The Palestinian Arab plan for de-legitimizing Israel, 1968

In 1968, Israel was still considered the small - but admirable - survivor of a war meant to destroy, waged by the combined forces of much of the Arab world. Israeli were, to the Western world, the "good guys."

It would be a gross understatement to say that this has changed in the intervening years. The entire framework of how Israel is viewed has been turned completely around, by a very successful campaign of de-legitimization that has cumulatively paid off in spades since then.

The blueprint for this sea change in how the world views Israel was written in 1968.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Documentary Record, by Yehuda Lukacs, reproduces a number of hard to find documents about the conflict. On page 295 one can find the Palestine National Assembly Political Resolutions, 17 July, 1968.

This is a most illuminating document.

While parts of it are obviously dated, these resolutions give an eerily exact plan on how the Palestinian Arabs plotted out the propaganda war against Israel.

Here are the entire section on Methods:

1. The Palestinian Arab people have chosen the course of armed struggle in the fight to recover their usurped territories and rights. The current phase in their armed struggle started before the defeat of June, 1967 and has endured and escalated ever since. Moreover, despite the fact that this struggle renders a service to the entire Arab nation at the present stage, insofar as it prevents the enemy from laying claim to a status quo based on surrender, and insofar as it keeps the flame of resistance alive and maintains a climate of war, preoccupies the enemy and is an object of concern to the entire world community, that struggle is nevertheless a true and distinct expression of the aspirations of the Palestinian Arab people and is inspired by their objectives. In addition, we feel bound to declare quite frankly that this struggle goes beyond the scope of what it has become customary to call “the elimination of the consequences of the aggression", and all other such slogans, for the objectives of this struggle are those of the Palestinian Arab people, as set out in the preceding paragraph. The fight will not cease; it will continue, escalate and expand until final victory is won, no matter how long it takes and regardless of the sacrifices involved.

2. The enemy has chosen Blitzkrieg as the form of combat most suitable to him, in view of the tactical mobility at his command which enabled him, at the moment of battle, to unleash forces superior to those deployed by the Arabs. The enemy chose this method in the belief that a lightning victory would lead to surrender, according to the pattern of I948, and not to Arab armed resistance. In dealing with it, we must adopt a method derived from elements of strength in ourselves and elements of weakness in the enemy.

3. The enemy consists of three interdependent forces:
a) Israel.
b) World Zionism.
c) World imperialism, under the direction of the United States of America.

Moreover, it is incontestable that world imperialism makes use of the forces of reaction linked with colonialism.

If we are to achieve victory and gain our objectives, we shall have to strike at the enemy wherever he may be, and at the nerve centres of his power. This is to be achieved through the use of military, political and economic weapons and information media, as part of a unified and comprehensive plan designed to sap his strength, scatter his forces, destroy the links between them and undermine their common objectives.

4. A long-drawn out battle has the advantage of allowing us to expose world Zionism, its activities, conspiracies, and its complicity with world imperialism and to point out the damage and complications it causes to the interests and the security of many countries, and the threat it constitutes to world peace. This will eventually unmask it, bringing to light the grotesque facts of its true nature, and will isolate it from the centres of power and establish safeguards against its ever reaching them...

5. An information campaign must be launched that will throw light on the following facts:

a) The true nature of the Palestinian war is that of a battle between a small people, which is the Palestinian people, and Israel, which has the backing of world Zionism and world imperialism.

b) This war will have its effect on the interests of any country that supports lsrael or world Zionism.

c) The hallmark of the Palestinian Arab people is resistance, struggle and liberation, that of the enemy, aggression, usurpation and the disavowal of all values governing decent human relations.

6. A comprehensive plan must be drawn up to fuse the Arab struggle and the Palestinian struggle into a single battle. This requires concentrated ideological, information and political effort that will make it clear to the Arab nation that it can never enjoy peace or security until the tide of Zionist invasion is stemmed, and that its territory will be occupied piecemeal unless it deploys its resources in the battle, not to mention the extent to which the Zionist presence constitutes a drain on its resources and an impediment to the development of its society.

Palestinian action regards the Arab nation as a reserve fund of political, financial and human resources on which it can draw, and whose support and participation will make it possible to fight the successive stages in the battle.

7. The peoples and governments of the Arab nation must be made to understand that they are under an obligation to protect the Palestinian struggle so that it may be able to confront the enemy on firm ground and direct all its forces and capabilities to this confrontation, fully assured of its own safety and security. This obligation is not only a national duty, it is a necessity deriving from the fact that the Palestinian struggle is the vanguard in the defence of all Arab countries, Arab territories and Arab aspirations.

8. Any objective study of the enemy will reveal that his potential for endurance, except where a brief engagement is concerned, is limited. The drain on this potential that can be brought about by a long-drawn out engagement will inevitably provide the opportunity for a decisive confrontation in which the entire Arab nation can take part and emerge victorious.

It is the duty of Palestinians everywhere to devote themselves to making the Arab nation aware of these facts, and to propagating the will to struggle. It is also their duty to endure, sacrifice and take part in the struggle.

While the PLO has not been as successful in rallying the Arab nations behind it in recent years, its propaganda plan has been executed flawlessly. Even though their plan describes how the Palestinian Arabs are part of, and depend on the help of, the much larger Arab nation, they present themselves as an isolated, tiny, besieged and victimized entity to the West, compared to the huge Israel/World Zionist/imperialist alliance.

Any glance at a map reveals the absurdity of the idea that Israel has territorial designs on the larger Arab world, or that it is an expansionist, imperialist state. Yet years of repetition of the points listed in this document - repeated in the media, repeated on college campuses, repeated by the useful idiots of the Left and the latent anti-semites of the world - have made them appear self-evident to nearly everybody.

Not only that, but this document foreshadows the terrorist spree of the 1970s. That string of high-profile attacks against Western targets was a successful implementation of section 5b, where the Palestinian Arabs let the West know that any support of Israel will result in their citizens getting killed. Over time, that idea became crystallized in many countries' collective psyches to turn their political viewpoints towards defending their nations from terror - and believing that by sacrificing Israel, they would achieve short-term security. They of course justified their abandoning Israel in terms of human rights and justice, and their excuses took liberally from the brand new Palestinian Arab narrative - a narrative that was created expressly for the purpose of isolating Israel from the West!

US resolution 242, this document bitterly notes, did not even mention Palestinian Arabs. In 1967, it was obvious that the conflict was between Israel and the much larger Arab nation, and that the refugees and their descendants were pawns of the Arab world. The policies that resulted from the PLO decisions to implement this plan effectively created the "Palestinian people" ex nihilo from the perspective of the Western nations.  (This document is also explicitly against creating a Palestinian Arab state in the territories, calling it a Zionist plan and saying that such a state would serve Zionist objectives.)

While their military plans from 1968 only had limited success, the PLO's propaganda plan was executed brilliantly, and it continues to this day.

(h/t sshender)