by Robert Fisk
The identity of the Israeli suicide killer underwent an even more mysterious transformation. “Just imagine if this crime had been committed by a Palestinian in a synagogue,” Arafat’s newly resigned ambassador in Beirut, Chafiq al-Hout, said to me. “Imagine this: almost fifty Israelis slaughtered by a lone Palestinian gunman. What would have been the world’s reaction this morning? Answer me! What would have been the world’s reaction?” It was a difficult question. For a start, the world would have called the gunman a “terrorist.” Any group with which he was associated would have been dubbed a “terrorist group.” Any country harbouring such a “terrorist group” would have been threatened with immediate sanctions. And the American president would no doubt have condemned the deed, quite rightly, as a “wicked crime.”
But that, of course, was not the case. Goldstein was an Israeli. He was an Israeli reserve soldier. He was a Jewish settler. And only two Western news reports called him a “terrorist.” Goldstein was associated with the right-wing Jewish Kach movement. But the Kach was legal in Israel. It had offices in New York. And President Bill Clinton—following the policy of previous U.S. administrations when an Israeli, rather than a Palestinian, was to blame for a massacre—described the slaughter at the Tomb of the Patriarch as “a gross act of murder,” which it clearly was, but also a “terrible tragedy.” It was the same old weasel phrase. The victims were not victims of terrorism but of tragedy, of some natural disaster, a tidal wave, perhaps, or an earthquake.
Down the road from al-Hout’s home in Beirut, around the Palestinian refugee camp at Mar Elias, black flags snapped from lamp-posts, telephone wires and walls. “You damned people helped the Zionists,” a woman screamed at me. “We don’t count for you. We are animals.” In the cramped offices of the “Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” Suheil Natour’s voice growled in fury. “I wonder why the West was prepared to act to protect the Bosnians when sixty-eight of them were killed in the Sarajevo market,” he said. “And then I wonder why, when almost the same number of Palestinians are killed in and around a mosque, you people do nothing to protect us. The Palestinians are so weak that the Israelis repeat their crimes against us.”
It should be said that the Arab states, so loud in their condemnation of the Hebron massacre, had little moral authority to point the finger of guilt. Egypt could denounce the murders, but its police force was systematically torturing hundreds of Muslim prisoners in Cairo and Assiout. Jordan could condemn the bloodshed while forgetting the slaughter of infinitely more Palestinians by the Jordanian army in 1970. Syria could denounce Israel while ignoring the thousands exterminated by Syrian special forces in Hama in 1982. Israelis, too, had a list of atrocities to hold against the Palestinians: a bomb that killed 12 Israelis in a Jerusalem market in 1968; a Palestinian-inspired shooting at Tel Aviv airport that killed 25 people, including several Israelis, in 1972; the deaths of 11 members of Israel’s Olympic team at Munich the same year; the killing of 16 civilians at Kiryat Shmona in 1974; the killing of 21 children at Maalot in 1974. It is a sign of just how dangerously the whole “peace process” folly would collapse that these figures would seem mild by comparison with what was to come.
But the special fury of Arabs in 1994—of ordinary Arabs, not their unelected leaders—was directed at the double standards of the West. Why were we so surprised at the murders in Hebron? I was repeatedly asked. Had we forgotten the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre by Israel’s Phalangist allies which left up to 1,700 Palestinians dead? Had we forgotten how, every time a Palestinian murdered an Israeli, he was a “terrorist,” but every time an Israeli murdered a Palestinian he was a “deranged Jewish settler,” an “American immigrant,” or from a group of “underground Jewish fighters,” but never, with two exceptions, a terrorist?
Trawling through my archives in the aftermath of the Hebron massacre was therefore a very unsettling experience. On 9 April 1948, the Irgun gunmen— “terrorists” by any measure—who committed the Deir Yassin massacre were described by the Associated Press as “radical underground Jewish fighters.” In October 1956, forty-three Palestinian civilians in the Israeli town of Kafr Kashem were massacred by Israeli troops for innocently breaking a curfew. Then there was the Sabra and Chatila bloodletting. Curiously, the latter does not appear in the Associated Press list of major “attacks between Israelis and Palestinians” since 1948. Yet Israel’s own Kahan commission of inquiry, which held Sharon “personally responsible” for the killings, noted that over a period of thirty-six hours, Israeli soldiers around the camps witnessed some of the killings by Lebanese Phalangists—and did nothing. On 20 May 1990 an Israeli soldier lined up a group of Palestinian labourers at Rishon Lezion and murdered seven of them with a sub-machine gun. This slaughter was fully covered by the international press, of course, although the word “terrorist” was not used. The soldier, it was explained, was “deranged.” Five months later, Israeli police opened fire on Palestinians in Jerusalem, killing nineteen men. As U.S. secretary of state, it was James Baker’s lot to comment on this massacre. But he did not call it a “massacre.” He spoke of it as a “tragedy,” the same word Clinton was to use after the Hebron outrage.
This list of horror is not comprehensive, but a pattern emerges from it. When Palestinians massacre Israelis, we regard them as evil men. When Israelis slaughter Palestinians, America and other Western nations find it expedient to regard these crimes as tragedies, misunderstandings, or the work of individual madmen. Palestinians—in the generic, all-embracing sense of the word—are held to account for these terrible deeds. Israel is not. Thus, over the years, a strange confusion has emerged in the Western response to Israeli misdeeds, a reaction that is ultimately as damaging to Israel as it is to the West itself. When Israeli soldiers or settlers murder Palestinians, they are semantically distanced from their country.
Baruch Goldstein held the rank of major in the Israeli army reserve. But in news reports of the time, his identity underwent a now familiar transmogrification. No longer referred to as an Israeli soldier, even though he was wearing his army uniform and carrying his military-issue rifle when he set out to kill, he was now called “an American Jewish immigrant.” In the space of just twelve hours, the United States had been gently touched by the man’s guilt; and by the same process, his Israeli identity had begun to fade. Yet when Israel as a state was clearly involved in the taking of innocent Arab life—in the massive air raids on Beirut in 1982, for example, in which the Israeli air force was, in early June of that year, killing more than 200 civilians a day—moral guilt was also avoided. These were not “terrorist” actions; they were military operations against “terrorist targets.”
The same skewed semantics were applied to the July 1993 Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon. In revenge for the killing of nine Israeli soldiers inside its occupation zone in Lebanon, Israel attacked the villages of southern Lebanon, killing more than 100 men, women and children—almost double the number of innocents killed by Goldstein—and putting 300,000 refugees on the road to Beirut. As one of the few reporters in Lebanon at the time, I watched women and children shrieking with pain in the hospital wards, their bodies tormented with burns from Israeli phosphorus shells. This “operation” cost, according to the Israeli finance minister, $33 million, a bill that Washington helped to underwrite. And President Clinton’s reaction? He blamed the Hizballah—which killed the nine Israeli soldiers—for all the deaths, then called on “all sides” to exercise “restraint.”
Amid this obfuscation, a new rationale had been laid out in the Middle East, one which—on a far greater geopolitical as well as geographical scale—continues to this day. It goes like this: America is running a “peace process.” Anyone supporting it is a friend. That includes Israel and, for the time being—unless he had to metamorphose back into being a “super-terrorist”—it included Arafat as well. It also included Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But any Arab who believed that the Arafat–Rabin agreement was flawed—or who believes to
day that Washington’s monumentally ambitious and hopeless plans for Iraq and the entire Middle East are based upon lies or deceit—anyone who opposed this policy, objected to it, disagreed with it—however nonviolently—or said anything that might damage it, was treated as an enemy. Or, more specifically, in the words of the U.S. press, an “enemy of peace.”
Thus, by extension, anyone opposing America’s policy in the region—which also means anyone opposing Israel—is an enemy of peace. The all-embracing phrase leads to grotesque distortion. When those Palestinian protesters demonstrated against the Israeli dynamiting and rocketing of seventeen houses in the Tofah district of Gaza in 1993, CNN showed a tape of one of the young men stoning Israeli troops. But CNN’s commentary described the young man as “protesting at the peace process.” If he was fighting Israelis, he must have been an “enemy of peace.” Even if that had been his cause of complaint, it was clearly regarded as illegitimate.88 Yet it was the PLO–Israeli Oslo agreement that—in many Palestinian eyes—permitted Israel to keep both troops and settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was Arafat, for tens of thousands of his detractors, who “legitimised” the Jewish settlements, from which came the killer who massacred the Palestinians of Hebron. Because American newspapers and television networks also did not want to be regarded as “enemies of peace,” many in the West still did not realise just how disastrously Arafat’s “peace” accord with Israel was disintegrating, nor why Israel was being directly blamed by Palestinians for the Hebron massacre. The Israeli government denied any involvement in the slaughter. But that did not mean that Israel was not responsible for the slaughter. For it was Israel’s policy of colonisation, Israel’s arming of the colonisers, and the subsequent Palestinian resistance to that occupation, which led directly to the killings in Hebron. If the murderer’s act was an “individual” one, it was also inevitable. In any environment where opponents of Israel are dehumanised into “terrorists,” where Israeli criminals are treated on a different moral plane from Palestinian criminals, such crimes will be committed. Goldstein saw Arabs as “terrorists”— the same corrosive word that had led the Israelis into their Lebanon adventure in 1982 and which persuaded the Americans to embark upon their folly in Iraq twenty-one years later—and walked into the Hebron mosque to exorcise the demons that we had all helped to create for him.
Arafat, too, had his demons. And when the old conjuror turned up, late as usual, in Gaza, he had another illusion to foist upon us. His face was the same as it was in Beirut twelve years earlier, when he claimed victory over the victorious Israelis and inspected his troops on the quayside before fleeing Lebanon. He looked older, the cheekbones more pronounced, but the eyes were the same as he pushed his way through the frenzied crowd, halfway between ecstasy and fear. Only minutes before, a young gunman had shrieked through a police Tannoy that Arafat would lead them to Jerusalem, and many of the Palestinians seemed to believe it.
The illusions thickened. Arafat had come, he told us in that packed, sweating square in Gaza two hours later, “to build a homeland, a nation of freedom, equality and democracy.” Who could deny these Palestinians their dreams after the terrible years of occupation? Yet who could deny the familiar scenes on the road, from the Egyptian border-crossing point at Rafah: the screaming gunmen, the armed youths joy-firing from the car windows, the horse bolting in panic outside Khan Younis, its cart crashing into the olive tree by the roadside? Lebanon came to mind.
Even before Yassir Arafat staged his homecoming before the world’s television cameras, there were Palestinian mukhabarat security men on the roads, pistols in their belts, overweight and suspicious, the very same apparatchiks—as they happily reminded me at one checkpoint—that once ruled the streets of Beirut. There could be advantages in this. Journalists were urged to watch every second of Arafat’s triumphal arrival in “Palestine”; but, in faithful imitation of their oppressors, Palestinian officials would only allow journalists with Israeli credentials—or papers issued by the “Palestinian Authority” in Gaza—to reach the border at Rafah. My Beirut press card—issued by the Lebanese government—was of no use. The Independent’s brilliant young correspondent in Jerusalem, Sarah Helm, had all the right documents. “Don’t worry, Robert,” she told me and a colleague as we stood in the muck at the roadside, forbidden to proceed to the Egyptian frontier. “When I get to Rafah, I’ll find an official, come back and rescue you.” She did not.89 But a tall, lean Palestinian with a Kalashnikov rifle came to our rescue. “Mr. Robert? Is this Mr. Robert from Beirut?” he asked. “You don’t remember me? You gave me tea outside your home during the Beirut siege.” And I had the vaguest of memories of an exhausted, frightened young gunman with his arm in bandages sinking onto the porch of my home in 1982 and begging for water. Now it was my turn to do the begging. “Of course, you will come to Rafah with us,” he said. The gunman and his colleagues from Beirut were now all soldiers; another conjuring trick, like the parade at Rafah of smartly dressed men from the Palestinian navy— their drill immaculate, their dressing impeccable—who did not have a fishing boat to their name. But we had arrived just in time to witness this splinter of history.
And there was Arafat, a Hitler to the Israeli settlers down the road in Gush Qatif who had been so slow to recognise his transformation from “terrorist” to “statesman.” He might have driven over the border in his usual fatigues and kuffiah, but Arafat quickly realised that the reception awaiting him—of esteemed and elderly village dignitaries sitting in the heat—was not worthy of his time. He swept past them in a mob of security men, greeting only the widow of his old comrade Abu Jihad—assassinated by the very nation whose troops were now watching him from the roadside.
“Never,” said one of those Israeli soldiers to me—a veteran of the Lebanon war, wearing the purple beret of the Givati Brigade—“did I ever imagine in all my life that I would have to help protect Yassir Arafat.” Across that same road, I found Captain Abu Shamra, a Palestinian Lebanon veteran with the black beret of the Palestine Liberation Army on his head, who insisted that in Beirut he never, ever doubted that he would “return to Palestine.” The old conjuror had confounded the Israeli, but not the Palestinian.
It had taken him nearly all of ten months since he first shook hands with Rabin to negotiate his entry into “Palestine.” But it was easy to be churlish that hot morning of 2 July 1994. Standing with his head through the sunroof of his car as it raced towards Gaza, Palestinian women and children waving to him from the palm groves, Yassir Arafat was seen by his bodyguards to be crying uncontrollably. As his voice echoed later round the hot concrete façades of Gaza City, we heard him address himself to his enemies among both the Israelis and the Palestinian Hamas movement. For the Israelis, he announced that illusive “peace of the brave.” For Hamas, he praised the courage of their imprisoned leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He saluted the “steadfastness” of the Palestinians in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan without mentioning that his peace agreement doomed them to remain for ever in their misery. Then he told the crowds they would “all pray together in Jerusalem.”
Had Arafat not seen the Israeli soldiers along his route into Gaza City, dug in behind their earth revetments in combat jackets, belt-fed machine guns pointing at the highway? Had he not noticed the forest of Israeli flags—before any Palestinian flags—as he entered his homeland? Did he not see the notice announcing that entry to the Palestinian “autonomous” area was “by co-ordination with the Israel Defence Force”?
His rule crept slowly across Gaza City. First came the commercial eulogies, the cloying praise of the new Palestinian president in advertisements printed on the front and back pages of the morning papers, eulogies from mayors and restaurant owners and construction company managers who, no doubt, hoped to earn a few contracts from the Palestinian “authority.” “Congratulations to our brother and leader Yassir Arafat and all his brothers on their return to our precious Palestine,” the Raghab Mutaja Company of citrus exporters and mo
tor importers of Gaza announced. “We thank you for starting to build a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.”
Down at the Palestine Hotel, Arafat was holding court with his servants, the Fatah leaders who ran the resistance battle against Israeli occupation—and whose absolute loyalty he must have in the coming years. He met the Jerusalem consuls of Britain, France and Germany—whose countries’ financial assistance he needed almost as much as he did the support of his gunmen. Escorted by dozens of armed men, he drove through the refugee camp of Jabaliya—where the first intifada against Israeli rule began—and addressed thousands of refugees in a decrepit schoolhouse. “With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you,” came the tired response. No, Arafat roared back, in future they must shout that they sacrifice themselves “for Palestine.” Aware at last of the deep and widespread dissatisfaction with the Oslo peace accords, he now spoke more ruefully about them. “The agreement we have made is not to our taste,” he said as an Israeli helicopter flew over the schoolhouse. “But it’s the best we’ve got at a time when the Arab predicament could not be worse.” All the while, Arafat’s men covered the crowd with their Kalashnikovs.
“Arafat’s men” soon became a common expression in Gaza. Some of them were Gazans, but many were Palestinians who played no part in the resistance, who rotted away in Baghdad or Cairo or grew old fighting in Lebanon’s internecine wars. They had arrived here now to rule Gaza with many of the characteristics of their countries of exile. The Palestinian soldiers and policemen who came from Egypt adopted that special mixture of Ottoman bureaucracy and British colonial arrogance that rubbed off on the Egyptians a hundred years ago. The Palestinians who spent too much time in Baghdad shouted and gave orders. “They want to use the stick,” as one Gazan put it. Those who lived in Lebanon were more acquiescent, prepared to turn a blind eye to transgressions or even take a bribe or two.
