ISRAEL'S FATEFUL HOUR
Yehoshafat Harkabi
New York: Harper & Row, 1988
256 pp., $22.50
Yehoshafat Harkabi, a professor and retired general, is one of Israel's most outstanding students of the Middle East and of international relations. He is a grand example of Saifa vesafra, a man of the pen and the sword. Former chief of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence and political adviser to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharret, Harkabi has written another polemical book on his favorite topic--the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Harkabi began his writings on the conflict early, back in 1964 when the conflict became the subject of his doctoral dissertation at Hebrew University. Later, it was the focus of the book that made him famous, The Arab Position in the Arab-Israeli Conflict. The book was a monumental amalgam of research and study as it analyzed some 600 pamphlets, newspapers, editorials, leaflets, and flyers as well as the writings of Arab politicians, writers, poets, and soldiers on the Arab attitude toward Israel. The result was a chilling demonstration of the ideological and eschatological foundation of the Arab attitude and of the Arab-Israeli conflict, showing the Arab dedication to the destruction of Israel.
The book was well received in Israeli political and military circles but it was also criticized by Arabist, Israeli, and Middle Eastern scholars for what they described as Harkabi's obsessive focus on Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism. Harkabi did not relent, continuing to point out the Arabs' annihilator stance toward Zionism, which amounted to bringing about the complete destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. In countless articles, mostly in Maariv and other Israeli newspapers, Harkabi hammered into Israeli readers the cognition of a dire catastrophe, the threat of the Arab anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist ideological agenda.
Harkabi, a dedicated scholar, challenged the fledgling Palestinian Liberation Organization on its 1964 charter, and he was the first to do so. Through ninety pages of meticulous interpretation Harkabi revealed to the world that Palestinian nationalist doctrine called for the destruction of Israel by all means, including terrorism, political defamation, ideological crusades, and action. In fact, it was largely due to Harkabi's commentaries that the PLO charter became an object of controversy. Harkabi's political blows to the PLO charter were reproduced by the Israeli government to launch a counter-PLO propaganda campaign, one that persists to this day. Read out in the open, there exists no other tract (with the possible exception of Nazi writings) that is so blatantly and virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist in nature than the PLO charter. Its translation into English, French, and Hebrew owed much to the prodding of Harkabi.
Alerting on the PLO charter
It George Kennan is identified with the concept of containment vis-à-vis U.S.-Soviet relations, then Harkabi is surely identified with raising the warning of the annihilator nature of the PLO charter. But like Kennan, Harkabi has undergone a change of heart and mind; in effect, like Kennan, has turned on his own original argument. Some time after the 1977 Likud takeover,
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