A History of the Middle East (52 page)

The PLO survived as an organization, and Arafat pursued a diplomatic offensive as he shuttled between the many capitals of the world that were ready to receive him, but Western governments remained wary and the United States continued to back Israel’s refusal to have any dealings with the PLO. Both countries still hoped that the Palestine problem could be solved through an agreement with Jordan which would leave the Palestinians in the occupied territories under some form of Jordanian–Israeli condominium. In February 1985 the stalemate appeared to be broken when King Hussein and Arafat agreed on a joint Palestinian–Jordanian peace initiative, based on the exchange of territory for peace. But a year later the initiative collapsed, for reasons which had become familiar: the Jordanian monarch felt that Arafat had reneged on his undertaking to declare his willingness to recognize Israel, while Arafat refused to give up this last Palestinian card of negotiation or even to negotiate without at least securing United States recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination and hence the right to establish an independent state.

The impasse was broken by a development which none of the parties to the Arab–Israeli conflict – including the PLO – had foreseen. In December 1987 the Palestinians in the occupied territories began an uprising against the Israeli occupiers. The uprising or
intifada
– an Arabic word which was to become as much part of the international vocabulary as the Russian
glasnost
– was unexpected because, although there had been days or even weeks of sporadic unrest, the Israeli occupiers had faced a relatively easy task for two decades. Guerrilla attacks had never been a serious military problem; internal resistance had not been prolonged or organized. When a hostile political leadership had looked like emerging, its members were imprisoned or deported. In December 1987, however, a minor incident in Gaza sparked off a resistance movement which, although unplanned and at first unorganized, refused to die down. The half of the population who had not yet reached twenty years of age had known only foreign occupation. As the occupiers seized more land and water and planted new Jewish settlements on their territory they saw a future that could only become darker. Some 200,000 crossed each day into Israel to work, but it was generally to perform menial and unskilled tasks – the Palestinian economy was entirely colonial in kind. The despair of the people of the occupied territories was increased by the fact that the Arab states appeared to have lost interest in them. For the first time ever at a meeting of Arab heads of state, in Amman in August 1987, the Palestine problem had been displaced from the head of the agenda by a different question – the Iraq–Iran war.

The
intifada
took the form of demonstrations, tyre-burning, the illegal raising of the Palestinian flag and strikes. Its characteristic feature was the hurling of stones at Israeli soldiers by Arab adolescents and even children. A significant innovation was that an anonymous National Unified Command of the Uprising emerged which, through pamphlets and a secret radio station on Syrian territory, gave some effective organization to the demonstrations and strikes.

The Israeli authorities, surprised by the intensity and persistence
of the uprising, responded with mass arrests and deportations, curfews, beatings and the various forms of plastic bullet, which were often lethal or caused grievous wounds. In the first two years there was an average of about one Palestinian death each day.

After two years some 50,000 Palestinians had been arrested, 7,000 wounded and more than 500 killed. About half of those arrested were under the age of eighteen. The rebels rarely resorted to arms – their uprising was called the ‘Stone Revolution’ – but as its second year progressed it became increasingly bitter as the Palestinians began killing anyone suspected of collaborating with the Israeli secret police, and Islamic fundamentalists opposed to any political compromise came to the fore.

For Israel, the effort to suppress the
intifada
was costly and damaging – both to the morale of its troops, mostly untrained in putting down civil resistance, and to Israel’s international reputation. There was no question that it was capable of opposing the insurrection militarily and economically – it was the political dimension that was important. Despite defiant assurances by Israeli political leaders that the rebellion would be ended, it became an accepted international truism – shared by the United States government and much of the Israeli public – that any purely military solution would be ineffective. Israel was faced with the prospect of a
de facto
Palestinian state being created west of the River Jordan.

The success of the uprising merely in staying alive gave a wholly fresh impetus to the PLO. Although it had neither timed nor organized the internal rebellion, and the amount of support and direction it could provide from outside was very limited, the Arabs under occupation left no doubt that they regarded the PLO as their representative and Arafat as their leader. Everywhere they displayed his picture as the symbol of their defiance. Paradoxically, this demonstration of the spirit of Palestinian nationalism enabled the PLO leadership to adopt a more overtly moderate position which emphasized the common interest of Palestinians and Israelis in peace and security. At the same time it persuaded King Hussein of Jordan to destroy once and for all the credibility of the ‘Jordanian option’ –
that is, the belief then entertained by many Israelis and some Western governments that Palestinian nationalism could remain under joint Jordanian and Israeli hegemony. In July 1988 the Jordanian monarch announced that he was finally abandoning all Jordan’s responsibilities for the West Bank. From there it was only one step for the PLO to declare, through its quasi-parliament meeting in Algiers in November, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Arafat as its president. But simultaneously the Palestine National Council for the first time unambiguously declared its acceptance of UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 – the step which the United States had long been demanding as a demonstration that the PLO was willing to recognize Israel. It also declared that it was renouncing all forms of terrorism.

Arafat spelled this out more clearly in other world capitals. He was advocating a ‘two-state solution’ – that is, a small independent Palestinian state living alongside Israel. This had been his objective for years, but he had never felt confident enough to declare it unambiguously for fear that abandoning the dream of liberating all Palestine from Zionism would divide his people against each other.

Israel’s leaders denounced the PLO’s new stand as false and treacherous. The threat to their position was underlined when for the first time the United States declared that it was prepared to begin a dialogue with the PLO through its ambassador in Tunis.

However, Palestinian hopes of rapid rewards for their new concessions were not realized. In March 1990 Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli premier from 1988 to 1990, dismissed his Labour partners in his coalition and eventually succeeded in forming a right-wing Likud government. Although the United States showed increasing impatience with Shamir’s stubborn rejection of any plausible formula for Palestinian autonomy it was still unprepared to exert concentrated pressure on its Israeli ally to change its attitude. An increasingly disillusioned Arafat, faced with a growing Islamic fundamentalist element in the
intifada
that rejected any two-state solution in favour of the old slogans of total liberation, began to look towards President Saddam of Iraq, who was posing as the
champion of the Palestinians and threatening Israel with its missiles. After a botched terror raid on an Israeli beach by a PLO splinter group, almost certainly promoted by Iraq, the United States broke off its listless dialogue with the PLO.

Consequently, Arafat showed some evident sympathy with Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, though formally advising an Iraqi withdrawal, while ordinary Palestinians in Jordan and the occupied territories cheered Saddam as a hero. Powerful anti-Palestinian feelings were aroused among the Gulf Arabs, and Western governments declared that the PLO had marginalized itself in the Gulf conflict. But this was premature and unrealistic. The
intifada
had superficially subsided in the first half of 1990, partly through exhaustion and partly through a more restrained Israeli policy of repression, but in October a renewal of violence enhanced extremism on both sides and further envenomed relations between Arabs and Jews. In these circumstances there was no way that either the United States or Israel could promote an alternative Palestinian leadership to the PLO.

Forty years after the triumph of Zionism in the creation of a Jewish state, a new stage had been reached in the Palestine problem that this had created. This emphatically did not mean that the problem had been solved, or even that it was nearer a solution – a ‘solution’ that would be satisfactory to all the parties concerned is in any case inconceivable. The original concept of the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state – approved by the United Nations in 1947 with so little concern for its consequences, and so bitterly rejected by the Arabs of Palestine at the time – had come to be accepted by a new generation of Palestinians and much of the rest of the world. But, after twenty years’ occupation it was no longer accepted by Zionist Jews, except for a small, albeit growing, minority. Some, represented by Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, saw the West Bank (or Judaea and Samaria) and Gaza as part of the Land of Israel and could not contemplate abandoning it to an Arab sovereignty. Others, represented by the Labour leader Shimon Peres, although ready to give up some land for peace, still
could not face the prospect of an independent neighbouring state governed by the PLO under President Arafat. In this rejection of an independent Arab Palestine, Israel had the support of the world’s most powerful state, and experience had shown on multiple occasions that the United States government, however much it disapproved of certain Israeli acts or attitudes, would exert pressure to change them only on the rarest occasions and never for long. It remained a cardinal principle of the US–Israeli alliance that the United States would sustain Israel’s military machine and economy to ensure that Israel remained the most powerful state in the Middle East.

Syria’s crucial role in trying to restore peace and unity to the Lebanese state was grudgingly acknowledged by most of the world after the withdrawal of Western and Israeli troops in 1984 and 1985. But if Syria was dominant in Lebanon, it was far from all-powerful. Even President Assad’s supreme abilities as a political tactician could not resolve the multifarious conflicts of Lebanon. It proved impossible to secure the essential minimum of an agreement among the factions to reunite the country. While Syria had some friends among the Maronites, these were outnumbered by its bitter enemies who controlled the strongest militia, the Lebanese Forces. Even Syria’s allies in Lebanon – the Druze, the Shiite Amal militia and the extremist Hizbollahis – were far from obedient and sometimes fought each other. An additional factor was that some of the Palestinian fighters, now fiercely anti-Syrian, had returned to Beirut and the south and had become engaged in fighting with the Amal militia who besieged the Palestinian refugee camps. By sending their forces into Muslim west Beirut, the Syrians were able to reduce the fighting between the militias, but Christian east Beirut and the Shiite southern suburbs remained outside their control.

When President Amin Gemayel’s six-year term of office ended in September 1988, the anti-Syrian Maronites prevented the parliamentary deputies from electing a successor who would have been acceptable to Syria. After the failure of every alternative, Gemayel’s last act as president was to appoint General Michel Aoun, the
Maronite commander of the armed forces, as prime minister. Since Muslims refused to serve in his cabinet and the previous Sunni prime minister declared himself still in office, Lebanon had two half-governments and no head of state. It seemed as if the little republic of Lebanon was doomed to final destruction after less than seventy years of existence. The Lebanese economy, which had survived the first decade of civil war with amazing resilience, was on the point of collapse.

However, the peculiar circumstances of Lebanon, with its shifting balance of internal forces and external pressures, do not favour final solutions or dissolutions. The Arab states, backed by all the outside powers concerned with the region, made unsparing efforts to hold Lebanon together. This required an accommodation between Syria and its Lebanese Christian opponents which was difficult to achieve. General Aoun, who suffered from minor Napoleonic delusions, was uncompromisingly defiant. He was buoyed up by a vague and unwarranted belief that the Western powers would come to the aid of the Christian Lebanese, although he also received real help in money and arms from Syria’s arch-enemy Iraq. He was unable to fulfil his boast of driving the Syrians out of Lebanon, but equally the Syrians and their allies lacked the power and will to overrun the Christian fortress enclave. In the summer of 1989 the two sides poured shells on to each other, causing atrocious suffering mainly to civilians.

Against most expectations, Arab mediators secured a cease-fire in September 1989 and persuaded the surviving and elderly deputies of the Lebanese parliament to meet in Taif, Saudi Arabia’s summer capital, where they hammered out an agreement on a new political structure for Lebanon, through which the Maronites, who had been politically dominant since the French creation of Greater Lebanon, would relinquish some of their powers. Since it was a compromise, many were dissatisfied. The Christians had not secured Syria’s immediate departure and the Shiites, now more numerous than Lebanese Sunnis, felt that they should have a more influential role. But the agreement made it possible for the deputies to meet in Syrian-controlled
north Lebanon to elect on 5 November 1989 a new president – Rene Muawwad. General Aoun defiantly declared the election illegal and claimed that he was still Lebanon’s constitutional leader.