Yasir Arafat Speech to the United Nations

                                  Nov. 13, 1974

                               (Excerpts, Part II)

     ....If we return now to the historical roots of our cause we do so 

because present at this very moment in our midst are those, who, while they

occupy our homes, as their cattle graze on our pastures, and as their hands

pluck the fruit of our trees, claim at the same time that we are disembodied

spirits, fictions without presence, without traditions or future. We speak of

our roots also because until recently some people have regarded -- and continue

to regard -- ours as merely a problem of refugees. They have portrayed the

Middle East Question as little more than a border dispute between the Arab

states and the Zionist enclave. They have imagined that our people claims

rights not rightfully its own and fights neither with logic nor valid motive,

with a simple wish only to disturb the peace and terrorize wantonly. For there

are amongst you -- and here I intend the United States of America and others

like it -- those who supply our enemy freely with planes and bombs and with

every variety of murderous weapon. They take hostile positions against us,

deliberately distorting the true essence of things. All this is done not only

at our expense, but at the expense of the American people, and of the

friendship we continue to hope can be cemented between us and this great

people, whose history of struggle for the sake of freedom we honor and salute.

     I cannot now forego the opportunity, Mr. President, to appeal from this

rostrum directly to the American people, asking it to give its support to our

heroic and fighting people. I ask it wholeheartedly to endorse right and

justice, to recall George Washington back to mind, heroic Washington whose

purpose was his nation's freedom and independence, and also Abraham Lincoln,

champion of the destitute and the wretched, also Woodrow Wilson whose doctrine

of fourteen points remains subscribed to and venerated by our people. I ask the

American people whether the demonstration of hostility and enmity taking place

outside this great hall reflect the true intent of the American will? What, I

ask you plainly, is the crime the people of Palestine have committed against

you? Why do you fight us so?

                                      *****

     The roots of the Palestinian Question reach back into the closing years of

the 19th Century, to that period we call the era of colonialism as we know it

today. This is precisely the period during which Zionism as a scheme was born;

its aim was the conquest of Palestinian land by European immigrants, just as

the settlers colonized and indeed raided, most of Africa....And just as

colonialism and its demagogues dignified their conquests, their plunder and

limitless attacks upon the natives of Africa with appeals to a `civilizing and

modernizing' mission, so to did waves of Zionist immigrants disguise their

purposes as they conquered Palestine. Just as colonialism as a system and

colonialists as its instrument used religion, color, race and language to

justify the African's exploitation and his cruel subjugation by terror and

discrimination, so too were these methods employed as Palestine was usurped and

its people hounded from their natal homeland.

     And just as British, French, and Portuguese colonialism heedlessly used

the wretched, the poor, the exploited as mere inert matter with which to build

and to carry out settler colonialism, so to were destitute, oppressed European

Jews employed on behalf of world imperialism and of the Zionist leadership.

European Jews were transformed into the instruments of aggression; they became

the elements of settler colonialism intimately allied to racial 

discrimination.

     Zionist theology was utilized against our Palestine people....Zionism is

an ideology that is imperialist, colonialist, racist; it is profoundly

reactionary and discriminatory; it is united with anti-semitism in its

retrograde tenets and is, when all is said and done, another side of the same

coin....When it is proposed that the only solution for the Jewish problem is

that Jews must alienate themselves from communities or nations of which they

have been a historical part, when it is proposed that Jews solve the Jewish

problem by immigrating to and forcibly settling the land of another people --

when this occurs exactly the same position is being advocated as the one urged

by anti-semites against Jews.

     Thus we can understand the connection between Cecil Rhodes, who promoted

settler colonialism in South East Africa, and Theodor Herzl, who had settler

colonialist designs upon Palestine. Having received a certificate of good

settler colonialist conduct from Rhodes, Herzl then turned around and presented

his certificate to the British government, hoping thus to secure a formal

resolution supporting Zionist policy. In exchange, the Zionists promised

Britain an imperialist base on Palestinian soil so that imperial interests

could be safeguarded at one of their chief strategic points.

     And so the Zionist movement allied itself directly with world colonialism

in a common raid on our land. Allow me now to present a selection of historical

truths about this alliance:

     --The Jewish invasion of Palestine began in 1881. Before the first large

wave of immigrants started arriving, Palestine had a population of a half

million; most of the population was either Moslem or Christian and only 20,000

were Jewish. every segment of the population enjoyed the religious tolerance

characteristic of our culture.

     --Palestine was then a verdant area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in

the course of building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous

culture.

     --Between 1882 and 1917, the Zionist movement settled approximately 50,000

European Jews in our homeland. To do that, it resorted to trickery and deceit

in order to implant them in our midst. Its success in getting Britain to issue

the Balfour Declaration once again demonstrated the alliance between Zionism

and imperialism. Furthermore, by promising to the Zionist Movement that what

was not hers to give, Britain showed how oppressive was the rule of

imperialism....

     --In the wake of the Balfour Declaration and over a period of thrity

years, the Zionist movement succeeded in collaboration with its imperialist

ally, in settling more European Jews on the land, thus usurping the properties

of Palestinian Arabs.

     --By 1947 the number of Jews had reached 600,000; they owned about six

percent of Palestinian arable land. The figures should be compared with the

population of Palestine, which at that time was 1,250,000.

     --As a result of the collusion between the mandatory power and the Zionist

movement, and with the support of the United States, this General Assembly

early in its history approved a recommendation to partition our Palestinian

homeland. This took place in an atmosphere poisoned with questionable action

and strong pressure. The General Assembly partitioned what it had no right to

divide--an indivisible homeland. When we rejected that decision, our position

corresponded to that of the natural mother who refused to permit King Solomon

to cut her son in two when the unnatural mother claimed the child for herself

and agreed to his dismemberment.

     Furthermore, even though the partition resolution granted the colonialist

settlers 54 percent of the land of Palestine, their dissatisfaction with the

decision prompted them to wage a war of terror against the civilian Arab

population. They occupied 81 percent of the total area of Palestine, uprooting

a million Arabs. Thus they occupied 524 Arab towns and villages, of which they

destroyed 385, completely obliterating them in the process. Having achieved

this end, they built their own settlements and colonies on the ruins of our

farms and our groves. The roots of the Palestine Question lie here. Its causes

do no stem from any conflict between two religions or two nationalisms. Neither

is it a border conflict between neighboring states, it is the cause of a people

deprived of its homeland, dispersed and uprooted, and living mostly in exile

and in refugee camps.

                                      *****

     It pains our people greatly to witness the propagation of the myth that

its homeland was a desert until it was made to bloom by the toil of foreign

settlers, that it was a land without a people, and that the colonialist entity

caused no harm to any human being. Such lies must be exposed from this rostrum,

for the world must know that Palestine was the cradle of the most ancient

cultures and civilizations. Her Arab people were engaged in farming and

building, spreading culture throughout the land for thousands of years, setting

an example in the practice of freedom of worship, acting as faihtful guardians

of the holy places of all religions.