Preface
by Christopher Barder
to
Palestinian Ideology and Practice
Ten Years after Oslo
Moshe Sharon
All the matters
raised in 1998 have since been subject to no amelioration whatsoever.
Indeed, the constrictions on Israel and the enlargement of the scope
of Palestinian ambitions have developed further, almost hand in hand,
so that the initially unequal equation has been subject to greater
advantage on the one side and less room for maneuver on the other.
Where Israel
offered far more, in time, and the Palestinians were portrayed by
Shimon Peres as having to receive because Israel had more to give, the
trend continued in such a fashion that more and more was surrendered
still with the promise of a future peace somewhere on the horizon,
which has never been delivered. This has been illumined by a range of
historical facts, which have failed to alter the underlying imbalance
whereby Israel surrendered land and security and the Palestinians gave
only promises which remained continually broken.
After Binyamin
Netanyahu’s attempts at ensuring reciprocity failed and the
vulnerability of the bypass roads and the inhabitants of Hebron became
daily statistics, Israel was facing the complete breakdown of
practical utility for the Oslo process. It was plain that there was
neither Palestinian cultural nor political will to prevent terror and
yet Israel had lost much of the capacity to undertake the task itself.
Shimshon unit action was also no deterrent and persecution of those
accused of “collaboration” became normative, delivered without any
rule of law whatsoever, and corruption in the PA and paralysis in its
administration became well known throughout the world. Still, however,
Presidents Clinton and Chirac led the Western world in constant
support for and recognition of Arafat and his regime.
The walk on the
Temple Mount undertaken with top level liaison with PA officials by
Ariel Sharon provided the excuse for a full scale low intensity
assault on all Israelis using homicide bombers and drive-by shooting,
accompanied by psychological warfare and an all out effort in the
media. This was preceded by substantive offers by Ehud Barak of land
and control, even over parts of Jerusalem. He appeared, with Shlomo
Ben-Ami, his mild-mannered Western-educated Foreign Minister, to be
fulfilling all that Washington and Brussels wanted by way of
reasonable concessions – even allowing Syrian sovereignty down to the
slopes leading to the Kinneret (so including an element of
“comprehensiveness”).
All this and
the violence of the “second intifada” have failed to shake the
West into pressuring the PA into a different investment in its youth.
Quite the reverse – all the features of five years ago are now more
entrenched and more established, with EU funding and President Bush
and EU policies proclaiming explicit plans and a “road map” rewarding
the Palestinians with a state built on the principles established in
the deception of Oslo, now ten years old.
|
Palestinian Ideology and
Practice
Five/Ten Years after Oslo
Moshe Sharon
This article
is an excerpt from the book,
ISRAEL AND A PALESTINIAN STATE: ZERO SUM GAME?,
ACPR Publishers & Zmora Bitan Publishers, 2001, Hardcover (Large format), 532
pages.
The Oslo
agreements were aimed, from the moment they were signed, to end all acts of
hostility, both physical and verbal, between Israel and the Palestinians. The
Israeli leaders at home presented the agreements in almost Messianic terms,
pointing to the “historic reconciliation between the Palestinians and the
Israelis”. It was clearly understood that the Palestinians would not only stop
all acts of violence against Israel but would change the tone of their
propaganda and endeavor to disseminate messages of peace and good
neighborliness. The Israeli public was made to believe that similar to Israel,
the Palestinian Authority would develop special educational programs for the
schools to educate the young generation in the spirit of peace and prepare it
to live in a new era of no-war, just as Israel had been doing for years on all
levels of education and in the media. It was also hoped that the anti-Israeli
and anti-Semitic line of propaganda, common in the Palestinian press (and
other sources of information), would at least be tempered if not completely
changed.
The least
that even those who were most skeptical about the agreements had hoped for was
that on the official level, the notorious symbols of the hatred for Israel in
the official documentation of the PLO would be modified, notwithstanding the
Palestinian Covenant and the Fatah Charter.
In reality,
none of these hopes were realized.
After the
establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip and the “West
Bank”, the terrorist actions against Israeli citizens were intensified. Israel
became more accessible, and the terrorists now had territories under the
jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority in which to prepare their acts of
murder and to which they would withdraw after perpetrating them and be safe.
Israeli property also became easily accessible, and the stealing of Israeli
vehicles and other property became a Palestinian national sport, causing
Israel tremendous economic damage.
Over and
above all this, the Palestinian Authority, from the minute of its
establishment, did nothing to change the atmosphere of hatred among the
Palestinians. On the contrary, the language of hatred, the incitement to war
against the Jews, the belligerent speeches, the books in schools, the ideology
of negating Israel’s existence and the Jewish right to a homeland remained the
same as they had been even since before World War II. Nothing has changed in
the ideology but much has changed in the intensification of its dissemination
and the availability of the facilities to bring it to almost every individual,
via the press, electronic media and Internet.
* * *
Palestinian Achievements in Oslo
In the eyes
of those who signed the Oslo agreements on the Palestinian side, their major
achievements were as follows:
1. Territories
The
acquisition of real property, namely land, ceded to the Palestinians by
Israel, in return for a general, unbinding declaration “against terror”.
According to the Arab lexicon of the Arab-Israeli conflict, terror does not
exist at all on the Palestinian side. When the Arabs condemn “terror” they
mean Israeli terror, represented by the sheer existence of the State of
Israel. The Arab definition of the killing of Israeli citizens by Palestinian
terrorists is: “Palestinian freedom fighting”. For this reason any Palestinian
or Arab declaration “against terror” means absolutely nothing. And if it can
bring real profit, as in Oslo, the Palestinians, will concede to using it at a
price.
2. Army
The
formation of an army, under the disguise of “a strong police force”. The
Palestinian Authority, brought the whole PLO fighting force which had been
stationed in Tunisia and other Arab countries into the territories received
from Israel. This is a well trained army, indoctrinated for war against
Israel. Its slogan: “With our souls and blood we shall redeem thee, O
Palestine,” which the soldiers, inflamed by Arafat’s speeches, chant. Most of
the members of this army are not even disguised as policemen. They wear army
uniforms, are organized in military units, get military training, although
none of them has any involvement in police duties or work. The agreements
limit the number of “policemen” to 30,000, yet the actual size of the standing
Palestinian army is double this number, and its arsenals constantly swell with
arms strictly forbidden by the agreements, including artillery and rockets,
smuggled in by the agents of the Palestinian Authority itself.
3. Legitimacy
The
legitimization of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which was,
and still is, defined as a terrorist organization. This legitimization is a
particularly important achievement, because it has been conceded by the very
victims of this organization’s acts of terror. In this way, Israel, the major
victim of the PLO, accepted it as a legitimate freedom-fighter body, exactly
as this organization had been claiming it was, and gave up its demand that the
PLO should account for the atrocities which it had perpetrated for more than a
quarter of a century.
4. Legal Precedent
The setting
of a precedent, according to which a sovereign state negotiates, officially,
with a body of no legal or political standing whose declared aim is to
obliterate it. Israel did this without demanding the obvious: the abolishment
and rejection of all the official documents calling for the destruction of
Israel as a precondition for even meeting for negotiations.
5. Avoidance of Cardinal Issues
The creation
of a situation by which the Palestinian side acquired meaningful and real
achievements without having to enter into any commitment regarding the major
issues which are the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict, such as: borders,
refugees, Jerusalem.
The
Israelis, so eager to have the Palestinians as partners, regarded the sheer
act of the negotiations as a great achievement and interpreted them as
amounting to Palestinian recognition of the State of Israel.
For
propaganda purposes, especially in the West, official Palestinian bodies
adopted this Israeli interpretation but left out the geographical
definition of “Israel”, namely, they refrained from speaking about Israel
within any borders, not even the armistice lines of 1949. Similarly,
Israel is completely absent from the Palestinian maps; there is no such
country in the Palestinian atlas (as well as in any other Arab atlas).
The Voice of Palestinian Rejection
The
Palestinians who rejected Oslo, whether these were identified Islamic bodies
such as the Hamas, or elements inside the PLO, claimed that by
recognizing Israel, even in an indirect fashion, and within any borders, no
matter how diminished they may be, negated fundamental principles of the
Palestinian Covenant which forbid the division of Palestine, do not recognize
the Jews as a people, reject Jewish history altogether and any form of
recognition of the Jews’ right to have a state of their own. They regard
Zionism as a terrorist, racial and colonialist movement which should be rooted
out together with Israel, its creation.
The Muslim
elements endorsing each one of these ideas emphasized also the fact that the
jihad, the Holy War against the Jews, the historical enemies of Islam,
could not, and should not, be stopped. The Qur`an holds that the Jews
must forever be demeaned and degraded, and it follows that they may never
rule, especially over an Islamic land. It goes without saying that the Muslims
should not even post facto accept a situation in which Jews rule over
Muslims, or that they abolish the principle which prescribes that only Muslims
should govern their own holy places and the holy places of others. In other
words, it is impossible for Muslims willingly to give up on the cardinal idea
that Jews, and Christians, can only be dhimmis, namely, that they may
live under Islamic rule only as an inferior class of “protected people”. As
far as Muslim organizations led by the Hamas are concerned: “Islam is
the solution, and jihad is the way.”
Those who
signed the Oslo Agreement, Arafat included, although not defined as “Muslim
fundamentalists”, do not oppose this Islamic ideology. Moreover, in essence
they even support it spreading in every possible manner. However, their
argument is that this Islamic ideology may be implemented at a later date;
until then, all efforts must be concentrated on the achievement of real gains
(acquiring territory, building a fighting force, receiving international
support), which at the right time will enable the successful implementation of
the Islamic ideology.
Arafat’s Policy of Free Gains
The father
of this line of thought is Yasser Arafat himself, and these are its major
components:
-
The
Palestinian Covenant has not been abolished, even if it is important to
present to the world, from time to time, a formula which sounds like its
abolishment, taking advantage of the ignorance of the other side and of the
sympathy, as well as ignorance, of the Israeli and international media. For
example, Arafat declared in Paris (1988) that the Covenant is “caduc”,
or the Palestinian National Council takes a decision to nominate a committee
to decide which of the articles of the Covenant should be amended (1995), or
Arafat announces that Israel herself should adopt a constitution prior to
the amendment of the Covenant. The basic idea behind this strategy is that
the world and media in general will accept, adopt, and give currency even to
the most outrageous absurdity, if it is repeated often enough.
-
The
presentation of the agreements with Israel as temporary ones. It follows
that it is permissible, even desirable, to sign them, especially since they
come cheap, even free, and are useful. Their usefulness is important. In
this context Arafat speaks the language of the Islamic Hamas, relying
on an historical precedent established by no less a person than the Prophet
Muhammad himself.
-
Muhammad made a treaty with the tribe of
Qureish, his enemy, because he thought that the agreement was beneficial
for the Muslims.
-
The agreement did not abolish the state of
war, only postponed it.
-
The agreement brought great benefits to the
Muslims, enabling them to build their military power, weaken their enemy,
and anesthetize it to such a degree that it lost its defensive instincts.
-
The agreement was breached by Muhammad at the
first opportunity, once he had readied his army.
-
Those who opposed the agreement at the time
of Muhammad said that it was a shameful agreement, but Muhammad proved
that in the long run it was a great strategic move, which led to the
ultimate victory of Islam.
The Program for Israel’s Gradual Elimination
Following
Muhammad’s precedent which Arafat loves to quote, the Oslo agreements are
therefore presented as a temporary treaty, a mere phase in the overall
strategy of destroying Israel in stages.
The
theoretical foundation of this strategy was already formulated in 1974. It is
based on the principle of using every opportunity to secure territorial
acquisitions at the cheapest price. Oslo, Arafat explained, established this
principle of cheap acquisition, without giving up the option of war.
Following
this line of thought, the Palestinian authorities continue to develop and
spread the ideas already extant in the various Palestinian movements, the PLO
notwithstanding, long before Oslo. These ideas touch on three cardinal issues
which were discussed neither in Oslo nor since Oslo, in spite of the fact that
they should have been the first to be put on the negotiating agenda. These are
the problems on which the final settlement of the Arab-Israeli
conflict depend. (Parenthetically, it must be emphasized that the Palestinians
have no interest in discussing the final settlement, because such negotiations
would, by their nature, prevent them from making the maximal use of the Oslo
agreements which enable them, as already emphasized, to acquire maximum
property for almost no price).
The
Palestinians have very clear ideas regarding the three (undiscussed) main
problems of the final settlement: borders, refugees and Jerusalem, which may
be summed-up and are as follows:
1. Borders
Palestine,
between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, is indivisible. It belongs only to
the Palestinians. It follows that Israel’s existence is just a temporary
presence. The final aim is to replace it with an Arab-Palestinian state which
would comprise the whole of Palestine as it was drawn during the British
Mandate.
For this
purpose, the Arab citizens of Israel must be recruited too, to take part in
the national Palestinian struggle from within the State of Israel, making use
of Israel’s democracy, its media and legal institutions. The aim of replacing
Israel with an Arab-Palestinian state can be achieved in two ways.
-
War. This option involves the recruitment of all, or most, of the Arab
countries, notably Egypt, Syria, and Iraq at a convenient moment, preferably
after Israel has been contained at least within its 1949 lines.
-
Changing Israel’s character. This is a plan which aims at the eradication of
Israel as a Jewish state by bringing it to abandon its national Jewish
symbols, abolish the “Law of Return” which enables free Jewish immigration,
open its borders to the free influx of Arabs, so that in the long run,
having been ethnically changed, Israel will be defeated by its own
democracy. All agree that this option demands a long time period, but its
implementation is possible, especially since it does not involve bloodshed
and is likely to gain the support of many Israelis too.
It is
possible to shorten the last mentioned process, if the Palestinians begin the
negotiations over the borders not as starting from the 1949 armistice lines
(or from “The 1967 Green Line”), but from the 1947 UN “Partition Plan”,
according to which they would demand most of the Galilee and the major part of
the Negev.
It should be
pointed out that already following the Oslo agreement, the Palestinians
developed a plan to take over parts of the Negev through the establishment of
a corridor under Palestinian jurisdiction connecting the Gaza Strip with the
“West Bank” and cutting Israel in half. Both sides of this planned corridor
are populated by ever increasing Bedouin tribes, Arab citizens of Israel, who
have undergone in the last decade a sharp process of Palestinization and are
destined to take an active part in this plan.
2. Refugees
Appended to
the definition of Israel’s borders is the thesis which has long acquired
international approval, namely, that unlike all the refugees in the world who
were ever resettled and rehabilitated after wars, the Arab refugees are to be
maintained, fully supported by the international community, as a permanent
problem. Moreover, the Arabs have succeeded in imprinting on the international
mind the idea that being a Palestinian refugee is not a temporary
condition, but a status bequeathed and inherited from generation to
generation. A Palestinian refugee is always a refugee, and so also are his
descendants. The “Palestinian refugees” therefore are always on the increase,
and a whole UN machinery has been established to support, and to sustain
directly, this anomaly of human suffering. By now the Arab refugees are as
permanent as the weather on the UN agenda.
The
Palestinians understand the tremendous advantage of the refugee tool in their
plan to destroy Israel, emphasizing that all the refugees, and their millions
of offspring, belong to the original places in which they lived before the
1948 war. Their right to return to these places, most of which have long
ceased to exist, has been the cornerstone in the Arab-Palestinian policy
towards Israel. There is no attempt to disguise the reason behind this demand.
Flooding Israel proper even with a few hundreds of thousands of Palestinian
Arabs means the end of the Jewish state within a few years. Indeed, the
refugee camps are a great asset to the Arabs which they will endeavor to keep
even if an agreement on reparations to the refugees is reached some time in
the future.
3. Jerusalem
According to
the Arabs, Jerusalem belongs only to the Muslims; the Jews have no right to
it. In many of his speeches, Arafat repeats the absurdity that since the
destruction of the First Temple, the Jews have not been in Jerusalem and that
they were only recently brought to it by the British.
Arafat is
only repeating the false “facts” which are part of the intensive re-writing of
“Palestinian history”, which has been going on for more than seventy years, a
process similar to the rewriting of the history of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and
other Arab states which were born after World War I. In their re-writing of
history, the Palestinians aim at obliterating any memory of the Jews from
Jerusalem in particular and from the historical map of the Holy Land in
general, by presenting the whole history of ancient Israel as an insignificant
episode between the Canaanites – who are identified as “Palestinians” – and
the Islamic conquests, which are presented as just another wave of Arabs
coming to historically Arab lands.
The Islamic
conquests in the 7th century are introduced as the key to the special position
of the Muslim-Arabs in Palestine, since these conquests established the legal
relations between the Muslim rulers and the Christian dhimmis, the Jews
being of no consequence, and possessing no holy places. Only through this
twisting of history was it possible to present the Muslim conquests as the
legal source for the establishment of a system of protection bestowed by the
Muslims on the Christians, who were granted custody of only non-Muslim holy
places.
Following
this reasoning, Arafat hammers repeatedly the idea that the Jews not only are
not in possession of the holy places in the Holy Land, these being either
Muslim or Christian, but that Israel as a state has no legal right even to
offer protection to the Christian holy places, since it was Caliph `Umar (CE
634-644) who established the system of protection which only Muslims
may benevolently bestow on the Christians.
The
Palestinian-Arab-Muslim ideology regarding the Jews, which followed the Oslo
agreements, is the same as the one prior to them. It prescribes the total
negation of any connection between the Jews and their historic homeland,
including all the historical Jewish holy places. All the holy places to which
the Jews lay claim are accordingly presented as Muslim holy places with Arab
names: The Western Wall is al-Buraq, The Temple Mount is al- Haram
al-Quds, Hebron is al-Khalil. Classical Islamic texts already
Islamized the major figures of Jewish history from Abraham to Solomon; they
are all Muslim personalities, mainly prophets. All the holy places connected
with them are therefore, by definition, Muslim holy places. The re-writers of
Palestinian history are making maximum use of these old texts.
The
Palestinian program as seen in the current policies of the Palestinian
Authority’s educational system, media, and literature is clear: The eye, ear,
and heart of future generations of Palestinians should be recruited to one and
only aim, the removal of Israel. For external consumption, this ideological
bundle is covered in the necessary verbal wrapping, pleasant to the Western
eye, this dish of deceit is spiced to suit the European and American palate.