A Durable Peace (35 page)

By the mid-1970s, PLO speakers were covering the globe, proclaiming the organization’s commitment to peace, its abhorrence
of violence and terror, and its new-found realism and pragmatism.
⁵⁴
The PLO was then awash with money it had extorted from wealthy Arab regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
(Kuwait put a quintessentially Moslem twist on Lenin’s famous phrase by providing the rope with which literally to hang Kuwaitis,
as the PLO’s henchmen proceeded to do following Saddam’s takeover of Kuwait in 1990.) It therefore could easily afford a network
of offices around the world from which to sell its message of moderation to a world audience that was becoming exceptionally
eager to buy
anything
that could be used to “solve the Middle East conflict.” (By now, that “conflict” had also brought them the oil embargo.)
Articulate, well dressed, and soft spoken, PLO representatives in Europe and North America, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
presented their moderate wares on television, in the press, in Rotary clubs, in churches—even in synagogues.

Thus, while PLO-sponsored terror was reigning everywhere, the PLO was busy denying. Indeed, this subterfuge had already been
fully operational in 1970, when Black September, the first of a swarm of ostensibly independent terrorist splinters, was manufactured
in order to carry out the assassination of Jordanian prime minister Wafsi Tal, the slaying of American ambassador to Khartoum
Cleo Noel and his aide Curtis Moore, the Munich Olympic massacre, and other outrages. Arafat claimed to have no connection
to Black September up until 1973, when a top PLO operative fingered Abu Iyad, his second in command, as its direct commander.
⁵⁵
When Arafat was finally forced to admit that Black September and the PLO were one and the same, he was able to turn even
this to public relations advantage by claiming that the PLO had since grown more “moderate.”

In addition to concealing its involvement in terror by renaming itself, the PLO has tried to come out of the attacks as the
hero by “negotiating” the release of hostages being held by its own gunmen. This is a ruse that has even succeeded on occasion,
as in 1979, when the PLO negotiated the release of hostages whom a mysterious group called the “Eagles of the Palestinian
Revolution” had seized in the Egyptian embassy in Turkey. The Turkish government was so grateful for the end of the crisis
that it granted the
PLO diplomatic recognition. Later, it transpired that the PLO “negotiator” had masterminded the hostage crisis in the first
place.
⁵⁶

The most infamous example of this technique is the 1985 murder of a wheelchair-bound American Jew named Leon Klinghoffer
on the Mediterranean cruise ship
Achille Lauro.
Klinghoffer was shot at close range and then thrown overboard. Abul Abbas, a member of the PLO executive and an Arafat protégé,
arrived in Egypt and told the press that he had come at Arafat’s behest to mediate an end to the hijacking,
⁵⁷
for a moment gaining the hijackers their freedom. But this time, the matter did not end quite as planned. Freed hostages
described how the killers had hailed Arafat as they beat elderly passengers. Intercepted communications revealed that the
murderers were not renegades but were minions of the PLO, directly under the command of Abul Abbas himself. American fighter
planes nabbed the escaping PLO killers in a spectacular midair operation. In short order, the PLO was forced to switch from
denying any relationship to the terrorists to denying that they had murdered anyone and asserting that the killing was a “big
lie fabricated by the intelligence services of the United States.”
⁵⁸
(Farouq Kaddoumi, Arafat’s “foreign minister,” added insult to iniquity by suggesting that it was Mrs. Klinghoffer who had
pushed her husband overboard in order to collect the insurance money.
⁵⁹
Abul Abbas’s version was, “Maybe he was trying to swim for it.”)
⁶⁰

Despite these efforts to deflect blame from itself, the PLO was running into trouble because terrorism itself was running
into trouble. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 had led to the dismantling of the terror empire that the PLO had built
in that country for over a decade, and to the expulsion of the PLO to Tunisia, where it was stripped of much of its power
to wreak havoc. By the mid-1980s, an organized political counterattack had begun to undermine the political effectiveness
of terrorism by exposing its Arab sources and the involvement of states behind the scenes—as well as pointing out the unacceptability
of terror, regardless
of the identity of its perpetrators or their professed motives.
^*
Evidence was carefully marshaled that proved that terror, far from being the work of frustrated individuals, was in fact the
product of a dismal alliance between terrorists and totalitarians.

The United States led the West in fighting back against terrorism, most notably in the midair arrest of the
Achille Lauro
gunmen and in the raid on Libya in 1986, in which American and British bombers struck targets in Libya, narrowly missing Qaddafi
himself. In 1987, the U.S. Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism Act, ordering all PLO offices on American soil shut down, and
declared: “The PLO are a terrorist organization and a threat to the interests of the United States and its allies.” After
twenty years of laissez-faire terrorism, these actions finally established the principle that neither terrorists nor the terror
states behind them would be allowed to get off unpunished. The greater awareness of the methods of the terrorist groups, combined
with the risk of further American raids, threatened to topple the entire scaffolding of international terrorism—and the PLO’s
hope of gaining legitimacy along with it. The climate had suddenly turned inhospitable to international terrorism, and the
PLO faced the loss of its last means
of inspiring the respect of the Arab world and its funding by Arab governments.

By early 1988, the PLO had reached one of its lowest points since the organization had been founded. From its faraway seat
in Tunis, unable to act out its bravado calls for the continuation of the “armed struggle” against Israel, it was fast being
consigned to political irrelevance. Indeed, at the November 1987 summit of the Arab League held in Amman, Jordan, the Palestinian
issue was put on the back burner for the first time in anybody’s memory. (The front burner was at long last devoted to the
Iran-Iraq War, which at that point had been raging for most of the decade.)
⁶²

For the PLO, all this spelled the urgent need to make a radical break with the terror image it had previously evaded only
with partial success, and to find other ways to demonstrate that it was still capable of “liberating Palestine.” After 1986
it became clear that for the PLO to earn acceptance in the West it must not only make increasingly vehement denials of its
terrorist
methods
but also try to show the United States that it had changed its basic
goal
with regard to Israel.

Thus, for example, there was a self-conscious shift toward the use of terminology that expressed the same goals but could
readily be misinterpreted in the West. Consider, for example, the PLO’s incessant use of the phrase
occupied territories
to denote those Arabs that it seeks to liberate, or to which it will restrict its operations. The entire PLO leadership uses
this term to mean
all
of Israel (“occupied” in 1948), while being fully aware that in the West it is understood to mean only Judea, Samaria, and
Gaza (“occupied” in 1967). Occasionally, however, a PLO member makes a gaffe and spills the beans. Thus, in an interview with
the BBC in 1985, Abu Iyad, head of the Fatah’s military department, said, “When we say occupied Palestine… we consider all
Palestine occupied…. Our resistance will be everywhere inside the territory and that is not defined in terms of the West Bank
and Gaza alone.”
⁶³

Similarly, Farouq Kaddoumi, in the French daily
Quotidien de Paris
that same year.:

When we speak of the armed struggle, whose legality is recognized by the United Nations, we are speaking of all the occupied
territories of Palestine.… It is our right to fight the enemy that has taken over our land, whether this be in the 1967 occupation
or in the previous one in 1948.
⁶⁴

But in the Western press such candor was extremely rare. Most of the time the PLO took pains to obscure its intentions. Indeed,
one of the most successful devices for creating the impression of moderation in the PLO’s goals has been the game of Declaration
and Retraction, whereby PLO leaders have issued ambiguous statements that could be interpreted as signifying a concession,
such as the recognition of Israel’s right to exist, only to have them withdrawn immediately thereafter. A famous illustration
of this technique is a document that Arafat purportedly signed in his besieged bunker in Beirut in 1982 in the presence of
visiting American congressman Paul McCloskey. According to McCloskey, Arafat said that he was prepared to recognize Israel
in the context of all UN resolutions, a statement he had actually made before and whose value was dubious even then. But McCloskey,
apparently enthralled by his proximity to what he believed to be a world-changing event, promptly announced this “breakthrough”
to the press, which dutifully trumpeted the news of Arafat’s new openness to the world—only to have the entire event denied
by the PLO a few hours later.
⁶⁵

As in each of its previous Western-oriented stratagems, the principal aim of the PLO “recognition of Israel” game has been
to conceptually conquer Washington. Long before the ultimate collapse of Soviet power, it had become clear to the majority
in the PLO leadership that the road to putting real pressure on Israel passed through the White House, the Congress, and the
American voting public—a realization that has gradually dawned on all the
Arab world, most notably on Syria after the American victory in the Gulf War in 1991. The PLO strategy was thus built logically
on Arab propaganda concepts that had already gained currency. Having reduced all Middle East turbulence to the Arab-Israeli
conflict, having reduced that to the Palestinian-Jewish dispute, and having reduced the Palestinians to the PLO, the Americans
and the West were now to be asked to accept the last link in the chain: The PLO was to be shown as the party of compromise
and peace, Israel as the obstacle resisting peace. America would then respond by engaging the “moderate” PLO and pressuring
the “intransigent” Israelis.

Getting this campaign off the ground required that the PLO overcome one major hurdle. In 1975, then-Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger had signed a memorandum with Israel that obligated the United States to refrain from negotiating with the PLO as
long as the organization did not recognize Israel’s right to exist and rejected UN Resolution 242. The United States subsequently
undertook not to deal with the PLO until it had ceased engaging in terrorism. To meet the memorandum’s demands, the PLO’s
objective of destroying Israel had to be laundered and ironed into a form that could be worn about Washington without violating
this dress code. Gaining acceptance in American eyes would therefore entail that the PLO “moderate” itself enough to meet
these two demands, while still uttering nothing but readily retractable doublespeak.

The PLO achieved this late in 1988, when it finally reached an agreed-upon formula for its absolution with the Americans.
Arafat, debating to the last every dotted “i” and every crossed “t,” would finally utter some approximation of a position
tolerable to the United States at a Palestine National Council conference in Algiers in November and, with some necessary
corrections from the Americans, again at a press conference in Geneva a few days later.

Leaving aside the peculiar view that words alone suffice for the political redemption of tyrants and terrorists, a view contradicted
by a long list of despots in this century who have habitually lied to
achieve their ends, it must be noted that these words, which the Americans extracted from the PLO the way one pulls a tooth,
did not amount to much. Here is what Arafat finally did say in Geneva about terrorism:

[The PNC has] reaffirmed its rejection of terrorism in all its forms, including state terrorism…. This position is clear and
free of all ambiguity. And yet, I, as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, hereby once more declare that I condemn
terrorism in all its forms, and at the same time salute those sitting before me in this hall who, in the days when they fought
to free their countries from the yoke of colonialism, were accused of terrorism by their oppressors….

I also offer a reverent salute to the martyrs who have fallen at the hands of terrorism and terrorists, foremost among whom
is my lifelong companion and deputy, the martyr-symbol Khalil al-Wazir [Abu Jihad], and the martyrs who fell in the massacres
to which our people have been subjected in the various cities, villages and camps of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and South
Lebanon.
⁶⁶

Certainly Arafat condemned “terrorism”—but only to slip the meaning of the word out from under our feet in the very next sentence.
“Terrorism,” according to Arafat, is what Israel has done to the Palestinians, and
this
he is willing to condemn. As for the actions of the PLO itself, he “salutes” those who have been “accused of terrorism“:
the PLO, and Abu Jihad, who orchestrated the Na-hariya slayings in 1974, the Coastal Road massacre in 1978, the murder of
three Israeli merchant seamen in Barcelona in 1985, and more. Nowhere does he agree to alter the policies of the PLO in any
way. Most important, nowhere does he renounce “the armed struggle,” the term the PLO has always used universally for what
the West refers to as terrorism.

Likewise, the PLO’s alleged recognition of Israel’s right to exist was achieved with mirrors: