PLO:s rötter

Är det någon som vill ha något att läsa i en timme eller två?

Själv har jag halsfluss, och bara sover, och svälter, eftersom jag knappt kan svälja min saliv. Morfin hade suttit fint, men det blev bara Kåvepenin och Ipren hos doktorn. Ingenting för att se till att svullnaden i halsen går ner. Är detta tacken för att jag inte rökt en cigg på två veckor? Allt skulle ju bli så fint om man slutade! Smaksinnena skulle återkomma. Maten skulle bli dubbelt så god. Hostan skulle försvinna. Jag hatar livet nu. Läsning är det sista jag kan fokusera på.

Men två artiklar om sovjetblockets inflytande i den palestinska saken är så makalöst spännande (även om jag naturligtvis inte kan gå i god för deras sanningshalt) att de bör läsas ändå.

Den första bygger på David Meir-Levis History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression.

[T]he PLO was conceived at a time when the KGB was creating “liberation front” organizations throughout the Third world. Others included the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created in 1964 with help from Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and the National Liberation Army of Colombia, created in 1965 with help from Fidel Castro. But the PLO was the KGB’s most enduring achievement.

In 1964, the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Soviet blueprint for a Palestinian National Charter—a document drafted in Moscow—and made Ahmad Shukairy, the KGB’s agent of influence, the first PLO chairman. The Romanian intelligence service was given responsibility for providing the PLO with logistical support. Except for the arms, which were supplied by the KGB and the East German Stasi, everything, according to Ion Pacepa, “came from Bucharest. Even the PLO uniforms and the PLO stationery were manufactured in Romania free of charge, as a ‘comradely help.’ During those years, two Romanian cargo planes filled with goodies for the PLO landed in Beirut every week.”

The PLO came on the scene at a critical moment in Middle East history. At the Khartoum conference held shortly after the Six-Day war, the defeated and humiliated Arab states confronted the “new reality” of an Israel that seemed unbeatable in conventional warfare. The participants of the conference decided, among other things, to continue the war against Israel as what today would be called a “low intensity conflict.” The PLO’s Fatah forces were perfect to carry out this mission.

Den andra, skriven av den gamle sovjetblocksavhopparen Ion Mihai Pacepa, som är en centralfigur i texten ovan, fortsätter på samma spår: Russian Footprints.

In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me, 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.

Terrorism and violence against Israel and her master, American Zionism, would flow naturally from the Muslims’ religious fervor, Andropov sermonized. We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were “fascist, imperial-Zionist countries” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.