Spectator's Journal: Arafat's Eternal Covenant
Aikman, David
"Spectator's Journal: Arafat's Eternal Covenant" by David Aikman Arafat's Eternal Covenant Arabic words have meaning, even in translation....
...Our forces," said Marwan Barguti, a key figure in the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, a few months ago, "will fight the Israelis...
...It is either us or the Zionists...
...Nice Guy...
...In other words, if the PLO doesn't like the look of the new Netanyahu regime, it will simply renege on the one section of the Declaration of Principles that Israel at the outset considered to be a prerequisite for any further discussions...
...The collective energy of Arafat's and the PLO's words, calling over three decades for the utter dismemberment of Israel, could only be negated by years of public and private discourse in a totally different direction...
...The decision by the Palestinian [sic] National Council this evening to cancel the Palestinian Covenant," he said, "may be the most important ideological change this century...
...Ever since it was first presented to the world after the Cairo meeting of the Palestine National Council in 1968, the Covenant has for most Israelis been one of the most threatening expressions of Palestinian hatred that has ever surfaced within the Palestinian national movement...
...By May 1994, Arafat may have been getting impatient with the pace of transition...
...On the Internet an array of "Palestine" sites sustains a version of Palestinian nationalism far closer to the sayings of the "bad" or "old" Arafat, filled with headings like "The relationship of Zionism and Anti-Semitism" and "The racist nature of Zionism," with graphics of barbed wire...
...In theory, the offending clauses should have been formally removed from the Covenant by the PNC before the May 7 deadline stipulated in the Oslo II accords...
...Officially, he and the PLO have accepted key U.N...
...Is it...
...is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase...
...Right...
...We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion...
...Unofficially, it is a different story altogether...
...When a reporter asked Arafat during his visit to President Clinton last May whether he still wanted to reclaim all of Palestine, i.e., the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel proper, he got angry and retorted: "This is an unfair question...
...You cannot discard them like clothes, donning them one day, throwing them out the next...
...51 The American Spectator • August x996...
...In undertaking to negotiate directly with the PLO the governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres clearly had co-existence in mind...
...In a speech that was recorded during his visit to a mosque in South Africa, Arafat called for "a jihad to liberate Jerusalem...
...Transition to what...
...He refused to comment further...
...I n fact, not only is the question not unfair, it is an absolutely essential one to pose publicly to Arafat and other PLO leaders at every opportunity...
...The document unequivocally calls not simply for the destruction of the Jewish state and its total replacement by "Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British mandate," but for the mandatory use of military violence to do so...
...Israel must not demand that the PLO alter its covenant," he said, "just as the PLO must not demand that the Jewish nation cancel the Bible...
...In January of this year, Arafat once again grew bored with playing Mr...
...In a speech to an American Jewish audience in October 1993, PLO official Zia Abu Ziad likened the Covenant to holy writ...
...We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a Palestinian state," he told his audience, which would have been surprised and probably annoyed if he had said anything different...
...Only then would Israel be willing, through a terse accompanying letter from Rabin to Arafat, to recognize the PLO as a legitimate negotiating partner for the rest of the so-called peace process...
...If Arafat's "unofficial" statements to Palestinians and other Arabs were isolated aberrations, one could perhaps dismiss them as the musings of an aging revolutionary unable entirely to doff his battle fatigues...
...The comment by then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres last April was almost Nixonian in its hyperbole...
...An "unfair" quote, too old...
...No less than 30 of the 33 articles elaborate on this goal, in the process asserting that any alleged Jewish historical ties with Palestine "are incompatible with the facts of history," demanding that Zionism be made globally illegal, and repudiating all international decisions that originally made possible the emergence of Israel - namely the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the U.N...
...He added that he wanted to concentrate on "splitting Israel psychologically into two camps...
...So offensive has the Covenant been to Israelis that when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat signed the historical Decla ration of Principles (DOP) on the White House lawn in September 1993, Rabin demanded, in the official documentation, a letter from Arafat agreeing to nullify it...
...and the U.N...
...No one understands this better than Arafat...
...Nothing of the sort happened...
...In September 1993, the very month the DOP was signed, Arafat told Radio Monte Carlo that the agreement would be "the basis for a Palestinian state in accordance with the Palestine National Council resolution issued in 1974...
...We already have in Gaza 20,000 armed security personnel...
...Partition resolution of 1947...
...Peace for us," said Arafat back in 1980, "means the destruction of Israel...
...Jews will not want to live among Arabs...
...This is both short-sighted and curiously condescending towards the Palestinians themselves...
...In the PLO Covenant, the Palestinians clearly did this...
...The document has been something of a sacred script for Palestinians ever since its adoption in 1968...
...Specifically, Arafat was to declare "inoperative and no longer valid" those articles that denied Israel the right to exist or that contradicted the content of the DOP...
...Give thy worst of thoughts the worst of words," said Shakespeare in Othello...
...The word "jihad," of course, means "holy war," a term that has been embraced by Palestinian Islamic suicide bombers in their efforts to spread terror among Israelis-or to employ a favored Washington and Jerusalem bureaucratic circumlocution, "to disrupt the peace process...
...The objective is wholly admirable...
...Orders have already been given...
...Even "moderate" PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), architect of the Oslo Accords and a designated successor of Arafat, has refused to disown a book entitled The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement, which claims, among other things, that Zionist Jews actually conspired with the Nazis during the Holocaust to kill off the Jews of Europe in order to "prove" that Jews could not live peaceably among other peoples...
...Benjamin Netanyahu's skillful exploitation of this point, in the view of many Israeli analysts, was a decisive factor in his narrow victory over Shimon Peres...
...We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations...
...According to the document uncovered by Peace Watch, and produced by the "Research and Thought" division of the Arafat-controlled Fatah wing of the PLO, "the drafting of the new document will take into account the extent of Israeli fulfillment of this previous and coming obligations, and the extent of the commitment of the Israeli Prime Minister that will be elected at the end of May...
...As for the number of Jews murdered at Auschwitz and other death-camps, the PLO estimate coincides with Holocaustdenial assertions of "less than one million" (who died largely because of disease...
...Words, especially in Arabic, motivate, direct, change lives, and over time harness immense and sometimes ferociously dark energy...
...Arafat is indeed aging-he is 66-but his continued, venomous sentiments against Israel voiced in non-diplomatic settings are echoed by Palestinians of all ages and from all levels of leadership in the PLO, from the refugee camps of Lebanon to the slums of Gaza...
...its realism is something else...
...Yet he remains true to the very essence of Palestinian nationalism, a belief-system that entirely defines itself by denial of Jewish nationhood...
...By "population explosion," Arafat made it clear that he planned to activate as vigorously as possible the Palestinian "right of return," that is, the entry into the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem of hundreds of thousands, then millions of Palestinians originally from, or the descendants of people originally from, parts of Israel proper...
...resolutions like 242 and 338 that reflect an acceptance of the reality of Israel as a state, not to mention formally acknowledging, in the 1993 Declaration of Principles, "the right of Israel to exist in peace and security...
...before Israel's May election that this had not happened at all...
...Calling for the total dismemberment of Israel and the expulsion of all Jews who had not been there before 1947, the Covenant has remained intact throughout every twist and turn of PLO politics, from the airlinerhijacking, Olympic Games terrorism of the 1970's to the smiling diplomacy of the Oslo negotiations of the 199o's...
...Not really...
...Peres went on: "I've always known you can depend on Arafat, and here it's clear that Arafat is fighting terror and changed the Covenant just as he promised...
...Despite the assertion by Peres that the Covenant had indeed been changed, it became apparent in the last, frantic days...
...That any "peace process" can seriously take place between Israel and the Palestinians without a truly honest alteration of those words-and the thoughts behind them-flies in the face of basic common sense about the human condition...
...A bipartisan Israeli peace-monitoring organization called Peace Watch obtained an internal Fatah document composed at the end of April that asserted the Covenant had definitely not been annulled, merely "frozen" while a specially appointed Legal Committee of the PLO considered the composition of a new charter...
...In Lebanon, Abu Imad had put the issue succinctly somewhat earlier on: "Palestine cannot contain the two of us...
...Because it exposes the Palestinian strategy's dialectical thinking-in the Chinese Communist sense that allowed a Marxist to hold two completely contradictory positions simultaneously so long as they furthered revolution...
...DAVID AIKMAN is a former Jerusalem bureau chief of Time...
...The prime minister was referring to the April 24 meeting of the Palestine National Council in Gaza, at which the PLO's supreme organ had supposedly decided to alter, if not abolish, its infamous "Covenant" -the Palestinian National Charter...
...Peace process enthusiasts routinely dismiss Israeli worries about Palestinian rhetoric as exaggerated and self-serving...
...The rhetoric of revolution and victory that has permeated Palestinian public utterances ever since the founding of the PLO in 1964 may indeed have turned out so far to be utopian and unrealistic, but it has nevertheless served as 50 August r996 • The American Spectator both a rallying cry for Palestinian frustrations and, much of the time, as a guide to Palestinian action...
...since World War II...
...S P E C T A T OR ` S J O U R N A L by David Aikman Arafat's Eternal Covenant Arabic words have meaning, even in translation...
...I have no use for Jews...
...Thus Arafat plays cheerfully-he can be positively cherubic when he chooses-by the diplomatic rules imposed on international relations by the U.S...
...Confronted with evidence that he had used highly inflammatory, aggressive language, Arafat explained that what he really had in mind was "a jihad for peace...
...This time it was in a talk to Arab diplomats in Stockholm's Grand Hotel...
...Armed struggle," as Article 9 has it...
...In one of his last pronouncements as Prime Minister, Peres declared his goal to be nothing less than "total elimination of the conflict between us and the Palestinian people...
...That resolution called for a Palestinian state on any part of Palestine "separated from Israeli control," sometimes called "the transitional option...
...To the destruction of Israel, of course...
Vol. 29 • August 1996 • No. 8
