The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  “We must start with fundamentals—beyond theory, beyond ideology, even beyond faith,” he says. “In relation to this country we call Eretz Israel and they call ‘Palestine,’ two peoples are in existence, each of them deeply conscious in their mind—and feeling in their bones—that this country is their country. And history cannot be amended or corrected. From this terrible situation, there is one of only two possible results and there is no third.” Professor Leibowitz, stooped in his chair, his kippa almost falling off his bald head, pauses for a long time at this point. He has no political influence, but it is not hard to see the moral authority which has made him so influential among young left-wing Israelis.

  “One of these two peoples conquers and occupies the other country and deprives the other people of the right of national independence. The Arabs tried to do this in 1948 and they lost. But since 1967, we have done this—and this situation has brought about all the contemporary horrors. The domination of the state of Israel over another people can be maintained only by violence. The only alternative is partition. Both parties will have to renounce a claim to the entire country. Partition is technically very difficult, but psychologically it’s even more difficult— because both peoples have a very deep consciousness that this country is their country. But it is an absolute necessity if we are to avoid a catastrophe.”

  Leibowitz does not claim partition should be carried out along the original borders the United Nations laid down for Israel. Nor does he forget that Jordan annexed the West Bank after the 1948 war, that the Arabs did not allow “Palestine”—as a state originally envisaged by the UN—to exist.

  “But I state unequivocally that we are responsible for the terrible situation we have today, just as the Arabs were responsible for the war of 1948 when we had the whole world behind Israel. And if there is no partition, if—if—the existing situation continues, two consequences are unavoidable: internally, the state of Israel will become a full-fledged fascist state with concentration camps not only for the Arabs but even for Jews like me. And externally, we will have a war to the finish against the Arabs, with the sympathy of the entire world on the Arab side. This catastrophe can be averted only by partition. It will be psychologically very difficult to renounce our claim to Jerusalem as the sovereign capital of Israel. For if partition is realised, then Jerusalem will have to be partitioned too.”

  It is not difficult to see why the Jewish colonists—even, perhaps, most Israelis—dismiss the old professor who fled Germany for British Mandate Palestine in the early years of the Third Reich, before the worst Nazi persecution of the Jews. Greenberger calls Leibowitz a “media freak.” Leibowitz sees Greenberger and his fellow colonists as the greatest danger to the state. The two men present opposing versions of reality, a reality that one is trying to create and the other is desperate to avoid. But one has God and logic on his side. The other has God and a bulldozer.

  OSAMA HAMID set off to blow himself to pieces just after saying his prayers at the Bilal mosque. All his friends claimed that he was an unlikely car bomber, but Hamdi Hamid was not surprised when he was told of his son’s death. “He talked a lot about martyrdom, about dying in battle against the Israelis,” the old man said as he sat by the wall of the mosque where he had last seen his son. “He told me that if he became a martyr in this cause, he would attain a higher place in paradise.” Hamid had prepared himself for death three months to the day after Arafat’s handshake on the White House lawn.

  Every few seconds, a weeping relative or friend would interrupt Hamdi Hamid’s remarks to embrace the father of the second Palestinian “martyr” in forty-eight hours. Just a day earlier, Anwar Aziz had driven a bomb-laden ambulance into a jeepload of Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip, wounding three of them; for six hours after the explosion, his blackened and shrivelled corpse lay on the roadside while his friends recalled his preparation for death—a ritual washing and praying at his local mosque—and their much-trumpeted pride in his departure.

  For the Israelis, it had been a frightening week: the suicide bomber—the fearful, unstoppable instrument of mass destruction which had helped to drive Israel’s occupation army back to the south of Lebanon a decade earlier—had come of age in Gaza. Another two would-be suicide bombers were captured during the week and their explosives defused. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin understood what this meant. “Since Hamas became strong a year or more ago, we have witnessed suicide attacks for the first time,” he told a Knesset meeting in Jerusalem on 13 December 1993. “Palestinians, until Hamas, did not do it—just as the Lebanese did not do it before Hizballah.”

  He did not, of course, remind his audience that it was Israel that originally encouraged the creation of Hamas as an opponent of the PLO. Nor could he have known that, only hours after his prescient warning, Osama Hamid, a twenty-fiveyear-old pharmacist at Gaza’s Islamic University, would have shaken hands with his unsuspecting father at the Bilal mosque and set off—his bomb in the trunk of his car and a Kalashnikov rifle on the passenger seat—on the second suicide mission of the week.

  The brothers and cousins who were comforting his father afterwards—a group of hard young men in black leather jackets—all spoke of his growing interest in religion. Walid Hamid tried to describe his dead cousin in one of those barren sketches that always emerge after a suicide bombing. “He read the Koran all the time and he gave speeches in the mosque about the need to die in the war against Israel. He never smiled. He played table-tennis from time to time, but that was all. The Israelis kept arresting him. He spent four years in jail as a Hamas member and he was always being beaten.” On the walls of the Bilal mosque, the family had pasted a series of coloured snapshots of Osama Hamid. They showed a bespectacled, bearded young man posing melodramatically on one knee with a Kalashnikov in his hand and a Koranic inscription behind his head. But the Hamas posters announcing the death of their latest “martyr”—the seventh Palestinian suicide bomber to have attacked the Israelis—did not hint at the failure of his mission.

  For, far from killing his enemies, Osama Hamid headed down a road in the Sejaya area of Gaza in the hope of ramming his car into an army truck—only to find himself being chased by an Israeli border patrol which noticed that he was driving a stolen car. Instead of stopping, Hamid tried to shoot his way out but was killed instantly by two Israeli bullets.

  “Osama was against the Arafat peace,” his father remarked as the muezzin wailed prayers across the fly-blown streets around the funeral tent. “He said it would never be implemented but he had talked of dying for the liberation of Palestine weeks before that. The last time I saw him, he asked me if there was anything I and his mother wanted. He didn’t spend the night at home. And next day I heard what he did.” The man paused, aware that his son was—in Israeli eyes—a “terrorist.” “I am proud of him,” Hamid Hamdi said.

  But why do such young men set off so easily for their deaths? On the day of Osama Hamid’s funeral, I found five Palestinian men in the Shifa hospital, covered in blood from stomach and leg wounds. The Israelis shot them but provided no explanation. Half an hour later, on the road out of Gaza, I was stopped by soldiers who were screaming at a group of youths. Beside the soldiers was the corpse of a Palestinian. “The Israelis tried to arrest him,” one of the young men told me. “The Palestinian pulled out an axe and attacked them. The Israelis shot him dead.” The Israeli army later confirmed that they had killed eighteen-year-old Ashraf Khalil when he attacked a soldier with a hatchet.

  The “Arafat peace” was what it was now called; Osama Hamid believed that Oslo would never be implemented, and he was right. The very first signs were made manifest in Cairo on 12 December 1993, when Arafat agreed to hold a joint press conference with Rabin at which—so he thought—the first Israeli withdrawals would be announced. But the moment I saw Arafat, I guessed what had happened. All the old fire had been knocked out of him. Usually, Arafat loved the television lights—he was, after all, now “President of Palestine”—but he stared unblin
king, almost frightened, at the battery of cameras. For once he had nothing to tell us, not even a scrap of cheer to brighten the eve of what he had repeatedly called a “sacred day.” He could announce no Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories, no agreements on the release of Palestinian prisoners, on road passages for Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza or on the size of the Palestinian “autonomous zone” of Jericho. The word “Jerusalem” did not pass his lips. Asked if there would be negative repercussions in the occupied territories because of the failure of the PLO and the Israelis to meet the withdrawal deadline, Arafat gloomily replied: “I hope not.”

  We knew something had gone wrong in the talks between Arafat and Rabin the moment the Israeli prime minister walked into the room, equally grave-faced, flanked by unsmiling negotiators. The words came out in Rabin’s familiar drawl but without the vigour he showed those three short months ago at the White House. He talked of “difficulties” over security, over those settlers’ passages, over the “frontiers” to be drawn between Palestinian “autonomous zones” and Israeli-occupied areas.

  Of course, he told us it would make no difference. A delay of ten days before further talks would help to clarify the issues. “I don’t see any reason why, if we reach agreement in ten days from now . . . there will be any difficulty in achieving, in the time frame of the negotiations, the implementation of ‘Gaza–Jericho first.’” In other words, the first Israeli withdrawal could still be completed by April 1994. Arafat was left talking about “some points of diversity” and “some differences.” Having failed to demand international guarantees for the Oslo accord, he had pleaded with the Norwegians to put pressure on the Israelis to start their withdrawal on 12 December. He had pleaded with Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher, to urge Israel to make at least a token withdrawal on his “sacred day.” And with growing concern, the PLO learned that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East—always a reliable weather vane when plans start to go awry—were beginning, even now, to distance themselves from the agreement that the world was encouraged to applaud as the potential end of a hundred years of conflict. There were, the diplomats suggested, “holes” in the Articles of Agreement signed on 13 September 1993. The accord, U.S. embassies were telling American correspondents, should be seen as a “step” on the road to peace, rather than an end in itself.

  None of this prevented “our” experts—all those who believed that Israel and the United States would sustain the peace—from maintaining their flawed analysis that the Israelis would carry the day for peace. The Independent’s Middle East editor, Charles Richards, managed to tell readers on 14 December that “the historic breakthrough is irreversible . . . Mr. Rabin has made up his mind. He carries the country with him. And it is Israel as usual that is calling the shots, not the Palestinians.” The Israeli delay, however, was to become a feature of the coming years and would contribute substantially towards the collapse of the Oslo agreement. Indeed, within twenty-four hours of that depressing press conference, Rabin would say that “it would be a mistake to think that an agreement would be signed within the next ten days.”

  Back in Hebron, I found Hamas men talking of renewing the intifada, of their “triumph” in understanding the nature of Arafat’s “surrender.” Newly painted graffiti on the walls beside Hebron University threatened the settler who killed a Palestinian civilian in November. “The Islamic Movement of Hamas will kill the man who killed Talal Bakri,” warned a slogan in black paint. “Our guns are speaking and we will strike down the seller of our country.” The “seller,” of course, was Arafat. Ibrahim, collecting a plastic bag of flat Arab loaves from the bakery on the main street of Hebron—most Palestinians preferred not to divulge their family names—declared himself a Hamas supporter. “We thank Rabin for refusing to help Arafat,” he said. “And you see that now the Israeli army wants to talk not to the PLO but to us.”

  And remarkably, Ibrahim was correct. For the Israeli army itself—again, to the detriment of Arafat—admitted opening a “dialogue” with Hamas in which Hamas officials met with Brigadier General Doron Almog, the Israeli commander of the Gaza Strip. General Almog talked of how Hamas preferred “the continuation of the Israeli occupation over Arafat’s control under autonomy.” Yet even Hamas was mystified as to why the Israelis would do so much to undermine the PLO leader. The truth, of course, was that within the Israeli army there were those who were dedicated to destroying the Oslo agreement—just as there were Israelis murderous enough to kill their own prime minister in 1995 to extinguish all hope of agreement with the Palestinians.

  Arafat had meanwhile to explain his secret escapades to his fellow Arabs. Yet again, I travelled to Cairo for this embarrassing performance, a one-man stand by Arafat at the 100th session of the powerless Arab League. “Antics” was the word used by one Levantine delegate—readers may guess which nation he belonged to—and Arafat did indeed appear before his fellow Arabs in the manner of a schoolboy who had much to explain. Why, they wanted to know, did he negotiate behind their backs after claiming that all Arabs should negotiate with Israel together? What about the “comprehensive” peace which all Arab leaders—including Arafat himself—had demanded?

  He carefully placed a pair of spectacles on his face and read from an equally carefully prepared script. Arabs, he said, must “confront” the “New World Order” lest they be excluded. Palestine would always remain part of the Arab nation. “Though we bear the pain and words of our nation and its aspirations towards the future, we are standing at the threshold of a new stage of our history,” Arafat lectured. Yes, there would be an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. There would be debates in the Palestine National Council. But after all, it was long ago that the PLO had decided “to set up a state on any part of liberated Palestine.”

  And then came the blow. “After twenty-two months, no progress was being made on the Palestinian and Israeli talks [in Washington] while the Israeli oppression on our occupied Palestinian people was growing worse.” He had undertaken secret talks “to break the deadlock, to bridge the gap in the dead end” of the Washington peace talks. So that was it. The Arabs were supposed to feel grateful to Arafat who had single-handedly saved the entire “peace process” by starting his own secret negotiations with Israel. At the other end of the room, Farouk al-Sharaa, the Syrian foreign minister—President Assad’s grey-suited policeman at the back of the hall—sat smoking Silk Cut cigarettes, his aides taking notes. Here was a school report that would make very interesting reading, one that the headmaster, back in Damascus, would find most unsatisfactory. But there was no end to the Arafat admissions.

  “In order to confront the Israeli intransigence,” he told us all, “we had to retreat away from the terms of reference of the negotiating process.” The Palestinians were “on the verge of a new era.” An Arafat history lesson reminded us of the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897, but at last the world acknowledged that the people of Palestine “have lived on this land since the beginning of time.” No, the whole solution was not to be had just yet. “The phased process is regaining a dear part of our Palestine, in Jericho and Gaza, and the establishment of Palestinian self-government . . . What is most important is not the text or the start of Israeli withdrawal but that the executive Palestinian Authority will cover all the occupied territories.” Only through this solution—Arafat’s deal—could a “comprehensive” peace come about. Arafat made no mention of Palestinian critics, of armed Islamic opposition. Of those millions of Palestinians left out of his agreement with Israel, Arafat said: “I will tell you later what will happen to those 1948 refugees.” He never did.

  When he went to make his excuses to Assad in Damascus, the Syrian leader took his place on Arafat’s right and sat in silence while the PLO chairman explained his secret agreement with Israel. Then Assad told Arafat, slowly and in a low, harsh voice: “You are sitting on the chair that Sadat sat on when he came to see me before his peace treaty with Israel—and
look what happened to him.” Sadat’s murder in 1979—by one of his own soldiers—had lain over every Arab leader since. In 1982, the Lebanese president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, had expressed his desire for peace with Israel—and died within weeks in a bomb explosion during a Phalangist party meeting in Beirut. Abdul Khalim Khaddam, the Syrian vice president, would later privately describe the Oslo agreement as “the worst document the Arabs have signed since the 1948 partition of Palestine.”

  From the start, we did not appreciate how stubbornly Oslo was opposed by right-wing Israelis as well as by Islamist—I suppose we might also call them right-wing—Palestinians. The degree of Arafat’s betrayal somehow obscured the extent of Rabin’s treachery in the eyes of the Israeli colonists in Gaza and the West Bank. So when Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli army reserve officer in uniform, decided to massacre Palestinian worshippers in the mosque at Abraham’s tomb in Hebron on 25 February 1994, we—journalists, Americans, Europeans, Israelis—did not know how to react. The “terrorists” were supposed to be Arabs. But Goldstein was an educated man, an American-born doctor—for heaven’s sake—who must have known that his mission was suicidal. The survivors of the slaughter literally beat and strangled and tore him to death.

  First reports spoke of more than fifty Palestinians dead in Hebron—the figure was accurate. After Goldstein had cut down more than two dozen Palestinians and wounded up to 170 others in the blood-spattered mosque, Israeli troops shot and killed at least another twenty-five enraged Palestinians outside who pelted them with stones and tried to break through the military cordon that was supposed to protect the sacred area—though it had failed to protect the worshippers. But within thirty-six hours, the Associated Press altered the statistics. Goldstein himself had killed only twenty-nine Palestinians—and this then became the “total” figure for the bloodbath. The other twenty-five dead became a “cut-out,” another story, the aftermath of the killings rather than part of the total death toll.