The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has pointed out that the new Internal Charter of Palestinian Authority (PA)’s Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party, which controls the PA, has not eliminated Fatah’s rejection of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and its support for the legitimacy of terrorism against Israel but, on the contrary, speaks of “sacrific[ing] our souls, blood, time and effort. All these are the weapons of the revolutionaries … our tragedy continued throughout all those long years. You must know that our enemy is strong and the battle is ferocious and long. You must know that determination, patience, secrecy, confidentiality, adherence to the principles and goals of the revolution, keep us from stumbling and shorten the path to liberation. Go forward to revolution. Long live Palestine, free and Arab!”
The Internal Charter mentions “revolution” eleven times, repeatedly refers to “liberation,” speaks of the “enemy” and does not mention accepting Israel as a Jewish state or even as a state. Also, it does not mention any rescission of the Fatah Constitution, which calls for “Opposing any political solution offered as an alternative to demolishing the Zionist occupation in Palestine” (Article 22) and insists that “Armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic, and the Palestinian Arab People’s armed revolution is a decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence, and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated” (Article 19).
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “The first thing to understand is that this is an Internal Charter, concerned chiefly with regulating the Fatah Party and its organizational machine, which is why it is filled with dense, procedural issues and regulations, not ideology or aims. In short, this is not a replacement of the Fatah Constitution, which has never been rescinded by the relevant Fatah bodies. (Fatah Constitution is a separate document, distinct from the PLO Charter).
“It is also noteworthy that Secrecy News, which has a report on the translation of the Internal Charter by Open Source Center, says that ‘The document is not particularly conciliatory in tone or content. It is a call to revolution, confrontation with the enemy, and the liberation of Palestine, “free and Arab”’ – so what has changed?
The new Fatah Internal Charter reaffirms that Fatah continues to work on the basis of its 1989 Basic Charter and its ‘adherence to the principles, objectives, and methods agreed by the members of Fatah.’ As eminent middle East scholar and expert on the Palestinians, Professor Barry Rubin, remarks, ‘In other words, every detail of the original charter still holds; nothing is repealed, no error admitted, no explicit change of course accepted.’
“Moreover, the new Internal Charter is the product of Fatah’s Bethlehem Conference which, as we outlined in detail at the time, reaffirmed Fatah’s refusal to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, glorified terrorists and the ‘armed struggle, insisted on the so-called ‘right of return,’ and rejected an end of claims in any future peace agreement with Israel. At this Conference, Fatah honored terrorists, including Khaled Abu-Isbah and Dalal Mughrabi, responsible for the 1978 coastal road bus hijacking, in which 37 Israelis, including 12 children, were slaughtered.
“The Fatah Internal Charter is clearly designed to register continuing adherence by Fatah to its core values of eliminating Israel and waging war on her, while not saying so explicitly. Yet they still call for war, sacrifice and blood. If Fatah was serious about peace, it would explicitly rescind its Constitution and renounce terrorism.
“This document is therefore worse than meaningless – it promotes our greatest fears regarding Fatah’s war against Israel and its commitment to violence and terror. We Jews should take the Fatah Constitution and the 1989 Basic Charter very seriously, because these spell out Fatah aims and violent methods. We have no reason to doubt the reality of Fatah’s war. Only last Friday, Fatah-controlled PA TV broadcast a mosque sermon calling for the murder of every Jew, who were labeled the enemies of God and humanity and compared to the Nazis.
“History has taught that Jews must listen and believe that threats from our enemies stating they will destroy us are real. We tragically ignored Hitler’s words against Jews in Mein Kampf – we dare not ignore the Palestinian Arabs repeated threats against Israel and the Jewish people
We have learnt to our cost that when our enemies say they will destroy us, they mean it. To doubt this would be to repeat the tragic mistake so many of treating Hitler’s words as unimportant or mere rabble-rousing.”