UNM Israel Alliance

by Ido Zelkovitz
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2008, pp. 19-26
http://www.meforum.org/article/1874

Many U.S. and European diplomats contrast Fatah’s Palestinian nationalism with Hamas’s Islamism. At a November 28, 2007 press conference, U.S. national security advisor Stephen Hadley praised Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and cited President George W. Bush’s argument that “Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda [are] different faces of the same evil: a radical ideology seeking to impose its world-view throughout the Middle East and beyond.”[1] But, while Fatah, the core of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), may have its roots in the revolutionary, secular-oriented ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s,[2] Islamist discourse is also integral to the movement.[3] Indeed, even as Western diplomats seek to bolster Fatah’s Abbas as an alternative to Hamas, they underestimate the degree to which Palestinian nationalism now intertwines itself with Islam.[4] Since the 2000 Palestinian uprising, Fatah has fused national and religious symbols in order to use Islam as an instrument of mobilization.[5]
Fatah Imagery in the Twentieth Century

In the 1970s, Fatah graphic art promoted the culture of armed struggle which was at the heart of Fatah’s ideology. (See Figure 1.) This enabled Fatah to mobilize the masses in the absence of a solid ideology among the divided and faction-ridden Palestinian society. Its imagery and texts sanctified violent struggle as the miracle cure for Palestinian problems. From the everyday struggle, they believed, would grow the formulas and theories for their ideology in the future.[6]

Figure 1: Armed struggle graphic art in 1970s spirit with the slogan: “Victory is ours.”

Before the outbreak of the second intifada, a Palestinian public opinion survey (conducted between November 1997 and March 1999) revealed that 87.6 percent of Fatah supporters believed Islam should play a major role in the future life of Palestinian society, and 80 percent said that any future Palestinian state should be run according to Islamic law.[7]

Fatah was the dominant political movement in the West Bank and Gaza from the Oslo-sanctioned return of PLO leader Yasir Arafat in 1994 until at least 2000. In September 2000, the Palestinians launched an uprising and unleashed a wave of terrorist attacks, which they named the “Al-Aqsa” intifada. Fatah re-branded its armed wing—previously known as the Storm, Al-’Asifa[8]—calling it Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a name chosen to bolster both Palestinian claims to Jerusalem and Fatah’s religious claims. In one of the brigades’ earliest proclamations, its members said they fought for independence, and national and religious values.[9]

Previously, Palestinian figures embraced the sectarian diversity of Palestinian Arabs, especially for the Western audience. For example, in a London press conference, Yasir Arafat said that “according to our religiousness, Christians should be mentioned before the Muslims,” which was in the context of the suffering of the Palestinian people as a result of the intifada.[10] But today Palestinian society emphasizes Muslim supremacy. Fatah expresses its new Islamist discourse not only in educational and cultural terms but also in its embrace of suicide bombing—”self-martyrdom” (istishad)—as a tactic.

Fatah infused its icons with religious imagery in support of its fighters and suicide bombers. A proclamation in memory of Suhail ‘Ali Bakr, an Al-Aqsa member responsible for producing and launching rockets and killed in a February 7, 2007 Israeli air strike, combined the traditional colors of the Islamic jihad flag with the black-and-white checkered headscarf (kaffiyeh), long the symbol of the Fatah movement. (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2: Proclamation in memory of Suhail ‘Ali Bakr.

Fatah has embraced Islamist discourse for several reasons. First, competition with Hamas led its leaders to invoke Islam as a way to create a system of symbols and images that, combined with the national struggle, would fuse past and present and pave the way to an ideal future.

In the mid-1980s, Fatah established satellite groups with an Islamic appearance in response to the activities of Islamic Jihad.[11] Then, as Hamas became a competitor in the run-up to and after the outbreak of the second intifada, Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades printed a Qur’anic verse on their banner that read, “Fight against them! God will chastise them by your hands, and will bring disgrace upon them, and will succor you against them; and He will soothe the bosoms of those who believe.”[12] It is no coincidence that Hamas used the same verse on its proclamations during the first intifada.[13]

Even Arafat embraced religious reference. Arafat often used the language of the Qur’an to mobilize the Palestinians,[14] especially during times of war. For example, on July 22, 1981,[15] in the months before the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Arafat told his followers, “Permission (to fight) is granted to those who are being persecuted, since injustice has befallen them, and God is certainly able to support them. They were evicted from their homes unjustly, for no reason other than saying, ‘Our lord is Allah.’”[16] Arafat then cites the Qu’ran to promise the afterlife to those who fight for God and Palestine:

God has bought from the believers their lives and their money in exchange for Paradise. Thus, they fight in the cause of God, willing to kill and get killed. Such is His truthful pledge in the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur’an—and who fulfills His pledge better than God? You shall rejoice in making such an exchange. This is the greatest triumph.[17]

In response to allegations that the Israeli army planned to deport him from the West Bank and Gaza, in 2002, he said, “They will not take me captive or prisoner, or expel [me], but as a martyr, martyr, martyr. O God, give me martyrdom.” He then quoted the Prophet Muhammad:

There still exists a group in my nation that preserves its religion, vanquishes its enemy, and is not harmed by any one who attacks it, and its people are the victors, due to God’s strength. It was said [to the Prophet Muhammad], “O Messenger of God, where are they and who are [these people]?” The Prophet answered: “They are in Jerusalem and its surroundings, and they are at the forefront until Judgment Day.”[18]

In many ways, Arafat paved the way for the growth of Islamism within Fatah.

Second, given Israel’s military dominance, Fatah may have embraced Islamism to counterbalance its technological weakness. Faith can be a useful counterweight to science and technology. During the Iran-Iraq war and in subsequent Arab suicide bombing campaigns, Islam provided the motivation for young fighters to confront technologically superior enemies, which conventional forces usually refrain from fighting.

Third, Islam may have provided a useful glue to overcome factionalization within Fatah. The second intifada left Fatah beset by internal divisions and rivalries. The clan and sub-clan nature of Palestinian-Arab society compounded the problem.[19] Arafat empowered the biggest clans and extended families as a counterweight to the rising, young, local leadership from the “new middle class.”[20] Bodies which rely on a sub-national identity in the broader framework of a national movement need an additional element to broaden their power base. Islam provided a useful mechanism by which to hold the clans together.

Islam also provided Fatah a much-needed makeover. Implanted as a political entity in the West Bank and Gaza after the 1993 Oslo accords, by 2000, Fatah was associated with corruption in the minds of many Palestinians.[21] An Islamist patina enabled Fatah to create an image of incorruptibility, purity, and devotion to jihad.

The Oslo process enabled the Palestinian Authority to develop a formal armed force. Arafat built ten separate security apparatuses, each headed by loyalists.[22] For example, Amin al-Hindi led General Intelligence, and Faisal Abu Sharkh led Presidential Security.[23]

On September 28, 2000, followers of Marwan Barghouti, a West Bank Fatah leader convicted on May 20, 2004, of five counts of murder, formed the core of Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.[24] The brigades’ operations are decentralized, in part because of the tension between the young guard, born in the West Bank and Gaza, and Fatah’s old guard, who spent most of their lives overseas.[25] Islam provided a bond to hold the factions together and, unlike Palestinian nationalism, also allowed the group to establish links to non-Palestinian movements under the banner of Islamic solidarity. Zakaria Zubaydi, the chief commander of Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in the Jenin area, for example, said that his group receives funds from Hezbollah.[26]
Fatah Factions Discover Islam

The change in the discourse can be seen in the case of the Fatah Hawks who, during the first intifada, both spearheaded the Fatah fight against Israel in the Gaza Strip and fought against Hamas activists. The Hawks, who had earlier represented themselves as a national element fighting against the extreme Islamist movement,[27] today boast that, upon “God’s great name,” they “will protect the beautiful Islamic land of Palestine.”[28]

Hawks’ communiqués abound in Islamic discourse. Reference to “pure soil” is also a frequent motif in Hawks’ statements as the group seeks to claim the land of Israel as exclusive Muslim property. Their statements often speak about “the Arabic and Islamic people,” tying Fatah to a struggle greater than just Gaza and the West Bank.[29]

Visual material about the Hawks also testifies to the importance of Islam in their ethos. The profession of faith and the cry of “God is Great,” both of which fighters recite on their way to jihad, appear on their flag. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3: A Fatah gunman in front of a banner including the Hawks’ symbol and the Muslim profession of faith.

On their shield, the Hawks also use visuals, such as the Dome of the Rock, which reflect Palestinian folklore as national symbols. From the dome arises a map of Palestine, incorporating all of Israel and colored green to represent Islam. (See Figure 4.) That the map rises from the dome suggests a reference to Muhammad’s nocturnal ascent to heaven. While the Qur’an does not mention Jerusalem, and the Arabs built Al-Aqsa mosque more than fifty years after Muhammad’s death,[30] Muslims commonly consider it the site of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven. Above the image is a Qur’anic verse, “When God’s Succor Comes, and Victory.”[31] The Arabic term nasr, which appears at the pinnacle of the Fatah shield, has two meanings: “salvation” and “victory.” Fatah seeks to intertwine the two even further with its slogan, “Revolution until Victory” (thawra hata’ an-nasr).

Figure 4: The Fatah Hawks’ symbol.

The Shahid Ahmad Abu’r-Rish Brigades, a Fatah faction centered in the Khan Yunis and Rafah areas, also accord Islam a central role. The brigades acknowledge a close relationship with Hamas based both on shared religious principles and on having fought together “in the trenches against the enemies of the motherland and religion.”[32] On their Internet site, they call themselves Ansar al-Islam (Supporters of Islam), an expression that refers to the companions of Muhammad in Medina.[33]

The Abu’r-Rish Brigades declare their aims to be not only the liberation of Palestine but also exaltation of God and flying the flag of Islam. They explain, “We believe that Allah is God, and Islam is our faith, for the Prophet is a model and teacher for us, for our way is the way of the jihad for the sake of Allah.”[34] This slogan, which mirrors one used by the Muslim Brotherhood, is now a staple of Fatah demonstrations in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.[35] They also use the Arabic hijra calendar.

On an earlier home page, the brigades appealed to religious emotion, portraying the Qur’an and the Dome of the Rock on a green background. This page was shut down by the Canadian government in mid-2006 after a Canadian court accused the Abu’r-Rish Brigades of terrorism.[36] Like their mother organization, the Fatah Hawks, they created a motif of a map of undivided Palestine in green above the Dome of the Rock, denoting the whole of Palestine as a waqf, or religious endowment. Crossed Kalashnikov rifles signify fulfillment of the goal of liberating the land through jihad—through armed struggle against the Israeli presence. The Abu’r-Rish Brigades forbid any Western solution involving compromise with Israel. They mix classical Fatah discourse describing Israel as a branch of Western imperialism[37] with Islamic terminology and suggest jihad to be the only solution to the Palestinian question.[38] This policy is reflected in the Qur’anic quotes: “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors. They are but friends and protectors to each other.”[39] By this quote they portray themselves as a nationalist-Islamic force that stands against the “imperialist-infidel” conspiracy to divide Palestine.

The Clear Victory Brigades, whose name in Arabic derives from the Qur’an,[40] call for the continuation of the struggle by means of the word and the rifle and seek both moral reckoning and the preservation of social values now in decline.[41] The use of names indicating the Islamic roots of Fatah falls into a pattern reminiscent of the first intifada when the political struggle between Fatah and Hamas was expressed in part through Fatah graffiti bearing a religious complexion: “Allah is my Lord; Islam is my faith; the Qur’an is my book; to the Ka‘ba, I turn in prayer; Muhammad is my prophet; Fatah is my movement,” or “There is no god but Allah—thus we have always believed (Fatah, Nablus),” and “Fatah everywhere—even in the Qur’an.”[42]

The Holy Warriors Brigade, active in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, was created from within Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades after the death of Jihad ‘Amarin, one of the founders of the brigades in the Gaza Strip. Abu al-Sheikh, one of its activists, said the name symbolizes “those who stand for the Islamic ideal within Fatah, which is a movement with a variety of modes of action (ijtihadat). We have no connection with any other movement, despite our good relations with the other Palestinian organizations.”[43] (See Figure 5.)

Figure 5: Poster of Muhammad Abu Shari‘a, from the Holy Warriors Brigade.

The Pioneers of the Army of the People—The Brigade of the Return—is another clear example of the mixing of religious and national symbols. Its banner also features a green map of repartition Palestine and an image of the Dome of the Rock with crossed rifle-barrels. Accompanying the banner is the Qur’anic verse, “Kill those who fight you everywhere.”[44] Its members devote themselves to liberation of land “completely under the aegis of God and in the fulfillment of His commandments.”[45]

The picture of an activist of the faction sitting on what appears to be a rostrum reflects the depth of the blending of the symbols (see Figure 6): Behind the activist hangs a Palestinian flag decorated with the Muslim profession of faith, next to which is the logo of Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. A Pioneers of the Army of the People flag covers the table. The activist himself chose to be photographed reading the Qur’an with weapons placed beside him.

Figure 6: Image from the group Pioneers of the Army of the People, The Brigade of the Return.

Despite their internecine struggles for prestige, all of these Fatah factions duplicate certain symbols: the Dome of the Rock and a green map of Palestine. Quotations from the Qur’an cement the link between religion and Palestinian nationalism. Yunus Karim, a senior Fatah member imprisoned in Israel for twenty-five years for the murder of an Israeli soldier, complained that the new generation of Fatah fighters know about jihad but only learn about Fatah’s philosophy when in prison.[46]
Conclusion

Fatah imagery chronicles the Islamization of the movement. In the 1970s, Fatah graphic art dedicated itself to promoting the culture of armed struggle, which, at the time, was the heart of the movement’s ideology.

Today, the gap between Fatah and Hamas in terms of the role of Islam has narrowed. Fatah is more likely to see Islam as one component of national identity while Hamas preaches the primacy of Islamic identity,[47] but both agree that Palestinian society should be Islamist. Fatah leaders may try to keep their movement distinct, not by reversion to its secular past, but rather by arguing that its version of Islam is less extreme than that of Hamas.[48] It is not a coincidence that Fatah organized mass prayers in public areas in the Gaza Strip to protest against Hamas policies.[49]

Fatah’s loss to Hamas in the January 2006 parliamentary elections, though, forced it to externalize its Islamism. This may further a trend within the West Bank and Gaza—as well as, perhaps, in Jordan—toward Islamist radicalism.

It is no surprise that Fatah chairman Mahmoud Abbas recently attended Friday prayers at his Muqata‘a mosque, accompanied by the political leadership of Hamas in the West Bank.[50] To preserve his legitimacy, as well as national unity among Palestinians, Abbas must strengthen the Islamic elements in his political behavior. Fatah has deepened its own Islamic terminology and now preaches on the importance of prayer and faith in God during training and indoctrination of its new members.[51] Fatah has also started a propaganda campaign accusing Hamas of being a servant of Iranian interests and Shi‘i supporters,[52] thereby using Islam to criticize its rival.

Fatah’s new religiosity cannot easily be undone. It is ironic that while many Western diplomats now turn to Fatah as an alternative to Hamas’s Islamism, the real Fatah is much closer to Hamas while the secular Fatah now appears to be a relic of the past.

Ido Zelkovitz is a Ph.D. candidate in Middle Eastern History at Haifa University.

[1] Stephen Hadley, remarks at Johns Hopkins University, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, D.C., Nov. 28, 2007.
[2] Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 91.
[3] Rafiq Shakir an-Natsha, Al-Islam wa-Filastin (Beirut: Manshurat Filastin al-Muhtalla, 1981), p. 17.
[4] Nels Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism (London: Kegan Paul International, 1982), pp. 65-6, 77-86; Saqr Abu Fakhr, Al-Haraka al-Wataniya al-Filastiniya: Min an-Nidal al-Musallah ila Dawlat Manzu’at as-Silah (Beirut: Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiya li’d-Dirasat wa’n-Nashr, 2003), pp. 26-9.
[5] Emanuel Sivan, Hitnagshut be-Tokh ha-Islam (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 2005), pp. 190-2 .
[6] Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile: Lives of a Palestinian Revolutionary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988), p. 53.
[7] “Political Beliefs and Preferences of People Who Trust Fatah and People Who Trust Leftist Factions,” Analysis of Palestinian Public Opinion on Politics, Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, Sept. 2000, p. 35.
[8] Kata’ib Shuhada’ al-Aqsa, “Kilmat al-Kata’ib—Min Al-’Asifa ila Kata’ib Shuhada’ al-Aqsa,” accessed Nov. 21, 2007.
[9] Kata’ib Shuhada’ al-Aqsa, “‘An al-Kata’ib,” Sept. 21, 2005.
[10] Tony Blair and Yasir Arafat, news conference, Prime Minister’s Office, Oct. 15, 2001.
[11] Ronni Shaked and Avivah Shabi, Hamas: Me-emunah be-Allah le-derekh ha teror (Jerusalem: Keter, 1994), pp. 204-6; Meir Hatina, Islam and Salvation in Palestine (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University, 2001), p. 69.
[12] Qur. 9:14.
[13] See Hamas proclamations, nos. 3, 5, and 7, in Shaul Mishal and Reuven Aharoni, eds., Avanim zeh lo ha-kol: ha-Intifadah ṿe-nesheḳ ha-keruzim (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad and Avivim, 1989), pp. 202-13.
[14] Hillel Frish, “Nationalizing a Universal Text: The Quran in Arafat’s Rhetoric,” Middle Eastern Studies, May 2005, pp. 322-5.
[15] Munazzamat at-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya, Rasail al-Akh Abu A’mmar Ra’is al-Lijna at-Tanfidhia li-Munazzamat at-Tahrir al-Filastini—Al-Qa’id al-‘Amm li-Quwwat ath-Thawra al-Filastinyya ila Abtal al-Quwwat al-Mushtarika wa-Jamahir ash-Sha‘bayn al-Lubnani wa’l Filastini fi’l-Harb as-Sadisa, Wathiqa 1-2-3-4-5 (n.p., n.d.), pp. 23-40.
[16] Qur. 22:39-40.
[17] Qur. 60:111.
[18] Al-Hayat (London), Oct. 5, 2002, in Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Special Dispatch Series, no. 428, Oct. 11, 2002.
[19] Ephraim Lavi, “Zehoyot Kibotziot Mitharot be-He’ader Medina Leomit,” paper delivered at “The Solidarity of the Arab State—Is It in Decline?” conference, Moshe Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University, Mar. 21, 2006.
[20] Michael Milstein, Fatah ve-Hareshot Hafalastinit Bein Mahapekha le-Medine (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University, 2004), p. 57.
[21] Fabio Forgione, “The Chaos of the Corruption: The Challenges for the Improvement of the Palestinian Society,” The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group Report, Jerusalem, Oct. 2004.
[22] Gal Luft, “The Palestinian Security Services: Between Police and Army,” Middle East Review of International Affairs, June 1999.
[23] Nigel Parsons, The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to Al-Aqsa (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 154.
[24] Medinat Israel Neged Maerwan Iben Hatib Barghuthi (The state of Israel vs. Maerwan Iben Hatib Barghuthi), file no 1158/02, Beit Ha-Mishpat Ha-Mehozi Be-Tel Aviv, May 20, 2004.
[25] Anat N. Kurtz, Fatah and the Politics of Violence: The Institutionalization of a Popular Struggle (Eastbourne, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), p. 140.
[26] Ar-Ra’y al-‘Amm (Kuwait), Mar. 6, 2004.
[27] Rema Hammami, “From Immodesty to Collaboration: Hamas, the Women’s Movement, and National Identity in the Intifada,” in Joel Beinin and Joe Stork, eds., Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 204-6.
[28] Sukur al-Fatah, ‘Ashat Dhikra al-Marid al-Fathawa’i, Jan. 1, 2005.
[29] Hatina, Islam and Salvation in Palestine, p. 66.
[30] Daniel Pipes, “The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem,” Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2001, pp. 49-66.
[31] Qur. 110:1.
[32] Kata’ib ash-Shahid Ahmad Abu’r-Rish, Hawla Mushkilat Kata’ib ash-Shahid Ahmad Abu’r-Rish ma‘a Hamas (n.p.: Rabi’a al-Thani 4, 1426 A.H., May, 13, 2005).
[33] Sivan, Hitnagshut be-tokh Ha-Islam, pp. 190-2.
[34] Kata’ib ash-Shahid Ahmad Abu’r-Rish, “Min Nahnu-Nibadha Muhtasara,” accessed Nov. 15, 2007.
[35] “Masirat Fatah fi Mukhaym al-Bureij,” Sept. 20, 2007.
[36] Yusuf Sadik, “Kanada Taharib Kata’ib ash-Shahid Ahmad Abu’r-Rish,” accessed Nov 28, 2007; Kata’ib ash-Shahid Ahmad Abu’r-Rish, “Iftitah al-Maktab al- I‘alami li- Kata’ib ash-Shahid Ahmad Abu’r-Rish Ba‘d Ighlaqahu mi qabal Jihat Sahyuniya-Kanadiya,” Mar. 13, 2007.
[37] Fatah, “An-Nizam al-Assasi,” Fatah Basic Order, first part, articles 7-8, accessed Nov. 12, 2007.
[38] Kata’ib ash-Shahid Ahmad Abu’r-Rish, “Min Nahnu-Nibadha Muhtasara,” accessed Nov. 15, 2007.
[39] Qur. 5:51-52.
[40] Qur. 48:2.
[41] “Kata’ib Fatah al-Mubin,” n.p., 2005.
[42] Tariq Ibrahim and Muhammad Ibrahim, Sha‘rat al-Intifada (London: Filastin al-Muslima, 1994), pp. 265, 367-6.
[43] ‘Abu ash-Shaykh: “Afkhar inani Ibn li-hadha al‘A’ila wa-Fakdan ithnayn min ashiqqa’i la Yuharabuni’,” accessed Mar. 12, 2006.
[44] Qur. 2:192.
[45] Kata’ib Shuhada’ al-Aqsa, “Bayan Na‘i min Kata’ib Shuhada’ al-Aqsa wa- Talai‘ al-Jaysh ash-Sha‘bi- Kata’ib al-A‘wda: Al-Ab al-Qa’id Yasir A‘rafat fi Dhimmat Allah,” Nov. 11, 2004.
[46] Yunus Karim, interview on Israeli Channel One, May 18, 2005.
[47] Lavi, “Zehoyot Kibotziot Mitharot be-He’ader Medina Leomit.”
[48] Bakr Abu Bakr, Harakat Fath wa’t-Tanzim Allathi Nurid (Ramallah: ‘Anah li’t-Taba‘a wa’n-Nashr, 2003), p. 165.
[49] Al-Ta’amim (Fatah periodical, Ramallah), Aug. 2007.
[50] Al-Ayyam (Ramallah), Nov. 3, 2007.
[51] Bakr abu-Bakr, “Qiyam as-Sala wa-ikhtirak al-Gudur,” accessed July 11, 2007.
[52] Fatah- al-I’alam al-Markazi, “M’ashal: Hamas al-ibn ar-ruhi lil-Imam Khumayni” (M’ashal: Hamas is the spiritual son of Imam Khomeini), accessed Aug. 21, 2007.

By Nonie Darwish in the Huffington Post

“Gaza conditions at ’40-year low’” the BBC headlined last week. Rarely a week goes by without a politician or organization deploring the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. But I do not hear anyone describe its root cause: 60 years of Arab policy aimed at maintaining Palestinians as stateless refugees in order to pressure Israel.

I lived in Gaza as a child in the 1950s when Egypt conducted guerrilla-style operations against Israel from Gaza, then under Egyptian control. My father commanded these operations, carried out by “fedayeen,” (which means, “self sacrifice”). This became the frontline of Arab Jihad against Israel. My father was killed by Israel in a targeted assassination in 1956.

Today the Gaza Strip, now under the control of Hamas, has become the Gaza prison camp for 1.5 million Palestinians and continues to serve as the launching pad for attacks against Israeli citizens.

This is the legacy of the Arab world’s Palestinian refugee policy, started 60 years ago, when the Arab League implemented special laws regarding Palestinians that all Arab countries had to abide by. Arab countries could not absorb Palestinians. Even if a Palestinian married a citizen of an Arab country, that Palestinian could not become a citizen of his or her spouse’s country. A Palestinian can be born, live and die in an Arab country, but never gain its citizenship. Even now I receive e-mails from Palestinians telling me they cannot have a Syrian passport, for example, and must remain Palestinian even though they have never set foot in the West Bank or Gaza. Forcing the Palestinian identity on them is designed to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee status. Palestinians have been used and abused by Arab nations, and by Palestinian terrorists, for the purpose of destroying Israel.

The 22 Arab states certainly do not have a shortage of land. Many surrounding Arab areas, such as the Sinai Peninsula, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, are very sparsely populated. But absorbing Palestinians would end their refugee status and their desire to harm Israel.

Arab wealth, which is increasing dramatically because of skyrocketing oil prices, is not used to improve the lives, infrastructure and economy of the people of the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, it supports terror groups who reject Israel’s existence and oppose peace with Israel. The average Gaza man has a better employment opportunity if he joins Hamas.

Gazans’ breach of their checkpoint with Egypt in January, orchestrated by Hamas, is a result of the Palestinian refugee policy. The checkpoints on the Arab side of Gaza could not keep the inmates inside. The Arab plan to overpopulate Gaza exploded in the wrong direction. After this explosion, Suleiman Awwad, an Egyptian administration spokesman, said, “Egypt is a respected state, its border cannot be breached and its soldiers should not be lobbed with stones.” In other words, Egypt is not like Israel, which is a disrespected state. Gazans should not direct the violence at Egypt, only at Israel. This is Arab conventional wisdom.

Last month Hamas threatened to bring 40,000 Palestinians, primarily children and women, to the Gaza border with Israel to protest Israel’s restrictions on Gaza. Some Hamas leaders hinted they would send these protestors to breach the border, once again demonstrating that the Palestinian terrorists have no qualms about endangering the lives of innocent people — Israelis or Palestinians. Fortunately, only 5,000 showed up.

But Hamas did succeed two days later in killing an Israeli: a 47 year-old father of four during a rocket attack from Gaza while he was sitting in his car next to Sapir College near Sderot. Two weeks earlier, two Israeli brothers, Osher and Rami Twito, ages 8 and 19, were seriously injured by a rocket from Gaza while buying their father a birthday present. Osher’s left leg had to be amputated.

Israel completely left Gaza in August 2005. In May and June 2007, Hamas waged war against its Palestinian brothers in Fatah to gain control of Gaza. Hamas intensified its rockets attacks on Israeli towns, compelling Israel to take economic and military measures against Gaza. Hamas has become a danger not only to Israel, but to Palestinians and to neighboring Arab countries, as well. Nevertheless, the Arab world still refuses to see its role in creating this monster. It is difficult to find a similar situation in human history: the intentional creation of a refugee status for a million and a half people, sustained for 60 years. The Arab world has cut its nose to spite its face.

The world needs to understand that this dangerous mess started when 22 Arab countries agreed to create a human prison called the Gaza Strip. Arabs claim they love the Palestinian people, but they seem more interested in sacrificing them. It is time for the Arab world to open their side of the borders and absorb the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza who wish to be absorbed. It is time for the Arab world to truly help the Palestinians, not use them.

Nonie Darwish, who grew up in Cairo and Gaza City, is the author of, “Now They Call me Infidel.”

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.