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 hortly
after the September 11 attacks, Americans bristled at the first
images of the Palestinian reaction: uninhibited glee. Yasser Arafat's
Palestinian Authority moved quickly to prevent coverage of Palestinian
celebrations, issuing denials and confiscating videotape. A student
protest in support of Osama bin Laden even precipitated a gun battle
with Palestinian police, which left two dead and 76 injured at Islamic
University in Gaza — the nastiest internal Palestinian conflict
in years. Afterward, the PA closed universities in Gaza and banished
foreign reporters from the Gaza Strip to prevent unsympathetic coverage
of the Palestinians in the Western press.
Arafat has
worked hard to establish Palestinian sympathy with the victims of
terrorism. After the Trade Center attacks, the Palestinian Authority
required its schoolchildren to observe a moment of silence, and
organized a candlelight vigil outside the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem.
On September 12, Arafat donated blood for injured Americans at a
Gaza hospital. The Palestinian Authority promoted coverage of the
spectacle, which helped to deflect public attention from the revelry
in the Palestinian street.
The whole episode
testifies to a striking change in Arafat's persona. Just over a
decade ago, the PLO was notable as a terrorist force, and Arafat
was a criminal. In 1986, 47 U.S. senators — Al Gore among them
— urged the Justice Department, in a formal letter to the attorney
general, to indict Arafat for murder. Now, of course, Arafat is
a Nobel laureate, enjoys a statesman's legitimacy, and presides
over a national government and security force. Last year, Gore lauded
Arafat as America's partner in creating world peace — and hosted
him at the White House.
To be sure,
the Palestinian Authority's newest media initiative masks popular
support for terrorism, which is at least more widespread than Palestinian
officials are willing to admit. But terrorist-turned-victim Arafat
is primarily concerned with preserving his newer, more agreeable
face in the West.
Arafat effected
this dramatic shift in public opinion by recasting the image of
the Palestinian national movement. The PLO stopped presenting itself
as a guerilla army, aimed at wiping Israel off the map, and instead
adopted the pose of a humanitarian effort aimed at protecting a
beleaguered minority, the Palestinian Arabs, and establishing a
homeland for a dispossessed people. In short, Arafat presented the
Palestinians to the world as Jews.
Arafat's drive
to project an appearance of Palestinian sympathy with the victims
of terror in New York and Washington is part of his long-term strategy
is for the Palestinians to imitate the Jews — not the Jews
of historical record, but the sinister Jews of the Palestinian imagination,
who fabricated a history of oppression and won global sympathy,
and who arrived in a foreign land under a banner of peace and then
dislocated its inhabitants by conquest. That is why Arafat has been
preoccupied with a Palestinian right of return, modeled on the Jewish
right of return — and why he is so eager to equate Zionism
with racism in the public consciousness.
"We are
the Jews of the 21st century," Faisal Husseini, the late PA
minister and PLO representative, told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Arabi
in June. "Meaning, we the Palestinians will be the Jews of
the earlier century. They infiltrated our country using various
methods, using all kinds of passports, and they suffered greatly
in the process. They even had to face humiliation but they did it
all for one goal: to enter our country and root themselves in it
prior to our expulsion out of it. We must act in the same way they
did. [We must] return [to the land], settle it, and develop new
roots in our land from which we were expelled; whatever the price
may be." In Husseini's version of history, the Israelis accepted
the U.N. partition plan in 1947 in order to establish a territorial
foothold, which they later enlarged through successive wars of conquest
— the ultimate goal being a "Greater Israel" from
the Nile to the Euphrates, even if the Israelis would never admit
it.
"Similarly,
if we agree to declare our state over what is now only 22 percent
of Palestine, meaning the West Bank and Gaza — our ultimate
goal is 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,"
Husseini explained. "In short, we are exactly like they are.
We distinguish the strategic, long-term goals from the political
phased goals, which we are compelled to temporarily accept due to
international pressure. When we are asking all the Palestinian forces
and factions to look at the Oslo Agreement and at other agreements
as 'temporary' procedures, or phased goals, this means that we are
ambushing the Israelis and cheating them."
After Palestinian
intransigence at Camp David, and the subsequent launch of a new
intifada, many commentators pointed to the policy of "phased
goals" — the policy in which the Palestine National Council
resolved to accept any plot of land through negotiation, to be used
as a staging ground for the subsequent armed liberation of all Palestine
— as describing Palestinian intentions all along. Indeed, PLO
officials concede the point with a surprising frankness. Abu Iyad,
as Arafat's deputy in the 1980s, greeted the prospect of peace talks
thus: "The Palestinian people will achieve an independent Palestinian
state which will be the start of the liberation of the entire homeland…
The Palestinian state which shall arise will be the beginning of
the end of Israel. The olive branch has no value unless it rests
on the rifle."
But the Palestinians,
imitating Zionism, have also concerned themselves with establishing
historical rights to the land of Israel, and erasing Jewish history
there. Abu Mazen, second in command to Arafat — and the chief
Palestinian negotiator at the Oslo accords — is the author
of a book entitled The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between
Nazism and the Zionist Movement, which maintains that "the
Zionist movement was a partner in the slaughter of the Jews"
and that, in any event, the Nazis really only killed fewer than
one million people. Abu Mazen's fictitious history pervades the
official Palestinian press, which embraces the equation of Zionism
and Nazism, and the belittling of the Holocaust. History programs
on PA Television explain that Dachau and Auschwitz were merely "disinfection
sites." The official Palestinian Authority newspaper, Al
Hayat Al Jadida, has editorialized, "The truth is that
the persecution of the Jews is a deceitful myth which the Jews have
labeled the Holocaust and have exploited to get sympathy. The most
credible of historians have challenged the Jews to bring convincing
evidence to prove it."
Arafat's Palestinian
Authority has, in turn, been busy inventing myths of its own, charging
Israel with outlandish atrocities, in order to win sympathy for
the Palestinian cause. The most famous example, of course, is Suha
Arafat's accusation that the Israeli government taints Palestinian
air and drinking water with "chemical materials." Appearing
at a 1999 press conference with Hilary Clinton, the Palestinian
First Lady declared, "Our people have been submitted to the
daily and intensive use of poisonous gas by the Israeli forces which
has led to an increase in cancer cases among women and children."
Other examples, however, abound. In 1997, Yasser Arafat alleged
that Israel planned to demolish the Al-Aqsa mosque — a plot,
explained Al Hayat Al Jadida, which would be accomplished
via "the creation of artificial earthquakes that can be triggered
from afar which will undermine its foundations and will destroy
it." Nabil Ramlawi, the PLO representative in Geneva, has charged
that Israel injected Palestinian children with AIDS during the first
intifada. Other Palestinian officials have accused Israel of tainting
Arab food with carcinogens, Mad Cow disease, and other contaminants.
This new history
of victimization at the hands of a neo-Nazi Zionist regime informed
the Palestinian response to September 11, which equated the terrorists
with the Israeli state. "We, the Palestinian people, who suffered
more than any other people from state terror, cannot but express
our real and genuine solidarity with the victims of terror anywhere,"
announced Ahmad Qurei, speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council,
in a special session of the PLC. "Our feelings are with those
who are suffering in the United States because we are victims of
state terror being exerted on us for a year now by the Israeli government,"
said Palestinian spokesman Hanan Ashrawi, also a member of the council.
Still, in an official statement, the PLC maintained its right, in
the face of recent events, to resort to armed violence; the council
warned against "attempts to equate the legitimate struggle
and resistance of the Palestinian people with the blind terrorism
that struck innocent civilians without discrimination."
The neo-Zionist
Palestinians have been sure to legitimate armed struggle with a
revisionist history of the Jews as outside occupiers, without historical
ties to the land. The Palestinian Authority's Information Ministry,
for example, provides a list of the "most distinctive religious
sites in Jerusalem." Fifth on the list is the "Al-Boraq
Wall," which "is part of the exterior facade of the western
wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque." As the ministry explains, the "'Al-Boraq'
creature which carried Mohammad during his ascension to heaven was
tied to this wall. Some Orthodox religious Jews consider it as a
holy place for them, and claim that the wall is part of their temple,"
but "all historic studies and archeological excavations have
failed to find any proof for such a claim."
The PA even
suggests that Jewish reverence for the Western Wall is born of malicious
intent: "In order to undermine the foundations of Al-Aqsa Mosque,
the Israeli government has convert[ed] it into a religious shrine
for Jews." In fact, claims the ministry, "there is no
tangible evidence of any Jewish traces/remains in the old city of
Jerusalem and its immediate vicinity." In 1996, Arafat himself
remarked, "That is not the Western Wall at all, but a Muslim
shrine." He further claimed, in an interview on Qatar television,
that the Biblical patriarch "Abraham was neither Jewish nor
a Hebrew, but was simply an Iraqi. The Jews have no right to claim
part of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Abraham's resting
place, as a synagogue. Rather, the whole building should be a mosque."
Arafat has
always maintained that "The claim of a historical or spiritual
tie between Jews and Palestine does not tally with the historical
realities," as the PLO charter puts it. Since the establishment
of the Palestinian Authority, however, he has put himself to the
heady task of inventing those historical realities. One of the first
acts of the PA's Ministry of Culture, in August 1996, was a festival
in the West Bank town of Sebastia, celebrating the history of the
"Palestinian-Canaanite people." Palestinian children donned
Canaanite dress, rode horse-drawn chariots, and saw a play depicting
the dramatic story of Baal, the Canaanite god of the heavens. The
story's narrator explained that the Palestinian-Canaanite nations
— the Amorites, Girgashites, Jebusites, and Perizzites —
fought alongside Baal to repel the Hebrew invaders from across the
Jordan River.
The narrative
is clearly nonsense, but it receives official sanction from Arafat's
Palestinian Authority. The PA Information Ministry's "Historical
Facts" on Jerusalem explain that the "Jebusite Arabs"
settled Jerusalem in 4500 BC: "The Jebusites descended from
the first Arab tribesmen in the Arab Peninsula. During their rule,
the Arab Canaanites flooded into the city during the year 2500 BC"
— only to be displaced "when the city was conquered by
King David in the Year 1000 BC." The year 636 AD, says the
ministry, witnessed "the Arab Islamic Liberation of the City."
The Muslims
who invaded Judea in 636, to be sure, were not the Jebusites of
Biblical history. And the Palestinian Arabs are about as closely
related to the Canaanites, who in any event disappeared 2,500 years
ago, as they are to the Hebrew "invaders" — to whom
the Palestinians also claim kinship at times. Both Arafat and Ashrawi
have publicly claimed that Jesus, in fact, was "Palestinian."
In July 2000, under the headline "Nazareth: The City Where
the Jews Murdered the First Palestinian of Her Sons," Al
Hayat Al Jadida opined, "The forces of the Zionist occupation
did not succeed in altering the face of the Palestinian Nazareth,
and she did not forget and will not forget her first son who the
Jews betrayed and handed over to the Roman emperor, and persisted
until he was taken out to be killed."
Informed observers
can easily dismiss Arafat's counterfeit history, and they do. But
the emergent Palestinian memory — composed mostly of myth and
demagoguery — is precisely the sort of monumental history on
which national movements rest. The Zionists understood the motivating
power and symbolism of history, even if their account could claim
more resemblance to actual facts — and Arafat now follows their
lead.
Already, Arafat
has transformed "the Palestinian people" from a subset
of the Arab nation (remember that neither Egypt nor Jordan felt
compelled to grant Palestinian autonomy in the parts of Palestine
they conquered in 1948) to an independent nation in its own right.
And he has converted his terrorist organization into a national
government.
The irony of
all this is that the Palestinians are adopting Zionism just as Israelis
are abandoning it. "Our people has long since tired of bearing
Zionism on its shoulders generation after generation," Israeli
columnist Yoel Marcus wrote in 1995. "While the Arabs have
remained faithful to their ideology of the holiness of the land
. . . Israel is ready to withdraw lightly from the lands that were
the cradle of Judaism." On the heels of the Oslo Accords, Shimon
Peres announced that Israel should seek membership in the Arab League
— signaling an important break on the part of Israel's leaders
with the very idea of a Jewish state. "A new type of citizenship
is catching on," Peres wrote in his The New Middle East.
"Particularist nationalism is fading and the idea of a 'citizen
of the world' is taking hold."
Of course,
this post-Zionist universalism is nothing new. The German-Jewish
philosopher Hermann Cohen opposed Zionism in the early 20th century
on precisely this basis. For Cohen, the destruction of the ancient
Jewish state in Israel was a welcome development, for it permitted
the Jews to transcend nationalism and spread a universal message.
He even wrote that the Jews owed Germany "a debt of filial
piety," for German nationalism was the secular embodiment of
Jewish religious values, based on "the spirit of classical
humanism and true universalism." The shocking divergence of
the destinies of the Jews and Germany undermined that universalist
outlook. The lesson of World War II was that "loss of national
rights was identical with loss of human rights, that the former
inevitably entailed the latter," as Hannah Arendt observed
after the war. Not only that, but "the restoration of human
rights," as the establishment of Israel itself proved, "has
been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment
of national rights."
But if some
in the Israeli leadership have forgotten the lessons of their own
history, Arafat has taken them to heart, creating the Palestinian
national ethos that animates his movement. The Oslo Accords, then,
represent an Israeli retreat from Zionism as well as a Palestinian
embrace of Zionist ideals. Nowadays, it's the Palestinian Arabs
who are talking about an historical birthright to the Holy Land.
And Yasser Arafat has become the world's leading Zionist.
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