Fatah website calls for Israel's destruction

Steve Rodan
Jerusalem Post
08-10-1998
As Israel negotiates with the Palestinians to change their covenant, an Internet website of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement has released a constitution that calls for the destruction of Israel.

The Fatah organization website [www.fatah.org] does not distinguish between Israel and the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War. The constitution calls the Zionist movement "racial, colonial and aggressive in ideology, goals, organization and method. The Israeli existence in Palestine is a Zionist invasion with a colonial expansive base, and it is a natural ally to colonialism and international imperialism."

"Liberating Palestine and protecting its holy places is an Arab, religious and human obligation," it says.

Article 12 of the constitution lists the goal of the Fatah movement as "complete liberation of Palestine and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence." The constitution says: "armed public revolution is the inevitable method for liberating Palestine.

"Armed struggle," the constitution reads, "is a strategy and not a tactic, and the Palestinian Arab people's armed revolution is a decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated."

The constitution does not mention the Oslo Accords, supported by Fatah, but says it opposes any "political solution offered as an alternative to demolishing the Zionist occupation in Palestine..."

Fatah spokespeople, who attended a swearing-in ceremony in Gaza last night for Arafat's new cabinet, could not be reached for comment. In the past, however, Fatah officials have dismissed statements calling for the destruction of Israel as mere rhetoric.

Israeli officials said they were stunned by the Fatah web site.

David Bar-Illan, director of policy planning for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, called the constitution "in some ways worse than the Palestinian covenant. This is as clear an indication as any that the PLO has not abandoned its intention to destroy the State of Israel," he said.

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