Between You and Me (15 page)

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he wrote, “Israelis began to negotiate the price they expected to pay to recover their dead.”

I quoted the sentence and said that after reading it, one could easily conclude, “Aha, Anwar Sadat! He is anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish!”

Sadat responded with another hearty laugh and adroitly replied,

“Anti-Semite, this is something that has been invented to blackmail anyone and to scare anyone. No. I myself am a Semite. How could I be anti-Semite? They are my cousins.”

Yet by then Sadat was losing patience with the “cousin” whose cooperation he needed most: the prime minister of Israel. The once promising peace initiative had run into serious obstacles, and by the spring of ’78, the euphoric expectations of the previous November, after Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, had evaporated. The disagreements continued to harden over the summer until finally, in August, Carter intervened with the offer that brought Begin and Sadat to Camp David. Had it not been for Carter’s invitation and his patient mediation during the difficult negotiations that followed, the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel almost surely never would have come to pass. Most historians agree that Carter’s diplomacy at Camp David that summer was the high-water mark of his presidency.

The lion’s share of the credit belongs to the leaders of the two countries that for the past three decades had been so belligerent toward each other. Each of them had to make major concessions. Sadat had pushed hard for a comprehensive peace plan that would have embraced the entire region, though he had to settle for the far more narrow treaty between Egypt and Israel. Begin yielded significant ground when he agreed to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian control. But the adjoining Gaza Strip remained under Israeli occupation, as did the territories captured from Jordan and Syria in the Six-Day War: East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

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For all its limitations, the agreement was lavishly praised as a vital first step toward a durable peace that would extend throughout the Middle East. Hence, no one was surprised when, later that year, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the years since 1978, the Camp David accords have lost some of their luster, mainly because there has been no significant follow-up. Contrary to the more optimistic expectations, the treaty between Egypt and Israel did not provide the spark for other firm and lasting Arab-Israeli peace agreements. There were some encouraging moves in that direction, but they all were stymied by one thing or another.

The chief stumbling block, of course, has been the Palestinian question, and at the heart of that complex and difficult issue loomed the flamboyant presence of the Arab leader whom Menachem Begin described as “the man called Arafat.”

Y a s i r A r a f at

Y A S I R A R A F A T W A S T H E L E A D E R of a nation in exile. In one of the early 60 Minutes pieces I did on the Middle East, I described the Palestinians as “the new Diaspora,” and pointed out that most of those stateless refugees lived in the squalor of camps that were scat-tered throughout the Arab countries bordering Israel. Out of their misery had emerged the rebellious forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Arafat took over as chairman of the PLO in 1969, and with his scruffy beard, he came across as a Bedouin version of Fidel Castro. Yet when I finally met him in person, it was his warm and expressive eyes that caught my attention. They struck me as the eyes of

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a poet or a devout religious figure, and not at all what I expected to find in the face of a guerrilla leader who had dedicated his life to violence and revolution.

Our first meeting took place in March 1977 in Cairo. I’d gone there to do a story on Sadat, and when I heard that Arafat was in town, I was able to arrange an interview with him as well, even though his general policy in those days was to shun the U.S. media, which he dismissed as slavishly pro-Israel. I suspect the main reason Arafat granted my request was because he had been encouraged by recent news from Washington. In a major foreign-policy speech, Jimmy Carter had called for the creation of a Palestinian homeland, thereby becoming the first American president to adopt that position publicly, as I noted when I sat down with Menachem Begin later that year. In my interview with Arafat, he praised Carter’s speech as “a progressive step, because for the first time, the president of America put his hand on the core of the whole crisis in the Middle East—the Palestinians.”

Carter’s speech was misleading, for it later became clear that a key ingredient in his proposal was Israel’s ultimate approval of any blueprint for a Palestinian homeland. Which meant there was no real change in U.S. policy. To Yasir Arafat, Carter was just another American president under the thumb of the Jewish lobby. The Carter-driven Camp David accords only confirmed and deepened Arafat’s resentment. The next time I interviewed him was in early 1979, and the dark brown eyes that greeted me at his PLO headquarters in Beirut were no longer soft and sensitive. Instead, they blazed with murderous fury because an Arab-Israeli peace agreement had been reached that did not include a plan for resolving the Palestinian problem. The chief target of his rage was his fellow Arab, Sadat, whom he reviled as “a quisling, a traitor,” though his charges of betrayal also extended to President Carter. I asked him about that.

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W A L L A C E : Why would Jimmy Carter want to betray the Palestinians? Because that’s what you’ve said.

A R A F A T : I think he is a— He’s looking for the votes.

W A L L A C E : So, he’s just doing this for votes?

A R A F A T : I am sorry to say.

W A L L A C E : He will betray the Palestinians—

A R A F A T : I am sorry to say that what he is doing is only for some votes for the new election.

W A L L A C E : And you— By “some votes,” you mean Jewish votes in the next election.

A R A F A T : Maybe. Votes—the Jewish votes or other votes.

W A L L A C E : Well, then, other votes?

A R A F A T : But mainly it is Jewish votes.

W A L L A C E : I see.

A R A F A T : I am sorry to say it.

In 1982, I returned to Beirut and interviewed him again, shortly before pressure from Israel’s invading forces drove the PLO out of Lebanon. Following that expulsion, Arafat moved his command post to Tunis, and when I sat down with him there in 1989, he vigorously defended the intifada, the Palestinian uprising of riots, mayhem, and violence that engulfed the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank in 1987 and persisted over the next four years. We also talked about his more conciliatory positions, for Arafat had recently renounced terrorism and had formally acknowledged Israel’s right to exist, a diplomatic step that reversed twenty-five years of PLO policy. That olive branch helped create the climate for direct negotiations with Israel, and in the aftermath of the 1993

Oslo Accords, he set up his headquarters in Gaza City, where I visited him twice. My seventh and last interview with him was in 2002

at yet another site, Ramallah on the West Bank.

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Throughout most of the quarter century that had elapsed since I first met him in Cairo, Arafat’s PLO guerrillas and Israel’s armed forces were at each other’s throats, and the depressing history they shared was mostly one of destruction and bloodshed. But on at least two occasions, Arafat came tantalizingly close to resolving the PLO’s major disputes with Israel in a way that would have brought peace and stability to the region.

The first time was in 1993, when the two foes signed the Oslo Accords. The key elements in that historic agreement called for official recognition of the state of Israel, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip and West Bank, and a plan to implement Palestinian self-rule in those territories over a five-year period.

Arafat’s counterpart in the agreement was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had long been revered as one of Israel’s great patriots. He had been a field commander in the 1948 War of Independence and the military chief of staff during the Six-Day War in 1967, and his towering reputation as a war hero gave him the stature and clout he needed to sell the Oslo Accords to skeptical Israelis. At the formal signing ceremony with President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn, Rabin shook hands with his longtime enemy, and although he did so with some hesitation, that gesture of goodwill sig-naled the dawn of a more tranquil era in the Middle East. Like Sadat and Begin fifteen years earlier, Arafat and Rabin were showered with praise for their diplomatic triumph. Like those previous leaders, they went on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor they shared with Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, who had played a critical role in the long and difficult negotiations.

But the high hopes generated by the Oslo pact were abruptly shattered. Inthe fall of 1995, as plans were moving forward to implement the agreement, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli fanatic, a terrorist who bitterly opposed the concessions

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that were being made to the Palestinians. His motive for killing Rabin had beento derail the peace process, and to a large extent, he succeeded. Moreover, that deadly assault was a sad reminder to all of us that acts of terrorism in the Middle East were not confined to Israel’s Arab enemies.

The second golden opportunity came in 2000, when Israel’s new prime minister, Ehud Barak, set out to revive the harmonious spirit of the Oslo Accords. This time around, President Clinton became an active participant in the negotiations. In July 2000 he summoned Barak and Arafat to meet with him at Camp David, where he hoped to pull off the kind of diplomatic coup that Carter had achieved there in 1978. Clinton was then in the final months of his presidency, and a Carteresque mediation of a long-standing Middle East dispute would have been an impressive capstone to his eight years in the White House.

Barak assured Arafat that he was committed to all the provisions that had been set down in the Oslo agreement, and with a sharp nudge from Clinton, he went even further. In addition to relinquish-ing all of the Gaza Strip and over 90 percent of the West Bank for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, Barak said Israel would be willing to give the Palestinians control over parts of East Jerusalem. That concession went well beyond any previous proposal to Arafat; never before had an Israeli leader offered to compromise on the status of Jerusalem, a city that both Jews and Arabs steadfastly claim as their capital.

Although it was a remarkably generous offer, Arafat rejected it.

And in spite of intense pressure imposed on him by Clinton, he declined to make a counteroffer. The president was furious at Arafat and all but accused him of sabotaging the talks at Camp David, which he had convened with such high expectations and at which he had put his own reputation on the line.

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For Arafat, pressure from Bill Clinton was not nearly as threatening as pressure from Hamas and other radical Islamic groups that were challenging his authority. Their growing influence within his own community was now so strong that Arafat did not dare to defy their unrealistic demands, which went far beyond anything the Israelis could accept. When I interviewed Arafat in Gaza City three months after the Camp David meeting, I asked why he had refused Barak’s generous proposal. Arafat replied that if he had accepted, he would be “drinking tea in heaven with Yitzhak Rabin.”

The collapse of the Camp David negotiations had a devastating effect on the peace process. When I visited Gaza in the fall of 2000, guerrilla attacks and similar uprisings were an almost daily occurrence there and on the West Bank. The new wave of violence had all the earmarks of the 1987 insurrection; indeed, it soon became known as “the second intifada.” As for Ehud Barak, he had staked his career and reputation on being able to reach an agreement with Arafat, and his failure was political suicide. As the violence escalated that fall, he had to prepare for new elections, and in February 2001, Israeli voters veered sharply to the right and chose the notorious hard-liner Ariel Sharon as their next prime minister.

The last time I interviewed Arafat was in February 2002, in Ramallah, where he was a virtual prisoner in his own presidential compound. For the previous two months, Sharon had kept tanks positioned on the streets outside the compound and had vowed to confine Arafat to his quarters until he arrested a number of Palestinians the Israeli government had identified as terrorists. Among other things, the show of force underscored how much Sharon detested Arafat. I asked the PLO leader about that personal enmity, which stretched back over two decades or more.

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W A L L A C E : Why does Ariel Sharon hate you so? He wanted you killed.

A R A F A T : He has tried to kill me thirteen times.

W A L L A C E : Right. Why does he hate you so?

A R A F A T : You have to ask him.

W A L L A C E : No, no, no, no. You have your own opinion. Why?

The only answer Arafat offered was that he was a man of peace, as he had demonstrated at the time of the Oslo Accords, and that Sharon had always been a staunch opponent of the peace process.

Arafat then launched into his favorite litany about the Israeli occupation—which he called “the siege”—and how grievously the Palestinian people had suffered during the decades of Israel’s military oppression. I had heard it all before, too many times before.