The Great War for Civilisation (85 page)

“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 motor 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.

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.