by Adam LeBor
Hasan met Arafat at midnight in his office. Their discussions lasted almost three hours. Hasan had spent many hours preparing for the meeting: he had drawn up plans outlining how to create an independent corporation to run the Citrus Processing Company, and how the Palestinian government could foster a healthy economic environment. He discussed the role of citizens in drawing up a constitution and legislation, the rule of law and how it would regulate public and private institutions, and commerce. ‘I explained how Chairman Arafat would carve a role for himself as the father of Palestine, as well as the father of Palestinian liberation. The meeting was lively, and later on people told me how often I had said to him, “Please listen to me.” He was charming, knowledgeable and deferential. But he had not yet made the transition from leading a liberation movement to leading a new nation. I was impressed at the respect and adulation he received. But so much so that there was no room for any public critiques or accountability.’ The charm and emollience were a front for doing nothing that might upset the comfortable status quo. Hasan’s proposals were filed away, nothing more was heard of them, and he eventually resigned his consultancy, sad and disillusioned at the missed opportunity. Hasan’s disappointment was shared by many Palestinians who felt that the Arafat-era leadership, which had been based in Tunis since 1982 and only returned to Gaza in 1994, simply did not understand the Israeli mentality and the obstinacy with which Israelis negotiated. It would have been better, they said, to draw on the pool of Palestinians who had been living under Israeli rule since 1967, and knew the Israeli modus operandi and way of thinking.
The murdered prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was succeeded by his old rival, Shimon Peres. As foreign minister in Rabin’s government, Peres had negotiated the Oslo Accords, for which he was awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize along with Yasser Arafat and Rabin himself. Peres was a veteran peacenik who wanted to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, and he was also an architect of the treaty Yitzhak Rabin signed with Jordan barely ten days before his murder. Despite – or more likely because of – the Oslo Accords, the Islamists continued their bombing campaigns inside Israel and the West Bank during the mid-1990s. With the new threat from the Islamic radicals who were determined to destroy any rapprochement, peace looked more remote than ever. The militants took the concept of asymmetric warfare to a new level: young men, and sometimes women, were wrapped in explosive belts, and despatched to bus stops, crowded cafés and restaurants where they blew themselves – and as many bystanders as possible – to bits.
Ironically, the Israeli security services themselves had initially encouraged the build-up of the Islamists as a counterweight to the PLO, on the old principle of divide and rule. But secular nationalists can be negotiated with, while those who claim a heavenly mandate are less willing to compromise. Shin Bet had helped create a Palestinian version of the Golem, the monster brought to life by a rabbi in the medieval Prague Ghetto to save the Jews, who eventually ran amok. After Mossad agents killed Fathi Shkaki, head of Islamic Jihad, in Malta in October 1995, and Yayha Ayash, Hamas’ bombmaker in Gaza in January 1996 with a booby-trapped mobile telephone, the Islamists swore revenge. Their planning and attacks were unimpeded by Yasser Arafat’s security forces. On the morning of 25 February 1996, twenty-six Israelis were killed and more than eighty injured in two suicide bombings in Jerusalem. The next day an Islamic fundamentalist drove into a bus stop in Jerusalem, killing a woman and injuring twenty-three others. On 3 March a suicide bomber killed eighteen on a bus by the main post office, and on the following day another set off his charges in downtown Tel Aviv, killing thirteen and wounding one hundred.3 The series of bombings could not have taken place without Arafat’s authorisation, or at least without his knowledge of them.
The Islamists and Arafat were the Likud’s greatest electoral assets. In the May 1996 elections Likud, together with its religious and right-wing allies, won sixty-six seats and formed a coalition government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, a former ambassador to the United Nations. Netanyahu, educated in the United States, was the son of a distinguished history professor who was an expert on Spanish and Sephardic Jewry. His brother Jonathan had been the only Israeli casualty of the dramatic raid on Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. Despite his western background, Netanyahu was a divisive ideologue whose government deliberately wrecked what was left of the Oslo Accords, accelerating the settlement programme and the land grab across the West Bank. Likud and the Islamists were locked in a danse macabre. Netanyahu did not want to withdraw from any part of the occupied territories, although he did authorise a half-hearted pull-out from Hebron. The continuing Hamas attacks through 1997 gave him the perfect excuse to dig in, which in turn fostered support for the Islamists, and so the cycle continued.
Netanyahu was dubbed ‘Bibi the Bungler’ for his general air of incompetence, and the low point of his premiership was the botched attempt by two Mossad agents to kill a Hamas official in Amman by injecting him with a nerve toxin. The agents were caught and confessed, and were only released in exchange for the freedom of Sheikh Yassin, Hamas’ spiritual leader. Meanwhile Arafat’s rule over his patchwork of territories degenerated into further authoritarianism, as he ordered the closure of independent media and the arrest of political opponents. The Palestinian Authority had more than ten security services, each a petty fiefdom of corruption and intimidation. On both sides of the Green Line, the old sense of gloom and hopelessness returned.
In May 1999 Israel went to the polls again. By now the changing demographics of Israeli society had fractured the old left–right divide. Labour, renamed ‘One Israel’ in an attempt to broaden its appeal, won twenty-six seats, while Likud took nineteen. Sephardic Jews no longer voted for Likud, but for their own religious party, Shas, which was the real winner with seventeen seats. Although not on the left, Shas was prepared to cooperate with Labour in exchange for sufficient state funds for its welfare and education projects. Labour’s left-wing ally Meretz took ten seats, and a party representing Russian immigrants took six, while the remainder were divided between various left-centre and religious groupings and the Arab parties. Eventually Labour’s new leader, Ehud Barak, formed a coalition of seventy-five seats with Shas, Meretz and several smaller groupings. Again it seemed Israel had a leader who wanted peace, and a mandate to make it, although at first glance Barak was an unlikely candidate. He had served in the Israeli army for over thirty years and had led the commando team that had assassinated the poet Kamal Nasser in Beirut in 1973. Barak received the overwhelming endorsement not just of the Israeli left, but also of Israel’s Arab voters, who saw in him the chance for a Palestinian state. Barak quickly restarted negotiations with both the Palestinians and Syria, and oversaw the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon.
In July 2000 President Clinton invited Barak and Arafat to Camp David. Clinton hoped to build on the remains of the Oslo Accords to reach a final, overall settlement. Barak’s concluding offer to Arafat included about 90 per cent of the West Bank and almost all of the Gaza Strip. He broke several great taboos of Israeli politics: he offered to divide Jerusalem and hand over some of the city to Palestinian sovereignty; to allow several thousand refugees to return home, and even to pay compensation for confiscated property. In Tel Aviv the left rejoiced, believing a final settlement was about to be agreed, while those on the right were enraged. Barak’s own foreign minister, David Levy, resigned in disgust. Barak had gone further than any Israeli politician had ever dared. But the talks ultimately failed, and the bitterness and recriminations continue to this day.
For Arafat it was not enough. Viewed from Ramallah, Camp David 2000 did not offer a viable and contiguous state, and was certainly not enough for the Palestinians to forgo their demand for a right of return for all refugees – no matter that Israel would never grant it. Israel would have retained control of the borders with Egypt and Jordan, of customs and water, and of the territory along the Jordanian border. Many settlements would be annexed by Israel, while the numerous security
checkpoints that made Palestinians’ everyday life such a misery would remain. It was not a mistake to reject Camp David, says Rema Hammami. ‘This was neither a proper nor a workable deal. Barak was offering to return only something close to 85 per cent, in three truncated areas that were divided by Israeli settlements, and the sovereignty over Jerusalem only applied to its outer suburbs. And Israel rejected making even a verbal expression of responsibility for the refugee problem. This was the same way we were conned under Oslo. Camp David was asking for us to legitimise the settlement project.’ In addition, the failure of Oslo had left a legacy of anger and disillusionment, explains Rema: ‘You have to see this in the context of all the broken promises: the prisoner release that never happened; the stepped-up land confiscation, the doubling of settlements while we were supposedly in a peace process. Palestinians came to understand during Oslo that if you sign something with Israel, it is meaningless, because everything is about power, their power.’
But there were no more offers like Camp David, nor are there likely to be. To outside observers it seemed that the Palestinians had missed their best chance for potential statehood.
* * *
Two months later, on Thursday 28 September 2000, Ariel Sharon went for a walk at the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in Jerusalem, which is holy to both Muslims and Jews.4 Furious Palestinians attacked Israeli police guarding the site. The demonstrations erupted again on Friday, the day of prayer for Muslims. Arab rioters flung stones at Israeli police and nearby Jewish worshippers. The police entered the compound and opened fire, killing four Palestinians and injuring more than a hundred. On Saturday the riots spread across the West Bank. Unlike in the first Intifada, this time Palestinian security troops joined forces with the rioters, opening fire on Israeli positions. Arab leaders called for a general strike. On Sunday, Jaffa’s Arabs hung up protest signs and placards along Yefet Street, protesting about Sharon’s visit. A crowd soon gathered, and the mood turned ugly. The consequences of the Al-Aqsa Intifada – as this second uprising was known – would be disastrous for Arab–Jewish co-existence in Jaffa. It left a legacy of bitterness that still poisons intercommunal relations to this day.
In 1960, over forty years earlier, the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti published his classic study of mob dynamics, Crowds and Power. His analysis of a ‘reversal crowd’, committed to ‘overturning the established order’, perfectly applied to those on Yefet Street: ‘People who are habitually ordered about… can free themselves in two different ways. They can pass onto others the orders which they have received from above; but for them to be able to do this, there must be others below who are ready to accept their orders.’ The only people ‘below’ an Israeli Arab were illegal workers from Gaza and the West Bank. But Jaffa’s Arabs were gathering in solidarity with their cousins across the Green Line. ‘Or they can try to pay back to their superiors themselves what they have suffered and stored up for them.’5 The mob pelted passing cars with stones. Windows and windscreens shattered, scattering glass across the road. The crowd’s chants grew louder, and more young men poured out of the side streets of Ajami and Jebaliyyeh, high on anger and adrenalin. It was indeed ‘payback’ time.
The rioters blocked off Yefet Street and fought with the police, hurling stones and bricks. Plumes of black smoke curled from burning tyres. Thick clouds of tear gas drifted along the road. Jaffa was now Gaza – the Intifada had finally crossed the Green Line into Israel proper. Violence erupted across Israel’s major Arab population centres. Israeli police used live ammunition to break up the crowds, often deploying snipers, who shot several demonstrators in the head or chest. Each death or injury further inflamed the Arabs on the street, as did the deliberate incitement and provocation by Palestinian politicians and the Palestinian media. Just as in 1921 and 1936, the Arab riots provoked Jewish counter-attacks, often in the same places, even around the same buildings, where both sides had fought decades earlier. Once again, the Hasan Bey Mosque, Jaffa’s northernmost outpost and the last remnant of Manshiyyeh, was attacked by Jews, who tried to set it on fire. Jewish rioters attacked Arab-owned shops and restaurants. Jaffa, like all of Israel and Palestine, was a prisoner of its history, condemned to experience endless cycles of retribution. When the smoke cleared and the rubble was removed, thirteen Palestinians were dead across Israel – though none in Jaffa – and hundreds injured, as well as dozens of Israeli policemen. One Israeli had been killed when his car was hit by a stone.
Standing on his terrace, the Jewish community activist Sami Albo could hear the fighting in the street. But the violence did not spread inland as far as Jerusalem Boulevard, or his home a couple of blocks behind it. The phone kept ringing as friends and relatives called from nearby Tel Aviv, concerned for the family’s safety. The Albos were all fine, but like many of Jaffa’s Jews, the family’s feelings towards their Arab neighbours had hardened, probably permanently. Sami explains: ‘We felt that we were living in another country, not in Israel. The burning tyres and stones being thrown reminded me of what my father told me about the pogrom in Turkey. The same pictures came into my head. The Arabs only attacked the Jewish businesses. They said this exploded because they are treated badly. I asked them what the connection was, to make an Intifada in Jaffa? If you want to demonstrate then go to the police, get permission, demonstrate against the government, against the municipality, against everyone. But why are you making a pogrom against me as a Jew?’ The first Intifada in 1987 helped fuel the October 2000 riots, Sami believes. ‘Something happened then to the Arabs in Israel in general, and to the Arabs of Jaffa after that. They said they were Palestinians first, then Israeli Arabs. This is their country as well, but I ask them, please don’t call yourselves Palestinians. You are not Palestinians. All this time they have been Israeli Arabs, now they decided, because of the situation on the West Bank, that they are Palestinians.’
The October 2000 violence and Arafat’s rejection of Camp David were more than Barak’s increasingly shaky coalition could bear. He had gone further than much of Israel in the concessions he had offered the Palestinians, and these were opposed by a substantial part of public opinion. Barak resigned in December and elections for the post of prime minister alone were set for February 2001. Once again Yasser Arafat was the Likud’s best electoral ally. Arafat’s rejection of Camp David first caused dismay and confusion on the Israeli left, then a nationwide fatalism: as it seemed impossible to make peace with the Palestinians, there was simply no point trying any more. Barak ran for office again but won barely a million votes, compared to almost 1.7 million for Ariel Sharon, a hardline Likud ideologue who as minister of defence in 1982 had overseen Israel’s disastrous invasion of southern Lebanon. Barak left politics tired and profoundly disillusioned and Sharon formed a National-Unity government with Labour. The short-sighted decision by Israel’s Arab minority to boycott the elections helped return Likud to power. The Arabs had reason to be angry: Barak had received over 95 per cent of Arab votes in the 1999 elections. But he did not invite any Arab parties into his coalition, meet with Arab leaders, or bother with even a symbolic gesture of inclusion. Only 18 per cent of Israeli Arabs voted in 2001, compared with over 70 per cent in 1999, and this helped to open the door for Sharon.
The 2000 riots highlighted the fundamental contradictions of Israel’s Arab Palestinian minority. They live in an open society with more rights and freedoms than anywhere else in the Middle East. They are citizens of a democracy with free speech, an aggressively critical media, and an independent judiciary. Arab Knesset members may call for the dissolution of the Israeli state, even as it pays their salaries and the bodyguards that protect them from Jewish extremists. Arabic is an official language, used on public street signs. Women in particular have benefited from the abolition of polygamy and child marriage, and unlike in several Arab countries they may vote and be elected to parliament. But ultimately Israel’s Arab citizens are non-Jews in a Jewish state. Discrimination is systematic and institutionalised. Israel’s Arab minor
ity comprises just over 19 per cent of the 6.7 million population. Unemployment and child mortality rates are higher among Israeli Arabs than Jews. More than a hundred ‘unrecognised’ villages lack proper water and electricity, or road and sewerage systems. Despite an affirmative action campaign to employ more Arabs, most ministries have fewer than 5 per cent on their staff, and these are generally working in minor positions. The Ministry of Religious Affairs’ budget for 2000 allocated just 2.9 per cent of its resources to non-Jews.6 Zionist organisations such as the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund have quasi-governmental status in Israel, enjoying privileged access to funds and tax breaks, and even taking part in decision-making. All are exclusively Jewish in their concerns.
The warnings of Shin Bet, the domestic security service, that Israel’s Arab minority was ready to explode were ignored, says Nachman Tal, former head of the Arab affairs division. ‘The service consistently and constantly demanded from every government ministry: don’t ignore the problem. The service heads went to the prime ministers and governments time after time and asked them to set out guidelines for a strategic, long-term programme regarding Israel’s Arabs,’ he told Haaretz newspaper. ‘Give them budgets, close the gaps – they deserve equal rights – and in return, demand civil loyalty.’7
