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The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror
David Meir-Levi , Dec 14, 2007 @ 20:14 GMT
How the Cold War policies of the USSR came to affect peace in the
Middle East
The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror
By David Meir-Levi
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 stateâ€"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 Charterâ€"a document drafted in Moscowâ€"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.â€
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 groupsâ€"some of them neo-Nazi and extreme
right-wing groupsâ€"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
(Augustâ€"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 Liberationâ€
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.â€
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 (1958â€"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 “liberationâ€
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.â€
Creating “Palestineâ€
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.â€
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 (1922â€"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.â€
But even these admissionsâ€"that the concept of a “Palestinian peopleâ€
and a “Palestinian homeland†were invented for political purposes to
justify and legitimize terrorism and genocideâ€"could not stem the
enthusiasm of western leaders. Within the space of a few years, the
Middle East conflict with Israel was radically reframed. No longer was
little Israel the vulnerable David standing against the massive
Goliath of the Arab world. As the PLO’s Communist-trained leaders saw
the inroads that Vietnam, Cuba, and other “liberation struggles†had
made in the west, Arafat promoted the same script for the
Palestinians. Now it was Israel who was the bullying Goliath, a
colonial power in the Middle East oppressing the impoverished,
unarmed, helpless, hapless, and hopeless Palestinians.
Despite the changing imagery, however, one thing remained constant.
>From his earliest days, Arafat was clear that the PLO’s aim was “not
to impose our will on [Israel], but to destroy it in order to take its
place . . . not to subjugate the enemy but to destroy him.†The
Palestinian nationalism that he and his Communist advisers created
would be the only national movement for political self-determination
in the entire world, and across all of world history, to have the
destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of a people as its
only raison d’etre.
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