UNM Israel Alliance

The Arab League and the anti-Israel left wing activists in the US, Europe and Israel commonly claim that any Jewish building outside of the 1949 Armistice lines is illegal and contravenes international law. They fail to point out what provision of which international law is violated, but they point out that most of the members of the United Nations are against Israeli building. Evidently they consider majority opinion to be international law. However, that isn’t actually international law. Then what is international law? Aren’t UN resolutions international law, and so can’t it be said that majority opinion and political pressure is international law?

General Assembly resolutions are commonly cited as international law, but in practice, they are not treated as and international law, but only international suggestions. UN Security Council resolutions carry much more weight, but they are frequently ignored by nations around the world and are only partially enforceable. Membership in the UN is voluntary, as is acceptance of UN decisions. Any nation may withdraw from the UN, and any nation may reject UN determinations and resolutions, as the Islamic nations aligned against Israel and some African nations regularly do, for example, or as Germany, Italy, Great Britain, China, North Korea, the USSR, the US and most other countries have done. UN organizations themselves frequently break the UN resolutions they were set up to monitor. These resolutions cannot be called binding or have the status of international law, since they are not enforced except for political reasons and are not made with the agreement of the affected nations. They are simply statements and demands, perhaps to be honored and perhaps not.

But if UN resolutions are rejected as binding international law, what is international law? The only real basis of international law are those conventions and treaties that are signed by two or more nations. The signatory nations are considered to be bound by the agreements they signed. Israel has signed many such agreements and can be said to be bound by them. The Arab nations have likewise signed many and are bound by them. The Arab terrorist groups who were given the status of legitimate government in Israel and membership in the UN in 1993 have signed few agreements and have reneged on all of them.

What conventions, treaties and agreements apply to the larger issue of whether Jews may live and build in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem, or as the Arabs and their left-wing allies like to call them, the “occupied territories”? Is it reasonable to call Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem “occupied territories”? That’s a very basic question, and other issues that build upon that issue can’t be settled until this most basic issue is settled. There are even more basic issues that disputed such as Israel’s right to exist and Israel’s right to be a Jewish state. However, this article is dealing with the issues of territory. It’s necessary to understand what documents legally define Israel’s borders. The theoretical no-man’s land that is legally neither Israel’s, Egypt’s nor Jordan’s is commonly called “Palestinian”. That non-Israeli Arabs have any claim to any part of Israel is also a matter that can be reasonably disputed, and the two issues are tied together. The issue of Arab claims to Israel and the Arab “right of return” is discussed in an earlier posting.

The first document that applies to the establishment of a Jewish Homeland and its location is the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Great Britain, which gained control of what is today Jordan and Israel, agreed that Palestine should be set aside for the purpose of Jewish settlement, as the “Jewish Homeland”. This decision was confirmed and ratified in the Paris Peace Conference of 1920, which called for a Jewish national homeland to be established in Palestine. Palestine was a region, not a nation, that was part of the lands vacated by the Ottoman empire after its defeat. This establishment of a Jewish Homeland was specifically to be done according to the principal of the Balfour Declaration, and it was authorized by the San Remo Resolution, and written into the Treaty of San Sevres. The treaty of San Sevres was superceded by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 with Turkey, after Attaturk came to power in Turkey. In that treaty the area known as Palestine was released by Turkey and turned over to the allied powers of WWI. In turn, the former Ottoman territories that were not already absorbed into other countries were divided into “mandates” by the League of Nations with the goal of developing these areas so that they could become independent nations. Consequently, a Jewish homeland in area known as Palestine was established by international law. It is interesting that liberal academics, Arab nations and liberation theology Christians like to refer to this establishing of new nations from mandates as colonialism, when in fact it was planned as the purposeful end of colonialism. The majority of the Arab nations came into existance because of the Paris Peace Conference, the Lausanne Treaty and the League of Nation mandates.

All of Palestine, which includes what today is Israel and Jordan, was given to the jurisdiction of Great Britain as the “British Mandate” of 1922. In the British Mandate, Britain’s responsibility as a trustee of Palestine was spelled out in considerable detail, and it’s responsibility to encourage and facilitate Jewish settlement in Palestine, for the purpose of creating an independent Jewish Homeland was listed in direct terms. Almost immediately Britain acceded to Arab demands that Muslim Arabs be given the greater part of Palestine, all of the territory east of the Jordan River and Dead Sea. The region of Transjordan was formed and documented in the Churchill White Paper of June, 1922. The British zionist ideas behind the Balfour document reversed in post WWI times, as is documented in the Passfield White Paper of 1930 and the Peel Whitepaper of 1939, both of which limited Jewish movement and settlement in Palestine and limited Jewish land ownership, in contradiction of its mandated responsibilities in Palestine. This is even more serious given the backdrop of events at the time. In 1929 for example, widespread Arab riots, which were encouraged by Muslim religious leaders and treated lightly by the British, led to the massacre of the Jews of Hebron and the occupation of their property by the Arabs in the town, as well as Arab attacks on Jews in other areas. In Europe, Hitler was coming to power and by 1939 had begun his persecution of Jews in Germany and Poland. Jews in Europe had begun to try to escape to Palestine and other countries, and Britain, the US and many other nations were purposefully blocking their escape. At that same time in Palestine, Arabs started another round of murderous rioting against Jews, and Britain was enforcing the restrictions it had imposed on the Jewish population in Palestine. That is when the Peel Whitepaper limiting Jewish immigration to the “Jewish Homeland” was written, in direct contradiction British responsibilities to international law and human decency.

Immediately after WWII, Trans-Jordan gained its independence by UN resolution in 1946, and became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Syria and Egypt likewise had gained their independence without controversy. Lebanon had gained its independence from the French mandate earlier. That left the land on the west side of the Jordan River and Dead Sea for the Jews. There were no further legal divisions of the British Mandated lands. In 1947, the boundaries of Israel were defined by the boundaries of the adjacent nations.

In November, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed UN Resolution 181, which specified the establishment of a Jewish state in areas currently settled by Jews, an Arab state in areas currently settled by Arabs, and international jurisdiction over Jerusalem and other religious sites in Israel. In actuality this plan abrogated the terms of the Mandate of 1922 and earlier agreements and resolutions regarding Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people, and was not valid. However, Israel accepted the terms, realizing that was the best they would get in the UN. However, the Arab nations and their allies from other parts of the world rejected the partition plan, because they wanted no Jewish state at all for ethnic and religious reasons, and consequently this resolution, the Partition Plan, never went into effect legally. Arab nations attacked Israel en masse as soon as it had declared itself as a state in May, 1948.

The background for the passing of UN Resolution 181 was that Britain had requested to be relieved of its duties in the British Mandate. Britain found that it was not able to fulfill its mandated duties. The rosy idea of Jews and Arab Muslims living side by side in peace and tranquility was turning out to be impossible. Giving 75% of the mandate to Muslims did not satisfy them, because their goal was 100% of the Palestinian mandate with no Jews. British anti-semitism and desire for good relations with Arab states did not make their job any easier, since they were charged with doing what neither they nor their desired allies wanted: to provide for the establishment of a Jewish State on the historical Jewish territory. In the meantime, Jewish Freedom Fighters and Militants fought the British regularly, and there was even less love lost between Palestinian Jews and the British government. The British wanted out as soon as possible, and could not fulfill the terms of their mandate. Consequently the UN General Assembly met to decide how to solve the problem. The most honest, courageous and effective method would have been to assign all the remaining area of the Mandate for the Jewish Homeland, as was originally intended. Instead, in deference to Arab threats and pressure and their own collective mixed feelings about Jews and a Jewish Homeleand, they attempted a territorial and political compromise. The compromise failed, as these compromises still do today, because they do not take into account the unchanging Arab/Muslim goal of having no Jewish State in existence.

Anthony D’Amato believes that the British Mandate was a sacred trust, even though it was in many ways abrogated by the British. He says that Britain had the sole decision making authority for its mandate, in the role of a trustee, and when Britain withdrew from its position of trustee and handed the matter to the UN, the UN resolution dividing the remainder of Palestine between Arab and Jewish jurisdictions, the boundaries they defined and the condition of having Jerusalem be an internationally administered area was binding and is still in effect today. He believes that no other agreements, not even treaties, invasions, armistices and agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority supercede the boundaries of Resolution 181, even though D’Amato states that General Assembly resolutions are not international law, this one was because it was the settlement of the issue of the British Mandate. For D’Amato’s theory and the following discussion, see his online symposium.

In answer to that I would say that the General Assembly is not given the authority to rule on these issues, nor to set boundaries for territories or nations, and his argument isn’t valid, but appears to politically motivated, judging by the Arab propaganda terms he uses in his argument, and his hostility towards responders who give good arguments for the opposing view. The UN charter has a trustee framework set up, and if the British Mandate were to be transferred to the UN, it should have been passed to the UN trustee framework, not to the General Assembly. As the General Assembly had no authority in this particular matter, has no general authority to establish boundaries, and their resolutions are not considered international law, and the resolution was not even accepted by all the parties involved as a viable framework for future agreements, it cannot be considered binding, and is certainly not the last word on Israel’s boundaries.

As stated many times by Arab nations and the leadership of the Arab factions that seek to make a claim on the former British Mandate, the Arab factions, whether religious or secular, do not want any non-Muslim state in the Mideast, and especially not a Jewish state. This is the real basis of their objection to the State of Israe, and their continued military, political and economic agression against Israel. The idea that only Muslim Arab states may be established in the Mideast is a racist concept, and the Arab reaction to the establishment of Israel was definitely racist and genocidal, which contravenes international law. The UN and Great Britain, in unilaterally taking more land out of the specified Jewish homeland for the purpose of establishing an Arab state was also breaking international law. Israel was not breaking international law in declaring itself to be a nation, in not allowing all Arabs who had deserted Israel at its creation to come back, or in re-taking the mandated land that had been occupied by Arab armies since 1949.

The war continued into 1949, with Israel surviving, but being unable to drive the invading armies out of its territory. Jordan occupied the eastern side of Israel, in what is now called the “West Bank”, and the eastern part of Jerusalem. Jordan slaughtered hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, destroyed synagogues and other Jewish property, held control of the Temple Mount, not allowing access to Jews or Christians, and its armies occupied the the towns of the “West Bank”. Syria and Lebanon occupied Mandate territory on the northern side, and Egypt occupied Gaza and large parts of the Negev. This was in direct opposition to international law, UN Security Council resolutions and the UN charter.

In 1949 Armistices were signed between Israel and Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Armistice lines were determined at the point where troops were at the time of the armistice. The point was to bring a quick stop to the fighting, not to establish national boundaries. Consequently the Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian armies were allowed to occupy large parts of the land granted to Israel, and UN troops were stationed in the Sinai until 1956. These are the 1949 lines that anti-Israel goups refer to as if they were national boundaries. They are specifically described as NOT being boundaries, but only temporary cease fire lines. Jordan had annexed the west bank territory, but that annexation was not recognized because Jordan had no prior claim of any kind to the land on the west side of the Jordan River, and was strictly based on its military occupation of those lands.

In 1967 the neighboring Arab states, except for Lebanon, again invaded Israel in a joint effort to destroy the Jewish state. This time, Israel drove the invading armies completely back to the national borders of the invading nations, and in the case of Egypt, beyond. Israel held all of Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, all of Judea and Samaria, Gaza and a large portion of the Sinai. Israel later gave up the land it took in the Sinai, in the peace negotiations with Egypt, but kept control of all of its land in Israel until the Oslo Nakba of 1993. At this point Israel did not occupy those areas, since those areas were part of the land originally granted to it by the League of Nations, and it had a reasonable claim to that territory. If it had been any nation but Israel, this would have been acceptable according to international law and world opinion. Israel annexed the Golan and East Jerusalem, but did not annex the area known as the West Bank, in deference to international politics. The area annexed as Jerusalem was the area defined as Jerusalem in Article 8 of UN Security Council resolution 194:

Resolves that, in view of its association with three world religions, the Jerusalem area, including the present municipality of Jerusalem plus the surrounding villages and towns, the most eastern of which shall be Abu Dis; the most southern, Bethlehem, the most western, Ein Karim (including also the built-up area of Motsa); and the most northern Shu’fat, should be accorded special and separate treatment from the rest of Palestine and should be placed under effective United Nations control;

In 1973 the nearby Arab nations except for Lebanon and Jordan again invaded Israel, with the help of the USSR and other nations, in an attempt to destroy Israel. Again Israel forced them out, and this war did not result in changes to who controlled the various regions of Israel. As in 1967, the UN ordered all sides to quit fighting, but as usual, did not censure the attacking Arab nations for invading a UN member state, nor attempt any sort of discipline or sanctions on those nations.

The politics of the years between 1967 and 1975 was extremely complicated and volatile. There was the rise of OPEC, the oil embargos on western nations who supported Israel during the Arab attacks on Israel, shifts in international alliances, major economic changes with western nations leaving the gold standard, Viet Nam, energy politics, radical Communist ideologies, detente, two wars in Israel, the rise to prominence of several Arab terrorist groups, the rise of some nations to political power and the falling back of others, the instability and changes of government in South and Central America and Africa, the changing economic forces world wide…all of these things had a great effect on issues relating to Israel and international support. However, as long as the “rule of law” has any pretence of importance in the UN and international thinking, the hot issue of the boundaries and jurisdiction of the State of Israel would best be considered objectively through the criteria of applicable law and documents, and not of international politics.

International politics cares only for international law when it appears to suit the goals of the players, which is to say international politics tends towards agression, whether political, economic or military. However, even at its most idealistic and chastened moments, such as during the founding of the League of Nations and the United Nations after WWI and WWII, the international community is a political and ruthless beast, as it always has been. The new world order of the UN is a realignment of the world order, not a reform. International law is applied as a tool of international politics, and so loses its standing as a fair arbiter of international disuputes.

If international law could be applied justly in the sensitive matter of Israel, and if nations of the world could discipline themselves to abiding by true and objective international law, it could prove itself as a viable means to achieving world peace. However, if international law and the UN continues to be a tool of international political alignments, the international body of the UN and pretenses of international law will not lead to peace, but to a war which will be worse than any that came before.

In 1978 Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat met at Camp David with Jimmy Carter to work out the first Camp David Accords, and in March, 1979 Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. The treaty required Israel to give up all of its holdings in the Sinai, including towns, roads, utilities and oil fields. An international border was agreed upon between Israel and Egypt, and the Sinai was demilitarized. Anwar Sadat was assasinated two years later, in 1981 by a group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian terrorist groups because of the treaty. Both Israel and Egypt have so far kept substantially to the treaty, and it may be said that both sides have benefitted from it. The treaty gave the first direct delineaton of a part of Israel’s national boundaries, the southern border.

In 1987 the first intifada broke out in Israel, among the Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The violence was incited by Muslim clerics in Israel, and orchestrated throughout by Marwan Barghuti, and Yasser Arafat with the PLO in Tunis, Tunisia. The violence of the intifada brought an attempt by the world community, led by the US and supported by the USSR and other nations, to broker peace in the region, as had successfully been done between Israel and Egypt in the Camp David Accords.

A series of conferences were held, starting with the Madrid conference, which sought to work out a framework for implementing the “two state” solution in Israel between the Arab terrorist factions that ruled the Palestinian Arabs, especially Yasser Arafat and his PLO/Fatah gang, and Israel. In 1993, following secret negotiations after the Madrid conference, the PLO and Israel worked out a “declaration of principles” at a conference in Oslo, Norway, known as the Oslo Accords, and had a public signing in Washington DC between Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, witnessed by the US and Russia.

The Oslo Accords did not change or establish any boundaries. The issue of final borders was left to “final status” negotiations to occur at an unspecified time in the future, after the other parts of the accords had been done.
In the Oslo accords Israel agreed to withdraw from Jericho and Gaza and to turn over civil control of Arab areas to Palestinian control, but does not prohibit Israel from building suburbs, buildings, roads or other infrastructure in Jewish areas anywhere in Israel. There is no prohibition against “settlements” or expansion in the Oslo Accords. The main feature of the Oslo Accords was the promise of mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel, and intentions to cooperate on many joint projects towards normalization of relations between Palestinian Arabs under the leadership of the PLO and Israel, and improvement of Palestinian areas so that they could act as an orderly self governing group. Also prominent were agreements to settle all disputes peacefully and directly, by negotiation and arbitration, without outside interference.

Inspired by the peace treaty with Egypt and the Oslo Accords, Jordan and Israel negotiated and signed a peace treaty in 1994. This treaty fixed Israel’s eastern border with Jordan, based on the border established in the British mandate, with some adjustment for overlapping private ownership in two areas.

In 1995 Israel and the PLO, under the benign eye of the US, the USSR, Japan and the EU signed the Interim Agreement for the West Bank and Gaza that were the continuation of the 1993 Oslo Accords. This agreement did not fix any boundaries and the jurisdictional areas defined in this document were not to be considered even preliminary boundaries. That was to be held until bilateral “Final Status” negotiations. However, the jurisdictional boundaries and arrangements were used as practical boundaries, even if not final boundaries, and the Arab dominated UN General Assembly passed a series of resolutions against Israel demanding withdrawal from “occupied territories”, the Golan and so on, to the point that the US reprimanded the General Assembly for its detrimental interference in the “peace process”.

In August, 1999 the Arab aligned block of the UN, in another “emergency” session called for a Fourth Geneva Convention, boycotted by Israel and the US, much like the infamous Durban conference on racism in 2001. A resolution was passed unanimously, declaring that the fourth article of the 1949 Geneva convention applies to the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. The more serious and more deadly issues of religious and ethnic strife and genocide in several Muslim and allied countries, such as Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Lybia, the Sudan, Somalia, Russia and so on were of course not considered at this convention.

This bears on the matter of international law, because the UN is acting as both judge and prosecutor in regards to Israel, and controlling blocks of the UN obviously have idealogical, political and financial interests that cause the UN as a body to set aside its mandate of bringing world peace and being an objective world arbitrator in favor of acting on the desires of the majority political alignment. Consequently the UN is compromised and unable to fulfill its duties as an international arbiter. The judging body has serious conflicts of interest in the case it is hearing, and if it were ethical it would recuse itself. If the judge is shown to be compromised, his decisions are invalid.

The Oslo process broke down during the years between 1995 and 1998 due to Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israel, Hizbullah attacks in northern Israel, Israel’s crossing into Lebanon to stop Hizbullah, and the artificial issue of Israeli building in Jerusalem and Jewish areas the West Bank. During these years there was no change or further establishment of Israeli borders except in regard to Jordan.

In 1998 the US attempted to revive the “peace process” with the Wye River Accords, and again in 2000 with a second round of negotiations at Camp David. In 2001 Israel and the PA met at Taba, Egypt for discussions after the second intifada, but the situation didn’t change and the “final status” negotiations of the Oslo process never came near, although both sides implemented many of the steps. In 2002 Saudi Arabia proposed a peace plan, and in 2003 the US introduced the “Roadmap”, which was similar to the Saudi Arabian plan. These plans require Israel to retire to the 1949 Armistice lines and give the rest of the land to the Palestinians in return for “normalization” of relations with Arab nations. Essentially this plan is a forced surrender, since there is no legal reason for Israel to give up all land that it holds now, that it didn’t hold in 1949, and there is no reason aside from racism and religious hatred for Arab nations not to have “normal” relations with Israel since its founding.

As of 2007, the borders of Israel remain essentially the remainder of the British Mandate, after with the removal of Jordan from the mandate. The last legal delineation of Israeli boundaries was in 1996, based on its peace treaty with Jordan, and the Oslo process begun in 1993 has had no binding effect on those boundaries. These agreements establish rules for relations between Israel and the Palestinians, but in no way establish boundaries. The Palestinian Authority has no legal boundaries, although it has the practical boundaries established by Israeli-Palestinian agreements and the “facts on the ground” that both Israel and the PA have worked to achieve in order to influence the outcome of whatever negotiations may be forced on Israel in the future.

In August, 2005 Israel forcibly removed all Israelis from Jewish towns in Gaza and three towns in northern Samaria. Their property, businesses and synagogues were turned over to the PA and generally destroyed in Gaza, in complete violation of the various peace agreements. They did not receive adequate or timely reparation, their deeds and mortgages were not settled, even though they could not enjoy their property, and in many cases they received no reparation for their losses, either from the Israeli government, the PA, the UN, or any of the overseers of the “peace process”. This was done in accordance with the Oslo Accords, which called for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, although it was done on the initiative of Ariel Sharon and out of sequence.

Despite the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and PA and Hamas control of the region, the withdrawal did not change the legal boundaries of Israel in regard to Gaza, as no treaty or other binding agreement was made about that boundary. If Israel re-took Gaza, its status would be the same as was established in 1979, with the Egyptian peace treaty, and if Israel does not re-take Gaza, the boundary remains the same.

This is the history and chain of title of Israel in modern times, and left-wing and Arab claims of “Palestinian Land” and “occupied territories” are false and groundless.

The following article by Daniel Pipes gives statistical backing to the claims frequently made and daily supported by facts on the ground: that Palestinian leadership is violent and corrupt, and money given to it goes not for the public good, but for murder and carnage against both Israelis and Arabs.

How can the delusion persist that giving Mahmud Abbas billions of dollars will bring peace? He is a career terrorist, head of a network of violent and gangster-like factions. When has feeding money to criminals, terrorists and racists ever made them into humane, tolerant peaceful people? It never has and never will, and to persist in such a belief is a sign of serious imbalance.

Lavishing funds on Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to achieve peace has been a mainstay of Western, including Israeli, policy since Hamas seized Gaza in June. But this open spigot has counterproductive results and urgently must be stopped.

Some background: Paul Morro of the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2006, the European Union and its member states gave US$815 million to the Palestinian Authority, while the United States sent it $468 million. When other donors are included, the total receipts come to about $1.5 billion.

The windfall keeps growing. President George W. Bush requested a $410 million supplement in October, beyond a $77 million donation earlier in the year. The State Department justifies this lordly sum on the grounds that it “supports a critical and immediate need to support a new Palestinian Authority (PA) government that both the U.S. and Israel view as a true ally for peace.” At a recent hearing, Gary Ackerman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, endorsed the supplemental donation.

Not content with spending taxpayer money, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched a “U.S.-Palestinian Public Private Partnership” on Dec. 3, involving financial heavyweights such as Sandy Weill and Lester Crown, to fund, as Rice put it, “projects that reach young Palestinians directly, that prepare them for responsibilities of citizenship and leadership can have an enormous, positive impact.”

One report suggests the European Union has funneled nearly $2.5 billion to the Palestinians this year.

Looking ahead, Abbas announced a goal to collect pledges of $5.8 billion in aid for a three-year period, 2008-10, at the “Donors’ Conference for the Palestinian Authority” attended by over ninety states on Monday in Paris. (Using the best population estimate of 1.35 million Palestinians on the West Bank, this comes to a staggering amount of money: per capita, over $1,400 per year, or about what an Egyptian earns annually.) Endorsed by the Israeli government, Abbas won pledges for an astonishing $7.4 billion (or over $1,800 per capita per year) at the donors’ conference.

Well, it’s a bargain if it works, right? A few billion to end a dangerous, century-old conflict – it’s actually a steal.

But innovative research by Steven Stotsky, a research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) finds that an influx of money to the Palestinians has had the opposite effect historically. Relying on World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other official statistics, Stotsky compares two figures since 1999: budgetary support aid provided annually to the Palestinian Authority and the number of Palestinian homicides annually (including both criminal and terrorist activities, and both Israeli and Palestinian victims). Graphed together, the two figures show an uncanny echo:

The correlation is even clearer when the aid of one year is superimposed on the homicides of a year later:

In brief, each $1.25 million or so of budgetary support aid translates into a death within the year. As Stotsky notes, “These statistics do not mean that foreign aid causes violence; but they do raise questions about the effectiveness of using foreign donations to promote moderation and combat terrorism.”

The Palestinian record fits a broader pattern, as noted by Jean-Paul Azam and Alexandra Delacroix in a 2006 article, “Aid and the Delegated Fight Against Terrorism.” They found “a pretty robust empirical result showing that the supply of terrorist activity by any country is positively correlated with the amount of foreign aid received by that country” – i.e., the more foreign aid, the more terrorism.

If these studies run exactly counter to the conventional supposition that poverty, unemployment, repression, “occupation,” and malaise drive Palestinians to lethal violence, they do confirm my long-standing argument about Palestinian exhilaration being the problem. The better funded Palestinians are, the stronger they become, and the more inspired to take up arms.

A topsy-turvy understanding of war economics has prevailed in Israel since the Oslo negotiations began in 1993. Rather than deprive their Palestinian enemies of resources, Israelis have been following Shimon Peres’s mystical musings, and especially his 1993 tome, The New Middle East, to empower them economically. As I wrote in 2001, this “is tantamount to sending the enemy resources while fighting is still under way – not a hugely bright idea.”

Rather than further funding Palestinian bellicosity, Western states, starting with Israel, should cut off all funds to the Palestinian Authority.

By David Meir-Levi
Published in Front Page Magazine 12/14/07

Front Page Magazine Intro:

The following is chapter from David Meir-Levi’s new book, History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. The Terrorism Awareness Project previous printed his history of the “right-wing” influence on Islamic extremism, “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.