What Really Ails the Mideast Peace Process: The Palestinians’ Abiding Determination to Destroy Israel

(Washington, D.C.): The latest outbreak of Palestinian-Israeli violence in Hebron is being
portrayed by the Clinton Administration, the international media and others as a product of Arab
frustration with the “breakdown of the peace process.” This formulation relieves the Palestinian
Arabs of responsibility for their criminal activity. And it implicitly places the blame on Israel for
failing to move swiftly or generously enough on the surrendering of further territory to Yasser
Arafat’s Palestinian Authority (PA). These are dangerous misconceptions that will, if left
uncorrected, ensure that there is no peace in the Middle East — and, perhaps, ultimately no
Israel.

The PLO’s Unaltered Pursuit of the ‘Phased Plan’

The real problem is not the pace of Israeli territorial concessions to and other forms of
appeasement of the PLO. Rather, it is the fact that the Palestinian Arabs are being encouraged
to believe that such concessions — and indeed the “peace process” itself — are not about
ending conflict with Israel but about destroying the Jewish State.

As the invaluable Zionist Organization of America noted in a release issued on
8 January 1998, Arafat started the New Year by telling an interviewer from the Palestinian Arab
newspaper Al Ayyam on 1 January: “Since the decision of the Palestinian National Council at its
12^th meeting in 1974, the PLO has adopted the political solution of establishing a National
Authority over any territory from which the occupation withdraws.”

As the ZOA release notes, this reference is to “the ‘Strategy of Phases’ [which] was adopted by
the PLO’s National Council at it session in Cairo during June 1-8, 1974.”

“Prior to the 1974 meeting, the PLO’s position was that it would never accept anything
but the immediate destruction of Israel. At the 1974 meeting, the PLO decided to
seek Israel’s destruction in phases, by first establishing a small PLO state, then later
seeking to conquer the rest of Israel. Point #2 of its 10-point 1974 platform declared
that the PLO should create a ‘national, independent fighting authority on every part of
the Palestinian land to be liberated.’ Point #8 explains that ‘the Palestinian national
entity, after it comes into existence,’ will seek ‘to complete the liberation of the
entire Palestinian soil.’” (Emphasis added.)

An even more explicit reaffirmation of the Plan of Phases was provided by Abdul Asis
Shaheen, Arafat’s Minister of Supplies in the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat
Al-Jadida on 4 January 1998: “The Oslo accord was a preface for the Palestinian Authority
and the Palestinian Authority will be a preface for the Palestinian state which, in its turn,
will be a preface for the liberation of the entire Palestinian land.” (Emphasis added.)

The ‘Peace Process’ as Suicide Pact for Israel

Such statements — of which there are innumerable other examples (including infamous remarks by
Arafat to Jordanian and Egyptian media on the very day he signed the Oslo accords in which he
called those accords part of the Plan of Phases) — bespeak cynicism: Palestinian participation in
the “peace process” as nothing more than a continuation of the war of liberation of “Palestine”
through other means. They illustrate once again the attitudes towards Israel being inculcated in
the Palestinian Arab population by their leaders, namely a predisposition for war, not peaceful
coexistence.

Another manifestation of this predisposition are the maps of “Palestine” routinely employed by the
Palestinian Authority. These maps — which appear, among other places, on the uniforms of
Palestinian “police,” as backdrops on Palestinian television broadcasts, on the memorials to
“martyrs” of the Intefada, and as official depictions in Arafat’s office and other PA facilities —
show not only the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as “Palestine” but also all of pre-1967 Israel. In short, in the most simple and direct manner possible, the PLO is encouraging the
Palestinian Arabs to believe that the liberation of all of “Palestine” remains its unwavering
objective.

Under these circumstances, further territorial concessions by Israel will only increase the
danger the Palestinian entity will pose to the Jewish State. They will also compound the
difficulty and costs the Israeli Defense Forces will face in dealing with the vastly greater
bloodshed and mayhem sure to follow from the second phase of the Plan of Phases.

The Bottom Line

If the United States persists in its current effort to bludgeon the Israeli government into making
such concessions, it will bear no small responsibility for the tragic events to come. Unfortunately,
it will likely fall to Israel alone to pay the price in lives lost, property damaged and national
treasure squandered.

Unless the U.S. government denounces the Palestinian practice of teaching and preaching war,
rather than peaceful coexistence, at least some of the Israeli blood to be lost will be on American
hands. It is relatively easy to determine that this practice of using symbols and rhetoric calculated
to whet revanchist Palestinian Arab appetites has been formally eschewed and halted by the PA.
And if it has not, no amount of lip-service paid by Palestinian officials to their ostensible goals of
“fighting terrorism” and “increasing Israel’s security” will have any significant impact. Until at a
minimum this odious Palestinian practice is halted, Israel should not make further concessions —
and the United States should stop insisting that it do so.

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