Showstopper on Arafat: Prompting Reflections on Palestinian Leadership
September 28, 2003

L’Shanah Tovah!
 
The following article is something to write home about, one of those rare pieces that gives us a glimpse into the hidden workings of war and peace that barely make it into the memoirs of the leaders who made the history. In this case, its written by Ion Mihai Pacepa, once the Romanian director of intelligence and personal comrade of men like Andropov and Ceausescu, and, as it turns out, the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. It reads like something out of a spy movie, detailing the Soviet Union’s tight relationship with the armed Palestinian movement and Yasir Arafat.
 
This is, perhaps, a good time to reflect on the history of Palestinian leadership in general. Beginning in the 1920s, the Palestinian leadership was composed of local religious leaders and landowners; later, beginning in the 1960s, nationalist revolutionaries like Arafat took the reins, and still hold them. For the Jews, Palestinian leadership has been characterized throughout by rejectionism, a refusal to compromise; for the Palestinians, their leaders have brought them one failure after another.
 
The first wave of Jewish immigrants began arriving in 1880s, and, far from displacing anyone, they lawfully and openly purchased land, 70% of it from wealthy absentee landlords living in Cairo, Damascus and Beirut. The British obtained Palestine and large swathes of the region from the defunct Ottoman Empire after World War I, and in 1917 published the Balfour Declaration to announce the “establishment of a Jewish National Home.” The Balfour Declaration became binding international law when it was accepted by the League of Nations.
 
Arab violence against the small local Jewish communities – who came not with guns but with plows and shovel, fleeing vicious pogroms in the Pale of Settlement (the area in Europe where the Jews would forced to live) – began shortly after the first immigrants arrived. Despite Jewish overtures for friendship – who, vastly outnumbered, sought no conflict – the violence escalated, incited by increasingly vitriolic rhetoric from Palestinian leaders along religious and then racial lines, culminating in the Hebron massacre of 1928 (and elsewhere), with hundreds of Jewish casualties. The British condemned the attacks as “atrocious acts by bodies of ruthless and bloodthirsty evildoers…acts of unspeakable savagery…perpetrated against defenseless members of the Jewish population.” The cause they identified was “racial animosity on the part of Arabs.”
 
In order to find a two-state solution to the problem – which had emerged as the only viable one – they organized the Peel Commission in 1938, which provided a plan for partition (the map of it is to the right). It gave roughly 20% of the Palestine to the Jews (and divided into two parts) and 80% to the Arabs. The Jews accepted the plan – the Arabs, alternatively, began rioting again and demanded that Jews be “transferred” out of Palestine, as “this country [cannot] assimilate the Jews now in the country.”  In fact, during the proceedings, Arabs refused to sit in the same room as the Jews. One Palestinian notable, Aref Pasha Dajana, said that “It is impossible to live with them! …In all the countries where they are at present they are not wanted…because they always…suck the blood of everyone.” Note that these rejections and calls to violence all came from the Palestinian Arab leadership.
 
This, again, was in 1938, a year before Hitler was to invade Poland and when his murder-machine was established; widespread violence and discrimination against the German Jews had been in effect for years. The polarizing tendencies of impending war led the British to make concessions to the Arabs in the form of the infamous White Paper in 1939, limiting Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next five years, a decision which, in tandem with Arab refusal to share the land, consigned hundreds of thousands of Jews to gas chambers and mass graves.

During the Second World War, the spiritual (and also political) leader of the Palestinians, Haj Amin al-Husseini, traveled to Germany and became a friend and advisor to Reichschancellor Hitler (that’s them sitting together on the left). In 1940, he demanded that the Axis powers settle the Palestinian-Jewish dispute in favor of the “racial interests of the Arabs and along similar lines to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany,” meaning the Final Solution. One of his battle cries used to foment riots was “Nashrab dam al-Yahud!” – “we will drink the blood the Jews!” Palestinians would receive training from Nazi SS men, and al-Husseini established the barbaric Muslim SS units in Balkans.

After the war, the British handed the partition problem over to the United Nations. In November 1947, UN Resolution 181 was passed, forming the basis of the two-state solution; it would have given roughly 35% of the lands to Jews, 65% to the Arabs. And yet again, though binding by international law, the Arabs rejected it, and announced that they did not consider themselves bound by the resolution (as they would with other UN resolutions like 242; contrast that to their near-constant invocation about the sanctity of international law today – world-class hypocrisy).

The first phase of the Israeli War of Independence erupted, a sort of civil war, which the Jews, far better organized, won. The day immediately after their Declaration of Independence in March 1948, five Arab armies -- Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon -- invaded together to ‘strangle the baby in its cradle.’  Against all odds, in tale captured beautifully in Collins’ and Lapierre’s O Jerusalem!, the nascent Israeli state emerged victorious. In 1955, Egyptian made an arms purchase from the Soviet Union, signaling the Arab alignment with the Soviets. (Ironically in contrast with later history, the Soviet Union fully supported the establishment of Israel in 1948, seeing it a way to stick it to the British, whom they still regarded their chief rival.  Israeli’s arms in 1948 came from Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, which essentially rescued Israel’s war effort). 

In June 1967, the Arabs struck again with a combined, multi-front invasion led by Egypt and Syria with Iraqi support. In one of the most phenomenal upsets in history, studied today by military men and women worldwide, Israel won again, capturing the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. Only after this, in 1968, did Israel begin receiving arms shipments from the United States (the warplanes that secured Israel’s victory were Mirages from France, dog-fighting with Soviet MiGs). 
 
Then, the Cold War game began its course: the United States (and other Western democracies) on Israel’s side, the Soviet Union and its brotherly friends on that of the Arabs. In October 1973, the Arabs gave the destruction of Israel their third and final shot through war – the Syrians and Egyptians launched a surprise attack on Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day, when most were with families and in prayer. Despite taking big losses at first, the Israelis rallied and pummeled the combined Arabs armies. They even began an advance on Damascus as well, and if it weren’t for the Soviets, who demanded the halt to the advance, Israel could have conquered Syria. 
 
In 1991, the Soviet era came to an end, and so did their aid, weapons technology and diplomatic support to the Arabs. If you can’t beat someone on the battlefield, you have two options: you go up, to equalizing weapons of mass destruction, or you go down, to terrorism – and so Arab states began funneling money to various Palestinian terrorist groups, though the PLO had been killing Israelis the world over (Israeli embassies and emissaries have been attacked in twenty-three cities the world over, from Paris to Bangkok to Quito).
 
Also that year, the Palestinians supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, cheering from their rooftops as forty Scud missiles (which they thought were armed with chemical weapons) hurtled overheard on their way to Israeli cities.  Note also that the Kuwaitis were understandably not pleased by this, and expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – commonly estimated at 300,000 – who had been working there. (That’s Saddam and Arafat to the left – they’re about to kiss.  I know because I’ve seen the video; not pretty).  
 
The PLO, for its part, believed in the “liberation of Palestine through armed struggle,” and it trained Communist and nationalist revolutionaries from Central America, Africa and the Arab world in its camps. Correspondingly, the original Palestine National Charter rejects “any claim of historical or spiritual links between the Jews and Palestine,” as well as any Partition Plan. Professor Edward Said, an enormously intelligent Palestinian critic who taught for years at Columbia and who on Thursday passed away, wrote that, “the whole of Palestinian nationalism was based on driving all the Israelis out.”
 
This brings us to the present day.  But first, to review: Palestinian leaders have sided in the last centuries major face-offs first with the Kaiser’s Germany and the dying Ottomans, then the Nazis, then the Soviet Union, then Saddam. No wonder they’re appealing to the United States to be “honest broker,” so that, God forbid, anyone should take sides! I think this email is long enough to set aside for now the history of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which began after the Gulf War, but the most recent history is necessary here.
 
In December 2000, at the end of years of negotiations under the auspices of Clinton, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak made the most generous and farthest-reaching offer ever made to Arafat, and which will most likely never be repeated, in an attempt to shoot the moon, that is, to reach a final settlement once and for all: a Palestinian state on 95% of the West Bank, 100% of the Gaza Strip, shared sovereignty over Jerusalem, a removal of all Jewish settlements save three blocks contiguous to Israel, a limited refugee return and a $30 billion compensation package. As everyone now knows, Arafat walked out without even making a counteroffer. (The people who still dispute this are a few partisan professors found in Middle East Studies Departments who spend their time giving lunchtime lectures to the pro-Palestinian activists).
 
Clinton blames Arafat (he’s to the left, in front of a map of all of Israel and one of his terrorist fighters; he’s flashing the “V for victory” sign, lest is be confused with a peace one – “Israelis want peace, Palestinians want victory”). Dennis Ross, the chief American negotiator and the man who has spent more time with Arafat than any other Western diplomat blames Arafat. Jacques Chirac blames Arafat. Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US since 1983, told Arafat (related in a New Yorker interview), “take this deal,” and “I hope you remember, sir, what I told you.  If we lose this opportunity, it is going to be a crime.” Later, Bandar said Arafat’s walkout was “a crime against the Palestinians – in fact, against the entire region.” Arafat subsequently launched his Second Intifada, characterized not by civil disobedience like the first in the late 1980s, but thoroughly militarized and consisting almost entirely of suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism. Arafat thought, wrongly so, that he could suicide-bomb Israel into making further concessions before signing that final status treaty. 
 
The decision was one of the most calamitous in Palestinian history, leading to thousands of casualties, the collapse of their economy, closed schools, destroyed infrastructure, further isolation, harsher occupation, and a severance of trust from Israelis, shocked that he rejected their offer. And those Palestinian leaders who would dare speak out against Arafat have decried it. We can recall last September, when Palestinian Authority Interior Minister Abdel Razak Yehiyeh led a surprising charge on behalf of anti-Intifada moderates, declaring that, “All forms of Palestinian violence have to stop. All resistance acts that are characterized by violence, such as using arms or even stones...are harmful.” 
 
Yesterday, the “Quartet” – the US, Russian, European Union and UN – released a statement read by Kofi Annan that identified Palestinian terrorism as hindering the peace process, demanding that “Palestinians…take immediate, decisive steps against individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks. The Quartet members recognize Israel’s legitimate right to self-defense in the face of terrorist attacks against its citizens.” Two days ago, a Palestinian terrorist knocked on the door of a family eating their Rosh Ha’Shanah dinner. He sprayed the room with machine-gun fire, killing the guest who opened the door, and a baby girl, whose parents are in the hospital.
 
Now, Israel debates what to do with Arafat, but probably won’t expel him because the repurcussions would be too great, and, most importantly, it wouldn’t do anything anyway (he can direct his terrorism from anywhere). In a speech from Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom to the UN General Assembly on the eve of Rosh Ha’Shanah, he said, once again, what Israel has always known: despite decades of Palestinian rejections, refusing to share the one land inhabitated by two peoples, war, riots and terrorism, Israel will still patiently wait for a Palestinian leadership to emerge that will finally be ready to do what their predeccessors had to so tragically failed: make peace at long last with Israel. (The letter below it is itemized list of expenditures for arms-making materials for terror-groups provided by the Palestinian Authority; it was captured in last April’s raids).

I quote Mr. Shalom: 

"Israel's historic record is clear. Whenever a true partner for peace emerged, he was met with Israel's extended hand. This was true when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt came to Jerusalem in 1977 and it was true when King Hussein of Jordan signed the Peace Treaty with us in 1994. The same is true today.  Israel stands ready to complete the circle of peace with all its neighbors. Real peace. Not just peace for the headlines, but peace which brings an end to violence and hostility, and positive change for the citizens of our region. From this great podium - a podium shared by all humanity - I call on the leaders of Syria and Lebanon, of Iran and of the Palestinian people - to abandon once and for all their hostility towards us, and join us in building a better future for our children.”

[Note: should anyone require sources for the above information – I kept them out for neatness’ sake – I would be happy to provide them. – Joey]

Read Ion Mihai Pacepa, "The KGB's Man," The Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2003.