By Stan Goodenough
Jul 30, 2007
Newly appointed Palestinian Authority "prime minister" Salam Fayad Sunday joined a long line of his illustrious Palestinian Arab predecessors who have successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of many Israelis.
On Friday, carefully "unnamed" PA officials "confirmed" that the platform of their "government" omits the phrases "armed struggle" and "resistance" against Israeli "occupation."
But speaking to reporters in Cairo, where he is attending an Arab League meeting, Fayad dissembled, saying his people have a right to this "resistance", but then "hinting" (as an Israeli news outlet put it) that this resistance does not always "have to be" through terrorism.
"We are certainly an occupied people and resistance is a legitimate right for the Palestinian people as an occupied people," he said, then added, "What is the essence of resistance fundamentally, especially in light of the nature of the existing occupation? Does it not begin by exerting every possible effort to ... reinforce the steadfastness of the Palestinian citizen on his land?"
[Ed. note: There is not, nor ever has been, a country called Palestine, so there can be no Palestinian citizens; and of course it is not their land but the Jews' lands which the Arabs strive to conquer - by violence and by negotiations.]
"This," Fayad said, "is the program of the government."
Reinforcing the steadfastness of the "Palestinian citizen" on "his" land could, of course, mean many things - including violence.
Fayad has left open the terrorism option, but to the world and to left-wing Israelis he has presented himself as a "moderate" and a "partner for peace."
Before him, Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Ahmed Qurei and Nabil Shaath all played the same game.
Meanwhile the PLO Charter, which calls for Israel's destruction, has been neither revoked nor amended, despite the first Oslo Agreement in which Arafat undertook to scrap it.
Its platform underpinned the years of vicious terrorism that followed the signing of those accords, killing more than a thousand Israelis and wounding many thousands more.