A SYSTEM TEST (Part 2). How I developed my research question.

An MOR series: A SYSTEM TEST: Are US bosses managing the next Holocaust?

The University of Pennsylvania (UPENN), where my system test was incubated.

• I was hired at an ethnic-conflict think tank at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Everybody there was interested in the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process, created by US bosses to bring PLO/Fatah into Israel.

• But nobody there ever mentioned Hajj Amin al Husseini, top leader of the German Nazi Final Solution, and creator of PLO/Fatah.

• What gives?

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I you haven’t read Part 1 of this series, here it is:

A SYSTEM TEST: Are US bosses managing the next Holocaust?

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In 1993-94, with heavy US sponsorship and pressure, Israeli bosses signed the Oslo Accords with PLO/Fatah, what we now call the ‘Palestinian Authority,’ the organ that governs Arab Muslims in the disputed territories of Judea & Samaria (‘West Bank’) & Gaza.

The two-step logic of that was:

1. PLO/Fatah—responsible for a long list of terrorist attacks that had murdered many Israeli civilians (and citizens of other countries)—would stop launching terrorist attacks meant to destroy Israel; and

2. Israel would enter ‘peace’ negotiations with PLO/Fatah so it could become the ‘Palestinian Authority’ with partial sovereignty in the disputed territories, thus preparing the ground for a future PLO/Fatah State (a ‘State of Palestine’).

As explained in Part 1 of the present series, in 2003, while doing research on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I came across certain stunning facts concerning the relationship between the Arab Palestinian movement and the German Nazis:

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The responsibility of the Arab Palestinian movement in the German Nazi Final Solution

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Summarized, these facts, still unknown to most people in the West, are the following:

• The founding father of the Arab Palestinian movement, Hajj Amin al Husseini, worked hand-in-glove with the German Nazis, at the highest level, to exterminate the European Jews during World War II.

• After the war, Husseini escaped justice and created the terrorist group Al Fatah with the express mission of continuing Adolf Hitler’s genocide in Israel.

• By 1970 Al Fatah had swallowed the PLO, or Palestine Liberation Organization, keeping its name (hence, I always write ‘PLO/Fatah’).

• This group, PLO/Fatah, was supported by US bosses, who essentially forced the Israelis to accept it inside the Jewish State on the militarily strategic territories of Judea & Samaria (‘West Bank’) and Gaza.

After learning all of that, my burning question was the following:

• Did US bosses work to bring PLO/Fatah into the Jewish State knowingly or unknowingly? In other words, did they understand, when they invented the Oslo Process, that this group had come straight out of the German Nazi Final Solution and was hellbent on finishing Hitler’s job in Israel?

I decided to conduct a system test to answer that question. In this piece, Part 2 of the present series, I will give you the context of how I came to this particular juncture and developed my research question.

Personal background

If identified by my academic degree, then I am a political anthropologist with training in evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology, and sociocultural ethnography. For my Ph.D. thesis at UCLA anthropology, I presented evidence and a new theory to explain the evolutionary origins of those cognitive mechanisms that make us susceptible to racist political appeals.

From the start, this theory was rather successful. It got me a New Investigator Prize from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), a job at the University of Pennsylvania’s famous psychology department, and a fellowship at the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict (also at UPENN)—and all of that before even publishing my theory in Current Anthropology (though that was in the works) or even defending my thesis formally before my UCLA advisors. In fact, the Asch Center gave me a grant to finish my Ph.D. thesis at UPENN, in time to start as a psychology professor in the fall of 2001.

This was all highly unusual. By the year 2000, which is when I got my job offer from UPENN, it had become entirely standard even for the most promising new scientists to spend several years in post-doctoral limbo, as universities were cranking out way too many Ph.D.’s. But here I was with a job offer before even turning in my Ph.D. thesis.

I share this not to toot my own horn—well, maybe a little. But I also have a more important reason, which is to make clear that UPENN considered my work to be the very best on offer in the academic market. And that’s highly relevant context to fully interpret UPENN’s subsequent institutional behaviors.

Okay, so there I was, teaching ‘Biocultural Psychology’ and ‘The Psychology of Ethnicity’ at UPENN psychology, and working also as a fellow at the Asch Center think tank, where a central topic of investigation was the Oslo Peace Process.

(It was a great time. I loved Philly, and I got myself the most perfect two-story flat in the Old City, including a large wooden deck and a panoramic view of the Franklin Bridge and the Delaware River—kid you not. Sigh… Magnificent days. I felt like such a success!)

This was the post-Oslo years.

The Oslo paradox

Now, the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process was, on purely logical grounds, a challenge to any rational mind.

The mainstream geopolitical interpretation that saturated all Big Media news reporting and academic analysis claimed that US bosses were self-evidently the bestest, greatest, most intense and unconditional allies of the State of Israel. One even heard the accusation in both media and academia that the ‘Jewish Lobby’ or ‘Israel Lobby’ supposedly had ‘too much power’ in Washington and used it to steer US policy too far in Israel’s favor.

And yet here were the US bosses creating a diplomatic process to bring professional killers of Israeli civilians—men, women, and children—into the Jewish State. Who needs enemies when your ‘friends’ do that?

Wasn’t this a paradox? How to resolve this (obvious) contradiction?

US bosses resolved it for us: they gave us a narrative. A Palestinian State, they said, would satisfy Arab opinion, and this would bring about a lasting solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, making Israel secure for the long term. There was nothing to fear, because PLO/Fatah was now the good guys: they were abandoning terrorism!

When Israeli bosses appeared to resist this rather doubtful logic, President George Bush Sr. threatened to cancel badly needed aid for Israel and moreover threatened to meet with the Arabs—without Israel—to decide the future of the Middle East. In this manner, Israel was coerced into the Oslo Peace Process.¹

Tough love for a stiff-necked people that doesn’t know what’s good for them, was the mainstream media interpretation: US bosses were protecting Israelis from their own stubborn selves.

Lots of ordinary folk wondered about that mainstream interpretation. And there were some questions. But US bosses, working hand-in-glove with their cronies in Sweden, slapped a Nobel Peace Prize on mass murderer Yasser Arafat. The implicit message: ‘See? He really wants peace now. Otherwise, why did we give him a Nobel Peace Prize? Calm down.’

And US bosses got AIPAC (the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee), the center of the so called ‘Jewish Lobby’ or ‘Israel Lobby,’ to support Oslo, which meant: ‘See? The Jews support Oslo. It’s all kosher. Calm down.’

And that… worked! (By such tricks is our reality managed.)

I make a troubling discovery

I too had became a strong supporter of the so-called Oslo Peace Process. To be frank, it was hard to resist.

You have to understand: young academics absolutely worship older academics and constantly seek their approval. I was no exception. And the older academics around me expressed unanimous support for the Oslo Peace Process. This was true, especially, of the Asch Center directors at UPENN, where I was now a fellow, and where the Oslo Process was a key research topic featured prominently in the presentations of our local academics and invited guest speakers.

Perhaps inevitably, I myself became immersed in Oslo stuff after landing the UPENN psychology job and the Asch Center fellowship. I began studying the entire history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That’s when I learned that Hajj Amin al Husseini, founding father of the Arab Palestinian movement, had played a leading role in the German Nazi extermination of European Jewry, and had then created PLO/Fatah, the very group that Oslo had brought into the Jewish State.

I stood there looking at my documents in shock: just two weeks of research, and all of it in UPENN’s Van Pelt Library, a mere one-minute walk away from my Assistant Professor’s office. I asked myself: Why had I never before heard of Husseini?

I was holding an anthropology Ph.D. from UCLA specializing on the question of racism and ethnic conflict. But never had I come across Husseini. Why not?

Looking further, I found my answer: starting right around the time of my birth (1969), which is also when Al Fatah was swallowing the PLO, a complete silence had been imposed in media and in academia on the question of Husseini.

As a startling example of this, not one expert at my own think tank, the Asch Center, an institution obsessed chiefly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Oslo Process, had ever so much as mentioned Husseini’s name—the once-world-famous founding founder and longtime leader of the Arab Palestinian movement, and mentor to Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas!

His relevance did not rate a single mention? Wasn’t that… very odd?

The mainstream interpretation: PLO/Fatah is like the IRA

In this total vacuum on all things Husseini, Big Media and establishment academia had pushed with impunity the following interpretation: the Oslo Process was like the concurrently running negotiations to produce the Northern Irish Good Friday Agreement²; PLO/Fatah, therefore, should be understood as roughly analogous to the Irish Republican Army (IRA).³

This interpretive framework was dominant at the Asch Center.

Political scientist Ian Lustick, one of the Asch Center directors (and the most important one), had published in 1993, to coincide with the launching of the Oslo Process, a book that strongly endorsed such comparisons: Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza.⁴ His good friend Brendan O’Leary, an expert on the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ and also an Asch Center director, likewise agreed with this framework.⁵ But lumping PLO/Fatah and the IRA into the same category now seemed to me incoherent.

Yes, true, both PLO/Fatah and the IRA engaged in terrorist activity. But the IRA was concerned with political questions, all of them in principle susceptible to negotiation rather than armed conflict:

• Who should have power in Northern Ireland?

• What rights should Catholics in Northern Ireland enjoy?

• What should the relationship of those Catholics to Ireland proper be?

• Should Ireland remain divided?

• By what rules should the British government—if at all—exercise sovereignty in Northern Ireland?

If some concessions on some of these questions could be negotiated, the IRA might lay down its arms, especially in the context of widespread and growing opposition among Irish Catholics to IRA terrorism. No one had any reason to suppose that concessions made to the IRA would be used by this group to prepare the extermination of non-Catholics in Northern Ireland because genocide was simply not the IRA’s announced goal.

By contrast, as historian Howard Sachar candidly wrote in 1982:

“From the outset... the Fatah’s reputation depended largely upon the success of its Moslem traditionalist approach of jihad against Israel.”⁶

You may suspect that perhaps Sachar slipped above when he wrote that PLO/Fatah was a jihadi organization, because for years media and academia have told us that PLO/Fatah is supposedly secular. But Sachar didn’t slip.

You see, in 1982, when Sachar published that book, the media/academic campaign to clean up PLO/Fatah’s image was not quite yet at full throttle. Moreover, just three years before, PLO/Fatah had had the starring role in the creation of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s jihadi Iran.

I kid you not. PLO/Fatah trained and armed Khomeini’s guerrillas. Moreover, after putting Khomeini in power in Teheran, this group, PLO/Fatah, also created the key institutions that jihadi Iran employs to oppress ordinary Iranians and to export jihadi terrorism everywhere. All of that was reported on the front page of the New York Times in the period 1979-1981.

Yes, you read correctly. We document all that here:

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WAR IS PEACE: Did the US force Israel to cede strategic territory to Iran?

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That was all fresh in 1982, when Sachar wrote his book. It was therefore no secret to Sachar—or to anyone paying a bit of attention—that Fatah, creator of jihadi Iran, was in consequence, and most obviously, a jihadist organization.

So what happened? How could the world forget that PLO/Fatah was a jihadist organization? How could the world forget that PLO/Fatah had created Khomeini’s jihadi, terrorist Iran? What happened?

Just one year later, as if a sudden decision had come from On High to all the world’s meaning makers, all mention of the relationship between PLO/Fatah and jihadi Iran was essentially abolished from public discussion. The effect of that was remarkable. Very soon—just a few years—nobody could remember what the NYT had explained on its front page. That’s how public memory works.

We explain this phenomenon here:

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Memento: A parable of reality management

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Such complete and total forgetting was quite functional to a saturation campaign in media and academia, assisted by high-profile political/diplomatic maneuvers, that already, from 1979, had been working to make us believe that PLO/Fatah—an Islamo-fascist group—was supposedly secular and moreover leftist.

Yes, it was the leftists who adopted PLO/Fatah and made this group their mascot.

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How the left cleaned up PLO/Fatah

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The effect of that was tremendous: it made the Oslo Process eventually possible.

But in 1982, when Howard Sachar published his book, most of that had not happened yet. And the Iranian Revolution was still fresh. So Sachar wrote that Al Fatah, created by the fanatical jihadist Hajj Amin al Husseini, and creator of jihadi Iran, was a jihadist organization.

And that’s the truth: PLO/Fatah is a jihadist organization.

Jihad always means genocide. Given that, the first hypothesis for any rational person should have been that PLO/Fatah’s participation in the Oslo Process negotiations was just a ruse to obtain from Israel, for its genocidal plan, the militarily strategic territories that Oslo dangled as a reward.

Of course, to propose any such hypothesis a rational person would first need to know that Husseini had led the German Nazi Final Solution, that he had created PLO/Fatah, and that PLO/Fatah had created jihadi Iran, which promised to repeat the Final Solution in Israel.

Or a rational person would need to pay enough attention to PLO/Fatah, for this group was explaining in public that they intended to fake an interest in negotiations to be in a better position to annihilate Israel.

So was the problem ignorance? Had US bosses created the Oslo Process because they no longer remembered Husseini? Did they also not remember, anymore, that PLO/Fatah had created jihadi Iran? Weren’t they paying any attention to what PLO/Fatah was saying in public to its Arab audiences?

Or was there a more sinister explanation, one that would fit comfortably in the ‘conspiracy theory’ category?

This became my research question.

To be precise, my research question concerned only the issue of knowledge about Husseini, because back then, in 2003, I had not myself become aware, yet, of the facts concerning PLO/Fatah’s creation of jihadi Iran (that would come later). So my 2003 test was focused exclusively on what US bosses knew about Husseini.

Hypothesis testing

To explain the fact that US bosses had organized the Oslo Process, I had two options to consider.

• Option A → Incompetence. The bosses—and their ‘experts’—were collectively so incompetent that not one of them had thought to do even the most basic research in a university library—like puny little me had done—on the history of the Arab Palestinian movement, and so Husseini had disappeared from historical consciousness. Afflicted by their encyclopedic ignorance, when the US bosses had brought PLO/Fatah into the Jewish State, created to protect Jews from genocide, they had done so in good faith. It was a royal screw-up.

So that was Option A.

If, however, US bosses had known about Husseini all along, as minimally competent bosses would, then a different hypothesis would explain their quite rabid insistence, for several decades, in favor of the Oslo Process:

• Option B → Machiavellianism. US bosses had deliberately inserted PLO/Fatah, Husseini’s creature, into the Jewish State precisely because PLO/Fatah was built to finish Adolf Hitler’s job; US bosses had been consciously collaborating with Husseini’s genocidal plan.

I fleshed out the two possibilities.

In Option A, US bosses—the most powerful in human history—were somehow, despite their unprecedented power and resources, utterly ignorant concerning matters of grave moral and geopolitical importance, and naively eager to mobilize vast material and diplomatic resources without proper consideration, achieving in consequence dramatic results at direct cross-purposes to their own intentions.

I would have to suppose that the media and academic systems, which had uttered not a peep about Husseini for several decades, were also run by thoroughly incompetent people, and were unable to document basic and relevant historical facts for the public despite their own vast resources.

But at least in Option A a benign view of the values, intentions, and broad goals of US bosses, and of media and academic professionals, could be preserved.

To adopt Option B, by contrast, would be to jump to an entirely different model, in which the values, intentions, and broad goals of US bosses were frankly… evil.

Here, an appealing hypothesis for the silence of media and academia on Husseini would be massive clandestine corruption—by the same US bosses—of the entire meaning-making system in our ‘democratic’ West.

Question: How to find out which model, whether Option A or Option B, whether well-intentioned incompetence or evil Machiavellianism was more valid?

I explain the logic of my research approach, and of my test, up next in Part 3.

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1. On 6 December 2001, US Ambassador to Israel Daniel C. Kurtzer gave a talk at the BESA Center, Bar Ilan University, entitled ‘The American Role in the Oslo Process.’ The US ambassador began, remarkably, by denying that the US had played a role in the Oslo process:

“In dissecting the American role in Oslo, I think the title of my talk should be ‘The American Perspective on Oslo,’ since the Oslo process took place largely outside the direct purview of the United States.”(a)

In fact, the Oslo process could not have happened without the October 1991 Madrid talks, and the US all but forced the Israelis to go to Madrid, as I review below.

On April 19, 1991, The Independent wrote this:

“FATIH JABAR [an Arab whom they interviewed] had some advice for James Baker, the US Secretary of State, who flew to Israel last night to continue his peace-making efforts. ‘Stop financial aid to Israel for six months, and order the Israelis to pull out from the occupied territories,’ he urged, sipping coffee in the cool lounge of his home in this quiet village south-west of Nablus. ‘They'll have no choice but to comply.’

...While [Israeli Prime Minister] Mr [Yitzhak] Shamir continues to indicate support for a regional conference, there is no hint of a new willingness on his part to make meaningful concessions at the negotiating table. If Mr Baker is to shift the Israeli prime minister, it seems he might have to take Mr Jabar’s advice and hit Mr Shamir in the pocket, conceivably by withholding the $10bn (pounds 5.6bn) in housing loan guarantees Israel needs to build homes for Soviet immigrants. For if there is one issue that concerns the prime minister as much as his commitment to the retention of the territories, it is the absorption of Soviet Jews. Only if this process is threatened, might he consider what is, for him, almost the unthinkable - an eventual pullout from parts of the occupied territories.”(b)

And take Jabar’s advice they did! The Independent was prophetic. This is what the Times of London wrote only a few days later:

“...American officials, including William Brown, the ambassador to Israel, and Senator Robert Dole, have warned Israel that it will not receive a sympathetic hearing in Washington if it does not co-operate with the administration's peace plans for the region following the Gulf war.”(c)

Specifically, the US threat against Israel became the following:

“The message to the Shamir government is clear enough: Unless the Israelis agree to a freeze on settlement activity in the occupied territories before and during the [‘peace’] conference, there will be no U.S. loan guarantees to help finance the resettlement of Russian immigrants. Implicit in the warning are two further threats: If Israel remains obdurate, hold the conference without it and let the political chips fall where they may; and further down the line, diminish or cut off the annual U.S. grants and loans to the Jewish state. Whether one thinks the Bush-Baker preconditions are justified or not, and given a visible decline in pro-Israel sentiment in Congress and the country, it is obvious...that the president can make the loan guarantee warning stick.”(d)

In other words, the American message to the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir was: go to Madrid and negotiate, or else no money for resettlement of Russian immigrants, and no further grants or loans to the Jewish state: we will choke you off. Moreover, if you don't go, said the US to Shamir, we will hold the conference anyway, and “let the political chips fall where they may.” The US had threatened to decide the future of Israel without Israel—the way Hitler and Britain had decided the future of Czechoslovakia without representatives of that country—“if Israel remain[ed] obdurate.”

There can be no question on this point: the US was passionately interested in making the Madrid talks happen, and flexed all of its diplomatic muscle.

Some American observers simply could not understand why this was going on. Here is Charles Krauthammer scratching his head on the pages of the Washington Post:

“It is a rule in the Middle East: Israel wins every war, and the great powers step in to save the Arabs from the consequences of defeat. Regardless of whose side you think justice is on, one thing is indisputable: The result of such rescues is more war. The losers are given the chance to continue the fight.

In 1956, for example, Israel won the Sinai from Egypt. Eisenhower forced Israel to give it back. Ten years later Egypt broke the agreement under which Sinai had been returned, blockaded Israel and started the Six-Day War. In the 1982 Lebanon war, Yasser Arafat and the PLO were cornered in Beirut. The U.S. and other Western countries intervened to save them. Saved, they later returned to Lebanon to fight another day.

The Palestinians have just lost another war, and the United States is preparing another rescue. The Palestinian intifada, the uprising against Israel, is dead. The Palestinians, exhausted and defeated, are demoralized, having nothing to show for three years of strikes and stone throwing. Worse, in a replay of the Arab uprising of 1936-1939, the intifada has turned most monstrously on itself. Far more Palestinians are dying at the hands of brother Palestinians than at the hands of Israelis.

‘Everyone remains terrified when he hears a knock on his door at night,’ writes the Palestinian newspaper Al Fajr. ‘This fear multiplies when he discovers that the knocker is not a[n Israeli] soldier but rather a masked [Palestinian] man, swathed completely in black from head to toe, armed with an ax or a sword, who requests that his host, or his son or daughter, come out ‘for only five or ten minutes!’ The next day, we hear on Israeli radio or television that a bound and disfigured body with signs of torture and stab wounds has been discovered.’

This is how the uprising ends. Moreover, the Palestinians have not just lost the intifada. They managed to lose a second war this year, the gulf war, their proxy war against Israel and the West. They staked their political and diplomatic capital on Saddam and lost again.

In the normal course of events, a people having undone themselves yet again with their extremism, having so exhausted the patience of their friends and sponsors, having maneuvered themselves into political marginality, would have to make their own peace overtures to their enemies or fade away.

Instead, James Baker and the U.S. administration come riding in to rescue the cause at its weakest, to keep the grievance alive and to advance its demands in an international forum. Shouting ‘land for peace,’ they single-handedly revive a cause for which, as the Palestinians will tell you, no Arab state—not Saudi Arabia, not Jordan, certainly not Syria—really cares. And they demand that Israel, the only organic American ally in the region (meaning a country that no coup could ever shake from its friendship with the United States), gamble its existence at a conference at which that slogan is to be the centerpiece.

Why? In part, as a reward—‘linkage’—for the Arabs who allowed us to go to war to save them from Saddam. This reasoning is even crazier than it sounds because the Saudis and gulf Arabs, after the Palestinians lined up with Saddam, have lost all enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause.”(e)

I doubt Krauthammer can be right that the Arab states were utterly reluctant to push for a PLO state, given that the idea of a PLO state was theirs long before the PLO itself signed on. However, it is significant that Krauthammer got the distinct impression that the Arab states didn’t want a PLO state more badly than the US did!

The upshot of US Secretary of State James Baker’s strong-arming of the Israelis—with economic threats—was to force them to accept a ‘peace’ process in Madrid.

“The Madrid Invitation, inviting Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians to an opening conference jointly sponsored by the US and the Soviet Union on October 30, 1991, represented the result of US Secretary of State James Baker’s shuttle diplomacy in the eight months following the Gulf War. The Madrid peace conference was a watershed event. For the first time, Israel entered into direct, face-to-face negotiations with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians. In order to make this possible, since Israel would not negotiate with the terrorist PLO, the Palestinians were represented by individuals from the West Bank and Gaza who were not associated with the PLO. This was a sham, as everyone knew, and PLO figures were in the hotels guiding the Palestinian delegation throughout the proceedings.

...Madrid was also the catalyst for the 1993 series of non-public talks in Norway between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs that launched what became known as the Oslo peace process. Once the Oslo process began, the Madrid structure of talks faded away.”(f)

In other words, the Madrid talks, to which the US practically forced Israel to go, were the engine that set in motion the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process, the purpose of which was to bring PLO/Fatah—a defeated organization—out of exile in Tunis and into Judea & Samaria (the ‘West Bank’) and Gaza, where it would become the government over the Arabs, in preparation for getting a PLO/Fata State courtesy of the United States. From this position, PLO/Fatah was able once again—and better than ever, in fact—to kill innocent Israeli civilians.

SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE:

(a) American Embassy Tel Aviv - Press Section; U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel C. Kurtzer; "The American Role in the Oslo Process"; BESA Center, Bar Ilan University; December 6, 2001
https://web.archive.org/web/20020606043631/http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/mission/amb/120601.html

(b) The Independent (London), April 19, 1991, Friday, FOREIGN NEWS PAGE; Page 12 , 667 words, Baker visit angers Israeli settlers, From DAVID HOROVITZ in Kifl Harith, West Bank.

(c) The Times, May 14, 1991, Tuesday, Overseas news, 302 words, Shamir faces US cash squeeze, From Richard Beeston in Jerusalem

(d) A PRECARIOUS PEACE CONFERENCE THOUGH THE HARD WORK IS FINISHED, MIDEAST TALKS; COULD FALL APART AT ANY MOMENT, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), October 3, 1991, THURSDAY, FIVE STAR Edition, EDITORIAL; Pg. 3C, 915 words, Victor T. Le Vine.

(e) The Washington Post, August 2, 1991, Friday, Final Edition, EDITORIAL; PAGE A25, 923 words, Road to Nowhere, Charles Krauthammer

(f) ‘ISRAEL 1991 TO PRESENT; MADRID 1991’; Palestine Facts.
https://web.archive.org/web/20021018093526/http://palestinefacts.org/pf_1991to_now_madrid_desc.php

2. Wikipedia explains that “Serious political efforts to end the conflict began in the late 1980s and continued through the 1990s.” That’s precisely when seriously political efforts to get the Oslo Process going also began, in the late 1980s, with a 1989 RAND study that Graham Fuller, a CIA analyst, prepared for the Pentagon. You may read Fuller’s ‘study’ here:

Fuller, G. E. (1989). The West Bank of Israel: Point of No Return? RAND Corporation.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA215658.pdf

3. Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article so that you can see how breezily PLO/Fatah and the IRA are lumped into the same category of “national self-determination” or “liberation movements.” Indeed, the New York Times claims that PLO/Fatah—founded by a jihadi genocidal terrorist, and itself the creator of the Iranian jihadi terror regime—is supposedly different from jihadi terror groups.

“In its broadest definition during most of the 36 years of the I.R.A.’s war, armed struggle was depicted as a means to national self-determination—sanctified during the second half of the 20th century by anti-colonial struggles. Liberation movements, from the African National Congress in South Africa to the Palestine Liberation Organization, claimed international legitimacy as the custodians of national aspirations.

And it followed from their focus on a national destiny that their threat was contained within one region: the I.R.A. never claimed to be the voice of international Catholicism in a campaign to restore the medieval papacy and the Inquisition. Their armed wings and their political wings, moreover, worked in tandem, offering an identifiable interlocutor in harness with the threat of violence. This was true, too, of the African National Congress and the P.L.O.

In Northern Ireland and the British mainland, the I.R.A. set off the bombs, the last in 1995, while its political wing, Sinn Fein, went on to negotiate the Good Friday peace accord in 1998 and to contest elections. No such path to bargaining seems available from the bloodstained debris of a subway train in London whose bomber has died with his own explosives.

Leaders once dubbed terrorists—from Nelson Mandela to Yasir Arafat—became national and internationally accepted figures. To the dismay of many, Gerry Adams, whose denials of membership in the I.R.A. have often been met with skepticism, has nevertheless been accepted on the international stage as a statesman.”

SOURCE: ‘Two Faces of Terrorism: Is One More Evil Than the Other?’; New York Times; 31 July 2005; by Alan Cowell.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/weekinreview/two-faces-of-terrorism-is-one-more-evil-than-the-other.html?searchResultPosition=6

4. Lustick, I. S. (2018). Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza. United States: Cornell University Press.

5. O’Leary has represented the PLO as “nationalist”—rather than jihadist—and claims that “the PLO’s decision to embrace the Oslo process made it easier for the IRA to explore peace.”

SOURCE: McGarry, J., O'Leary, B. (2004). The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements. Reino Unido: OUP Oxford. (pp.142, 150)

6. Sachar, H. 1982 [1976]. A history of Israel: From the rise of Zionism to our time. New York: Knopf. (pp.619, 698)