Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (6 page)

Over the six years from 1973 to 1979, on an individual basis, Arafat summoned to Beirut from all over the world the 300 members of the PNC. And in one-to-one conversations with them behind closed doors he made his case for the historic compromise with Israel. The initial response of most PNC delegates was outright rejection of their leader’s policy. Some told him to his face that he was a traitor to their cause and would be seen as such by their masses. Some warned him that he would be assassinated if he continued to advocate such an unthinkable compromise. Arafat refused to consider the prospect of political defeat. He listened patiently to each and all of the rejectors and then told them to go back to their places in the Palestinian diaspora, to think carefully and deeply about what he had said and, when they had done that, to visit him again. When they returned he worked them over again. And again. The measure of his success at the end of his marathon effort to turn the PNC around was counted in votes: 296 for his policy of politics and compromise, 4 against.

On public platforms Arafat appeared to all Western observers as a man with little or no charisma of the kind that is essential for effective leadership. Yes but... the private Arafat was something else. The private Arafat had his own very special brand of charisma and the magic of it worked through his relationships with people on an individual basis or in small groups behind closed doors—when he did not have to play to public galleries.

By the end of 1979 he had performed a miracle of leadership. Over time I got to know well all of his senior leadership colleagues including his critics and opponents. The one thing they all agreed on, as did every other Palestinian to whom I talked, was that only Arafat could have persuaded the PNC to be ready to make the historic compromise needed to bring the longest running and most dangerous conflict in all of human history to an end.

What Arafat needed thereafter—to enable him to deliver the historic compromise—was a serious negotiating partner on the Israeli side; a leader who was prepared as a first step to do what all of Israel’s leaders had vowed they would never do: recognise and negotiate with the PLO for the purpose of making peace on terms that, following an end to Israeli occupation of Arab land seized in the 1967 war, would see the coming into being of a Palestinian state with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital. This, plus compensation for those refugees who would never be able to return to their homeland because of Israel’s existence, was the Palestinians’ irreducible minimum demand and need in the name of justice. A demand and a need that not even Arafat the miracle worker could compromise.

On the face of it, because of the real leadership Arafat had demonstrated, a peaceful resolution of the Palestine problem was there for the taking by—it bears repeating—the end of 1979.

That was President Carter’s judgment and he was right.

Begin’s Israel responded with two initiatives.

The first was a political one to block an attempt by President Carter to recognise the PLO and bring it into the negotiating process.

The second was a military one—the invasion of Lebanon all the way to Beirut—to liquidate Arafat and his leadership colleagues and replace them with Israeli puppets. If Begin’s Israel had achieved all of its invasion objectives, the puppets would have been installed in Jordan when King Hussein had been overthrown.

It was in between those two Israeli initiatives that I became by chance the linkman in a secret exploratory dialogue between Arafat and Shimon Peres. (The story of what my mission revealed about the agony of any rational Israeli leader who wants to be serious about peace has its place as appropriate in the pages to come).

Peres was then the leader of Israel’s Labour Party, the main opposition in Israel’s fractious parliament, the Knesset, to Begin’s Likud- dominated government. Begin’s policy was to go on creating facts on the ground—more and more illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land— to prevent any meaningful manifestation of Palestinian self-determination.

At the start of my unofficial shuttle diplomacy the hope almost everywhere behind closed doors, especially in President Carter’s White House and the UN Security Council, was that Peres would succeed in denying Begin a second term in office by winning Israel’s next election. My role in the time remaining before that election was to try to develop enough understanding between Arafat and Peres so that when Peres became prime minister, he could engage in open dialogue with Arafat to get a real peace process going.

The expectation everywhere, including in Israel itself, was that Peres would beat Begin at the polls. But in the event Israel’s amazing (many would say mad) system of proportional representation gave Begin the first crack at cobbling together a coalition government. He eventually succeeded and, confirmed as prime minister for a second term, he appointed General Ariel Sharon (the “bulldozer”) as his Defence Minister. From that moment the invasion of Lebanon all the way to Beirut was on.

In the context of the whole story, only one conclusion is invited by Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. What he and all of Israel’s hardliners feared most was not Arafat the terrorist but Arafat the peacemaker. The one thing Zionism did not want was a Palestinian leader who was interested in compromise and who, given the opportunity, could deliver it. Negotiations with such a Palestinian leader would require Zionism to abandon its Greater Israel project (i.e. the retention of most Arab territories occupied in 1967).

Arafat’s real crime is that he outwitted Zionism to bring about the regeneration of Palestinian nationalism. In the script written by Zionism’s leaders and effectively endorsed by the political establishments of the Western and Arab worlds, that regeneration was not supposed to happen. Why not emerges from the pages to come.

Arafat Terrorist or Peacemaker?
was first published nearly two years after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and Sharon’s failure to destroy the PLO—its leadership and its infrastructure. I was naturally pleased that my call for Israel to face up to reality had echoes there. The loudest echo was in a remarkable book written by Yehoshafat Harkabi. It was a most important book because Harkabi was nothing less than Israel’s foremost authority on the subject of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was that because of his work experience. He was the longest serving of Israel’s Directors of Military Intelligence, known in their world of secrets by the acronym of the job description—DMI. In that capacity Harkabi had provided the strategic assessments which justified Israel’s policy of seeking to impose its will on the Arabs by force. But with time and events Harkabi had found himself being moved to question the fundamentals of Israeli policy and the assumptions on which they were based.

In 1986 Harkabi, a prolific writer by then, published his magnum opus, in Hebrew
Hachraot Goraliot
. Two years later it was translated and updated for the English-speaking world with the title
Israel’s Fateful Hour
. Endorsing by implication what I had said in my book about the need for Israel to face up to reality and negotiate with Arafat, Harkabi wrote this:

What we need in Israel is not a united front behind a wrong policy (continuing Israeli occupation of Arab land seized in 1967) but searching self-criticism and a careful examination of our goals and means, so that we can differentiate between realistic vision and adventurist fantasy. We need clear, rational and, above all, long-term, comprehensive political thinking. Politicians frequently focus their gaze on the pebbles they may stumble on, ignoring the precipice. Some are brilliant in their analysis of the past weeks, but myopic in their perspective on what can happen in the coming months or years.

Jews in the West, particularly in the United States, should participate in this debate. They should not be squeamish and discouraged by the fear that the arguments they air may help their enemies and those of Israel. The choice facing them, as well as Israel, is not between good and bad, but between bad and worse. Criticizing Israeli policies may be harmfully divisive, but refraining from criticism and allowing Israel to maintain its wrong policy is incomparably worse. If the state of Israel comes to grief, God forbid, it will not be because of a lack of weaponry or money, but because of skewed political thinking and because Jews who understood the situation did not exert themselves to convince Israelis to change that thinking.

What is at stake is the survival of Israel and the status of Judaism. Israel will soon face its moment of truth. The crisis that faces the nation will be all-consuming. It will be bitter because many will have to acknowledge that they have been living in a world of fantasy; they will have to shed conceptions and beliefs they have held dear.
⁴⁴

And time was of the essence so far as Harkabi was concerned. Israel, he insisted, had to negotiate its way out of occupation while there was still a Palestinian leadership that was interested in compromise and could deliver. Harkabi understood the reality on the Palestinian side. It was, as I had said in my book, that Arafat would run out of credibility with his own people if Israel did not assist him to demonstrate to them that his policy of politics and compromise would get results.

On the subject of Arafat’s PLO, Harkabi wrote this:

By describing the PLO as a basically terrorist organisation we criminalize it and thus, unwittingly, criminalize the whole Palestinian community, which hails the PLO as its representative and leader. Such a stance is both politically and morally wrong.
⁵

And Harkabi gave this warning:

Israel is the criterion according to which all Jews will tend to be judged. Israel as a Jewish state is an example of the Jewish character, which finds free and concentrated expression within it. Anti-Semitism has deep and historical roots. Nevertheless, any flaw in Israeli conduct, which initially is cited as anti-Israelism, is likely to be transformed into an empirical proof of the validity of anti-Semitism... It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also byJews throughout the world. In the struggle against anti-Semitism, the front line begins in Israel.
⁶

If a
goy
had written such words he (or she) would have been condemned by Zionism’s zealots as the most rabid anti-Semite, and probably would not have gotten such thoughts published.

As we shall see, Harkabi was by no means the first of his faith to see Zionism as a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism.

The Hebrew edition of Harkabi’s book and the debate it provoked led, as he intended, to some serious rethinking by leaders representing rational Israel—about half and perhaps more of the country’s Jewish citizens. And that led in due course (better late than never, I thought at the time) to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, pulled by Arafat and pushed from behind by Foreign Minister Peres, agreeing to recognise and negotiate with the PLO in what became known as the Oslo process. And thus it was, on the lawn of the White House on 13 September 1993, that Rabin accepted Arafat’s outstretched hand. A watching world was stunned and amazed. I was in a BBC studio at Broadcasting House, and I was not the only one of the assembled pundits who struggled to hold back a tear of joy and hope.

Two years later Rabin paid for his conversion to reality with his life. He was assassinated by a Zionist fanatic who knew exactly what he was doing—killing the Oslo peace process. I was and still am convinced that if Rabin had been allowed to live he would have done his best to honour the Oslo deal with Arafat. If he had succeeded there could have been peace on the basis of a two-state solution within five years or so as provided for by the Oslo Accords. And the countdown to Armageddon would have been stopped.

If that had happened, Arafat could have taken a place in history as the first among the peacemaking equals because the initiative for the Oslo process that led to the historic Israel-PLO breakthrough was his and his alone.

Rabin’s place was taken by Peres but his prospect of winning Israel’s next election and becoming prime minister in his own right, essential if the corpse of the Oslo peace process was to rise from the dead, was blown to pieces. As the election approached, Hamas suicide bombers struck (actually in response to an assassination Peres authorised which, as we shall see, was the biggest mistake of his life and a severe blow to Arafat’s chances of containing the men of violence on his side). Over three days 59 Israelis were killed. Predictably Israel lurched to the hard right and in May that year, 1996, the Likud’s Netanyahu defeated Peres and became prime minister. Netanyahu’s mission was to halt and put into reverse the Arafat-Rabin peace process; to cancel as far as possible the gains the Palestinians had made on account of Arafat’s policy of politics and compromise.

It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their mis- conduct is paid not only by them but also by Jews throughout the world.

After Netanyahu’s disastrous first term in office, a return to realism on the Israeli side was proclaimed by the Labour Party’s next prime minister, Ehud Barak, a military man with not a lot of political skill. Late on his watch, and with President Clinton’s assistance, another great Zionist myth was created. According to it, Barak offered Arafat “95 percent” of what he had been saying he wanted for peace, and Arafat rejected the offer because he was a terrorist, had never been a peacemaker, was committed to Israel’s destruction, and thought he had more to gain in the short term from violence rather than negotiations.