About that rumor that Hamas is ready to accept Israel as a legitimate and sovereign nation? Forget about it. It ain’t gonna happen. Via Al Bawaba-Jordan:

Hamas on Thursday denied a report in an Israeli newspaper that it is ready to accept Israel’s right to exist. Dr. Aziz Dwaik, Hamas’ senior representative in the West Bank and speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, told the Hamas website on Thursday that the report quoting him was “inaccurate.”

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.

HonestReporting’s biography, with links to important sources.

EARLY LIFE

It’s ironic that the man who personified the Palestinian movement was neither born in the region it claims, nor conforms to his own organization’s definition of Palestinian identity. Yassir Arafat, whose real name is Abdel-Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, was born in August 1929 in Cairo, son of an Egyptian textile merchant. He was sent to Jerusalem as a small child after his mother died, then returned to Egypt via Gaza.

Throughout his career, Arafat’s Egyptian background was a political impediment and source of personal embarrassment. One biographer notes that upon first meeting him in 1967, ‘West Bankers did not like his Egyptian accent and ways and found them alien,’ and to the very end Arafat employed an aide to translate his Egyptian dialect into Palestinian Arabic for conversing with his West Bank and Gaza subjects.

As a young man, Arafat took no part in the formative experience of the Palestinian movement ― the 1948 Arab-Israeli war ― but he would nonetheless claim refugee status throughout his life: ‘I am a refugee,’ he cried out in a 1969 interview, ‘Do you know what it means to be a refugee? I am a poor and helpless man. I have nothing, for I was expelled and dispossessed of my homeland.’ (Arafat’s congenital lying would continue for decades.)

FATAH AND THE PLO

In the mid-1950s, Arafat joined the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, then rose to the head of the Palestine Student Union at the University of Cairo. In the late 1950s Arafat moved to Kuwait,

where he co-founded Fatah (‘Palestine National Liberation Movement’ ― an acronym meaning ‘conquest’), the faction that would later gain control over the entire Palestinian movement. Fatah’s motley ranks of Islamists, communists and pan-Arabists expanded via brute violence. ‘People aren’t attracted to speeches, but rather to bullets,’ Arafat quipped at this stage. (At right: Fatah logo of rifles and grenades over Israel)

Fatah began military-style training in Syria and Algeria in 1964, and the following year tried unsuccessfully to blow up a major Israeli water pump. Fatah’s stated goal was the obliteration of the State of Israel, and well before the 1967 war would supply a pretext, Arafat’s organization repeatedly attacked Israeli buses, homes, villages and rail lines.

This violence against Israeli civilians was a pillar of the Palestinian National Covenant (the foundational charter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization – PLO), which states that ‘the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence’ and that ‘armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine and is therefore a strategy and not a tactic.’ (Despite repeated Palestinian commitments in the late 1990s to annul these sections of the covenant, it was never officially changed.)

Arafat’s public profile got a boost in 1968, when the IDF raided a Fatah terrorist stronghold in the Jordanian village of al-Karameh. The uniformed,
keffiyah-clad Arafat took this opportunity to project himself as a fearless Arab leader who, despite the post-Six Day War gloom, dared to confront the Israelis. The image stuck, and Fatah’s numbers swelled with new recruits.

Arafat and Fatah consolidated power through bribery, extortion and murder, and at the Palestinian National Congress in Cairo in February 1969, Arafat was appointed head of the PLO― a position he would never relinquish.

JORDAN, LEBANON AND TUNISIA
By the late 1960s, heavily-armed, Arafat-led Palestinians had formed a terrorist ‘state within a state’ in Jordan, not only attacking Israeli civilian targets, but also seizing control of Jordanian infrastructure.
The tension reached a height during late 1970, when Jordan’s King Hussein cracked down on the Palestinian factions. During this bloody conflict, known as ‘Black” September’, Palestinians hijacked four Western airliners and blew one up on a Cairo runway (pictured at right), to both embarrass the Egyptians and Jordanians and, in their words, ‘teach the Americans a lesson for their long-standing support of Israel.’ With the broad publicity this generated, Arafat had hit the world stage.

When King Hussein drove Arafat’s faction out of his Jordanian kingdom (causing thousands of civilian deaths), they relocated in Lebanon. As in Jordan, Arafat soon triggered a bloody civil war in his previously stable host country. Simultaneously, the PLO launched intermittent attacks on Israeli towns from southern Lebanese positions.

Yassir Arafat then brought the high-profile terrorist act to western soil. In Sept. 1972, Fatah-backed terrorists kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic games. And in 1973, Arafat ordered his operatives in the Khartoum, Sudan office of Fatah to abduct and murder US Ambassador Cleo Noel and two other diplomats. (In 2004, the FBI finally opened an official investigation against Arafat for the Khartoum murders.)
The wanton violence fueled Arafat’s political goals, as his presence on the world stage grew: In 1974, he became the first representative of a nongovernmental organization to address a plenary session of the UN General Assembly (pictured at left) In the speech, with a gun holster strapped to his hip, Arafat compared himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Arab heads of states declared the PLO the sole legitimate representative of all Palestinians, the PLO was granted full membership in the Arab League in 1976, and by 1980 was fully recognized by European nations.

In 1978-82, the IDF invaded Lebanon to root out PLO groups that had continually terrorized the northern Israeli populace. The U.S. brokered a cease-fire deal in which Arafat and the PLO were allowed to leave Lebanon; Arafat and the PLO leadership eventually settled in Tunisia, which remained his center of operations until 1993.
During the 1980s, Arafat received financial assistance from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which allowed him to rebuild the battered PLO. This was particularly useful during the first Palestinian intifada in 1987 ― Arafat took control of the violence from afar, and it was mainly due to Fatah forces in the West Bank that the anti-Israel terror and civil unrest could be maintained. Arafat would then become nearly the only world leader to support Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War. (Saddam would later repay this loyalty by sending $25,000 checks to families of Palestinian suicide bombers.)

THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

In the early 1990s, the U.S. led Israel and the PLO to negotiations that spawned the 1993 Oslo Accords, an agreement that called for the implementation of Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a five-year period. The following year Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

In 1994, Arafat moved his headquarters to the West Bank and Gaza to run the Palestinian Authority, an entity created by the Oslo Accords. Arafat brought with him from Tunisia an aging PLO leadership that would bolster his ongoing monopoly over all Palestinian funds, power and authority. Elections in 1996 extended Arafat’s control over the PA, but under the Oslo agreement, the term of that candidacy ended in 1999. Arafat never allowed new elections to take place.

While Israel went about implementing its side of the Oslo agreements ― removing troops from nearly all Palestinian areas, recognizing the PA, and educating for peace ― the PA utterly failed to live up to its commitment to renounce and uproot anti-Israel terrorism. Instead, unprecedented incitement from Arafat’s official PA media and school textbooks, and active and passive PA support for terrorist groups led to a string of suicide bombings in the mid-1990s that killed scores of Israeli civilians. In October, 1996, at the height of the Oslo years, Arafat cried out to a Bethlehem crowd, ‘We know only one word – jihad! Jihad, jihad, jihad! Whoever does not like it can drink from the Dead Sea or from the Sea of Gaza.’ [For more on the failure of Oslo, see HonestReporting's documentary film,http://www.blogger.com/Camp between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. There, Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in Gaza and 92% of the West Bank, and a capital in East Jerusalem― the most generous offer ever from an Israeli government. Yassir Arafat rejected the offer and ended negotiations without a counteroffer. As American envoyDennis Ross concluded, 'Arafat could not accept Camp David... because when the conflict ends, the cause that defines Arafat also ends.' [See alsothis interview with Ross on Oslo.]
Immediately following this breakdown, the PA media machine under Arafat’s control ramped up the war rhetoric, and preparations were made for riots that were unleashed following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. The Arafat-supported ‘al” Aqsa intifada’ would continue for four years. This unprecedented wave of anti-Israel terrorism, which would result in over 1,000 Israeli deaths, was marked by over 120 Palestinian suicide bombers and the growth of an Islamic martyrdom cult.

This stage of violence revealed that Arafat and the PA had never abandoned their longstanding plans to liquidate the Jewish state. Arafat had told an Arab audience in Stockholm in 1996, ‘We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion… We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.’ Likewise, Arafat explained to a South African crowd in 1994 that the Oslo agreement was merely a tactical ruse in the larger battle to destroy the Jewish state ― a modern version of the Muslim prophet Mohammed’s” trickery against the ancient tribe of Quraysh. Arafat’s colleague Faisal al-Husseini was even more explicit, describing the Oslo process as a ‘Trojan Horse’ designed to promote the strategic goal of ‘Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea’ ― that is, a Palestine in place of Israel.

TERRORIST TO THE END

The final phase in Arafat’s life-long commitment to organized terror was channeled through the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a Fatah group that was responsible for many of the most deadly attacks against Israeli civilians between 2000-2004. Though many media outlets described a mere ‘loose affiliation’ between Arafat and this terrorist group, the evidence clearly indicated a direct financial and organizational bond between the two:

▪ In November, 2003 aBBC investigation found that up to $50,000 a month was funneled by

An ammunition bill for the terrorist Al Aqsa Brigade, signed by Yassir Arafat – see larger version

Fatah, with Arafat’s approval, directly to the Al Aqsa Brigades, for the purpose of organizing bombings, snipings and ambushes against Israeli civilians.

▪Documents captured by the IDF in 2002 indicated Fatah’s ‘systematic, institutionalized and ongoing financing’ of the Al Aqsa Brigades. (See Arafat’s signature on the weapons budget, and this full report from Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.)

▪ The leader of the Al Aqsa Brigades in Tulkarm told USA Today on March 14, 2002: ‘The truth is, we are Fatah, but we didn’t operate under the name of Fatah…We are the armed wing of the organization. We receive our instructions from Fatah. Our commander is Yasser Arafat himself.’
[For more on the Arafat-Al Aqsa connection, click here.]
In addition, Arafat granted free rein to the radical Islamic terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad to perpetrate dozens of horrific acts of civilian murder between 2000-2004. [At left: Arafat with Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, 2003]
DELEGITIMIZATION

In January 2002, the Israeli Navy seized a Gaza-bound, PA-owned freighter ― the Karine A― that was loaded with more than fifty tons of Iranian ammunition and weapons, including dozens of surface-to-surface Katyusharockets. (See more on the Karine A.)

In June 2002, upon recognizing Arafat’s ongoing financing and abetting of terrorism, U.S. President Bush called for Arafat’s removal from power. Progress toward peace required, according to Bush, ‘a new and different Palestinian leadership…not compromised by terror.’ Release of a U.S.-backed ‘road” map’ for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was therefore delayed until such a new Palestinian leader emerged. On its part, the Israeli government chose to isolate Arafat in his Ramallah compound, the ‘Muqata’, where he would remain from early 2002 until his final days, and where his burial is expected to occur.

In April 2003, hours after Mahmoud Abbas assumed the role of Palestinian prime minister, the official road map was released and diplomatic progress began. But Arafat consistently undercut the authority of Abbas, leading to Abbas’ resignation and the halting of the road map peace process.

CORRUPTION, AUTOCRACY, JIHAD

Over the course of his ‘revolutionary’ career,Arafat siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars of international aid money intended to reach the Palestinian people.

Estimates of the degree of Arafat’s wealth differ, but are all staggering: In 2003, Forbes magazine listed Arafat in its annual list of the wealthiest ‘Kings, Queens and Despots,’ with a fortune of ‘at least $300 million. ‘Israeli and U S officials estimate Arafat’s personal holdings between $1-3 billion.

And while the average Palestinian barely subsisted, Arafat’s wife Suha (at left) in Paris received $100,000 each month from PA sources as reported on CBS’ 60 Minutes. That CBS report also noted that Arafat maintained secret investments in a Ramallah-based Coca Cola plant, a Tunisian cellphone company, and venture capital funds in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands.

Arafat also used foreign aid funds to pay off cronies who bolstered his autocracy: An International Monetary Fund report indicated that upwards of 8% ($135 million) of the PA’s annual budget was handed out by Arafat ‘at his sole discretion.’ And Arafat’s select PA policemen, far from keeping the peace, were repeatedly among the suicide bombers and snipers.

Money was just one method of strengthening Arafat’s power apparatus. Critics of his PA government were routinely imprisoned, tortured or beaten. One example: In 1999, Muawiya Al-Masri, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, described Arafat’s corruption to a Jordanian newspaper. For this, he was attacked by a gang of masked men and shot three times. Al-Masri survived the ordeal and described Arafat’s grip on PA power: ‘There is no institutional process. There is only one institution ― the Presidency, which has no law and order and is based on bribing top officials.’
From 2000-2004, Arafat permitted Muslim imams to incite unprecedented anti-Israel and anti-American violence from their mosques and through official PA media. Arafat’s Religious Affairs Ministry employed preachers who regularly called for children to ‘martyr themselves’, and PA television glamorized the act of suicide bombing.

Under Arafat, the Palestinian Authority school textbooks denied Israel’s very existence, and jihad was presented to Palestinian children as an admirable course of action. The Jewish people, meanwhile, was represented to schoolchildren as a tricky, greedy and barbarous nation.

Freedom of the press was virtually non-existent during Arafat’s reign in Gaza, Jericho and Ramallah ― if it didn’t speak favorably of Arafat, it didn’t get printed in the PA-controlled media. Moreover, the PA enacted a systematic policy of intimidation of foreign journalists. One case among many: When an AP cameraman captured footage of Palestinian street celebrations following the 9/11 attacks, he was kidnapped, brought to a PA security office, and Arafat’s cabinet secretary threatened that the PA ‘cannot guarantee [his] life’ if the footage was broadcast.

Yet beyond the terrorism, extortion, embezzlement and intimidation lies Arafat’s most unfortunate ongoing impact: The inculcation of murderous values in an entire generation of Palestinians, who have been educated ― under Arafat’s direction ― to continue the fight of jihad against Israel, rather than compromise to end the decades-long conflict.

How many generations will it take to undo Arafat’s dark legacy?

This article can also be read at: http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/Yassir_Arafat3_1929-2004.asp.

This article was originally published on the early Smooth Stone archives on Blogger on November 11, 2004.