There You Go Again’: Arafat Reneges On The PLO Covenant, Prepares For War Against Israel; Some ‘Partner For Peace’!

(Washington, D.C.): With the signing
of the recent Hebron agreement between
the Israeli government of Benjamin
Netanyahu and the Palestine Liberation
Organization’s Yasser Arafat, hopes once
again rose in some quarters of both
Israel and the United States that the
latter would, at last, honor
long-standing — but as yet unfulfilled
— commitments. As the Center for
Security Policy noted on 20 January 1997:

“…A document called in
diplomatic parlance a ‘Note for
the Record,’ was prepared by U.S.
Special Middle East Coordinator
Dennis Ross [to accompany the
Hebron accord]. It affirms the
Israeli and Palestinian leaders’
commitment ‘to implement the
Interim Agreement [signed at the
White House in September 1993] on
the basis of reciprocity.’ Of
paramount importance for Israel,
however, is the Note’s
enumeration of ‘Palestinian
responsibilities.’

“These include reaffirmation
of the Palestinian side’s
commitments to: ‘complete
the process of revising the
Palestinian National Charter’
which calls in 30 of its 33
provisions for the
destruction of the State of
Israel and/or violence against
Israelis; ‘fighting
terror and preventing violence’
via, among other things,
‘preventing incitement and
hostile propaganda,’
‘apprehension, prosecution and
punishment of terrorists,’ and
‘confiscation of illegal
firearms;’ and limiting
‘the size of the Palestinian
Police.’ The reason
these commitments needed to be
reaffirmed, of course, is because
they have been repeatedly
breached by Arafat and his
Palestinian Authority.

“A case in point is the
issue of revising the
vitriolically anti-Israel
Palestinian Charter. Arafat &
Company have employed numerous
excuses, bureaucratic dodges and
temporizing measures to leave the
Charter intact. Particularly
noteworthy was the ruse of
announcing in April 1996 that the
question of how to modify the
Charter’s language had been
remanded to a legal committee for
action.⁽¹⁾

“The U.S. and Israeli
governments (led at the time by
Mr. Netanyahu’s predecessor and
rival, Shimon Peres) promptly
tried to portray the Charter as
already changed. Mr. Clinton
actually declared: ‘When we met
at Sharm el-Sheikh, [Arafat] said
that there would be a revision in
the Palestinian Covenant by the
first of May. Under difficult
circumstances, he kept
that commitment.‘ The
U.S.-generated ‘Note for the
Record’ is the Clinton
Administration’s first formal
acknowledgment that the
Palestinians have yet to fulfill
this key undertaking.

Arafat: No Change in the
Covenant

Now, according
to the 26 January edition of the Jerusalem
Post, Arafat has once again refused
to fulfill his obligation to change the
PLO Covenant:

“In interviews given to two
French dailies, Le Monde
and Liberation,
published over the weekend,
Arafat declared: ‘We have already
canceled the articles that were
in contradiction to the Oslo
agreements. We have fulfilled our
commitments. The rest of it
concerns us only. The Israelis
want us to adopt a new charter.
As far as I know, the Israelis do
not have a constitution. When
they will have one, we will do
the same.'”

In other words, Arafat has simultaneously
declared that the PLO has already
“canceled” unspecified articles
that are inconsistent with the Oslo
accords — even though there has been no
public indication of which of the 30
offending provisions have been changed,
or in what way — and announced that the
PLO will not produce a “new”
(i.e., changed) covenant unless and until
Israel adopts a constitution. In light of
the U.S. acknowledgment in the Hebron
“Note for the Record” that the
PLO charter has not in fact been
changed,⁽²⁾
Arafat’s announcement that there are new
preconditions that will have to be met
before he honors his repeated pledge to
promulgate a new charter is outrageous —
though hardly surprising.

Other
Ominous Signs of the PLO’s Bad Faith

Unfortunately, this is hardly the only
indication of the PLO’s bad faith in the
post-Hebron period. As the New York
Times reported on 17 January, the
number of policemen in Hebron
“exceeded the 400 who were to be
positioned in the city under the terms of
the Israeli-Palestinian agreement.”
When asked about this by reporter Douglas
Jehl, the PLO-appointed mayor of Hebron,
Mustafa Natshe, replied,
“Officially, 400 is the number. But
maybe it will be double or triple that to
keep order. Who is going to count
them?”

The Times and Washington
Post also observed that the number
and quality of weapons — including
Kalashnikov assault rifles — carried by
those police were significantly greater
than was permitted under the Hebron
agreement. When Jehl asked PLO officials
about these infractions, he reported they
“shrugged off the apparent
violations.”

Preparations for War

Even more troubling are the
indications that Arafat’s Palestinian
Authority is preparing for more violent
breaches of its commitment to peaceful
reconciliation with Israel. As noted in
the Center’s 20 January Decision
Brief, Israeli intelligence is
now persuaded that its previous
assumptions about Arafat’s political
situation and intentions — assumptions
upon which the peace process has been
predicated — were erroneous. According
to an article which appeared in the Washington
Times on 17 January:

“[Israel’s] security chiefs
now believe — and have told the
Cabinet and the Knesset (the
parliament) — that Mr.
Arafat is willing if necessary to
have a violent confrontation with
Israel that could escalate into
war and is preparing for that
eventuality, Israeli
sources said. The intelligence
chiefs also believe that Mr.
Arafat can ‘turn on and off,’ as
an Israeli source put it,
Palestinian popular protests in
the areas under his control and
that his ruthlessly effective
security police prevent Hamas and
other Islamic fundamentalists
from posing any serious threat to
him. Israeli intelligence ‘had
warned of the danger of Arafat
losing control of the Palestinian
street: in reality, he has
demonstrated exemplary control,’
Mr. [Ehud] Ya’ari [the chief
Middle East correspondent for
Israel Television] wrote [in the
January 9th issue of the Jerusalem
Report].

Of particular concern is
mounting evidence of Arafat’s efforts to
collaborate with Syrian preparations for
war with Israel. For example, according
to the Mideast Newswire of 19 January
1997:

“Sources in the Lebanese
Army, a bilateral agreement
between the Syrian and PLO
intelligence services is
currently operational. The
sources which requested
anonymity, said ‘The Palestinians
have requested a special
protection of their networks in
the Palestinian camps in Lebanon
and an intensive training of
their anti-aircraft units. The
members of these units will
deploy in few months inside the
Palestinian autonomous areas.’

“The sources did not specify
how the Syrian-trained
anti-aircraft units will receive
their weapons under the
Israeli-PLO military
arrangements. In return, said the
sources, ‘the Syrians
have requested the deployment of
technical operatives inside the
West Bank.’ According to
the same sources, the Syrian
intelligence services are
planning to establish networks
within the Palestinian
territories under the protection
of the PLO security apparatus.

“These Syrian groups will be
granted Palestinian IDs, and will
serve as ‘military attaches’ for
training and advising. In
Lebanon, a number of Lebanese
officers feared this development
will reassert the prominence of
PLO cadres. But the Lebanese
military intelligence, under the
full control of Colonel Jamil
Sayyed, the Shiite number two of
the [Syrian] state security, will
‘make sure to implement the
agreement at any costs,’ asserted
the sources.”

What is more, according to a report
entitled, “Approaching the
New Cycle of Arab-Israeli Fighting,”
released on 10 December by the U.S. House
of Representatives’ Task Force on
Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare:

“In late September, the
Palestinian factor was added to
the joint preparations [between
Syria, Iraq and Iran for war with
Israel] when the
Palestinian Authorities (PA)
entered into a major military
agreement with Syria.
Significantly, this agreement is
between the PA, and not
the PLO, and Syria — thus
explicitly committing the
Palestinian forces in the
territories. The essence
of the agreement is for the
Palestinian ‘police’ forces and
other armed elements (terrorist
organizations) to flare-up the
Israeli interior in case of an
escalation in the north….

“Meanwhile, the
PLO’s preparations for an
imminent war are evident.
In Gaza, Arafat ordered the
marked acceleration of the
building of a personal command
bunker, four stories deep.
Moreover, the PLO is rapidly
building all over Gaza a chain of
command centers, ammunition and
weapons-storage areas — all of
them underground and well
fortified to even withstand
Israeli bombing and shelling. The
PA’s security services are also
accumulating large stockpiles of
anti-tank and anti-aircraft
weapons, including missiles, even
though they are forbidden by the
Oslo Accords.”

The Bottom Line

As the Center for Security Policy
noted in its recent Decision
Brief entitled What
is U.S. Policy Toward Syria?
(No. 97-T 2, 3
January 1997), the United States must
urgently reconsider its approach to
Damascus in light of Syria’s increasingly
threatening behavior toward Israel.
Palestinian Arab collaboration with Syria
in some of that ominous activity
compounds concerns aroused by Arafat’s
ongoing failure to honor his commitments
assumed as part of the “peace
process” and the threatening steps
being taken by PLO/PA in its own right.

Taken together, these
developments argue for an overhaul of
U.S. policy toward Arafat & Company,
as well. At a minimum, such a
revision must include an immediate
cessation of American aid to the PLO and
of pressure on Israel to continue to make
concessions in a unilateral –and ever
more palpably futile — quest for peace.

– 30 –

1. For more on
this flim-flam, see the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled, Besmirching
the Oval Office: Clinton-Arafat Meeting
Propounds the ‘Big Lie’ ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_43″>No. 96-D 43,
3 May 1996).

2. The Clinton
Administration nonetheless reported last
week to Congress that, in the words of
the Jerusalem Post, “the
just-reached Hebron accord ‘erected a
solid foundation’ for continued
Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, and
demonstrated that the PA ‘is committed to
good faith negotiations with Israel.’ The
report also ‘stated that the PA has taken
‘numerous concrete measures’ to prevent
terrorist attacks and found that the PLO
and the PA ‘have – on the whole – taken
steps to carry out their commitments and
otherwise taken the steps called for in
Middle East Peace Facilitation
Act.'”