“PLO announces that it will no longer recognize the State of Israel” now runs as a headline around the world.
This is fake news at its best.
The PLO never recognized the State of Israel in the first place
Most people do not realize that the PLO never ratified y the “Declaration of Principles of the Oslo Peace Accord when the PLO was supposed to have recognized Israel in the first place.
I cite in my book, GENESIS OF THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY that few people know or remember that it was Israeli journalist Pinchas Inbari, who broke the story that Arafat announced in Tunis that he could not get a quorum of the executive council of the PLO to ratify the Declaration of Principles of the Oslo Accords.
I cite in my book, GENESIS OF THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY that few people know or remember that it was Israeli journalist Pinchas Inbari, who broke the story that Arafat announced in Tunis that he could not get a quorum of the executive council of the PLO to ratify the Declaration of Principles of the Oslo Accords.
One of the few Israeli correspondents covering the PLO in Tunis at the time, Inbari for the Israeli left-wing Hebrew newspaper Al HaMishmar, which ran a headline story on October 7, 1993 which confirmed that the PLO did not ratify the peace accord that Arafat and Abbas had signed together with Peres and Rabin only a few weeks before, with US and Russia as co-signers.
Carrying Al HaMishmar in hand, I walked into the office of the Israel Government Press Office Director at the time and showed him the headline of PLO non-ratification of the Oslo accords.
The GPO director, speaking on behalf of Prime Minister Rabin, took the news item very seriously and made it clear that, from the point of view of the Israeli government, this meant that Arafat signed the accord on his own, without the sanction of the PLO. And that never changed.
The rest of the Israeli media, however, did not report that the PLO never ratified the accord
Yet the Israeli government acted as if the PLO had done so.
Yet the Israeli government acted as if the PLO had done so.
Inbari was scheduled to appear on a popular morning KOL YISRAEL radio show when he got back from Tunis. However, Kol Yisrael informed Inbari that an Israeli government official asked Kol Yisrael to cancel that appearance.
Instead, the Israeli government dispatched then deputy minister of Foreign Affairs, Yossi Beilin, to fly to Tunis to thank Arafat for facilitating the ratification ofthe Oslo accord, which the PLO never did.
Why is this important? According to Israeli law, since the PLO did not ratify the Oslo accord which renounce terrorism, the PLO and Fatah were not stricken from Israeli law books as “a terrorist entity,” a status that the PLO received on March 1, 1980.
If you check the law books today, you will find that the PLO is still defined in Israeli law as a terror entity, because the PLO never ratified the Oslo accord.
The same goes for American law. In March 2002, US government designated the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades of the Fatah as a terror organization.
That PLO terror designation was never changed. Under US law, any government that aids and abets an organization defined as a terror organization must forfeit US foreign aid assistance.
