The Great War for Civilisation (86 page)

In the years to come—as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians degenerated into Palestinian suicide bombings, Israeli air attacks, extrajudicial executions, house destruction and further massive Israeli land expropriation—the Palestinians would be blamed by both Israel and the Americans for their failure to “control” violence and to accept a deal that would have given the Palestinians a mere 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of Mandate Palestine that was left to negotiate over. So before we embark on this shameful story of tragedy and loss, it is vital to establish that Israel reneged on every major accord and understanding that was signed in the coming years.

UNDER THE OSLO AGREEMENT, the occupied West Bank would be divided into three zones. Zone A would come under exclusive Palestinian control, Zone B under Israeli military occupation in participation with the Palestinian Authority, and Zone C under total Israeli occupation. In the West Bank, Zone A comprised only 1.1 per cent of the land, whereas in Gaza—overpopulated, rebellious, insurrectionary—almost all the territory was to come under Arafat's control. He, after all, was to be the policeman of Gaza. Zone C in the West Bank comprised 60 per cent of the land, which allowed Israel to continue the rapid expansion of settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. Arafat, as Edward Said was the first to point out, had already conceded Jerusalem; he had already agreed that it would be discussed only during “final status” talks. It thus fell outside the “zoning” system, remaining entirely in Israeli hands.

The truth was that Oslo—far from holding out the possibility of statehood for the Palestinians—allowed Israel to renegotiate UN Security Council Resolution 242. Whereas 242 demanded the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territory captured during the 1967 war, Oslo permitted the Israelis to decide from which bits of the remaining 22 per cent of “Palestine” they would withdraw. The “zoning” system represented this new Israeli reality. The Israelis had the maps—Oslo, incredibly, was negotiated without proper maps on the Palestinian side—and the Israelis decided which zones would be “given” to the Palestinians at once and which would be haggled over later.

Indeed, a detailed investigation in 2000 of Israeli withdrawals under the Articles of Agreement would prove that not a single one of these accords had been honoured by the Israelis since the 1991 Madrid conference.
⁹⁰
In the meantime, the number of settlers illegally living on Palestinian land had risen in the seven years since Oslo from 80,000 to 150,000—even though the Israelis, as well as the Palestinians, were forbidden to take “unilateral steps” under the terms of the agreement. The Palestinians saw this, not without reason, as proof of bad faith. Little wonder that by 1999, Edward Said, who had for many years shown both compassion and understanding for Arafat's brave role as the sole representative of a forgotten and dispossessed people, felt able to describe the Palestinian leader not only as “a tragic figure” but as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

From Beirut, I would journey every few months via Cyprus or Jordan to Arafat's little fiefdoms in Israel—still in a formal and sometimes actual state of war with Israel, there were no direct flights from Lebanon—and each trip would reveal two parallel but totally contradictory narratives: the awesome optimism of the United States and Western correspondents that Israeli–Palestinian peace was a certainty (albeit that the “peace process” was always being put “back on track”) and the steady deterioration of all hope among Palestinians that they would ever achieve statehood, let alone a capital in East Jerusalem. A trip to Gaza on 8 August 1995 was pure Alice through the Looking Glass.

“By the blood of our martyrs, take your cars from the race-track,” a man in a white shirt screamed. “Take away your cars or we will burn them. Abu Amar is coming.” In the old days, Palestinians were asked to perform stirring deeds for the blood of their martyrs. But the dead of the Palestinian revolution had never hitherto been summoned to sort out a parking problem. It was Arafat's sixty-sixth birthday and they had laid on a party for him at the beach racetrack, complete with a flurry of Arab steeds ridden by members of the “Palestinian Society of Equitation” of which President Arafat of Palestine also happened to be the honorary secretary. And when he came, preceded by blue police cars and jeeploads of gunmen and soldiers and security men, it had to be said that the chairman looked his age. He was tired, very tired, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep—angry meetings of the Palestinian Authority now dragged on till dawn—and his old generals and colonels in their faded uniforms with their eagles and crossed swords on equally faded epaulettes looked like men of the past, smoking too much, for ever fingering their moustaches. About the only fit creatures at the party were the horses that pranced past the Palestinian leader as he sat down on a blue-and-pink armchair beneath an awning and stared out across the Mediterranean. He did, it's true, try to look happy.

He embraced children, kissing a girl four times on the cheek, a little boy in a military uniform five times on the cheek and once on the hand. He had already opened the new children's park named after his eleven-day-old daughter Zahwa— “The Amusement Park of Palestine's Zahwa,” it was cloyingly called—and a children's zoo with a mangy lion for the entertainment of Palestinian youth. And when the Palestinian boy scouts trooped past him, Arafat was on his feet saluting them. He saluted the girl guides, too, saluted the Palestinian Kung Fu society, all dressed out in black overalls and white headbands, saluted a child acrobat. And when a rider persuaded his mount to kneel before the president of Palestine, Arafat leapt to his feet and saluted the horse.

He laughed and grinned his way through a musical performance of
dabkeh
dancers and actors who rhetorically discussed the difficulties of the “peace process.” “We have Gaza and Jericho because of your presence,” they chorused confidently. “Jerusalem will come back to us with Abu Amar's efforts,” they went on, less confidently. “Do we want to sell this land?” one actor asked. And his colleague replied: “I will not forget Jerusalem or Haifa or Bisan.” And the crowd roared because half of Jerusalem and all of Haifa and Bisan are in present-day Israel, not in Gaza or the West Bank. And at the end, before the races began, the actors embraced, old friends who disagreed about the peace but would never fight each other. Arafat clapped and laughed. Ah yes, if only it was that easy, if only there was no need for the Palestinian midnight security courts and the twenty-fiveyear prison sentences and the after-dark arrests that were now part of life in Gaza for those who disagreed with Arafat. Then the president of Palestine opened the races while his men handed out baskets of sweet wafers to the hundreds of sheikhs and family leaders who sat beneath the awning. The people ate, the horses raced. Yes, the old man gave his people bread and circuses to mark his birthday.

For Arafat was running a little dictatorship down in Gaza, with the total approval of Israel and the United States. Under the pretext of stamping out “terrorism” on Israel's behalf, he now had more than ten competing Palestinian intelligence services under his command, a grand total exceeded only by Arab leaders in Baghdad and Damascus. New press laws effectively muzzled Palestinian journalists, many of whom were “invited” to security headquarters in Gaza City for after-dark meetings with plainclothes intelligence officers who now liaised with the Israeli security services.

Ostensibly aimed at Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of whom had carried out suicide bombings against the Israelis, the carapace of new “security” measures being lowered over every aspect of Gaza life meant that Arafat was turning into just another Arab despot. The secret midnight courts were sentencing alleged Hamas members to up to twenty-five years in prison while at least three Palestinians died in custody. In April 1995 a newly-released prisoner was shot dead by Arafat's police in what many Palestinians regarded as an extrajudicial execution; he was said to have seventy bullets in his body.

Around Arafat there were now constructed “Military Security,” “Political Security,” “National Security” and “Preventive Security” units, along with a Palestinian intelligence service and a praetorian guard of three more paramilitary organisations: Amn al-Riyassi (presidential security), Harass al-Riyassi (presidential guard) and Force 17, the special security unit that had charge of Arafat's personal protection. In time-honoured Arafat fashion, the heads of these different outfits were encouraged to suspect and hate each other. Colonel Mohamed el-Musri, a former officer in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, for example, would collaborate only with his nominal boss, General Youssef Nasser, the head of the Palestinian police force. “Preventive Security” was run by Colonel Mohamed Dahlan, an officer who had developed close relations with the Israeli intelligence services even though his men were largely composed of “Fatah Hawks”—who played a leading role in the first armed uprising against Israeli occupation—and former long-term prisoners of the Israelis. All heads of security were summoned each night to hear Arafat discourse upon their duties and the dangers to his statelets, a meeting which they now called “The Lecture.”

Far from condemning the ever-increasing signs of despotism on the other side of their border, the Israelis lavished only praise on Arafat's new security measures. U.S. State Department spokesmen, while making routine reference to their “concern” for human rights, welcomed and congratulated Arafat on the vitality of his secret midnight courts—a fact bitterly condemned by Amnesty International. Equally secret meetings of Arafat's inner cabinet, which led to mass arrests of political opponents, were ignored by the U.S. administration.

That Arafat's cabinet did meet in secret was revealed only when the Palestinian leader signed a series of harsh new measures against the press on 25 June 1995. Of the fifty Articles, the thirty-seventh stated that it was “strictly prohibited” for journalists to publish “the minutes of the secret sessions of the Palestinian National Council and the Council of Ministers of the Palestine National Authority.” To comprehend these new press laws, it was necessary to visit Marwan Kanafani, special adviser to the president—the president of Palestine, of course—who happened to be the brother of the militant (and murdered) poet Ghassan Kanafani.

“We closed
Al-Watan
because of the report about the president,” he announced to me. “The editor was arrested for something else—he is under arrest, yes. He is being questioned. We have also closed
Al-Istiqlal
. They have been involved in disinformation.” And Kanafani glanced at his computer screen as if it contained the very law under which Imad al-Falouji, editor of the Hamas newspaper, was taken from his home the previous Saturday morning by plainclothes PLO security men. Al-Falouji's sin, it seems, was to have carried a small news item on his paper's back page which claimed to quote a report from
The Independent
that Yassir Arafat had sold to a French company the right to use the name of his newly-born daughter Zahwa on its products. In fact, my paper had carried no such report, but its provenance was of no interest to the PLO.

“Hamas only printed this article to hurt the credibility of President Arafat,” Kanafani said with contempt. “Nobody believes it. President Arafat is a very generous man—he'd never do such a stupid thing. This has only been done to discredit the president. Yes, I talked with the president about it. His response was more in sorrow than in anger. I hope the suspension will be temporary. I hope the writers of that paper understand that this kind of ‘news' has got nothing to do with what is called ‘the people's right to know.' Why, I know of three news agencies which refused to carry the story.” Writers on magazines like this were hurting the basis of the development and freedom of the press.

“We don't have any taboos here,” he said. “Yes, these State Security courts, do you know whom they embarrass most, who complains most? The Palestinians. And me. I don't like them. Yes, they have passed a lot of sentences, some of them harsh. Yes, there are rules that the public are not allowed to attend. But these are just the regulations that go with these courts. And under current conditions here, we may have certain rules that may not be democratic. But didn't Britain have special courts when it was at war? We're almost in a state of war against those who don't want us to implement peace here. It's a very critical situation. When 1.2 million Palestinians are punished for what one or two [militants] have done, then we are in a state that calls for extraordinary measures. We are trying to punish justly those who are jeopardising the security, property, lives and human rights of the Palestinian people.”

This was quite a speech. And this, I kept telling myself, was Arafat's special adviser. But more was to follow:

The Declaration of Principles signed in Washington was based on three words: land for peace. We will do anything humanly possible to satisfy Israel's security needs. But they must do everything humanly possible to satisfy our need for land. President Arafat knew when he signed this agreement that there were big holes in it. And the Israelis got praise for making peace. Rabin shared the Nobel prize with President Arafat. But now when we come down to the nitty-gritty, the Israelis want both peace and land. And if they want to keep their soldiers in the West Bank to protect settlements and keep most of our land under different pretexts, then we're not going to have peace. Yassir Arafat took a lot of chances for this. He took personally all the decisions that were necessary, yes, including arrests and unpopular decisions, as well as raising the hopes of our people . . . He did this because he believes in peace. Heads of state don't take these chances but leaders do—and he is a leader. He wants it to work but he is exhausted. He is worried. He is not satisfied that the peace process is moving.