Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former chief of Romanian intelligence, defected to the US and wrote about the links between Arafat and the KGB: “Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB,” Pacepa wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American “imperial-Zionism” during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, “imperial-Zionism” was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded antisemitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.
… Don’t believe it? How about this statement from Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, in 1977[?]
[To some extent, this is now irrelevant. Regardless of what one calls these Arabs (and there are all sorts of subdivisions already within Arab ethnicity), they are the people displaced in the British partition of what was called Palestine at the time. The partition made accommodations for these displaced peoples to have their own state, but they chose to join in a series of wars intended to annihilate Israel instead. The problem isn’t the term ‘Palestinian,’ which is at least a handier shorthand for ‘Arabs displaced by the partition of 1948,’ but the ‘Palestinians’ themselves and their leadership. — Ed]
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