Palestinians: Aggressors, Not Victims

Palestinians: Aggressors, Not Victims

By David Meir-LeviFrontPageMagazine.com
Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Arab propaganda has been successful in presenting a picture of the Palestinian people as the helpless and innocent victims of Israeli aggression -- potential friends of America who have been alienated by America’s support for Israel and its failure to support a Palestinian national state. This decision is itself the result of a “Jewish Lobby” run by “neocons” and “receiving its orders” from Israel. The fact that Palestinians are now led by two terrorist organizations, Fatah and Hamas, is also blamed on Israel and the United States rather than on the Palestinians who elected terrorists as leaders.
According to Palestinian revisionism, the Palestinians lived from time immemorial in historic Palestine, a veritable paradise of flourishing orchards and fertile vineyards, teeming with happy peasants. Then, the evil Zionists came and, with the support of the British, stole the Palestinians’ land, exiled their people, and initiated a reign of terror and ethnic cleansing that has not abated until this very day.
Goebbels died 60 years ago, but his core propaganda strategy lives on in the Great Arab Lie that there exists a Palestinian people who have suffered great injustices at the hands of Israel, the UK, and the USA. Arab leaders know that if they just keep repeating the same lie often enough, eventually people will believe it -- and the greater the lie, the more readily will people believe it.
Since the Six-Day War, the Arab world’s most powerful leaders -- in Egypt, Libya, Arabia, Syria, and Iraq prior to Saddam’s demise -- have waged a war of words against Israel. Having failed to defeat Israel by means of naked military aggression, these leaders and their advisors decided, sometime between the end of the war and the Khartoum Conference of August-September 1967, to bring about the destruction of Israel by means of a relentless terror war.
To justify to the world their ruthless mass murder of Israeli civilians and their undying hatred of the West, these leaders needed to invent a bizarre and apposite reality. Slowly but surely, the reality of the “little David” Israel assailed by the “giant Goliath” of the entire Arab world has been reversed. Now the “Goliath” Israel is depicted as the racist, apartheid, war-mongering, oppressive, illegal occupier Jewish State, regional superpower, hell-bent on the destruction, indeed, the genocide of the poor, defenseless Palestinian people -- the Middle East’s new “David.” This grotesque fiction could be foisted upon the world only if there were indeed a “little David” for Goliath Israel to oppress; only if Israel’s combatant in the conflict were not the entire Arab world, but rather some poor, enfeebled people who could mount no real defense against the Jewish superpower, but nonetheless had a stronger claim to the land of Israel than Israel itself. Thus the PLO, under the tutelage of the KGB, invented “The Palestinian People.”
This propaganda war has developed a mendacious narrative which works in two directions at once. On one hand, Arab propaganda sources claim the Canaanites were Palestinians; Abraham was a Palestinian; so were David, Solomon, and even Jesus. And the Jews were interlopers, invaders, and conquerors in the days of Joshua, just as they are now.
On the other hand, Israel is discredited and delegitimised in the present by the endless anti-Israel resolutions in the UN, orchestrated in large part by the Arab bloc and their Russian (formerly Soviet) mentors; and by the constant clamor of Arab states to the world at large, promoting the risible assertion that Israel is the aggressor. This occurs even though Israel has sued for peace after winning each war, Israel has agreed a dozen times over to the creation of a Palestinian state on part of its land, even as Hamas’ qassam rockets fall daily upon innocent Israeli civilians, even as Hezbollah declares vociferously its goal of the annihilation of world Jewry, and Iran looks forward perpetrating a nuclear Armageddon in order to create a world without Israel. If only Israel were destroyed, they assert, then the entire Middle East would know peace.
This mendacious narrative is stalwartly bolstered by a growing host of pseudo-academics in Western universities, and by a cadre of Western journalists, who churn out books and articles that effectively rewrite history and archaeology in order to erase Israel’s connection to the Holy Land and thus deny both the Christian and Jewish historic and religious roots in the Land of Israel.
This propaganda campaign to legitimize the 60-year-old Arab war against Israel and to create the fiction of the “Palestinian people” as the poor oppressed victims of imperialist colonialist Israel, illegally occupying “Historic Palestine,” is a veritable war against History. It deals in lies, just the kind of lies Goebbels had in mind. And the biggest lie of all is the existence of a “Palestinian People.”
How the Lie Began
After he took over as leader of the PLO, [1] Arafat sent his adjutant, Abu Jihad (later the leader of the PLO’s military operations), to North Vietnam to study the strategy and tactics of guerilla warfare. Arafat was struck by Ho Chi Minh’s success with left-wing sympathizers in the United States and Europe. “Progressive” activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the line of North Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam War from a Communist conquest of the South into a struggle for national liberation. An insight into this North Vietnamese PR campaign, which provided the key to the Communist victory and a lesson for PLO operatives, was offered by Ho’s chief strategist, General Giap: “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.”
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. And the key to all this was creating an image that would help Arafat manipulate the American and Western news media.
The PLO also looked to other examples of a “people’s war” to find both military allies and ideological paradigms. Thanks to input from the late Romanian President-for-Life Ceausescu, General Giap, and the Algerians, Arafat developed the images of the “illegal occupation” and “Palestinian national self-determination,” both of which lent his terrorism the mantle of a legitimate peoples’ resistance. After the Six-Day War, Muhammad Yazid, who had been minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments (1958-1962), imparted to Arafat some wisdom that echoed the lessons he had learned in North Vietnam:
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. [2]
Of course, there was one ingredient missing in this imaginative reconfiguration of the struggle: There had never been a “Palestinian People,” nor a “Palestinian Nation,” nor a sovereign state known as “Palestine,” nor even any specific territorial entity that could rightfully be called “historic Palestine.”
Inventing “Palestine”
The term Palestine (Falastin 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 11th and 12th centuries B.C. The Philistines were apparently from Greece, or perhaps Crete, or the Aegean Islands, and/or Ionia. They seem to be related to the Bronze Age Greeks, and they spoke a language akin to Mycenaean Greek. Their descendents, still living on the shores of the Mediterranean, greeted Roman invaders 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 subsequent history, the name remained 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, remaining instead under successive foreign sovereign domains from the Umayyads and Abbasids to the Fatimids, Ottomans, and British.
During the centuries of Ottoman rule, when the “dead hand of the Turk” (to quote Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”) brutally frustrated the attempts at national self-determination among the Turks’ unhappy subjects in Greece, Armenia, Albania, and the Kurds, no Arabs under Turkish rule made any attempt to formulate an ideology of national identity, least of all the impoverished Arab peasantry in the region today known as Israel.
The emergence of Arab nationalism has been thoroughly documented, [3] and Arab sources are clear that even after the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire was carved up into various Middle Eastern nation-states, there was no concept of a separate state or people of “Palestine.” On the eve of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the very first congress of the Muslim-Christian Association met to select representatives; and they took care to note that the entity now termed Palestine by the British was “by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds” in inseparable part of Syria. [4] The same arguments were raised by Arab spokespersons in the UN on the eve of the 1947 partition plan.
The term Palestinian, ironically, was used during the British Mandate period (1922-1948) to identify the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine. The Arabs of the area were known as “Arabs”; and their own designation of the region was balad esh-Sham (the province of Damascus). While some Arab nationalist writers, and coffee-shop intellectuals in Cairo or Beirut, developed the concept of Arab nationalism in large part as a response to Zionism, the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian” were used in their traditional sense as geographic designations, not as national identities.
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 spoke out vociferously against such a division because, they argued, the region was really a part of southern Syria, no such people or nation as “Palestinians” had ever existed, and it would be an injustice to Syria to create a state ex nihilo at the expense of Syrian sovereign territory. [5]
An even greater irony is the fact that the Arab population of the region grew almost four-fold from the onset of the Zionist Endeavour (1855) to the beginning of Israel’s statehood (1948) in large part because of:
a) The efforts of the Zionist pioneers to reclaim waste land and turn it in to farmland, thus creating both farming and grazing land for Arabs; and
b) The substantial improvements in the economy of the region which were generated by both the British and the Zionists; and
c) The substantial improvements in the health services generated by the Zionists and the British.
From a mere 350,000 in 1855, the Arab population of the region increased to around 1.4 million by 1947. Part of this increase came from immigration in to the region from surrounding areas which lacked the burgeoning economy and health services offered by the British and the Zionists. Part came from the dramatic decrease in infant mortality and increase in longevity which the Arabs of the region enjoyed, thanks to the health and nutrition improvements generated by the Zionists and the British. [6] Thus, it is quite likely that the majority of Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip today owe their very existence to Zionism and British Middle Eastern foreign policy. During the 19 years from Israel’s victory in 1948 to Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, all that remained of the UN’s partitioned territory to the “Arabs” of British Mandatory Palestine were the West Bank, under illegal Jordanian sovereignty, and the Gaza Strip, under Egyptian rule. Never during these 19 years did any Arab leader anywhere in the world argue for the right of national self-determination for the Arabs of these territories. A “Palestinian” nation and “Palestinian” people had not yet been invented. Even Yasser Arafat, from the earliest of his terrorist days until 1967, used the term ‘’Palestinians’’ to refer to the Arabs who lived under, or had fled from, Israeli sovereignty; and the term “Palestine” to refer to Israel in its pre-1967 borders (the 1949 armistice line).
Article 24 of the PLO’s original founding document, the PLO Covenant, states: “this Organization (the PLO) 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 before the Six-Day War, Palestine was Israel. It was not the West Bank or the Gaza Strip; because the West Bank and the Gaza Strip belonged to other Arab states, and the inhabitants of these areas were not numbered among the Palestinians whose “homeland” Arafat sought to “liberate.” The only "homeland" for the PLO in 1964 was the State of Israel. However, in response to the Six Day War, the PLO revised its Covenant on July 17, 1968, to remove the operative language of Article 24, thereby newly asserting a “Palestinian” claim of sovereignty to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
This ploy was, perhaps inadvertently, revealed to the West in a public interview with Zahir Muhse’in, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, in a March 31, 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. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan. (Emphasis added.)
Arafat himself said the same thing, on many occasions, and asserts often in his authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker): “[T]he Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.”
But such admissions could not stem the enthusiasm with which these fictions were greeted by Western leaders. Within a few years, the USSR's invention of the fictitious narrative of Palestinian national aspirations and rights of self-determination created the facade of morality and legitimacy that the terrorists needed to curry favor with the EU, the UK, and the U.S. This same facade facilitated the Soviet implementation of its takeover, with the Arab bloc, of the UN General Assembly, and UN committees and functions outside of the Security Council.
“Palestinian nationalism” today?
But what about today? After 60 years of unrelenting terror war against Israel, 60 years of hardship and privation incarcerated in refugee camps scattered throughout the Arab world -- an incarceration forced upon them by their host Arab countries, not by Israel -- after 40 years of the propagandistic pretense that the people today known the “Palestinians” were and are a cohesive national group with historic roots in what they call “Palestine,” and after 14 years of a “Palestinian Authority” created by the Oslo Accords to offer the “Palestinians” the framework and infrastructure of their own state…what is the condition of “Palestinian Nationalism” today?
For the answer to that question, we must look to the current demographic distribution of “Palestinians” both in Israel and in what they call the “Palestinian Diaspora.”
Estimates vary, but most place the Palestinian population at about 9 million worldwide. Of these, more than 3 millionlive in the West Bank and Gaza Strip today, [7] more than 4 million live in Arab countries, and the remainder have migrated elsewhere, mostly to the West. [8] These figures do not include the approximately 1.3 million Arab Israeli citizens (who are sometimes incorrectly referred to as “Palestinians” or “Israeli Palestinians”) living within the borders of pre-1967 Israel.
Although the Arab narrative states the “Palestinians” are Arabs who fled Israel in 1948, and fled the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and were forced in to refugee camps by their host Arab countries, less than one-third of all “Palestinians” in the Arab world and Israel live in refugee camps. More than 67 percent of these Palestinians have left the camps over the decades since those wars, and have created homes, jobs, and families for themselves throughout the Arab countries and the world.
Moreover, even those who remained in the refugee camps harbor no great desire to return to what the propaganda narrative claims are their homes and farms in Israel. In a 2003 opinion poll taken by Khalil Shikaki’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (Ramallah, Palestinian Authority), only ten percent of respondents said they would agree to return to a Palestinian state. Only 10 percent of these respondents -- i.e., one percent of the entire survey -- would agree to return to their homes in Israel if it meant becoming citizens of Israel; they would return only if Israel no longer existed and had been replaced by a Palestinian state. [9]
Clearly the results of this poll presented a serious challenge to the concept of Palestinian nationalism and to the hype and hyperbole that the Arab narrative has given to the wholly fabricated concept of “right of return.” So serious was this challenge, and so totally incapable were Arab leaders of mounting any rational argument against it, that they resorted to violence in order to silence Shikaki. Shortly after the poll was published, “there were about a hundred people who basically stormed into the office. They wanted to attack me, attack the center, attack the staff. They believe that the right of return is being tampered with…What it indicated is that there is a great deal of softness, practicality, on the exercise of the right in terms of people electing or choosing their place of residence. That is the shocking, [sic.] in terms of for the first time, having these results being made public.” [10]
Shocking indeed. Other reports indicate that nearly 200 armed gunmen stormed Shikaki’s offices, destroyed computers and books and records, threatened and intimidated office workers, and threatened to kill Shikaki himself if he continued his work. Clearly such concrete evidence that the Palestinian’s putative love for his land and yearning for his ancestral home is long a thing of the past, if indeed it ever existed at all, is existentially threatening to the propagandists who demand a “right of return” for all the millions of “Palestinians” who now claim the status of refugees.
Shikaki’s poll is even more important when one considers the tragic plight of Palestinians, refugees or otherwise, in their Arab host countries. One might think, on the basis of the oft-ballyhooed commitment of Arab states to the “Palestinian cause” that their Arab brethren would treat the Palestinian refugees well in their host countries. But one would be wrong.
The Palestinians have suffered grievously at the hands of their Arab hosts. Conditions vary from country to country, but Arab host governments and societies have maintained a level of hostility toward Palestinians that expresses itself in numerous legal limitations on their rights of movement, employment, land and home purchase, citizenship, discrimination and general antipathy on the part of the host society. Studies of attitudes in various host countries indicate a fear and suspicion of the Palestinians, and a hostility bordering on violence [11] -- this despite the almost universal agreement by Arab states to the Casablanca Protocol, in which is outlined the need for the proper care and rehabilitation of the refugees, but without compromising their status as refugees. [12]
This hostility has in some cases overflowed into lethal violence against the Palestinians by their host brethren. During the first Gulf War, Kuwait expelled 300,000 of its 440,000 Palestinian residents because they sided with Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait, despite the fact that most of them had been born in Kuwait and lived there all their lives. This extreme Arab-vs.-Arab ethnic cleansing merited almost no column-inches in Western news outlets. More than a decade later, Kuwait’s hostility toward Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority is still intense. [13]
Perhaps even more revealing is the fact that once the Palestinian Authority was established, as a product of the Oslo Accords (of September 1993), and Palestinians worldwide looked forward to the emergence of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, there was no perceptible influx of Diaspora Palestinians to their erstwhile homeland.
In light of the above, one may reasonably ask: Why do Arab leaders and their Amen Corner insist on the Arab “right of return” and the fulfillment of the putative “inalienable right of national self-determination” for the “Palestinian people”? Half of the answer has already been given to us by Arafat himself and Zahir Muhse’in in the aforementioned interview. But, unfortunately, the other half is more heinous than the first. The fiction of an uprooted and oppressed “Palestinian people” is really much more than a justification for endless terrorism and war against Israel: it is also the hoax whereby the Arab bloc in the UN can maintain, at levels of near hysteria, their justification for a propaganda war and a terror war against the United States.
Palestinians in the Jihad against “global non-belief”
As described above, Palestinians and their leaders were allied with the Nazis before and during World War II. After the war, Arab states offered safe haven to Nazi criminals and incorporated Nazi Jew-hatred in to traditional Muslim anti-Jewish ideology. During the Cold War, Palestinians were in alliance against the U.S. with the USSR, serving as their proxy terrorists against Western targets; and during the first Gulf War they sided with Saddam Hussein. Palestinian leadership and some significant part of the rank-and-file have been the enemies of the USA and the West for the past 70 years. [14]
Today, Hezbollah and Hamas work with Iran and al-Qaeda to advance the cause of global jihad. Israel is the first target, but the USA is next. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasr’allah has said, “'Death to America’ is not a slogan. Death to America is a policy, a strategy, and a vision.”
Just as Arafat served his Soviet masters, so too now do Hamas and Hezbollah serve Iran. Pursuant to Iran’s goals and strategies, Hezbollah has attacked many USA targets over the past 25 years. Iran’s use of Hezbollah as its proxy gives Iran “plausible deniability” in these actions. Of Hezbollah’s terror attacks against USA targets, the most deadly were the April 18 and October 23, 1983, suicide bombings against American targets in Beirut, killing 63 and 241 Americans respectively, wounding hundreds of others. [15]
The tragic and very perilous reality is that Palestinian Arabs, since before World War II, have in large numbers supported the very worst of America’s enemies, from the Nazis to the Soviets to Saddam Hussein; and now they support the Islamo-fascist terrorist jihad against the West. Today the majority party in the Palestinian Authority is Hamas, a self-defined terrorist organization which has joined forces with Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and Iran in their terror war against the West. On September 13, 2001, a high-ranking Hamas official told the world just how deeply Hamas hates the U.S. In response to the attack of 9/11, Dr. Atallah Abd as-Subh published an open letter to America, in which he said: “Allah has answered our prayers; the sword of vengeance has reached America and will strike again and again.” [16]
Hamas cooperates closely with al-Qaeda. Since the Israeli unilateral and unconditional retreat from the Gaza Strip in August, 2005, al-Qaeda cells under the leadership of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, have entered the Strip and work alongside of Hamas and the dozen other terror groups at large there. Al-Zarqawi recruits Gaza Strip Palestinians with family members in the West Bank for his terrorist efforts because they can more easily cross the Israeli check points under the guise of “family reunions.”
Al-Qaeda and Hamas and Hezbollah deployed for terror in the USA
Operatives from the major Arab and Iranian terror groups have infiltrated our own homeland with the intent to attack us from within. Palestinian terror groups and individuals are a key part of this operation. [17]
Very little of this information has ever appeared in our mainstream media. Rather, the task of informing the American public of the dangers posed to us by Iranian and Palestinian terrorist jihad falls, with very few exceptions, to more highly specialized (and apparently more honest and courageous) media outlets.
A survey of these non-mainstream media discloses the most discomforting evidence that Palestinian and other terrorists are:
Thoroughly and comfortably ensconced in downtown America, under the noses of law-enforcement and Homeland Security officials, and they number in the thousands; [18]
Training for war in secret camps in the USA; [19]
Infiltrating the USA’s own military; [20]
Penetrating Washington, D.C., with political influence, staffers, and spies; [21]
Exploiting our legal system to advance their propaganda and stifle criticism or analysis of their jihadist goals; [22]
Copying American Indian legal precedents in order to establish enclaves of Muslim legal independence in which Shari’a law trumps the Constitution inside the USA; [23] and
Working to prevent us from understanding the jihadist goals of these actions by dissimulating, covering up and whitewashing the terrorists and their apologists. [24]
And our mainstream media seem ignorant of, or inclined to ignore, the accumulating evidence that jihadist sleeper cells abound with Hezbollah and Hamas and al-Qaeda terrorists hidden within the Islamic American community, waiting for the call to action from Teheran or Damascus. [25]
Palestinian attempted attacks on American Soil
Recently declassified CIA documents reveal that as early as March 1973, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, a PLO sub-group created by Arafat, tried to detonate three car bombs in New York City, timed to coincide with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's visit. The powerful bombs, which might have killed or wounded hundreds, failed to explode due to improper wiring of the timing mechanisms. It is now well known that Arafat ordered the murders of American and Belgian diplomats in Sudan. And since then the PLO and Fatah and other Palestinian terrorists groups have claimed dozens of Americans as their victims. Later, individual Palestinians carried out their own personal version of jihad with attacks or attempted attacks on American soil. Palestinian Arabs in Brooklyn prepared a biological terror attack on a Brooklyn bus and a subway station, which was thwarted by an almost unbelievable stroke of good luck. (A neighbor in their Brooklyn apartment complex noticed the multiple UPS deliveries of glass laboratory equipment to their apartment. She alerted the police, thinking that they were running a ‘meth-lab’ in their kitchen). Palestinians were involved in the attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993. They had also planned to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the United Nations building.
And many more attacks have been planned. Especially after 9/11, al-Qaeda commanders and officials stationed in Western countries, including the United States, have recruited Hamas operatives and volunteers to carry out reconnaissance or to serve as couriers. In August 2004, two suspected high-level Hamas operatives, Mohammed Salah and Abdelhaleem Ashqar, were detained in the U.S. and charged with providing material support to Hamas, racketeering and money laundering. In November 2003, Jamal Aqal, a Gazan who emigrated to Canada, was arrested in Israel under suspicion of receiving weapons and explosives training from Hamas for use in future terror attacks in Canada and New York City. Aqal pleaded guilty in 2004 to planning to kill American and Canadian Jewish leaders and Israeli officials traveling in the U.S.
Also in 2004, Ismail Selim Elbarasse, a long-time Hamas money man, was arrested in Maryland, reportedly after authorities witnessed his wife videotaping Maryland's Chesapeake Bay Bridge from their SUV as Elbarasse drove. The images captured by Elbarasse's wife included close-ups of cables and other features "integral to the structural integrity of the bridge," according to court papers. Hamas leaders discussed openly their plans, and threats, to carry out terror operations against American targets in the Middle East and in the USA because of America’s support for President Abbas and the PLO after Hamas’ election victory.
Conclusion
During the week of June 13, 2007, Hamas forces soundly defeated the much larger and better armed Fatah forces in Gaza, killing at least 160 Arab Palestinian Fatah loyalists, effectively destroying the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip and establishing complete control over the Gaza Strip.This new development affords Hamas a prime strategic asset for escalating its violent campaign against Israel. This sudden and unexpected shift, this rebellion against Abbas, is also a rebellion against moderation; and it is a direct attack against U.S. goals in the Middle East. Hamas’ actions, and the widespread support for these actions among the Palestinian people, also reveal something else: that the Palestinian people are at war with America.
The history outlined above demonstrates that this war has been going on for three-quarters of a century, beginning in the 1930s with the alliance between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler, developing from the 1960s to the present with Arafat’s actions as an agent for Soviet policy and a supporter of Sadam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and Hamas’ overtly anti-American threats and attacks and its backing of Hezbollah’s attacks against Americans today.
It cannot be argued that hatred of America is restricted to only a small minority of Palestinians, the leaders, the fanatics, the extremists. Hundreds of thousands adored the Mufti and yearned for his Final Solution. Millions followed Arafat, cheering and celebrating when he hit both Israelis and Americans. Tens of thousands flocked to his banner to join his forces (Fatah, PLO, PFLP, PFLP-GC, DFLP, the abu-Nidal group, Tanzim, Force 17, el-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the Black September Group, among others) and created a full-fledged terrorist army.
Moreover, in 1996 the Palestinian people voted him in to office with a landslide victory. When his mandate expired in January of 2000, there was no opposition to his continued illegal control of the Palestinian Authority until his death in November 2004. After Arafat’s death, the voters’ loyalties shifted not to his supposedly more moderate successor, Mahmoud Abbas (nor to any of the other moderate parties on the 2006 PA ballot: Hanan Ashrawi’s “Third Way” party garnered only 3 percent of the votes on a platform of ending the Intifada), but to the terrorist army offering the most extreme agenda of terrorism and mass murder and endless war against Israel and against the USA: Hamas.
But why this animosity toward America? One reason commonly offered is that Palestinian hatred comes from U.S. support for Israel. The fictions of the “Palestinian people” who have been exiled and oppressed by Israel, and of the “Palestinian homeland” which has been stolen from its rightful owners by the evil Zionists, provide justification to Arab hatred against the USA for supporting Israel, the cause of all the Palestinian suffering.
But while the U.S. does support Israel, it has also done much to support the Arab world, the Palestinians, Yasser Arafat, and the PLO in particular. And the USA has been a prime mover in the efforts since World War II to create a Palestinian state alongside of Israel. After World War II, President Roosevelt took the uncompromisingly anti-imperialist position that Third World countries should be given the opportunity for self-determination; and the Muslim Third World was very much a part of his vision. On a regular basis from Roosevelt to Clinton, the U.S. has given almost as much money to Egypt as to Israel, has given billions more over the years to many other Arab states, and has given billions more to UNRWA for support of Palestinian refugees, and this despite the fact that UN representatives acknowledge that UNRWA refugee camps have become havens for terrorists whose targets include Americans and who have been complicit in the development of worldwide terrorism.
In addition to being a consistent source of financial largesse to the Palestinians, America has for almost 60 years has consistently and intentionally turned a blind eye to the fact that at least some of that money is used to recruit, train, equip, arm, and deploy terrorists against Israel, and at times against American targets.
As president, Jimmy Carter played a crucial role in Arafat’s makeover from terrorist to statesman, and as ex-president he has slavishly supported the Palestinians. Arafat was an honored guest at the White House more than any other head of state during Bill Clinton’s presidency. President Clinton hosted the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, which brought Arafat out of exile and set in to motion what should have been the creation of a Palestinian state. He presided, as well, over the Camp David II talks, in which Arafat was offered the state of Palestine on a silver platter. Presidents Clinton and Bush have authorized hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to the PA since the Oslo Accords (1993).
President Bush was the first American president to make a public commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state; and he led the “Quartet” in initiating the Road Map whose main goal was getting peace negotiations back on track so that a Palestinian state could emerge with the resolution of the conflict.
If their right to national self-determination and getting their own state were indeed what the Palestinians' leadership wanted, that leadership would see the U.S. as an ally. But they see the U.S. as an enemy. Why? Because their most profound dreams do not involve national self-determination or a state of their own.
The Palestinians are instead motivated by the dream of what the most extreme of the world’s Muslim terror armies say they can deliver: the destruction of Israel, “Death to America,” and “Islam uber Alles.”
ENDNOTES: See original article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=5ADD2CD9-BDD7-4488-8D2E-77357B1CB326