by Yoram Ettinger
yoramtex@netvision.net.il

Jewish Week, Washington, DC, December 2, 1999

In defiance of US Jewish grassroots – but in line with the Department of State – the US Jewish establishment has pressured a reluctant Congress to appropriate additional $400 million to the PLO. Ironically, it has thus become a lobbyist for the PLO, an ally of Saddam, Iran, the Sudan and N. Korea and a threat to the Hashemites in Jordan. The PLO has harbored and publicly praised anti-Israel and anti-US suicidal bombers. It has incited against the US, Jews and Israel, has misused prior US funds ($500MN), has oppressed the Christian Palestinian minority and suppressed Palestinian human rights, and has urged Palestinians “to liberate Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean”. Exposing the PLO’s track record frustrates wishful-thinking, but it is a prerequisite for reality-driven peace process.

According to a September 28 1999 poll conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, 78% : 10% and 76% : 13% of US Jews oppose further aid to the PLO until Arafat outlaws and extradites terrorists and removes all anti-Semitic and anti-Israel references in PLO school textbooks. Jewish grassroots have realized that insistence on compliance with commitments, recycled since 1993, is not an obstacle to peace, but the most basic prerequisite for peace! Rewarding a non-compliant PLO, breeds further terrorism and undermines the cause of genuine peace.

The US Jewish establishment – which has played a key role in the growth of Israel and its ties with the US – has been wrong before. It did not challenge FDR’s refusal to absorb Jewish refugees and to bomb the railroad tracks leading to the concentration camps. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver successfully challenged the Jewish establishment, which was intimidated by Secretary of State Marshall’s insistence that Ben-Gurion postpone the declaration of Israel’s independence. The kidnaping of Eichman was mildly criticized as a violation of international law. The establishment opposed a high-profiled “Let My People Go” during its early stage, and it initially objected to the coercion of Soviet Jewry into Aliya, rather than immigration to the US and W. Europe.

The Jewish establishment has, rightfully, risen against Holocaust deniers and against hate-education in the US. It has chosen to downplay the more extreme level of Holocaust denial and hate education in Arafat’s school system and PLO-controlled media. Six years following the signing of the Oslo Accords, Arafat refuses to expunge from school textbooks the systematic depiction of Jews and Zionists as enemies of Arabs, Islam and humanity. A recent study of recurring themes in 140 PLO school textbooks includes heralding anti-Jewish Jihad, praising suicidal bombers and depicting Jews as deceitful, treacherous and inhumane occupiers of Jaffa, Haifa, the Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem. Suha Arafat’s libelous anti-Semitic statement has merely echoed PLO’s education system, which is an authentic reflection of the PLO’s strategy. A 1999 PLO-published school textbook, The New History of the Arabs and the World, indoctrinates Palestinian youth that “there is a basic similarity between Nazism, Fascism and Zionism...The Talmud is a book of hatred toward gentiles...” Fourth graders are brainwashed that “Jews are the enemies of the Prophets and the believers...” Arafat has just instructed PLO teachers (k-12) and PLO-controlled media to commemorate, annually, “the catastrophic consequences of the November 2, 1917 Balfour Declaration, which facilitated the creation of the Zionist enemy.”

Arafat has aligned himself with America’s worst enemies (Osama bin-Laden, Saddam, Iran, Libya, the Sudan, No. Korea) and intense adversaries (China, Russia, Cuba). Arafat’s controlled-dailies, Al-Ayyam and Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, wrote: “Osama bin-Laden, you are not the only one harassed by US terrorism..., Hitler and Mussolini, and more recently Pinochet, were no worse than [Clinton] in the murder of children and the destruction of [Iraq].”

Obviously, the $500 million previously transferred by the US to the PLO, have not moderated the organization. It has kept the Oslo process alive, while achieving perverse outcome! A process which has been replete – since 1993 – with PLO non-compliance and hate-mongering cannot advance US interests nor peace. Worshiping the process, at the expense of compliance, has convinced the PLO that it can eat the cake and have it too. The continued exchange of tangible benefits for unfulfilled PLO promises undermines genuine peace and vital US and Israeli interests. Neither the Truth nor Peace should be sacrificed on the altar of any process.

Rather than lobbying for the PLO, one should insist that the PLO desist from incitement and comply as a precondition to further US financial assistance. The US Jewish establishment would thus be consistent with Jewish grassroots, advancing peace by forcing the PLO to choose between Hamas and Peace and to change spots rather than tactics.