“He had a permanent chip on his shoulder, an angry undertone that seemed to insist: “We are weak, and you have injured us. We are thus entitled to do whatever we want. No one can judge us or stop us. And you, for your sins, must pay and pay forever.”
— Barry Rubin and Judith Rubin
As the chairman strode to the United Nations podium on Oct. 13, 1974 amidst applause, he must have marvelled at his good fortune. Only a few years prior he was persona non grata. Expelled from Jordan after King Hussein tired of the existential threat the charismatic revolutionary posed to the country and to Hussein’s own throne, the Palestinian leader found only a half-hearted welcome in other Arab capitals. From Riyadh to Cairo, no matter their publicly declared support, other Arab rulers had privately tired of his arrogant assumption they owed him for his frontline attacks against Israel and Jews.
Arab rulers would often pay him what amounted to protection money. That would at least divert his terror from their thrones to other targets. Everyone understood the realpolitik bargain: interests of state and power — not camaraderie — were in play. More surprising was the gun-toting orator’s luck in escaping opprobrium for his terror. Just two years prior, in 1972, Black September, the terrorist cell linked to the chairman murdered eleven Israeli-Jewish-athletes and a German security guard at the Munich Olympics.
More recent was a May 1974 terror attack in the northern Israeli town of Ma’a lot. There, Palestinian gunmen killed 21 children and injured 65 more. In an age closer to our own, a revolutionary who so recently fomented terror attacks directly or through comrades would be hunted to his death. But this was the early 1970s — radicals and terrorism were still chic. The starry-eyed, terrorists and tyrants from Che Guevara to Fidel Castro were the international political equivalents of 1960s flower children: they promised to right the world’s wrongs through slogans and revolutionary acts. For some intellectuals, such men of action had the potential to actualize their belief that ostensible unjust societies could be razed and restarted anew. For the cynical, murderous revolutionaries were necessary for the end goal: a Palestinian state, the death of Jews, or both.
And so, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), arrived at the United Nations headquarters in New York in 1974 and spoke of peace. His “dream,” he said, was to live in “one democratic state where Christian, Jew and Muslim live in justice, equality and fraternity.”
As Arafat would demonstrate over the ensuing decades, the PLO leader mastered the triple act of posing for peace, offering up the Palestinian experience as one of unrelenting victimization, while himself threatening, ordering, and carrying out terror. The peace-terror duplicity only occasionally cheapened his political currency, but it was never devalued enough to make him a pariah in the manner of Carlos the Jackal or, much later, Osama bin Laden. Barely two years after the PLO attack in Munich, six months after Ma’a lot, and as yet another terror attack was underway in northern Israel, the 35-year-old Arafat, with a pistol at his side, spoke to the United Nations General Assembly and to the world.
Jews were the chairman’s direct target, but Arafat needed support beyond those reflexively responsive to his narrow tribal call; the references to Jews and Christians in addition to Muslims were meant to convince the world that Palestinians were not the only victims, but, so too, many in his audience. The Palestinian issue was placed in a wider narrative, in the touchstone of imperialism that would resonate with UN delegates from the third world. In a tack used regularly by Palestinian leaders over subsequent decades, the Palestinian wretched of the earth were pressed upon, and not just because some other nationalists (Zionists) arose in numbers large enough to wrestle control of land away from Palestinians.
For Arafat, the Palestinians suffered because a broader force was at work, one that many in the audience might have encountered firsthand — Western colonialism. Arafat could thus widen the appeal of his cause and half-justify occasional terror by framing the issue in deeper, structural terms. The appeal even allowed the PLO chairman to express faux sympathy for selected Jews: “Just as colonialism heedlessly used the wretched, the poor, the exploited as mere inert matter with which to build and to carry out settler colonialism,” Arafat told UN dignitaries, “so too were destitute, oppressed European Jews employed on behalf of world imperialism and of the Zionist leadership. European Jews were transformed into the instruments of aggression; they became the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial discrimination.”
As would become common in the decades since, real and alleged problems were blamed on colonialists, with “colonialist,” “settler colonialists,” and “imperialist” peppered throughout his speech dozens of times along with “zionist” as routine as punctuation.
The grievance narrative fed and nourished over the decades by Yasser Arafat had its murderous consequences in his lifetime but also today. The rise of Islamism and Iran-financed proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah have long twinned with Arafat’s original victim narrative and genocidal vision to make peace impossible between Israel and the Palestinians. A peace treaty assumes a partner on the other side willing to enforce it. But the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre of over 1,200 people including babies, children, festival-goers, and the elderly in southern Israel made clear that those who chant “from the river to the sea” always meant it prior to that murderous pogrom and mean it now.
However, not all Arab writers share that murderous revolutionary creed, nor the Palestinian victim narrative nourished by Arafat and others. Instead, after the PLO leader’s death in 2004, some Arab thinkers correctly identified the Palestinian problem as a continued fascination with revolutionary politics.
Once the Palestinian terrorist faction Hamas took control of Gaza in 2006 elections, Dr. Fandy echoed his earlier criticism of the now-dead PLO leader. “Gaza’s leaders were not,” he wrote, “acting as someone faced with the task of (establishing) a state capable of managing its people’s affairs.” He asked rhetorically when, after 60 years after the establishment of the state of Israel, “will the Palestinians advance from the ‘adolescence’ of revolution to the ‘maturity’ of statehood?” Fandy wrote that Gaza’s potential, while small as a seaport, was similar to Singapore, which had long prospered: “Instead of adopting Singapore as a model,” wrote the author, “the Palestinians have chosen the model of Tora Bora! They have transformed Gaza into part of Afghanistan, with its extremist Islamists, weapons, and missiles.”
Another author, the French-Tunisian writer Lafif Lakhdar, observed that the Palestinians suffered from a failure of leadership and a lack of self-criticism: “The first step in recovering from rejectionism is (applying) self-criticism: admitting that many Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims are their own (worst) enemies,” wrote Lakhdar, “and that they are the ones who bring disasters upon themselves — not the Zionists, Imperialists, Free Masons, Communists, or else globalization or the New World Order — as claimed by the discourse that presents the Arabs as victims and drives them back to the stage of childish whining.”
One Israeli writer was more sympathetic but agreed with the diagnosis: “The Palestinians, of course, suffered most in the conflict,” wrote Barry Rubin in 1994. “Losing their homeland brought great material deprivation and psychological trauma. It was not their fault they lived on ground claimed by another nationalist movement, Zionism. But their own leaders and choices repeated earlier mistakes, thus contributing to lengthening and deepening their plight.”
Post-October 7, 2023 however, one must also be clear that successive generations of Palestinian leaders from 1948 onward, be it Yasser Arafat or Hamas’ Yahya Sinwar and multiple others in-between, committed not only “mistakes” but chose terror and 1972 Munich Olympics-style massacres for their own sake.
That has been unlike other Arab leaders who have signed treaties with Israel, and unlike former president of Sinn Féin Gerry Adams’ decision to end hostilities with the United Kingdom despite a “colonial” presence in Ireland in favour of peace and potential prosperity. The result of such Palestinian choices, most notably the October 7 massacre of Israelis, was an inevitable war in Gaza against Hamas where, once again, Palestinians suffered as a result of their own leadership. They indeed chose ‘Tora Bora’ and not peace, prosperity, and the Singapore model.
National Post
Excerpted from The Victim Cult: How the Grievance Culture is Wrecking Civilization, by Mark Milke, published by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.