“In Palestine I had been met every day by evidence of the Jewish blindness to the Arab problem,” asserted Richard Crossman, British Labor M.P., who served as a member of the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry.
Arab failure to annihilate Israel by force has convinced them to embrace the Marxist-Leninist “people’s war” strategy used with much success in China and Vietnam asserts historian Joel Fishman. He quotes Stefan Possony, an American military strategist, who explains that a people’s war “is a conflict between societies,” involving political and military elements.
A “people’s war” employs asymmetrical warfare enabling a revolutionary movement to wage war against a militarily superior enemy. “Since the late 1960s,” Possony said, “the political campaign has sought to divide Israeli society and delegitimize the country through incitement in Arab textbooks and media describing them as Satan, sons of apes and pigs, a cancer and demonize her at the UN by branding Israel a racist and pariah state.”
Part of this strategy Fishman notes is that after the Six-Day War, Muhammad Yazid, who had been minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments (1958-1962), advised Palestinian Arab propagandists to adopt to the following principles:” Wipe out the argument that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab states, or the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees; instead, present the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation like the others.
Wipe out the impression…that in the struggle between the Palestinians and the Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only facing the Zionists but also world imperialism.”
Oslo Accords
Another part of this strategy Fishman asserts was to sign the Oslo Accords to secure land from which to launch a guerilla war to destroy the Jewish state and replace it with an Arab one. The late Faisal Husseini, Palestinian Authority minister for Jerusalem Affairs, called this ruse a “Trojan Horse.” Husseini urged the Arabs “to look at the Oslo Agreement and at other agreements as ‘temporary procedures, or phased goals’: This means we are ambushing the Israelis and cheating them. Our ultimate goal is [still] the liberation of all historical Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, even if this means that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for many generations.” The negotiations were a means toward “an extension of continuing conflict and not an opportunity for two peoples to reach a new rapprochement.”
Temporary Concessions
Agreeing to temporary concessions to achieve their primary goal was suggested to Yasser Arafat and Abu Iyad, his top lieutenant, at a meeting with the North Vietnamese in early 1970. In his book My Home, My Land: A Narrative of The Palestinian Struggle, Iyad avowed: “Our ultimate strategic objective was to set up a unitary democratic state on all Palestine, but we hadn’t provided for any intermediary stage, or any provisional compromise.” Members of the Vietnamese Politburo explained to Arafat and Iyad how in their struggle for independence they had made difficult compromises, including dividing the country into two separate independent states, while waiting for a more positive shift in the balance of power.
Fatah (the largest Palestinian political party) accepted this strategy, which Iyad later justified by pointing out that David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders had accepted partition in 1947, although they claimed all of Palestine. The same applied for North and South Korea. Even Lenin had forfeited a large section of Soviet territory in the Brest-Litovsk treaty, to ensure the survival of the Bolshevik government. Weren’t the Arabs entitled to the same “margin of flexibility and maneuver” the Zionists had afforded themselves, Iyad asked, especially since Israel would “remain invincible in the foreseeable future?” There is a difference, he noted, between surrender and compromise.
Fishman points out that if the Arabs were prepared to accept an interim solution such a two-state solution or a series of solutions, without acknowledging that this was only an interim phase, this would defuse criticism of the PLO in the West while playing for time to achieve their objective. Iyad observed that their Vietnamese comrades do not “hesitate to sacrifice the details so as to preserve the essential.”
Failure to Recognize the Blatantly Obvious
Why has it been difficult for so many Israeli and American Jews to recognize that the attacks against Israel by Arab religious and political leaders constitute a threat to our very existence as a people and as a nation?
How many Israelis have to be killed or maimed by homicide bombings, how often do Jews have to be portrayed in the Arab media and in sermons as Satan, sons of apes and pigs, and as a cancer, how often do Israelis have to have their connection to the Jewish holy sites refuted and the Holocaust denied, before we acknowledge the true extent of Arab enmity and their real objectives in dealing with the Jewish Question?
The Oslo Syndrome
In The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege Kenneth Levin, a clinical psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, offers a plausible answer as to why, in the face of continuous killing of Jews, open declarations to destroy Israel and blatant violations of agreements made with the Jewish state, many Jews still disregard this evidence and cling to the notion that Arabs want peace. Israelis, Levin says are in “state of chronic siege” which causes them to seek ways to extricate themselves from this predicament. This has produced “the Oslo approach,” which is based on “wishful thinking divorced from reality.” Maintaining this position regardless of countervailing evidence and tolerating no debate is textbook “delusional,” according to Levin.
This self-delusion, he says, manifests itself in a number of other ways as well. One is to believe that they can actually maintain some kind of control of the situation. By accepting the condemnation of their enemies and appeasing the terrorists, Israelis think they will themselves bring an end to hostilities. If only the Jews would make enough concessions to the Arabs, and stop obsessing about defensible borders and other strategic issues, peace would soon be at hand and such concerns would become irrelevant.
Why do some Israelis respond in this way? Levin suggests that since Jews were historically subjected to so much abuse, elements within the community are so eager to escape this painful experience that they interpret the ostensibly improved conditions under Oslo as proof that the past is behind them.
There is also an element of arrogance to “this self-delusion.” Jews assume a responsibility for something over which they have no control, in order to ward off despair. Levin suggests that this is similar to an abused child who feels responsible for his plight and views himself as “bad.” The child maintains, “the fantasy that if he becomes good enough,” his father will cease hitting him, his mother will give him attention and whatever other form of abuse he suffered will stop. In the same way, some Israelis are delusional when they assume they can control Arab behavior.
Another myth is to describe Arab intentions as “moderate,” even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
A third assumption is the “fellowship fallacy”-that the Palestinians share Jewish values, goals and positions. Some Israelis have met informally or in public forums with high-level individuals from Judea and Samaria who are connected to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Israelis hear more nuanced statements about the conflict in these discussions than are usually heard from the Palestian Arab leadership.
The October 7th massacre has changed the thinking of a number of Israelis about the existential danger the Arab terrorist organizations pose to the Jewish State. Whether this awareness will translate into a more realistic approach by the Israeli government and the IDF to dealing with this threat remains to be seen.
