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Palestine Liberation Organization (view source)
Revision as of 14:21, June 16, 2021
, 14:21, June 16, 2021no edit summary
First, let me dispose of a current canard. As evidence of her egregious lack of sensibility, she has been repeatedly charged with denying the existence of Palestinians. Her actual words were: "There is no Palestinian people; there are Palestinian refugees." In the 1980s, such a distinction is damning; within its historic context it is not at all so. When Golda arrived in Palestine , the only avowed Palestinians were Jewish pioneers. Arab nationalists stridently rejected the designation of "Palestinian" as an attempt to fragment an ideal Arab unitary state. From the Versailles Conference until the Partition debate at the United Nations, Arab spokesmen insisted that Palestine was southern Syria and that to confer independent status on this territory, cherished in Jewish history, infringed on the Arab nationalist vision. As late as 1956, Ahmed Shukairy, subsequently head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, argued at the Security Council that "it is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." Golda took her adversaries at their word.
First, let me dispose of a current canard. As evidence of her egregious lack of sensibility, she has been repeatedly charged with denying the existence of Palestinians. Her actual words were: "There is no Palestinian people; there are Palestinian refugees." In the 1980s, such a distinction is damning; within its historic context it is not at all so. When Golda arrived in Palestine , the only avowed Palestinians were Jewish pioneers. Arab nationalists stridently rejected the designation of "Palestinian" as an attempt to fragment an ideal Arab unitary state. From the Versailles Conference until the Partition debate at the United Nations, Arab spokesmen insisted that Palestine was southern Syria and that to confer independent status on this territory, cherished in Jewish history, infringed on the Arab nationalist vision. As late as 1956, Ahmed Shukairy, subsequently head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, argued at the Security Council that "it is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." Golda took her adversaries at their word.
Only in the 1960s did the Palestine Liberation Organization come forward with the demand that Arab refugees be renamed a homeless Palestinian people. Since that time, the distinction has become archaic.</blockquote></ref>
Only in the 1960s did the Palestine Liberation Organization come forward with the demand that Arab refugees be renamed a homeless Palestinian people. Since that time, the distinction has become archaic.</blockquote></ref>
From Golda Meir's OpEd in the NYTimes, January 14, 1976:<ref>
[https://static01.nyt.com/packages/pdf/oped40/CONFLICTMeir.pdf Published: January 14, 1976] [https://www.aish.com/jw/me/Golda-Meir-on-the-Palestinians.html Aish, Jan 13, 2018, "Golda Meir on the Palestinians," Aish, Jan 13, 2018] [https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/cgs/1976/01/22/01/article/33/?e=-------en-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxTI--------------1
"Israel and the Palestinians." Golda Meir. The Sentinel, 22 January 1976]</ref>
<blockquote>To be misquoted is an occupational hazard of political leadership; for this reason I should like to clarify my position in regard to the Palestinian issue. I have been charged with being rigidly insensitive to the question of the Palestinian Arabs. In evidence of this I am supposed to have said, “There are no Palestinians.” My actual words were: “There is no Palestinian people. There are Palestinian refugees.” The distinction is not semantic. My statement was based on a lifetime of debates with Arab nationalists who vehemently excluded a separatist Palestinian Arab nationalism from their formulations.
When in 1921 I came to Palestine – until the end of World War I a barren, sparsely inhabited Turkish province – we, the Jewish pioneers, were the avowed Palestinians. So we were named in the world. Arab nationalists, on the other hand, stridently rejected the designation. Arab spokesmen continued to insist that the land we had cherished for centuries was, like Lebanon, merely a fragment of Syria. On the grounds that it dismembered an ideal unitary Arab state, they fought before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and at the United Nations.
When the Arab historian Philip K. Hitti informed the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry that “there is no such thing as Palestine in history,” it was left to David Ben-Gurion to stress the central role of Palestine in Jewish, if not Arab, history.
As late as May 1956, Ahmed Shukairy, subsequently head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, declared to the United Nations Security Council, “It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.” In view of this, I believe I may be forgiven if I took Arab spokesmen at their word.
Until the 1960’s, attention was focused on the Arab refugees for whose plight the Arab states would allow no solution though many constructive and far-reaching proposals were made by Israel and the world community.
I repeatedly expressed my sympathy for the needless sufferings of refugees whose abnormal situation was created and exploited by the Arab states as a tactic in their campaign against Israel. However, refugee status could not indefinitely be maintained for the original 550,000 Arabs who in 1948 joined the exodus from the battle areas during the Arab attack on the new state of Israel.
When the refugee card began to wear thin, the Palestinian terrorist appeared on the scene flourishing not the arguable claims of displaced refugees but of a ghoulish nationalism that could only be sated on the corpse of Israel.
I repeat again. We dispossessed no Arabs. Our toil in the deserts and marshes of Palestine created more habitable living space for both Arab and Jew. Until 1948 the Arabs of Palestine multiplied and flourished as the direct result of Zionist settlement. Whatever subsequent ills befell the Arabs were the inevitable result of the Arab design to drive us into the sea. Had Israel not repelled her would-be destroyers there would have been no Jewish refugees alive in the Middle East to concern the world.
Now, two years after the surprise attack of the Yom Kippur War, I am well aware of the potency of Arab petrobillions and I have no illusions about the moral fiber of the United Nations, most of whose members hailed gun-toting Yasir Arafat and shamefully passed the anti-Semitic resolution that described Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, as racist.
But though Israel is small and beset, I am not prepared to accede to the easy formula that in the Arab-Israeli conflict we witness two equal contending rights that demand further “flexibility” from Israel. Justice was not violated when in the huge territories liberated by the Allies from the Sultan, 1 percent was set aside for the Jewish homeland on its ancestral site, while in a parallel settlement 99 percent of the area was allotted for the establishment of independent Arab states.
We successively accepted the truncation of Transjordan, three-fourths of the area of historic Palestine, and finally the painful compromise of the 1947 partition resolution in the hope for peace. Yet though Israel arose in only one-fifth of the territory originally assigned for the Jewish homeland, the Arabs invaded the young state.
I ask again, as I have often asked, why did the Arabs not set up a Palestine state in their portion instead of cannibalizing the country by Jordan’s seizure of the West Bank and Egypt’s capture of the Gaza Strip? And, since the question of the 1967 borders looms heavily in the present discussions, why did the Arabs converge upon us in June 1967, when the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Sinai, the Gaza Strip and old Jerusalem were in their hands?
These are not idle questions. They go to the heart of the matter – the Arab denial of Israel’s right to exist. This right is not subject to debate. That is why Israel cannot by its presence sanction the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the Security Council, a participation in direct violation of Resolutions 242 and 338.
We have no common language with exultant murderers of the innocent and with a terrorist movement ideologically committed to the liquidation of Jewish national independence.
At no point has the P.L.O. renounced its program for the “elimination of the Zionist entity.” With startling effrontery P.L.O. spokesmen admit that their proposed state on the West Bank would be merely a convenient “point of departure,” a tactical “first stage” and finally, a combatant “arsenal” strategically situated for the easier penetration of Israel...</blockquote>
===Perpetuating the refugee problem===
===Perpetuating the refugee problem===