5

The Teflon Guerrilla

The true relationship between a leader and his people is often revealed through small, spontaneous gestures. Maybe that was why I was so intrigued watching Yasir Arafat marching down a Beirut street one day, his walking stick in hand, drawing children and mothers, grandparents and guerrillas, out of their apartments and into his wake like the Palestinian Pied Piper he most surely was. The scene was West Beirut in the early 1980s, minutes after Israeli planes had bombarded the Fakhani neighborhood, where the PLO maintained its political and military headquarters somewhere beneath the multistory apartment houses. One Israeli bomb had made a direct hit on a corner apartment block; it looked like a wedge of cake that had been smashed by a fist. Trapped inside were many civilians, including one old woman’s four children. When Arafat walked up, this woman was hysterically trying to drag away the tons of concrete by herself to reach her missing kin. As soon as she spotted the PLO chairman, though, the woman stopped in her tracks. She climbed down off the rubble, ran up to Arafat, grabbed his pea-green army cap, threw it off his head, and began kissing his bald pate.

“I lost four of my family inside,” the woman sobbed, “but I have nine more and they are all for you.”

I reported about Yasir Arafat on and off for almost ten years. He is without a doubt one of the most unusual characters and unlikely statesmen ever to grace the world stage. He is, in many ways, the Ronald Reagan of Palestinian politics—an agent of change for his nation, a great actor who understands the soul of his people and how to play out their greatest fantasies, and, most of all, the ultimate Teflon guerrilla. Nothing stuck to Yasir Arafat—not bullets, not criticism, not any particular political position, and, most of all, not failure. No matter what mistakes he made, no matter how many military defeats he sustained, no matter how long he took to recover Palestine, his people forgave him and he remained atop the PLO. Something about this scraggily bearded man, living out of a suitcase, resonated in the heart of every Palestinian. Al-Khityar—“the Old Man,” they called him affectionately—the Palestinian version of “the Gipper,” and like Americans, the Palestinians were always ready to win one more for their “Gipper.”

What was the source of this Teflon? It certainly wasn’t Arafat’s good looks or inviting smile. Only five feet four inches tall, with protruding eyes, a permanent three-day-old stubble, and a potbelly, Arafat was not what one would call a dashing figure or a man on horseback; in fact, in a television era, he was a walking, talking, Palestinian public-relations disaster. It also wasn’t his military record. As a leader of men in battle, Arafat always had more in common with General George A. Custer than with General George S. Patton.

No, the secret of Arafat’s political success and longevity can be understood only by locating him in the broad sweep of Palestinian history. Put simply: Arafat’s great achievement was that he led the Palestinians out of the deserts of obscurity into the land of “prime time,” and, at the same time, created an institutional framework to keep them there. To put it another way, Arafat did for the Palestinians what the Zionists did for the Jews: brought them from oblivion back into politics.

Long before Arafat came on the scene, there was a clearly defined Palestinian nation, but it was a nation to whom history had said no. At that very fluid moment between the end of World War I and the end of World War II, when all kinds of peoples were getting states of their own, the Palestinians missed the train, largely as a result of the failures of their own leaders and the conniving of their Arab brethren. After the 1948 Middle East war, when Israel was created, and Jordan and Egypt swallowed most of the land that the United Nations had designated for a Palestinian state, the Palestinians almost disappeared as a people. They were either subsumed into Israel as Israeli Arabs or melted into Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria, as refugees. As Arafat himself liked to say, the Palestinians were being treated like “the American Red Indians,” confined to their reservations—shafted by the Arabs, defeated by the Jews, and forgotten by the world. Arafat brought this people back from the dead, galvanized them into a coherent and internationally recognized national liberation movement, and transformed them in the eyes of the world from refugees in need of tents to a nation in need of sovereignty.

He did it by making the PLO into an organization unlike anything the Palestinians ever had before in their history, and endowing it with four unique attributes: independence, unity, relevance, and theatrics.

Yet for all his greatness at reviving the Palestinian cause and rallying the Palestinian nation, Arafat never delivered on his ultimate promise—turf, statehood, land. As I would discover in Beirut, and later in Jerusalem, the very skills and attributes that enabled Arafat to bring the Palestinians from obscurity to prime time would be the chains that would prevent him from bringing them from prime time to Palestine.

Many of the qualities Arafat conveyed to the PLO—its middle-class aspirations, its penchant for institution-building, its tendency for stagecraft as much as statecraft, its conspiratorial quality, its devotion to Palestine, and its deep need to play the Arab game on equal terms with all the other Arab states—were all traceable to Arafat’s own youth and the political era in which he emerged.

Yasir Arafat was born in 1929 (either in Cairo or Gaza—he has told people both), one of seven children of a prosperous Palestinian merchant. His given name was Mohammed, but he quickly won the nickname Yasir, which means “easy.” His mother died when he was four and his father sent him to live with his married uncle in Jerusalem, where he grew up inside the walls of the Old City. His house, in fact, was situated right next to the Western Wall of the Second Temple, revered by Jews as their holiest shrine. The Israelis, he liked to point out, demolished his home when they cleared away a piazza in front of the Western Wall after the 1967 war. After elementary school, he moved to Cairo and lived with his father, who had remarried. In his biography of Arafat, Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? (1984) Alan Hart quotes Arafat’s sister Inam as saying that her younger brother was obsessed with the Palestinian and Arab nationalist struggles virtually from the moment he emerged out of the womb.

“Yasir,” she said, “was [always] gathering Arab kids of the district. He formed them into groups and made them march and drill. He carried a stick and used to beat those who did not obey his commands. He also liked making camps in the garden of our house … . Often I used to escort him [to school]. But he would slip away from the classroom. And often when I went to school to escort him home he was not there. The only time he seemed to be seriously interested in study was at home in the evenings with his friends. But he was acting … . When I entered the room Yasir and his friends would pretend to be doing their homework—but really they were discussing political and military matters.”

Arafat eventually attended Cairo University and earned a degree in civil engineering, but during his spare time he was constantly active in Palestinian nationalist student organizations, fighting against the Zionists in the 1948 battles south of Jerusalem and in Gaza. In the wake of the 1948 defeat, though, Arafat admitted that even he thought the Palestinian movement was finished—that it had missed its moment. While all the other Arabs he had studied with in Cairo would get their turf, Arafat and his friends would have none.

“I was very discouraged … after we all became refugees,” he revealed in an interview published in Playboy in September 1988. “During that period I was going to leave, leave the area entirely and continue my studies someplace else … . I was accepted into the University of Texas—I think it was the University of Texas, anyways, I didn’t go.”

Instead, Arafat went east. He found his way to Kuwait, worked for the Kuwaiti government for a year, and then started his own contracting company.

“I was well on my way to becoming a millionaire,” Arafat said in the interview. “We built roads, highways, bridges. Large construction projects … . During that period … I had four cars. Nobody believes that, but I did. I had Chevrolets, and I had a Thunderbird and a Volkswagen. But I gave them all away when I left Kuwait to rejoin our struggle. All but one—the Volkswagen.”

Indeed, Arafat and his Volkswagen became familiar features around the Arab newspaper offices in Beirut. In 1956, Arafat and a group of other middle-class Palestinians living in Kuwait decided to rededicate themselves to the liberation of Palestine and formed their own underground guerrilla organization called al-Fatah (“Victory”). Arafat was appointed spokesman for the group, prompting him to give up his contracting career in Kuwait and relocate to Beirut and Amman. He would often show up in the evenings at Arab newspapers in Beirut to plead with the editors to print “communiqués” about military actions against Israel undertaken by al-Fatah guerrillas. Most of the time he was given a cold shoulder and shown to the door. The struggle against Israel was, in the early 1960s, viewed as primarily, though not entirely, the responsibility of the Arab states. Few took seriously the idea of the Palestinians recovering Palestine on their own. The Arab heads of state founded the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 in order to control the Palestinians, and to use them for their own military and political purposes. Ahmed Shukery, the first chairman of the PLO, was a bombastic buffoon from an upper-class family who did what he was told.

No wonder Arafat and his colleagues were anxious to get their cause out of the hands of the Arab leaders, but not out of their pockets. They needed to assert independent Palestinian control over the Palestinian national movement, but without going so far as to lose the backing of the Arab world, without which an effective military and diplomatic struggle with Israel was impossible. Paradoxically, it would be Israel’s victory in the 1967 war that would give Arafat and his colleagues their chance. Israel’s devastating rout of the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967 thoroughly discredited the entire Arab ruling class, including its Palestinian toadies, leaving an emotional vacuum and a leadership void. After the ’67 defeat, the Arab world was hungry for a new face, a new hope, a new redeemer, and the Palestinian guerrillas emerged from the underground and stepped into all those roles. Thanks to several courageous confrontations with Israeli troops, Arafat’s al-Fatah group achieved the greatest legitimacy among the emerging guerrilla organizations, and this enabled Arafat, in 1969, to wrest control of the PLO away from the discredited Arab states and to turn it into an umbrella organization covering all the Palestinian guerrilla groups, from the far right to the far left. It has never belonged to any Arab regime since, something which has always been a source of pride for Palestinians. The PLO under Yasir Arafat was the first truly independent Palestinian national movement.

Once he had the PLO in his hands, Arafat kept it independent, thanks first and foremost to his own natural political skills. Arafat was born with the cunning of a bazaar merchant, the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t hands of a magician, the balance of a Barnum & Bailey tightrope walker, and, most important, the skin of a chameleon, which took on whatever political colors were in season. This enabled him to tiptoe through the snake pit of inter-Arab politics, playing the Syrians off against the Jordanians, the Iraqis off against the Egyptians, and always maintaining for the PLO a tiny corner in which to operate freely.

Because Arafat gradually made himself synonymous with the Palestinian cause, and because the Palestinian cause became the most sacred cause in Arab politics, in Islamic politics, and even in Third World politics, Arafat was also able to turn himself into a kind of Arab Pope. One touch from his scepter could make the most vile Arab despot legitimate in Arab eyes. As Arafat himself told Playboy: “Maybe you don’t know that in some circles, I am considered more than a freedom fighter. By some I am considered a symbol of resistance. It was only in some circles I was called a terrorist … . For your information, I am the permanent [chairman] of the Organization of the Islamic Conference chairmanship. The co-chairman changes every three years—but I am the permanent chairman. And I am the permanent vice-president of the Nonaligned Countries movement. Just for your information.”

Arafat’s status as the keeper of the seals of Arab legitimacy greatly enhanced his independence, because it meant that there was always some Arab leader ready to throw him a life preserver whenever he seemed to be drowning. Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, for instance, was always anxious to embrace Arafat in order to ease Cairo’s isolation after it had signed a peace treaty with Israel. At a time when his popularity was at a low ebb in the mid-1980s because of a seemingly endless war with Iran, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein offered Arafat office space for headquarters in Baghdad. It never hurt an Arab leader to have his picture taken with Arafat seated next to him on the couch.

No less important than the independence which Arafat won for the PLO was the unity with which he endowed the organization. Throughout their history the Palestinians had suffered from violent disunity. Palestinian Christians were often at odds with Palestinian Muslims, Palestinians from Hebron were at odds with those of Jerusalem, pro-Jordanians were at odds with Palestinian nationalists, and radical Palestinian factions were at odds with more moderate ones. The Palestinians, as a result, spoke with many and contradictory voices on the world stage.

Arafat managed to bring virtually all the Palestinian trends together under the PLO umbrella and to keep them there. He accomplished this through several skills. One was his personal ability to be everything to all men in the Palestinian movement. Arafat could sit in a room with representatives from eight different PLO factions, listen while each one offered a different approach to a given dilemma, and then go his own way—without making anyone in the room feel that his views had been totally ignored, or totally accepted; he was as easy to nail down as a lump of mercury. In order to remain so fluid, however, Arafat often had to talk out of both sides of his mouth. (This damaged his credibility, though, and would haunt him later in life when he wanted to be taken seriously by the Israelis.)

Another unifying tactic adopted by Arafat was to keep the PLO’s ideology simple. He rejected calls by PLO Marxists, such as George Habash, for a “class struggle” against the Arab bourgeoisie, and he also rejected the idea of making the PLO an extension of any particular Arab bloc. Arafat’s line was, in effect, “I will use the son of the Palestinian camp dweller for my army and I will use the bank account of the Palestinian millionaire for my bureaucracy. My door will always be open to both.”

The only firm ideological commitment Arafat stuck by for all the years that he was based in Jordan and Lebanon was the lowest common denominator in Palestinian politics—something which all Palestinians from the far left to the far right, from those living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to those living as refugees spread out all across the Arab world could accept—the principle that Palestine was Arab land and that the right of the Jews to establish a state there must never be formally recognized. This position was embodied in the PLO Charter, written in Cairo in 1964. Beyond that red line, however, Arafat kept himself ideologically “loose” in order to bend with the wind and exploit whatever diplomatic opportunities were available. He was not a man who spent his time either reading or writing pamphlets.

It must be remembered that Arafat’s primary base of support during his Beirut days came from those Palestinians living in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. They formed the ranks of his guerrilla army and filled the positions of his bureaucracy. They were the very soil from which the PLO sprang. Most of these Palestinian refugees hailed from towns and villages that fell within the boundaries of pre-1967 Israel—places such as Haifa or Jaffa or the Galilee. They were not particularly interested in a West Bank–Gaza Palestinian state, because that is not where they were from. Gaza was as far from their homes as Beirut. Therefore, they were always more inclined to a maximalist Palestinian political position that held on to the dream that one day Israel would disappear and they would be able to return to their actual homes. It was their aspirations which Arafat reflected in the 1960s and 1970s; it was their dreams to which he catered. Many Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza would come to take a more realistic approach, since they had to contend with the reality of Israel every day, but during the 1960s and 1970s their influence on PLO positions was limited. The guerrillas were the dynamic element in Palestinian politics; they were the ones out fighting and dying, so the West Bankers and Gazans had to follow their lead.

Arafat’s ability to keep the Palestinians unified was also a result of the fact that he was the first Palestinian leader in history able to meet a payroll over a long period of time. The paychecks weren’t big, and sometimes they came late, but they came, and when they did they didn’t bounce. Arafat was a genius at playing the good cop–bad cop routine with Arab leaders. He would fly into Saudi Arabia after some radical Marxist PLO faction had just hijacked an airliner or committed some outrage and say in effect to the Saudis, “Look, my friends, I am sitting on top of a volcano. If anything happens to me these people will really go out of control. Who knows what they might do. They are angry men, and angry men can do crazy things. So please, help me, support me, it is a small price for you to pay for peace of mind.” Arafat then used this Arab conscience money to build a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio that could sustain more than $200 million a year in welfare payments, scholarships, newspapers, radio stations, health payments, educational programs, trade unions, diplomatic missions, weapons purchases, and salaries to bureaucrats and guerrillas in Beirut and around the Middle East—making as many as 60,000 Palestinian families directly dependent on Arafat and the PLO for their economic well-being.

The third attribute with which Arafat endowed the PLO was relevance. By unifying the Palestinian people under one banner, by creating an institutional framework to sustain that unity, Arafat assembled a critical mass behind the Palestinian cause that simply made it impossible to ignore, as it had been during the 1950s and 1960s. But it wasn’t only the number of supporters Arafat could field that made him so relevant. The Arab states became an international financial force in the 1970s in the wake of the explosion of oil prices that followed the 1973 Middle East war. Arafat deftly exploited this newfound Arab clout to convince the United Nations and more than one hundred other countries around the world to accept PLO diplomats and to recognize the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. During the oil boom the Arab world could not be ignored, and that meant its favorite cause could not be ignored. It was no coincidence that Arafat was first invited to address the United Nations in 1974, just as oil prices were going through the roof. One cannot understand the rise of the PLO without connecting it to the rise of OPEC. Thanks to Arafat’s strategy, the Palestinians’ demand for self-determination was constantly represented on the world stage and in every conceivable international forum. This created a snowball of legitimacy for the PLO, which kept growing and growing year after year.

For those who were not disposed to listen, Arafat reinforced the PLO’s relevance by engaging not only in guerrilla warfare with the Israeli army and civilians but also in terrorist operations outside the Middle East. Arafat learned a lesson from Kurdish rebel leader Mustafa Barzani. Barzani was once asked why the Kurdish national liberation movement, which he led, never got the world attention of some other national liberation movements, like the Palestinians. Barzani said it was simple: “Because we fought only on our own land and we killed only our own enemies.” The PLO under Arafat did not make that mistake. They took their war to other people’s countries; they killed non-combatants as well as people who had nothing to do with their conflict. They always fought on the world stage as much as in the Middle East, and they consistently reaped the benefits.

But these very attributes—independence, unity, relevance—which made Arafat and his PLO unique in Palestinian history were also a prescription for paralysis. Because Arafat’s main constituency during the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s was the Palestinian refugees living outside Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, the only way he could maintain the PLO’s unity was if he never formally acknowledged Israel’s right to exist—otherwise his whole organization would fragment under him. Arafat was always a leader who reflected the consensus of his people; he did not shape it. He had seen what happened to Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat; he knew the fate of those who got out too far ahead of their nations.

This meant Arafat had a dilemma: as long as he would not recognize Israel in a clear and unambiguous manner he had no hope of recovering even an inch of Palestinian territory through negotiations. Israel simply would not consider any settlement with the Palestinians that did not include total acceptance of the Jewish state within at least its pre-1967 boundaries. At the same time, Arafat could not get an inch of land back by war, because he did not have the resources to tangle with Israel alone, and the Arab states, while ready to send him checks, were not ready to send him divisions. Arafat, in other words, was caught between a decision he could not make and a war he could not fight. Such were the cards that history had dealt him.

Arafat escaped from his dilemma, or at least made it tolerable, by investing the PLO and Palestinian politics with one last attribute—theatrics. Arafat plied the Palestinian people with hopes, slogans, fantasies in order to keep the Palestinian movement alive until that day when the Arabs might awaken to their cause enough to join them in a battle for Palestine, or when the West might awaken to their cause enough to force Israel to give them a piece of Palestine. Arafat the actor helped to keep a whole nation hoping that around the next corner, after the next summit conference, in the wake of the next war, a state was waiting for them—if they could just hold on a little longer and keep the faith.

He accomplished this by acting many roles, which simultaneously played on his own fantasies as well as those of his people. On some days, for instance, Arafat played the “Traveler.” Arafat visited more countries each year than any statesman in the world, by far. For a Palestinian people, whose own freedom of movement was so restricted, who in many cases didn’t even have passports to travel on, to have a leader who could travel anywhere, and didn’t even need a passport, was their own dream come true. Even better, Arafat, when he arrived, was not told by a customs agent to go to a special room to be frisked or interviewed because he was a Palestinian. He got 21-gun salutes, he got motorcades, he got marching bands, he got red carpets, and he got Palestinian flags fluttering in the breeze. Arafat loved to arrive places, to inspect the honor guards, and to be treated as an Arab head of state equal to all the other boys on the block. Other days Arafat played the “General.” He gave this Palestinian people who never really had military power, who for so long were disarmed, a leader with the title of commander in chief, who always wore a holstered Smith & Wesson pistol on his hip. Was it loaded? I don’t know, but who cares. It was there. On other days, Arafat played the “Revolutionary.” Arafat elevated the Palestinians from their sleepy village roots, merchant culture, and traditional conservative Arab homes and made them, overnight, “revolutionaries” who could eat with chopsticks at the table of Chairman Mao. On other days, Arafat played “Mr. Universe.” He gave this Palestinian people, who for so many years were invisible to the world, who felt that the world constantly wanted to forget them, a leader whose face was as famous as, if not more than that of the American President.

On still other days, Arafat played the “Chairman”—busy, rushing, always shuffling papers, moving here and moving there, never letting his people believe that things were going nowhere, that some solution wasn’t around the corner.

“Files! Files! Files!” Arafat once exclaimed in an interview with a reporter from Vanity Fair (February 1989) who was riding with him in his private jet. “These files never finish. Though I am not a chief of state, I must work twice as hard as one because I have to both administer a bureaucracy and run a revolution … . Do you see that carton over there? That is the not-so-secret fax, and do you see that aluminum suitcase? That is the very secret fax. I am very proud of our communications system. It costs a lot of money. The Sharp Corporation of Japan says the P.L.O. is its best customer, but every dollar is worth it. We can be in touch with any of our diplomatic missions anywhere in less than half an hour.”

Finally, and most important, Arafat played the “Seer.” He taught his people how to look at the world only through a crystal ball—his crystal ball. You see, the Palestinians’ predicament, caught between Israel and the Arabs, was really an impossible one. It could not bear up to close scrutiny; it could never be examined under a microscope; it could never be subjected to a real empirical analysis—otherwise it would deliver heartbreak and resignation. It always had to be viewed through a crystal ball, where the difference between fantasy and reality would be blurred, distorted, and thrown out of proportion, where the scope for imaginative interpretations would be great, where defeats could be declared victories and total darkness transformed into glimmering lights at the end of the tunnel.

Life without illusions is unbearable, especially if you are a refugee, and Arafat gave the Palestinians all the illusions, and even some of the substance, which made their dispersion bearable. Arafat’s approach, however, required a very special city—one that was open to illusions, tolerant of seers, free of laws, and fun enough to wait around in until Palestine was redeemed. After Arafat and his men tried to take over Amman, Jordan, in 1970, and were driven out by King Hussein, they fled to Beirut and found just the city they were looking for—or so they thought.

I will never forget the very first PLO press conference I attended in Beirut.

It was in June 1979 and Yasir Arafat and several other senior PLO figures were giving the briefing in a shabby apartment block in West Beirut. I don’t recall a thing they said. What I do remember is that on my way in I noticed a big old black Cadillac Eldorado, one of those late-sixties models with big fins, parked outside. I asked another reporter who this Batmobile belonged to. He replied, “That revolutionary car belongs to Zuhair Mohsen.” Mohsen was the leader of al-Saiqa, the pro-Syrian faction of the PLO. A bovine figure with silver hair and a diamond-dripping Syrian wife, Alia, Mohsen was an armchair revolutionary if there ever was one. He was known in Beirut as Mr. Carpet, because of all the Persian carpets he and his men had stolen during the Lebanese civil war. When the rigors of leading the revolution became too much for him, Mohsen would split to an apartment he kept on the famous La Croisette Promenade in Cannes, probably the most expensive stretch of real estate on the French Riviera.

In July 1979, Mohsen made one his frequent rest stops in Cannes, having overexerted himself leading the PLO delegation to an Organization of African Unity summit in Liberia. After a long night at the blackjack tables of the Palm Beach Casino, Mohsen walked back to his apartment in the luxurious Gray d’Albion building at one o’clock on the morning of July 25. Just as his wife opened the door to let him in, a young man, described as “Arab-looking,” stepped out of the shadow with a .32-caliber pistol and blew part of Mohsen’s brains all over the marble floor. I was in the PLO news agency office in Beirut the day after he died and Arafat’s newsmen there put out a statement that was pure tongue-in-cheek, noting that this great revolutionary Palestinian “hero and martyr” was killed “on the way to the field of battle.”

The cynicism of both Mohsen and his eulogizers disgusted me, but my encounter with this late-lamented guerrilla leader was an important lesson about Beirut. Beirut was a city built on myths. Every night there was one of the 1,001 Arabian Nights—seductive, theatrical, illusionary. The distinction between words and deeds was often lost in Beirut. It was a display culture, a city of amusement-park mirrors, which made short people look tall, fat people look thin, and insignificant people look important. Men loved to pose there—revolutionaries by day, merchants and gamblers by night. Life did not imitate art in Beirut; it was art. With a little money and a mimeograph machine, you could buy whatever identity you wanted in Beirut. Just by putting up one checkpoint manned by two teenage thugs on a busy highway in Beirut, you could turn yourself into a four-star general, a political party, a tax collector—hell, you could be a whole liberation movement if you wanted. The law of Lebanese politics was: I have a checkpoint, therefore I exist.

No one became more ensnared by Beirut’s charms and chains than Yasir Arafat and his PLO. On the one hand, Beirut was a godsend for Arafat. He was able to use his manipulative skills to play off the Lebanese Muslims and Christians against each other, and carve out his own mini-state between them, thus enhancing his independence. The Fakhani, Sabra, and Shatila neighborhoods of West Beirut became Arafat’s first quasi-sovereign territory—a tree house, where he could always run and hide from the pressures of the various Arab regimes. Beirut also enhanced Arafat’s relevance, since it put the PLO in contact with a huge and generally uncritical international press corps, many of whose members identified with the PLO as underdogs and sixties-style revolutionaries. At the same time, Beirut provided Arafat and the PLO with a base for launching guerrilla raids directly into Israel and for recruiting and training operatives for spectacular hijackings or international terror attacks, such as the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, which kept the Palestinian cause relevant and impossible to ignore. Finally, Beirut strengthened Arafat’s ability to maintain PLO unity, since virtually all the PLO factions were headquartered in Lebanon (for the same reasons it attracted Arafat), and this enabled the PLO chairman to impose a certain limited degree of physical and economic domination over them by virtue of the fact that his own al-Fatah organization was the most powerful force on the ground.

But while Beirut enhanced Arafat’s unique leadership attributes, it also tightened his political paralysis. Why? Because Beirut, city of illusions, made waiting for Godot fun. It made it easy for the PLO to continue avoiding the concessions for peace, which might have brought about a negotiated settlement with Israel, and to continue pretending that it was preparing for war with Israel, when in fact it was doing no such thing.

Beirut, and the mini-state Arafat created there, drained the PLO leadership, and to some extent the rank and file, of the impatience a normal national liberation movement would feel about achieving its avowed objectives, which, in the case of the PLO, was the recovery of all or part of Palestine. With its attractive nightlife, restaurants, and intellectual ferment, Beirut became for many PLO functionaries the watan al-badeel—the substitute homeland, as they called it, and one which in many ways was far more exciting than the boring Galilee villages in which their fathers were raised. Sitting in Beirut, it was very easy for the late Khalil al-Wazir, alias Abu Jihad, “Father of Struggle,” then Arafat’s top military deputy, to declare when asked why he wouldn’t come to terms with Israel that “we will not be squeezed by time.”

Why should they? The 1970s were a great era for Third World revolutionary politics, and the PLO joined in the jamboree. Their printing presses cranked out great manifestos and their silk-screen artists produced dramatic posters, with guns superimposed over maps of Palestine and Palestinian men and women in heroic poses. It was the Che Guevara era of West Beirut. George Habash went off to discuss the global revolution with the great Korean revolutionary Kim Il Sung; radical PLO guerrilla leader Nayef Hawatmeh talked about Lenin with Brezhnev, while Arafat held counsel with fellow revolutionaries from Castro to Mao. Palestinian intellectuals sat around Faisal’s Restaurant in West Beirut arguing about the direction of their revolution and the evils of the Zionist enemy, all gulped down with some of the best hummus and arak in the Middle East. Ali Hassan Salameh, one of Arafat’s senior intelligence operatives and a man with particular affection for silk shirts and tailored suits, married Georgina Rizk, the Maronite Lebanese beauty queen who once won the Miss Universe contest. She was enough to make any man’s stay in Beirut tolerable. Ali Hassan’s, however, was cut short by an Israeli hit team, who blew him up with a car bomb in downtown Beirut to avenge his role in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.

Arafat himself did not share in the corruption, but he tolerated it in his closest deputies. His longtime chief of intelligence, Atallah Mohammed Atallah, alias Abu Zaim, lived in an opulent apartment in West Beirut on Rue Beshir Kessar. Actually, he had one huge apartment, blanketed with mirrors, for himself, and two others for his twenty-two bodyguards—each of whom made about $300 a month. Abu Zaim had two wives, one in Jordan and the other a stunning Lebanese Maronite, who tooled around West Beirut in a red Mercedes. I got to hear a lot about Abu Zaim, because one of my best friends in Beirut knew his chief guard, who loved to regale him with stories of his boss’s excesses. One of his favorite tales was about the night Abu Zaim was giving a party and called down to the chief guard on his intercom and ordered him to get a kilo of caviar from a well-known Beirut deli, the Mandarin.

The guard, a simple soldier, asked, “What is caviar?”

“Never mind,” Abu Zaim told him. “Just go to the store and ask for it.”

But this was 10:00 p.m., and when the guard got to the Mandarin it was closed. So he and his men woke up the neighbors, found out where the owner lived, and went to his apartment. When the guerrillas knocked at his door, the owner looked through the peephole, saw a bunch of armed men, and began begging for his life.

“We are from Abu Zaim,” the guard reassured the owner. “He wants caviar.”

When the owner heard this, he was so relieved that he threw on some clothes, went down to the shop, and gave the guard two kilos of caviar. The guard told my friend that he found this “caviar stuff” so offensive-smelling that he carried it back to Abu Zaim’s apartment with his arms extended, the way one would carry a dead fish.

With such a city to run home to, no wonder Arafat passed up an excellent opportunity to make a clear-cut declaration about peace with Israel when the whole world was listening—when he was invited to address the United Nations on November 13, 1974.

Arafat’s idea of a peace initiative was to point to the June 9, 1974, decision by the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, in which the PLO committed itself to establishing an “independent combatant national authority for the people over every part of Palestinian territory that is liberated.” That was Arafat’s way of hinting that he would accept a state in the West Bank and Gaza. Not surprisingly, the world, not to mention Israel, missed the point.

Five years later, Arafat would squander another excellent opportunity when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat negotiated the Camp David accords, which included a provision for Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza that might have served as a springboard for the creation of a Palestinian state.

Even the PLO leaders in their franker moments admitted that since the early 1970s, when the PLO settled into Beirut, all it had done was tread water. Salah Khalaf, alias Abu Iyad, the number-two figure in the PLO’s political hierarchy, once remarked in an interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Anba (September 7, 1988): “We have not taken a single step on the road to an independent Palestinian state since 1974.”

In Beirut, the PLO not only enjoyed the hummus and the nightlife, but it also got to taste real power, and this, too, made it in less of a hurry to return to Palestine. The PLO had their boots on the necks of the Lebanese Muslims in West Beirut, and some of them loved it. These sons of Palestinian refugees, who had been kicked around by the Arabs and Palestinian upper classes all their lives, finally got to change roles, and they did it with all the relish and subtlety of a New York street gang emerging from the South Bronx to impose its rule on Park Avenue. Beginning in the early 1970s, the PLO became the dominant militia in West Beirut, partly just to protect its own civilians from the Phalangists and partly at the behest of the Lebanese Muslims to be their sword against the Christians in the civil war. The PLO eventually became so much a part of the Lebanese domestic conflict that Abu Iyad declared one day that the road to liberating Jerusalem “runs through Juniyah,” the Phalangist militia-run port in East Beirut. In other words, before they could liberate Jerusalem they had to liberate Juniyah. Arafat became the effective mayor of West Beirut, and to his credit he kept it a relatively open and Westernized place. The same cannot be said for all his associates. When they were not busy fighting the Phalangists or the Israelis, PLO factions engaged in frequent street fights and turf battles with Lebanese Shiites and Sunnis in Beirut, Sidon, and south Lebanon—which was exactly what the PLO was embroiled in on the eve of the Israeli invasion in June 1982.

Lebanese political scientist Ghassan Salame had it right when he said, “The P.L.O. leaders were archetypical petit bourgeoisie. They were neither notables nor educated professionals, but rather school teachers, like Abu Iyad, or engineers, like Arafat. They were a frustrated class from families which had neither power nor wealth. So, just like any other Lebanese militia, the PLO became a machine for the social promotion and advancement of a certain class of people. Don’t think for a minute that they didn’t love giving orders to the sons of Palestinian notables. In Lebanon, the PLO became so obsessed with social promotion it stopped caring about Palestine.”

The PLO had a bagpipe band in Beirut. I once heard it perform as part of an honor guard reception for Jesse Jackson when he came to visit Arafat in September 1979. The bagpipers were Palestinians who had defected from the British-trained Jordanian army, where they apparently acquired their musical knowledge from Scottish advisers. They were a slightly ragtag bunch, each with a different camouflage guerrilla uniform. Their performance for Jackson was a cacophony for both the eye and the ear.

As the PLO got spoiled in Beirut, it turned from an ascetic, authentic, and even courageous young guerrilla organization living primarily in the hardscrabble hills of south Lebanon and trying to lead an armed struggle against Israel, into a rich, overweight, corrupt quasi army and state, complete with bagpipe bands, silver Mercedes limousines, and brigades of deskbound revolutionaries whose paunches were as puffed out as their rhetoric. Instead of continuing to confront Israel in the only effective way possible—through painstaking, grassroots guerrilla warfare—the PLO drifted to two extremes which sapped its strength.

On the one hand, the more the Palestinians became part of the Lebanese game and display culture, where men loved to strut around in uniforms, the more they tried to develop into a conventional Arab army. They acquired old Soviet-made T-34 tanks and organized into brigades with officers and ranks and chauffeurs. Every other PLO official you met gave his rank as captain or colonel. The PLO’s Korean War–vintage tanks and its army of colonels were great for posing in the Lebanese theater, and maybe even useful in a war with other Lebanese militias, but they proved useless in a conventional battle with the ultra-modern Israeli army.

On the other hand, some PLO factions went to the opposite extreme, eschewing any form of conventional warfare and concentrating instead on spectacular headline-grabbing terrorist attacks or airline hijackings inside and outside Israel, augmented by occasional guerrilla shelling of the Galilee. This terrorism was another form of theater. It was a means of winning attention in the television age, but it was no means for winning a war. There is no question that these spectacular operations put the Palestinian cause on the news agendas of Israel and the world at a time when the world would have been more than happy to go on ignoring the Palestinian issue. In this sense, I believe that terrorism, while morally repugnant, was functionally relevant for the PLO at its takeoff stage. The problem was that these spectacular terrorist operations became an end in themselves, instead of just a necessary phase or instrument in a larger struggle to achieve a political solution.

This media terrorism actually ended up hurting the PLO more than helping it, because the PLO leadership fell in love with their own press clippings. Headlines became a narcotic substitute for truly meaningful grassroots political or military actions and gave the PLO leaders a much exaggerated sense of their own strength. They mistook news reports for real power and theatrical gestures like hijackings for a real war with Israel. This helped them delude themselves into thinking that history was on their side, that they were getting stronger, and that this was no time for making concessions to Israel.

The cynicism and the theater of Beirut came together for me one afternoon in 1979, a day after someone tried to blow up Christian leader Camille Chamoun with a car bomb. The explosion was a split second late and missed him. The next day I went to Chamoun’s apartment in East Beirut to interview him. I found his living room filled with get-well bouquets, many of which were affixed with the personal business cards of those who had sent them. As I waited for Chamoun to receive me, I discovered in a corner a huge floral wreath upon which was a white business card with the printed name: “Yasir Arafat.” Arafat had sent Chamoun get-well flowers. These two men had sent so many young men to die in defense of their own personal power and status, and now they were sending bouquets. That was Beirut. Beirut was a theater and Arafat thought he could star in it forever.

Then one day an outsider stormed in, without even buying a ticket. He was a big man, a fat man, and he did not understand the logic of the play.