Arafat's letter of incitement <<Complete Letter in addendum following>>
By Bret Stephens and Lamia Lahoud
April, 15 2002
A letter seized by the IDF from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Ramallah office suggests a concerted effort by the PA to incite Israeli Arabs against Israel. The letter, released Sunday, is dated September 30, 2001, the first anniversary of the "Aksa Intifada."
"Yes, we will still write in blood the map of the one homeland and one nation...." reads the letter, issued as a statement in the name of a "Liaison Committee" from President Arafat’s office. "We look and follow with nationalistic eyes, dreaming about our families and great nation in villages and cities that stand strong since the year 1948. For they are partners of the goal and the fate, partners of the one national dream."
According to Yarden Vatikay, media adviser to Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the letter reached leaders of the Israeli-Arab community, although he declined to comment on whom those leaders might be. He said the number of recipients was relatively small, perhaps between 10 and 20 people, one reason the letter has not previously come to light.
Reached for comment Sunday, Palestinian sources said there is no proof the document is authentic. "This is just another document Israel claims it has found; like the other ones, it is unsubstantiated," said one source.
However, PA security sources have said in the past there were connections between the Islamic Movement in Israel and Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The PA has also recruited some Israeli Arabs, they added. Palestinians have warned in the past that the conflict may spread into Israel creating a confrontation between Israeli Arabs and Jews if the political process does not resume.
Efforts by Arafat and the PA to co-opt Israeli Arabs are not new. In the mid-1990s, Arafat interceded in the quarrels of hamullas – or clans – in villages in northern Israel, in an attempt to be recognized as the "godfather of all the clans," according to Mordechai Keddar, an expert in Israeli Arab society at the Begin-Sadat Center of Bar-Ilan University.
Not all of these efforts have met with success. In the election last year, there were indications Arafat was sending messages to Israeli Arabs to vote for the Labor Party. Most Israeli Arabs chose instead to sit out the election.
Israeli Arabs have also been careful not to mix their problems with Palestinians living under PA control.
Following the September 9 suicide attack in Nahariya by Muhammad Hobeishi, an Israeli Arab, several Arab MKs visited Arafat, reportedly to ask him to make sure the PA does not involve Israeli Arabs in suicide attacks.
But the release of this letter casts doubt on Arafat's willingness to comply with the request. "They're asking the Arab population not to sit quietly, but to take the initiative by saying we have the same goals and the same national dream," said Shalom Goldstein, Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert's adviser on east Jerusalem affairs. "It shows the problems we had with Israeli Arabs were coordinated with the PA, with Arafat’s office."
According to Goldstein, the differences between the PA and religious terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad have increasingly become blurred. Terror attacks in Judea and Samaria are coordinated through a common leadership, known as the Islamic and National Leadership of the Intifada. And several Israeli Arabs have been implicated in several attempted suicide bombings. In February, the police foiled a female suicide bomber en route to Jerusalem, who was being driven in a car driven by Israeli Arabs.
Then too, according to Keddar, an Israeli Arab newspaper, Sawd al-Haq Wa al-Hurriya, has published articles by Yusuf Qaradawi, an Egyptian fundamentalist living in exile in Qatar who sanctions suicide attacks, including attacks by women. Publication of the newspaper is permitted under Israeli free speech laws.
(02:00) Arafat letter incites Israeli Arabs against state
Following is the English translation of a letter written by Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat in which he incites Israeli Arabs against the state.
"Palestine Liberation Organization
The Palestinian National Authority
The President's Office
"In the name of merciful Allah, position statement by the Liaison Committee to mark the first year of the Aksa Intifada.
"Woe to our Palestinian nation, the masses who cling [to our land], stand strongly and patiently, whose roots are in the land of their fathers and grandfathers. You, who realized by means of your determined position and hold [on the land] from the time Allah desired it, for more than half a century, while you are fighting the occupation that steals our land and homeland.
"It has been decreed upon you and the generations that follow, until the resurrection, to protect this homeland. You are guarding this pledge [that depends] on your necks and the necks of your grandchildren, because you are the protectors and guardians [of the homeland], and live on it, and are its original and legal owners, and its inheritors until
the day you will be resurrected.
"We mark with you and by means of you, the first anniversary of the breaking out of the spark of the intifada... the blessed Aksa Intifada, which our nation is carrying out in the liberated territories and the occupied territories, in the Diaspora, which emphasizes the intensity of its struggle imbedded in its soul to explode the spark of built-up rage in the face of the robbers of the century, the manufacturers of world terrorism, the killers of children, women, and the elderly, the stealers of land and livelihood, the destroyers and burners of land, seeds, and stones.
"Indeed, the nation, including all its parts and groups, broke out in the intifada in every place it is found. The ties of connection are interwoven between the residents of Jerusalem and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the residents of the occupied cities of old. [Israeli Arabs], who have forever been the natural continuation and wall and fortification of our Palestinian nation and its just problem.
"The [Palestinian] nation, indeed, broke out its intifada in order to pave with its pure and clean blood the sidewalks, alleyways, and roads of the holiest of holies, the capital of the independent Palestinian state.
"The stone and the man, the bird and the tree, broke out the intifada in the alleyways of Jerusalem and its holy places and the hills and valleys of the West Bank, and the Gaza coast and its refugee camps, and the plains and hills and summits of Palestine, in cities and villages of Palestine, occupied since 1948.... Yes, we will still write in blood the map of the one homeland and one nation.
"Indeed, we are still to draw the lines and demarcations of the nobleness of the national struggle against the nations of darkness, racism, requisition, deportation, and intentional banishment, [steps] taken against the Palestinian man, as the international community [disappeared, and with] imagined justice.
"Today, we do not have any expectations from the leaders of the [Arab] nation who are overcome by sleep and fettered by silence, and in which cowardliness has increased. We look and follow with nationalistic eyes, dreaming about our families and great nation in villages and cities that stand strong since the year 1948. For they are partners of the goal and
the fate, partners of the one national dream.
"Al-Aksa Intifada and independence have realized the national unity among all the Palestinian people that stands strong, despite the roadblocks of the occupation, despite all acts of massacre which have been carried out by the Zionist gangs since the nakba [disaster] of 1948.
"To commemorate this... memory, we emphasize together and equally the will of this one nation, the life of ennobled freedom. Despite the nations of oppression and the darkness of racism which is being carried out against us by the worst soldiers of occupation history has ever known, in order to express in fury the historic oppression which has fallen upon us since the beginning of our historic times by means of the intifada of stones, the intifada of built-up rage...
"Today, no voice is louder than the voice of the intifada. It will continue to be the intifada of the one nation, erupting with one flowing blood.... It will continue to be the intifada of ongoing fury... the intifada of ongoing independence... the intifada of generations that will continue until the realization of our sublime national dream.
"Indeed, we are the owners of the land and the legal truth, the owners of the independent homeland and the independent state.
"Therefore, with you and by means of you, and by means of our noble Arab and Islamic nation, and by means of freedom-seeking people in the world, we will establish our independent Palestinian nation and its holy capital of Jerusalem... with you and by means of you we will liberate our holy al-Aksa Mosque so that the free Palestinian flag will wave in the skies of Jerusalem, the cradle of heavenly religions, the land of the messengers, the land of the gathering of creation on the day of judgement.
"Glory and eternity to our innocent victims, speedy recovery to our brave wounded, freedom to our brave prisoners, disgrace and shame to the agents [collaborators] and those who sinned, this is a revolt until victory.
"Liaison Committee of the President's Office, Sunday, 30 September 2001" |
