The Fatah Conference in Ramalla-Translation2
Elyakim Haetzni
Arutz Sheva August 31, 2009
In a “Ma’agar Mohot” survey ordered by IMRA- Independent media and analysis- the question posed was “Regarding Minister Ya’alon’s warning against ‘sliding down the slippery slope’ of those who give in to pressure, do you believe that Netanyahu is or is not on a slippery slope vis-à-vis President Obama?” 55% agreed with the question, and only 26% did not.
Netanyahu’s descent down the slippery slope started when he accepted the idea of a Palestinian state in the heart of our homeland, slid past a quiet agreement with Barak to a de facto freeze on construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and the handing out of home demolition orders throughout Judea and Samaria, and skidded on by giving free reign to the State Attorney’s office to support Peace Now petitions before the Supreme Court regarding the demolition of yet more Jewish homes. The semantics emerging from the Prime Minister’s office have also changed from the already anemic allusion to “natural growth” in Judea and Samaria to an even weaker humanitarian reference to a preservation of the “quality of life” there. Now even this policy has been abandoned as Netanyahu caves in to Mitchell’s demands for a construction freeze in the area, comparable to cutting off blood and oxygen to a limb about to be amputated.
Netanyahu’s miserable capitulation must be assessed set against the background of another event which took place at the same time, yet virtually ignored by Netanyahu’s supporters and the usually hostile media as well, namely, the PLO convention in Bethlehem .
Those interested in knowing what is in store for us, even according to the so-called moderates among the Arab population of Judea and Samaria, must study the events of the PLO convention, and the true face of Mahmud Abbas- aka Abu Mazen. This man is the temporary head of the PA, while at the same time serving as the head of the PLO and Fatah organizations, three which are actually one and the same. Looking closely at the Fatah convention resolutions and the roll call of its elected leadership is shocking. And when we connect the dots for the envisioned Fatah terror state as set out at the Bethlehem convention on the one hand, and the slippery slope where Netanyahu is sliding down toward a similar outcome on the other, no doubt remains concerning what we may expect from Mahmud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu, orchestrated by Barack Hussein Obama.
Two people warned us, but who heard them?
Minister Edelstein said, “We must not act as though we did not hear anything. We must extract ourselves from the cycle of illusions, pretending that those moderates want peace. They openly state that they support the continuation of the armed struggle.” Edelstein quoted Abu Mazen as saying that “resistance” remains an option.
Vice-minister Meier Porush said, “The outcome of the Fatah convention may be a renewed outbreak of terror in Judea and Samaria .”
Indeed, Abu Mazen proclaimed, “We will sacrifice lives until Jerusalem will return to us, cleansed of settlers”, and lives are sacrificed as the result of terrorism or war. The convention also proclaimed the right to “resist occupation”, and to them resistance is tantamount to terror. Jibril Rajoub, a well-known crony of the Israeli security establishment openly said, “The Fatah will never renounce its option of armed struggle. “Resistance” was, and has always been the tactical and strategic option, and part of Fatah policy. Rajoub was elected to the ‘central committee’ which is the Fatah’s supreme council.
Another resolution of the convention says it all: “there must be absolute and total opposition to any recognition of Israel as ‘the Jewish State’ in order to protect the rights of the refugees, and those of our people on the other side of the green line.”
I recommend reading and rereading this line over and over as it explains why they refuse to recognize Israel as the Jewish State: the state belongs to the Arab refugees and Arabs already living here! This brings us back to Arafat’s original Fatah platform. From the sea to the river! It was Arafat who dreamt up the “staged plan” which proposed that for the moment the lands east of the Green Line would do, while preparing the next phase.
Who, then, are the Fatah leadership? Let’s begin with Abu Mazen. We have already grown used to the fact that he is a Shoah-denier whose book, The secret relationship between Nazism and Zionism, spoke in terms of the “Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie of the killing of six million Jews”. Perhaps less well-known is his claim that the Zionists and Nazis conspired in a cynical and macabre manner to massacre Jews in Europe, in order to cause them to flee to Palestine . We have never heard this contemptible character retract his satanic thesis, nor did anyone demand this of him before accepting him as a “peace partner”. Moreover, Abu Mazen was the man in charge of financing the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. For financing the Karin-A arms vessel, Israel sentenced Shubaki to twenty years imprisonment, yet what is that, compared to the Munich massacre? In his autobiography From Jerusalem to Munich, Abu Dahoud, the terrorist who planned Munich , wrote “after Oslo , in 1993, Abu Mazen went to the Rose Garden at the White House to have his picture taken with Arafat, President Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. Do you think this would have been possible had the Israelis known that Abu Mazen was the money behind our operation?”
In the year 2000, during the talks between Barak and Arafat at Camp David , Abu Mazen was the most extreme by far: he did not allow Arafat to move even one inch, as reported by the expert on Middle Eastern affairs, Dan Shiftan.
Among documents confiscated by Israel in the Muqata’a in Ramallah, the late journalist Uri Dan found a letter from Abu Mazen to Arafat which said, “You continue in your world travels on the red carpet, and let me continue the deception of the Jews.”
In an interview with the Al-Shark-al-Ousat newspaper Abu Mazen proclaimed, “We did not promise to renounce the armed struggle; we have the right to resist. The Intifada must continue…Moreover, I say that if Israelis come to your country and establish settlements there, it will be your right to protect what is yours…the only exception is suicide missions in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.” Shortly after this, in March 2003, Rabbi Eli Horowitz and his wife Dina were murdered in Kiryat Arba as they were eating their Sabbath meal. Abu Mazen’s attitude sanctioned the spilling of their blood, and the same writing is all over the walls of the Bethlehem Fatah convention as follows: we shall be happy to get our demands met through negotiations, but if these fail we will return to our (terror) resistance. And who will remind them that the only reason they are here and not in their Tunisian exile is thanks to the Oslo Accords where they pledged that under no circumstance would they ever go back to fighting and terrorism?
Yusuf Tarife made a statement to the police to the effect that in 1996 Abu Mazen transferred a suitcase filled with half a million dollars in cash to his father, Jamil Tarife. He had heard that the money was intended for use in the Israeli elections…
At a Fatah meeting in Ramallah, as far back as January 11, 2007, Abu Mazen addressed the assembled there by saying that “We have the right to turn our guns on the Israeli occupier. The Children of Israel are mentioned in the Koran as the corruptors of humanity.”
In 2008, at an Islamic convention in Senegal , in the presence of Ahmadinajad, he accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and of a campaign of genocide against the Palestinians.
When the mass murderer George Habbash had breathed his last, Abu Mazen proclaimed three days of mourning, and praised him as a “historic leader”.
Abu Mazen sent greetings to the family of the murderer Samir Kuntar, and in September 2008 met with the latter in Beirut . Olmert called him to order on this by saying, “You are not a man of terror and I did not expect you to meet with a revolting killer such as him.”
In a radio talk, Shimon Peres referred to Abu Mazen as a moderate. When asked about Mazen’s attitude toward the murder of settlers, Peres responded, “It does not matter what they say.” Perhaps Peres had forgotten that in 1933 people also said that it did not matter what Hitler said.
The media has reported, that at the Fatah convention ‘new blood’ joined its leadership, and the learned Israeli talking heads expressed their great satisfaction with this development. One of those elected to the central committee of the Fatah was Nabil Shaat, who in 2003 at a symposium in Beirut said, “The right of return is not an illusion; it is an inseparable aspect of the Saudi initiative and the American roadmap. There is no solution but a return to the homeland. The right of return is assured within the lands of the Palestinian State as well as Palestinian cities within the borders of Israel . Whether a refugee chooses to return to Haifa or Shehem, his right to do so is secure”. And what will happen if such a refugee is not allowed to move to Haifa ? Shaat answered this question at the Bethlehem convention, “The armed struggle is an important historical point which has brought us this far, and we still reserve this option based on international law”. It emerges, then, that in the same way that terrorism returned Bethlehem to them, it will return them to Haifa !
Another personality elected to the central committee is Jamil Tirawi, a member of the ‘parliament’ and former brigadier commander of ‘general intelligence’. In March, 2002, this man was accused of sending a suicide bomber to blow himself up inside the Coffee Shop restaurant in Tel Aviv. And with an overwhelming majority, Marwan Barghouti was elected to the central committee. This man headed the “Tanzim” murder organization, and is currently serving five life sentences in Israel .
Well-known Gaza personality, Mahmud Dahlan is another new elect. In an article in the Wall Street journal dated June 2nd, 2002, none other than Ehud Olmert himself wrote that “Dahlan let Gaza be used as a safe haven for hundreds of terrorists fleeing from the Israeli forces. Among these was Dahlan’s childhood friend, Mahmud Deef, arch-terrorist and member of the Hamas whose hands are stained with the blood of scores of Israelis. Mr. Dahlan and his henchman, Rashid Abu-Shbak, are the prime suspects in the Kfar Darom terrorist attack involving a school bus filled with Israeli children, in November, 2000. The explosion on the bus left half a dozen children permanently crippled. Criminals of Mr. Dahlan’s ilk cannot be rehabilitated, and they must be eliminated by force.” In addition, two adults on the bus were killed, and several of the Cohen family’s children lost their legs.
Dahlan is a favorite of the Americans. They notified Weissglass that the USA would support the disengagement only if the keys to the Gaza Strip were handed over to Dahlan and his 2500 man strong militia, trained and armed by the Americans to fight Hamas. The outcome is known. Carrying their guns, the entire force moved over to Hamas and Dahlan fled to Ramallah.
The CIA had a recording of Dahlan and Abu-Shbak giving the orders to carry out the attack on the school bus, and handed the tape over to Israeli Intelligence which… filed it (BeSheva, Hagai Huberman, August 5th, 2004).
This same Dahlan made the following declaration on Palestine television, “For the thousandth time I want to say, in my name and that of the Fatah members, we do not demand that Hamas recognize Israel . Rather, the opposite is true: we demand that the Hamas NOT recognize Israel , because till this day, the Fatah has not recognized Israel .” Abu Mazen himself expressed similar sentiments in 2006.
I will end this sad tale by letting President Peres speak. Quoted in Professor Efraim Karsh’s book “The Oslo War: A Tale of Self-delusion, his seemingly light words border on the foolish when he said, “I think that what matters truly in this peace process is the creation of a partner; this is more important than having a plan. Because plans do not create partners, but if one has a partner, then one can negotiate a plan.” And what, Karsh asked, if the partner does not play the role you assigned to him? To this, Peres responded, “We will close our eyes. We will not pass criticism. Because for the sake of peace we must create a partner.”
Elyakim Haetzni
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