Israel's View of the Palestinian Question
SALPETER, ELIAHU
EXAMINING THE REALITIES Israel's View of the Palestinian Question BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv Stalin was fond of saying that once you get your enemy to employ your terminology you have won half...
...In fact, every nation has a right to object to (and oppose) any movement—especially one at its doorsteps—whose declared and actual aim is its destruction...
...million from Communist East Europe, for instance—when the victims do not have the weight of oil wells behind them...
...Though he had every reason to present a moderate face, Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO's spokesman for foreign affairs, once more rejected Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, and restated his organization's refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist...
...Article 19 announces that "the partitioning of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void...
...Because of the size of the areas involved, either the Palestinian state would have to forgo long-range artillery and anti-aircraft missiles, or all of Israel's cities and air bases would fall within the range of Palestinian fire...
...EXAMINING THE REALITIES Israel's View of the Palestinian Question BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv Stalin was fond of saying that once you get your enemy to employ your terminology you have won half the battle...
...In fact, the half million Palestinian Arabs who fled in 1948 (and whom the Arab nations refused to absorb) were practically equal in number to the Jewish refugees from Arab countries...
...There are close to 3 million Arabs of Palestinian descent in the Middle East...
...Finally, the feeling is that since the convoluted shape and small confines of a Palestinian state would prevent it from achieving economic or military viability, it would become a hotbed of further irredentism, a base for future PLO-spearheaded Arab aggression against Israel...
...But one must also remember that those exposed to PLO guns may not be eager to challenge the terrorists' claim to represent them...
...The Palestine Liberation Army's treatment of Lebanon's Christian Arabs was a vivid demonstration of the "secularism" practiced by the proponents of a "secular, democratic Palestine," a secularism that cannot tolerate any other entity—even if the difference is only religious, not linguistic or national...
...More recently, during the UN Security Council debate on Palestine in January, the PLO representative took an equally uncompromising stand...
...Only after the 1967 War did the Arab governments become the advocates of Palestinian nationalism...
...America's performance on the international scene lately, moreover, gives little reason to hope that Washington could deter such a development...
...Israelis, on the other hand, realize that these definitions are critical to the PLO's very reason for being, and can be ignored only at grave risk to their country's survival...
...They have elected representatives in the Jordanian Parliament and in the local councils (including those freely elected under Israeli government on the West Bank...
...All of this is important in understanding Israel's strategic and national anxieties...
...These concerns have created a seemingly insoluble dilemma: Insistence on what is vital to its security reinforces Israel's image of inflexibility and thereby weakens its support in the West...
...About 2.5 million of them are Jordanian citizens living either in Transjordan or on the West Bank...
...Only the Jewish people have no right to nationhood and a state of their own...
...3. The world cannot continue to tolerate the injustice done for 26 years to the Palestinians...
...It is, by the way, one of the ironies of history that the West now tends to accept the identification of "Palestinians" with the region's Arab inhabitants, whereas the only solidiers who fought against the Nazis with the word "Palestine" on their shoulder patches were members of the Jewish Brigade...
...In addition, the speeches in New York and the shooting in Beirut have made Israelis less hesitant about questioning several "axioms" of the Palestine dispute: 1. Israel has no right to say who should and who should not represent the Palestinians...
...The organization's deep-seated opposition to a Jewish national presence is merely part of a decades-long Arab struggle to annihilate the numerous ethnic and religious minorities that constitute a significant part of the Middle Eastern mosaic...
...But the two events did reaffirm the widespread rejection of a "PLO state," and have brought most people closer to the Rabin government's position: that Palestinian rights will have to find expression within some kind of broad political framework—possibly a Palestinian-Jordanian state—if Israel's existence is to be assured...
...After a withdrawal to the 1967 frontiers would come a demand for a retreat to the 1947 demarcation...
...Neither the Security Council debate nor the Lebanese civil war have reversed the trend in Israel toward recognizing that Palestinian nationalism is a reality and that Israel will have to learn to live with it...
...This would push Israel way beyond the 1948-67 boundaries...
...The solution Israel is now hesitantly returning to (with American approval) calls for encouraging Jordan's King Hussein to reintroduce himself as representative of the Palestinians—despite the agreement reached unanimously at the Arab summit meeting held in Rabat in October 1974, which recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people on any liberated Palestinian territory...
...Western Europe and the United States seem reluctant to recognize this...
...This would also be the smoothest transition to formalization of the de facto peace along Israel's eastern border...
...but flexibility might oblige it to make concessions more dangerous than the image of inflexibility...
...Arab spokesmen, when questioned, quickly deny that the establishment of a "secular Palestine" would involve the mass expulsion of Jews from the country...
...Indeed, in 1974 the Palestine National Council reiterated that "the PLO will struggle against any plan for the establishment of a Palestinian entity the price of which is the recognition of Israel...
...Eliahu Salpeter is a member of the editorial board of Ha'aretz, one of Israel's leading newspapers...
...Officials here believe, too, that a sovereign Palestinian state would find it almost impossible to agree to demilitarize as much of its territory as would be necessary to guarantee Israel's security...
...A Jordan-West Bank federation or Palestinian autonomy within a Jordanian confederation would provide Israel with more physical and psychological security than any other solution short of continued direct Israeli control of the West Bank...
...As the PLO openly declares, all Jews who came to Israel (including the more than 600,000 who fled from persecution in Arab countries as well as their children) would have no place in its "Palestine...
...In fact, it was Israel that, in 1947, accepted the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, while the Arab countries annexed most of what should have become the new Arab State...
...Jerusalem takes the PLO seriously when it says that Jaffa, Haifa and Lydda are no less Arab than Jericho, Nablus and Hebron...
...For according to the PLO and its Arab patrons, every newly "liberated" community of islanders is entitled to sovereignty and a seat in the General Assembly...
...At most, the PLO speaks for the 20,000 or 30,000 members of its respective organizations...
...But irrespective of their political views, practically all Israelis agree that the PLO does not represent the Palestinians, and that the refusal to negotiate with it does not mean refusal to recognize the national identity of the Palestinian Arabs...
...Article 20 states that "the Balfour Declaration [undertaking the founding of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine] and the [subsequent League of Nations] Mandate document and what has been based upon them are considered null and void...
...It remains to be seen, of course, whether Hussein will agree to this finessing of the PLO, and what his price would be...
...Eventually, the Arabs hope, the Jewish State would disintegrate without Arabs having to risk a major military confrontation...
...And Israel may perhaps be faulted for failing to promote an indigenous Arab leadership on the West Bank that would provide an alternative to the PLO...
...Today, Soviet-supported anti-Semitism and traditional orthodox Moslem views of the Jews as an "inferior race" conveniently meet in the Middle East and at the UN...
...True, a large percentage of the Palestinian Arabs may consider the PLO a symbol of their dislike of Israel and of the Israeli occupation...
...Besides sweeping the Bible and the 2,000 years that followed from human history, the Charter goes on to define who shall be considered a Palestinian and permitted to live in Palestine...
...Listening to such talk, many Jews can't help thinking of the Nazi Holocaust...
...They know, too, that not a single sentence denying Jewish national existence has been deleted, despite all the talk of late about the PLO's moderation...
...At the same time, Western pleas for even small changes as a concrete gesture of PLO intention have been consistently rejected...
...The world today almost automatically refers to the loose grouping of several Arab terrorist outfits as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO...
...Belaboring these points about the PLO is not sophistry, since the way the organization uses the word "Palestinian" is important in analyzing the chances for progress toward a Middle East settlement...
...Israelis are inclined to note as well that West European commentators seem less concerned about the fate of refugees...
...The more candid "moderate" Arab spokesmen even admit that the insistence on Israel's return to the 1967 lines is simply one element of their "salami tactics...
...Israelis know that the Palestinian National Charter of 1968, the PLO's "Constitution," is not an abstract outline of ultimate hopes and desires, but a real platform guiding day-To-day policies...
...As the questions put to Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during his January visit to Washington indicate, Arab extremists are making excellent use of the late Soviet dictator's maxim...
...Article 15 describes it as a "national duty" to "purge the Zionist presence from Palestine...
...The bloodshed in Lebanon, meanwhile, has heightened awareness here of the virulent Moslem Arab nationalism the PLO represents...
...Since the PLO's official "beginning of Zionist aggression" is the Balfour Declaration of 1917, what is being said is that every Jew who was not resident in the region before that time is to be expelled...
...It also asserts that the "claim of historical or spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine does not tally with historical realities...
...the Arab nationalists from Palestine, guided by the Mufti of Jerusalem, sided with Hitler...
...2. The Zionist movement was always blind to the existence of a competing nationality on the soil of Palestine...
...As for the Jews, Article 6 says that those Israelis "who were living permanently in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist aggression will be considered Palestinians...
...Bearing this scenario in mind, Israeli officials are highly skeptical about any solution that envisages a Palestinian state in the land occupied in the 1967 War...
...One cannot imagine France, Brazil, Bulgaria, or any country, whatever its form of government, tolerating a similar threat...
...Nor did they make any attempt to create a Palestinian Arab state in the years between 1948-67, when the West Bank and Gaza were under their control...
...Article 5 specifies that "the Palestinians are the Arab citizens who were living permanently in Palestine until 1947 .. and whoever is born to a Palestinian Arab after this date...
...Liberal democracies, apparently judging others by their own criteria and consequently attributing little motivating force to ideology, are inclined to dismiss the PLO's stands on Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews as mere rhetoric...
...For example, when the PLO's Arab friends speak about "relevant UN resolutions" as a basis for the founding of a Palestinian state, well-meaning Western statesmen may think of Security Council resolutions 242 or 338, calling for Israeli-Arab negotiations, but Israelis suspect that what is meant is the 1947 partition resolution...
...This places Israel on a twofold defensive: It must first explain why it opposes a "liberation" organization and, second, why it refuses to "recognize the Palestinians...
...They are convinced that it would very shortly be subverted by Arab extremists and become a Soviet satellite, endangering both Israel and Jordan...
...In Yasir Arafat's lexicon, "Palestinian" refers mainly to Arab Palestinians —not to their Jewish neighbors...
...This is the same kind of racist anti-Semitism that Hitler employed to picture the Jews as "sub-human," and to send them to the gas chambers...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 5
