war for independence from France offered a model and inspiration. One of the group, Abu-Jihad (the nom de guerre of Khalil al-Wazir), stayed on to open the PLO’s first foreign office.28
The Algerian example proved to be crucial. The independence movement there had triumphed more in the political plain than the battlefield. Mohammed Yazid, who had served as the new government’s minister of information, shared the lessons with Fatah. Portray the enemy as not only Israel but also “world imperialism,” he counseled, and “present the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation like the others.”29
“The others” meant Communists as well as various movements around the globe professing a less orthodox anti-capitalism or fighting to be free of colonial rule. It would be some years before Moscow would open its arms to Fatah, but the non-European Communists were more receptive. Algeria provided entrée to the most important of these regimes—China, North Vietnam, and Cuba. Arafat and Abu-Jihad visited China in 1964, and the latter went on to North Vietnam.30
Beijing began to provide material aid to Fatah, and the group issued a series of pamphlets titled, The Chinese Experience, The Vietnamese Experience, The Cuban Experience, etc.31 The admiration of the Fatah leaders seems to have been genuine. Abu Iyad relates that on one of several subsequent visits:
I was extremely impressed by the Chinese people’s dedication. They seemed totally devoted to labor—manual or intellectual—and spent their leisure time in simple and healthy activities. Their life-style seemed characterized by a Puritanism worthy of the most fundamentalist Islam. “The Prophet couldn’t have done better than Mao Zedong,” I remarked to Arafat.32
Abu Iyad also found Cuba intoxicating. The “Cuban intelligence” official who greeted him on arrival was a “wonderfully humorous man,” and Fidel was a “veritable force of nature . . . plain-speaking . . . earthy and vibrant.”33 The most important model, however, was North Vietnam, which was accumulating sympathizers worldwide for its long-odds war against America. “The Vietnamese resistance . . . filled me with a sense of hope,” said Abu Iyad. “Everything I was to see in North Vietnam was a source of enrichment and inspiration for me.”34
Thus did Fatah (and the PLO under Fatah’s leadership) master a lingo that lifted their struggle out of the reactionary Arab past and imbedded it instead in an international movement of “progressive” forces. A seven-point program adopted by Fatah’s central committee in January 1969 declared: “The struggle of the Palestinian people, like that of the Vietnamese people and other peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, is part of the historic process of the liberation of the oppressed peoples from colonialism and imperialism.”35
In contrast to Abu Iyad, who was held spellbound by every Communist state he visited, Arafat maintained his ties with the religious and conservative side of the Arab world, never squandering the patronage he assiduously cultivated of the Saudi royals or the other dynasties of the oil-favored Gulf. Nonetheless, he could channel Das Kapital and the holy Koran with equal conviction. “Our struggle is part and parcel of every struggle against imperialism, injustice and oppression in the world,” he affirmed. “It is part of the world revolution which aims at establishing social justice and liberating mankind.”36
So central was the Vietnamese model to the new persona of the Palestinian movement that forty-odd years later, long after the end of the Cold War, and with Hanoi straining to import large elements of free enterprise into its economy, Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, was still singing the praises of Vietnam’s Communist revolution. During a 2010 visit to that country he averred:
[W]e are comrades in struggle and fighting, and our vision of the future is one. Historically, people have always linked Palestine and Vietnam, and to this day, when people mention the Palestinian struggle they recall the struggle of the Vietnamese people. We have both suffered occupation, colonialism and oppression, but you eventually prevailed, and we are certain that, thanks to your position and your support, we shall prevail as well.37
By 1968, with the PLO now in Fatah’s hands, a new revolutionary identity established, its relations blossoming with Beijing, Hanoi, and Havana, and the whole arrangement blessed by Nasser, Arafat found that Moscow was ready to open its arms. Nasser included him in his entourage on a visit to the USSR, using a pseudonym identifying him as an Egyptian so as to conceal him from the West. That year, the Soviet press began to liken Fatah to the heroic “partisans” of World War II, and Moscow arranged for some of its East European satellite states to supply it with weapons.38 In 1969, the Kremlin formally recognized the PLO as a legitimate “national liberation movement,” and Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin hailed its “just national liberation and anti-imperialist struggle.”39
More important even than the arms and training that the Soviet connection provided were the political benefits. “To recruit the Soviet Union as a sponsor was undoubtedly a great coup for Arafat, because its worldwide propaganda services [were put] at his disposal,” comments journalist David Pryce-Jones.40 The Soviet Union’s state news agencies, like the newspaper Pravda and the news service TASS, might have had little international credibility, but Moscow nonetheless influenced discourse outside its own precincts through a network of front groups and sympathizers and the contacts with respectable journalists cultivated by Soviet personnel in many fields and guises.
The strategy of embedding itself in the global revolutionary Left inspired the PLO to adopt a new statement of the goals and purposes. This was unveiled by Abu Iyad at a Beirut press conference in October 1968. “I announced,” he wrote, “that our strategic objective was to work toward the creation of a democratic state in which Arabs and Jews would live together harmoniously as fully equal citizens in the whole of historic Palestine.”41
The import of this new approach was explained by Arafat biographers Gowers and Walker:
Gone, said Fatah, were the old chauvinist slogans about revenge and “throwing the Jews into the sea” that had been the stock and trade of Shukairy’s generation of leaders . . . Instead, the Palestinians were now proposing to co-operate with those Jews who had been prepared to throw off the shackles of Zionism in building a completely new society.42
In a later interview with Gowers and Walker, Abu Iyad added this gloss: “In itself this was saying something revolutionary at the time as far as Arabs were concerned: that we were willing to live with the Jews in Palestine.”43
Enduring the presence of some Jews, “revolutionary” though this idea may have been, did not imply acceptance of the existence of Israel. On the contrary, Fatah’s manifesto of October 1968, explained: “Our struggle aspires to liberate the Jews themselves . . . [O]ur revolution, which believes in the freedom and dignity of men, considers first and foremost . . . the radical uprooting of Zionism and the liquidation of the conquest of the Zionist settlers in all forms.” In other words, after the “liquidation” of Israel, the Jews could live on as a minority in Arab Palestine, where they could enjoy the same “dignified life . . . they had always lived under the auspices of the Arab state.”44
And even this dubious honor was not offered to all the Jews of Israel, but only, according to the Palestinian covenant, those “Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion.” The “Zionist invasion” was defined in other Fatah documents as having commenced in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration. In other words, those who had arrived before 1917, and perhaps their descendants, could stay on as citizens of “democratic Palestine.” The overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews would, however, have to leave. Boiled down, this differed little from Shuqairy’s threat to drive them into the sea, but it sounded better.
Nor was this Arab state that the PLO envisioned intended to be “secular” although the phrase “democratic, secular state” came into circulation and was commonly attributed to the PLO. Gresh reports:
Contrary to a widespread notion, the idea of a democratic state is not associated with the idea of a secular state in Palestinian political thought. In fact, the idea of a secular state does not appear