Soviet Russia, creator of the PLO and inventor of the Palestinian people

How Soviet Russia created the “peace process” and incited the Muslim world against the U.S.

By Wallace Edward Brand  (first published in Jan, 2014)

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (R) greets Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (R), 29 November 1999 during their meeting. Arafat arrived to Russia on a two-day working visit. (ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)

The “peace process” is now, after some 20 years after OSLO, is known to be no more than a charade. The revelations of the highest ranking Soviet bloc defector, Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa, show that the peace process is, and has from the outset, been nothing but a charade.

It all started with the creation of a fictitious “Palestinian People” who allegedly demand political self determination. This collective noun was created by the Soviet disinformation masters in 1964 when they created the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the “PLO”. The term “Palestinian People” as a descriptive of Arabs in Palestine appeared for the first time in the preamble of the 1964 PLO Charter, drafted in Moscow. The facts in the preamble to the Charter were affirmed onlyh by the first 422 members of the Palestinian National Council, handpicked by the KGB.

Why in Moscow? The 1960s and 1970s were the years the Soviets were in the business of creating “liberation organizations”: for Palestine and Bolivia in 1964, Columbia 1965, in the 70s “The Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia” that bombed US airline offices in Europe, and “The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine that bombed Israelis.” But the PLO, was by far its most enduring success.

Major-General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. He has written that for nearly four decades, the PLO has been the largest, wealthiest, and most politically connected terrorist organization in the world. For most of that time, it was held in the firm grip of Yasser Arafat’s iron fist. But Arafat was not the fierce, independent actor he posed as; he was completely dependent on the Soviet KGB and its surrogate Warsaw Pact intelligence services for arms, training, logistical support, funds, and direction.

According to Pacepa his KGB handlers included Vasali Samoylenko, Vladimir Buljakov, and Soviet “Ambassador” Alexander Soldatov. Arafat’s closest friend and head of PLO intelligence, Hani Hassan, was actually an agent of the DIE, the Romanian subsidiary of the KGB. Pacepa was its head. He speaks not from opinion but from his personal knowledge.

In the PLO Charter preamble they actually had to use the phrase “Palestinian Arab People” to exclude those Jews who had retained a presence in Palestine since Biblical times and had been a majority population in Jerusalem as early as 1845. Romanian Communist dictator Ceausescu, at Soviet urging, persuaded Arafat to abandon his claim of wanting to annihilate the Jews in Israel in favor of “liberating the Palestinian People” in Israel.

Why? A brilliant strategy. That was the first step in reframing the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews from religious jihad to secular nationalism in a quest for political self determination, a posture far less offensive to the West. By focusing on political liberation for a small group of Arabs, it ignored the fact that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the surrounding Arab states. These are states that outnumber its population many fold with Muslims who are commanded by an extreme form of their religion to kill infidels to take back land formerly controlled by Muslims.

It creates Jews in Israel, ignoring they are a relatively small group in comparison with the Arabs surrounding them, as oppressors of an even smaller discrete group of Arabs, described in the Charter as Palestinian Arabs excluding those in Jordan, Judea, Samaria and Gaza. (After the 1967 war, and the Isreali conquest of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the exclusions for Arabs in those areas were removed the Charter. To enter into the pretended peace negotionations it pretended to excluse the Palestinian Arabs within the Green Line but has never taken steps to carry out its promise to amend the PLO Charter). It transforms the Jews from victims to oppressors. It worked.

The Arabs in Palestine had been engaged in religious jihad at least since 1929 when they massacred 69 Jews in Hebron and more elsewhere, egged on by Haj Amin al Husseini, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He had imported the Brotherhood’s vicious jihadist doctrines into Palestine from Egypt. Now, mirabile dictu, jihad became “liberation”. The religiously motivated attacks on Jews were turned into “resistance” from oppression motivated by secular nationalism. This will explain to you why, whenever the Arabs attacked the Jews thereafter, they said they were “resisting”.

In his book, History Upside Down,[2] David Meir Levi puts it this way:

“Arafat was particularly struck by Ho Chi Minh’s success in mobilizing left-wing sympathizers in Europe and the United States, where activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the [propaganda] line of North Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam war from a Communist assault on the south to a struggle for national liberation. Ho’s chief strategist, General Giap, made it clear to Arafat and his lieutenants that in order to succeed, they too needed to redefine the terms of their struggle. Giap’s counsel was simple but profound: the PLO needed to work in a way that concealed its real goals, permitted strategic deception, and gave the appearance of moderation: “Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand.”

At the same time that he was getting advice from General Giap, Arafat was also being tutored by Muhammad Yazid, who had been minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments (1958-1962): wipe out the argument that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab states, or the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees; instead, present the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation like the others. Wipe out the impression that in the struggle between the Palestinians and the Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only facing the Zionists but also world imperialism.

To make sure that they followed this advice, the KGB put Arafat and his adjutants into the hands of a master of propaganda: Nicolai Ceausescu, president-for-life of Romania.

For the next few years, Ceausescu hosted Arafat frequently and gave him lessons on how to apply the advice of Giap, Yazid, and others in the Soviet orbit. Arafat’s personal “handler,” Ion Mihai Pacepa, the head of the Romanian military intelligence, had to work hard on his sometimes unruly protege. Pacepa later recorded a number of sessions during which Arafat railed against Ceausescu’s injunctions that the PLO should present itself as a people’s revolutionary army striving to right wrongs and free the oppressed: he wanted only to obliterate Israel. Gradually, though, Ceausescu’s lessons in Machiavellian statecraft sank in. During his early Lebanon years, Arafat developed propaganda tactics that would allow him to create the image of a homeless people oppressed by a colonial power. This makeover would serve him well in the west for decades to come.”

Brezhnev, according to Pacepa, carried it one step farther when Carter came into office. He suggested to Pacepa that Carter might fall for Yassir Arafat PRETENDING to renounce violence and pretending to seek peace negotiations. He persuaded Arafat to do this by telling him that the West would shower him with gold and glory. It did. Billions of dollars and a Nobel prize. Ceausescu warned Arafat he would have to pretend over and over again. Abbas is still pretending. James Woolsey, former CIA director has been reported as stating that Pacepa is credible. Pacepa’s account is also corroborated by Zahir Muhsein, a member of the PLO executive board. In an interview by the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977, he stated that there is no such thing as the “Palestinian People”, that the term’s use is a political ploy, and there is no quest for political self-determination — that as soon as the Jews have been wiped out, sovereignty would be turned over to Jordan.

Hafez Assad also has stated there was no “Palestinian People”; that prior to 1964 the Arabs in Palestine called themselves “citizens of Greater Syria”.

During WWI the British offered the local Arabs self determination if they helped in the war against the Ottoman Empire but the local Arabs fought on the side of the Ottomans to the eternal gratitude of the Turks.

This is from Pacepa’s article “Russian Footprints” in National Review Online:

“In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me [Pacepa], a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.

“According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.”

Again from the National Review Online article, Pacepa writes:

“In the mid 1970s, the KGB ordered my [Rumanian intelligence] service, the DIE — along with other East European sister services — to scour the country for trusted party activists belonging to various Islamic ethnic groups, train them in disinformation and terrorist operations, and infiltrate them into the countries of our ‘sphere of influence.’ Their task was to export a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world. Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, my DIE had dispatched around 500 such undercover agents to Islamic countries. According to a rough estimate received from Moscow, by 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc intelligence community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world.

In the mid-1970s we also started showering the Islamic world with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tsarist Russian forgery that had been used by Hitler as the foundation for his anti-Semitic philosophy. We also disseminated a KGB-fabricated “documentary” paper in Arabic alleging that Israel and its main supporter, the United States, were Zionist countries dedicated to converting the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.

We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds, because we knew we could not win any military battles. It is hard to say what exactly are the lasting effects of operation SIG. But the cumulative effect of disseminating hundreds of thousands of Protocols in the Islamic world and portraying Israel and the United States as Islam’s deadly enemies was surely not constructive.”

You can find additional revelations in Pacepa’s biography, Red Horizons and in a Front Page magazine interview with him:[4].

The foregoing gives much insight into the invention of the Palestinian Arab People, however the strongest clue on the motivation of inventing a “Palestinian People” can be found from a reading of Professor Eugene Rostow’s 1980 article Palestinian Self-Determination: Possible Futures for the Unallocated Territories in the Yale Studies on World Public Order.

“Slowly and reluctantly, Europe and the United States are coming to realize that the pattern of events in the Middle East reflects more than random turbulence in the aftermath of the British and French Empires. For nearly thirty turbulent years, the Soviet Union has sought control of this geo-political nerve center in order to bring Western Europe into its sphere. Even if Soviet ambitions were confined to Europe, Soviet hegemony in the Middle East would profoundly change the world balance of power. But Soviet control of the Middle East would lead inevitably to further accretions of Soviet power if China, Japan, and many smaller and more vulnerable countries should conclude that the United States had lost the will or the capacity to defend its vital interests * * * The exploitation of Arab hostility to the Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate, and the existence of Israel has been a major weapon in the Soviet campaign to dominate the Middle East. * * * * The attack on the legitimacy of Israel has been the strongest and most effective tool of Soviet strategy in the Middle East* * * The anti-Israel card is not the only asset in the Soviet Union’s Middle East hand, but among the Middle Eastern masses it has been trumps. * * *After the 1973 War, when there was some danger that Egypt and other countries might make peace with Israel, the Soviet Union invited Arafat to Moscow, supported his appearance before the United Nations in November, 1974, and increased its pressure for General Assembly resolutions supporting claims of self- determination for the Palestinian Arabs and denouncing Zionism as ‘racism’ [emphasis added]”

Professor Rostow again addressed the question of the political rights of the Arab and Jewish Peoples and the rights of the so called “Palestinian People” in a paper he wrote just after the OSLO agreement was signed, in November 1993 entitled The Future of Palestine:

“The mandate implicitly denies Arab claims to national political rights in the area in favour of the Jews; the mandated territory was in effect reserved to the Jewish people for their self-determination and political development, in acknowledgment of the historic connection of the Jewish people to the land. Lord Curzon, who was then the British Foreign Minister, made this reading of the mandate explicit. There remains simply the theory that the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have an inherent “natural law” claim to the area. Neither customary international law nor the United Nations Charter acknowledges that every group of people claiming to be a nation has the right to a state of its own.” [emphasis added]

It was Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points Speech in 1918 who was the first to put forward the right of self-determination, focusing on these rights for Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine although foreshadowed by the work of John Locke. And in 1941 its was again mentioned by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in their “Atlantic Charter” in 1941 created aboard a battleship in the Atlantic Ocean. These were both mentioned as matters of “natural law” with the rights of self-determination as a natural or God given right. But they slowly evolved from natural law into International Law.

The first UN adoption of the right of self-determination was in its Charter, in 1945 just after the end of WWII. Self-determination is clearly mentioned in the 1945 UN Charter (Art. 1(2)) but only as a “principle”. States’ sovereignty and territorial integrity are reserved in Art. 2:

“The Organization and its Members, in pursuit of the Purposes stated in Article 1, shall act in accordance with the following Principles.

1. The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.”

Among the General Assembly Resolutions not long after WWII was Resolution 1514, the decolonization resolution, adopted some 15 years later in December, 1960 and then two more that were not expressly addressed to decolonization arrived in the middle 60’s, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Each of these provided as a matter not only of “natural law” but also of International Law that “All peoples have the right to self determination. But they also required respect for territorial integrity by insisting they “respect that right [of self-determination] in conformance with the conditions of the Charter of the United Nations”. As of this date, International Law supported the right of self-determination in decolonizations where no secession was involved that would impinge on territorial integrity of a sovereign state.

Was the Soviet Union’s pressure on the UN General Assembly to support the “Palestinian” claims for self determination promoted by the dezinformatsia to help the attack on the legitimacy of Israel by promoting the cause of the Arabs? These resolutions for two international covenants were adopted in 1966, two years after the preamble of the first charter of the PLO invented the Palestinian People to be put into effect in 1976. A major factor in the early 1970s was the after- shock of the oil embargo, and the rising influence of the OIC Organization of the Islamic Conference (now “Cooperation”), which included the Arab Bloc and many other countries. The influence of the Soviet Union was primarily channeled through the NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) which included the Third World countries, and were pretty much “aligned” with the Left in spite of their name.

If they wanted to help the Arabs in Palestine by supporting a state for them to be carved out of the Jewish Peoples state, the Russians had three barriers to overcome. First, the Palestinians were undifferentiated members of the Arab people located in Palestine. They were not and never had been a nation or a people. They had never ruled Palestine from a capital in Palestine.

Second, they had never sought the right of self determination.

Third, the right under International Law had been limited to decolonizations where there was a tension between such a right and the right of sovereign states to territorial integrity. Only decolonizations would not affect the boundary of an existing sovereign state. Secessions would.

With the Soviet invention of the Palestinian Arab People in 1964, and their quest for self-determination assumed in the preamble of the PLO Charter, (Brand, Was there a Palestinian Arab National Movement at the End of the Ottoman Period) the first two barriers could be overcome

The same people may still working now on overcoming the third barrier. Territorial integrity of sovereign states has been the mainstay of world order since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. International Lawyers had always given territorial integrity a priority over the right of self determination. There is some evidence that the right to self-determination was considered for the charter of the League of Nations in 1919, but at the time, the authors could not resolve the cases where there was tension with the territorial integrity of sovereign states.

Currently there is a movement among ethical philosophers and International Law commentators for an exception to the existing rule of International Law that the right of self determination only supports decolonization and not secession that would change the boundary of a state. They argue for it as a last resort where a people or nation is much oppressed by the majority population of the state. You don’t have to look far to hear, created by PW or psychological warfare, the Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood at the hands of the Jews, now accepted around the world as a poetic truth; one that can’t be dented with facts, logic or reason even though the evidence showing the far greater benefits the Jews brought to the Arab People establishes the relative insignificance of any burden placed on them. To what extent these are prompted by the desinformatsiya we won’t know until the defection of another member of the former Soviet bloc closely associated with the KGB’s successors.

According to Major General Ion Pacepa in his recently published book Disinformation, the dezinformatsiya has not ended its work following Gorbychev. It still remains the largest division of the Russian agency that is the successor of the KGB.

The current violence both in Israel and around the rest of the world is a third wave of Islamic Jihad or Holy War, with the violence in Israel disguised by the Soviets as secular nationalism in a quest for political self determination. As a consequence, Israel is the West’s first line of defense.

Russia is still the enemy of Israel and the United States.