“Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries round-about her.” - Ezekiel 5:5
This is part twenty of the FAI Publishing series Center of Nations which examines the history of the modern State of Israel in the midst of an increasingly hostile world.
THE BROTHERHOOD
Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1929. The sixth child of an Egyptian Gazan father and an Arab Jerusalemite mother, he spent his childhood in both cities before attending King Faud University (later Cairo University) in the mid-1940’s. By 1948, he had become an ardent Arab nationalist and fought with the Muslim Brotherhood in the Gaza City area against the newly declared Jewish State. After the war, he returned to university and graduated with a degree in civil engineering, a skill which earned him a visa to the British protectorate of Kuwait in the late 1950’s. It was during this period that he adopted the name of one of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions, Ammar ibn Yasir. Dropping his father’s family name, which whom he had a strained relationship, he retained the surname Arafat.
In Kuwait in the late 1950’s, Yasser Arafat met two other Arab Palestinians with the nom de guerres Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad. Both were members of Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, or Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization founded in Egypt in 1928 in the wake of the collapse of the Turkish Ottoman Caliphate. Its founder, an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna, envisioned the reestablishment of the Islamic State and the global domination of Islam, writing that “it is in the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” The most prominent philosopher and theologian of the Brotherhood was an author and teacher named Sayyid Qatb. Described as a Qua’anic literalist, Qatb wrote voluminously, penning books on the importantce of Islamic revival and jihad that would eventually inspire movements including Islamic Jihad, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. He wrote, “It is essential for mankind to have new leadership! At this crucial and bewildering juncture, the turn of Islam and the Muslim community has arrived – the turn of Islam.” A virulent anti-Semite, Qatb also blamed the Jewish people for an apparent lack of progress toward the goal of Islamic revolution, suggesting that “behind the subsequent war declared against the first signs of Islamic revival, from every place on the face of the earth...stood the Jews."
The Muslim Brotherhood led an insurgency against the secular, Soviet-aligned government of Gamal Abdul Nasser in the 1950’s, including an attempt on the dictator’s life. This led to a regime crackdown which forced many of the Brothers outside of Egyptian territory, including Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad. By 1957, together with Yasser Arafat and other Arab Palestinian exiles in Kuwait, such as Mahmood Abbas, they had formed the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, known in Arabic by its reverse-acronym Fatah (which was also a classical Arabic word for conquest). As opposed to other nationalist Arab Palestinian organizations, which argued for the “liberation” of the Palestinian territory from the Jews by means of a united pan-Arab state, Fatah advocated for an organic nationalist Palestinian movement. Arafat wrote a four-page tract named Falasinuna (Arabic for Our Palestine) which was widely distributed across Arab Palestinian communities in the Middle East and Europe, and Arafat become a public figure. But it wasn’t just the Palestinians who were paying attention to this rising star. He also caught the eye of the Soviet Committee for State Security, most commonly known by its English acronym, the KGB.
THE SOVIETS
The Soviet Union was ironically the first nation to formally recognize the State of Israel in 1948 and to establish diplomatic relations with it. Considering Israel’s large population of Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement, and their socialist political leanings, Josef Stalin first sought to court the nascent Jewish State into his orbit. However, Israel subsequently aligned more closely with the United States, and Stalin’s increasing political paranoia led him to shift Soviet policy against Russia’s Jewish elite.
By the late 1950’s, the Russian government was rife with Antisemitic suspicion, while its race with the United States to establish global spheres of influence was in full swing. The KGB funded, trained, and armed Communist revolutionary groups on every continent, focusing especially on the creation of “liberation” organizations in the Third World. The Russian spy agency became expert at grooming revolutionary leaders, creating their profiles, and establishing a popular narrative in places like Vietnam and Bolivia which often portrayed a struggle against Western imperialism. But the KGB had no qualms welcoming Third World dictators into the fold either, such as Fidel Castro in Cuba, Gamal Abdel Nassar in Egypt, and the various Syrian regimes of the Cold War era. And so, in the Middle East, a region which held not only geo-strategic considerations, but economic incentives as well, the potential for a revolutionary movement that could consolidate Arab support and isolate the US-aligned Jewish State was too great for the KGB to ignore.
At some point in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s, the Soviet Union made contact with Yasser Arafat and began to groom him for leadership of the Arab Palestinian liberation movement. Since Soviet-era KGB files are still classified by the Russian government to this day, most of what we know about the spy agency’s connection to Arafat comes to us from Ion Mihai Pacepa, a deputy director of intelligence in the Communist Romanian government during the 1960’s and 70’s, and a personal advisor to infamous Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. At one point, Pacepa was appointed as Arafat’s personal KGB handler and had first-hand knowledge of the Soviet Union’s role in the Palestinian cause. In 1978, Pacepa defected to the United States and became a valuable asset to the CIA. After the end of the Cold War, he wrote and spoke often about his experiences behind the Iron Curtain, including his dealings with Yasser Arafat. In a 2004 interview, he described how the KGB invented a new identity for the middle-class Egyptian university student:
“He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.”[1]
The persona of Yasser Arafat was invented by the KGB, but that was not the only creation of Soviet spies for Palestinian revolutionaries in the early 1960’s. In a masterstroke of clandestine tradecraft, at its offices in Moscow, the KGB drafted a secret document before working through one of its assets, Palestinian leader Ahmad Shukeiri, to call 422 Palestinian representatives (using a list prepared by the KGB) to a conference in East Jerusalem in May 1964. The purpose of the meeting was to ratify and sign the secret document; a charter for a new organization that would unite all of the various Palestinian nationalist factions together under an umbrella of common cause. And so, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was born. As Pacepa recounts,
“In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter -- a document that had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman.”
Although Arafat’s Fatah Party was the largest faction in the PLO, other organizations such as the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) signed the covenant as well.
Within six months of the ratification of the PLO covenant in June 1964, Yasser Arafat was directing Fatah terrorist attacks inside Israeli territory, unsuccessfully attempting to bomb the newly completed National Water Carrier, which transported water from the Sea of Galilee to the arid southern Negev region. Explosives were also planted on a railroad leading into Jerusalem, while land mines planted in public roads were used in two separate 1966 attacks to kill 5 Israelis.
WARS AND TERROR
The Six-Day war in June 1967 changed the fabric of the Palestinian nationalist movement. The Jordanian and Egyptian armies were swiftly defeated by the IDF in a matter of days. Arabs left on the West Bank of the Jordan River and in the Gaza Strip were left without a national identity. The West Bank and Gaza were not subsequently annexed by the State of Israel, nor did Jordan and Egypt allow for the evacuation and integration of the Arabs in Israeli-occupied territory within their respective countries. As a result, the KGB-backed PLO played a key role in defining the Arab Palestinian as a unique national identity. In British Mandate Palestine, all ethnic and religious groups were referred to as Palestinians, including Jews. The PLO reserved the classification of Palestinian for Muslim and Christian Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza. Although there was no discernable ethnic, religious, or linguistic difference between Arabs on either side of the Jordan River, the identification of Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza as Palestinians facilitated their claim to the Land.
Immediately after the Six-Day War, Fatah guerillas joined the War of Attrition which followed until 1970. While Egyptian forces were shelling and raiding Israeli positions along the Suez Canal, Yassar Arafat waged a campaign of terrorism against Israel from PLO bases in Jordan. On March 18, 1968, a land mine exploded underneath a school bus in the Negev region, killing two Israeli school children and wounding 28 more. The attack sent shock waves through Israeli society, and the IDF responded by sending a contingent across the Jordan River three days later to destroy the PLO camp near Karameh and to capture Arafat. Although the camp was destroyed and over 140 PLO prisoners taken, Arafat was not among them. A massive counterattack by the Jordanian military together with Fatah militants forced the IDF to retreat with heavy casualties. It was during this engagement that Arafat first employed the new tactic of suicide bombing, a weapon that both he and future generations of jihadists would continue to employ until the present day.
Between March 1968 and September 1970, there were at least 23 terrorist attacks inside Israeli territory that killed at least 51 and wounded over 400. They included bombings and shootings at markets, bus stations, schools, universities, and even the Western Wall. On May 22, 1970, Palestinian terrorists opened fire with automatic rifles and rocket propelled grenades on a school bus near Avivim, killing twelve people, including 8 children between the ages of 7-14 years old, and wounding 25. The assailants escaped into Lebanon and were never apprehended. Like the Negev school bus bombing two years before, the Avivim Massacre sent shock waves through Israeli society, prompting the Israeli military to shell villages in Southern Lebanon and begin cross-border patrols.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was hard at work to delegitimize the Jewish State and to legitimize PLO terrorists on the world stage. As historian Robert S. Wistrich writes,
“After 1967, the USSR began to flood the world with a constant flow of anti-Zionist propaganda... Only the Nazis in their twelve years of power had ever succeeded in producing such a sustained flow of fabricated libels as an instrument of their domestic and foreign policy.”[2]
The KGB focused especially on injecting a modified strain of the classic European Antisemitism into the Arab world. In an expansive operation codenamed SIG (Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or "Zionist Governments"), Soviet spies adapted concepts from the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery from the early twentieth century which had provided fodder for the Nazis, and combined them together with the antisemitic traditions inherent in Islam. The strategy was to connect the Jewish State to the United States in the Arab mind, suggesting that the former was a satellite of the latter, and that both were controlled by Zionist Jews. Both the US and Israel were described as fascist, racist, imperialist, and genocidal; labels which continue to echo to the present day. Pacepa summarized the philosophy of KGB chairman Andrei Andropov as follows,
'‘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 KGB’s strategy went beyond propaganda to material support. Pacepa’s Romanian intelligence sent two cargo planes full of weapons and military supplies to the PLO in Lebanon every week. The Communist East German government sent millions of AK-47 rounds to the PLO, while the Communist Czechoslovakian government sent over 1,000 tons of explosive Semtex for use in terrorist attacks. As Soviet general and foreign intelligence director Aleksandr Sakharovsky stated to Pacepa,
"In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”
Pacepa’s role was to be Yasser Arafat’s KGB-appointed handler. He was instructed to deliver a $200,000 USD check to Arafat every month, and to introduce him to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, with whom the PLO leader formed a close friendship.
Besides its support for Fatah, the KGB also invested in other, more extreme parties in the PLO. In 1967, the Arab National Movement (ANM) merged with two smaller parties to form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), instantly becoming the second-largest faction in the PLO. Its political leader was George Habash, a secular Marxist devotee who fancied himself as an Arab Che Guevara, the radical Argentinian writer and violent revolutionary who had served in Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s regime. Habash’s deputy and the leader of the PFLP’s armed wing was Wadie Haddad, a Palestinian born to a Christian family in the Galilee city of Safed. Haddad was later revealed to be a “trusted” intelligence agent in the KGB, who acted as the conduit for millions of dollars in cash and weapons between the Soviet spy agency and the PFLP.[2] Haddad used these resources to plan terrorist attacks so brazen that even Yasser Arafat and other PLO leaders would distance themselves in the aftermath.
Besides the standard “bombs and bullets” attacks on Israeli civilians in the 1960’s, the PFLP also employed an increasingly popular form of terrorism: civilian airline hijacking. In July 1968, barely one year after the PFLP was founded, a cell of three operatives boarded Israeli El Al Flight 426 with service from Rome to Tel Aviv. Midway through the flight, the terrorists took control of the cockpit and forced the flight to land in Algiers, where it held the crew and twelve Israeli passengers hostage for forty days before freeing them in exchange for 16 Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. It was the first and only successful hijacking of an El Al flight to date.
Two more PFLP attempts to hijack El Al flights ended in failure, although not without Israeli casualties. Wadie Haddad then pivoted to targeting American and European airliners, in keeping with the Soviet philosophy of equating both the State of Israel and Western governments as Zionist projects. In August 1969, another team of PFLP operatives boarded TWA Flight 840, again servicing from Rome to Tel Aviv. After commandeering the aircraft and taking its occupants hostage, the plane was forced to land in Damascus, Syria. The crew and passengers were ordered to deplane before an attempt was made to destroy the aircraft with explosives. Among the terrorists was a female PFLP recruit named Leila Khaled. She addressed the hostages in the Damascus terminal with a speech torn right from the pages of the KGB playbook, declaring,
“We diverted flight 840 because TWA is one of the largest American airlines that services the Israeli air routes and, more importantly, because it is an American plane. The American government is Israel's staunchest supporter. It supplies Israel with weapons for our destruction. It gives the Zionists tax-free American dollars. It supports Israel at world conferences. It helps them in every possible way. We are against America because she is an imperialist country.”
Khaled and her co-conspirators were soon arrested by Syrian security services, although they were subsequently released without charge. The Syrian regime released most of the hostages within days, although two Israeli hostages were kept for three months as a bargaining chip for the release of 71 Syrian and Egyptian soldiers interned by Israel after the end of the Six-Day War.
Although the PFLP hijackings has enjoyed some operational success, they were nonetheless frowned upon by Fatah and other parties in the PLO. This was partially due to jealousy, due to the high-profile nature of the attacks and their exposure in the international media. But Arafat also considered airliner hijackings to be a source of negative press and detrimental to the Palestinian nationalist cause. PLO leadership put pressure on Habash to reign in Haddad in 1969, and the PFLP began to fracture into different, more-radicalized factions. But the KGB asset refused to comply. On the contrary, Haddad began planning a series of even more conspicuous airline hijackings for the following year.
By the latter half of 1970, the Soviet Cold War strategy of mobilizing the Islamic world against Israel and the United States was beginning to hit its stride. But events in September of that year would alter the trajectory of the Palestinian cause, igniting a conflict whose solution has proven the most elusive in the modern era.
Gabe Caligiuri is the editor of THE WIRE, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.
[1] This and subsequent Pacepa quotes regarding Arafat come from a 2003 Wall Stret Journal article available here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB106419296113226300
[2] As detailed by historian Robert S. Wistrich in his 2010 book A Lethal Obsession.
[3] Revealed in documents that were smuggled into the UK by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and published in his 2000 book with Christopher Andrew entitled The Sword and the Shield.