The concept of Palestine as a modern state has existed for only 60 years. The very purpose behind the creation of the Palestinian independence movement was to ”liberate ” the territory that constituted the State of Israel — in other words, to eliminate the State of Israel.
The Roman expulsion of Jews from Judea took place through two major Roman-Jewish wars nearly two thousand years ago, which led to genocide, mass slavery, and a large Jewish diaspora primarily in Europe and the Arab world. The Roman Emperor Hadrian changed the name of Judea to Syria Palaestina, renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina, and erected a temple to the Greek god Jupiter on the Temple Mount, in order to insult the Jews and suppress Jewish national identity. The port city of Caesarea Maritima was made the administrative center instead of Jerusalem, which never became a capital of the Roman province.
Even when occupying powers such as the Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and British later controlled the area, Jerusalem remained largely an insignificant and neglected city, while Palestine never existed as an independent country.
After the Arab world rejected the UN partition plan of 1947 and attacked the newly established Jewish state in May 1948, Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip while Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria. In 1959 Egypt incorporated Gaza into Egypt, and in 1950 Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria, which became known as the West Bank, referring to the western bank of the Jordan River. Jordan did not renounce this claim until 1988.
The modern Palestinian national identity was first created in the 1960s when Moscow abandoned Israel in favor of the Arab world. When the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) wrote its charter in May 1964, it made no territorial claims to the West Bank or Gaza — which were occupied by Jordan and Egypt — but primarily to Israeli territory.
The PLO was formed with support from Egypt and the Soviet Union with the goal of ”liberating ” the territory that constituted the State of Israel. Only in 1968, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, was the Arab population’s independent national identity emphasized through calls for the ”liberation of our homeland ” by armed struggle.
The charter described the State of Israel as ”entirely illegal ” and regarded the original borders of the British Mandate as the indivisible homeland of the Palestinian people.
In Cairo in June 1974, the PLO adopted a program calling for a national authority ”over every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated ” with the aim of completing the liberation of the entire territory. Armed struggle did not exclude diplomatic compromises if they served the goal of ”completing the liberation of all Palestinian territory. ”
In April 1996, the PLO decided to amend its charter as a result of the Oslo Accords, but as late as 2009 PLO officials confirmed that the charter remained unchanged.
On Radio Monte Carlo, a little more than a week after the Oslo agreement, Arafat claimed that the Oslo Accord was part of the PLO’s 1974 plan, which had the destruction of Israel as its goal.
The Israeli daily Ynet News described in November 2016 how secret KGB documents revealed the Soviet Union’s deep involvement in Palestinian terrorist attacks directed against Israel and the West from the late 1960s onward.
Through Palestinian terrorist organizations, the Soviet security service KGB conducted a kind of ”shadow war ” against Israel.
The KGB recruited Yasser Arafat and his Fatah faction early on. At the same time, the KGB placed an agent with one of Arafat’s close advisers. The KGB’s recruitment of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, began around 1979 when Abbas arrived in Moscow to study at Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University.
Abbas was admitted to the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow to pursue doctoral studies, and when he returned to Lebanon he spread Soviet propaganda developed by the KGB and the East German Stasi.
”Yasser Arafat is still the same bloody terrorist I knew so well during my years at the top of Romania’s intelligence service, ” wrote former Securitate chief Mihai Pacepa in The Wall Street Journal on January 12, 2002.
Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the former Soviet bloc, became directly involved with Arafat in the late 1960s, during the period when Arafat was financed and manipulated by the KGB.
”During the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel humiliated two of the Soviet Union’s Arab client states, Egypt and Syria. A few months later, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, General Alexander Sakharovsky, landed in Bucharest. According to him, the Kremlin had tasked the KGB with ‘repairing the prestige’ of ‘our Arab friends’ by helping them organize terrorist operations that would humiliate Israel. The KGB’s principal asset in this joint enterprise was a ‘devoted Marxist-Leninist’ — Yasser Arafat, ” wrote Mihai Pacepa in The Wall Street Journal, continuing:
”General Sakharovsky asked us in Romanian intelligence to help the KGB secretly transport Arafat and some of his fedayeen fighters to the Soviet Union through Romania, so they could be indoctrinated and trained. That same year, the Soviet Union maneuvered to have Arafat appointed chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, with the help of Egypt’s ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser.”
