Yasir Arafat Speech to the United Nations

                                  Nov. 13, 1974

                              (Excerpts, Part III)

     We do distinguish between Judaism and Zionism. While we maintain our

opposition to the colonialist Zionist movement, we respect the Jewish faith.

Today, almost one century after the rise of the Zionist movement, we wish to

warn of its increasing danger to the Jews of the world, to our Arab people and

to world peace and security. For Zionism encourages the Jew to emigrate out of

his homeland and grants him an artificially-created nationality. The Zionists

proceed with their terrorist activities even though these have proved

ineffective.

     --We urge the people and governments of the world to stand firm against

Zionist attempts at encouraging world Jewry to emigrate from their countries

and to usurp our land. We urge them as well firmly to oppose any discrimination

against any human being, as to religion, or color.

     --Why should our Arab Palestinian people pay the price of such

discrimination in the world, Mr. President? Why should our people be

responsible for the problems of Jewish immigration, if such problems exist in

the minds of some people? Why don't the supporters of these problems open their

own countries, which can absorb and help these immigrants?

     Those who call us terrorists wish to prevent world public opinion from

discovering the truth about us and from seeing the justice on our faces. They

seek to hide the terrorism and tyranny of their acts, and our own posture of

self-defense.

     The differenc between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the

reason for which each fights. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for

freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and the

colonialists cannot possibly be called terrorist otherwise the American people

in their struggle for liberation from the British colonialists would have been

terrorists; the European resistance against the Nazis would be terrorism, the

struggle of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples would also be

terrorism....As for those who fight against the just causes, those who wage war

to occupy, colonize and oppress other people, those are the terrorists. Those

are the people whose actions should be condemned, who should be called

criminals: for the justice of the cause determines the right to struggle.

     Zionist terrorism which was waged against the Palestinian people to evict

it from its country and usurp its land is registered in your official

documents. Thousands of our people were assassinated in their villages and

towns; tens of thousands of others were forced at gunpoint to leave their homes

and the lands of their fathers. Time and time again our children, women and

aged were evicted and had to wander in the deserts and climb mountains without

any food or water. No one who in 1948 witnessed the catastrophe that struck the

inhabitants of hundreds of villages and towns: in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Lydda,

Ramla and Galilee, no one who has been a witness to that catastrophe will ever

forget the experience, even though the mass blackout has succeeded in hiding

these horrors as it has hidden the traces of 385 Palestinian villages and towns

destroyed at the time and erased from the map.

     The destruction of 19 thousand houses during the seven last years, which

is the equivalent to the complete destruction of two hundred more Palestinian

villages, and the great number of maimed as a result of the treatment they were

subjected to in Israeli prisons, these cannot be hidden by any blackout....For

tens of years Zionists have been harrassing our people's cultural, political,

social and artistic leaders, terrorizing them and assassinating them. They have

stolen our cultural heritage, our popular folklore and have claimed it as

theirs. Their terrorism even reached our sacred places in our beloved and

peaceful Jerusalem. They endeavoured to de-Arabize it and made it lose its

Moslem and Christian character by evicting its inhabitants and annexing it.

     The small number of Palestinian Arabs who were not uprooted by the

Zionists in 1948 are presently refugees in their own homeland. Israeli law

treats them as second class citizens and subjects them to all forms of racial

discrimination after confiscating their land and property. They have been

victims of bloody massacres such as that of Kafr Qassem; they have been

expelled from their villages and denied the right of return as in the case of

the inhabitants of Ikrit and Kafr Birim. For 18 years, martial law was enforced

and our people denied any freedom of movement without prior permission from the

Israeli military governor. This at a time when Israeli law was promulgated

granting citizenship to any Jew anywhere who wanted to immigrate to our

homeland. Moreover, another Israeli law stipulated that Palestinians who were

not present in their villages or towns at the time of the occupation were not

entitled to Israeli citizenship.

     The record of Israeli rulers is replete with acts of terror, perpetrated

on those of our people who remained under occupation in Sinai and the Golan

Heights. The criminal bombardment of Bahr al-Bakr school and Abu-Zaabal factory

are but two such unforgettable acts of terrorism. The total destruction of the

Syrian city of Kuneitra is yet another tangible instance of systematic

terrorism....And yet the Zionist racists and colonialists have the temerity to

describe the just struggle of our people as terror. Could there be more

flagrant distortion of truth than this? We ask those who usurped our land, who

are committing murderous acts of terrorism against our people and are

practicing racial discrimination more extensively than the racists of South

Africa. we ask them to keep in mind the U.N. General Assembly resolution that

called for the one-year suspension of the membership of the government of South

Africa from the U.N. Such is the inevitable fate of every racist country that

adopts the law of the jungle, usurps the homeland or others and persists in

oppression.