Yassir Arafat, “spokesman” for El Fatah, is quoted as saying not only that “We don’t want peace, we want victory,” but that if Lebanon and Jordan were to act to suppress guerrilla operations from their territories. El Fatah “will proceed with the march for the liberation of Palestine, whether the countries we start from like it or not.” He did not go so far as to say his organization would declare war on either one, though acknowledging that the area he identifies as Palestine is made up in large part by what the world accepts as Jordan. Mr. Arafat, who denied he was the “head” of El Fatah, “just one of the many members of the Central Committee,” spoke in an interview with correspondent Oriana Fallaci of the Italian magazine L’Europe, reprinted in English in Sunday’s Washington Post. “We shall never stop,” he insisted, “until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed…We shall fight on to victory even for decades, for generations if necessary.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.