The Palestinians are loudly mourning the passing of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. PLO Chief and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas ordered flags in the PA to be flown at half-mast on Sunday to honor Castro.
They are right to celebrate him.
The Cuban Communist dictator, who murdered tens of
thousands of his own people, imprisoned tens of thousands more, caused a
million Cubans to flee their homeland, and transformed an island paradise into
a water enclosed prison, was a key ally of Palestinian terrorists in their war
to destroy Israel.
Castro’s support for the PLO and its longtime terror
master Yassir Arafat spanned five decades. Castro’s secret police, the DGI
trained Palestinian terrorists both in Cuba and in the Middle East.
According to the CIA, several hundred Palestinian
terrorists were trained in Cuba in the 1970s. Cuban trainers also worked with
the PLO in Algiers and Damascus and later worked with the PLO in training
terrorists from around the world at PLO training camps in Lebanon in the 1970s
and early 1980s.
Military training in terror warfare tactics wasn’t the
only way that Castro helped Arafat. He also provided the PLO with diplomatic
cover and political guidance. Palestinian terrorists, including Arafat began
routinely visiting Cuba in the early 1960s. Castro welcomed the formation of
the PLO in 1964. His military and intelligence officers met with Arafat and
other senior Palestinian terrorists in Algiers and Damascus as early as 1965.
In 1974 the PLO
adopted the Phased-Plan for the annihilation of Israel. The Phased-Plan
committed the PLO to a piecemeal strategy of destroying Israel rather than
calling for the terror group to work with Arab states to destroy Israel in an
all-out war.
According to the Phased-Plan, the PLO committed to take
control over every inch of territory under Israeli control that it could and
use those areas as launch pads for expanding the war whose ultimate goal was
Israel’s eradication.
Shortly after signing the initial Oslo peace deal at the
White House in September 1993, Arafat told an audience at a mosque in South
Africa that the Oslo process was the first step towards the implementation of
the Phased-Plan.
The Phased-Plan was trumpeted by the Soviet bloc and
their supporters in the Western Left as a sign of PLO moderation. Following its
adoption, with Soviet support and Cuban sponsorship, the PLO began winning
major diplomatic battles over Israel.
Arafat was invited to address the UN General Assembly
later in 1974 where he spoke with a gun strapped to his hip. The PLO was then
granted “observer status” at the UN.
Arafat paid a triumphant visit to Havana following his UN
appearance where he was warmly greeted by Castro. The next year, the General
Assembly passed Resolution 3379 defining Zionism as a form of racism. Cuba was
the only non-Arab state to sponsor the resolution.
Resolution 3379 set the stage for the diplomatic war
against the Jewish national liberation movement and the Jewish state that has
raged ever since.
Cuban partnership with the PLO was part of a larger
political war waged through Third World leaders by the KGB against the US and
the Western world. Both the KGB archive spirited out of the Soviet Union by
Vasili Mitrockhin and the revelations of former Rumanian Communist spy chief
Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the US in 1978 have demonstrated the nature
of that war.
The KGB used the language of human rights and national
liberation as a means to deny the US-led West the moral legitimacy to fight the
Cold War against the Soviet Union and its satellites. Castro and Arafat were
leading fighters in this propaganda war.
The basic concepts behind this war were developed shortly
after the end of World War II. Under the KGB, the US and its allies were
deliberately smeared as colonialist and imperialist powers. Every liberation
group and every state that was supported by the US was castigated as
reactionary. On the other hand, every terror group and regime that were supported
by the USSR were celebrated as authentic, democratic revolutionary movements
seeking to free their peoples from the yoke of Western imperialism.
The political war placed the US and its allies into an
intellectual trap. Inside the closed intellectual jail of liberation theory,
every action the West took was necessarily reactionary and imperialistic. As a
result the US and its allies could do nothing to defend themselves since every
argument they made was simply dismissed as imperialist propaganda.
The political successes won by the Soviet propaganda war
were extraordinary. For instance, in 1969, the Non-Aligned Movement comprised
of newly independent post-colonial states sided with the Vietnamese Communists
against the US at its fourth conference. The NAM was silent about the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous year.
Vilifying Israel was a major component of the Soviets’
political warfare strategy. Israel was viewed as a key enemy of the USSR.
It wasn’t always this way.
Until 1949 the Soviet Union viewed the Zionist movement
and the nascent Jewish state as a potential client. The Truman administration
recognized Israel just moments before the Soviet Union did. And unlike the US,
the Soviets supplied arms to Israel during the 1948-49 War of Independence.
Without Soviet help, it is doubtful that Israel would have survived the joint
invasion of five Arab armies the day it declared independence.
The Soviets soured on Israel for three reasons. First,
Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion decided to side with the US
against the USSR in the Cold War despite the State Department’s hostility
towards Israel.
Second, Ben Gurion moved to purge Communists from the IDF
and other power centers immediately after the War of Independence.
Finally, the Soviets soured on Israel because the birth
of Israel awoke the yearnings of the Jews of the Soviet Union. In 1949,
Israel’s first ambassador to Moscow Golda Meyerson – later Meir – was mobbed by
Soviet Jews when she visited the main synagogue in the city.
A wave of anti-Semitic repression followed the event. It
was in 1949 that the Soviets began castigating Zionism as a form of imperialism
and racism. Zionism became a code word for Jewish and prominent Jews in the
Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc were arrested, tried in show trials and
murdered for alleged “Zionist” sympathies.
The Soviets also viewed their ideological assault on
Zionism as a means of demonizing the US. The Jews’ native rights to the land of
Israel were as old and well-known as the Bible. If Westerners could be
convinced that the Jews were colonial usurpers in Israel, they could be
convinced that Western civilization was evil.
According to Pacepa, by 1968, the KGB completed its
control over the PLO. It used Castro and his DGI agency as a means to promote
the Palestinian political war against Israel. According to Cuban American
researchers, Castro was a conduit for promoting anti-Zionism and support for
Palestinian terrorists among Western radicals. For instance, the DGI introduced
PLO terrorists to African American radicals like the Black Panthers, who were
trained by Castro’s forces.
Castro’s lionization by the Palestinians and the
international Left alike shows that 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the legacy of the Soviets’ political war against the US-led West was not
only successful during the Cold War. It is still very much a part of our world.
Castro never taught the Palestinians how to live in
peace. He never taught them how to raise crops. He taught them how to murder
and libel. He taught them how to indoctrinate others to believe lies about
themselves and about their perceived enemies.
The fact that these lies are still believed by so many in
the Left, shows that Castro died a victor. The fact that the terrorist methods
he developed with Arafat under the guiding hand of Moscow are still viewed by
Western intellectuals as legitimate “tools of resistance” shows that he won.
And the fact that Palestinian murderers who learned the
trade at his knee are still viewed as legitimate forces in world politics shows
that together with his KGB bosses, Castro was able to get away with his crimes.
The West managed to defeat the Soviet state, but not the
Soviet cause. And the flags at half-mast for Castro in Ramallah are proof of
the Castro-executed Soviet victory over morality and over truth.
**Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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