The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  In Omar Mukhtar Street, they were sitting outside the police station manning a set of ancient typewriters, trying to organise a new car registration scheme. Palestinians were handing over Israeli military papers in return for a document headed “Palestine Authority.” But the symbols of statehood do not give a nation reality. Anyone walking through the streets of Shati or Jabaliya camps in Gaza quickly realised that most of Arafat’s new Gaza subjects—perhaps 90 per cent of them— did not come from Gaza at all.

  They were refugees—or the children of refugees—from that part of southern Palestine that is now southern Israel, having lived for almost half a century amid the rubbish pits and squalor of Gaza waiting for Arafat to honour his promise of sending them home to Ashkelon or Beersheba. Just as the Galilee Palestinians had washed up in the camps of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, so the Palestinians from the south had ended up in the wasteland of Gaza, over which—unlike the other locations to the north—Arafat would now have to rule. But they, too, had now to face the reality that they would not be able to go “home,” indeed that they must live on in Gaza with two-thirds of the original Israeli occupation force who were still guarding Jewish settlements here and patrolling the borders of the nation that those newspaper advertisements lauded so fulsomely.

  In Shati camp, the day after Arafat’s arrival in Gaza, I found Ibrahim, a taxi-driver from the town of Ramleh which is now in Israel, standing at the door of his slum home, waiting to catch sight of Arafat. “Ten years ago, I drove my mother to Ramleh and she found her home and I knocked on the front door,” he said. “There was a Jewish family inside. The Israeli man asked us to come in and said ‘Welcome to our home.’ And my mother—and it was her home, remember, that she was driven out of—broke down in tears. The Israelis were kind to us and understood that this had been our family’s property. My mother died a year later. No, I know I’ll never get our home back. Anyway it has been destroyed now for a new estate. Maybe I’ll get compensation. And maybe also some statement from the Israelis that they took our homes away in 1948.”

  Elsewhere in Shati, men from Beersheba, Jaffa and Lod said that yes, they really did believe they would one day return to these towns—now in Israel—“with God’s help.” That, of course, is not what the Israelis had in mind for them. The Israelis wanted to see an orderly, well-policed “autonomous area” on their doorstep—and had chosen Yassir Arafat for the job. A few hours later, I was trekking through the sand dunes back to my run-down hotel when two plainclothes men in a green saloon car stopped me in Shati. The PLO’s security men were suspicious, abrupt. “What are you doing here? Where are you from? Give me your papers!” they demanded. Arafat’s “Palestine,” I reflected, might, after all, turn out to be just another typical Arab state.

  To his economic advisers, Arafat had promised Palestinian postage stamps in three weeks, passports in three months. “There will be no problems with the Israelis about this,” one of those advisers commented wistfully to me as he strode the sand-encrusted lawn of my hotel. “The protesters don’t matter. The Israelis are now what we call the ‘enemy-friends.’ ” It was an exclusive point of view. In Gaza, PLO officials now talked about the “good Jews” with whom they could negotiate, the honest Israelis they could trust. But the moment I drove out of Gaza, en route across Israel and the West Bank to Arafat’s other borough of Jericho, all the old double standards reasserted themselves. At the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel, two elderly Palestinian women were forced to sit on the pavement in the sun while their papers were checked, hands upraised and begging an Israeli officer to allow them to pass. An Israeli border policeman forced a Palestinian with out-of-date papers to stand beside his car while he screamed abuse at him.

  That morning’s Jerusalem Post maintained the same double standards. The front page announced the wounding of an Israeli Jew by Arab “terrorists” while the back page carried a smaller article reporting that “Jewish extremists” might have been responsible for the murder of a Palestinian Arab. My Israeli Arab taxi-driver watched fearfully as a squad of bearded Israelis in yarmulkas erected a huge banner across the Ashkelon–Tel Aviv highway intersection calling for Arafat’s assassination. Yet within four days of his appearance in Gaza, Arafat was performing the same trick all over again, this time in Jericho.

  It was such stuff as dreams are made on—Yassir Arafat arriving by air in the West Bank escorted by an Israeli helicopter gunship; Yassir Arafat, microphone in his right hand like a crooner, pleading to be heard as his supporters stormed the platform in “free Jericho”; Yassir Arafat promising an “industrial revolution” in the oldest city in the world; Yassir Arafat solemnly swearing in a “government” whose “Minister of Jewish Affairs”—himself a Jew—was the only cabinet member not to recognise the state of Israel. Was there anything left to surprise us, now that the old man had arrived in his ramshackle capital? His features had become so familiar that only now, on the last day of his first return to “Palestine,” did we notice that his pepper-and-salt beard now matched the black-and-white kuffiah on his head. His habit of raising his eyebrows to compensate for his small eyes gave him the appearance of a surprised walrus, a characteristic caught with uncanny and cruel accuracy by the amateur wall artists of Jericho.

  His rasping voice, which grew ever harsher as he sought to shout down the crowds until he lost it altogether, and the constantly moving, whiskery features somehow made him appear both passionate and at the same time outrageous. “Listen to me! Listen to me,” he screamed. “I have returned to Palestine . . . Don’t touch those people”—this to the Palestinian police who were manhandling the crowds. “Stay calm . . . just hear me, listen to me like Dr. Saeb told you to . . . listen to me . . . in 1948, the Israelis said they had found a land without people and that they were a people without land . . . listen to me . . . now we remind them that nobody can erase the Palestinian people . . . I want to tell you we are devoted to a just peace, committed to it . . . I want to know who is preventing people from coming here to Jericho today . . . unity, unity, unity . . . we shall pray in Jerusalem— till we pray in Jerusalem, till we pray in Jerusalem.”

  It was painful to transcribe his speech—and to hear that failing voice, his ideas and phrases crashing into each other—as a lone, massive woman pushed her way through the armed security men and shrieked her desire to embrace “the President of Palestine.” Arafat stood stunned but suddenly relented and the lady was hauled to the dais. She hurled herself at Arafat who recoiled in horror and then, with a frozen smile, put his arms around her.

  He had spotted the real problem when he demanded to know who “prevented” Palestinians from coming to Jericho. For after the crowds had broken through the security fences and trampled through the journalists and photographers, it was evident—and it must have been even more so to Arafat as he stood above us—that the field behind was empty. Not half, perhaps not a quarter of the people of Jericho had bothered to turn out to see him. There were rumours that the Israeli army had turned back busloads of West Bankers—an Israeli soldier on the nearest checkpoint admitted he had stopped them but then said the opposite; settlers certainly stoned cars on the Jerusalem–Jericho road. But a million Palestinians lived in the West Bank. There were no curfews to keep them at home. Those who gathered to greet Arafat were fewer than the Lebanese who gathered to bid him farewell from Beirut after the 1982 siege.

  Most Palestinians had already gathered the purpose of Arafat’s return. The Hebron massacre had been followed by a bloody bus bombing in the Israeli town of Afula—a “terrorist” attack, CNN was quick to tell us—and the Palestinian leader was clearly required to put an end to “terror.” As the months and years went by, this became the agenda tabled by Israel and the Americans—and the usual, compliant journalists—and the question itself became a cliché: can Arafat control his own people? That Arafat was supposed to represent his people, rather than control them, was a point never made by journalists or Western politicians. Nor did anyone ask whether Sharon could
“control” his own increasingly shambolic army as it gunned down Palestinian child stone-throwers ever more frequently with live bullets.

  The “Palestinian Authority” was at times prepared to do the same. By November 1994, Arafat was participating in a form of parallel theatre. While his own policemen were shooting down Palestinians during violent protests by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Israelis were shooting down Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. Within days, Arafat was reduced to the claim made by all Middle East despots when they are attacked by their own people: his opponents, he said, were participating in “a foreign plot.” It was an essential part of the Arafat story—anything to avoid the reality that those Palestinians who hated Arafat’s rule were home-grown and objected not so much to the notion of peace but to what they saw as the grotesque injustice of the “Declaration of Principles” that Arafat had been so quick to sign a year before. “Foreigners” are always a card in the hand of those who will not confront the identity of their opponents; the Americans were to use just such a lame excuse when they faced an all-out Iraqi insurgency in 2003 and 2004 and 2005. The beauty of the trap into which Arafat had driven with such messianic confidence must already have been clear to him. If he refused to confront the Islamic movements opposed to Oslo, this would prove that he could not be trusted with more territory—as he was entitled to receive under the Oslo agreement. On the other hand, if he fought the Islamists into a civil war, the ensuing chaos would provide proof that Arafat presided over anarchy—which was also good reason why he should be given no more territory. And the longer the Palestinians waited for Israeli withdrawals, the weaker Arafat became.

  In the years to come—as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians degenerated into Palestinian suicide bombings, Israeli air attacks, extrajudicial executions, house destruction and further massive Israeli land expropriation—the Palestinians would be blamed by both Israel and the Americans for their failure to “control” violence and to accept a deal that would have given the Palestinians a mere 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of Mandate Palestine that was left to negotiate over. So before we embark on this shameful story of tragedy and loss, it is vital to establish that Israel reneged on every major accord and understanding that was signed in the coming years.

  UNDER THE OSLO AGREEMENT, the occupied West Bank would be divided into three zones. Zone A would come under exclusive Palestinian control, Zone B under Israeli military occupation in participation with the Palestinian Authority, and Zone C under total Israeli occupation. In the West Bank, Zone A comprised only 1.1 per cent of the land, whereas in Gaza—overpopulated, rebellious, insurrectionary—almost all the territory was to come under Arafat’s control. He, after all, was to be the policeman of Gaza. Zone C in the West Bank comprised 60 per cent of the land, which allowed Israel to continue the rapid expansion of settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. Arafat, as Edward Said was the first to point out, had already conceded Jerusalem; he had already agreed that it would be discussed only during “final status” talks. It thus fell outside the “zoning” system, remaining entirely in Israeli hands.

  The truth was that Oslo—far from holding out the possibility of statehood for the Palestinians—allowed Israel to renegotiate UN Security Council Resolution 242. Whereas 242 demanded the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territory captured during the 1967 war, Oslo permitted the Israelis to decide from which bits of the remaining 22 per cent of “Palestine” they would withdraw. The “zoning” system represented this new Israeli reality. The Israelis had the maps—Oslo, incredibly, was negotiated without proper maps on the Palestinian side—and the Israelis decided which zones would be “given” to the Palestinians at once and which would be haggled over later.

  Indeed, a detailed investigation in 2000 of Israeli withdrawals under the Articles of Agreement would prove that not a single one of these accords had been honoured by the Israelis since the 1991 Madrid conference.90 In the meantime, the number of settlers illegally living on Palestinian land had risen in the seven years since Oslo from 80,000 to 150,000—even though the Israelis, as well as the Palestinians, were forbidden to take “unilateral steps” under the terms of the agreement. The Palestinians saw this, not without reason, as proof of bad faith. Little wonder that by 1999, Edward Said, who had for many years shown both compassion and understanding for Arafat’s brave role as the sole representative of a forgotten and dispossessed people, felt able to describe the Palestinian leader not only as “a tragic figure” but as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

  From Beirut, I would journey every few months via Cyprus or Jordan to Arafat’s little fiefdoms in Israel—still in a formal and sometimes actual state of war with Israel, there were no direct flights from Lebanon—and each trip would reveal two parallel but totally contradictory narratives: the awesome optimism of the United States and Western correspondents that Israeli–Palestinian peace was a certainty (albeit that the “peace process” was always being put “back on track”) and the steady deterioration of all hope among Palestinians that they would ever achieve statehood, let alone a capital in East Jerusalem. A trip to Gaza on 8 August 1995 was pure Alice through the Looking Glass.

  “By the blood of our martyrs, take your cars from the race-track,” a man in a white shirt screamed. “Take away your cars or we will burn them. Abu Amar is coming.” In the old days, Palestinians were asked to perform stirring deeds for the blood of their martyrs. But the dead of the Palestinian revolution had never hitherto been summoned to sort out a parking problem. It was Arafat’s sixty-sixth birthday and they had laid on a party for him at the beach racetrack, complete with a flurry of Arab steeds ridden by members of the “Palestinian Society of Equitation” of which President Arafat of Palestine also happened to be the honorary secretary. And when he came, preceded by blue police cars and jeeploads of gunmen and soldiers and security men, it had to be said that the chairman looked his age. He was tired, very tired, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep—angry meetings of the Palestinian Authority now dragged on till dawn—and his old generals and colonels in their faded uniforms with their eagles and crossed swords on equally faded epaulettes looked like men of the past, smoking too much, for ever fingering their moustaches. About the only fit creatures at the party were the horses that pranced past the Palestinian leader as he sat down on a blue-and-pink armchair beneath an awning and stared out across the Mediterranean. He did, it’s true, try to look happy.

  He embraced children, kissing a girl four times on the cheek, a little boy in a military uniform five times on the cheek and once on the hand. He had already opened the new children’s park named after his eleven-day-old daughter Zahwa— “The Amusement Park of Palestine’s Zahwa,” it was cloyingly called—and a children’s zoo with a mangy lion for the entertainment of Palestinian youth. And when the Palestinian boy scouts trooped past him, Arafat was on his feet saluting them. He saluted the girl guides, too, saluted the Palestinian Kung Fu society, all dressed out in black overalls and white headbands, saluted a child acrobat. And when a rider persuaded his mount to kneel before the president of Palestine, Arafat leapt to his feet and saluted the horse.

  He laughed and grinned his way through a musical performance of dabkeh dancers and actors who rhetorically discussed the difficulties of the “peace process.” “We have Gaza and Jericho because of your presence,” they chorused confidently. “Jerusalem will come back to us with Abu Amar’s efforts,” they went on, less confidently. “Do we want to sell this land?” one actor asked. And his colleague replied: “I will not forget Jerusalem or Haifa or Bisan.” And the crowd roared because half of Jerusalem and all of Haifa and Bisan are in present-day Israel, not in Gaza or the West Bank. And at the end, before the races began, the actors embraced, old friends who disagreed about the peace but would never fight each other. Arafat clapped and laughed. Ah yes, if only it was that easy, if only there was no need for the Palestinian midnight security courts and the twenty-fiveyear prison sentences and the after-dar
k arrests that were now part of life in Gaza for those who disagreed with Arafat. Then the president of Palestine opened the races while his men handed out baskets of sweet wafers to the hundreds of sheikhs and family leaders who sat beneath the awning. The people ate, the horses raced. Yes, the old man gave his people bread and circuses to mark his birthday.

  For Arafat was running a little dictatorship down in Gaza, with the total approval of Israel and the United States. Under the pretext of stamping out “terrorism” on Israel’s behalf, he now had more than ten competing Palestinian intelligence services under his command, a grand total exceeded only by Arab leaders in Baghdad and Damascus. New press laws effectively muzzled Palestinian journalists, many of whom were “invited” to security headquarters in Gaza City for after-dark meetings with plainclothes intelligence officers who now liaised with the Israeli security services.

  Ostensibly aimed at Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of whom had carried out suicide bombings against the Israelis, the carapace of new “security” measures being lowered over every aspect of Gaza life meant that Arafat was turning into just another Arab despot. The secret midnight courts were sentencing alleged Hamas members to up to twenty-five years in prison while at least three Palestinians died in custody. In April 1995 a newly-released prisoner was shot dead by Arafat’s police in what many Palestinians regarded as an extrajudicial execution; he was said to have seventy bullets in his body.

  Around Arafat there were now constructed “Military Security,” “Political Security,” “National Security” and “Preventive Security” units, along with a Palestinian intelligence service and a praetorian guard of three more paramilitary organisations: Amn al-Riyassi (presidential security), Harass al-Riyassi (presidential guard) and Force 17, the special security unit that had charge of Arafat’s personal protection. In time-honoured Arafat fashion, the heads of these different outfits were encouraged to suspect and hate each other. Colonel Mohamed el-Musri, a former officer in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, for example, would collaborate only with his nominal boss, General Youssef Nasser, the head of the Palestinian police force. “Preventive Security” was run by Colonel Mohamed Dahlan, an officer who had developed close relations with the Israeli intelligence services even though his men were largely composed of “Fatah Hawks”—who played a leading role in the first armed uprising against Israeli occupation—and former long-term prisoners of the Israelis. All heads of security were summoned each night to hear Arafat discourse upon their duties and the dangers to his statelets, a meeting which they now called “The Lecture.”