The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Less than three years after the Achille Lauro fiasco, Yassir Arafat was turning up in Strasbourg to address socialist members of the European parliament. The local daily paper was asking—like the pro-Israeli demonstrators outside—when Arafat intended to “give up terrorism”—as if “terrorism” was a health complaint, like alcoholism. What was significant, however, was that within twenty-four hours the same paper was talking about Arafat’s “triumph.” Instead of being pilloried on his first visit to Strasbourg, the PLO leader was lionised. He had called for peace with Israel. He had conveyed Israel’s Jews greetings on the occasion of the Jewish new year—and he had done this not in Arabic but in Hebrew. He wanted a state in the West Bank and Gaza—this, remember, was September 1988, and he thought that being a friendly “ex-terrorist” would help his cause.

  I cornered Arafat later—his eyes would always follow me like a wolf when I prowled up to ask a question—and when I asked him if any Palestinian refugee would be allowed to live in a West Bank state, any one of the 5 million Palestinians whose families originally came from that part of Palestine that is now Israel, he was not amused. Every Palestinian could have a passport, he told me lamely. Yes, but could they live in a new Palestinian state? “At least they can be buried there,” Arafat replied. It was an unfortunate answer, as his aides immediately realised. Sitting to his left, they immediately interrupted the PLO leader—but Arafat repeated his earlier, unwise reply: “At least Palestinians can be buried in Palestine.”

  But could any Palestinian go and live in Palestine? I repeated again. Palestinians were interested, surely, in living in Palestine, not in dying there. What use was the land to them if they could only touch it when it became their grave? I tried a fourth time. Could the Palestinian diaspora go and live in Arafat’s West Bank state? There was muttered conversation with his aides. “Definite,” he boomed out. “It is his [ sic] right.” Which was both the correct reply and the wrong reply. Correct because it should be the right of any Palestinian to live in his or her country. Wrong because Arafat would never permit the millions of the Palestinian diaspora to enter the West Bank. The population of “Palestine” would then outnumber Israel—and this the Israelis would never allow. Nor, therefore, could Arafat. By December 1988, he was accepting the partition of Palestine. This was not how he presented his case to the United Nations special session in Geneva. To this august body—and especially to the Americans—he was accepting the existence of the state of Israel. But in his speech to the UN and at his press conference afterwards, he effectively renounced any idea of returning to the borders of Mandate Palestine. The land that now belonged to Israel would remain Israel’s, despite the three-quarters of a million Palestinians who had fled their homes there.

  Then came Arafat’s classic and characteristic error: his support of Saddam Hussein after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. It was a decision taken in a moment of emotion rather than reason. Saddam, the hero of the Iran–Iraq War, he who had held the line against the Persian horde, he who was not afraid to fire his missiles at Israel: was this not a worthy partner in the cause of Palestinian statehood? Arab historians may one day question whether their leaders should use emotion less and reason rather more when deciding the fate of their people. Western leaders have veered wildly between the two, coldly advancing their imperial designs on the collapse of the Ottoman empire, cruelly calculating when they planned to invade Suez, pragmatic when they decided to liberate Kuwait, trapped by politics and guilt in their support for Israel, insanely emotional when they invaded Iraq. Arafat was emotional. He represented a people who had been dispossessed and occupied for more than four decades yet who were still portrayed in America—and in the media in general—as dangerous, mindless “terrorists,” a “threat” to the nation which had taken their homes and property and, since 1967, had occupied every square metre of their land.

  But his greatest error, his support for Saddam, was to give him his greatest and hollowest victory. Financially cut off by the wealthiest Gulf Arab states— especially Kuwait itself—and derided by the world, Arafat shared the fate of King Hussein of Jordan: he was now weak enough to be accepted as a “peace partner” by Israel. The Palestinians were not at first allowed to represent themselves. President George Bush Senior’s Middle East “peace” was to permit the Palestinians to attend the Madrid Middle East conference only as part of a Jordanian delegation, a delegation moreover in which Arafat was very definitely not invited to participate. But in October 1991, the Arabs and the Israelis—the latter, under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, with considerable reluctance—did gather in the Spanish capital under the auspices of Bush’s “new world order.” Not that anyone wanted to wield the cane.

  It was George Bush Senior’s right hand, slicing downwards in that familiar, supposedly decisive gesture of resolution, which defined a critical moment in the narrative of Middle East “peace.” “Let them sort it out,” he pleaded, “. . . we’re not here to impose a settlement.” Less than twenty-four hours before he was to enter the eighteenth-century folly of the Palacio Real for the opening of the conference, here was the American president breezily handing responsibility for the future to the peoples who inhabit what in Bush-speak was now repeatedly called “that troubled corner of the world.”

  Those who wished to revisit history, of course, remembered another palace and another peace conference in which victors had shared out the spoils of the conquered. The Palacio Real in Madrid was not Versailles, but there were some distinct parallels. Mikhail Gorbachev was there, the “loser” in the Cold War, a smiling, compliant figure, agreeing demurely with all of the American president’s remarks. It was the future of Gorbachev’s former Arab allies that would be under discussion in this Bourbon mansion.

  No one could dispute the difference in scale. More than 10,000 delegates attended the Paris peace conference of 1919. Armenia, the most bloody of victims, had forty independent delegations. King Feisal even supported the Zionist cause— and the Zionists wanted a nation that stretched deep into what is now southern Lebanon. In Madrid more than seventy years later, the delegates were fewer, the public larger. Six thousand journalists and television crew members arrived in Madrid, most of whom would not see Messrs. Bush, Gorbachev and the Middle East luminaries in the flesh. They would sit instead in a hen-coop auditorium and watch the peacemakers on giant television screens, the bleak equivalent of William Orpen’s final portrait of Lloyd George and Clemenceau in the Versailles Hall of Mirrors.

  At least the nations of the Middle East were represented in Madrid. From Paris, Feisal had been taken on a tour of the 1914–18 war battlefields and then briskly betrayed by the British and French. The Zionists had to wait twenty-nine years for the Balfour Declaration to be honoured. But Woodrow Wilson—while in Paris—had stuck to his Fourteen Points. American diplomats in Madrid, however, noted George Bush’s refusal to comment on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab land and which, for the Arabs, were the touchstone of any peace treaty. He would not talk of “land for peace,” nor would the obedient Mikhail Gorbachev. The man who in 1990–91 sent half a million soldiers to enforce a UN Security Council Resolution—which called for another Middle East army, Iraq’s, to withdraw from another occupied Arab land, that of Kuwait—felt able to dismiss the darkness of history. “It’s not my intention to go back to years of differences,” was what Bush said.84 For the Americans, the present was the future; for the Arabs and Israelis, the present was also the past. It was they rather than the Americans who recalled that Jews and Muslims once lived together in peace in Spain. The Palacio Real was built on the site of a castle that the Arabs constructed to protect Toledo.

  At least the delegations in Madrid all agreed about God. President Bush had publicly sought His assistance at the start of the conference. Prime Minister Shamir of Israel credited Judaism with the belief in one God. Foreign Minister Abu Jaber of Jordan reminded the conference that God had “created mankind as
tribes so that they may know each other.” Haidar Abdul Shafi of Palestine invoked God the most merciful, the most compassionate. “May God guide our steps and inspire us,” prayed Foreign Minister Farez Bouiez of Lebanon. God was about the only personality who received a clean bill of health at the start of the Madrid peace conference.

  The English language, in which most of the conference delegates chose to speak, did not. If clichés could produce peace, the last shots would already have been fired in the Middle East. The pursuit of peace was “relentless” (Shamir), the “shackles of hatred” had to disappear (Abu Jaber), there was “light at the end of the tunnel” (Abdul Shafi), a “new dawn” (Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa) that would emerge from “a long night of darkness” (Abu Jaber again). The quotations were almost a relief: the Koran and Albert Einstein, the Prophet Isaiah and Yassir Arafat, Mark Twain, the Jewish philosopher Yehuda Halevy and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish were all recited with approval by the appropriate delegates. The creator of Huckleberry Finn was enlisted by Shamir to prove that Palestine was a wilderness before Israel’s existence, Darwish’s poetry to explain why a Palestinian homeland could no longer be represented by a refugee’s suitcase. Noble ideals were brandished like knives: “human rights,” “freedom,” “justice,” “peace,” “reconciliation,” “the integrity of nations,” “international legitimacy.”

  At times, it seemed as if degrees of suffering rather than legitimacy were supposed to deliver peace. Shamir recalled the expulsion of the Jews (but not the Muslims) from Spain, and the Jewish Holocaust. The Arabs acknowledged the sins of Nazi Germany but asked why they should pay the price for them. The Palestinian exodus of 1948 and 1967 and the grief of occupation obsessed Abdul Shafi. Lebanon’s sixteen years of civil war and two Israeli invasions were recalled by Bouiez. There was, too, a kind of equilibrium of omission. Shamir wanted to know why the Arabs had ignored UN Resolution 181 which provided for a state called Israel.85 Abu Jaber demanded Israel’s adherence to Resolution 242. But beneath the substratum of rhetoric, another imbalance appeared. The Arabs wanted their land back and then they wanted peace with Israel. The Israelis wanted peace but wanted to keep some of the Arab land. Talk of territory would be “the quickest way to an impasse,” said Shamir. But when Abdul Shafi referred to Israel’s “dream of expansion,” the fingers of Shamir’s left hand drummed on the table.

  The 1st of November 1991 became Madrid’s day of rage. The mullahs in Tehran, who that very week had organised their own “day of rage” against the Middle East talks in Madrid, must have loved it. Saddam Hussein may have been tempted to uncork a magnum. For inside the banqueting hall of the Palacio Real, the last day of the first session of the peace conference was little more than a disgrace. Had I not been there, I would never have understood the nature of the venom that the Arabs and Israelis displayed towards each other. It was not so much the mutual accusations of “terrorism” that created so shameful a spectacle. It was not the extraordinary decision of the Israeli prime minister to stomp out after making the first speech because, he claimed, he wanted to return to Israel by the Sabbath. Nor was it even the Syrian foreign minister’s decision to brandish an old British Mandate poster of a young Jewish “terrorist” called Yitzhak Shamir. It was because the Israelis and Arabs used the peace conference to talk about war.

  Shamir accused the Syrians of hijacking aircraft, murdering civilians and subjecting their Jewish community to a life of “perpetual terror.” The Palestinians, he said, had a leader “who collaborated with the Nazis for the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust”—even Haj Amin al-Husseini, it seemed, had a place at the Madrid conference table—while Farouk al-Sharaa accused Shamir of lying and Israel of hijacking and shooting down civilian airliners. Then up came the old poster of “terrorist” Shamir. “He is 32 years old,” al-Sharaa quoted from the British wanted poster. “He is 1.65 metres tall . . .” Arabs and Israelis alike sat transfixed, perspiration condensing on their faces under the television lamps. There was something mesmeric about this fixation with the Middle East’s murderous history. “1.65 metres,” one kept thinking. So Shamir was over five feet tall when he was thirty-two years old. Not 1.64 metres, mind you. Al-Sharaa wanted to be precise.

  U.S. secretary of state James Baker suggested they were merely posturing for the cameras. They were not. Watching the faces at the T-shaped table—sullen, watchful, suspicious, occasionally images of suppressed fury—it was clear that they really hated each other. Had automatic weapons been available to the delegates, there might have been a rush for the doors. Around the walls of the banqueting hall, arrogant busts of the great Caesars stared down with marble implacability at this lamentable failure of spirit. Shamir had already left, of course. A Jew is allowed to break the Sabbath if human life is at stake but he had chosen to depart the conference—negotiations that might save countless lives—without listening to the other delegates. However sincere his reasons, it was as if Shamir had excused himself for a dentist’s appointment. “Friday is a holy day for us,” Abdul Shafi reminded the Israeli with dignity. “But we chose to stay in this conference today rather than go to our religious rites.”

  Syria’s criticism of Israel, Shamir had said earlier, “stretches incredulity to infinite proportions.” How dare al-Sharaa condemn Israel’s human rights record when Syria was “one of the most oppressive regimes in the world”? “Lies,” responded al-Sharaa. Israel’s accusations were “a total forgery.” The Israelis had murdered the first UN negotiator to arrive in the region, he said. Maybe all of us journalists, I began to wonder, will in future have to arrive at peace conferences with a “fact kit.” Yes, it will inform us, the Jews of Syria were not all free to leave the country—and were treated badly under previous regimes—but they are free to practise their religion today. Yes, the Israelis did shoot down a Libyan civilian airliner after it strayed into Israeli airspace. Yes, the Israelis forced a civilian airliner carrying Syrian government officials to land at Tel Aviv. Yes, Syria has an atrocious human rights record. Yes, Shamir and his colleages in the Jewish Stern and Irgun gangs murdered civilians. Yes, a Jewish hit squad murdered Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948. Yes, Haj Amin al-Husseini encouraged Hitler and Himmler to prevent Jewish emigration to Palestine and thus probably helped to doom thousands of European Jews.

  But this was supposed to be a peace conference, a place of compromise, not a murder trial. Abdul Shafi emerged with credit, still pleading for an end to Jewish settlements, accepting Israel’s need for security, insisting that “it is the solution that brings about peace, not the other way round.” Egyptian foreign minister Amr Moussa besought delegates to avoid “passionate speeches” and condemned Shamir’s “wild dreams of expansion.” Yet it was a sorry enough affair, and the response to it was deeply inadequate.

  Officially, the Madrid peace conference was meeting under the auspices of the United States, the Soviet Union—hence Gorbachev’s presence—and the United Nations. But in the auditorium beside the palace, there was no doubt who was running the show. The Americans had a bank of offices manned by hundreds of State Department officials. The United Nations had two offices, a bunch of bureaucrats and a fax machine. The Russians had one office, three officials and no fax machine. Shamir would later admit that his sole intention at Madrid was to prevaricate. Real work—real proposals for peace—was put together by the Arabs in the luxury hotels to which they had been appointed around Madrid.

  Syria, for example, had drawn up an eleven-point plan for the Middle East which demanded a comprehensive and total Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab lands but which also accepted a demilitarised zone on both sides of the Israeli–Syrian frontier and the continued existence of an unspecified number of Jewish settlers under Arab sovereignty in a “liberated” Palestinian West Bank. In other words, Syria, which lost the Golan Heights in 1967 and was always portrayed as the most intransigent of the Arab “confrontation” states, was even at this early stage prepared to contemplate the mainte
nance of some Jewish settlements on Arab land. The plan, which represented Syria’s maximum demands, followed a confidential letter of assurance to President Hafez Assad from Secretary of State Baker in which, according to the Syrians, the United States refused to accept the Israeli annexation of Golan, its annexation of East Jerusalem or the legality of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

  The Syrian proposals, which tolerated no deviation from UN Security Council resolutions 242, 338 and 425,86 were drawn up after Baker had visited Damascus to talk to Assad. The Syrian president told Baker that UN resolutions were not “up for discussion” but had to be implemented in full, adding that “if you had let Iraq discuss the implementation of UN resolutions, the Iraqi army would still be occupying Kuwait.” Assad’s all-or-nothing approach to Israeli withdrawal was also influenced by America’s separate “letter of assurance” to the Lebanese government which, again according to the Syrians, might allow Israel to stage its withdrawal from Lebanon, claim it had given “land for peace,” and then refuse to give up Golan, the West Bank and Gaza. If any UN resolutions were dropped, Assad told his delegation, he would regard Madrid as “null and void.”