The Great War for Civilisation (81 page)

A decade before, in Lebanon, Arafat and I had discussed a partitioned Palestine. “We will be united and we will have our state,” he said, although he would not admit then that he would relinquish 78 per cent of Mandate Palestine to the Israelis. I reminded him that Michael Collins, who fought so bloodily for Irish independence from Britain, was forced to accept only twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland and to abide by an oath of allegiance to his former colonial master. Did he know, I asked, that the Irishmen who fought for independence broke apart because of that agreement? “I will settle on any corner of my land,” Arafat repeated, but then asked what happened to Collins. I told him that he was cut down by the very same Irishmen with whom he had fought the British. Collins was an infinitely more honest man than Arafat, but the Palestinian leader listened in silence. And a coldness came over his face when I described how the British army, preparing to leave Dublin, supplied the field guns for Collins's men to destroy their former comrades. What, I asked Arafat, if he ended up with the Americans or Israelis supplying him with the guns to destroy those of his colleagues who rejected a settlement? “Never!” Arafat cried. “Never!”

His predicament seemed unending—although quite unappreciated by Arafat himself. Perhaps it was his vanity that had led him into this trap. Or his advancing years. At sixty-four, Arafat and the middle-aged men who surrounded him—overweight, grey-haired cronies who had grown fat in Beirut—were reaching a point where they might never see Palestine, let alone rule it, where the mythology they had grafted onto their lives might never be made real, where the story of their fight for survival and recognition might not be completed. All their lives in exile, they had waited for the triumphal end of their epic story, the entry into “liberated” Jerusalem, the final CinemaScope dream come true.

Or could I be wrong? With a few exceptions—and Edward Said was the most courageous—the “experts” and the Middle East “analysts” and the old reporters who had spent decades covering these squalid Arab–Israeli wars were convinced that the geopolitics of the Middle East had changed for ever. Charles Richards,
The
Independent
's own Middle East editor, became angry when questioned about his own absolute, unquestioning faith in the Oslo agreement. “Things have changed, Robert,” he said irritably down the phone to me as I set off from Egypt to the Israeli-occupied West Bank in September 1993 to find out if this was really true. I landed at Ben Gurion airport, drove to Jerusalem and set off next morning down the long road from Jericho through Hebron to Israel's south-eastern border, the closest a Palestinian could get to the Gaza Strip.

And I found they were already building the Arafat trail. The Palestinian construction worker on the sweltering slope beneath the town of Ubeidiya was less charitable as he sat in the shade of his truck on the dust-covered track. “This road is the graveyard of the Palestinian people,” Imad Eid said. “Just look at the road— look where it is and you will understand why I say this.” A corroded black kettle hissed away malevolently on a gas burner beside him.

“They'll let Arafat travel this road down from Jericho to Gaza and that way he won't be able to pass through Jerusalem,” Eid said, his finger tracing the switchback trail of dust through the rocks of the wadi below. “This is what the Israelis want.” The five men sitting beside him nodded in agreement. All were Palestinians, helping to build the road that would exclude them as well as Arafat from the city he still thought would one day be his capital.

The road looks as ugly as its apparent purpose. It careens sharply through rocks outside Abu Dis, tips down into a sun-baked valley and traverses a frothing sewer on a concrete bridge. Eid and his colleagues were widening the trail, preparing a new metalled road after two decades of frost have crumbled its surface. The Israelis had told them it must be repaired in time for the winter rains so that the Palestinians of Ramallah, Nablus or Jenin in the north of the West Bank might travel to Hebron in the southern half of the Israeli-occupied territories without passing through Jerusalem, turning their current temporary exclusion from the holy city—initiated after the start of the first Palestinian intifada uprising—into permanent exile.

What could be presented as a humanitarian gesture—how cruel it would be to prevent the Palestinians of the north from visiting the Palestinians of the south just because Jerusalem was temporarily closed to them by the Israelis—was thus also a devastating political act. Once Imad Eid and his workers had finished pouring tarmacadam onto the track, the people of the West Bank could not possibly demand transit rights through Jerusalem; a perfectly good alternative road would be available to them.

How easily the traps were laid. A three-hour drive from Jericho to Hebron, less than 50 kilometres apart, on this road showed just how treacherous Arafat might find his political “corridor.” The first 10 kilometres of my journey were through a Jewish “Palestine,” a wadi that started from Jericho's Aqabat Jaber refugee camp, past underground Israeli military emplacements and the desolate Byzantine cistern at Manzil Jibr and finished by the Jewish settlement at Wadi Qilt. They were extending the housing project there when I arrived, smoothing out the lawns of Wadi Qilt's Israeli “tourist village” where the on-site manager, a military veteran of the Lebanon war who had tried to destroy Arafat in Beirut eleven years earlier, predicted nothing but civil war between the Arabs of Palestine.

The highway from Wadi Qilt to Jerusalem was a canyon of Jewish settlements, row upon row of European-style houses—part of the great concrete “ring” around East Jerusalem—which have changed the contours of the Arab land that Arafat still claimed to remember. But he was not going to reach Jerusalem. Instead, there was that snaking, hot little road to Ubeidiya and to the villages further south where a different Palestinian Arab voice was represented on the walls. “No to the conspiracy to sell Palestine,” was plastered over the side of a grocery store. “Whoever gives up Jerusalem will not represent our people” and—a more sinister announcement beside a cemetery—“Those who give our rights to the Jews will not be spared.” But on the heights before you reach the ancient home of another local leader who feared betrayal—King Herod's palace is now no more than a pile of stones—the Palestinian leader would be granted just one very distant view of Jerusalem, 8 kilometres away, the Dome of the Rock and the Ottoman walls just visible through a crack in the hills, close enough to taunt him with its presence, far enough away to ensure despair. “There is no solution without Jerusalem,” old Aida Jadour remarked with near-contempt as he sat in the square of Si'ir village, just out of sight of the third-holiest city of Islam. “If Arafat comes through here . . . we will not welcome him. We cannot accept that our children should die in the intifada for nothing more than Jericho and Gaza.”

No one on the road south spoke in favour of Arafat's acceptance of an “interim” solution. At Harsina Jewish settlement outside Hebron—where new caravan homes arrived two months earlier, as Arafat was being persuaded to make his accord with Israel—an Israeli military convoy moved into the city, headlights blazing in the sun, soldiers sitting on the trucks with their rifles pointing at the Arab shops. On a pavement beside a group of Israeli border guards—green berets askew, shouting at anyone who tried to break yet another curfew—sat six Palestinian men, all informers according to the knowledgeable youth who directed me to them, all yellow-eyed and staring, one of them drooling.

“Cocaine,” one of them giggled. It probably was; informers were said to be “hooked” on drugs by their Israeli intelligence controllers, although the Israelis routinely denied this. Yet even these sad creatures condemned Arafat out of hand: “treachery,” one of them muttered. He had spent fourteen years in Israeli prisons before reluctantly signing up with Shin Bet. Difficult though it might be, I couldn't help feeling sorry for Yassir Arafat that hot afternoon on the West Bank. The most optimistic remark of the day came from a Palestinian who would identify himself only as Bassam. “If you are a small collaborator, the Israelis will help you in a little way,” he said. “But if you are a big collaborator like Arafat, they may let you visit Jerusalem.”

It was to prove much, much worse than this—and Arafat never would be allowed to visit Jerusalem—but the world's euphoria knew no bounds. I wrote an article based on my journey from Jericho to Hebron which ran in
The Independent
under the headline: “Arafat's road to Gaza is ‘graveyard of the Palestinians.' ” Yet next day, in my room at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, I received a call from Harvey Morris—the same Harvey Morris who had been the garrulous Reuters bureau chief in Tehran fourteen years earlier and who was now my foreign news editor. “Fisky, you have been setting the cat among the proverbial pigeons,” he said. “The great and the good here are wondering if you've got it right.” I could imagine the nonsense that Charles Richards had been churning out about the inevitability of peace. “Not him, me old mate,” Harvey replied. “I think it's our esteemed editor who's asking if you're not up to speed.” I told Harvey that if Andreas Whittam Smith—who always loyally printed my reports despite the verbal missiles hurled against him—believed that, he should call me himself. He did, a few minutes later. “I don't doubt you're accurately reporting the pessimism being expressed, Robert,” he said. “But is that the whole picture? My Jewish friends say this is wonderful news and that there will be peace with the Palestinians.” I forbore to ask Whittam Smith what his Muslim friends were telling him.

But inside the Beit Agron—Temple of Truth to the Jerusalem press corps—the Israelis kept their files on Yassir Arafat. Assiduously collected from the Arabic press in the days when he was supposedly the personification of Arab evil—the days when Menachem Begin regarded him as “Hitler in his lair”—there were pages and pages of Arafat's rhetoric, promises and demands and threats. Here were all those weary, hopeless proclamations that we listened to over the years as the PLO chairman, sweating and shouting and sometimes weeping with emotion, addressed his Fatah guerrillas and the destitute of the Palestinian camps. “The land of Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinians, and the homeland of the Arab nation from the Ocean to the Gulf,” he had announced in 1989. “. . . the PLO offers not the peace of the weak, but the peace of Saladin.” Not any more. “The Palestinian uprising will in no way end until the attainment of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including the right to return.” Not any more. “There will be no peace other than through . . . the right to return, self-determination, and establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital at Jerusalem.” Not any more.

Arafat liked to use children as props. One cloyingly hot night in Lebanon, in an olive grove high above one of his battlefields, he met a group of journalists to talk about the PLO's future. What, we asked politely, did the future hold? And Arafat seized a twelve-year-old in a tiny guerrilla uniform, pressed his lips for several seconds to the boy's cheek and said: “This is our future.” Even his colleagues were embarrassed. There was nothing improper about Arafat's gesture. It was the emptiness of it, the lack of intellect, the inappropriateness of response that troubled them. If this was how Yassir Arafat chose to talk about the future of his nation, they must have asked themselves, how would he react when he really had to negotiate Palestinian statehood?

Now we know. Like his celibate “marriage to the revolution”—which in 1991 turned into an unhappy marriage to a twenty-eight-year-old Palestinian Christian less than half his age—Arafat's promises were reveries, statements of happy intent for the good of his people, the most recent of which had been ground down in Norwegian drawing rooms to give him Jericho and the slums of Gaza. How could he dream dreams now? At the height of the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, a sweltering moment of crisis in the PLO's existence when the Israelis beat down on the encircled city with Sarajevo-like brutality, a visitor presented Arafat with a coloured jigsaw puzzle of Jerusalem to while away the hours in his bunker. The PLO chairman saw the television cameras and held up the lid of the jigsaw in front of him. “Ah yes, of course,” he said. “This is my city. This is my home. This is where I was born.”

More dreams. Arafat was not born in Jerusalem, not even—as some of his comrades claimed—in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, but in Cairo in 1929, the fifth of seven children of a Palestinian merchant called Abdul Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini who was killed fighting the Israelis twenty years later. Before his father's death, former friends say, Arafat spent hours each day studying the Koran. He was to be briefly inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood while studying engineering at Cairo University; but he combined nationalism with religion when he decided—with a vanity that would become familiar—to change his name. He abandoned his original first name, Rahman, and chose “Yassir” after an Arab killed by British Mandate troops in Palestine. “Arafat” is the name of the sacred mountain outside Islam's holiest city of Mecca.

Thus did he reinvent his name, just as he was to reinvent Palestine for the millions of refugees who looked to him for hope. In the end, Arafat came to realise that something was better than nothing. Early in 1993, he took a call from Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian Muslim president, asking for Arafat's advice on the now-aborted Vance–Owen peace plan. “Are they offering you any land?” Arafat asked down the phone. Told by Izetbegovic that they were, but that it was too little, Arafat replied: “Take it! Take it! Accept!” Izetbegovic did not. Arafat saw the terrible results.