FOR YASSER ARAFAT, CRIME CERTAINLY PAID
Amir Oren
Haaretz, August 26, 2011
Crime doesn’t pay” is a nice saying. When it comes to diplomacy, however, it nearly always does pay. Without murderous terrorism, Yasser Arafat would not have led the Palestinian national movement to many of its achievements, including his successor Mahmoud Abbas’ plan to ask the United Nations General Assembly to recognize Palestine as an independent state next month. Abbas has secured a majority in support of this, although not for UN membership, which must be authorized by the UN Security Council.
Since Arafat first appeared on that platform, in 1974, his gun holster hanging from his belt, the Palestinians have advanced from being an organization (the Palestine Liberation Organization ) to an “authority” created by the Oslo Accords, and from there to being an embryonic state. Arafat leveraged Palestinian terror crudely—and directly. The terror attacks he masterminded eventually drove the Americans to offer him diplomatic recognition at the expense of its two veteran partners, Israel and Jordan.
On the eve of UN recognition of Palestine, 18 years after the Oslo Accords carried Arafat to the White House and from there to the Nobel Peace Prize, and seven years after his death, the U.S. government now confirms that Arafat was responsible for the 1973 murder of its ambassador and his deputy in Khartoum, Sudan. The two were taken hostage and killed “with the full knowledge and by the personal authorization” of Arafat, according to a study released last month by the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian, entitled “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Volume XXV, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1973.”
The incident began on March 1, 1973, when eight members of Black September stormed the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum during a reception, and captured the Saudi ambassador and four of his guests: American ambassador Cleo Noel, U.S. deputy chief of mission George Curtis Moore, and the Belgian and Jordanian charge d’affaires in Sudan. Black September was a transparent front for Fatah, and Arafat was the commander of both, as well as head of the PLO. When the kidnappers understood that Jordan, Israel and the United States would not be releasing prisoners in exchange for the captives, Fatah headquarters in Beirut ordered them to shoot the two Americans and the Belgian, Guy Eid.
Intelligence cover-up
Two months later—and one month after the so-called Spring of Youth raid on Beirut by an elite Israel Defense Forces unit, paratroopers and the Mossad, which killed three senior Palestinian leaders—Foreign Minister Abba Eban visited U.S. President Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.
“During the Khartoum incident, someone suggested we ask you for help,” Kissinger said, according to the newly released report. “You would have blown up Beirut.”
Eban replied: “You know that it was from Beirut that the phone call went to finish them off.”
Kissinger concurred: “We know that.”
The official State Department archives do not contain information about intercepted communications between the Sudan terrorists and their handlers in Lebanon. For its part, the National Security Agency published its own documentation in the 1970s without any information concerning the Khartoum incident, which had been censored.
At the end of the 1990s, a former navy officer named James Welsh launched a campaign to denounce the intelligence, security and diplomacy establishments’ failure to warn about the Khartoum attack. In letters to Congress and interviews with the media, Welsh said that between 1970 and 1974, he had worked in the NSA and secretly monitored the Palestinians’ actions.
A day or two before the attack, the NSA recorded conversations about the terror plans, Welsh said, adding that he recognized the voice of Arafat telling his aides, Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, to carry out the attack. The U.S. State Department was warned immediately, so it could pass on the message to the diplomats in Khartoum.
When he heard about the attack in the media, Welsh was astounded to discover that the person on duty had decided on her own that the warning was not urgent, and thus had delayed disseminating it. It arrived in Khartoum after the murders.
Welsh claimed that when he demanded that the State Department’s failure be investigated, his superiors at the NSA told him such a campaign would cost him his security clearance and result in his transfer from Washington’s quiet corridors to the rigors of a navy fueling ship. Welsh backed down.
While there had been no official response to Welsh’s claims about the negligence that led to the disaster (which resembled the communication glitches that led to the positioning of the U.S. Navy ship Liberty off the Israeli coast in 1967 ), in 2006 the State Department half-heartedly recognized the part involving Arafat. The NSA’s top-secret report on the Khartoum attack was reclassified, although it was released without its original publication date, signature or the list of recipients.
“The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat,” aided by representatives of Fatah in Khartoum, who transported the terrorists in their car, which enjoyed diplomatic immunity, the NSA report states. It makes no mention of U.S. governmental bodies, and it was included in a digitized collection of documents about Africa, published by the State Department’s Office of the Historian, without an opinion as to its reliability.
Meanwhile, last month, the U.S. State Department published the above-mentioned study of Israeli-Arab relations. It contains that quote blaming Arafat. Now that the information has been declassified, this means the U.S. government’s official position is that the attack was planned and carried out with Arafat’s full knowledge and personal approval.
The Clinton and the first Bush administrations considered Arafat a partner for diplomatic dialogue and he was a high-ranking guest at the White House. From now on it will be hard for official American visitors to the future Palestinian state to lay a wreath on the grave of the person who orchestrated the Khartoum murders, according to the usual protocol.
Intoxicating success
The Khartoum operation was an intoxicating success for Arafat. It drew the Nixon administration to launch secret negotiations with him, through an intermediary, Richard Helms, ambassador to Iran and CIA head through 1973. The contacts were conducted with Ali Hassan Salameh, “Arafat’s right-hand man,” as Helms put it, and Black September’s operations officer.
Nixon and Kissinger wanted to moderate Arafat’s policies and prevent further terror attacks (against Americans; the others didn’t count). For his part, the Palestinian leader leveraged the attacks to conduct diplomatic negotiations, unbeknownst to Israel and Jordan.… [Ed.—See ‘On Topics,’ below, for continuation of this text.]
UKRAINE CLEANSES ITS HISTORY
Tom Gross
National Post, September 2, 2011
It seems parts of Europe are less tolerant now than they were in the 16th century. Last week, I watched as bulldozers began to demolish the adjacent remnants of what was once one of Europe’s most beautiful synagogue complexes, the 16th-century Golden Rose in Lviv. Most of the rest of the synagogue was burned down, with Jews inside, by the Nazis in 1941.
During the war, 42 other synagogues were destroyed in Lviv, which from the middle ages to the 20th century was known by its Austrian (and Yiddish) name, Lemberg, and then called Lvov after the Soviets annexed it in 1945. The remnants of the Golden Rose are one of the few remaining vestiges of Jewish existence in Lviv, the majority of whose residents, in 1940, were Jewish.
It is not only morally wrong for bulldozers to drill through the last traces of this vibrant past without first giving the handful of remaining Jews here a chance to restore this site, or turn it into a place of memorial. It is legally wrong too. Ukraine’s own laws are designed to preserve such historic sites.
The Ukrainian authorities are not the only ones at fault. Where is the UN cultural organization UNESCO? The synagogue ruins were designated part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998.
And where is European soccer body UEFA? The Ukrainians are planning to build a hotel on the site to host fans and players at next year’s European soccer championships, the world’s third most-watched sporting event, which they are co-hosting with Poland. So much for UEFA’s much-hyped campaign to “Kick racism out of football.” (In addition to there being residual anti-Semitism in Ukraine, the authorities seem to be motivated by cultural and historical crassness and illiteracy, and denial of the past, as well as real-estate greed.)
During the Holocaust, 420,000 Jews, including over 100,000 children, were murdered in Lviv and its environs, more than in almost any other city in Europe. The killing was so efficient that the Nazis organized transports of Romanian and Hungarian Jews to be brought here to be killed once they were done killing the Polish and Ukrainian Jews. There were almost no survivors.
Yet you will hardly find any reference to this in the official guide books or in the museums of Lviv. There is no monument to the murdered Jews in Lviv’s old town.
A few elderly people still remember. One Ukrainian woman who approached me last week as I stood at what used to be the ghetto entrance told me she remembered, as a child, seeing Jews whipped as they were forced to walk on their knees back and forth for hours until they collapsed, and were then shot while Nazis laughed.
Few tourists make their way here these days, but many readers may recognize the city since it is where Steven Spielberg chose to film parts of Schindler’s List. This formerly Austrian and Polish town still resembles parts of pre-war Krakow, where much of the film was set.
Others may have read Robert Marshall’s harrowing “In the sewers of Lvov”—an account of the only group of Jews to stay alive for any length of time in the sewers of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Ten Jews, including two children and a pregnant woman, managed to survive for 14 months among the feces, rats and darkness despite the Nazi use of dogs and grenades to flush out the other estimated 500 Jews who tried to hide there.
This group of 10 survived with help from Leopold Socha, an illiterate former Polish criminal who, on release from prison, became a sewer worker and made it what he called his “life’s atonement” to save a few Jews by risking his life to bring them food as often as he could. (There is now a plaque to Socha at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem.)
The Lviv authorities know it is an outrage to destroy the remains of the Golden Rose, which is why last week they placed a tall fence around the planned hotel site and closed off most of the street to hide it from view. Meylakh Sheykhet, one of Lviv’s last Jews, and I had to mount a long ladder to peek over a wall and watch the drills at work.…
Sheykhet observed. “The Holocaust has not stopped here, the destruction goes on. Over the tombstones of some of history’s greatest rabbis, there are now movie theatres, discos and car parks. At the very least the authorities could put up some marker on these sites.”
Two years ago, another site of mass murder in Lviv, the Citadel—where tens of thousands of Jews and others were tortured to death—was converted into a five-star hotel. Amazingly, the hotel is owned by Volodymyr Gubitsky, the deputy regional governor responsible for the preservation of culture and heritage.…
In the 16th century, when the Golden Rose was built, Lemberg was a tolerant city where many ethnic groups lived side by side. Is the world today really so intolerant that it can’t countenance conserving the last remains of this once flourishing Jewish community and leave the murdered to rest in peace?
RIGHT OF RETURN
James Kirchick
Tablet, September 2, 2011
Exactly one year ago, a Libyan Jew named Raphael Luzon returned to his native land for the first time in 43 years. It wasn’t a simple family vacation: It was the anniversary of Libya’s Independence—Sept. 1, 1969—when a 27-year-old army officer named Muammar Qaddafi staged a bloodless coup against King Idris, who had ruled the country since its independence from Great Britain in 1951. Luzon, the leader of a Libyan Jewish exile organization based in the United Kingdom, was invited by Qaddafi himself.
For decades, the “Brother Leader” of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had attempted to place himself at the forefront of resistance to the Jewish State, giving millions of dollars annually to the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Black September terrorist group. In 2008, he claimed that the reason President Barack Obama had called for Jerusalem to be the undivided capital of Israel was that he feared assassination by Israeli agents, “the same fate as Kennedy when he promised to look into Israel’s nuclear program.”
All of which is why Qaddafi’s invitation, delivered directly from the Libyan consul in London, took Luzon by surprise.
Luzon, who had fled Libya for Italy in 1967 at the age of 13, brought his 87-year-old mother and sister along for the trip. It was a bittersweet homecoming: Eight of Luzon’s family members were killed that year by a Libyan army officer in the midst of an anti-Jewish riot. In his native Benghazi, where initial protests against Qaddafi’s rule broke out this February, Luzon visited the house where he was born and the synagogue—one of 82 that existed back then—that he attended as a young boy. Walking through the souk in Tripoli, he was stopped by an Arab Libyan. “Because we threw out the Jews,” the man said, “God gave us Qaddafi.”
At the end of the trip, the Jewish exile dined with the dictator. Over the course of the meal, Luzon claims he reached a “pre-agreement” with Qaddafi about compensation for Libyan Jewry, whose property had been confiscated by the Libyan government. He says Qaddafi went so far as to propose an academic conference with “Jewish Libyan academics together with Arab academics” in Tripoli.
But like many of Qaddafi’s promises, this grand idea went nowhere. “He always declared to the media ‘I’m ready to open doors to Jews,’” Luzon told me. But in reality, “he never allowed the Jews to return. I had asked 10 times to obtain a visa and was always rejected.”
Libya’s Jews can trace their history back some 2,500 years, long before Arab tribes ever settled the territory. Yet most left the country soon after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Anti-Jewish riots left a dozen dead and nearly 300 homes destroyed, part of the wave of anti-Jewish violence that swept the region in the aftermath of Israel’s war of independence. By 1951, the vast majority of Libyan Jews, some 30,000, had fled to Israel.
The next exodus of about 4,000 Jews occurred in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War. By the time Qaddafi seized power two years later, there were only 100 Jews left. He exacerbated their plight, as well as that of the Jewish exiles, by confiscating all property owned by Jews and by canceling all debts owed to those Libyan Jews whose property had already been seized or destroyed.…
The regime’s rapprochement with the Libyan Jewish community seems to have been the initiative of the dictator’s son and heir apparent, Saif al-Islam, who, at least until the uprising began in February, was viewed by many in the West as a liberal reformer. While a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics, Saif is said to have befriended Nat Rothschild, heir to the Jewish banking fortune, and is rumored to have stayed at Rothschild’s Corfu villa.…
Just yesterday, Haaretz reported that Saif claimed he was prepared to sign a peace treaty with Israel once the fighting in Libya ended and was even willing to serve as an intermediary to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who has been in Hamas custody for more than four years. Saif’s belief that Israel would accept such offers from a dying regime is evidence of his desperation. His instinct to settle with Israel and thus get into the good graces of international Jewry was, however wise, far too little, too late.
A year after his encounter with Qaddafi, Luzon was once again contacted by a putative Libyan leader. Last month, several days before Tripoli fell to rebel forces, two emissaries of Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a former Qaddafi justice minister who now heads the anti-Qaddafi National Transitional Council, visited Luzon at his home in Hendon, England. They wanted him to join the newly formed Libyan Democratic Party, which will compete in the country’s first free elections scheduled for next year. Jalil plans for the party to be led by a committee composed of two women, two Arabs, two Berbers, and one Jew.
“It would be the first Arab country to propose this kind of thing to a Jew,” Luzon says. “Lots of Arabs are elected to the Israeli parliament, but not the opposite, unfortunately. I told them I’m very pleased about the proposal and that I would accept it based on the condition that they are really going to build up a free and democratic system.…”
Jalil’s support for reconciliation with his country’s forgotten Jews, however, should not be mistaken for a national sentiment. Libyans under Qaddafi, like Arabs across the region, have been indoctrinated by state-sponsored anti-Semitism for decades. Lost amid the flattering press coverage of the gallant rebels is the widespread belief among Libyans that Qaddafi is himself Jewish, and that the Mossad tried to keep him in power. The origins of this belief can be traced to Qaddafi’s mysterious family history and the longstanding rumor that he has either a Jewish mother or grandmother.…
Like Luzon, Gina Bublil Waldman fled Libya in 1967. She and her family were nearly killed when the driver of the bus taking them to the airport attempted to blow it up. She’s now the president of an organization called JIMENA, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, and speaks around the country about the dispossession and exile of Libyan Jews.… [She asks], “Are these people rebelling because they want democracy, or are they rebelling because they’re so miserable and so poor and their systems and governments have been corrupt that they’ve had enough?”
That’s the fundamental question to be asked about all the revolutions that have swept the Arab world since last December, when a young Tunisian fruit seller set himself on fire and inflamed the region. What’s often overlooked in all the sympathetic news coverage, Waldman argues, is just how widespread anti-Semitism is in these societies, even among so-called liberals. Hatred of Jews, she says, was widespread in Libya prior to the Qaddafi era.… “[Anti-Semitism] was very much widespread,” she says. “It was integrated in every aspect of life in Libya whether it was in the mosque where they preached against Zionists and Jews,” or in the country’s educational system and media.…
“With all due respect,” Waldman says to me about Luzon, “if he has been invited to go back, many of us believe that he would be used as a token, the court Jew that is being ushered back into Libya to show how ‘multicultural’ this country’s going to become.” Before any Jews return to Libya she says, “the first order of business is [for Libyans] to recognize that a Jewish community existed there and they owe us an apology for the wrongs they’ve done to us.” A major part of that apology, she says, would include some sort of recompense for the synagogues and other Jewish sites that were destroyed long ago.…
JEWS SAY YES
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield Blog, August 27, 2011
Some 70 years after high school students, shopkeepers and doctors stood with their backs to the wall of the ghettos and sang, “Never Say You Walk Upon Your Final Way” while reloading their pistols, a rally organized by “Jews Say No” gathered to protest against Israel for defending itself.
The Partisan’s song of the ghettos was a courageous affirmation of life by those who went off to fight in Warsaw and in Jerusalem. And today there are the ugly chants of those who deny that affirmation. Who insist that the Jews are better off dead. Their rhetoric cloaks this agenda in the occupation,
Jerusalem Postcolumnist Larry Derfner wrote on his blog that, “the Palestinians have the right to use terrorism against us.” Of the terrorists who killed eight Israelis [two weeks ago], “however vile their ideology was, they were justified to attack.…” Derfner dresses up his murderous permissiveness in talk of resistance, but if the fathers of one of the children killed by Fatah terrorist attacks were to kick [Palestinian Authority president] Abbas in the shin, he would be the first to call for his head. It’s resistance when you kill Jews. It’s occupation when Jews fight back.
Larry Derfner’s comments aren’t atypical, they’re widely believed on the left, but less often said outside their own circles, and even less often in English by a well known columnist. The reason for that isn’t that the Israeli left are any more moral than their American counterparts, but in a country where going off to the army is still a national duty, those are explosive words.
The Israeli left makes a game of harassing soldiers with groups such as Machsom Watch, but it also tries to maintain the fiction that it is advocating on behalf of the soldiers by freeing them of dangerous duty in the territories, rather than openly approving of murdering them. Opinions such as Derfner’s can be found among anarchists and the far left which marches openly with red flags, but rarely among a Post columnist.…
These are the Jews who say no; whether they say it in New York near the Israeli embassy, smirking for the camera, or writing on their blogs ideas…it is still the same word. It is not a new word. For every Jew who picked up a rifle in the Warsaw Ghetto and refused to give up, there were those who also said, “No.…” The Soviet Union too had its Jews who said, “No”. This was the Yevesktsia, or the Jewish Section, which shut down synagogues, persecuted Rabbis, executed Zionists or anyone suspected of Jewish activities.…
In every society under occupation, there are those who collaborate and those who resist. But the modern occupation is not a thing of armies and fortresses. It is the occupation of the mind.
The occupation of the Jewish mind is an old story. A people cannot live as a minority without experiencing this occupation. The Fuhrer and Commissar of the mind who teaches you to love yourself by loathing your own people. But the occupation of the Western mind is a newer thing. These occupations are all the more insidious because there is no army to drive out, no barricades to charge.
How does one challenge an occupation of Larry Derfners and J-Streets? In the ghettos they waited until the inevitable moment had come, and the situation was as bad as it was going to get, and those appeasers who had some scrap of decency committed suicide or stood aside. But a Warsaw Ghetto doomed last stand would be a terrible thing in Israel or the rest of the free world.
The Israeli right was proven right about appeasing terrorists over and over again. Every prediction that was made, from Arafat violating the accords, to widespread terrorism, to Jerusalem being on the table have come true. The right predicted disaster after withdrawal from Lebanon. They were right. They predicted that the pullout from Gaza would lead to a Hamas terrorist state, and they were right.
We can go back further than that to Jabotinsky pleading with the Jews of Poland to flee while they had the chance. He was right, but as usual it didn’t matter. The Jews of Eastern Europe were wiped out as he had predicted.…
This is the occupation of the mind. It has a surface logic over an utterly irrational mindset.… Its goal is to convince you to say, No, or at least, Maybe. Most Jews will never say, No, but quite a few will say, Maybe—because we are terribly reasonable people and we like to listen to both sides of the argument.… And any concession to No, is a slow path to suicide.…
The occupation, says Larry Derfner. The occupation, choruses, Women in Black, Jews Say No and a thousand other organizations. But what occupation was there when the Jews of Hebron were massacred in 1929? Ah, but there were Jews in Hebron. There is your occupation.…
This is our war. It is what we fight against. The colonization of the Jewish mind is manifested in the No’s and the Maybe’s.… The No’s can never be entirely defeated, but that is not the point. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising did not bring down the Third Reich, but it remains a powerful symbol of “Yes”. The Maccabee uprising too was a short term triumph, that ended in Roman occupation, but the story of Chanukah is eternal. These “Yes” moments represent our will to live, free of physical and mental occupation. They are the story of our national dignity.…
