In spite of the fact that Arabs have been slaughtering Jews since the late 1880’s, Barack Hussein Obama blames Israel for the 1967 “occupation” even though Israel was attacked first in a coordinated aggression that started when Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran and Arab armies amassed on Israel’s borders to invade and liquidate the state.

The West Bank and Gaza, which were controlled by Jordan and Egypt from 1948 to 1967 came under Israeli control only during the Six Day War of 1967 and it is important to note that during their 19-year rule, neither Jordan nor Egypt made any effort to establish a Palestinian state on those lands. Israel has, in fact, returned most of the land that it captured during the 1967 war and right after that war offered to return all of it in exchange for peace and normal relations; the offer has been rejected multiple times.

The land that Obama calls Palestine is formerly a part of Jordan.  Sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel and three years before the Six Day War in 1967, Fatah was founded in 1964 with Arafat as one of its founding members.  Unless causality has no meaning, the ongoing war against Israel was born with no reference to 1967 but, rather, with Jews living in their own indigenous homeland and Israel’s re-birth in 1948.

The fact that Jews in the British Mandate have been attacked by Arabs since the early 1900’s -  was not because of any territorial dispute – but is because Jews exist.

In fact, Arabs themselves are occupiers in the Middle East – Arabs belong in Arabia and have no right to Egypt, Syria, Jordan, or Lebanon, so Obama needs to be corrected and reminded that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not Israeli-occupied territory but Arab-occupied territory.

With the exception of Egypt, all the countries of the Middle East are artificial creations. After World War I, England and France carved up the Ottoman Empire, with England retaining what are now Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Iraq, and France being in possession of what are now Syria and Lebanon.

But because Obama has Muslim roots, he will keep diapering and bottle feeding palestinians and will never admit that palestinians are not exactly chained to their homicide belts and kassam rockets.

Obama needs to answer this:

If Israel is responsible for Muslim wrath, please explain what Israel did to encourage Syria to swallow Lebanon, to encourage Saddam Hussein to unleash a bloodbath against Iran, to encourage Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, to encourage Kuwait to expel hundreds of thousands of “palestinians”, to encourage the Taliban to destroy the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, to encourage the slaughter of Christians in the Sudan, to encourage the bombings in Bali that killed 202 people, to encourage church bombings in Pakistan, or to blow up 200 Indians on the railroad system in Bombay.

The oft-repeated Arab claim that the Israeli ‘occupation’ is somehow to blame for being the root cause of palestinian terrorism is nothing more than an empty retort, repudiated by the facts, and disproved by a century of historical reality.

Obama needs to learn about the longest running war, the war of
hatred that Arabs have perpetrated upon Jews including the 1929 Hebron Massacre when Arabs shot and murdered 66 innocent Jewish men, women and children while praying in a synagogue in Hebron, before there was an “occupation”.

To those of us disgusted with the demonization of Israel, the Nazification of
Zionism, the politicization of all things Israeli, the Arab oversimplification reducing all discussions of Israel to the “palestinian problem”,
we have assholes like Obama telling us how to think, feel, react, emote,
and otherwise curl up and go submissive, while he sprinkles his
speeches with historical revisionism in foreign countries.  What a detestable fraud he is.

There is nothing more disgusting than Muslims who de-legitimize non-Muslims.

The fact of the matter is that it’s not Israel that causes MidEast unrest, it’s Islam.  Islam is unhinged.  It is the global Muslim rejection of Israel’s right to exist and not Israeli policies that are the cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

How detestable that we have a president, a World Citizen, who denies how mohammedans are ethnically cleansing Gaza, Lebanon and TransJordan of the indigenous Jews from their ancient homeland of Israel with genocidal Muslim zombies raised on milk from their mother’s breast full of hatred for the infidel.

It’s too bad that Obama’s own Muslim identity politics interferes with his ability to know facts and history.  But that’s who America elected.  It is outrageous in the extreme that the US has a president that accepts a scheme that would permit Arabs to have an ethnically cleansed geographical region where no Jews can live.

Thank goodness for two-term presidential limits.

Via JPost:

President Obama’s speech at the UN, with its reference to ending “the occupation that began in 1967,” implies, perhaps unintentionally, that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is the cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This clearly inverts cause and effect. Terrorist activities against Israel had started years before the “occupation,” and the PLO, committed to the destruction of the Jewish state, was founded in 1964.

On May 13, 1967, the Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdel Nasser announced that two Egyptian divisions would move into the Sinai Peninsula bordering on southern Israel – contrary to international agreements, U.S. commitments and UN guarantees. Shortly after, Cairo announced that it would block all shipping to the port of Eilat, Israel’s only maritime outlet in the south, while Egyptian Mig21 war planes began flying over Israeli territory. Concurrently, Syrian and Iraqi forces were ordered to prepare for an assault on northern Israel. On May 30, King Hussein of Jordan signed a military agreement with Egypt’s Nasser, including a Jordanian commitment to join Egypt in any war with Israel. Its “Arab Legion” was put under Egyptian command.

The rest is history. Israel achieved complete victory in a war of legitimate self-defense against blatant aggression whose declared aim had been its obliteration. Successive American leaders declared that Israel should never be asked to go back to its former vulnerable borders. This is what 1967 is all about: not “ending” occupation, but making sure that Israel will never again be put in a situation like the one it faced in 1967.

The Yom Kippur War was October 6 – 24, 1973.  It is not the same as the Six Day War.  The Six Day War was in 1967.

In 1971, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat raised the possibility of signing an agreement with Israel, provided that all the occupied territories were returned by the Israelis. No progress toward peace was made, however, so, the following year, Sadat said war was inevitable and he was prepared to sacrifice one million soldiers in the showdown with Israel. His threat did not materialize that year.

Throughout 1972, and for much of 1973, Sadat threatened war unless the United States forced Israel to accept his interpretation of Resolution 242- total Israeli withdrawal from territories taken in 1967.

Simultaneously, the Egyptian leader carried on a diplomatic offensive among European and African states to win support for his cause. He appealed to the Soviets to bring pressure on the United States and to provide Egypt with more offensive weapons to cross the Suez Canal. The Soviet Union was more interested in maintaining the appearance of detente with the United States than in confrontation in the Middle East; therefore, it rejected Sadat’s demands. Sadat’s response was to abruptly expel approximately 20,000 Soviet advisers from Egypt.

In an April 1973 interview, Sadat again warned he would renew the war. But it was the same threat he had made in 1971 and 1972, and most observers remained skeptical.

On October 6, 1973 — Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — Egypt and Syria opened a coordinated surprise attack against Israel. The equivalent of the total forces of NATO in Europe were mobilized on Israel’s borders. On the Golan Heights, approximately 180 Israeli tanks faced an onslaught of 1,400 Syrian tanks. Along the Suez Canal, fewer than 500 Israeli defenders were attacked by 80,000 Egyptians.

At least nine Arab states, including four non-Middle Eastern nations, actively aided the Egyptian-Syrian war effort.

A few months before the Yom Kippur War, Iraq transferred a squadron of Hunter jets to Egypt. During the war, an Iraqi division of some 18,000 men and several hundred tanks was deployed in the central Golan and participated in the October 16 attack against Israeli positions. Iraqi MiGs began operating over the Golan Heights as early as October 8, the third day of the war.

Besides serving as financial underwriters, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait committed men to battle. A Saudi brigade of approximately 3,000 troops was dispatched to Syria, where it participated in fighting along the approaches to Damascus. Also, violating Paris’s ban on the transfer of French-made weapons, Libya sent Mirage fighters to Egypt (from 1971-­1973, President Muammar Qaddafi gave Cairo more than $1 billion in aid to rearm Egypt and to pay the Soviets for weapons delivered).

Other North African countries responded to Arab and Soviet calls to aid the front­line states. Algeria sent three aircraft squadrons of fighters and bombers, an armored brigade and 150 tanks. Approximately 1,000-2,000 Tunisian soldiers were positioned in the Nile Delta. Sudan stationed 3,500 troops in southern Egypt, and Morocco sent three brigades to the front lines, including 2,500 men to Syria.

Lebanese radar units were used by Syrian air defense forces. Lebanon also allowed Palestinian terrorists to shell Israeli civilian settlements from its territory. Palestinians fought on the Southern Front with the Egyptians and Kuwaitis.

The least enthusiastic participant in the October fighting was probably Jordan’s King Hussein, who apparently had been kept uninformed of Egyptian and Syrian war plans. But Hussein did send two of his best units — the 40th and 60th Armored Brigades — to Syria. This force took positions in the southern sector, defending the main Amman-Damascus route and attacking Israeli positions along the Kuneitra-Sassa road on October 16. Three Jordanian artillery batteries also participated in the assault, carried out by nearly 100 tanks.

Thrown onto the defensive during the first two days of fighting, Israel mobilized its reserves and eventually repulsed the invaders and carried the war deep into Syria and Egypt. The Arab states were swiftly resupplied by sea and air from the Soviet Union, which rejected U.S. efforts to work toward an immediate cease­fire. As a result, the United States belatedly began its own airlift to Israel. Two weeks later, Egypt was saved from a disastrous defeat by the UN Security Council, which had failed to act while the tide was in the Arabs’ favor.
The Soviet Union showed no interest in initiating peacemaking efforts while it looked like the Arabs might win. The same was true for UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. (Waldheim’s service with a World War II German army unit guilty of war crimes in the Balkans resulted in his being barred from entering the United States after his election as President of Austria).

On October 22, the Security Council adopted Resolution 338 calling for “all parties to the present fighting to cease all firing and terminate all military activity immediately.” The vote came on the day that Israeli forces cut off and isolated the Egyptian Third Army and were in a position to destroy it.

Despite the Israel Defense Forces‘ ultimate success on the battlefield, the war was considered a diplomatic and military failure. A total of 2,688 soldiers were killed.

Maps: The Pedagogic Center, The Department for Jewish Zionist Education, The Jewish Agency for Israel, (c) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000.

——————————-
Gratefully reprinted from The Yom Kippur War by Mitchell Bard, courtesy of The Jewish Virtual Library

What happened in 1967 that caused Israel’s borders to change? Did Israel just decide they wanted more land?

No.  Israel was attacked by warring Arab Muslim nations.

But before we discuss 1967, let’s roll back the clock to the year 1917. 1917 is the year Great Britain issued the Balfour Declaration which stated that the British government favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. . . .”

As you may already know, Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for 400 years before the British came along in 1917. At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire and other imperial powers agreed to surrender their colonies. In 1919, Emir Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein who led the Arab revolt against Turkey, signed a declaration in support of the Balfour Declaration, even supporting all necessary measures “…to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale, and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of the soil.”

As a result, Great Britain issued the British White Paper of June 1922, agreeing to give Arabs almost 80% of Palestine, which was severed from the rest of the colony and called Transjordan (later re-named Jordan). All of the land given to Arabs was to the east of the River Jordan. Then came The Palestine Mandate. It is from this time that the Arabs living in this area get the name Palestinians. Of course, at that time the Jews living in the region of the Palestine Mandate were called Palestinians too.

In August of 1929, due to the instigation of Muslim clerics in the mosques, a series of riots broke out in which many Jews were massacred. In the Jewish Holy City of Hebron, 67 innocent men, women and children were slaughtered by Arabs while praying in their synagogue. The 1930s saw more rioting and more massacres, especially in Jaffa and again in Hebron. In response, the British convened the Peel Commission which almost totally did away with the Balfour Declaration that had originally promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine on both sides of the River Jordan.

In July of 1937, the Peel Commission issued a report that gave Jews only a tiny, 1-3 mile strip of land that could not possibly become the Jewish National Home because it was far too small and included only one major city – Haifa, but not Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, etc. It also included a small piece in the north abutting the west side of the Lake Kineret (“Sea of Galilee”). Such actions went totally against Article 5 of the Mandate which explicitly state that the British shall not divide the land.

This was an example of British perfidy at its worst. The Brits betrayed their legal document, their legal contract, with the Palestinian Jews.

The Arabs greeted the Peel Commission recommendation with a revolt which lasted until 1939. In 1939, Britain issued the White Paper of 1939 almost shutting down Jewish immigration, thus violating the League of Nations Mandate which calls on the Brits to promote Jewish immigration. The White Paper of 1939 also stated that Palestine shall not become a Jewish National Home and instead should be converted into an Arab state. From a legal point of view, UN resolutions were not needed to establish a Jewish state in Palestine because such state could be legally based on the League’s Mandate.

And that’s when on November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly passed resolution 181 recommending division of the land given to Jews under the Mandate. Great Britain did not support the resolution. From a political and practical point of view, the 1947 U.N. partition plan served as reason for the legal declaration of a Jewish State.

However, the 1967 lines are not a border. After the 1947- 48 war, the Arabs refused to recognize Israel, and insisted the boundaries were only ceasefire lines, and this remained their legal status. The eastern borders of Israel are yet to be decided. Moreover, UN Resolution 242, the foundation stone of Arab-Israeli negotiations, explicitly avoided requiring an Israeli retreat to the 1967 lines, its drafters believing those were indefensible.

Resolution 242 calls for the recognition of Israel’s right to exist, an end to the state of war maintained by the Arab world against Israel and secure and recognized boundaries for Israel. 242 does NOT require Israel to return to the non-secure borders of pre-1967.

What does 242 say?

“Termination of all claims or states of belligerency… ”
“…respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every State in the area… ”
“…[every State's] right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”
“Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories in the recent conflict.”

What does 242 mean?

- The Arab states must end the state of war initiated and maintained by them since 1948.
- The Arab states must recognize Israel’s right to exist.
- Israel is entitled to clearly defensible borders.

This is not a privilege, but rather a right guaranteed by international law.

- Israel should withdraw from some, not all, of the territories captured in the 1967 Six-Day War.
- Israel’s indefensible pre-1967 borders provided no security.
- The Arab states should sit down with Israel, without preconditions, to negotiate peace.

A few days before the UNSC vote on 242, President Johnson summoned UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg and Undersecretary Eugene Rostow to formulate the US position on the issue of ’secure boundaries’ for Israel. They were presented with the Pentagon Map, which had been prepared by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle Wheeler. The map displayed the “minimum territory needed by Israel for defensive purposes,” which included the entire Golan Heights and the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria. The participants of the meeting agreed that the Pentagon Map fulfilled the requirements of 242 for ’secure borders.’ (Prof. Ezra Sohar, A Concubine in the Middle East, Geffen Publishing, p. 39; Makor Rishon weekly, March 10, 2000).

242 does not refer at all the 1949/1967 Lines;
242 mandates negotiation – give and take, rather than give and give;
242 never refers to withdrawal from ALL the territories, which would negate the principle of negotiation;

242 calls for the introduction of a NEW reality of ’secure and recognized borders’, which indicates that the OLD reality of the 1949/1967 Lines is neither secure nor recognized.

The reality is that if Israel is to protect itself, it must achieve a comprehensive military victory over the Palestinians, so that the latter give up their goal of obliterating it.

Not one of the land suggestions addresses the real problem: the Palestinians’ conviction that, by continuing to hammer away at Israel, they can defeat and destroy it. Every piece of evidence suggests and every opinion poll confirms that the Palestinian assault on Israel is a wildly popular undertaking.

Ending the Palestinian assault will be achieved not through some negotiated breakthrough but by Palestinians (and Arabic-speakers more generally) concluding that their effort to destroy the Jewish state will fail, and so give up this ambition. There is a war under way, but nearly all prefer to ignore this unpleasant reality, preferring instead to suggest meaningless fixes and solutions.

Let’s not leave out the San Remo Resolution. The last legally binding document to be adopted regarding the areas of Israel in question remains the 1920 San Remo resolution, which deeds full sovereignty to the Jewish people. This resolution, consisting of the Balfour Declaration and Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, is the basic document upon which the Mandate for Palestine was constructed. The San Remo Resolution concerning Palestine and the Jewish National Home was adopted at the San Remo Peace Conference on April 25, 1920 by the four Principal Allied Powers of World War I who were represented by the Prime Ministers of Britain (David Lloyd George), France (Alexandre Millerand) and Italy (Francesco Nitti) and by the Ambassador of Japan (K. Matsui).

The Resolution was a binding agreement between these Powers to reconstitute the ancient Jewish State within its historic borders “from Dan to Beersheba”, an agreement that was incorporated into the Treaty of Sevres and the Mandate for Palestine.

But it really is futile to have a discussion about a “legalized framework” when a “legalized framework” was already in place with document after document after document that I cited above.

The Arabs have deceived the world for decades with their mendacious protests that their land has been “stolen” from them. One might take such proclamations seriously if it came from a pacifist people such as the Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by the Communist Chinese in 1950.

The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic; who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964—sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel and three years before the Six Day War in 1967; and who to this moment continue to seek Israel’s destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the creation of the manufactured entity of “palestine”, the Arab state they demand.

The only religious argument that makes sense is to point out how so many Jewish holy places exist in Israel. It’s hardly irrational that Jews should want to live near the Wailing Wall or other sites of great importance in Jewish history and Jewish religion, particularly given how poorly Muslims have treated such sites.

The fact is that the West Bank and Gaza were annexed by Jordan and Egypt fifty years ago with no Arab complaints. Israel has absorbed a million Jewish refugees from Arab lands and the Soviet Union with no complaints. The 3.7 million seething refugees who live abject poverty on the West Bank, and who have received more than a billion dollars in aid from Israel and the rest of the world are refugees only because the Arab states themselves have rejected them and kept them in poverty so they can be cannon fodder for the holy war to push the Jews into the sea. The “Palestinian problem,” is entirely a creation of the Arabs themselves, a product of their refusal to live side by side with any infidels they think they can destroy. If they want peace, they can start with rejecting the Hamas Covenant and the Palestinian National Charter, the only document that I know of where a state defines its national vision by calling for the destruction of another state.

I don’t believe in a two-state solution at all, and a one-state solution with the “law of return” will turn the entire nation of Israel into a land where only Arabs may live – with the goal to supplant Israel – not to live side by side with it. Therefore, there is no solution.

On the site called Israel-Arab Conflict FAQ, there is an introduction and it reads:

“Israel has been losing the media war in regards to the Israeli-Arab conflict. This simple ‘Question and Answer’ formatted document is meant to help people argue and debase Arab and Palestinian claims.”

Question #17 on the FAQ is: What are Israel’s legal rights and title to Yehuda, Shomron and Azza?

The answer to this question outlines the (at least) triple underpinning of sovereignty Israel has in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. (In east Jerusalem, Israel has no less than a quadruple underpinning of sovereignty, since its annexation under the Jerusalem Proclamation (Extension of Municipal Boundaries) of June 28, 1967. )

Attorney Howard Grief’s original thesis is “that sovereignty over all of the Land of Israel or Palestine was vested in the Jewish People as a direct result of the adoption of the San Remo Resolution by Britain, France, Italy and Japan on April 24-25, 1920.”

The San Remo Resolution was inserted into the preamble of the Palestine Mandate and confirmed by 52 states.

This view finds support in Israeli constitutional law and the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel [See Howard Grief, "A Petition to the Supreme Court of Israel Challenging the Legality of the Oslo Accords," International Journal of Statesmanship (Foundation for Constitutional Democracy), Vol. I, No. 2, Summer 1996, Part 1, Division A, Chapter 5.].

Even though the Palestine Mandate was terminated in 1948, the rights that it gave to the Jewish people to develop “close settlement” in Yehuda, Shomron and Azza remain intact. Howard Grief explains, “Under the principle of acquired legal rights, though the international instrument upon which those rights were founded did indeed expire, the rights themselves conferred on the Jewish People remained in force. This principle of international law is now codified in Article 70(1)(b) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.”

Unlike the previous view, ignored in each of the following analyses is the interpretation of de-facto sovereignty abated during Jordan and Egypt’s occupation and reserved for the Jewish people (Cf. Alan Levine, “The Status of Sovereignty in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3, Winter 1972, p.495.):

“They include: (1) The rule that would attribute sovereign title in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza to Israel, by virtue of the fact that Israel is the state in lawful possession of territory affected by a “sovereignty vacuum” (view of E. Lauterpacht); (2) The rule that in a situation of disputed sovereignty that state is entitled that can establish the best title thereto, a rule well recognized by the International Court of Justice; (3) The rule that a state in lawful possession of territory to which no other sovereign has a supportable claim of sovereignty is entitled to take the step of formal annexation” (Julius Stone, Israel and Palestine: Assault on the Law of Nations. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1981, pp. 168-169.). The first two of these views “conclude that under international law, sovereignty is already vested in Israel” (Ibid., p. 116.).

For a comprehensive treatment of these and related issues, an excellent online resource is Israel White Paper.

In the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Arab states launched a surprise attack against Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

Once again they tried to eliminate Israel, further motivated this time by the desire to redeem their honor after their major defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Though Israel was initially caught off guard, it then regrouped and repelled the Arab attack, but not before incurring heavy casualties. The war convinced the Arabs that they would not be able to destroy Israel militarily within its post-1967 boundaries. Thus they embarked upon a new three-stage strategy for Israel’s destruction, embodied in the PLO’s 1974 decision commonly known as the Phased Plan (the text of which is below).

The plan in brief:

1.Through the “armed struggle” (i.e., terrorism), to establish an “independent combatant national authority” over any territory that is “liberated” from Israeli rule.

(Article 2) 2.To continue the struggle against Israel, using the territory of the national authority as a base of operations.

(Article 4) 3.To provoke an all-out war in which Israel’s Arab neighbors destroy it entirely (“liberate all Palestinian territory”).

Today, the Phased Plan remains relevant. Speaking just after the 1993 revelation of the Israel-PLO accord, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat announced that the historic agreement “will be a basis for an independent Palestinian state in accordance with the Palestine National Council resolution issued in 1974…. The PNC resolution issued in 1974 calls for the establishment of a national authority on any part of Palestinian soil from which Israel withdraws or
which is liberated.” (Radio Monte Carlo, 1 September 1993)

It is worth noting that the PLO’s term for the self-rule council now in place in Gaza and the West Bank is the “Palestinian National Authority,” echoing the language of the Phased Plan.

Also note that Articles 5-6 call for a revolution in Jordan to establish a new Jordanian regime which will ally itself with the Palestinian National Authority. Historically, Jordan comprised the bulk of the Palestine territory, and a majority of its residents are of Palestinian origin. The PLO has never recognized the legitimacy of Kingdom of Jordan as a state independent of Palestine.

Full Text of the Phased Plan:

Political Programme
Adopted at the 12th Session of the Palestinian National Council Cairo, June 9, 1974

Text of the Phased Plan resolution:
The Palestinian National Council:

On the basis of the Palestinian National Charter and the Political Programme drawn up at the eleventh session, held from January 6-12, 1973; and from its belief that it is impossible for a permanent and just peace to be established in the area unless our Palestinian people recover all their national rights and, first and foremost, their rights to return and to self-determination on the whole of the soil of their homeland; and in the light of a study of the new political circumstances that have come into existence in the period between the Council’s last and present sessions, resolves the following:

1.To reaffirm the Palestine Liberation Organization’s previous attitude to Resolution 242, which obliterates the national right of our people and deals with the cause of our people as a problem of refugees. The Council therefore refuses to have anything to do with this resolution at any level, Arab or international, including the Geneva Conference.

2.The Liberation Organization will employ all means, and first and foremost armed struggle, to liberate Palestinian territory and to establish the independent combatant national authority for the people over every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated. This will require further changes being effected in the balance of power in favor of our people and their struggle.

3.The Liberation Organization will struggle against any proposal for a Palestinian entity the price of which is recognition, peace, secure frontiers, renunciation of national rights and the deprival of our people of their right to return and their right to self-determination on the soil of their homeland.

4.Any step taken towards liberation is a step towards the realization of the Liberation Organization’s strategy of establishing the democratic Palestinian state specified in the resolutions of previous Palestinian National Councils.

5.Struggle along with the Jordanian national forces to establish a Jordanian-Palestinian national front whose aim will be to set up in Jordan a democratic national authority in close contact with the Palestinian entity that is established through the struggle.

6.The Liberation Organization will struggle to establish unity in struggle between the two peoples and between all the forces of the Arab liberation movement that are in agreement on this programme.

7.In the light of this programme, the Liberation Organization will struggle to strengthen national unity and to raise it to the level where it will be able to perform its national duties and tasks.

8.Once it is established, the Palestinian national authority will strive to achieve a union of the confrontation countries, with the aim of completing the liberation of all Palestinian territory, and as a step along the road to comprehensive Arab unity.

9.The Liberation Organization will strive to strengthen its solidarity with the socialist countries, and with forces of liberation and progress throughout the world, with the aim of frustration all the schemes of Zionism, reaction and imperialism.

10.In light of this programme, the leadership of the revolution will determine the tactics which will serve and make possible the realization of these objectives.

The Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization will make every effort to implement this programme, and should a situation arise affecting the destiny and the future of the Palestinian people, the National Assembly will be convened in extraordinary session.