Many people, I have found, hold the following folk theory about institutions: the passage of time will alter their ideology. As members die or leave and are replaced with others, the institution will change because people have all kinds of different ideologies. Accordingly, the burden of proof is on whoever claims that after 60 years, say, the ideology of an institution will remain the same. I think this is backwards: the burden of proof, in my view, is on whoever affirms that the ideology of an institution has changed. I will defend that the Arab League, like most other institutions, has today the same ideology it had on the day it was founded. What is this ideology? Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, explained it when the League launched a war of aggression against the Israeli Jews in 1948: “This will be a war of extermination...”[1]

An institution is a network of organized relationships between people whose individual roles are defined by their kind of membership. These individuals will all die, and they may leave the institution even before passing away, but the institution survives because new people are always being recruited to the vacancies. An institution is potentially eternal. The Catholic Church, for example, is 2000 years old.

Now, the question for us is this: If an institution is created around a strongly felt ideology, how will this affect the process of recruitment to the vacancies?

Imagine institution V, created to promote vegetarianism, and run, naturally, by vegetarians. There are 10 people in the executive board. One day, at time = t, one of the board members dies. What kind of a person will the remaining 9 members look for? Another vegetarian. A meat-eater might be recruited to fill relatively low positions that are strongly utilitarian: for example, an expert in marketing might be hired even if he eats meat, because he is a mercenary who will do his contract job. But it would be remarkable for this institution to hire meat eaters to the governing board, where policy decisions are made. Given that at time = t vacancies were filled, and especially in the upper echelons, with vegetarians, the vacancies at time t+1 will also be filled with vegetarians, because once again those doing the selecting are surviving vegetarians. And so forth. There is no reason to expect that the passage of time will turn this vegetarianism-promoting institution into an institution that celebrates meat because the ideology of the institution creates a selection pressure in the recruiting process that works to keep the ideology stable.

Now let’s consider the Arab League. The question we must answer is this one: if we can agree that the Arab League meant, at its inception, to exterminate the Israeli Jews, is it possible that the Arab League, today, means to make peace with the Israeli Jews?

There are different ways of addressing the question of the Arab League’s ideology at its inception. One is to ponder what it means that the Arab League recreated the Arab Higher Committee after World War II.

Avi Shlaim explains that

“In the aftermath of World War II, when the struggle for Palestine was approaching its climax, the Palestinians [he means the Muslims living in British Mandate Palestine, a great many of whom were recent immigrants, including many non-Arabs, and none of which called themselves ‘Palestinians’ at that time -- FGW] were in a weak and vulnerable position. Their weakness was clearly reflected in their dependence on the Arab states and on the recently-founded Arab League. Thus, when the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) was reestablished in 1946 after a nine year hiatus, it was not by the various Palestinian political parties themselves, as had been the case when it was founded in 1936, but by a decision of the Arab League.”[2]

Shlaim is one of the ‘New Historians’ who have made it a specialty to defend the justice of the ‘Palestinian Arab’ movement, and I have quoted him to show what even defenders of this movement must implicitly concede.

Shlaim explains that the organism created to speak for the Muslims of Palestine was the Arab Higher Committee. What was it? According to Shlaim, the AHC had been created in 1936 by “the various Palestinian political parties themselves” to represent the Muslims in Palestine. This, however, is false. It was Hajj Amin al Husseini who created the AHC. Here follows the context in which he did so.

Hajj Amin al Husseini had organized two large Muslim terrorist riots against civilian Jews in British Mandate Palestine in 1920 and 1921, after which the British governing authorities -- which had assisted those anti-Jewish attacks -- made him Mufti of Jerusalem, transforming the office so that it had unprecedented power over the Muslim courts, mosques, taxes, schools, etc. They also gave him a generous British subsidy. (The British authorities wanted to derail the Zionist project but they wanted the British public to think that they had nothing to do with it, so they promoted Muslim violence against the Jews). Husseini used his power and British backing to launch jihad: the murder of infidels who refuse to convert to Islam or be the slaves of Muslims. The targets of his jihad were the Jews. There was a much larger terrorist riot in 1929, and then an even bigger and more sustained attack, lasting from 1936 to 1939. The last one was organized with weapons supplied by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and received much assistance in weaponry and personnel from nearby Arab states. Throughout all these years, Husseini used his terrorists to intimidate and murder any Muslims in Palestine who disagreed with him and tried to get along with the Jews, or who tried to sell their land to the Jews (who were paying very good money for it). In this way, Husseini -- from one of the largest feudal landholding families in Palestine -- could buy the plots of Muslim smallholders at bargain prices, consolidate them, and then resell them to the Zionists for very high prices, even though in public he accused that selling land to Jews was treason. It was in the context of his attacks against Muslim dissenters, in the so-called ‘Arab Revolt’ of 1936-39, that Husseini created the Arab Higher Committee in order to concentrate all political authority in his hands and destroy all moderate opposition.[3]

The question of whether the Arab Higher Committee created by feudal lord Hajj Amin al Husseini represented the interests of ordinary Muslims in Palestine is easily answered: 1) Husseini was using terrorism to steal the land of small-time Muslims and enrich himself; 2) the general strike his terrorist gangsters enforced hurt the Muslim economy especially; and 3) in his efforts to enforce his racism against the Jews, his terrorists in fact murdered many more Muslims than Jews: during the Arab Revolt “the Mufti’s forces killed more than four hundred Jews and several thousand Arabs.”[4] It is true, as Avi Shlaim states, that there were “various political parties” among the Muslims in Mandate Palestine, but if they had really all supported Husseini in the creation of the Arab Higher Committee he would not have murdered so many Muslims.

It is quite significant that Hajj Amin al Husseini, in late 1941, moved to Berlin and spent the entire war in Nazi-occupied Europe, organizing massacres of Jews for the Nazis. According to the post-war testimony of Dieter Wisliceny, one of Adolf Eichmann’s top lieutenants in the extermination of the European Jews, it was in fact Hajj Amin al Husseini -- at the time with 20 years experience (much more than the Nazis) murdering innocent Jews -- who convinced Hitler, Himmler, and Eichmann not to expel any Jews from Europe but instead to kill them all. Wisliceny also testified that Husseini had subsequently become an equal partner with Adolf Eichmann in the implementation and administration of the Final Solution, from the time of the fateful decision to kill all the Jews -- in the Wansee Conference of January 1942 (shortly after Husseini met with Hitler on 28 November 1941) -- till the end.[5]

Avi Shlaim tells us that after the World War, the Arab League, whose leading member was Egypt, recreated the Arab Higher Committee. What was the point of this? To give a voice to the Muslims in Mandate Palestine? On the contrary. Hajj Amin al Husseini, one of history’s greatest butchers of Jews, and no friend of ordinary Muslims in Mandate Palestine, was now living in Cairo under protection of the Egyptian government. What the Arab League was doing was prepare another attack against the Jewish people, using the Muslims in Mandate Palestine -- the so-called ‘Palestinian Arabs’ -- as useful pawns in the great game. This was also the British government’s game, for it was the British government that had created Hajj Amin al Husseini,[5] and the British government that had created the Arab League. When the Arab League decided to destroy the new Jewish State in the cradle, during the War of 1948, the British government allied with the Arab League’s attack, and in many ways led it (see below).

Shortly after the Arab League’s recreation of the Arab Higher Committee in 1946, the United Nations voted to create a state for the Muslims living in Mandate Palestine, and another state for the Jews. Today the Arab states holler loudly that a state must be created for the ‘Palestinian Arabs’ in order to do them ‘justice.’ But when this state was approved by the UN in 1947 the entire Arab world rejected it. Their concern was clearly not to create a self-governing state for the Muslims in Palestine, but to prevent any opportunity for the Jews to have their own.

And the Arab League would punish Jews everywhere, for soon it had drafted a series of laws which it planned to impose on any Jews living in the Arab States, as we see below.

[Quotation begins here (go to the source)]

Text of the Law Drafted by the Political Committee of the Arab League

Summary

In 1947, the Political Committee of the Arab League (League of Arab States) drafted a law which was to govern the legal status of Jewish residents in all Arab League countries. This law had already been approved by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, provided that, “beginning with a specified date, all Jews -- with the exception of citizens of non-Arab countries -- were to be considered members of the Jewish ‘minority state of Palestine,’ and that their bank account be frozen and used to finance resistance to ‘Zionist ambitions in Palestine.’ Jews believed to be active Zionists would be interned as political prisoners and their assets confiscated. Only Jews who accept active service in Arab armies or place themselves at the disposal of these armies would be considered ‘Arabs.’”[6]

Excerpts of Direct Quotes of the Law drafted by the Political Committee of the Arab League:

-- “All Jewish citizens…will be considered as members of the Jewish minority of the State of Palestine and will have to register [“within 7 days”] with the authorities of the region wherein they reside, giving their names, the exact number of members in their families, their addresses, the names of their banks and the amounts of their deposits in these banks…”[7]

-- “Bank accounts of Jews will be frozen. These funds will be utilized in part or in full to finance the movement of resistance to Zionist ambitions in Palestine.”[8]

-- “Only Jews who are subjects of foreign countries will be considered ‘neutrals.’ These will be compelled either to return to their countries, with a minimum of delay, or be considered Arabs and obliged to accept active service in the Arab army.”[9]

-- “Every Jew whose activities reveal that he is an active Zionist will be considered as a political prisoner and will be interned in places specifically designated for that purpose by police authorities or by the Government. His financial resources, instead of being frozen, will be confiscated.”[10]

-- “Any Jew who will be able to prove that his activities are anti-Zionist will be free to act as he likes, provided that he declares his readiness to join the Arab armies.”[11]

-- “The foregoing…does not mean that those Jews will not be submitted to paragraphs 1 and 2 of this law.”[12]

[Quotation ends here]

These laws are quite similar to Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws, and they prompted an article in the New York Times by Mallory Browne with the headline JEWS IN GRAVE DANGER IN ALL MOSLEM LANDS.[13] It was published on 16 May 1948, and in a sense was already outdated because by then the Arab states had launched themselves in war against the newly-created state of Israel. The Arab League explained out loud that they meant to continue Adolf Hitler’s great mass killing, so fresh that Europe still reeked of blood. Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League promised: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”[14] This was the War of 1948, the Israeli War of Independence, which might as well be called the War of National Survival.

During this war of attempted extermination, the Arab League was assisted by the British and United States governments.

“The first large-scale assault began on January 9, 1948, when approximately 1,000 Arabs attacked Jewish communities in northern Palestine. By February, the British said so many Arabs had infiltrated they lacked the forces to run them back. In fact, the British turned over bases and arms to Arab irregulars and the Arab Legion.

…The Arabs had no difficulty obtaining the arms they needed. In fact, Jordan’s Arab Legion was armed and trained by the British, and led by a British officer. At the end of 1948 and beginning of 1949, British RAF planes flew with Egyptian squadrons over the Israel-Egypt border. On January 7, 1949, Israeli planes shot down four of the British aircraft.”[15]

But that’s nothing: the British government sent captured Nazi officers to lead the Arab armies, as documented by The Nation in 1948, which published documents from British and French intelligence to show it in furious articles.[16]

What about the United States? It is true that earlier the United States had voted in favor of partitioning the Mandate territory, but the entire State Department was opposed and the US vote in favor happened only after the embarrassment of a passionate UN General Assembly speech by Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in favor of a state for the persecuted Jews.[16a] The United States did not want to seem less anti-Nazi than the Soviets. But once the Arab League had attacked, with its chances looking good, the US government announced that it no longer recognized the State of Israel and placed an arms embargo on the Israeli Jews.[17]

Despite all this, the Arab League lost the War of 1948. Kudos go to the fighting spirit of the Israeli Jews, and to the Czechoslovaks, who assisted the Israeli efforts with arms shipments.[18]

After the defeat, the member states of the Arab League expelled the Jews who lived in these countries, and a great many took refuge in Israel. This was such a large population that Jews from Arab-speaking countries, overnight, became the majority in the Jewish State.

In the 1950s important German Nazi fugitives came to Egypt to improve the deadliness of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military and intelligence services. These were Hajj Amin al Husseini’s old friends, and some of them had been his subordinates in the Final Solution. Thus, under protection of Arab League leader Egypt, Husseini had his Nazi friends train Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and other adolescent recruits of his, creating the group known as Al Fatah.[19]

What was the purpose of Al Fatah? The same as that which Azzam Pasha explained was the purpose of the parent organization, the Arab League: the extermination of the Israeli Jews. Article 12 of the Fatah Charter calls for the “Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military, and cultural existence.” How do you eradicate the “economic, political, military, and cultural existence” of the Israeli Jews? Why, by eradicating the Jews themselves. Further clarifying its intentions, Article 17 of the Fatah Charter states that “Armed public revolution is the inevitable method to liberating Palestine.” In other words, ‘Palestine’ can only be ‘liberated’ in the process of murdering Jews (since this method is “inevitable”). If this were not clear enough, Article 19 states that “armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic.” In other words, armed struggle -- killing Jews -- is not a means to an end but the end itself. The same article explains that the killing will not stop “unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.”[20]

The Arab League also played a role in the creation of the PLO.

Mitchell Bard writes that “the Arab League created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Cairo in 1964 as a weapon against Israel.”[21] Is he right? Yes. The PLO’s founding purpose was not really to ‘liberate’ ‘Palestine’ but to kill Israeli Jews -- as many as possible.

This is easily demonstrated.

The 1964 PLO Covenant or Charter in fact explicitly states that the West Bank, Gaza, and Himmah -- which Jordan, Egypt, and Syria respectively had occupied during the War of 1948 and were still sitting on -- were not part of ‘Palestine.’ These lands had all been part of British Mandate Palestine. And yet it was quite all right, the PLO stated, for Jordan, Egypt, and Syria to have those three territories, even though the PLO was defining ‘Palestine’ as British Mandate Palestine. But this made perfect sense: the PLO was an Arab League creation, and the states of the Arab League would not have the PLO contesting their control of the parts of ‘Palestine’ that they had occupied. Which ‘Palestine’ did the PLO mean to ‘liberate,’ then? Answer: whatever land the Jews were living on: Israel. This was conclusively demonstrated in the rewritten 1968 PLO Charter. In this document the PLO removed the clause concerning the West Bank and Gaza and from this point onwards did lay claim now to a ‘Palestine’ that includes the West Bank and Gaza.[22] What happened? The Six-Day War of 1967. In that war, provoked by the Arab League members who once again did their best to try and exterminate the Israeli Jews, the Israelis managed to capture Judea and Samaria (‘West Bank’) and Gaza, among other territories, and subsequently Jews returned to live there (Jews had been living in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza before they were massacred or forced to flee in the War of 1948). This demonstrates that there is no reality to ‘Palestine’; its boundaries are arbitrarily redrawn so that the territory to be ‘liberated’ will correspond to the one that Jews live on.

And by the word ‘liberate’ the PLO means the same thing that Al Fatah means: kill Jews. This, too, is easily demonstrated.

The 1968 PLO Charter states the objectives of the PLO as follows. Article 9 says that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.” This could be rewritten like so: “it is required that Palestine be liberated in the act of killing people.” Killing which people? Article 15 of the PLO Charter states that it is “a national duty to repulse the Zionist imperialist invasion from the great Arab homeland and to purge the Zionist presence from Palestine”; and article 22 declares that “the liberation of Palestine will liquidate the Zionist and imperialist presence.” In other words, the PLO, which organization asserts that ‘Palestine’ may be ‘liberated’ only in the act of killing people, explains that its goal is purging and liquidating the presence of “Zionists.”[23] Like its parent organization (the Arab League), the PLO means to exterminate the Israeli Jews.

Shortly after the PLO rewrote its charter in 1968, Al Fatah took it over. By 1970, writes historian Howard Sachar,

“the PLO had experienced less a revival than a total reincarnation of membership and purpose under the leadership of Yasser Arafat. Consisting ostensibly of representatives of all guerilla organizations, the PLO in its resurrected form was almost entirely Fatah-dominated, and Arafat himself served as president of its executive. In this capacity he was invited to attend meetings of the Arab League, and won extensive subsidies from the oil-rich governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf.”[24]

As this was happening, during the years 1967-70, Arab League leader Egypt launched a sustained series of attacks against Israel that have been called the War of Attrition. It couldn’t defeat Israel. So,

“On October 6, 1973 -- Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar -- Egypt and Syria opened a coordinated attack against Israel. The equivalent of the total forces of NATO in Europe were mobilized on Israel’s borders. On the Golan Heights, approximately 180 Israeli tanks faced an onslaught of 1,400 Syrian tanks. Along the Suez Canal, fewer than 500 Israeli defenders were attacked by 80,000 Egyptians.”[25]

The Arabs received assistance from the Soviet Union. When this happened, the US, which had been resisting Israeli calls for help, airlifted military supplies.[26] This was atypical: in previous conflicts the US had not helped, or had taken measures against Israel, but with Cold War prestige at stake, and given the popularity of Israel with the US population, the US government decided it could not afford to stay on the sidelines.

Israel won.

It was immediately after this, in the Arab League summit convened in Algiers on 26-28 November 1973, that “the heads of state present... recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the only representative of the Palestinian people.”[27] Given the trajectory of the Arab League up to here, the obvious hypothesis is that the Arab League decided to try a ‘Trojan Horse’ pseudo-diplomatic approach, promising peace in exchange for getting the PLO into the Jewish State, the better to exterminate the Israeli Jews (since direct military attacks always failed to bring about this result). Indeed, a diplomatic effort to create a PLO state ensued, and this push intensified in the second half of the 1980s. This new strategy was in fact led by US President Jimmy Carter,[28] who has been quite consistent over the years, and recently has launched a defense of PLO/Fatah and simultaneous attack against Israel that has been widely interpreted to be antisemitic.

From this point onwards, the main strategy would be to get the PLO -- really, Hajj Amin al Husseini’s Al Fatah, and therefore the continuation of the German Nazi Final Solution -- into the Jewish State.

The United States has continued to play a leading role in this. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon to put an end to the PLO/Fatah’s attacks against civilians in northern Israel, the US government saved the PLO/Fatah from destruction by stopping the Israelis and giving the PLO/Fatah a military escort to its new base in Tunis.[29] Later, the US government began making policy statements that a PLO/Fatah state had to be created in Judea and Samaria.[30] And soon after that the US government threatened the Israelis with the loss of all assistance if they did not attend the Madrid ‘Peace’ Conference, which became the platform for the Oslo ‘Peace’ Process, whose purpose was, precisely, to bring the PLO/Fatah into Israel and to give it ever more power inside the Jewish State.[31] With this accomplished, the US intelligence services began arming and training PLO/Fatah.[32]

Now the US and British governments are pushing very hard for this process to conclude with the creation of a PLO/Fatah state, cleansed of Jews, in Judea and Samaria, territories that the US military in 1967 concluded are strategic territories without which Israel cannot survive.[33]

In a few days, the Annapolis Conference is scheduled to begin, and it is expected that the Israeli government, with close to zero support from Israeli citizens (as of May 2007 “[Olmert’s] approval rating hovers around 3%,”[34] and I suppose that has a margin of error), will make a commitment to give Judea and Samaria to PLO/Fatah. In anticipation of this, some US congressmen have introduced a resolution calling for Mahmoud Abbas to Change the Fatah Charter so that it no longer calls for the extermination of the Israeli Jews.[35] Please resist the urge to cheer this. If these congressmen succeed, they will have given Al Fatah the opportunity to appear ‘well-intentioned’ in the context of the final handover negotiations. But there would be absolutely no reason to believe such a Fatah statement if it was made. Years ago, Mahmoud Abbas, from his perch as president of the Palestine National Council, the governing body of the PLO, authored the current PLO/Fatah ‘Trojan Horse’ strategy, which is to promise peace in exchange for land in order to get into Israel and murder the Jews.[36] In other words, he means to lie now so that he can kill Jews later. This strategy is sometimes called the Plan of Phases:

“Shortly after signing the Declaration of Principles and the famous handshake between [PLO leader Yasser] Arafat and [Israeli prime minister] Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn, Arafat was declaring to his Palestinian constituency over Jordanian television that Oslo was to be understood in terms of the [PLO’s] Palestine National Council’s 1974 decision. This was a reference to the so-called Plan of Phases, according to which the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO] would acquire whatever territory it could by negotiations, then use that land as a base for pursuing its ultimate goal of Israel’s annihilation.”[37]

The argument I defended at the top, about the stability of the founding ideology of an institution despite changes in personnel, naturally applies to Al Fatah. But in fact I need not invoke it, because Al Fatah is still run by one of the people who founded it: Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. as Abu Mazen): “Abu Mazen is... one of the founders of Fatah, one of the original Arafat band of brothers.”[38] As noted above, he was trained by Hajj Amin al Husseini, the great architect of the German Nazi Final Solution.

The passage of time has changed nothing. The Arab League has the same ideology that it had at its inception, and it is being supported, as it was back then, by powerful Western sponsors. The same goes for the organizational offshoots of the Arab League which are tools of its policies. What is being prepared is another genocide of the Jewish people. If the Israeli government continues to participate in this process, it will happen. And it appears that the Israeli government is in fact in something of a hurry: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has just approved equipping PLO/Fatah with sophisticated Russian APC's (Armored Personnel Carriers)! [39]