“This is not the end of the war … it is the beginning of the end,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the killing of Yahya Sinwar last week.
So, where and when did this all begin? Oddly, it started in Moscow in 1964. When will it end? It won’t, because it can’t. The Palestinian “leadership” won’t let it.
In 1964, the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti – KGB), was funding and sometimes organising various Marxist armies for national liberation around the world, and is believed to have come up with the idea of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. It reportedly even helpfully drew up a list of members and assisted with its charter.
This blended a disparate people – the Palestinians – and shaped their grievance into a policy calling for the destruction of Israel. At the time, Nikita Khrushchev was first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had in recent years brutally suppressed unrest in Georgia and Poland, and a revolution in Hungary, while coming perilously close to superpower nuclear war in 1962. He wanted to destabilise Israel – indeed, eliminate it – and exert more power and influence across the Middle East. A common denominator in the region was a hatred of Jews (Khrushchev wasn’t keen on them either). He would give this unity and focus.
The PLO officially formed in Egypt at a meeting of the Arab League in 1964. The Egyptian president, Gamal Nasser, was a client of Moscow, which supplied Egypt with weapons, trained its military leaders around its Eastern European possessions, and even offered to defend it with nuclear weapons during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
Any would-be nation needs a national anthem and the poet Said Al Muzayin obliged the following year, writing bellicose words pretty indicative of the Palestinian mindset then and now: “Warrior, warrior, warrior,” it starts, before going on about “my determination, my fire and the volcano of my vendetta”. No word here about saving gracious kings. In any case, they were girt by Jews. It continues: “With the resolve of the winds and the fire of the weapons.”
The first leaders of the PLO disappointed Moscow, so they lobbied for their man. After the Arabs’ humiliating defeat in 1967’s Six-Day War, Nasser, who briefly resigned, declared Egypt-born Yasser Arafat to be the leader of the Palestinians. By 1969, Arafat was chairman of the PLO, as well as the KGB’s chief asset in the region. By then Yuri Andropov, who would in 1982 replace Leonid Brezhnev as leader of the Soviet Union, was running the KGB – and Arafat.
Andropov told a senior Romanian colleague, General Ion Pacepa, that: “We needed to instil 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.”The Russians soon started funding and arming the PLO and its terror offshoots with shipments of machine guns, remotely detonated landmines, grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, and rifles for long-distance sniper attacks. Some of these were used in the 1970 Black September attacks when the PLO, which had taken up residence in Jordan, sought to take over that country.
They were used in other terror attacks including the hijacking in 1976 of an Air France flight on a stopover in Athens during a Tel Aviv-Paris service. The hijackers directed the plane first to Libya and then on to Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, where psychotic dictator Idi Amin, a pro-Palestinian racist, drove to the airport to welcome the terrorists to his country. They demanded Israel free about 40 Palestinian prisoners for the more than 100, mostly Jewish, hostages.
Instead, the Israelis launched their audacious raid on the airport on the night of July 3. They killed the hijackers and left with all but three of the hostages. One Israeli soldier was killed: Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of today’s Israeli Prime Minister.
One hostage, Dora Bloch, 74, had been taken to hospital. An enraged, humiliated Amin ordered that she be murdered. Soldiers killed her. Her body was found three years later in a sugar plantation. Her face had been burned. (It is worth noting that Amin was chairman of the Organisation of African Unity and the following year his country was elevated to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.)
Arafat would remain leader of the PLO until his death in 2004. Indeed, our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese once travelled to Ramallah to meet the man who used to boast that he invented hijacking. Foreign Minister Penny Wong did not go. Very sensible. According to the UN, where Wong likes to have the floor, the Palestinian territories are not safe for women: “Women and girls in the occupied Palestinian territory face discrimination and risk of gender-based violence, including early/forced marriage, intimate partner/family violence, sexual harassment, rape, incest, denial of resources, psychological abuse and risk of sexual exploitation and abuse.”