filled with goodies for the PLO landed in Beirut every
week.”

The PLO came on the scene at a critical moment in Middle East history. At
the Khartoum conference held shortly after the Six-Day war, the defeated and
humiliated Arab states confronted the “new reality” of an Israel that seemed
unbeatable in conventional warfare. The participants of the conference
decided, among other things, to continue the war against Israel as what
today would be called a “low intensity conflict.” The PLO’s Fatah forces
were perfect to carry out this mission.

The Soviets not only armed and trained Palestinian terrorists but also used
them to arm and train other professional terrorists by the thousands. The
International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
(CPSU), the Soviet Security Police (KGB), and Soviet Military Intelligence
(GRU) all played major roles in this effort. From the late 1960s onwards,
moreover, the PLO maintained contact with other terror groups—some of them
neo-Nazi and extreme right-wing groups—offering them support and supplies,
training and funding.

The Soviets also built Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship
University to serve as a base of indoctrination and training of potential
“freedom fighters” from the Third world. More specialized training in
terrorism was provided at locations in Baku, Odessa, Simferopol, and

Tashkent. Mahmoud Abbas, later to succeed Yassir Arafat as head of the PLO,
was a graduate of Patrice Lumumba U, where he received his Ph.D. in 1982
after completing a thesis partly based on Holocaust denial.

Cuba was also used as a base for terrorist training and Marxist
indoctrination, part of a symbiotic relationship between its revolutionary
cadre and the PLO. The Cuban intelligence service (DGI) was under the direct
command of the KGB after 1968. Palestinian terrorists were identified in
Havana as early as 1966; and in the 1970s DGI representatives were
dispatched to PLO camps in Lebanon to assist terrorists being nurtured by
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In late April
1979, an agreement was reached for the PFLP to have several hundred of its
terrorists trained in Cuba, following a meeting between its chief George
Habash and Cuban officials.

The PLO and the Arab States

In the chaotic aftermath of the Six-Day war, Yassir Arafat had seen an
opportunity for himself and his still embryonic Fatah terror organization in
the rubble of the Arab nations’ war machines and the humiliation of the Arab
world. He forged an alliance with President Nasser, whom he won over to his
belief that after traditional warfare had failed them yet again, the future
of the conflict for the Arabs was in the realm of terrorism, not the
confrontation of massed armies. From September to December 1967, Nasser
supported Arafat in his attempt to infiltrate the west Bank and to develop a
grassroots foundation for a major terror war against Israel. These efforts
were unsuccessful because local west Bank Palestinians cooperated with
Israel and aided in the pursuit of Arafat and his Fatah operatives.

Despite such setbacks, Arafat later described this era in his authorized
biography as the time of his most successful statecraft. When word reached
him of Israel’s post-Six- Day-war peace overtures to the recently defeated
Arab countries, he and his adjutants understood at once that if there were
ever peace between Israel and Jordan, for instance, there would be no hope
for a Palestinian state. So he set off on a grueling exercise in shuttle
diplomacy throughout the major Arab countries, preaching the need to reject
unconditionally any peace agreement with the Jewish state.

Arafat later claimed credit for the results of the Khartoum conference
(August–September 1967), in which all the Arab dictators unanimously voted
to reject Israel’s offer to return much of the land it had occupied as a
result of the war in exchange for peace. Had he not intervened, Israel might
conceivably have made peace with Jordan, and the west Bank would have
reverted to Jordanian sovereignty, leaving his dream of leading a state
there stillborn.

But while Arafat’s proposals to engage in a continuing terror war might be
enthusiastically received by Arab leaders, there was no support to speak of
among the Arabs of the west Bank, who readily gave him up to Israeli
authorities. Arafat was forced to flee with the Israel Defense Forces hot on
his trail, and finally established a base for his force in the city of Salt,
in southwestern Jordan. From there he executed terrorist raids across the
Jordan river and began to set up clandestine contacts with officers in the
Jordan Legion, almost half of whom were Palestinians.

The Israeli army, under the direction of Moshe Dayan, launched a limited
invasion of Jordan in March 1968 to stop Arafat’s raids. Its objective was
the village of Karama, near the Jordan river, where most of Arafat’s men
were encamped. The raid took a terrible toll of terrorist fighters. when
Jordanian artillery forces, under the command of Palestinians, unexpectedly
opened fire on the Israeli force, the Israelis retreated, not wishing to
escalate the raid into a confrontation with Jordan.

Showing his brilliance as a propagandist, Arafat redefined Israel’s
strategic retreat into a rout. Organizing his defeated and demoralized force
into a cavalcade, he marched into Salt with guns firing victoriously in the
air, claiming in effect that it was his force, rather than fear of a
diplomatic incident, that had caused the Israelis to move back. Arafat
claimed that he had liberated both Palestinian and Jordanian karameh
(“dignity” in Palestinian Arabic) by smashing the Israeli force and driving
it back across the Jordan river in shame and disarray. It was pure fiction,
but the Arabs believed it. Soon money and recruits were pouring in, and
Arafat was able to reconstitute and equip his haggard Fatah force. Shrewdly
leveraging his “victory,” Arafat challenged Ahmad Shukairy as head of the
PLO in February 1969. Acting through Nasser, the Soviets backed Arafat and
he emerged as the unchallenged leader of the Arab terrorist war against
Israel. while remaining distinct organizations, the PLO and Fatah were
unified beneath the umbrella of his leadership.

At this point, Soviet involvement became critical. Under Russian tutelage,
Arafat signed the “Cairo Agreement” in November 1969, which allowed him,
with overt Egyptian and Syrian backing and covert Russian support, to move a
large part of his force into southern Lebanon. There they set up centers of
operation to prepare for terror attacks against Israel’s northern border,
while Arafat and the rest of his force remained in Jordan.

The three years of Arafat’s sojourn in Jordan were not without internal
problems. Fatah terrorists routinely clashed with Jordanian soldiers (more
than nine hundred armed encounters between 1967 and 1970). Arafat’s men used
Mafia tactics to smuggle cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, and to extort money
from local Jordanians, setting up roadblocks to exact tolls and kidnapping
notables for ransom to finance “the revolution.” when Jordanian forces tried
to keep order, Fatah engaged and in some cases killed them. Jordan’s King
Hussein was not eager for a confrontation.

Faced with Arafat’s threats of civil war, he offered the PLO leader a
position in the Jordanian parliament. Arafat refused, saying that his only
goal in life was to destroy Israel. When the U.S. assistant secretary of
state, Joseph Cisco, came to Jordan in April 1970, Arafat organized massive
anti-American riots throughout the country, during which one American
military attaché was murdered and another kidnapped. Humiliated before his
most important ally, Hussein did nothing.

In July 1970, Egypt and Jordan accepted U.S. secretary of state William
Rogers’ plan for Israel’s withdrawal from the west Bank and Gaza in exchange
for peace and recognition. But instead of embracing the plan and taking
control of the West Bank and Gaza, Arafat denounced the Rogers proposal,
reiterating his determination to reject any peace agreement. He then
organized riots throughout Jordan in order to prevent a political solution.
The liberated Palestine he sought would stretch from the Jordan river to the
sea, with no Israel, and could only be achieved through fire and blood. All
peace agreements that left Israel intact were in his view betrayals of the
Palestinian cause.

Nasser was furious and let King Hussein know that he had withdrawn his
support for Arafat. Blundering ahead, Arafat announced it was now time to
overthrow King Hussein, and he launched an insurrection. 

Throughout August 1970, fighting between Arafat’s forces and the Jordan
Legion escalated. Arafat looked forward to support from Syria when he
launched his final coup, but the Syrians had backed off because they had
learned that the United States had given Israel a green light to intervene
if they became involved.

The final straw came on September 6, 1970, when the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), nominally under Arafat’s control, skyjacked
one Swiss and two American airliners. Two of the planes landed in Jordan,
where they were emptied of their passengers and then blown up. The
passengers were held as hostages, to be released in exchange for PLO and
other terrorists in Israeli jails. At this point, King Hussein declared
martial law, and ordered Arafat and his men out of Jordan. Arafat responded
by demanding a national unity government with himself at its head. Hussein
then ordered his 55,000 soldiers and 300 tanks to attack PLO forces in
Amman, Salt, Irbid, and all Palestinian refugee camps.

In eleven days it was over. Seeing his forces tottering on the brink of
total defeat and perhaps annihilation, Arafat, having promptly fled to
safety in Sudan, agreed to face a tribunal of Arab leaders who would
adjudicate an end to the conflict. After six hours of deliberation, the
rulers of Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan decided in
favor of King Hussein. And to make matters worse, Arafat’s last patron, the
dictator Nasser, died of a heart attack while seeing members of the tribunal
off at the Cairo airport. As Hussein forced the remaining PLO terrorists out
of his cities, Arafat had no choice but to leave. By March 1971, he had made
his way clandestinely to Lebanon, the only Arab country too weak to throw
him out.

Once in Lebanon, he sought to take control of the PLO forces, but he
discovered that his chief surviving officers quite correctly blamed him for
the Jordan debacle, which had become known as “Black September.” Their
resentment for the great and senseless loss of life in Jordan led to two
attempts on his life.

Arafat not only survived, but was able to use his ample diplomatic skills to
turn the tables on his opponents inside Fatah and the PLO. He argued that in
the few short years that he had led his liberation army, he had awakened
Palestinian nationalism (in fact, he had virtually invented it), recruited
and armed a substantial terror army (the PLO forces in Lebanon were
unscathed by the Black September catastrophe), initiated war against Israel,
rebuffed efforts by Egypt and Syria to control the PLO, made his
organization into a state within a state in both Jordan and Lebanon, and
raised substantial support from a growing number of rich expatriate
Palestinians and supporters throughout the Arab world. By early 1971,
despite the animosity that his debacle in Jordan had engendered, he
successfully reestablished himself as the unchallenged PLO military and
political leader.

Arafat’s ability to stay at the top of Fatah and the PLO in Lebanon was the
result, at least in part, of the support he received from the USSR. Soviet
interest in Arafat was motivated largely by his success in organizing and
motivating his terrorist followers. The Soviet Union’s Cold war agenda
required someone with just those talents to expand and develop the terror
arm of Soviet activity in the Third world, and especially in the Muslim
world. Within a few years, Russian-trained PLO operatives were manning a
dozen terror-training camps in Syria and Lebanon, and deploying terror cells
across the globe from Germany to Nicaragua, Turkey to Iran.

By 1973, Arafat was a Soviet puppet (and would remain such until the fall of
the USSR). His adjutants, including Mahmoud Abbas, were being trained by the
KGB in guerrilla warfare, espionage, and demolition; and his ideologues had
gone to North Vietnam to learn the propaganda Tao of Ho Chi Minh.

The PLO Discovers “Wars of National Liberation”

As early as 1964, Arafat had sent Abu Jihad (later the leader of the PLO’s
military operations) to North Vietnam to study the strategy and tactics of
guerrilla warfare as waged by Ho Chi Minh. At this time, Fatah also
translated the writings of North Vietnam’s General Nguyen Giap, as well as
the works of Mao and Che Guevara, into Arabic.

Arafat was particularly struck by Ho Chi Minh’s success in mobilizing
left-wing sympathizers in Europe and the United States, where activists on
American campuses, enthusiastically following the line of North Vietnamese
operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam war from a Communist
assault on the south to a struggle for national liberation. Ho’s chief
strategist, General Giap, made it clear to Arafat and his lieutenants that
in order to succeed, they too needed to redefine the terms of their
struggle. Giap’s counsel was simple but profound: the PLO needed to work in
a way that concealed its real goals, permitted strategic deception, and gave
the appearance of moderation:

“Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war
into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people
eating out of your hand.” 

At the same time that he was getting advice from General Giap, Arafat was
also being tutored by Muhammad Yazid, who had been minister of information
in two Algerian wartime governments (1958–1962): wipe out the argument that
Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab states, or
the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees; instead,
present the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation like the
others. Wipe out the impression that in the struggle between the
Palestinians and the Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the
Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only
facing the Zionists but also world imperialism.

To make sure that they followed this advice, the KGB put Arafat and his
adjutants into the hands of a master of propaganda: Nicolai Ceausescu,
president-for-life of Romania. 

For the next few years, Ceausescu hosted Arafat frequently and gave him
lessons on how to apply the advice of Giap, Yazid, and others in the Soviet
orbit. Arafat’s personal “handler,” Ion Mihai Pacepa, the head of the
Romanian military intelligence, had to work hard on his sometimes unruly
protégé. Pacepa later recorded a number of sessions during which Arafat
railed against Ceausescu’s injunctions that the PLO should present itself as
a people’s revolutionary army striving to right wrongs and free the
oppressed: he wanted only to obliterate Israel. Gradually, though,
Ceausescu’s lessons in Machiavellian statecraft sank in. During his early
Lebanon years, Arafat developed propaganda tactics that would allow him to
create the image of a homeless people oppressed by a colonial power. This
makeover would serve him well in the west for decades to come.

Although Arafat was pioneering the use of skyjacking during this time and
setting off a wave of copycat airborne terrorism, he discovered that even
the flimsiest and most transparent excuses sufficed for the western media to
exonerate him and blame Israel for its retaliatory or preventive attacks,
and to accept his insistence that he was a statesman who could not control
the terrorists he was in fact orchestrating.

But while Arafat was finally absorbing and applying the lessons he learned
from his Romanian and North Vietnamese hosts and handlers, as Pacepa
describes it in Red Horizons, the Soviets still questioned his
dependability. So, with Pacepa’s help, they created a highly specialized
“insurance policy.” Using the good offices of the Romanian ambassador to
Egypt, they secretly taped Arafat’s almost nightly homosexual interactions
with his bodyguards and with the unfortunate preteen orphan boys whom
Ceausescu provided for him as part of “Romanian hospitality.” with
videotapes of Arafat’s voracious pedophilia in their vault, and knowing the
traditional attitude toward homosexuality in Islam, the KGB felt that Arafat
would continue to be a reliable asset for the Kremlin. 

Whether or not Arafat’s homosexuality was the key to the Soviets’ control
over him, it is clear that by the early 1970s the PLO had joined the ranks
of other socialist anti-colonial “liberation” movements, both in its culture
and in its politics; and had reframed its terror war as a “people’s war”
similar to those of the other Marxist-Leninist terrorist guerrillas in
China, Cuba, and Vietnam. Thanks to input from Ceausescu, General Giap, and
the Algerians, Arafat gradually saw the wisdom of jettisoning his
fulminations about “throwing the Jews into the sea,” and in its place he
developed the images of the “illegal occupation” and “Palestinian national
self-determination,” both of which lent his terrorism the mantle of a
legitimate people’s resistance. Of course, there was one ingredient missing
in this imaginative reconfiguration of the struggle: There had never been a
“Palestinian people,” or a “Palestinian nation,” or a sovereign state known
as “Palestine.”

Creating “Palestine”

The term Palestine ( in Arabic) was an ancient name for the general
geographic region that is more or less today’s Israel. The name derives from
the Philistines, who originated from the Eastern Mediterranean and invaded
the region in the eleventh and twelfth centuries B.C. The Philistines were
apparently from Greece, or perhaps Crete, or the Aegean Islands, or Ionia.
They seem to be related to the Bronze Age Greeks, and they spoke a language
akin to Mycenaean Greek.

Their descendants were still living on the shores of the Mediterranean when
roman invaders arrived a thousand years later. The Romans corrupted the name
to “Palestina,” and the area under the sovereignty of their littoral city
states became known as “Philistia.” Six hundred years later, the Arab
invaders called the region “Falastin.”

Throughout all subsequent history, the name designated only a vague
geographical entity. There was never a nation of “Palestine,” never a people
known as the “Palestinians,” nor any notion of “historic Palestine.” The
region never enjoyed any sovereign autonomy, but instead remained under
successive foreign sovereign domains, from the Umayyads and Abbasids to the
Fatimids, Ottomans and British.

During the British Mandate period (1922–1948), the Arabs of the area had
their own designation for the region: Balad esh-Sham (the country, or
province, of Damascus). In early 1947, in fact, when the UN was exploring
the possibility of the partition of British Mandatory Palestine into two
states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs, various Arab political and
academic spokespersons vociferously protested against such a division
because, they argued, the region was really a part of southern Syria.
Because no such people as “Palestinians” had ever existed, it would be an
injustice to Syria to create a state ex nihilo at the expense of Syrian
sovereign territory.

During the nineteen years from Israel’s victory in 1948 to Israel’s victory
in the Six-Day war, all that remained of the territory initially set aside
for the Arabs of British Mandatory Palestine under the conditions of the UN
partition was the West Bank, under illegal Jordanian sovereignty, and the
Gaza Strip, under illegal Egyptian rule. Never during these nineteen years
did any Arab leader anywhere in the world argue for the right of national
self-determination for the Arabs of these territories. Even Yassir Arafat,
from his earliest terrorist days until 1967, used the term “Palestinians”
only to refer to the Arabs who lived under, or had fled from, Israeli
sovereignty; and the term “Palestine” only to refer to Israel in its
pre-1967 borders.

In the PLO’s original founding Charter (or Covenant), Article 24 states:
“this Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the west
Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Gaza Strip or the Himmah
area.” For Arafat, “Palestine” was not the west Bank or the Gaza Strip,
which after 1948 belonged to other Arab states. The only “homeland” for the
PLO in 1964 was the State of Israel.

However, in response to the Six-Daywar and Arafat’s mentoring by the Soviets
and their allies, the PLO revised its Charter on July 17, 1968, to remove
the language of Article 24, thereby newly asserting a “Palestinian” claim of
sovereignty to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Part of the reframing of the conflict, along with adopting the identity of
an “oppressed people” and “victim of colonialism,” then, was the creation,
ex nihilo, of “historic Palestine” and the ancient “Palestinian people” who
had lived in their “homeland” from “time immemorial,” who could trace their
“heritage” back to the Canaanites, who were forced from their homeland by
the Zionists, and who had the inalienable right granted by international law
and universal justice to use terror to reclaim their national identity and

political self-determination.

That this was a political confection was, perhaps inadvertently, revealed to
the West by Zahir Muhse’in, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, in a
1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw:

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state
is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for
our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians,
Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons
do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab
national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct
“Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. [Emphasis added.]

Arafat himself asserted the same principle on many occasions. In his
authorized biography he says, “The Palestinian people have no national
identity. I, Yasir Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity
through conflict with Israel.”

But even these admissions—that the concept of a “Palestinian people” and a
“Palestinian homeland” were invented for political purposes to justify and
legitimize terrorism and genocide—could not stem the enthusiasm of western
leaders. Within the space of a few years, the Middle East conflict with
Israel was radically reframed. No longer was little Israel the vulnerable
David standing against the massive Goliath of the Arab world. As the PLO’s
Communist-trained leaders saw the inroads that Vietnam, Cuba, and other
“liberation struggles” had made in the west, Arafat promoted the same script
for the Palestinians. Now it was Israel who was the bullying Goliath, a
colonial power in the Middle East oppressing the impoverished, unarmed,
helpless, hapless, and hopeless Palestinians.

Despite the changing imagery, however, one thing remained constant. >From
his earliest days, Arafat was clear that the PLO’s aim was “not to impose
our will on [Israel], but to destroy it in order to take its place . . . not
to subjugate the enemy but to destroy him.” The Palestinian nationalism that
he and his Communist advisers created would be the only national movement
for political self-determination in the entire world, and across all of
world history, to have the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide
of a people as its only raison d’etre.

 



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