Behind the Headlines the Plo: Suiting Deeds to Words

Shafik Al-Hout, the chief spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization at the United Nations, vowed today that the PLO will continue its attacks against Israel and indicated that the terrorists will continue to do so until Israel agrees to negotiate with the PLO.

This statement, in an interview with Barbara Walters on the NBC-TV “Today” show, came 24 hours after three terrorists murdered four civilians in the Israeli town of Beisan and after Al-Hout said yesterday afternoon at the UN that this latest terrorist assault is the “kid of negotiations (with Israel) we accept.” In defense of yesterday’s attack in Beisan he also said that Israel had stated it would meet the Palestinians only on the battlefield. “So we meet them on the battlefield.” he said.

Al-Hout. who arrived in the United States just before Yasir Arafat came to address the General Assembly last week, has been promoting the view that all the Palestinians want. including the PLO. is the return of land and property to “those who were driven off their land by the Zionist-imperialists,” and that the State of Israel must be replaced by a “democratic secular” state. Reporters who have tried to get him to discuss the future status of Israel’s integrity as a nation and the fate of the Jewish people have been given evasive replies and rhetoric by the PLO spokesman who has been described by many reporters as surly and arrogant.

VIEWS MADE CRYSTAL CLEAR

His views, however, were made crystal clear when he and five other representatives of terrorist organizations participated in a symposium March 20,1970, that was organized by the editorial staff of the Lebanese “Al Anwar.” At this meeting A1-Hout stated: “I do not believe that there exists a people by the name of the Jewish people. is there anyone here who believes there is such thing as the Jewish people? There is a people which includes different nations and differing ideological affiliations, If we declared that a Jewish people exists and that the Polish, Austrian and Arab (Jews) are a Jewish people because of the religious ties binding them, then we are creating a new definition for people in the political and ideological legacy.”

Referring to the slogan of a “democratic state,” Al-Hout declared: “If the slogan of a democratic state is only designed to reply to the contention that we aim to throw the Jews into the sea, then it is a successful slogan and an efficient political and propaganda act, but if we wish to see it as the final strategical aim of the Palestinian and Arab national liberation movements –then I am convinced that it demands continued consideration, since this a question of our history our present and certainly our future.”

He noted that further discussion could result in an alternative to “the basic aim of the Palestinian revolution–liberation of the Palestinian land and people in the national totally Arab frame to which we belong.”

Al-Hout put the finishing touch on this idea by asserting: “Assume that we guarantee to ourselves a democratic state with its population–what will be its fate in a hundred years time or in fifty years time? Eventually it will be an Arab state–if not by virtue of political semantic then by virtue of natural increase. Eventually the democratic state will sink in human and cultural terms into the Arab sphere.”

LIQUIDATION OF A SOCIETY

Al-Hout’s views at that symposium. were sustained by the others present and reinforced in an El Fatah pamphlet, “Researches and Experiments in Revolution–The Liberation of Conquered Territories and the Struggle Against Imperialism.” The pamphlet states, in part:

“The liberation action is not only the wiping out of an imperialist base but, what is more important, the extinction of a society. Therefore; armed violence will necessarily assume diverse forms in addition to the liquidation of the armed forces of the Zionist occupying state, namely…. the destruction of the various military, political, economic, financial and intellectual institutions of the Zionist occupation state, to prevent any possibility of a re-emergence of a new Zionist society….the blotting out of the Zionist character of the occupied land, be it human or social…there is no alternative to wiping out the existential trace of this artificial phenomenon.”

Thus, the candid views the terrorist representatives presented at the symposium must be viewed as the real aims of the so-called Palestine revolution, not the propaganda of the Arafats, Al-Houts and others of their ilk who seek to beguile the public with their talk of peaceful co-existence between Jews and Arabs in a democratic state. Their objective, by their own candid words is nothing less than the dismantling not only of the Israeli government institutions but the liquidation of a society, “human or social.” Those views were expressed before, and six million Jews were murdered.