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The following is chapter from David Meir-Levi's new book, History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. The Terrorism Awareness Project previous printed his history of the "right-wing" influence on Islamic extremism, "The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad." Taken together (with his entire book), these chapters show that Islamofascism is a political, not merely a religious force; and the potent and deadly offspring of the totalitarian ideologies of the past. -- The Editors.Although many Nazis found new and ideologically welcoming homes in Egypt and Syria after World War II, the Grand Mufti’s Palestinian national movement itself, bereft of its Nazi patron, was an orphan. No sovereign state of any consequence supported it. On the contrary, most of the surrounding Arab states, all of them buoyed by postcolonial nationalism and looking for political stability, perceived the Palestinian cause, especially as embodied in the Muslim Brotherhood, as a threat. Egypt aggressively suppressed the Brotherhood. Saudi and Jordanian royalty watched the growth of radical Islam with suspicion. Syria and Lebanon, trying to move toward more open societies in the pre-Ba’athist era, feared the Brotherhood’s opposition to western-style civil rights and liberties and its fierce condemnation of westernized Arab societies.More to the point, each of these states coveted some or all of what was formerly British Mandatory Palestine and were no more enthusiastic about the creation of a new Arab state there than they were about the creation of Israel. As a result of these complex national ambitions and antagonisms, no state for the Arabs of British Mandatory Palestine was created. Even though Israel offered the return of territories gained in the 1948 war at the Rhodes armistice conference of February 1949, the Arab leaders (among whom there were no representatives from the Arabs of the former Palestine) rejected Israel’s peace offers, declared jihad, and condemned the Arab refugees to eternal refugee status, while also illegally occupying the remaining areas that the United Nations had envisioned as a Palestinian state—as Arafat himself tells us in his authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker?). Egypt herded Palestinian Arabs into refugee camps in its new fiefdom in the Gaza Strip, assassinated their leaders, and shot anyone who tried to leave. Jordan illegally annexed the west Bank and maintained martial law over it for the next nineteen years.
Egypt was particularly conscious of the threat the Muslim Brotherhood posed to the westernized and increasingly secularized society it was trying to build, and both King Farouk and later Gamal Abdel Nasser took brutal and effective steps to repress the movement. They also made sure that the 350,000 Palestinians whom the Egyptian army had herded into refugee camps in Gaza would develop no nationalist sentiments or activism. Egyptian propaganda worked hard to redirect the Palestinians’ justifiable anti- Egypt sentiments toward an incendiary hatred of Israel. Its secret police engineered the creation and deployment of the fedayeen (terrorist infiltrators) movement, which between 1949 and 1956 carried out over nine thousand terror attacks against Israel, killing more than six hundred Israelis and wounding thousands. These fedayeen were mostly Arab refugees, trained and armed by Egypt.
As the conflict with Israel hardened throughout the 1950s, Nasser came to see that Palestinian nationalism, if carefully manipulated, could be an asset instead of just a threat and an annoyance. Although the fedayeen terrorism prompted Israel to invade the Sinai in 1956, the Egyptian leader saw the value in being able to deploy a force that did his bidding but was not part of Egypt’s formal military; which could make tactical strikes and then disappear into the amorphous demography of the west Bank or the Gaza Strip, giving Egypt plausible deniability for the mayhem it had created. But Nasser’s ability to support such a useful terrorist group was limited by the failed economy over which he presided; and so, in 1964, he was delighted to cooperate with the Soviet Union in the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)...
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As in the days of Noah....
