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The Myth of a "Secular Democratic Palestine"

[National Post-Canada] Benny Morris - The Palestinian national movement started life with a vision and goal of a Palestinian Muslim Arab-majority state in all of Palestine - a one-state "solution" - and continues to espouse and aim to establish such a state down to the present day. Moreover, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which led the national movement from the 1960s to Yasser Arafat's death in 2004, and Hamas today - all sought and seek to vastly reduce the number of Jewish inhabitants in the country, in other words, to ethnically cleanse Palestine. The PLO explicitly declared the aim of limiting citizenship to those Jews who had lived in Palestine permanently before 1917, a goal spelled out clearly in the Palestinian National Charter. Though "a secular democratic Palestine" was described by various Palestinian spokesmen in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to Western journalists, this has never been the goal of Fatah or the so-called moderate groups that dominated the PLO between the 1960s and the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power. Middle East historian Rashid Khalidi has written that "in 1969 [the PLO] amended [its previous goal and henceforward advocated] the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine for Muslims, Christians and Jews, replacing Israel." This is hogwash. The Palestine National Council never amended the Palestine National Charter to the effect that the goal of the PLO was "a secular democratic state in Palestine." It is a spin invented for gullible Westerners and was never part of Palestinian mainstream ideology. The Palestinian leadership has never, at any time, endorsed a "secular, democratic Palestine." The writer, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University, is the author of One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (2009).
2009-05-12 06:00:00
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