UNMIA

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 …

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 …

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 …

This is a fascinating account of something probably most of us don’t remember very clearly. If you are middle aged now, you were a child or a teenager in 1970, and you probably remember there were many hijackings in those days, and maybe something about Palestinians and Jordan and fighting in the Mideast, but chances are you don’t remember the circumstances and details…maybe you don’t remember the events at all. And if you are American and haven’t reached middle age, you would only know about the events surrounding Black September if you had a really good history class. But they were very important events whose effects are still felt today. Here is the riveting account of someone who knew first hand what happened, and has never forgotten.

by David Raab
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2007
http://www.meforum.org/article/1768

On September 6, 1970, terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked TWA flight 741 from Frankfurt to New York and Swiss Air flight 100 from Zurich to New York, diverting them both to a disused airfield in the Jordanian desert. Terrorists also hijacked Pan Am flight 93 from Amsterdam and diverted it to Beirut and then Cairo. El Al officials thwarted another …