Arafat for beginners
Charles Krauthammer explicates the cause pursued with singleminded devotion by Yasser Arafat: "Arafat's legacy." Krauthammer's column reveals the bloodlust celebrated throughout the world last week in connection with Arafat's death.
In an interesting symposium at Frontpage, former Romanian Communist intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa explains:
History always repeats itself, and if you can live two lives, you have an even greater chance of seeing that repetition with your own eyes. During the last six years of my other life, as a Romanian intelligence general, the main task of the Soviet bloc espionage community was to transform Yasser Arafat’s war against Israel and its main supporter, the United States, into an armed doctrine of the whole Islamic world. America was our main enemy, and a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on it than could a mere one million. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. Our task was to convert its historical hatred of the Jews into a new hatred of the United States, by portraying this land of freedom as an “imperial Zionist country” financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion,” the Kremlin’s epithet for the US Congress.In a brief subscribers-only column for the Wall Street Journal, Bernard Lewis picks up the question left hanging by Charles Krauthammer:According to KGB theorists, the Islamic world was a petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hate. Islamic cultures had a taste for nationalism, jingoism and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch. Terrorism and violence against America would flow naturally from their religious fervor. We had only to keep repeating, over and over, that the United States was a “Zionist country” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidel’s occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our dogma that American imperialism wanted to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom.
Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, the Soviet bloc intelligence community flooded the Islamic world with Arabic translations of an old Russian, forged, anti-Semitic tract entitled Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with “documentary” materials, also in Arabic, “proving” that the United States was a Zionist country governed by Jewish money, whose aim was to extend its domination over the rest of the world. We also infiltrated the Islamic world with thousands of Soviet bloc Islamic citizens recruited as intelligence agents and tasked to implant there a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism. They were to portray everybody and everything in America as being subordinated to Jewish interests: the leaders, the government, the political parties, the most prominent personalities—and even American history. Most of these agents were religious servants, engineers, medical doctors or teachers, and they had excellent credibility.
Although we now live in an age of technology, we still do not have an instrument that can scientifically measure the results of a sustained influence operation. Nevertheless, it is safe to presume that over the course of the further twenty-plus years—until the Soviet Union buckled—the combination between spreading hundreds of thousands of Protocols within the Islamic world and portraying the United States there as a criminal Zionist instrument should have left some trace. The hijacked airplane was launched into the world of contemporary terrorism by the KGB and its puppet Yasser Arafat, and it is significant that this became the weapon of choice for September 11, 2001.
The death of Yasser Arafat again raises the question of whether there is any possibility of negotiating a peace between Israel and the Palestinians, now under a new and perhaps different leadership.There are many aspects to this problem but one crucial one that often goes unmentioned. The demand for a Palestinian state is accepted by most people, including most Israelis, as a reasonable one. There is, however, a serious question -- is their objective a Palestinian state alongside Israel or in place of Israel? In other words, is the issue the size of Israel, or the existence of Israel? If it is the second, then obviously there is no hope of a negotiated peace. No government of any country is going to negotiate on whether it should or should not exist, and there is no compromise position, at least for a state, between existing and not existing.
If one assumes that the very existence of Israel is illegitimate, then any action against Israel, including a suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv discotheque, is defensive, while any Israeli action to prevent such attacks is offensive. The discourse on the Arab side, especially but not exclusively in Arabic, leans heavily in the direction of an existential issue in which, therefore, the best that one could hope for is a tactically conceded truce, to gain time for regroupment.
If, on the other hand, the issue is the size of Israel, and this is accepted in internal as well as external discourse, then it becomes what one might call by comparison a straightforward frontier question -- like Alsace-Lorraine or Texas or Kashmir; in other words, neither simple nor easy, but manageable and in time solvable, with the right dose of realism on both sides.
For the moment, however, the clear message from the Palestinian camp and from many of their Arab and other supporters is that the issue is the legitimacy, that is to say the existence, of Israel as a Jewish state. As long as this remains so, the struggle can only end when the Arabs either achieve or relinquish their purpose. Neither seems very likely at the present time.
