Carter and the Jews XII. Decoding the PLO

...This is why the whole question of Begin's settlements-universally viewed as the roughest and rawest issue of all-is beside the point, especially for those most opposed to them, and especially if the point is homelessness There was not a single Jewish settlement on the West Bank for 19 years The idea of a Palestinian state, a strategy that has today become a political force, sprang up the moment the land fell into Jewish hands-again as a result of failed jihad And before Israel held the West Bank, it was Israel within its existing borders that was contemplated for destruction...

...Were Palestinians not a "homeless people" then...

...The PLO is not a national liberation movement It is a Jew-killing movement, though it kills non-Jews who get in its way It kills only civilians In the International Year of the Child it killed numbers of children It killed three diplomats in Khartoum m 1973, one of them an American, after they had been tied in chairs, Iran-style, for several days On the West Bank it kills Palestinian elected officials who are not strident supporters It has never held an election itself, but it claims to be the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people " It is an enemy of the Camp David peace, it is an enemy of any peace that will grant Israel life...

...Much of the PLO he has long been decoded and exposed for anyone who cares to notice Among the relatively few who do, it is generally thought that the PLO's most ingenious propaganda coup-revealing a remarkable insight into how to manipulate American political feeling-has been the invention of the phrase "secular democratic,' as in "secular democratic Palestinian state ' Arafat's membership in the Moslem Brotherhood during his Cairo sojourn calls all that into question The Moslem Brotherhood was (and is, although currently outlawed by Sadat) a group of Islamic fundamentalists in no way politically distinguishable from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his zealots- passionately antisecular, passionately antidemocratic, passionately dedicated to the removal of every non-Islamic stain from end to end of the Moslem world The name "Abu Jihad"-the "guerrilla code name" of a top terrorist, the hero of the PLO's fiasco in offering to arbitrate for the release of the American hostages in Iran-also produces a certain skepticism about the PLO's civic professions jihad does not mean secular democratic, it means holy war Jihad is the declared purpose of the PLO Covenant...

...He has not repudiated that view He remains the President's teacher...

...From 1948-67, that whole generation when the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab, not Jewish, hands, there was no move to set up the Arab Palestine that earlier Arab wisdom had done away with Did scattered refugees not need a homeland then...

...The ideological elements that make up the PLO have been active since at least 1922, when Churchill divided Palestine Their objective has from the outset been classically and authentically Islamic to prevent any non-Moslem minority from attaining self-rule-neither the Christians in Lebanon, nor the Jews in Palestine Lebanon is a success-burned out, with Christian power broken Israel remains for the breaking The means is any means basically killing "Zionists," but also intelligently maneuvering all over the world to accomplish the dismantling of Jewish autonomy...

...All these are cleverly adapted Jewish words, "covenant" the most deeply Jewish of all When my grandmother took me to see the Palestine Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, "Palestinian" signified Jew, no Arab ever dreamed of wearing that Jewish hat, and a Palestinian passport was something a Jew carried In those days Arabs, no matter where they came from, didn't mind calling themselves Arabs The PLO is adept at Orwellian verbal reversals, four years short of 1984, it has already achieved some beauties The surviving victims of the century's most barbarous racist atrocities, for instance, are now "fascist racists ". To the most careful witnesses of the evolution of PLO Palestinianism, however, the "secular democratic" innovation, though a stroke of great skill, is less stunning than its twin-the idea of having a Palestinian state at all a good idea that was somehow overlooked for nearly two negligent decades The PLO Covenant itself has trouble with this contrivance, and has to doubletalk m order to reconcile the glorious ideal of a single widespread indivisible indissoluble universalizing Islamic hegemony-the Arab nation"-with a newly-hatched, particularized, politicized, purposeful "Palestine ". Such a state is not, it will be recalled, a latter-day invention, like "secular democratic " An Arab Palestine was first set up by the United Nations in 1947, under partition terms that divided the land unequally between Arabs and Jews, with the * abs getting by far the lion's share (The lion's share of what...

...A historic review of the Middle East may be tiresome in an article on American politics, but it is indispensable Last November a New York Times /CBS poll discovered that 42 per cent of "Americans who have heard of the Palestine Liberation Organization believe the U S should negotiate with the group despite the objections of Israelis 1 his suggests that 42 per cent believe the PLO has a rational territorial case to purvey-l e, that its purpose is the same as its public relations...

...The PLO's "moderates" are not always disingenuous when they explain their need for a state Zuhair Mohsen, a member of its executive committee and head of its military department, said candidly not long ago "Our sole aim in establishing the West Bank Palestinian state is to support our demand for the rest of Palestine " A patient stepping-stone state today the West Bank, tomorrow Tel Aviv And for expressing such patience, Zuhein Mohsen was murdered in his luxury apartment on the French Riviera by PLO factions who are less patient, and want Tel Aviv today...

...Similarly, Hitler's Big Lie-the notion that if you say something vile often enough it will finally take root-worked only in a circumscribed segment of the planet, PLO claims, by contrast, are triumphant all over the globe, both in intensely crude and in intensely sophisticated forms Edward Said, for instance, a Christian Arab with Marxist admirations who is a professor of English literature at Columbia University and a member of the Palestine National Council (which, according to Said, "fulfills the function of a parliament or legislature" of a projected PLO state), combines a specialty in Conrad with a specialty in dishing out (m excellent prose) straightforward, seemingly modulated, propaganda for Arafat Said's PLO perorations were recently dealt with in an unsigned New York Times profile as respectfully as his positions on literary criticism, as if there were no real differences in finesse or substance between the views of Arafat in Beirut and the discriminations of Harold Bloom at Yale...

...Rather, it is the ongoing terrorism that disheartens, and the scolding Israel gets whenever an attempt is made to disable the PLO military bases that launch it Lebanon's President Elias Sarkis last December announced the same objective to force the PLO out of southern Lebanon It is notable that he received no international reprimand, the PLO alone chastised him, and promised to keep its munitions m place World opinion appears to allow the PLO repeated acts of war-though exclusively against civilians-while forbidding Israel to defend itself...

...Yet the PLO merely uses the scattered It does not primarily intend to bring back Palestinians, it primarily intends to drive out Jews...

...The use of "covenant," incidentally, is an example of how (excluding the pivotal term jihad) most emotive PLO syllables are Zionist parrotings "people-hood," "diaspora," "homeland,' "exile," "return...

...Of the area that was left over from historic Palestine after Winston Churchill, in 1922, gave a big piece of it to the Hashemites, calling it Trans-Jordan 1 e , other-side-of-the-river Palestine, now known as Jordan) Israel turned out to be the single Middle Eastern government to endorse and recognize the UN-founded Palestinian Arab State, which Arab invasion and jihad quickly killed...

...Decoding the PLO Most American Jews seem not to be attracted to Peace Now attitudes Not because they have been "trained" to avoid criticizing any stand by Israel, nor because they are now resisting training by critical voices bearing Israeli credentials, nor even because they remember that 40 years ago the Jews of Europe also found it difficult to believe the assailant meant what he said and would leave them no loopholes ("Holocaust mentality" is upbraided by Peace Now advocates as well...

...Said is the PLO's most successful academic advocate, but all over American campuses Arab students on Arab government stipends mingle graduate courses with diligent political activism and constitute a well-trained paid lobby in the centers of intellectual opinion On a trip to universities in Denmark not long ago, I saw how Arafat's ascendancy in European intellectual circles is virtually complete, even in one of the most pro-Israel of nations "Arafat," said a New York writer after the Iranian seizure of the U S Embassy, "is Khomeini in Fidel's clothing", the remark was meant to be satirical, but it fails to reckon with the fact that Khomeini, Castro and Arafat are equal folk heroes in most parts of the world...

...The latest diplomatic means is a return to partition notions, bitterly fought against 32 years ago, but currently put to extraordinarily good service Though one need not be an intellectual to be duped, are there many readers of, say, the New York Review of Books who do not believe that the PLO's primary intention is to provide a homeland for a scattered people...

...The luxury apartment on the Riviera raises a small but curious point Although the PLO is now one of the world's richest organizations-it flies Professor Said to and from PLO headquarters in Beirut, maintains UN observer Zehdi Habib Terzi in a fancy town house m New York, and supports well-stocked military bases and training systems in Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Iran, and elsewhere-it continues to receive UN refugee rations, and it continues to disseminate posters of pathetic and hungry-eyed refugee children At the same time the PLO will not recognize UN Resolution 242 because Arafat now repudiates any "refugee" status While Cambodia starves, one of the world's richest organizations remains on the international dole-its leaders in luxury apartments ). Said Hanid Hassan, the PLO's man in Teheran, last New Year's Day "In five years we shall proclaim a Palestinian government, and in 15 years we hope to destroy Israel " The next month another moderate, another man of patience, Yasir Arafat himself, said in the Venezuelan periodical El Mundo "Peace for us means the destruction of Israel " And in May Arafat's Al-Fatah, at a meeting in Damascus, chose definitive language for its purpose the "complete liberation of Palestine, the liquidation of the Zionist entity, politically, militarily, culturally, and ideologically " This is an arm that, especially m its penultimate expression, stretches as far as New York, or wherever Jews who care about the Jewish State live...

...For the signers of the 1975 Brookings report, Brzezinski among them, the ultimate status of the PLO in any Middle East settlement was left unresolved The Foreign Policy article had little such uncertainty, it did not hesitate to designate who should represent the Palestinians There was now, Brzezinski wrote, "no more room for agreements without an attempt to tackle the central problem of the Middle East conflict, the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians"-and that, he concluded, "almost certainly means, in practice, the PLO...