A Durable Peace (38 page)

If there has been any effort to alleviate the refugee problem since 1967, it came not from the Arab governments but from Israel.
As part of an ongoing program, Israel attempted to dismantle some of the worst camps in Gaza, spending Israeli government
funds to build modern apartment buildings for eleven thousand families so far.
¹⁰⁵
But if the refugees have apartment buildings in which to live, this means that they are no longer homeless, no longer refugees,
and no longer the embittered people the PLO prefers them to be. This rehabilitation was violently opposed by the PLO. In the
end, Israeli security had to be brought in to protect families that wanted to move into apartments against PLO threats.

About a year after the outbreak of the intifada, I learned firsthand of the power of this PLO stratagem when I visited the
Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza. By then, the large-scale riots had subsided and there was relative calm. I left behind my
military escort and strolled with an interpreter through the alleys of Jabaliya. Next to one cement structure I found an elderly
Arab, with whom I struck up a conversation.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Majdal,” he answered, using the Arab name for the Israeli town of Ashkelon, a few miles north of Gaza.

“And where are your children from?” I asked.

“Majdal,” he answered again. Since his children were probably my age, it is conceivable they had been born there. On a hunch
I queried him further.

“Where are your grandchildren from?”

“Majdal,” he answered.

“And will you go back to Majdal?” I asked.

“Insh’allah,”
—“God willing”—he replied. “There will be peace, and we will all go back to Majdal.”

“Insh’allah,”
I repeated. “You’ll go to Majdal, and we’ll go to Jabaliya.”

His smile vanished. “No, we’ll go back to Majdal. You’ll go back to Poland.”

With tens of thousands of refugees ready to repeat this Palestine liberation fantasy to any journalist or diplomat who asks,
these camps have become a political weapon used to fuel a desire for a right of return that does not exist, and to fan Western
opposition to Jewish immigration to Israel. After all, the Arabs often ask Westerners, how can it be that an Arab born in
Jaffa cannot return there, while a Jew from Odessa who has never before set foot in Israel is welcomed with open arms? Rather,
as Hani al-Hassan, an aide of Arafat’s, recently explained, the return of
the Arabs
should be the world’s priority:

Americans and Soviets interested in the Middle East peace process have to understand that the problem requiring solution is
not the immigration of the world’s Jews to Palestine, but how to return Palestinian refugees to Palestine…. The Arab states
will not be willing to settle the Palestinian refugees…. Every refugee from 1948 or 1967 must be allowed to return to Palestine.
¹⁰⁶

Thus, the “right of return” is intended to mimic, counteract, and annul the
Jewish
dream of return by means of a false symmetry: The Jews have returned, and now the Palestinian Arabs must return. Yet the
Arab refugees of 1948 cannot be viewed without considering the
Jewish refugees
of 1948, who were expelled in roughly equal numbers from the Arab states. (Most of the Arab refugees left voluntarily, out
of fear or because of the exhortations of Arab leaders to “clear the way” for the Arab armies, as noted in
Chapter 4
.) At
a cost of $1.3 billion, the fledgling Jewish state took in Jewish refugees from Arab states from Morocco to Iraq and housed,
educated, and employed them, so that today they are no longer distinct from any other Israelis.
¹⁰⁷
For the vast, oil-glutted Arab states to now demand that tiny Israel
also
resettle all the Arab refugees is preposterously unjust. There was, in fact, an even exchange
of populations between the Arab and the Jewish states as a consequence of the Arabs’ war against Israel and their expulsion
of the Jews from their lands. Such exchanges of population have occurred a number of other times this century: Millions of
people were exchanged between Bulgaria and Greece in 1919, between Greece and Turkey in 1923, between India and Pakistan in
1947, and so on. In none of these cases has anyone ever seriously suggested reversing the exchanges, let alone reversing only
one side
of them.

That half a century later the Arab regimes say that they refuse to accept their side of an equation that they themselves formulated
is particularly telling. For the Arab leaders are well aware that if Israel were to agree to such a Palestinian “right of
return,” the country would be demographically overwhelmed and destroyed. The “right of return” is therefore nothing but a
subterfuge to undermine the Jewish state. As Qaddafi himself has said: “By then [i.e., the return of the refugees], there
would be no more Israel…. If they accept, then Israel would be ended.”
¹⁰⁸

Nevertheless, the demand of the “right of return” has never been renounced by the PLO, and it remains at the top of its list
of preconditions for any step toward a permanent peace settlement with Israel. Arafat has made this clear: “The Palestinian
uprising will in no way end until the attainment of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of
return.”
¹⁰⁹
Likewise, the PLO’s acceptance of Israel’s right to exist (as required by Resolution 242) is predicated on the Palestinian
“right of return,” which Qaddafi says would destroy Israel. As the PLO’s representative to Saudi Arabia, Rafiq Natshe, confirms:
“all members of the [PLO] executive committee reject [Security Council Resolutions] 242 and 338 if the declared rights of
the Palestinians are not understood to include… return of the refugees to their birthplace.”
¹¹⁰
In the same vein, Arafat also sets the “right of return” as a precondition for peace in the entire Middle East. In 1991,
he said:

There will be no peace and stability in the region as long as the inalienable national rights of the Palestinian people are
ignored, including
the right of return, self-determination, and the establishment of its independent state
whose capital is Jerusalem.
¹¹¹
[emphasis added]

This last statement is revealing in itself. If all the PLO wants is an independent state on the West Bank, why bother to include
the redundant terms “self-determination” and “right of return”? After all, an independent West Bank “Palestine” ought to satisfy
the supposed yearnings for self-determination of all Palestinian Arabs and absorb the remaining refugees. But in separating
these terms, as it habitually does, the PLO is indicating to an Arab audience in a well-understood code that a West Bank state
is merely one part of its plan to bring an end to Israel. The term
self-determination
is intended for the Arab communities
inside
Israel who, after the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, will claim the right of self-determination (that
is, independence) in regions with an Arab majority in Galilee and the Negev. And if these multiple amputations are not enough
to finish Israel off, the “right of return” will ensure that the Jewish remnants are asphyxiated by a flood of Arab refugees.

This trinity—West Bank State, Self-Determination, Right of Return—alongside the PLO Charter, the Phased Plan, and the Armed
Struggle, form the PLO’s catechism. This doctrine gives direction and guidance to its disciples as they pursue under changing
circumstances the unchanging goal of a holy war, a jihad aimed at Israel’s ultimate destruction. Even in the midst of peace
negotiations between Israel and the Arabs, Arafat continued to extol the same holy war he has espoused since the founding
of the PLO in 1964. Thus, on March 15, 1992, the chairman of the PLO exhorted:

Through the peace negotiations… the creative Palestinian mind has created the third side of the triangle of [which the first
two are] the Palestinian struggle and jihad toward certain victory.
We are involved in a political-
cum
-diplomatic battle.… We have to intensify the struggle and continue the sincere and honest jihad…. The jihad is our way and
Palestine is our road.
¹¹²

Scarcely a word about this PLO strategy reaches the newspapers and television news programs of the West, which almost never
bother to report on the PLO’s actions inside the Arab world or PLO statements made in Arabic. Little more reaches Western
leaders. When they are asked why no attention is paid to the PLO’s incessant promises to destroy Israel and its elaborate
laying of plans to do so, Western political leaders and media figures, if they can be persuaded to address the issue at all,
habitually shrug it all off as meaningless “posturing” or even as a kind of joke or game, certainly an irrelevance—with an
implied, condescending message: “Never take anything an Arab says seriously if he’s only speaking to Arabs.” But this stands
logic on its head. Dictatorial regimes and organizations will tell foreigners any lie that suits their ends; it is only what
they say to their own followers that in any way reflects their designs. To understand this is to understand much about the
PLO, which continues to peddle peace in the West while ceaselessly promising terror and the annihilation of Israel to Arab
audiences in the Middle East.

How can it be that the PLO’s fabrications are understood in the West to be truth, while the truth itself, no matter how often
rehearsed in word and deed, is taken to be of not even the slightest consequence? In fact not even “believing” Westerners
believe
everything
the PLO says to them. For instance, not even the most avid consumers of PLO lies were willing to swallow Arafat’s infamous
“secret map” that supposedly proved Israeli designs on the entire Middle East—which a few years ago he announced he had discovered
on the back of an Israeli coin. In a specially convened press session at the United Nations in Geneva, Arafat presented to
a crowded hall of journalists a map of an Israel encompassing most of the Middle East, reaching as far as the Nile and the
Euphrates and into Southern Turkey. Arafat explained that this
“map,” appearing in rough contour, comprised the lands that the territorially expansionist Israel intended one day to claim
as its own. It had been etched on Israeli coins so that every Israeli could share in the unspoken conspiracy every time he
fumbled through his pockets.

As Arafat was leaving his press conference, surrounded by an army of aides (in all my years at the UN, where I encountered
most of the world’s leaders, I had never seen such a huge procession), I walked into the conference room he had just vacated.
I produced the coin (a ten-agora piece, roughly equal to a nickel in value) and explained that the pattern imprinted on it
is the impression of an ancient coin from the reign of the Jewish king Mattathias Antigonus (40–37
B.C.E.
). Most modern Israeli coins include impressions of such ancient Jewish coinage. I showed a photograph of the original coin
that had been used to make the impression: Arafat’s “secret map” was nothing more than the outline of its corroded edges.

Although Arafat’s attempt to manufacture yet another lie met with immediate failure in this case, what struck me was that
so many of the PLO’s other lies are just as outrageous, even if they don’t lend themselves to instant visual puncturing. Yet
most people in the West receive the overwhelming majority of these falsehoods as either the truth or else a reasonable approximation
of it. Uncontested, this particular flight of fancy might also have become a regular part of the PLO’s web of slanders and
falsifications—just like the PLO’s purported recognition of Israel, and its alleged willingness to be satisfied with a state
on the West Bank.

It therefore seems that the ignorance of both the media and the politicians about the basics of PLO politics is not merely
due to the facility with which the PLO spews forth its fabrications. It is at least as much due to a profound Western desire
to believe what the PLO is saying. Westerners deeply wish to believe that everyone can be reformed and that even the worst
enemies can eventually become friends. This is why, despite the termination of the American talks with the PLO on the grounds
of its continuing terrorism
in 1989, the view that the PLO must be engaged persisted in Washington and European capitals. Ways were constantly sought
to bring the PLO back into the fold openly. Behind the scenes, feverish maneuvers took place, through PLO-approved middlemen,
to get the PLO’s agreement to this or that American move. The goal was ultimately to restore PLO legitimacy in the eyes of
the American public and Congress and to ensure its continued participation in the political process.

Schooled in compromise, Westerners found it difficult to realize that the PLO’s obsession with destroying Israel was not a
passing “interest” or “tactic.” In fact, this goal defined the very essence of the PLO. It is the PLO’s reason for existing,
the passion that has united its members and wins their loyalty. This is what distinguishes the PLO from the Arab states, even
the most radical ones. While these states would clearly prefer to see Israel disappear, neither Libya nor Iraq, to take the
most extreme examples, sees its own national life as
dependent
on Israel’s destruction. But the PLO was different. It was constitutionally tied to the idea of Israel’s liquidation. Remove
that idea, and you have no PLO.

Indeed, if Western governments genuinely wanted to test whether the PLO was interested in reforming itself, they would have
to ask it to take practical steps to stop
being
the organization for the “liberation of Palestine.” They would have demanded that the PLO formally abrogate its charter and
the Phased Plan, as well as the various other PLO resolutions calling for steps toward Israel’s destruction. They would have
demanded that the PLO dismantle its terror apparatus and accede to international monitoring to ensure that it has done so.
They would have demanded that it cease its organized inculcation of hatred in Palestinian youngsters in refugee camps, and
that it quit obstructing the rehabilitation and resettlement of the Palestinian refugees. Such elementary demands were seldom
made because it is intuitively clear to even the most befuddled observer that the PLO would find it hard to accept all of
them, let alone implement them. What must be asked is why. And the answer is that many of the PLO leaders are committed,
sinews and flesh, tooth and nail, to the eradication of Israel by any means.