By "Mr Mahdi"
Subject: The Paralysing Sting of the PLO
Date: Wednesday, October 18, 2000 11:07 AM

In the turbulent history of the Ummah this century, perhaps no struggle has captivated the Ummah's desire for liberation from colonialism as has the struggle against the occupation of Palestine. Outcast and betrayed by the neighbouring Arab states, the Palestinians turned to the PLO to lead their struggle. No leadership has been as beguiling and misleading as has that of the PLO. 

As Gamal Abdul Nasser come to the leadership of the Young officers regime in Egypt in 1952, he proceeded to seize the moral leadership of the Arab world and capture its sentiments. The Israeli occupation of Palestine, sanctioned by the United Nations, had led to the dispersion of the Muslims of Palestine throughout the surrounding region, in particular to Jordan Lebanon and Gaza in Egyptian held territory. Nasser's support amongst the Palestinians in particular was bolstered by the fact that he provided funding and a certain amount of training to the Palestinians in Gaza, which led the Palestinians to regard Nasser as an ally. The military raids launched against Israel, primarily from the refugee camps in Gaza targeting the Jewish settlers were never regarded by the Israelis as serious threats to the security of Israel, despite the fact that they were funded and armed by Egypt. The acquisition of Russian armaments by Nasser, however, did lead to alarm amongst the Israelis. Still in a state of War with Egypt, Israel realised it would have to pre-empt a conflict with Nasser's Egypt lest Egypt's military strength eclipse that which Israel could muster. Initially, Israel engaged in what came to be known as the Lavon affair in which a number of Egyptian Jews were recruited by the Israelis in order to begin a bombing campaign internally against Egypt. The plan was a failure, however, and the Egyptians arrested and punished the would be saboteurs. Despite this, the affect of the exposure of the affair was seized by the Israelis and tension between Egypt and Israel increased. In response to the plot, Nasser provided more assistance to the Palestinian commandos.
All this led to an increase in the Palestinian raids on the Israelis, culminating in a massive Israeli counter-raid on the Egyptian headquarters in Gaza. A further opportunity for Israel to escalate tensions arose when Nasser nationalised the Suez canal, creating the pretext for Israel to engage in a strike against Egypt. Acting with Britain and France, Israel attempted to deal a significant blow to Egypt's military, but the intervention of the US and the USSR, and the subsequent threats against Europe and Israel by the respective superpower forced Israel to back down. The difficulties experienced by Egypt during the Suez crisis contributed to a waning of support for the Palestinian cause. By this time, Nasser had opened a channel of communication with the Israelis through the respective delegates of Egypt and Israel to the United Nations to explore the possibility of a permanent peace settlement.

It was under this air of frustration with a lack of progress in the Palestinian struggle, at a time when the Arab regimes had all but abandoned the Palestinian cause, that the movement for the  National Liberation of Palestine was formed in 1958. It used the acronym "HATF" , which was rearranged to "FATH" , meaning victory. Amongst the founders of FATH was Yasser Arafat, a graduate of the Cairo University working in Kuwait as an engineer. FATH carried out numerous raids against Israel directly, but soon realised that these raids were ineffective in achieving anything without the support of the armies from at least one of the major Arab countries. This led FATH to pursue a path of political dialogue with the other Arab countries.

During the Cairo conference of 1964, the Arab League instructed its Palestinian representative Ahmed Shukeiri to form a Palestinian political body. Shukeiri then organised a meeting of the first Palestinian National Council, attended by 350 delegates who met in East Jerusalem. At this meeting, the delegates formed the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (agency), which was comprised of various groups including FATH. Ahmed Shukeiri became the chairman of the PLO but stepped down in favour of Yasser Arafat in 1969.

Why the PLO?

In order to understand the reasons for the establishment of the PLO, one must understand the situation surrounding its formation from an international perspective as well understanding the regional forces at play. The international powers wield influence in the region and try to shape its politics towards the favour of each. The primary player in this region is the US, which uses the UN and its agents in the region to achieve its goals. Britain and France also have interests and exert some influence in the region, but the scale of their influence has been on the decline since the Second World War. The US policy for the region has always been to create a two-state solution, one being the Jewish State of Israel and along side it the other, a Palestinian State. Jerusalem was to acquire a special status, controlled by an international body since its possession was so hotly contested. The United Nations served the role of the international body, and under American support the UN passed resolution 181 in 1947. This resolution calls for the partitioning of Palestine and the placing of Jerusalem under UN control. It also contains provisions for the right of Palestinians to be compensated for loss of property. However, after the establishment of the State of Israel, Israel started to assert itself and oppose US regional policy in the pursuit of its own interests. Yitzhak Shamir alluded to this point when he said, "Much as we want to co-ordinate our activities with the United States, the interests (of the United States and Israel) are not identical. We have to, from time to time, worry about our own interests". This political fact, coupled with the reality that Syria and Jordan were both under British influence at that time, led the US to pursue the formation of additional means through which it could realise its two state solution. It is on this basis that a body authorised to represent the Palestinian's, namely the PLO, was established during the 1964 Cairo conference.

Thus from the onset this organisation was created to facilitate the achievement of America's regional policy objective, which entailed the acknowledgement of the existence of Israel. The US needed to legitimise the group before it could start to use it to achieve its own objective, thus it pushed its own agents in the region, such as Nasser, to accept the PLO as the sole representative organisation for the Palestinians. Subsequently, the UN with the consent of the US invited the PLO chairman Yasser Arafat to debate the issue of Palestine in the General Assembly. The attempt to legitimise the PLO culminated in the 1974 Arab summit in Rabat where it was officially announced that the PLO was to be the sole legal representative of the Palestinians. After the six-day war in 1967, the UN passed resolution 242, which requires Israel to withdraw its forces to the pre-1967 borders. For the PLO to accept this resolution would mean recognition of the state of Israel, and its acknowledgement that Israel could continue to occupy the lands it usurped between 1948 and 1967. The acknowledgement of UN 242 became the basis for the US regional policy, for its acceptance by all parties would mean that all participants would recognise the existence of Israel and Palestine, enabling the two-state solution to be realised. Until the PLO accepted the resolution, the US would not publicly negotiate any solution with the PLO. In November 1988, the PLO accepted this resolution and by December, the US was engaged in direct diplomatic negotiations with the PLO. This was followed by the Madrid conference of November 1991 and culminated in the infamous White House signing ceremony, by which time all the parties were negotiating directly to establish the two-state solution, in light of what had been reached through the earlier Oslo Accords. Further, Yasser Arafat wrote a letter in 1993 to the Israeli Prime Minister, in which he not only accepted Israel's right of existence but also stated that he wanted peaceful relations with it.

The US also encouraged the establishment of this group from another perspective, which was to isolate the Palestinians from the Islamic world. The process of isolating this issue from the mindset of the Muslims as an Ummah, preventing it from being seen as an attack on the Islamic . aqeedah, was carried out in gradual steps. Firstly the problem was projected as an Arab problem rather then an Islamic problem which isolated the non Arab Muslim population. Hence the US promoted Arab nationalism through the actions of Nasser and the various shades of the Ba. ath Parties, each vowing to liberate the Arab homeland from occupation of the Zionists, rather than rallying the people around the Islamic aqeedah, and the call of Islam which is Jihad. Following this, the issue was further scaled down to being a Palestinian problem rather than an Arab problem. The US did this by using the PLO to project the Jewish occupation as a Palestinian problem rather than an Arab or an Islamic problem. Also, the legitimisation of the PLO being the sole legal representative of the Palestinians detached the Arab states from being directly involved, placing further emphasis on the Palestinian nature of the issue. In addition to this the establishment of the PLO contributed to the divisions within the Muslim Ummah along nationalistic identities and further legitimised the artificial borders within the minds of the Muslims by setting them as goals and targets of the PLO.

Is the PLO Radical ?

The PLO has been portrayed over the years as a radical terrorist group, which is bent on removing the Jewish State and establishing a secular Palestinian state, where Arab Muslims, Arab Christians and Jews would live under the authority of the PLO. In fact, the PLO charter clearly mentions the removal of the Zionist State and accepts only the borders predating the British Mandate (Balfour Declaration).

The "terrorist" acts against Israel can not be solely attributed to the PLO. Many of these acts were committed by frustrated individuals living under Israeli persecution, some by members of the FATH group, some by other individuals from other groups, and some from individuals from within the PLO. It must be noted that there should be a distinction between the actions of the individuals from the PLO and those directly coming from the PLO leadership itself. The individuals who rally around the PLO have been , in large part, sincere individuals who sought an opportunity to strike back against the Zionist entity. The PLO provided them with the means. The leadership, however, functions to fulfill the American objective of achieving a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. In fact after a series of hijackings during the 1970s, the individuals responsible were renounced by the PLO and were put into prison. As for the PLO being a radical group, one needs to examine the nature of radicalism. It is not simply an image, it has much to do with a conviction in the ideas being carried. Hence radicalism is associated with religious groups, who hold certain beliefs with conviction where there is no room for compromise. This is in sharp contrast to the PLO, which has never had deep convictions inherent to the movement. In fact, when the PLO was formed, it contained a mixture of people who only had one common objective which was the liberation of Palestine. As for having deep conviction in a common thought and having a unified personality resulting from that common conviction, this was never the case from the onset. For any group to succeed, it must have a clearly defined objective, it must have a clearly understood method. It must carefully choose means and styles according to which it would engage in the select actions which would contribute to the achievement of its objective. If any of these factors are lacking in the group, it will undoubtedly become reactionary to the unfolding political reality, forced into pragmatism because it would be unable to shape the reality around it by a specified and clear method. The PLO aside, most groups in the Muslim Ummah today lack such focus and consequently are either used by external powers, or fail to make an impact in the Ummah because they do not offer her a direction and a solution. In the case of the PLO, its members had various inclinations. Some were influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, some carried the Ba'athist ideology of Hizbul Ba'ath. Others carried the ideas of Arab nationalism inspired by Abdul Nasser.

The pragmatic nature of the PLO showed clearly after it was removed from Lebanon in 1982 by the Israeli's and the Lebanese Christian army. The PLO went on to accept the right of Israel to exist unconditionally, then it went on to recognise UN resolutions 242, and 381.

Further, the very objective of the PLO demonstrated that the organisation had neither a radical solution nor was its method one of radicalism. On the contrary, it has become an example of gradualism. The ideas of secularism which it calls for are a product of the human mind and surrounding circumstances, which clearly implies that these ideas can be altered when one sees it fit to do so. The principle of secularism lacks any absolute principles or fundamental truths and by definition is to be attained through negotiation and compromise. Hence within secularism the notion of compromise is intrinsic. The PLO displayed this clearly in the aftermath of the Madrid conference. In that period, the Arab states were engaged in bi-lateral negotiations to establish peace treaties between Israel and each of the Arab states which entailed that each regime would absolve itself from having any direct link with the struggle of the PLO. Abandoned in the political sense, the organisation then started to show its innate nature and proceeded to completely abandon its founding objectives with the aim of securing something substantial, as opposed to calling for the idealistic.

Hence the PLO is neither a terrorist group nor a radical Palestinian group. Rather it is a pragmatic group which was established by the US via its agents like Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia in order to realise its own objective of providing a two state solution in the region. The image of the PLO as a radical group can be attributed to the western media. The West, namely the US sought to portray the PLO as a radical group which only represented the interests of the Palestinians. This contributed to the legitimisation of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians. This enabled the US to use the organisation to promote the "peace process" as we see frequently in the media.

Success or Failure of the PLO ?

The impact of the PLO needs to be assessed not just in terms of its own objective, but also in terms of the impact that it has had and continues to have upon the Muslim Ummah. It is clear that the PLO has failed in terms of its own objective, which was to liberate Palestine. As the feasibility of this objective receded, and the circumstances became more trying, the PLO quickly responded to the situation by compromising and accepting the state of Israel. This in turns demonstrates that from the onset, the PLO never had the ideas it called for deeply ingrained within itself. In this manner the Palestinian cause was compromised again and again, which amounts to betrayal. The betrayal can not be solely attributed to the PLO, as the surrounding Muslim governments of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia are equally guilty. Most of these regimes preferred to establish peace and trade with the Jews and turned a blind eye to the occupation of Palestine. Whatever token support these regimes provided in the past had more to do with maintaining their credibility with the Arab population than with any sincere conviction in the cause of the liberation of Palestine. Since the recognition of the state of Israel, the target of the group changed from the liberation of Palestine in its entirety to the acceptance of the occupation of the land stolen prior to 1948, in exchange for being able to exercise limited autonomy over the West Bank and Gaza. This means all its resources are to be channelled for the new limited objective, which is to establish a Palestinian pseudo-state alongside the Zionist state, just what the Americans called for in UN 181 and UN 194. In fact, the acceptance of Israel by the PLO amounts to a far greater victory for the Zionist State than the three "wars" of 1948, 1967 and 1973 combined. The loss at a political level, compromising the very objective of the movement and acknowledging the futility of the liberation of Palestine is not only a single physical battle lost at certain point in time. It is a defeat for an entire nation for the present and future. The impact of the PLO. s betrayal is that the movement to liberate Palestine fully and unconditionally no longer exists within the Ummah. Future generations will be brought up in a political environment where the idea of Israel will be the norm. Those who reject that reality will be marginalised, and with time will no longer have an impact on the sentiments of the people. The objective and direction of the entire nation will have been altered. Hence, the recognition of Israel's existence by the PLO is the greatest victory for the Zionists to date and it brings closer the achievement of the US plan for a two-state solution.

Despite the fruition of the betrayal of the PLO, there are those from within the Ummah which still argue that the acceptance of the state of Israel which has led to the establishment of the Palestinian entity in the West bank and Gaza, is the first milestone in achieving the objective of the liberation of the entire Palestine. Further, the acceptance of the state of Israel is only due to momentary physical weakness, and once the PLO gains its strength it will ascend again to engage in the task of liberating all of Palestine. Such a claim is evidence of political blindness and naivet�. It is not a rational explanation based upon reality. The establishment of the Palestinian state is not the establishment of a sovereign state, rather of an autonomous province within the state of Israel with a yet to be determined degree of autonomy. The entity will have no military and will not be able to secure its own economic interests, nor will it be able to make any significant internal decisions without the consent of the state of Israel. The PLO will merely act as an administrator and an agent for the Israelis in keeping the streets clean and ensuring that no individual or groups attack any Israeli interest.

As for the unfounded claim that the pseudo-state will be a milestone on the road to achieving the liberation of the entire Palestine, the PLO's unconditional acceptance of the state of Israel by definition means that being forced not to undermine its safety and security is the starting premise. The external political recognition of such a state will undoubtedly be conditional upon its continued acceptance of Israel's existence. Without a military, an economy, and being dependent upon conditional external recognition for existence - conditional upon maintaining Israel's security- the elements which would make such a 'liberation' of the whole of Palestine possible just do not exist within the Palestinian state. Further, the successive generations will be brought up within the framework of the two state scenario. The climate shaped will be on this basis of acceptance of the state of Israel. The struggle to liberate all of Palestine will be reduced to remote idealism, existent in the minds of a segment of the population . With time and through trade, the economic dependence of the Palestinian entity on Israel will increase further, resulting in further political dependence and economic and social integration. If one were to examine the peace treaty between Israel and the PLO, the idea of the Palestinian state being a temporary one can not be found anywhere in the agreement between the two parties. Rather this state is proof of the success of the Zionists in subduing the Muslims of Palestine and forcing them to relinquish Palestine through the diseased mentality of gradualism and pragmatism. As Muslims, we must be aware of any groups within the Ummah which call for ideas such as gradualism or which demonstrate gradualism and pragmatism in their actions. Movements which join regimes currently to effect a change in the regime in the future are demonstrative of these very ideas.

The Solution for Palestine

Based upon a profound observation of reality, the fundamental problem of Palestine is the occupation of land by a hostile population and the subsequent subjugation of the resident population to the oppressive and brutal authority of the hostile invaders. The problem of Palestine is not the achievement of peace to integrate two hostile populations. This is what the invading force wants to do to legitimise its occupation. It is a fact that Palestine was a province of the Uthmani Khilafah where the Palestinians were resident. In 1948, migrant Zionist Jews removed the Palestinians from their territory and established the state of Israel upon usurped land. Those who suggest that the Zionists have a right to polity and a right to a state have no basis for establishing that polity on the land of Palestine, land which was populated by indigenous peoples. There is no rational reasoning for the Zionist state to exist in Palestine. If any group or movement were to compromise on this idea, then that group or movement would be an instrument of legitimisation in the hands of the Zionists for any actions based upon a recognition of Israel's 'right' to occupy Palestine would facilitate the normalisation of the occupation. This is precisely what the PLO has achieved.

As Muslims, there is clear textual instruction from the Quran and Sunnah of Muhammad forbidding us to give up lands to the Kuffar. It is prohibited for us to accept the authority of the Kuffar over the Islamic lands as Allah (SWT) mentions in Surat Nisa,

"Allah will never allow the Kuffar authority over the believers" [TMQ 4:141]

This Ayah makes it clear that Allah (swt) has made it haraam for the Muslims to accept the authority of the Kuffar over Muslim land. The land of Palestine is Kharaji land which means it was liberated by the army of the Islamic State and subsequently, the land was taxed by the state. It belongs under the state's authority and Insha-Allah will be integrated into the lands ruled with Islam by the coming Khilafah. Since the Islamic aqeedah is the basis of this understanding, and since this understanding is evident within the Quran and the Sunnah, then clearly, there is no possibility of compromising on the achievement of this objective. Further, the method for us to achieve the Islamic objective must also be found within the text, since in origin, any action must be based upon a textual evidence. With this in mind, it becomes clear that Islam's position on the occupation of Palestine is that Palestine must be liberated.