New York businessman William Langfan has offered an unprecedented $1 million prize to anyone who shows that the Palestinian National Council (PNC) has ever changed the PLO charter to accept Israel's existence, as is widely believed.
The offer is particularly timely, less than 24 hours after Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced that he no longer sees himself as bound by the Oslo Accords.
Probably the most important obligation in the “Peace Process” was a promise to annul the onerous clauses of their 1964 Palestinian National Charter. “The importance of the charter to the Palestinians can not be exaggerated,” according to Langfan. “To the Palestinians, it is virtually their 'Junior Koran.' These clauses in the charter declared the establishment of Israel illegal and void and called for armed resistance until Palestine is liberated.”
In an exclusive interview with Arutz Sheva's Baruch Gordon, Langfan explained that in 1993, when Israel and the PLO were about to sign the Oslo Accords, then-PLO chairman Yasser Arafat sent a letter to then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, in which he agreed to cancel the clauses in the charter that called for an armed struggle against Israel, and promised to submit the matter to the PNC for approval.
That letter was then used for years as supposed proof that the PLO had recognized Israel.
However, Langfan noted that according to the charter itself, a two-thirds majority vote would be necessary to make changes in the charter.
Rabin did not wait for this to happen, and immediately sent a letter to Arafat recognizing him and the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.
'A complete lie'
Amazingly, Arafat did not even bother to ask the PNC to ratify the change until three years later in 1996, following the Oslo II agreement. The PNC discussed the matter and decided to “re-draft” the charter, and hand the matter over to a legal committee, which would then represent its recommendations to yet another body, the Palestinian Central Council, for its approval, and then take the matter back to the PNC.
The Oslo II Israeli redeployment moved forward, and yet, “no record of any redrafted charter has ever been presented to the public,” Langfan stated unequivocally.
The matter was raised again in 1998, during the Wye River negotiations with the PLO – and again, Arafat wrote a letter, this time to then-President Bill Clinton, claiming that the PNC had struck the anti-Israel clauses from the PLO charter. Various PLO committees and organizations then reaffirmed Arafat's latest letter.
However, the actual vote in the PNC “never happened,” Langfan explained, and Arafat's letter was “a complete lie... All that they did was reaffirm Arafat's lies, that something was done... that was never done.”
Langfan previously offered $200,000 to Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid and others, “if they could present a document created by the PNC, which is the only entity that can change the charter, duly voted by at least two thirds, and signed by the PNC.”
Since this never happened – the affirmations by various heads of state who vowed that the PLO had accepted Israel's existence are inconsequential, Langfan confirmed. The entire Oslo process is based upon a lie: the legal committee given the task to edit the charter never met, and thus changes were never brought before or voted upon by the PNC.
Putting even more of his money where his mouth is, he decided to increase fivefold the prize he will grant to whoever can prove that the PLO charter was indeed modified.
“I will up the ante to a million dollars to the first person who can present a charter modification with annulments duly voted by the PNC. It's a million dollar bank check from Wells Fargo.”