DAVE GORDON
There has never been a sovereign Palestinian Arab state, the Arabs are not indigenous to Israel, there was no “Palestinian” ethnicity in history, and many scholars hold that Arab populations did not really come in large numbers until the late 19th century.
And unlike Zionism, the movement to return Jews to their ancestral homeland, there was no movement for an independent “Palestinian” state for Arabs anywhere in history.
The Soviets Enter the Picture
Then something happened in the 1960s that successfully pushed a narrative contrary to these facts. The Soviets, jockeying for global power and a larger sphere of influence, sought to get cozier with Arabs.
The Arab countries had the oil– and the oil meant infinitely more than a tiny Jewish country with no resources. It helped that the USSR opposed anything America supported, including Israel. And the Arabs were bitter about Israel’s existence, and bore a grudge against Israel for its victories over Arab armies in multiple wars.
But it was not always this way. For a brief time in the late 1940s the Russians had Israel’s back: they recognized the state, supported its entry into the UN, and let one of its satellite communist states, Czechoslovakia, sell arms to the nascent state. However, the honeymoon did not last long because Josef Stalin – the Soviet dictator of the time – fell under the influence of anti-Semitic paranoia – and saw benefit in courting the Islamic world.
“Palestinian Arabs” – Convenient Partners in Promoting Anti-Semitism
The Russians knew of a key group that was already fighting the Jews from within the territory of Palestine – a group that did not have a nation, and thus did not have to abide by international treaties – those who referred to themselves as Palestinian Arabs. They were the ones neatly positioned to punish the Jews. (By this time, the cause had already planted some roots. Haj Amin al Husseini, who eventually became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and allied with Hitler during the Second World War. Husseini began spreading the Brotherhood’s jihadist doctrines.)
The PLO and Yasser Arafat
To further the cause of annihilating Jews, in 1964 the Soviets helped launch the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Its Charter, drafted in Moscow, was rubber stamped by some four hundred KGB-picked Arab representatives. (As an aside, its preamble mentioned something called “Palestinian Arab People” – since up until 1948, “Palestinians” specifically meant Jews who lived in the Holy Land.) The Charter’s messaging was filled with a not-so-coded message to eliminate Israel. In 1968, Article 24 – which said that the Palestinians lay no claim to Gaza or the West Bank – was quietly removed, because, of course, it was a year after Israel won these areas in the Six-Day War. And naturally, Jews cannot have their land back after two thousand years, or acquire land in a defensive war, like so many other countries have.
Hundreds of Soviet secret service agents fanned out in the Arab world, looking for leaders who would take up the cause – and in the 1960s one of them was arch-terrorist Yasir Arafat, at the time a dedicated Marxist-Leninist, who became chairman of the PLO in 1969.
Onetime head of Romanian intelligence under Nicolae Ceauscscu, Lieutenant General , Ion Mihai Pacepa – who later, in 1978, became the highest-ranking KGB officer to ever defect from a Soviet bloc country — was closely associated with Arafat, the PLO chairman as part of his KGB duties. Decades after he defected, Pacepa began writing and speaking about Soviet plans to destroy Israel. He had recorded several conversations with Arafat when they met in Romania, at dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s palace. Arafat, in these recordings, unabashedly revealed that his primary goal is to destroy Israel. Ceausescu personally mentored Arafat on propaganda techniques.
Disinformation Campaign with International Partners
The Soviet propaganda project included a disinformation campaign that misused and contorted language to make the Palestinian cause appear noble and acceptable: that is, concocting a narrative of a human rights battle, a homeland struggle, or an anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist struggle, to hide the true aim: destroying the Jews. After all – he needed to whitewash terrorism to make murdering innocent civilians “justifiable.” The strategy worked: the world was soon convinced that the Palestinian Arab dream was about a land claim, rather than the plain old anti-Semitic desire to wipe Israel off the map.
Other guidance for Arafat came from Muhammad Yazid, one-time minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments from 1958 and 1962, as well as from General Vo Ngyuen Giap, an important Vietnamese Communist revolutionary and military leader and a close colleague of Ho Chi Minh.
During the Vietnam War, Giap was a North Vietnamese propagandist, who realized that the Palestinian Arabs would have an easier time “selling” a struggle for human rights, than a war of annihilation. In Pacepa’s view, the sanitizing of this kind of message had eventually successfully switched the West’s support during the Vietnam War and would do so again with the Palestinians. By this time, the Soviets already had created “liberation movements” in Bolivia (1964), Colombia (1965), and Armenia (in the 70s). The Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia bombed American airline offices in parts of Europe. Armenia remains something of a Russian puppet regime to this day.
The Soviets Ramp Up Their Hate and Propaganda
The Soviets bankrolled Palestinian leaders, and their terror activities, while ramping up a strategic propaganda campaign to demonize Jews and Zionism across the Arab world. That included a “disinformation office” that pumped out every kind of vile anti-Semitic message in every Arabic media publication.
Pacepa confirmed this in his article “Russian Footprints” in National Review Online, Aug. 24, 2006, saying that the Kremlin decided to turn the Islamic world against the Jews and the US with “Nazi-style hatred.”
KGB Chairman, and soon to be the sixth leader of the Soviet Union, Yury Andropov, told Pacepa, that a war of brainwashing of a billion Arabs “could inflict far greater damage” than could a few million soldiers. “We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds, because we knew we could not win any military battles,” Pacepa wrote, paraphrasing Andropov. The point was that “no one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.”
“The Islamic world,” he wrote, “was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred… Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.”
“We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews” and that the little Satan and the big Satan’s goals were to convert “the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.”
The Soviet machine and its Warsaw Pact tentacles continued to provide intelligence, arms, training, aid, funding, and political cover to the Palestinian cause.
These details are outlined in the Stanford Review, Feb. 27, 2008, in an article called “Deception of Palestinian Nationalism,” and in an online essay called “Soviet Russia, The Creator of the PLO and The Palestinian People” by Wallace Edward Brand.
PLO Rejects Peace, Chooses Destruction
In ensuing years, Arafat would preach one thing in Arabic – Jihad – and another, more palatable message in English to the West. He would go on to outright reject the generous offer at Camp David in 2000, that gave 96% of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria – which Israelis call Yehuda V’Shomron) to the Palestinians, choosing instead to launch a deadly Intifada. Five peace offers were rejected by Arafat since that time, demonstrating his single motive to destroy Israel, rather than build a state of his own.
Current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who kicked off his international political career by writing a paper denying the Holocaust during graduate studies at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, has vowed that any Palestinian state would be free of Jews and supported the destruction of Israel. Most recently, he has denied the atrocities of Oct. 7., and has– Throughout, he has courted heads of state under the cover of being a partner in peace. The widespread support of these poisonous ideas has taken hold amongst leftwing activists around the globe, and many foreign leaders, while fully supported in many forms by the Russians, Iranians, Arab dictatorships, and to a certain extent, the Chinese. In recent months, global fora have pushed the idea of a “two state solution” even after the Hamas terror attacks, and the high number of Palestinians who supported it – still buying the idea that the war is about land.
A member of the PLO’s Executive Committee,, Zahir Muhse’in, went on record plainly, on this very idea. “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity,” stated Muhse’in, in a 1977 interview with Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw.
“In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”