A new study on the Palestinians, published on the eve of the United Nations debate, says there is “no necessary collision between the interests of Israel and the fulfillment of Palestinian rights.” But the study–Issued by the American Jewish Congress and released at a news conference today–asserts that the Palestinians cannot demand fulfillment of their rights “at the expense of the people of Israel, who have the same rights.”
It further charges that the Palestine Liberation Organization–as a body that employs terrorist means to achieve its sworn goal of the destruction of Israel–has disqualified itself as the spokesman for Palestinian rights. “The problem of peace in the Middle East could be readily resolved if it depended only upon the recognition of a collective Palestinian presence or personality,” the study declares. “It has not been resolved because that recognition is construed by the PLO as also entailing the establishment of a revanchist government committed to the overthrow of the Jewish homeland.”
MEANING OF ‘LEGITIMATE RIGHTS’
The AJ Congress study, entitled “The Palestinians: What Is Real and What Is Politics,” was written by Phil Baum, associate executive director of the organization and director of its Commission on International Affairs. It describes the “legitimate rights of the Palestinians” as “commensurate and coordinate with the legitimate rights of other human beings.” These include, the report continues, the right to live in peace, dignity and freedom, to obtain relief from hunger and disease, to raise their standard of living, to educate their children and improve their depleted lands.
“Beyond this.” the study states. “as a people they (Palestinians) have collectively the right to seek to impress their corporate personality upon the stream of history. But they do not in addition have the right to demand them at the expense of the people of Israel who have the same rights. They do not have the right to insist that Palestinian self-realization can take place only on the land and territory which now is the sole place in the entire world for a Jewish national expression. They do not have the right to require the destruction of the Jewish State as the prerequisite for their own fulfillment.”
PLO AIMS CITED
In documenting the PLO’s aim to destroy Israel, Baum cites a number of PLO policy declarations, including the Palestinian National Covenant. The Covenant, regarded as the authoritative statement of PLO goals, declares that “the establishment of Israel is null and void,” states that “the Jews are not one people with an independent personality” and recognizes as future inhabitants of a new Arab Palestine only those Jews in Palestine “before the Zionist invasion,” defined as 1917, the year of the Balfour Declaration.
More recently, the AJ Congress study observes the Palestine National Council, meeting in Cairo last June, declared: “The Palestine national entity, after it comes into existence, will struggle to achieve a federation of confrontation states in order to complete the liberation of the entire Palestinian soil and as a step on the road to complete Arab unity.”
Characterizing the PLO statements as “real” and asserting that it is “important that we take them seriously,” Baum wrote: “The declarations of the Arab organizations unmistakably spell out both their intention to usurp all the territory now constituting Israel and their rejection of any solution short of that total take-over-except, perhaps, as a temporary and short-term strategy, made necessary or expedient by politics.”
‘A DEMOCRATIC SECULAR STATE’
The study describes as a “mirage” PLO claims that the new state to replace Israel would be a “democratic secular state.” It asserts: “Every single formulation in which this catch phrase is expanded upon by its proponents demonstrates that the ‘democratic secular state’ they envision is meant to be an integral, inseparable part of Arab culture and society and that any non-Moslem, non-Arab residents are there on sufferance and will be allowed only that modicum of freedom of self-expression available within the limits imposed by a pervasively and indelibly Arab society–that is, if they are permitted to remain at all.” Baum observes that the Palestine National Covenant insists on the pre-eminence of Arabs in the new Palestine and that the constitutions of every Arab state except Lebanon establish Islam as the state religion.
SOVIET TAKEOVER OF WEST BANK STATE SEEN
The 65-page study maintains that a West Bank Palestinian state under the PLO would be “a source of festering political unrest and subversion.” As a “launching pad against Israel,” the study observes, such a state would invite “a takeover by the Soviet Union–if not overtly then by the no less effective means of inducing a state of military and economic dependence.” The pamphlet declares:
“Any new Palestinian government could be counted upon to try to build as powerful a military machine as possible. In pursuing this end it would be free to import unlimited quantities of munitions and weapons which undoubtedly would be readily and eagerly supplied by its friends in the USSR….Because of the predictable Palestinian hunger for weapons, the mechanisms of the new government and its economic and military security would become increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union and thereby subordinate to its dictation and dominion. In any realistic view, it would seem impossible for any Palestinian government on the West Bank to escape swiftly degenerating into a puppet of the USSR.”
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.
