Commandos Dedicated to Uniting Palestine Arabs

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“There is more than an Israel headache in the dramatic Arab commando suicide attacks that explode in the news. The political purpose is powerful—and effective.

The Arabs reason that their guerrilla warfare is the first and best step in forcing Israel to evacuate the Sinai Peninsula, the west bank of the Jordan River and the Golan Heights of Syria held since the six-day 1967 war. And our State Department considers the Arabs’ special facilities for this to be more widespread than we may suppose.

The key comes in the failure to distinguish the Palestine Arabs from other Arabs in the Arab world. In the 1948 Palestine war Israel took about 3,000 square miles more territory than the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947, gave her. About a million of today’s evicted Arab refugees date from that time—20 years ago.

But this is only the better known part of the pressure.

Contrary to our general misimpression of ancient mutual hatred, there is probably nowhere on earth that Jews have traditionally lived more peacefully and successfully than in the Arab world, and for centuries… It was the Arab peoples and the Moslem ‘church’ which gave shelter and asylum to Jews fleeing Christian Europe from the Spanish Inquisition and the persecution of tsarist Russia down to the ghastly exterminations which Hitler called ‘the final solution.’

As a booty of World War I, Britain seized Palestine under the Balfour Declaration, obtained a League of Nations mandate, and set up shop to enhance Britain’s commercial interests—and by so doing violated every pledge Britain had given the Arabs in order to gain their help against the Turks in World War I.

It was then, not 1948, that the influx of European Jews and the eviction of the Palestine Arabs began.

The 92 per cent Arab, 8 per cent Jewish population changed to 65 per cent Arab, 35 per cent Jewish by the time Britain surrendered the Palestine mandate to the United Nations after World War I… In this long process the Palestine Arab evictees total about 2½ million, many more than generally supposed, and they are scattered on a scale we seem to have missed entirely… Through all these years these fragmented people have had a political life.

The Palestine commandos or fedayeen are mainly a political instrument dedicated to uniting the far-flung Palestine Arabs. Fiery-eyed Yaser Arafat, a Cairo-educated Palestine Arab, leads the main commando organization, Al Fateh. A second leader is former diplomat Ahmed Shukairy, who has represented Syria and Saudi Arabia.

And a third, Georges Habeche, a Palestinian who became a doctor in Lebanon, is on record in summary of the objective: ‘The Palestine Arabs can be mobilized only around the issue of fighting.’ The State Department finds that such leaders as Aarafat, Shukairy and Habeche talk of ‘fighting for 20 or so years.’

They even have training camps for 12-year-old youths, an expanding cadre called Baby Tigers. In effect, the Palestine commandos are moving to take the destiny of the Palestine Arabs out of the hands of the Arab world leaders and into their own.

The result is an important new force, and a very hard one for the United States to influence in that pressure-cooker part of the world.”

Context added by this archive

An American column in 1969 arguing that the eviction began under the mandate, not in 1948, and that Jews had lived more peacefully in the Arab world than in Christian Europe. It gives the population shift as a pair of percentages.

Cite this clipping

"Commandos Dedicated to Uniting Palestine Arabs," The Star Press, 28 April 1969, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1969-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1969-003