DAVID INTO GOLIATH: How the left (and the US bosses) cleaned up PLO/Fatah
Israel was once admired—and the darling of the international left. The dominant interpretation was: Israel is David; it’s enemies, Goliath.
When repeated conventional attacks by Arabs/Muslims did not destroy Israel, her enemies decided to invert the picture.
A new strategy was deployed, with the help of Western institutions, that was meaning-based and grounded in the moral grammar of the left.
This new strategy turned Israel into ‘Goliath,’ and the Arab Palestinians into ‘David.’
It was a lie.
The original story: Israel is David; her enemies, Goliath
The Arab Narrative on the Arab-Israeli conflict—where the Arab Palestinians are the worthy ‘resistance’ and Israelis are the big bad ‘oppressor’—was not always the dominant David vs. Goliath story in media and academia. This may be shocking to anyone born after the late 1960s, but there was a time when our cultural understanding was precisely the reverse:
Before the late 1970s, most Westerners—and even the media—represented the Israelis as brave David fighting an oppressive and genocidal Arab/Muslim Goliath.
What was this earlier picture based on?
First, there was the Shoah or Holocaust. The Jews were a tiny minority in Europe that almost all of Europe collaborated to murder. They were clearly David, not Goliath. That genocide was concluded in 1945.
Just two years later, in 1947, Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the Arab League, announced in public that there would be a new anti-Jewish genocide. He threatened
“a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar [Mongolian] massacre or the Crusader wars.”1
Why? Because, he said, the Muslims of the world would not tolerate the creation of a Jewish State in British Mandate Palestine where the Jews might protect themselves from repeated persecutions and mass murder. If the Zionist Jews accepted from the United Nations the offer of such a State, Muslims would come from everywhere to redeem themselves and gain Heaven by murdering all of the Jews, including the Holocaust survivors who’d taken refuge in British Palestine.
When the United Nations offered to create two States—one Arab, one Jewish—in British Palestine, Hajj Amin al Husseini, Founding Father of the Arab Palestinian movement, and until recently a top leader of the German-Nazi genocidal Final Solution in Europe, rejected the very notion of an Arab State in British Palestine if it meant the Jews would get something. The promised “war of extermination” was launched.
This was the War of 1948: Israel’s War of Independence, and Israel’s War of National Survival. In addition to various irregular jihadi armies that recruited fighters from all over the world, the Israeli Jews were attacked by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.
“The invading forces were fully equipped with the standard weapons of a regular army of the time—artillery, tanks, armored cars and personnel carriers, in addition to machine guns, mortars and the usual small arms in great quantities, and full supplies of ammunition, oil, and gasoline. Further, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria had air forces. (…) In contrast, the Jews had no matching artillery, no tanks, and no warplanes in the first days of the war.”2
The Israelis were clearly David. But, like David, they won.
The Muslims were so upset they had failed to exterminate the Israeli Jews that they called this outcome the nakba: the Catastrophe. This is the same name that the Jews use for the Holocaust: Shoah means Catastrophe. For the Jews, getting exterminated is a Catastrophe. For the Muslims, failing to exterminate the Jews is the Catastrophe. Two very different cultures…
But in the West there was no appetite for any kind of Arab Narrative. Westerners sided with the Jews. Leon Uris’s novel Exodus (1958)—“the best-selling novel in America since Gone With the Wind,” followed by its own smash-hit film adaptation featuring Paul Newman—taught the 1960s West to love the Holocaust survivors who, against all odds, had made themselves a free home in their ancestral land of Bible yore. Israel was much admired back then.
The Arab enemies of Israel were relentless, however, and they promised a new “war of extermination”:
“…Syria used the Golan Heights, which tower 3,000 feet above the Galilee, to shell Israeli farms and villages. Syria’s attacks grew more frequent in 1965 and 1966, while Nasser’s rhetoric became increasingly bellicose: ‘We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand,’ he said on March 8, 1965. ‘We shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.’ ”3
The Muslims mobilized in 1967 but Israel attacked first and won in six days: the Six Day War. Israel won against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon. And Israel made impressive territorial gains against its combined Muslim enemies.
The Muslim bosses, faced with this stunning defeat, had to question whether frontal assaults would easily conclude the hoped-for “war of extermination.” An idea was born: attack Israel’s symbolic flank instead.
The new strategy: soften Israel for the kill—by wounding her prestige
But how to do this?
The recipe was like this. First, clamor a bit less for genocide, and forsake—for a bit—conventional military attacks. Push instead for ‘justice for the Arab Palestinians.’ Voilà: the new ‘David.’ And blame Israel—and only Israel—for the Arab Palestinian plight. Voilà: the new ‘Goliath.’
It would seem, with this new approach, that the Arab/Muslim world was just advocating for a stateless people—nothing to do with genocide against the Jews. By pushing this new narrative, the sympathies of Westerners might be reversed.
Next, impose PLO/Fatah, a murderer of Arab Palestinians, as the sole representative of those Arab Palestinians, and promise the Jews ‘peace’ in exchange for land.
With enough media apologies for PLO/Fatah, and enough pressure from the vaunted ‘international community,’ this might bring PLO/Fatah—the ‘Trojan Horse,’ in words of senior PLO official Faisal Husseini4—into the disputed territories of Judea & Samaria (‘West Bank’), and Gaza. Then, with the hapless Palestinians for cannon fodder, they could at the appropriate time launch a new massive Muslim attack and destroy Israel.
The US military had reason to think this new strategy could work. Immediately after the Six Day War of 1967, a secret Pentagon study had concluded that, if the disputed territories of Judea & Samaria and Gaza ever fell to the enemy, Israel would be in a fatally vulnerable strategic position.5
PLO/Fatah’s ‘Plan of Phases’
PLO/Fatah was so eager to destroy Israel, and so short on patience for a long wait, however, that they were tough to convince. As late as 1969 they were still publicly opposing the new idea.6
Yet, when the Muslim states lost again in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the PLO/Fatah terrorists saw the light and adopted the new strategy in their 1974 ‘Plan of Phases,’
“according to which the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO/Fatah] would acquire whatever territory it could by negotiations, then use that land as a base for pursuing its ultimate goal of Israel’s annihilation.”7
Most Western citizens never heard about this, because the media—as I can show—didn’t report it.8
And that’s how your reality is managed.
This total silence on PLO/Fatah’s ‘Plan of Phases’ is one reason it has worked. But not the only one. Another is that US bosses assiduously protected PLO/Fatah’s “pretense of moderation”—as secret State Department documents called it—even though PLO/Fatah terrorists had just murdered US diplomats.9
The ‘Plan of Phases’ required that Western political grammar be expertly wielded as a weapon of psychological (or political) warfare. PLO/Fatah couldn’t do that. But Western politicians, journalists, and academics—so long as they could be made to act as a unified machine—could. How?
Consider, first, the moral grammar of Western ‘leftists.’
This grammar is
nationalist: those jointly labeled a ‘people’ or ‘nation’ have a sacred right to their own state; and
post-colonial: Westerners must expiate a guilt-burden for the problems of the ‘Third World’ they once ruled as colonial imperialists.
The idea here was to call ‘a people’—the ‘Arab Palestinian people’—those Arabs who’d ended up in Britain’s arbitrary definition of ‘Palestine,’ and complain that they don’t have their own State, while interpreting Zionism as a European, imperialist and colonialist movement.
Now, contrary to what almost every elite university student in the West now believes, the Zionist Jews never took anything from the Arab Palestinians, as we document here:
But never mind that. If the Western and global institutions, plus the Western politicians, journalists, and academics, were, almost as one, to shed rivers of crocodile tears over the ‘destitute’ and ‘oppressed’ ‘Palestinian natives,’ whose ‘national aspirations’ were allegedly denied by the ‘Zionist colonial empire’; if they portrayed PLO/Fatah as the legitimate ‘government in exile’ of a ‘suffering’ ‘people,’ wanting only a piece of land to call their own; and if they recast PLO/Fatah—these murderers of men, women, and children (many of them Palestinian!)—as born-again ‘doves’ eager to negotiate in ‘good faith,’ then a critical mass of Western ‘leftists’ would take the bait and help agitate for a ‘Palestinian State.’
This was done.
In November of 1974, just five months after the ‘Plan of Phases’ was inked, United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim—a former Nazi officer—invited PLO/Fatah’s Yasser Arafat to speak at the UN General Assembly, and “accorded [him] protocol honors of chief of state.”10 In the same month, UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 was approved, granting PLO/Fatah ‘observer status’ in the United Nations.11 (No such deference has ever been extended by the UN to any other terrorist organization.)
The grammatical implication of that circus—delivered with all the crushing weight of UN authority—was that the terrorist PLO/Fatah was supposedly a ‘government in exile.’ And if ‘Palestine’ has a government in exile, with a United Nations seat, then—by a coercive grammatical implication—‘Palestine’ exists. See?
This is how your reality is managed.
The next year, 1975, again under former Nazi officer Kurt Waldheim’s watchful gaze, UN resolution 3379 declared Zionism—the ambition to protect the Jews from Nazi-style genocides in a national State in their ancestral homeland—as equal to racism.12
The grammatical implication? Israel was no longer the refuge for the persecuted, the plucky underdog, the democratic hero that humbles genocidal Arab bullies; now it was the ‘oppressive Zionist empire’ stifling ‘dispossessed natives’ under its ‘colonial’ boot. She was compared to apartheid South Africa!
Since expressing support for Israel was (still) politically correct in the United States, US officials were careful to express public displeasure at these UN developments.
But grammatically obligatory public symbolism is geopolitically meaningless. Here’s what’s meaningful: former Nazi officer Kurt Waldheim, author of these stunning Orwellian inversions, owed his top UN job to (rather insistent) US lobbying.13 Naturally, Waldheim could scarcely risk anything grammatically so bold—and entirely without precedent!—as to induct a terrorist organization into the UN if his US patrons did not approve. The obvious conclusion is that this was all a US operation.
And that makes sense, when you consider that the CIA, the place where US foreign policy is cooked and baked, had been created by absorbing (at least) tens of thousands of German Nazis and Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe who had been Adolf Hitler’s intelligence infrastructure there.
Of course, certain appearances had to be kept. So the US government signed a 1975 treaty with Israel forbidding US contact with PLO/Fatah.
It was broken at once: in secret, writes the NYT, “the Central Intelligence Agency” kept open “a little publicized, so-called ‘back-channel’ line of communications with PLO headquarters in Beirut [Lebanon].”14
What “back channel”? A senior US intelligence official explained to PBS that, during the 1970s, PLO/Fatah were
“ ‘the protectors for the American diplomatic community in Beirut… There was liaison with the PLO, and the Americans were depending on them for their security.’ ”15
This was no “back-channel”; this was a face-to-face, intimate, high-level relationship—an alliance! And, by the way, it was precisely during the 1970s, when US Intelligence and PLO/Fatah obviously had a very cozy relationship in Lebanon, that PLO/Fatah armed and trained—in Lebanon—the Iranian guerrillas that would fight to impose Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini via the Iranian Islamic Revolution.
This US alliance with PLO/Fatah easily explains the harmonious dance of US and PLO/Fatah policy positions, starkly in evidence in Jimmy Carter’s maneuvers.
Jimmy Carter’s maneuvers
US President Jimmy Carter took office in 1977. Wasting no time, he declared his support in the same year for a ‘Palestinian homeland’ in the ‘West Bank’ (as he was careful to call it) and Gaza.16 This was followed, two weeks later, by PLO/Fatah’s endorsement:
“PLO spokesman Mahmoud Labady says PLO views Pres Carter’s concept of Palestinian homeland as important contribution to ‘just and durable’ peace in Middle East… Says PLO would agree to establishment of Palestinian state on West Bank and in Gaza Strip…”17
Right around this time, Arab media reported that Carter administration officials and PLO/Fatah were “involved in secret high-level contacts,”18 and a week later that Carter was instructing PLO/Fatah to claim ‘government in exile’ status so they could be invited to the proposed Geneva Peace Conference.19 Another week, and Carter was pressuring Israeli leaders to accept two Arab pre-conditions for that conference: 1) commit to relinquish the territories gained in the 1967 war; and 2) commit to the formation of a ‘Palestinian State.’20
Carter’s dramatic 1977 efforts on behalf of PLO/Fatah, of course, did not happen in a political vacuum: Bruno Kreisky was giving Carter a huge assist.
Bruno Kreisky and the grand leftist theater in support of PLO/Fatah
Bruno Kreisky laid the formally leftist groundwork for the demonization of Israel and the elevation of PLO/Fatah to leftist sainthood. For his labors, Kreisky “earned the respect and praise of every US presidential administration from Kennedy to Reagan”21
As Austrian chancellor and leader of the international left throughout the 1970s, Bruno Kreisky publicly defended PLO/Fatah and denounced Israel with equal passion. In 1977, right as Carter was making his own moves, Kreisky had the Socialist International, of which he was vice-president, publish a report blaming all problems in the Middle East on Israel.22
This report reinforced the new David and Goliath story, especially among ‘leftists’ (those who—grammatically—speak for the oppressed), and gave cover to both Carter and Waldheim. “Unlike ten years ago,” a Palestinian told Newsweek in June of that year, “we now have the sympathy of the entire world.”23
Yes, it was working…
This was the New Left—cultural Marxism was taking over.
Culture: Edward Said and the post-colonial maneuver
Into this new climate, in 1978, with strong tailwinds now favoring the diplomacy necessary for the ‘Plan of Phases,’ sailed English professor Edward Said. From his perch at Columbia University he founded, with his book Orientalism, what is known as ‘post-colonial studies,’ and thus engineered a profound academic and cultural shift.
Said argued that the portrayal of Arab Palestinians as violent, primitive, and irrational, and the Israeli Jews as democratic, modern, and rational was just a lot of Western ‘orientalist’—that is, colonialist—racism that never gave Arabs and other ‘orientals’ credit for anything.
In The Question of Palestine, published the following year, Said presented the PLO as the legitimate representative of a Palestinian people struggling for identity and self-determination. But Said did more: he presented Yasser Arafat’s PLO/Fatah as the epitome, symbol, and metonym for the broader anti-colonial struggle of Third-World peoples.
The media reacted as if Said had exposed a long-suppressed and urgently needed moral truth, catapulting him to rock-star status, while the almost universally leftist professors in the humanities and social sciences, in lockstep, obediently turned him into required reading. Before you could blink twice, an infatuation with Said had turned him into the moral arbiter on Palestine, the Middle East, and Western colonialism. Leftist polite society loved him.
’Twas radical chic.
To understand radical chic, let us turn to its chronicler: the inimitable Tom Wolfe.
Recall Wolfe’s famous 1970 scene, to which he was witness: Felicia Bernstein, wife of legendary philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, clinking cocktails with the Black Panthers in their Park Avenue Manhattan duplex apartment, full to brimming with hip, star-studded, ‘with it’ polite society—all eager to establish their progressive bona-fides. It was Lenny Bernstein’s party/fundraiser for the Panthers, twenty-one members of whom were accused of planning terrorist acts against various buildings in New York City.
Just as every great ethnographer is also a gifted writer, every great novelist is a natural ethnographer—and psychologist. Wolfe was exceptional, and here, at the top of his game. Like a gifted literary sommelier, he paired voice to description to ridiculous moment, making us complicit in his sardonic perspective—the last sane person in the asylum.
“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It’s the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savor of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle. Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d’oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons. . . The butler will bring them their drinks. . . Deny it if you wish to, but such are the pensées métaphysiques that rush through one’s head on these Radical Chic evenings just now in New York. For example, does that huge Black Panther there in the hallway, the one shaking hands with Felicia Bernstein herself, the one with the black leather coat and the dark glasses and the absolutely unbelievable Afro, Fuzzy-Wuzzy-scale, in fact—is he, a Black Panther, going on to pick up a Roquefort cheese morsel rolled in crushed nuts from off the tray, from a maid in uniform, and just pop it down the gullet without so much as missing a beat of Felicia’s perfect Mary Astor voice. . . (…) Harassment & Hassles, Guns & Pigs, Jail & Bail—they’re real, these Black Panthers. The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny’s duplex like a rogue hormone.”24
Edward Said was this kind of thing: a rogue hormone running through media and academia—radical chic. And he was launched during this period, too.
Said was “a member of the PLO’s Palestine National Council,” who “worked closely with [Yasser] Arafat,” and was “a negotiator on [the PLO’s] behalf.”25 The university geeks in the West, and the rest of leftish polite society, got an electric thrill from the guerrilla professor, the ‘Palestinian revolutionary’ (explanatory note: when terrorists are on the left, or if they are attacking Jews, or both, they are called guerrillas or militants—never terrorists).
Leveraging the adoration, Said established the New Left’s ‘post-colonial’ moral game: bash the West for its past sins and hoist a Third World flag as a symbol of justice. But hoist the Palestinian flag, especially: the new badge, signal, and litmus test of your pro-human, revolutionary virtue. Gen-Zers today who think ‘Free Palestine’ is a cry for ‘liberation’ and ‘revolution’ are still learning their leftish hipness from Edward Said.
(It hardly seems like a coincidence that Columbia University, where Said indoctrinated taught, has become the absolute worst hotbed of violent campus antisemitism.)
As a PLO member communicating with Western polite society at the genteel, university level, Said was careful not to stress that the PLO was a terrorist organization, nor did he ever comment on PLO/Fatah’s roots in the German Nazi Final Solution. In his editorials for the New York Times—this one, for example, from 1983—he celebrated “Mr. Arafat and his al Fatah loyalists” and he extolled the “humane audacity of [Arafat’s] vision.”26
Arafat’s “humane audacity” had included, in the years immediately preceding that editorial, the Coastal Road Massacre: 38 civilians killed, including children, and 76 wounded in a bus hijacking by Al Fatah; the Nahariya Raid, when a PLO terrorist “shot Danny [Haran] at close range in the back, in front of his daughter, and drowned him in the sea to ensure he was dead …, [then] killed the girl by smashing her skull against the rocks with the butt of his rifle”; and the Hebron Sabbath Ambush, when “three Israelis, two American Israelis, and one Canadian, were killed” in a PLO/Fatah attack “and another 20 Jews were injured as they returned home from Sabbath prayer.”
Was Edward Said’s rise entirely organic? I hardly think so. The exaggerated media and academic adoration suggests the artificial hand of the clandestine services, chock full of Nazis. Because Said—let us be perfectly frank—was a two-bit intellectual. The reason to lionize him, apparently, was simply that he was ‘Palestinian’ (in reality he was Egyptian, but no matter: such is the case for many ‘Palestinians’).27
Said was just a marketing product pushed relentlessly via saturation campaign and institutional patronage in order to make PLO/Fatah ‘kosher’ for the Western left. An additional goal was to change the culture: to make PLO/Fatah into the leftist mascot, so that ‘support for the PLO’ (aside from any other issues) would be processed as the secret-handshake or virtue signal of a person’s properly ‘leftist’ alignment with ‘liberation’ against ‘fascism.’
The Western media were hardly embarrassed that Edward Said was a card-carrrying member of a terrorist organization, and their plaudits turned Said into “ ‘arguably the most influential intellectual of our time’ ” (The Guardian).28
The media bosses, like modern engineers doing their will with a river, had reversed the natural flow of prestige: they made Said and his PLO/Fatah terrorist buddies ‘cool.’ Radical chic.
As Said became required reading across the humanities and social sciences, an entire generation of Western university students learned that “Israel was … built on the ruins of… Arab Palestine,”29 and came to see the Arab-Israeli conflict as black and white—or rather, to use Said’s racist terms, ‘colored’ and ‘white.’ On one corner of the ring was Israel, the alleged ‘white’ ‘European’ ‘colonial imperialist’; on the other was PLO/Fatah, fighting to ‘liberate’ the ‘colored’ ‘natives’ from ‘occupation.’
Thus was born a myth so powerful it still frames Western understandings of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And that is how your reality is managed.
Western students hungry to expiate colonial guilt with a redemptive pat on the back from their new media-superstar ‘Palestinian savior’ could not mentally resist. Steamrolled by the artificial prestige campaign, they accepted Said’s simple ‘New Left’ gospel: the ‘Palestinians’ are always right. That gospel protected PLO/Fatah’s growing prestige, come what may.
With the university/media strategy complete, PLO/Fatah became invulnerable
In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established a terrorist regime in Iran, after a violent coup engineered by none other than Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas and their PLO/Fatah henchmen, as we document here:
Did this become a problem for PLO/Fatah? Not at all. The US asked PLO/Fatah to ‘mediate’ with the new regime for the release of the US-embassy personnel that the Iranian jihadis had taken hostage. This further raised the international prestige of PLO/Fatah.30
In Teheran to celebrate with a thankful Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Arafat announced with his host the coming genocidal destruction of Israel, while Mahmoud Abbas laid out for traveling Arab reporters how it would be done. The Jews were suckers for an offer of peace, he explained, so PLO/Fatah would offer that. Many Jews—including many Israelis—would then join the Western bleeding hearts, producing internal divisions in Israel that would impair her ability to defend herself. Then, having gained territory through negotiations, PLO/Fatah would—with the help of Iran—destroy the ‘Zionist entity.’31
The ‘Plan of Phases’
A simple con: terrorists never became doves. But Western citizens never heard Abbas’s Teheran confessions, for neither the media nor Western politicians exposed them.
What the media did report was Austrian chancellor Bruny Kreisky’s tour-de-force propaganda of the same year, when, as vice-president of the Socialist International, he invited both Willy Brandt, German chancellor and president of the Socialist International, and Yasser Arafat, the PLO/Fatah chief, to an Israel-bashing fest in Vienna. The three “issued a joint communiqué blasting Israel.” And for good measure, Kreisky likened PLO/Fatah’s fight against Israel with European resistance to the Nazis.32
Nobody there, apparently, was embarrassed that the bosses of Germany and Austria—just three and a half decades after those countries had organized the Final Solution to murder the European Jews—had loudly embraced Yasser Arafat, protégé of Hajj Amin al Husseini, who’d led the Final Solution for Adolf Hitler. Nor were they embarrassed to compare PLO/Fatah—Husseini’s creation—to the murdered Jews, and the Israeli Jews to the Nazis.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. The Jews are the Nazis.
Orwellian inversion: complete.
And mission accomplished: David was now Goliath.
(And that is how your reality is managed.)
Barnnett, D. & Karsh E. 2011. Azzam’s Genocidal Threat. Middle East Quarterly. Fall. (pp.85-88).
https://www.meforum.org/3082/azzam-genocide-threat
Jewish Virtual Library. (n.d.). Arab armies invade (May 1948).
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/arab-armies-invade-may-1948
Sachar, Howard. (1979). A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time. NY: Alfred A. Knopf. (p. 616).
This was reported in The Baltimore Sun:
“...Faisal Husseini, the top PLO official in Jerusalem...[was] quoted as likening the Oslo accords to a ‘Trojan horse.’ ...the weekly Al-Arabi quotes Husseini as calling the Oslo accords ‘just a temporary procedure, or just a step towards something bigger…the liberation of all historical Palestine from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea, even if this means that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for many generations.’”
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun, July 11, 2001 Wednesday, FINAL EDITION, Pg. 1A, 1574 words, Israelis taking darker view of Palestinian intentions; Many see existence of Jewish state at risk, Mark Matthews
This Pentagon document was apparently declassified in 1979 but not published until 1984 in the Journal of Palestine Studies:
‘Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense’; Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2. (Winter, 1984), pp. 122-126.
It is also published as an appendix in:
Netanyahu, B. 2000. A durable peace: Israel and its place among the nations, 2 edition. New York: Warner Books. (APPENDIX: The Pentagon Plan, June 29, 1967; pp.433-437)
The secret Pentagon study says:
“From a strictly military point of view Israel would require the retention of some captured Arab territory in order to provide militarily defensible borders.”
This study was quite specific, explaining that Israel needed to hold most of the West Bank because,
“This border area [along the Jordanian West Bank] has traditionally been lightly held by military forces and defenses consist[ing] mainly of small, widely separated outposts and patrols and, therefore, afforded an area where launching of saboteurs and terrorists into Israel was relatively easy...”
On the Syrian border,
“Israel must hold the commanding terrain east of the boundary of 4 June 1967 which overlooks the Galilee area.”
This is a reference to the Golan Heights, from which the Syrians had earlier been shelling Israeli farmers in the Galilee. The Pentagon notes:
“During the period January 1965 to February 1967, a total of 28 sabotage and terrorist acts occurred along this border.”
Concerning Jerusalem, the Pentagon study states that
“To defend the Jerusalem area would require that the boundary of Israel be positioned to the east of the city to provide for the organization of an adequate defensive position.”
And about the Gaza strip, the Pentagon study states that,
“The Strip, under Egyptian control, provides a salient into Israel a little less than 30 miles long and from four to eight miles wide. It has served as a training area for the Palestine Liberation Army... Occupation of the Strip by Israel would reduce the hostile border by a factor of five and eliminate a source for raids and training of the Palestine Liberation Army.”
“… recent rejection by Al Fatah representative of all plans to establish Palestinian state on Jordan West Bank and in Gaza Strip noted; Palestinian National Council member Dr S Dabbagh urges commandos to prepare now for strategy they will follow if Arab states accept political settlement.”
SOURCE: The New York Times Company: Abstracts; Information Bank Abstracts; New York Times; March 14, 1969, Friday; Section: Page 8, Column 1; Length: 119 Words; Journal-Code: Nyt
The quote is from:
Levin, K. 2005. The Oslo syndrome: Delusions of a people under siege. Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus. (p.ix)
Levin’s interpretation is the generally accepted one. It is easily shown to be correct.
Article 15 of the 1968 PLO Charter says that the PLO means to “liquidate the Zionist…presence” (“liquidate” is the kind of language that the German Nazis used), and article 9 explains that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine” (my emphasis).(a)
In the 1974 ‘Plan of Phases’ a new policy was allowed. The 1974 document says that “armed struggle” was still “first and foremost” among the methods, but other methods could now be used as well. To what end? Any territory “liberated” by whatever means, explains the Plan of Phases, will be governed by a “Palestinian national authority,” and
“the Palestinian national authority will strive to achieve... the aim of completing the liberation of all Palestinian territory.” (myemphasis)
Given the definition of ‘Palestine’ employed in the PLO’s 1968 Charter, the words “all Palestinian territory” are synonymous with all of Israel. But, naturally, Israelis would not simply give up their entire Jewish State in a negotiation. The implication is therefore obvious: once a strategic position is obtained through negotiation, the “Palestinian national authority”—the name that PLO/Fatah now goes by in Judea and Samaria—will use it as a platform and will deploy “armed struggle” to destroy Israel.
SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE:
(a) Translation: The Associated Press, December 15, 1998, Tuesday, AM cycle, International News, 1070 words, Clinton meets with Netanyahu, Arafat, appeals for progress, By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent, EREZ CROSSING, Gaza Strip. (emphasis added)
Article 9…says that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.”
Article 15 says it is “a national duty to repulse the Zionist imperialist invasion from the great Arab homeland and to purge the Zionist presence from Palestine.”
Article 22 declares that “the liberation of Palestine will liquidate the Zionist and imperialist presence and bring about the stabilization of peace in the Middle East.”
I can show this with a simple search in the Lexis-Nexis Academic database, which archives a huge number of the most important Western newspapers.
In the media, the ‘Plan of Phases’ has also been called the “phased policy,” the “phased program,” and the “phased plan,” and its authorship is attributed to the PLO or, with greater precision, to Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian National Council (PNC), PLO/Fatah’s governing body.
I did a Boolean search in this database looking for articles with the terms “plan of phases,” or “phased policy,” or “phased program,” or “phased plan,” and “PLO” or “PNC” in the period going from 1974, when the ‘Plan of Phases’ was first formulated, until 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed.
Grand total: 9 results.
This is near, total, absolute silence on PLO/Fatah’s ‘Plan of Phases.’
But to leave it at that would be, in fact, to overstate the results. For none of them are older than 1985. And they consist, in any case, of 1) letters to the editor by Israeli officials; 2) editorials by Israeli officials (prominently, Netanyahu); and 3) mention, in passing, of statements by Israeli officials (prominently, Netanyahu). The very few Westerners who even noticed these—almost nonexistent—mentions of PLO/Fatah’s ‘Plan of Phases’ would likely dismiss them as “Israeli propaganda.”
And yet PLO/Fatah leaders, when expressing themselves before Arab audiences, were doing so without ambiguity. Consider:
“To Western audiences, the P.L.O. portrays the Algiers resolution of the Palestine National Council as a renunciation of terrorism and the recognition of Israel's right to exist.
But speaking to the Arab world, in the pages of Al Siyasa, a Kuwaiti newspaper, Abu Iyad, the P.L.O.’s second in command, explained it this way:
‘We swore that we would liberate even pre-'67 Palestine. We shall liberate Palestine stage by stage . . . The borders of our state as we declared it represent only part of our national aspirations. We will work to expand them in order to realize our aspirations for all the land of Palestine. . .’
Two weeks later, on December 21st, he declared in the same publication:
‘If the P.L.O. succeeds in establishing a state in the West Bank and Gaza, it would not prevent the continuation of the struggle until the liberation of all of Palestine is achieved…’
George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who participated in the Palestinian National Council and approved its resolutions, said last Jan. 31:
‘We believe that the international and Arab circumstances do not enable us to reach more than the establishment of a state on part of Palestine . . . We see in this move the beginning of the end to the Zionist Entity.
We see in the Zionist Entity a racist, fascist entity with which we cannot live in peace . . . There is no doubt that the Zionist Entity will be destroyed one day.’
Obviously, the P.L.O. has not abandoned its plan for the destruction of Israel by stages. It also has not renounced terrorism but continues to employ it, both in its attempts to silence any Palestinian who opposes its directives and in its persistent attempts to infiltrate Israel’s border with Lebanon—six times, in fact, since the P.L.O. supposedly renounced terrorism. Moreover, the P.L.O. still adheres to its original covenant of 1964, which considers Israel's existence ‘null and void.’ ”
SOURCE: The P.L.O.’s Forked Tongue; The New York Times, March 15, 1989, Wednesday, Late City Final Edition, Section A; Page 27, Column 1; Editorial Desk, 633 words, By Johanan Bein; Johanan Bein is the acting permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations.
PLO murders US diplomats; US State Department protects...the PLO!; Historical and Investigative Research; 6 January 2007; by Francisco Gil-White
“ABSTRACT: Palestine Liberation Orgn (PLO) leader Yasir Arafat is accorded protocal honors of chief of state Nov 13 by UN General Assembly. Does not sit in chair of chief of state proferred him by Assembly Pres Abdelaziz Bouteflika, but stands with one hand on it as delegates applaud his speech. Honor for Arafat reflects growing influence of third world countries in UN decisions. US Mission spokesman says US UN Amb John A Scali was not pleased by decision to treat Arafat as chief of state. Arafat holds audience like chief of state after his speech to Assembly. Jordanians join line of delegates to congratulate him, although they have been persuaded reluctantly by other Arab countries to forfeit claims to west bank of Jordan River for creation of Palestinian state. Arafat is guest of honor at reception given by Egyptian UN delegate Ahmed Esmat Abdel Meguid. Later, Arafat is seen leaving Waldorf Towers for unknown destination (M).”
SOURCE: The New York Times Company: Abstracts; Information Bank Abstracts; NEW YORK TIMES; November 14, 1974, Thursday; SECTION: Page 25, Column 7; LENGTH: 157 words; BYLINE: BY RAYMOND H ANDERSON.
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3236 | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [Consulted 1 September 2014]
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [Consulted 1 September 2014]
The future CIA director and future US president George Bush Sr. was, in 1971, the US delegate at the UN. Here is what he said:
“George Bush, the American [UN] delegate, issued a statement saying that Mr. Waldheim was ‘ideally equipped’ for the job [of UN Secretary General].”(a)
The US pushed for Waldheim’s reelection. And they were so happy with him that they even backed Waldheim for an unprecedented third term (which Waldheim did not win). The following is from an Associated Press wire written at the time when the UN was deliberating either reelection for Waldheim, or the election of a successor.
“Breaking her silence on U.S. support for Waldheim last week, [U.S. Ambassador] Mrs. [Jeane J.] Kirkpatrick told reporters that she and Soviet Ambassador Oleg A. Troyanovsky had agreed that the Austrian incumbent was ‘the kind of nonpartisan person’ both their governments could ‘get a fair shake from.’ The Americans regard Waldheim as an exponent of Western parliamentary democracy. To the Soviets, he is a known quantity from a small European state that has pledged since the end of World War II to remain neutral in international affairs.” (b)
SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE:
(a) SECURITY COUNCIL NAMES WALDHEIM TO SUCCEED THANT, BY HENRY TANNER; Special to The New York Times; New York Times 1857-Current; Dec 22, 1971; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2001); pg. 1
(b) The Associated Press, November 21, 1981, Saturday, AM cycle, International News, 1144 words, The Race for U.N. Secretary-General, By O.C. DOELLING, Associated Press Writer, UNITED NATIONS
NYT article from 1981 mentions the 1975 agreement and states:
“In fact, however, the Central Intelligence Agency has for several years maintained and occasionally used a little publicized, so-called ‘back-channel’ line of communications with P.L.O. headquarters in Beirut.”
The term “several years” typically refers to more than three. Thus, the CIA had been using this ‘back channel’ at least 4 or 5 years. Since the NYT article that reports this is from 1981, this means that the treaty with Israel was never honored.
SOURCE: The New York Times, May 17, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition, Section 6; Page 77, Column 3; Magazine Desk, 11464 words, "Putting The Hostages' Lives First"
Vincent Cannistraro was “Director of NSC Intelligence from 1984 to 1987, [Vincent] Cannistraro went on to serve as chief of operations for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and to lead the CIA’s investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103...”
SOURCE: PBS-FRONTLINE interview with Vincent Cannistraro.
“[Congress] watches, with a mixture of admiration and doubt, Jimmy Carter’s efforts to reassure the Israelis while trying to get them back to the pre-1967 borders with a new Palestinian ‘homeland’ on their flank.”
SOURCE: The Policy Of Confusion, By James Reston; New York Times (1857-Current file); May 13, 1977; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2001); pg. 20
New York Times; May 17, 1977, Tuesday; Section: Page 5, Column 1; Length: 106 Words; Byline: By Marvine Howe; Journal-Code: Nyt; Abstract
“Beirut newspaper Al Anwar repts Carter Adm and Palestinian guerrilla leaders are involved in secret high-level contacts. Cites June 24 meeting between William W Scranton, reptdly representing Carter, and PLO repr Basil Akl, London. Says exch began in May with note from PLO head Yasir Arafat delivered to Carter by Saudi Prince Fahd. Note reptdly outlined Arafat’s views on PLO role in Arab-Israeli Geneva peace talks and on Palestinian state and peace treaties with Israel (S).”
SOURCE: New York Times; July 20, 1977, Wednesday; Section: Page 8, Column 3; Length: 81 Words; Journal-Code: Nyt; Abstract:
“Reports in the state-controlled Egyptian news media said the Americans were suggesting that the Palestinians form a government in exile as one way of making themselves eligible for [the] Geneva [peace conference]. The argument, the reports said, was that the Palestine Liberation Organization can not now be invited because it does not represent a state.” (my emphasis)
SOURCE: The Associated Press, August 2, 1977, AM cycle, 911 words, By BARRY SCHWEID, Associated Press Writer, ALEXANDRIA, Egypt
“Bernard Gwertzman writes disagreements over Middle East peace strategy might provoke confrontation between US and Israeli leaders. Notes Sec of State Vance agrees with Arab nations that principles for peace settlement should be agreed upon before convening Geneva conf. Describes Israeli desire to start conf without any pre-conditions. Observes US is anxious over Israeli refusal to accept 2 Arab pre-conditions to conf, including relinquishment of most of the territory occupied since '67 war and acknowledgement of right for existence of some kind of Palestinian state. Remarks if Israelis continue to refuse to make commitments before conf, Pres Carter has said he would publicly issue peace plan. Notes Carter's view that Israeli Prime Min Begin will not risk open confrontation with US if plan seems equitable to Israeli population and narrowly-based pol coalition (M).”
SOURCE: The New York Times Company: Abstracts; Information Bank Abstracts; New York Times; August 8, 1977, Monday; Section: Page 1, Column 4; Length: 147 Words; Byline: By Bernard Gwertzman; Journal-Code: Nyt; Abstract:
SOURCE: Berg, M. P. 2000. Foreword to the English Edition. In M. P. Berg, J. Lewis, & O. Rathkolb (Eds.), The Struggle for a Democratic Austria. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books. (p.xiii).
Muravchik, J. 2014. Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel. New York: Encounter Books. (p.93)
Newsweek, June 13, 1977, UNITED STATES EDITION, INTERNATIONAL; Pg. 55, 849 words, The West Bank Today, Milan J. Kubic
Wolfe, Tom. (1970). Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. (pp. 2-3).
Rabbani, M. (2023, September 25). Edward W. Said and Palestine. Jadaliyya.
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45326
Said, E. W. (1983, November 15). Solidly behind Arafat. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/15/opinion/solidly-behind-arafat.html
Said’s father, a protestant who called himself William, emigrated to the US, served in World War I, became a US citizen, then settled in Cairo, where he made a fortune, and married Hilda, another protestant. They begat Edward, named after the British King Edward VIII (an infamous admirer of the German Nazis and Adolf Hitler). Said grew up surrounded by servants. Said grew up in a supremely wealthy, Protestant, English-speaking circle, in Cairo. His mother could converse in Arabic, which was exceptional, confessed Said, since few in his Cairo social register new the language!
“He and his four siblings—Rosemary, Grace, Jean, and Joyce—were reared in the church and in opulence, with a box at the opera, membership in country clubs, piano lessons, and education entirely at British and American primary and secondary schools in Cairo. Said felt ‘proud of my mother for conversing in Arabic, since she alone of the entire social group to which we belonged knew the language well.’ ”
Said presented himself as an ‘exile’ who had left Jerusalem, where he had been born and raised, “until forced from there at age twelve by the Jews.” The truth was that,
“until he moved to the United States to attend prep school in 1951 and never left, Said had resided his entire life in Cairo, not Palestine.”
A few months after Justus Reid Weiner demonstrated this, Said published his autobiography, confirming Weiner’s findings. But he nevertheless attacked Weiner. Said’s supporters,
“styling themselves The Arab-Jewish Peace Group, cosigned a letter to the editor that likened Weiner’s article to ‘deny[ing] the Holocaust’ ”
SOURCE: Muravchik, J. 2014. Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel. New York: Encounter Books. (pp. 101-03)
Quoted in: Muravchik, J. 2014. Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel. New York: Encounter Books. (pp. 99-100)
Said, E. 1980. The Question of Palestine. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (p.13)
“GRAND THEATER: THE US, THE PLO, AND THE AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI: Why did the US government, in 1979, delegate to the PLO the task of negotiating the safety of American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran?”; Historical and Investigative Research; 10 Dec 2005; by Francisco Gil-White
In a 1999 article republished in the most important Palestinian daily, Al-Quds, the journalist Saleh Qallab recalled that:
“Abu Mazen lectured at length on this issue in Tehran to a group of Palestinian and Arab journalists, accompanying Palestinian President Arafat, when he went to congratulate Khomeini for the triumph of the Iranian revolution. It was in February 1979, a week after Khomeini’s return from exile in France.
…All that is required from us is to bring the Israelis to the absolute conviction that we Arabs really want peace, because such conviction will deepen the dispute in Israeli society and bring the Israelis down from their tanks and out of their fortresses.”
Soften and divide the Israelis with talk of peace, then kill them—this is the strategy. What is the remaining obstacle?
“…This mission is not easy, because the Israeli right knows the truth… The Arabs, however, must give this phase a chance. They must convince the majority of Israelis that they… want a just peace based on what can be referred to as a historic settlement, on the basis of UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338.”
SOURCE: “Arab Peace Strategy and the Fragmentation of Israeli Society”; MEMRI; July 21, 1999; No.40.
Muravchik, J. 2014. Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel. New York: Encounter Books. (pp.92-94)
WOW!!!!!!!!!!!! Francisco you really have exceeded our highest expectations of your brilliance as a Researcher: a Writer: and, a Righter i.e. Fixer of The Modern Malaise. I've only done a first read through and haven't yet gone into the other Parts. Will do so today. i.e. Go Where No Man Dares Tread:). I like that you have "Do Your Part" for Share. Ain't that the truth. And that at the bottom of the essay is "Discussion About This Post" in place of 'Comments' i.e. Discuss rather than just Comment. Plus the abundant Footnotes. And to reiterate your brlliance in Research is matched by your grace as a Writer/Communicator. You ARE working to make this a better world and let us hope 'just in time'. Continued good wishes for you in all ways. X Ira
The late professor Eugene Narrett used to call our era, World War III. But every time I read one of your fascinating articles I wonder if WWIII is not just another phase, a continuation by other means, of the eugenicist project that was WWII.