CHAPTER ELEVEN
And be these juggling fiends no more believ’d,
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope.
—Shakespeare, Macbeth, V, viii, 23–26
IN A CORNER OF THE PALESTINIAN “Martyrs’ Cemetery” in west Beirut, surrounded by the graves of Palestinian guerrillas and Syrian soldiers who fell victim to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, there stands a raised tomb, surrounded by a cheap concrete wall. A bunch of withered flowers lies on the marble slab, which has been chipped by shrapnel and partly damaged at its base, as if someone has tried to break into the vault. But the Arabic script on the lid is still legible:
The tomb of . . . Grand Mufti Al Haj Mohamed Amin al-Husseini,
leader of the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee,
President of the Supreme Muslim Council.
Born Jerusalem 1897. Died Beirut 4th July 1974.
Photographs in that summer’s memorial issue of Palestine, the quarterly political magazine Haj Amin founded more than a decade earlier, show mourners at the graveside, less than a year before the start of the Lebanese civil war. Chafiq al-Hout, the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s ambassador to Beirut, and a clutch of former Lebanese prime ministers can be seen standing by Hassan Khaled, the Lebanese Grand Mufti; and just to their left, the figure of Yassir Arafat, sunglasses covering his eyes, the familiar kuffiah atop his younger but still unmistakable face, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth.
Archive pictures in the same issue show the Grand Mufti—the supreme religious officer and the most important elected Muslim leader in Palestine—sitting proudly among Palestinian fighters during the 1936 Arab revolt against British rule in Palestine and, dressed in a gold-fringed robe, alongside the Palestinian delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva. A tall man with broad, serious eyes and a carefully trimmed beard, he exudes, even in old photographs, something of the charisma of which his supporters still speak. Those who knew him talk of his unusual, bright blue eyes.
But there are other archive photographs that Palestine did not choose to print, pictures far more troubling than those of the last farewell to a man described at his funeral as “Sheikh of the rebels, Imam of the Palestinians.” These snapshots show Haj Amin sitting in a high-backed armchair, dressed in turban and black robes, listening attentively to a short-haired man with a brush moustache who is dressed in a military jacket, a man who is gesticulating with his left hand. A German eagle holding a swastika is stitched on Adolf Hitler’s left sleeve. The place is Berlin, the date 28 November 1941. There are other pictures of the time: of Haj Amin at Nazi rallies in Berlin, Haj Amin greeted by Heinrich Himmler, Haj Amin, right hand raised in the Nazi salute, inspecting newly recruited Bosnian Muslims who had joined the Wehrmacht.
Perhaps it is not surprising that more than thirty years after his death, the very name of Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, can still ignite both passion and hatred among Palestinians and Israelis. Recall the dedication with which he pursued the cause of Arab Palestine, his refusal to compromise when the British mandate government demanded the partition of his homeland, and Israelis will ask you why you do not condemn Haj Amin as a Nazi war criminal—which is how they portray him today in the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, west of Jerusalem. Examine the motives for his flirtation with Hitler, question what Palestinians sometimes refer to uncomfortably as Haj Amin’s “German period,” and Palestinians will ask you why you wish to support the campaign of “Zionist” calumny against the old man’s memory. Merely to discuss his life is to be caught up in the Arab–Israeli propaganda war. To make an impartial assessment of the man’s career—or, for that matter, an unbiased history of the Arab–Israeli dispute—is like trying to ride two bicycles at the same time. “My advice to you is to write about Haj Amin when you retire,” one of his former associates warned me when I asked him for his memories of the Grand Mufti. “It could be dangerous for you to produce such a biography.”
Certainly, the name of Haj Amin rarely appeared in Yassir Arafat’s speeches in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and not only because of Haj Amin’s cooperation with the Nazis. Relaxing in a Beirut garden in July 1994, the Palestinian scholar Edward Said suggested to me another reason for this reticence. “I was sitting with Arafat in 1985 when he placed his hand on my knee, gripping it very tight. And Arafat said: ‘Edward, if there’s one thing I don’t want to be, it’s to be like Haj Amin. He was always right, and he got nothing and died in exile.’ ” But in 1990, Arafat was to follow a curiously similar destiny. Just as Haj Amin travelled to Baghdad and then to Berlin—believing that Hitler could guarantee Palestine’s independence from British rule and Jewish immigration—so the PLO leader travelled to Baghdad to embrace Saddam Hussein after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, convinced by Saddam’s promise to “liberate” the land he called Palestine. Little wonder, perhaps, that Haj Amin’s ghost sent a chill through the old retainers of the PLO. In 1948, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem even set up a short-lived Palestine government in what was left of his country—like Arafat’s rump administration, it met in the seedy confines of a Gaza hotel.
The facts of Haj Amin’s life are well documented. Born in Jerusalem in the closing years of the Ottoman empire to a family that traced its ancestry back to the Prophet, he was educated at Islamic schools and at Al-Azhar University in Cairo before serving, briefly, as an officer in the Turkish army during the First World War, the war in which the British made their two conflicting promises. To the Arabs, they promised independence in return for an Arab alliance against the Turks. To the Jews, Lord Balfour declared Britain’s support for a Jewish national home in predominantly Arab Palestine. From these betrayals, Haj Amin emerged an Arab nationalist and an uncompromising opponent of Jewish immigration into Palestine.
Blamed for inciting violence against both the Jews and British in 1920, Haj Amin fled to Transjordan and then to Damascus, where he was feted as a national hero. Ironically, it was the British—impressed by his family’s status and his nationalist standing among Arab Palestinians—who engineered his election to the post of Grand Mufti. Haj Amin swiftly internationalised the Palestine question among Muslim nations and secured election to the newly created Supreme Muslim Council, which controlled Muslim endowments, courts and religious institutions. He was, needless to say, only one among many Arabs who would be raised to advantage by the Western powers—then bestialised when he no longer followed their policies.
Like King Hussein of Jordan in 1992, Haj Amin embarked on a project to restore the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques in Jerusalem, an undertaking that earned him enormous popularity in the largely rural areas of Palestine. “His major sources of power were the imams of the mosques and the villagers,” Chafiq al-Hout remembered. “The Arabs in the municipalities were for the English. To us laymen, the heads of the municipalities were traitors because they were against Haj Amin.” In August 1928, speeches by Haj Amin and other Muslim leaders to Arab villagers incited rioting in which sixty Jews were murdered in Hebron.
Among Haj Amin’s Arab opponents was Raghib al-Nashashibi, the mayor of Jerusalem, one of many Palestinians who would find themselves unable to accept a man who would never—ever—compromise. In 1930, the British seemed prepared to restrict Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. But when Haj Amin insisted that an Arab “national government” be created as well, the British lost interest. When the British arrested the leading Palestinian nationalists during the 1936–39 Arab revolt, Haj Amin fled secretly to Lebanon. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the British, amenable again to the Arab cause, called an Arab round-table conference to discuss Palestine. Haj Amin—who was prohibited from attending the talks by the British—insisted that Britain “stop trying to build a Jewish national home and give independence to Palestine.” The conference failed. A subsequent British White Paper agreed to abandon Balfour’s promise to the Jews and offered a state with an Arab majority within ten years. Haj Amin again turned down what Malcolm MacDonald, the British colonial secretary, called a “golden opportunity.” Later, Arafat would be accused of almost identical intransigence when he did not obey Israeli or American wishes.
Fearful of arrest in French-Mandate Lebanon, Haj Amin fled again, this time to Iraq, where he was received as a Palestinian hero and swiftly broke his promise to the prime minister, Nuri es-Said, not to meddle in domestic politics. Believing that a British victory would doom Palestine, he supported the pro-Axis Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as es-Said’s successor and wrote Hitler a long and angry letter, outlining the plight of Arab Palestinians in the face of what he called “world Jewry, this dangerous enemy whose secret weapons—finance, corruption and intrigue—were aligned with British daggers” and finishing with wishes for Hitler’s “shining victory and prosperity for the great German people . . .”
Nadim Dimeshkieh, later Lebanon’s ambassador to the United Nations, was a teacher in Baghdad at the time and frequently visited Haj Amin. “I suppose it was a great mistake to involve himself in Iraqi politics,” Dimeshkieh would recall more than half a century later. “The people he involved himself with were wild and irresponsible. But where was he to turn? To America? To Britain? He was hoping that Iraq would support Germany and that this would put the Arabs in a better negotiating position over Palestine when the war ended in Hitler’s favour. Haj Amin would keep on saying to us: ‘Well, let’s hope Germany doesn’t lose the war.’”
When Britain invaded Iraq in 1941,79 Haj Amin tried to organise a brigade of Palestinians living in Baghdad to fight alongside the Iraqis; elements of this organisation went to Abu Ghraib to confront the invading force, only to find that the Iraqis had already collapsed. So Haj Amin fled once more, to Iran, where he requested asylum in Afghanistan. But he rejected Kabul’s permission to cross the frontier and took the ultimate, politically fatal step of escaping across Turkey to Axis Europe. It was then that Haj Amin became, in Palestinian eyes, a hostage to history, a man forced by patriotism to turn to the only ally available to him. For survivors of the Jewish Holocaust—and for Jews around the world—his act was unforgivable.
By the mid-1990s, the only survivor of the hothouse world of Arab wartime Berlin society still alive was eighty-seven-year-old Wassef Kamal, who had been a supporter of Haj Amin in Baghdad and had made his own way to Nazi Germany via Vichy Syria, Turkey and Bulgaria in 1941. “Most of the Palestinians and Arabs in Germany gathered round Haj Amin and Rashid al-Gaylani, who had also reached Berlin,” he recalled for me in 1994:
Most of them preferred the Grand Mufti. I became one of his senior assistants in Berlin and we decided to create an organisation, the “Society of Arab Students in Germany.” Haj Amin was considered almost a head of state by the Italian and German governments. There was an agreement— that the Axis governments would give temporary loans to Haj Amin and Rashid [al-Gaylani]—to be repaid by the newly formed Arab states after an Axis victory. The two men were given salaries. I was treated like a refugee, but we received four times the rations given to German citizens and were
treated very nicely. But all the efforts of Haj Amin and Rashid to convince Hitler and Mussolini to make a treaty with Arab leaders guaranteeing a future independent Arab state and the destruction of the Zionist “national home,” failed. All they would say on German radio was: “We are with the Arab people and for their independence.” But they never agreed to a formal treaty.
When Haj Amin finally met Hitler in November 1941, the Grand Mufti obtained a verbal agreement from the Führer that “when we [Germany] have arrived at the southern Caucasus, then the time of the liberation of the Arabs will have arrived—and you can rely on my word.” Disregarding the fact that Hitler’s “word” was often a lie, Haj Amin recorded how Hitler insisted that the Jewish “problem” would be solved “step by step” and that he, Haj Amin, would be “leader of the Arabs.” But Hitler refused publicly to recognise the claim to independence of the Arab states, partly because Mussolini was in no mood to lose his colony of Libya.
Wassef Kamal was to recall:
There was no agreement reached so we concluded we were more or less forced to work for the Axis. When Rommel began winning battles in Libya and was about to enter Egypt, the Germans came to us and believed the Axis would be victorious in the Middle East. Hitler and Mussolini approached Haj Amin and Rashid, saying: “Our armies will soon enter Egypt and also Iraq via the Caucasus. Rashid, you will go with our armies from Russia, Haj Amin, you will go with the Italian army via Egypt to Palestine.” Haj Amin called us together. He said: “Prepare yourselves, get military uniforms and be ready to enter Egypt with me.” But I said to him: “Your eminence, in the past Sherif Hussein [leader of the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Turks] had a treaty with the British—and, in spite of this treaty, the British betrayed us with the secret [Sykes–Picot] agreement with France. And now,” I said, “we have not even a treaty with these people. How can we go when we have nothing in our hands? I will not go. I will not be a party to this.” Three or four others agreed with me. But Haj Amin began to prepare himself—to go through Libya to Egypt. But slowly, slowly, the Axis lost.
Haj Amin now enthusiastically went to work for the Nazi propaganda machine. Arabs would later experience great difficulty and embarrassment in explaining these actions. In his biography of Haj Amin, Taysir Jbara devotes only four pages to his collaboration with the Nazis under the anaemic title “The Mufti in Europe,” arguing that Haj Amin had as much right to collaborate to save his Palestinian homeland from the British and Jewish immigrants as the Zionists had to collaborate with Germany to save Jewish lives. Israelis have sometimes exaggerated his collaboration in order to portray him as a war criminal. And it can be argued that a man may make a pact with the Devil. Two of Haj Amin’s former comrades repeated to me that tired—and irritating—Arabic proverb that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Churchill readily allied himself to one of the most murderous dictators of the twentieth century, Josef Stalin, transforming the monster into “Uncle Joe” until the defeat of Germany. The Lebanese Phalange militia, founded in 1936 after its leader had been inspired by the “discipline” of Nazi Germany, acted as Israel’s militia allies in 1982. Anwar Sadat worked as a spy for Rommel yet he became, in later years, the darling of the West—though not of Egypt—for making peace with Israel. And it is true that the principal aim of Haj Amin was to gain the independence of Palestine after a German victory and, in the meantime, to prevent Jews from going to Palestine.
But amid the evil of the Holocaust, Haj Amin’s moral position seems untenable. There is, too, in the archives of the wartime BBC Monitoring Service, a series of transcripts from Nazi radio stations that cast a dark shadow over any moral precepts Haj Amin might have claimed. Here he is, for example, addressing a Balfour Day rally at the Luftwaffe hall in Berlin on 2 November 1943: “The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews . . . They have definitely solved the Jewish problem.” And on Berlin radio on 1 March 1944: “Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.” On 21 January that year, Haj Amin had visited Ante Pavelic’s ferocious Fascist state of Croatia—which included present-day Bosnia— where he addressed Muslim recruits to the SS with these words, so sharply in contrast with sentiments expressed in his postwar memoirs: “There are also considerable similarities between Islamic principles and National Socialism, namely, in the affirmation of struggle and fellowship . . . in the idea of order.”
He even played a role in fomenting hatred between Bosnian Muslims and the largely Serb-led partisan force fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia, an anger that burst forth again in the atrocities of 1992. On 26 May 1944, the BBC Monitoring Service recorded Haj Amin describing Tito as “a friend of the Jews and a foe of the Prophet.” In 1943 he received from Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, a telegram recalling for him that “the National Socialist Party had inscribed on its flag ‘the extermination of world Jewry.’ Our party sympathises with the fight of the Arabs, especially the Arabs of Palestine, against the foreign Jew.” Radio Berlin later reported that Haj Amin had “arrived in Frankfurt for the purpose of visiting the Research Institute on the Jewish problem.”
Did Haj Amin know about the Jewish Holocaust? According to his most meticulous biographer, Zvi Elpeleg—a former Israeli military governor of Gaza who is respected as a historian even by Haj Amin’s surviving family—“his frequent, close contacts with leaders of the Nazi regime cannot have left Haj Amin with any doubt as to the fate which awaited the Jews whose emigration was prevented by his efforts.” In July 1943, when the extermination camps were already in operation in Poland, Haj Amin was complaining to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, about Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine in the following words: “If there are reasons which make their removal necessary, it would be essential and infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control as, for example, Poland . . .” Before his death, Haj Amin was to write that “the Germans settled their accounts with the Jews well before my arrival in Germany,” a statement that is factually and historically untrue.
Wassef Kamal would insist that Haj Amin did not encourage the annihilation of the Jews. “He was of course involved in stopping the emigration of Jews to Palestine but he had nothing to do with the extermination policy. When I was in Berlin with him, I saw many Jews. The only sign of foreigners there was that Russians would have an Ost band on their clothes and the Star of David was worn by the Jews. They used to move about. I think it was a secret then, what was happening . . .” Three months before he died, Haj Amin met Abu Iyad, one of Arafat’s lieutenants, in Beirut. Of their conversation, Abu Iyad was to write:
Haj Amin believed that the Axis powers would win the war and would then grant independence to Palestine . . . I pointed out to him that such illusions were based on a rather naive calculation, since Hitler had graded the Arabs 14th after the Jews in his hierarchy of races. Had Germany won, the regime which it would have imposed on the Palestinian Arabs would have been far more cruel than that which they had known during the time of British rule.
Alia al-Husseini, Haj Amin’s granddaughter, recalled for me how her grandfather, in his last years, spoke of Hitler’s true aims. “He said that after the Jews, the Germans would destroy the Arabs—he knew this. But what could he do? You must understand that Haj Amin lived at a time when everyone was against him.” Rifaat el-Nimr, one of the founders of the PLO and subsequently a prominent Beirut banker, vainly tried to enlist the support of Haj Amin for the young PLO after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. “I don’t think it was a mistake he had relations with Herr Hitler,” he said. “In 1916, the British lied to the Arabs about independence. In 1917, we had the Balfour declaration. Would the British or Americans have given Haj Amin anything if he had not gone to Herr Hitler?” But el-Nimr admitted that Haj Amin “hated the Jews” because “they stole his homeland.”
As the Allies closed in upon Germany, Wassef Kamal and Haj Amin found themselves commuting between the ever more dangerous city of Berlin and the resorts of northern Italy that remained under Axis control. Kamal remembered one afternoon, standing on the lawn of an Italian hotel with Haj Amin, looking far up into the heavens and watching “thousands and thousands” of American and British bombers heading for Germany. Haj Amin returned to Berlin, travelled down to Obersalzburg and then decided to seek asylum in neutral Switzerland. The Swiss turned him back and so the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem surrendered to the French. He was briefly imprisoned in Paris before being, with French complicity and American ignorance, smuggled to Cairo under a false name on an American military aircraft.
For eight dramatic days in 1948, Haj Amin helped to create a Palestine government in Gaza before the final collapse of the Arab armies and the annexation of the West Bank by Jordan. This was Israel’s “War of Independence” and Palestine’s nakba—the “catastrophe” in which around three-quarters of a million Arab Palestinians were driven from their homes or fled into a refugee exile from which they would never return. “Haj Amin should have accepted the UN partition plan,” his former admirer Habib abu Fadel would say. “So many nations went along with it and the Russians were among the first. He did not think about the future.” Haj Amin’s political life had been in vain. He courted and then disliked Colonel Nasser—whose troops now occupied Gaza—and he later hated and then courted King Hussein of Jordan, whose army occupied the West Bank. Returning in 1959 to Lebanon for his final exile, Haj Amin moved into a mountain villa, dispensing wisdom and memories to the Palestinians who came to see him, refusing to join any political movements lest he be dwarfed by them.
Chafiq al-Hout, who wanted the Grand Mufti’s power to be enhanced among the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon, asked if he could advise the old man, but was rebuffed when he visited the villa at Mansourieh in the early Fifties and was later beaten up by Haj Amin’s thugs in Beirut. “He was like all those tamed Ottoman subjects,” he recalls. “He spoke slowly, in whispers, listening, aware of himself twenty-four hours a day. He was like a man on the stage. He could not be interrupted. There were no jokes . . .” His granddaughter Alia remembers him as a family man, scolding her parents when they tried to stop her laughing with friends during the Grand Mufti’s afternoon siestas. “He used to say our laughter was music,” she says.
Haj Amin spent his last years listening to the music of the Egyptian singer Um al-Khaltum and to the Arabic service of the BBC. Forgiving the past, al-Hout invited him as guest of honour to his wedding—to a young woman, Bayan, whose father was one of Haj Amin’s early comrades and who would write her Ph.D. thesis on the Grand Mufti. Haj Amin’s journey to Nazi Germany, Bayan al-Hout says, was “a very stupid act—he could have found someone else to take care of negotiations with Hitler. He used to believe that he was responsible for all Muslims in the world; he used to feel an Islamic responsibility. In Bosnia, they looked upon him as a great leader . . .”
Within two years of his death in 1974, the Christian Phalangist militia stormed into his empty villa, stealing his files and diaries—there is a rumour in Beirut that the Israelis possess them now—while fifteen Christian refugee families moved into the wrecked house. They were still there when I visited the house twenty years later, repairing cars in an underground garage beneath what was Haj Amin’s study. He was more kindly treated by the latest of his biographers, Elpeleg, who wrote not just of his “enormous failures” but also his “impressive achievements for the Palestinian national movement.”
When he died of a heart attack, the Israelis refused Haj Amin’s request to be buried in Jerusalem and it was left to al-Hout to arrange his funeral in Beirut. “To my surprise, I found that the new Palestinian leadership in the PLO did not regard this as a great event. I thought there should be some continuity in our history, that we should ‘close a chapter,’ so to say. I told Arafat he should attend.” At the funeral, al-Hout praised Haj Amin as a “religious fighter.” Al-Hout remembers the speech. “We used then to look upon his grave as that of a martyr. But then the Lebanese war came and we had so many hundreds of martyrs’ graves that we forgot about his.”
Not everyone did. Although the al-Husseini family tried to maintain the tomb, the Lebanese Shiite Amal militia—at war in 1985 with their PLO enemies in the Beirut camps—believed that Palestinian weapons had been hidden in Haj Amin’s grave. So they chiselled open the marble lid and looked inside. There were no guns; just the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in a decaying white shroud.
The Arab–Jewish struggle, from the conflicting British promises of Bill Fisk’s 1914–18 war—of independence for the Arab states, and of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine—to the establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian land following the Jewish Holocaust and the Second World War, is an epic tragedy whose effects have spread around the world and continue to poison the lives not only of the participants but of our entire Western political and military policies towards the Middle East and the Muslim lands. The narrative of events— both through Arab and Israeli eyes and through the often biased reporting and commentaries of journalists and historians since 1948—now forms libraries of information and disinformation through which the reader may wander with incredulity and exhaustion. As long ago as 1938, when the British still governed Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, the eminent historian George Antonius was warning of the dangers of too much reliance on the vast body of literature already in existence, and his words are no less relevant today:
. . . it has to be used with care, partly because of the high percentage of open or veiled propaganda, and partly because the remoteness of the indispensable Arabic sources has militated against real fairness, even in the works of neutral and fair-minded historians. A similar equality vitiates the stream of day-to-day information. Zionist propaganda is active, highly organised and widespread; the world Press, at any rate in the democracies of the West, is largely amenable to it; it commands many of the available channels for the dissemination of news, and more particularly those of the English-speaking world. Arab propaganda is, in comparison, primitive and infinitely less successful: the Arabs have little of the skill, polyglottic ubiquity or financial resources which make Jewish propaganda so effective. The result is, that for a score of years or so, the world has been looking at Palestine mainly through Zionist spectacles and has unconsciously acquired the habit of reasoning on Zionist premises.
Most of the last thirty years of my life have been spent cataloguing events that relate directly or indirectly to the battle for Palestine, to the unresolved injustices that have afflicted both Arabs and Jews since the 1920s and earlier. British support for an independent Arab nation was expressed when Britain needed Arab forces to fight the Turks. The Balfour declaration giving support for a Jewish national home was made when Britain needed Jewish support—both politically and scientifically—during the First World War. Lloyd George, who was British prime minister in 1917, would often fantasise upon the biblical drama being played out in Palestine, saying that he wanted Jerusalem for Christmas in 1917—he got it, courtesy of General Allenby—and referring in his memoirs to “the capture by British troops of the most famous city in the world which had for centuries baffled the efforts of Christendom to regain possession of its sacred shrines.” That Lloyd George should have reflected upon Allenby’s campaign as a successor to the Crusades—“regaining possession” of Jerusalem from Muslims—was a theme that would run throughout the twentieth century in the West’s dealings with the Middle East; it would find its natural echo in George W. Bush’s talk of a “crusade” in the immediate aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.
In those memoirs, Lloyd George makes scarcely any reference to the Balfour declaration—and then only to suggest that it was a gesture made to reward the prominent Zionist Chaim Weizmann for his scientific work on acetone, a chemical essential in the making of cordite, and therefore to the British war effort. Weizmann’s name, Lloyd George would enthuse, “will rank with that of Nehemiah in the fascinating and inspiring story of the children of Israel.” Nehemiah was responsible for the fifth-century BC rebuilding and restoration of Jerusalem, a task he accomplished after his release from captivity by the Persian king Artaxerxes. But at almost the same time Lloyd George was writing this panegyric—in 1936— he was speaking far more frankly about the Balfour Declaration in the House of Commons during a debate on the Arab revolt:
It was at one of the darkest periods of the war that Mr. Balfour first prepared his Declaration. At that time the French Army had mutinied; the Italian army was on the eve of collapse; America had hardly started preparing in earnest. There was nothing left but Britain confronting the most powerful military combination that the world had ever seen. It was important for us to seek every legitimate help that we could get. The Government came to the conclusion, from information received from every part of the world, that it was very vital that we should have the sympathies of the Jewish community . . . We certainly had no prejudices against the Arabs because at that moment we had hundreds of thousands of troops fighting for Arab emancipation from the Turk. Under these conditions and with the advice they received, the Government decided that it was desirable for us to secure the sympathy and cooperation of that most remarkable community, the Jews, throughout the world. They were helpful to us in America to a very large extent; and they were helpful even in Russia at that moment because Russia was just about to walk out and leave us alone. Under those conditions we proposed this to our Allies. France, Italy, and the United States accepted it . . . The Jews, with all the influence that they possessed, responded nobly to the appeal that was made.
The French army’s mutiny and potential collapse on the Italian front, it seems, had more to do with promises for a Jewish “national home” than did Nehemiah. But now the Arabs “were demanding practically that there should be no more Jewish immigration,” Lloyd George complained to the Commons. “We could not accept that without dishonouring our obligations. It was not as if the Arabs were in a position to say that Jewish immigration is driving them, the ancient inhabitants, out . . .” But Lloyd George grasped, if with too little gravity, where the problem lay:
The obligations of the Mandate were specific and definite. They were that we were to encourage the establishment of a National home for the Jews in Palestine without detriment to any of the rights of the Arab population. That was a dual undertaking and we must see that both parts of the Mandate are enforced.
But both parts of the British Palestine Mandate could not be enforced, and Nazi Germany’s persecution of its Jews in 1936, which Lloyd George specifically mentioned, would turn into the Holocaust that would ensure the existence of an Israeli state in Palestine—whatever “the rights of the Arab population.” By 1938, George Antonius was saying quite clearly that “the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, or of a national home based on territorial sovereignty, cannot be accomplished without forcibly displacing the Arabs . . .” Antonius wanted an independent Arab state “in which as many Jews as the country can hold without prejudice to its political and economic freedom would live in peace, security and dignity, and enjoy full rights of citizenship.” Fearing “an unpredictable holocaust of Arab, Jewish and British lives,” help for the Jews of Europe, he said, must be sought elsewhere than in Palestine:
The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilisation; but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate Jewish suffering and distress. To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilised world. It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another. The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland; and the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population.
It is astonishing that such remarks—so prescient in view of the Palestinian disaster a decade later—could have been written in 1938. Yet there were others who foresaw future disaster in equally bleak terms. Only a year earlier, but reflecting upon the future, Winston Churchill had written of the impossibility of a partitioned Palestine and had written—far more prophetically—of how:
the wealthy, crowded, progressive Jewish State lies in the plains, and on the sea coasts [of Palestine]. Around it, in the hills and the uplands, stretching far and wide into the illimitable deserts, the warlike Arabs of Syria, of Transjordania, of Arabia, backed by the armed forces of Iraq, offer the ceaseless menace of war . . . To maintain itself, the Jewish State must be armed to the teeth, and must bring in every able-bodied man to strengthen its army. But how long would this process be allowed to continue by the great Arab populations in Iraq and Palestine? Can it be expected that the Arabs would stand by impassively and watch the building up with Jewish world capital and resources of a Jewish army equipped with the most deadly weapons of war, until it was strong enough not to be afraid of them? And if ever the Jewish army reached that point, who can be sure that, cramped within their narrow limits, they would not plunge out into the new undeveloped lands that lie around them?
If Palestine should be partitioned, Churchill concluded, “I find it difficult . . . to resist the conclusion that the . . . [partition] scheme would lead inevitably to the complete evacuation of Palestine by Great Britain.” And so, as they say, it came to pass.
John Bagot Glubb, commanding the Arab Legion from 1939, would comment movingly that “the Jewish tragedy owed its origin to the Christian nations of Europe and America. At last the conscience of Christendom was awake. The age-long Jewish tragedy must cease. But when it came to the payment of compensation in expiation of their past shortcomings, the Christian nations of Europe and America decided that the bill should be paid by a Muslim nation in Asia.”
Antonius would have had the world settle Jewish refugees in countries other than Palestine—we know that the British considered Uganda—while we also know that prewar Zionist committees were contemplating the “transfer”—ethnic cleansing—of Palestine’s Arabs to, among other locations, the Djezaira area of Syria, the very deserts around Deir es-Zour and Aleppo in which the Armenian deportees “had ended their miserable existences” twenty years earlier. It was in this atmosphere of suspicion, paranoia and immense suffering that the Arabs and Jews watched the Second World War overwhelm Europe, the former fearful that Britain would eventually sanction an Israeli state on their lands, the latter observing the annihilation of their race in Europe while the British sought to block even those few Jewish refugee ships that made a run for the Promised Land. This was the world in which Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti, set off to Germany and urged Hitler to end Jewish emigration to Palestine. But at what cost?
HERE THE MORAL COMPASS begins to spin at ever-increasing speed. Why did the Palestinians have to bear the fate of Britain’s First World War promise to a people whose ancestors lived on their land two thousand years before? Why did this new flood of Muslim refugees have to pay this price, then—like the Armenians—be told that they were the aggressors, and those who dispossessed them the victims? For in the decades to come, the Palestinians would be the “terrorists” and those who took their lands would be the innocent, the representatives of a Phoenix nation rising from the ashes of Auschwitz. In the eyes of the world—especially in 1948, in a world grown weary of war and familiar with the millions of refugees who had washed across Europe—what was the lot of 750,000 Palestinian refugees when measured against the murder of 6 million Jews?
It is April 2002, a bright spring morning in west Jerusalem, and I am in the small, neat apartment where Josef Kleinman and his wife, Haya, live in what might seem—if we did not know its historical significance—to be just another tree-stroked suburb. Kleinman is excited, an instantly generous man who, asked to tell about the blackest days of his life, leaps from his chair like a tiger. “I will show you my museum,” he says, and scampers into a back room.
He returns with a faded old khaki knapsack. “This is the shirt the Americans gave me after I was freed from Landsberg on April twenty-seventh, 1945.” It is a crumpled, cheap chequered shirt whose label is now illegible. Then he takes out a smock of blue-and-white stripes and a hat with the same stripes running from front to back. “This is my uniform as a prisoner of Dachau,” he says. Familiar from every 1945 newsreel, from Schindler’s List and from a hundred other Holocaust movies, it is a shock to touch—to hold—this symbol of a people’s destruction. Josef Kleinman watches me as I hold the smock. He understands the shock. I am thinking: this was in Dachau. This was produced by the Nazis. This is part of the real, dysentery-soaked, cyanide-gassed history of extermination, every bit as much a witness to inhumanity as those Armenian bones that Isabel Ellsen and I had keyed out of the Syrian mud ten years ago. In the newsreels, the concentration-camp smocks are black and white, but the actual mass murder of the Jews of Europe was performed in colour. Blue and white. The same colours as the Israeli flag. On the front of the smock is the number 114986.
Down in the entrance to Kleinman’s block of flats, there are flyers reminding tenants of the forthcoming Holocaust Day. Givat Shaul is a friendly, bright neighbourhood of retired couples, small shops, flats, trees and some elegant old houses of yellow stone. Some of the latter are in a state of dilapidation, a few are homes. But one or two bear the scars of bullets fired long ago, on 9 April 1948, when another people faced their own catastrophe. For Givat Shaul used to be Deir Yassin. And here it was, fifty-four years ago, that up to 130 Palestinians were massacred by two Jewish militias, the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang, as the Jews of Palestine fought for the independence of a state called Israel. The slaughter so terrified tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs that they fled their homes en masse—just a few of the 750,000—to create the refugee population whose vale of sorrow lies at the heart of the Israeli–Palestinian war.
Back in 1948, around the old houses that still exist close to the Kleinmans’ home, Palestinian women were torn to pieces by grenades thrown by Jewish fighters. Two truckloads of Arab prisoners were taken from the village and paraded through the streets of Jerusalem. Later, many of them would be taken back to Deir Yassin and executed. Their mass grave is believed to lie beneath a fuel-storage depot that now stands at one end of the Jerusalem suburb. So a visit to the Kleinman home raises an unusual moral question. Can one listen to his personal testimony of the greatest crime in modern history and then ask about the slaughter that cut down the Palestinians at this very spot, when the eviction of the Arabs of Palestine, terrible though it was, comes nowhere near, statistically or morally, the murder of 6 million Jews? Does Josef Kleinman even know that this year, by another of those awful ironies of history, Holocaust Day and Deir Yassin Day fall on the same date?
Josef Kleinman is no ordinary Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the youngest survivor of Auschwitz and he testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, head of the special “Jewish Section” of the SS, who ran the Nazi programme to murder the Jews of Europe. Josef Kleinman even saw Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” who chose children, women, the old and the sick for the gas chambers. At the age of just fourteen, he watched one day as Mengele arrived on a bicycle and ordered a boy to hammer a plank of wood to a post. Here is part of Kleinman’s testimony at the Eichmann trial:
We weren’t told what was to happen. We knew. The boys who couldn’t pass under the plank would be spared. Those boys whose heads did not reach the plank would be sent to the gas chambers. We all tried to stretch ourselves upwards, to make ourselves taller. But I gave up. I saw that taller boys than me failed to touch the plank with their heads. My brother asked me: “Do you want to live? Yes? Then do something.” My head began to work. I saw some stones. I put them in my shoes, and this made me taller. But I couldn’t stand at attention on the stones. They were killing me.
Josef Kleinman’s brother, Shlomo, tore his hat in half and Josef stuffed part of it into his shoes. He was still too short. But he managed to infiltrate the group who had passed the test. The remainder of the boys—a thousand in all—were gassed. Mengele, Josef Kleinman remembers, chose Jewish holidays for the mass killing of Jewish children. Kleinman’s parents, Meir and Rachel, and his sister had been sent directly to the gas chambers when they arrived at Auschwitz from the Carpathian mountains, in what is now the Ukraine. He survived, along with his brother—who today, a carpenter like Josef, lives a few hundred metres away in the same suburb of Givat Shaul/Deir Yassin. Josef Kleinman also survived Dachau and the gruelling labour of building a massive bunker for Hitler’s secret factory, constructed for the production of Germany’s new Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter aircraft.
After his liberation by the Americans, Kleinman made his way to Italy and then to a small boat that put him aboard a ship for Palestine, carrying illegal Jewish immigrants who were to try to enter the territory of the dying British Mandate. He could carry only a few possessions. He chose to put his Dachau uniform in his bag—he would not forget what had happened to him. Turned back by the British, he spent six months in the Famagusta camp on Cyprus, eventually ending up in an immigrants’ camp at Atlit in Palestine. He arrived in Jerusalem on 15 March 1947, and was there when Israel’s war of independence broke out. He fought in that war—but not at Deir Yassin. I mention the name, almost in passing. But both Josef Kleinman and Haya nod at once.
“There are things which have been written that were wrong about Deir Yassin,” he said. “I was in Jerusalem and I saw the two truckloads of prisoners that came from here. Some reports say Arabs were killed, others that they were not. Not all the people were killed. There is much propaganda. I do not know. The Arabs killed their Jewish prisoners. There didn’t have to be much fighting for the Arabs to leave.”
But when he saw those Arabs leaving, did they not, for Josef Kleinman, provide any kind of parallel—however faint, given the numerically far greater and infinitely bloodier disaster that overtook the Jews—of his own life? He thinks about this for a while. He did not see many Arab refugees, he said. It was his wife, Haya, who replied. “I think that after what happened to him—which was so dreadful—that everything else in the world seemed less important. You have to understand that Josef lives in that time, in the time of the Shoah. Of the twenty-nine thousand Jews brought to Dachau from other camps, most of them from Auschwitz, fifteen thousand died.”
But is it just about the enormity of one crime and its statistical comparison to the exodus of Palestinians in 1948? A group of Jews, Muslims and Christians have long been campaigning for Deir Yassin to be remembered—even now, at the height of the latest Palestine war. As one of the organisers put it, “Many Jews may not want to look at this, fearing that the magnitude of their tragedy may be diminished. For Palestinians there is always the fear that, as often before, the Holocaust may be used to justify their own suffering.” The Kleinmans do not know of this commemoration—nor of the organisation’s plans for a memorial to the Palestinian dead not far from their home in the suburb of Givat Shaul. Josef Kleinman won’t talk about the bloodbath in Israel and Palestine that continues while we are talking. But he admits he’s “on the right” in politics and voted for Ariel Sharon at the last Israeli election. “Is there any other man?” he asks.
Yet Josef Kleinman’s memory of Deir Yassin is imperfect. Red Cross records and the dispatches of foreign correspondents of the time make it quite clear that the villagers of Deir Yassin were murdered and that some of the women were disembowelled. All over that part of Mandate Palestine which was to become Israel, there were little massacres—sometimes initiated by the Arabs, more frequently by Jewish fighters who were transmogrifying into the Israeli army as the war progressed—and just one small and tragic story gives an idea of what happened during the dispossession of Palestinians.
It is the year 2000 and I am in a rain-soaked village in southern Lebanon, a place of poverty and broken roads called Shabriqa. And eighty-five-year-old Nimr Aoun rolls up his trouser leg to show the twisted ligament and muscle where an Israeli bullet tore into him fifty-two years earlier. Aoun’s story is a tale of two betrayals, because he was a victim not only of the Israelis but of the two Mandate powers—Britain and France—who were supposed, in the aftermath of the First World War, to protect him. He comes from a village called Salha—now 2 kilometres inside Israel on the other side of the Lebanese frontier—and was the only survivor of an Israeli massacre of the male villagers.
The story of Salha and six other villages—En-Naame, Ez-Zouk, Tarchiha, El-Khalsa, El-Kitiyeh and Lakhas—goes back to 1923, when the British ruled Palestine and the French ruled the newly formed state of Lebanon. The two imperial powers were doing a little frontier-changing for their own ends and Paris decided to cede to London a few square miles of Lebanon—the British Mandate of Palestine was moved slightly north to take in the seven villages. A grubby deal lay behind this transaction. Old records in Beirut show that the land was handed over in exchange for a contract granted to a French company to drain marshland in the region for commercial use. At the time, it was called—I preferred not to tell old Nimr Aoun this—“the Good Neighbourhood” agreement. And it doomed every villager.
Nimr Aoun was no longer a Lebanese under the French Mandate. He was now a Palestinian under the British Mandate—although neither the Aoun family nor any of the other villagers were consulted about the matter. Anyway, Aoun remembers the British fondly. He was a farmer who married a girl of thirteen, and had nine children, living amid the cornfields of Salha. But his voice rises in pitch when he comes to 1948, the British departure and the arrival of the Jewish army outside the village. “They showered us with leaflets saying that, if we surrendered, we would be spared,” he says. “The women and children had already fled. So we believed the leaflets and surrendered. But the Israelis had lied. They cursed us and made seventy of us stand together.”
What happens next is confirmed in Israeli archives. The historian Benny Morris writes that in an Israeli attack called “Operation Hiram,” after “light resistance” by Arabs near Salha, ninety-four of the villagers were blown up in a house on 30 October 1948. Nimr Aoun has a different version of events, but one given veracity by his scars:
When we were all standing together, they opened fire on us. There were thirteen tanks all round the area. We had no chance. What helped me was that after I was shot in the leg, I fell under piles of bodies. They were on top of me and most of the bullets were hitting my friends. I was bleeding so much, I felt nothing. When night came, I pulled my way out and crawled past one of the tanks and then through long grass until I found a donkey.
Nimr Aoun heaved himself onto the animal’s back and rode painfully north to the Lebanese village of Maroun, where he was given medical treatment. A government official prevented doctors from amputating his leg, which is why Nimr Aoun can still hobble around his home at Shabriqa, 40 kilometres from the site of the once-Lebanese village of Salha in which only a long low building survives today. Most of the land is now covered by Israeli apple orchards.
Until 1998, Nimr Aoun and the other few survivors from the “seven villages” of 1948 were treated as Palestinians with Palestinian documents. Then the Lebanese government—not immune to the political advantages of such an act— awarded them all Lebanese citizenship. Aoun produced for me his new Lebanese identity card, the image of a cedar tree close to his passport picture. He started life as a citizen of the Ottoman empire, became a Lebanese under the French, turned into a Palestinian under the British, became a Palestinian refugee from Israel and, at the very end of his life, was Lebanese once more.
My files on the last years of the British Mandate are packed with letters from British army veterans, interviews with former Jewish and Arab fighters, along with hundreds of contemporary newspaper clippings. It is a story of anarchy and pain and—to use Israel’s current use of the word—“terrorist” attacks and bombings, most of them by the Jewish Haganah and Irgun and Stern gangs. A British Colonial Office pamphlet of 1946 reads like an account of the first year’s Iraqi uprising against American occupation in 2003: attacks on road and rail bridges, the kidnapping of British officers and clandestine radio stations broadcasting propaganda for the insurgents. “The action of blowing up the bridges expressed the high morale and courage of the Jewish fighters who carried out the attack,” the document reports Kol Israel as broadcasting on 18 June 1946.
Undisciplined British army raids—against Arabs as well as Jews—provoked ruthless revenge operations. The bombing of British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Irgun on 22 July 1946, killing ninety-one British, Jewish and Arab civil servants, was only the most infamous of the assaults carried out against the occupying power. British soldiers opened fire on civilians in the streets of Tel Aviv and when—after the British went ahead with the hanging of three Jewish Irgun fighters—the Irgun hanged two British army hostages, there were anti-Semitic attacks across Britain. Intelligence Corps Sergeants Mervyn Paice and Clifford Martin spent days hidden underground by their captors in the city of Netanya while the Irgun repeatedly threatened their execution. Paice’s father wrote a pleading letter to the Irgun leader Menachem Begin—later, the prime minister of Israel who would order the brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982—just as the relatives of Western hostages would appeal to Iraqi kidnappers in 2003 and 2004. I possess a photocopy of a statement from the “Court of the Irgun Zvai Leumi in Palestine” which was found pinned to the chests of the two men after they had been murdered. It says that the “court” found Paice and Martin guilty of “(a) illegal entry into our homeland. (b) Belonging to a British Terrorist Criminal Organisation known as the British Military Occupation Forces . . . the judgement was carried out on 30th July 1947. The hanging of the two spies . . . is an ordinary legal action of a court of the Underground which has sentenced and will sentence the criminals who belong to the criminal Nazi-British Army of Occupation.”
Attached to this document is a British Palestine Police report on the finding of the bodies of the two sergeants in a eucalyptus grove:
They were hanging from two eucalyptus trees about five yards apart. Their faces were heavily bandaged so it was impossible to distinguish their features . . . Their bodies were a dull black colour and blood had run down their chests which made it appear at first that they had been shot . . . the press were allowed to take photographs of the spectacle. When this had been done, it was decided to cut down the bodies. The RE [Royal Engineers] captain and CSM [colour sergeant major] lopped the branches off the tree which held the right hand body, and started to cut the hang rope with a saw . . . As the body fell to the ground, there was a large explosion . . . The two trees had been completely blown up and their [sic] were large craters where the roots had been. One body was found horribly mangled about twenty yards away . . . The other body had disintegrated, and small pieces were picked up as much as 200 yards away.
The Irgun published tracts in poor English, urging British soldiers that if they wished to stay in Palestine, the best way to do so would be to “risk your life every day so that the [British] Government may have ten more years to make up its mind to claar [sic] out of Palestine.” The British broke many of the rules of war. A British member of the Palestine Police was to describe how, when British soldiers travelled on the railway line from Lydda, “we usually had a gangers’ trolley preceding us with several prisoners on board—for them to enjoy the explosion of mines laid along the line.”
There is a fierce irony in all this. Israel came into being after a classic colonial guerrilla war against an occupation army; yet within fifty years, Israel’s own army—now itself the occupation force—would be fighting an equally classic anti-colonial guerrilla war in the West Bank and Gaza. The connection, however, often seems lost on the Israeli government. On 6 November 1944, Jewish gunmen assassinated Lord Moyne, the British minister-resident in Cairo, a former colonial secretary and close friend of Churchill. Moyne, who had favoured partition in Palestine, had upset Palestinian Jews because in 1942 he had urged the Turks to turn back the Struma, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from the Holocaust;80 he had also made a number of racist remarks about Jews, although few could argue with his observation that “the Arabs, who have lived and buried their dead for fifty generations in Palestine, will not willingly surrender their land and self-government to the Jews.”
Moyne’s murder prompted Churchill to reflect that “if our dreams for Zionism should be dissolved in the smoke of the revolvers of assassins and if our efforts for its future should provoke a new wave of banditry worthy of the Nazi Germans, many persons like myself will have to reconsider the position that we have maintained so firmly for such a long time.” Yet in 1975 the two murderers, Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet Zuri, were given a state funeral in Israel with a public lying-in-state attended by the prime minister and a military funeral attended by the deputy prime minister and two chief rabbis. Moyne’s son was to ask former Haganah officer David Hacohen: “Why then did your people murder my father? . . . In the end Palestine was partitioned and you are now consolidating your state on the basis of that partition, yet none of you has been assassinated for accepting this solution.”
This question—of honouring one’s own murderers while condemning the other side’s killers as “terrorists”—is one that lies at the core of so many modern conflicts, yet one that both the Israelis and the Palestinians have failed to understand. Equally, the 1948 war threw up extraordinary portents of other, later, Middle East wars—of events that we regard as causes of present danger but which have clearly been a feature of conflict in the region for longer than we like to imagine.
In 1997, a Palestinian humanitarian group in Scotland decided to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the UN Partition resolution, the end of the British Mandate, the Israeli war of independence and the Palestinian nakba by publishing a day-by-day account of events in Palestine throughout 1948, largely drawn from the pages of the Scotsman—a project that sometimes yielded devastating results. Here, for example, is a dispatch “from a Special Correspondent recently returned from the Middle East,” which appeared in the paper on 13 September 1948:
A new danger to law and order is emerging in the Middle East. It comes from a loosely formed association of Arab terrorist gangs of hot-headed xenophobic young men who have sworn to rid their countries of all Westerners and of course particularly of British and Americans. Open threats have already been made to Europeans living in Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo—oil men mostly—that if they continue to have business relations with the Jews they will be killed . . . The backbone of this new terrorist organisation is provided by young Palestinian Arabs. They have seen their country overrun . . . and have lost everything they possessed—homes, property, money, jobs; they have nothing further to lose. They feel they have been let down by the British and the Americans, by the United Nations, and also, to some extent, by the other Arab countries. They now realise there is a grave danger that the present situation in Palestine, with the Jews in total possession of the best part of the country, will be generally recognised and legalised . . .
Another disturbing light into the future was cast in an article by Patrick O’Donovan which had appeared in The Scotsman on 14 July 1948:
The war [of independence] began as a simple war of survival—or so it seemed to the Jews. There was a set of figures that every little sunburnt child knew by heart—“700,000 Jews against 30 million Arabs plus the support of Britain.” It seemed a victory every time a Jewish settlement survived an attack . . . but the Arabs proved less effective. And the Jewish consent to the continuation of the truce was flouted. (It makes no difference that the consent was certainly given in the knowledge that the Arabs would first refuse.) The Jews have been freed from any obligation to hold their hand. If Count Bernadotte’s81 efforts fail, then the Jews will wage a war which frankly will aim at acquiring a maximum of Arab land, much of which will be retained because it will be empty of Arabs and occupied by Jews . . . In Haifa . . . they have opened a ghetto for the Arabs. Four of the meaner streets have been wired off and, just like the Jews in Medieval Cracow, Christian and Muslim Arabs must sleep and live here under guard. Business men can apply for passes if they wish to emerge during the day . . . it would be hard to visualise a more subdued and frightened population than the Arabs left in Israel . . .
Although the extent of Palestinian dispossession often appears to be a newly discovered fact of Middle East history—at least until “new historians” like Benny Morris researched Israeli government archives of the time—the British press reported the nakba in graphic detail. On 25 October, for instance, The Times reported from Beersheba that:
The Arab villages are deserted, their miserable houses have been looted, and many are burnt. The inhabitants, estimated to be about 20,000— a number which has been swollen considerably by refugees from the north—have fled, and no one knows, or apparently cares, where they have gone. It is obvious that most have fled in panic, leaving behind their cloaks, sheepskins, and blankets so necessary if they are to survive the cold nights of the Hebron hills . . . in Beersheba itself, once a thriving centre for camel trading, a few inhabitants remain, and at present members of the Israeli Army are systematically looting those houses which survived the bombing. It is perhaps an ancient and tacitly accepted rule of war that troops should make themselves comfortable at the expense of the vanquished, but it is difficult to excuse the behaviour of some, who ridicule Islamic devotions in a desecrated mosque . . . holy books have been torn and strewn upon the floor . . . Such a scene is disappointing to those who had gratefully observed the care taken by the Israeli Army to guarantee the sanctity of Christian holy places elsewhere, and by those correspondents who today visited the Imperial war cemetery just outside the town. In spite of the difficulties under which they worked, the Arab caretakers to the last obviously attended the graves of the British and Australian soldiers who died here in 1917, and English flowers are still blooming in desert sands.
Desecration and murder were not tools of one side in this war. When the Israelis captured East Jerusalem in 1967, they discovered that Jordanian troops had used Jewish gravestones for lavatory floors. Ambushes and killings cut down many Jewish civilians, although Israel’s advance into the Arab villages of Galilee was accompanied, as contemporary research in Israel has proved, by massacres and—sometimes—the rape of young Arab women. But if Israeli historians have proved the truth of this, Arab historians have remained largely silent about their own side’s iniquities in this and other wars.
In my book on the Lebanon war, I have written at great length about the Palestinian dispossession of 1948, the subsequent history of those Palestinian homes that were vacated by their fearful inhabitants and the fate of the 750,000 Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants today, many of whom rot in the squalor of camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and in the occupied West Bank and Syria.82 Following their travail, the task of reporting their hopeless political leadership, their victimisation—most cruelly demonstrated when they were turned into the aggressors by an all-powerful Israel and, later, an even more hegemonic United States—and their pathetic, brave and often callous attempts to seek the world’s sympathy has been one of the more depressing experiences in journalism. The more we wrote about the Palestinian dispossession, the less effect it seemed to have and the more we were abused as journalists.
The 1956 Suez war, the 1967 Six Day War—and Nasser’s blind folly in taking on the might of the Israeli army—the 1973 Middle East conflict and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon all further crushed the Palestinians, indirectly and, usually, directly. In 1967 the West Bank and Gaza fell under Israeli occupation, so that Israel at last had the entire former British Mandate of Palestine under its control, the “Palestine” in which Balfour had promised support for a “national home” for the Jews—and Balfour, let us remember, made no mention of how much of Palestine an Israeli state could have. The Arab “friends” of Palestine turned out to be as woeful in their military as they were in their political ambitions. Fighting with numerically overwhelming odds on their side, the Arab armies were repeatedly mauled by the superior firepower, ruthless tactics and morale of the Israelis, an advantage reinforced by every Israeli’s understanding that he or she could never afford to lose a single war. The Egyptian army’s initial success in 1973—Arabs could not at first believe the newsreel film of captured Israeli soldiers on the Bar Lev line—was later lost to Egyptian military indecision. Only the Lebanese Hizballah, with its Iranian and Syrian support, proved that Israel could be beaten. Israel’s military retreat out of its occupation zone in Lebanon in 2000 and the dismantlement of its torture prison at Khiam remains one of the most significant military events in the Arab–Israeli war—although the Israelis, being the losers, have never chosen to regard it as such and the Americans, as their friends, refused to learn its lessons.
For throughout these long years, there was one outstanding, virtually unchanging phenomenon which ensured that the Middle East balance of power remained unchanged: America’s unwavering, largely uncritical, often involuntary support for Israel. Israel’s “security”—or supposed lack thereof—became the yardstick for all negotiations, all military threats and all wars. The injustice done to the Palestinians, the dispossession, the massacres, not only the loss of that part of Palestine which became Israel—and is internationally recognised as such—but also the occupation of the remainder of the Mandate territory and the bloody suppression of any and all manifestation of Palestinian resistance: all this had to take second place to Israel’s security and the civilised values and democracy for which Israel was widely promoted. Her army, which often behaved with cruelty and undiscipline, was to be regarded as an exemplar of “purity of arms” and those of us who witnessed Israel’s killing of civilians were to be abused as liars, anti-Semites or friends of “terrorism.”
Report the wanton use of violence by Palestinians—aircraft hijackings, attacks on illegal Jewish settlements and then, inevitably, suicide bombings on the innocent, the executioner with explosives strapped to his or her body—and that was “terror” pure and simple, dangerously present but comfortably isolated from reason, cause or history. As long as they were accused of crimes that had been committed because they hated Israel or hated Jews or were brought up as anti-Semites (despite being Semites themselves), or paid to carry out “terror,” or because they hated “democracy” or represented “evil”—most of these explanations would later be adopted by the Americans about their Arab enemies—then Palestinians were outside the boundaries of reason. They couldn’t be talked to, could not be negotiated with. You cannot “negotiate with terrorists.”
“Terrorism” is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence— our violence—which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing “commentators” of the American east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting for ever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens. Once he lived in Cairo and sported a moustache and nationalised the Suez Canal. Then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin. Then he wore a Muslim imam’s gown and ate yoghurt in Tehran and planned Islamic revolution. Then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly moustache and resided in a series of palaces around Baghdad. Terror, terror, terror. Finally, he wore a kuffiah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then, again, a master of terror, linked by his Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave.
Here, personified, was everything loyal and everything miserable about the Palestinian dream. I have a tape recording of Arafat, sitting with me on a cold, dark mountainside outside the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli in 1983, where the old man—he was always called the old man, long before he was elderly—was under siege by the Syrian army, another of the Arab “brothers” who wanted to lead the Palestinian cause and ended up fighting Palestinians rather than Israelis. Even worse, the Syrians had suborned some of “their” Palestinians to join them in the siege. Just a year before, Arafat and his PLO had withstood an eighty-eight-day siege in the Lebanese capital of Beirut by the Israeli army, led by Defence Minister Ariel Sharon. Now Arafat’s fortunes have crumbled again. The tape hisses and occasionally, far away, shells thump into a hillside. I play it again, listening to the wind cracking past the microphone:
ARAFAT: I will not be away from my freedom fighters while they are facing death and dangers from death . . . It is my duty to be beside my freedom fighters and my officers and my soldiers.
FISK: A year ago, you and I talked in west Beirut. Here we are on a windy hilltop outside Tripoli, fifty miles further away from the border of Israel, or the border of Palestine, and people within Fatah are rebelling.
ARAFAT: You see, I give you another proof that we are a nut that is not easy to be cracked. I hope that you still remember what Sharon had mentioned in the beginning of his invasion. He was dreaming that within three or five days he would liquidate or smash the PLO, our people, our freedom fighters—and here we are. The siege of Beirut, the battles of the south of Lebanon, this miracle, eighty-eight days, the longest Arab–Israeli war— and after that we have this war of attrition against the Israeli army, not only the Palestinians—definitely—we and our allies—our allies, the Lebanese—are participating in this war of attrition and we are proud— I am proud—that I have this brave alliance.
FISK: Fifty miles further from Palestine!
ARAFAT: What is the difference to be fifty miles or to be fifty thousand miles? One metre outside the border of Palestine, I am far away. FISK: But I think it was Mr. Sartawi83 who once said that if you keep having
victories like last year’s victory in Beirut, you’ll hold your next year’s meeting of the Palestine National Council in Fiji . . .
ARAFAT: Please! Please! Don’t give me this example! He is one of our brave martyrs, a brave martyr. But he was nervous [sic], he was not giving exact expression . . .
Arafat was a dreamer, which was a popular characteristic for Palestinians who had only dreams to give them hope. If compromise was required of him, he could talk to Israelis, even hint at acceptance of the partition of Palestine. “I will accept even one square inch of my land,” he would say; geographic proportion was not his strong point. But if one of the PLO’s more outlandish satellites embarrassed the Palestinians—and the world—by murdering an innocent, Arafat would step in to prevent further tragedy, thus acquiring prestige from the crimes of his own organisation. Nowhere was this better illustrated than in the 1985 voyage of the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise liner from which four teenage members of the “Palestine Liberation Front,” a PLO splinter outfit run by Mohamed Zeidan (Abul Abbas), intended to storm ashore at Haifa when the vessel called at the Israeli port, seize Israeli hostages and demand the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
Discovered by crew members before reaching Israel, the gunmen took over the ship, holding its 476 passengers and 80 crew at their mercy and then coldly murdering a sixty-nine-year-old crippled Jewish pensioner, Leon Klinghoffer, whose body was unceremoniously tipped over the side—still in his wheelchair—off the Syrian coast. Unaware of the murder, Arafat flew to Cairo to assume his usual pose of humanitarian leader. He ordered the hijackers to bring the Achille Lauro to Egypt and the first newspaper reports from Port Said—including my own for the London Times—spoke of how Arafat had played “a major part in bringing about a peaceful conclusion to a crisis which had involved the United States, Syria and Egypt.” By the time the ship, lit up like a Christmas tree under the half-moon, steamed pompously into the Suez Canal before dawn, we all knew what had happened.
Nicholas Veliotes, the American ambassador in Cairo, was emotionally talking to his diplomats about “those sons of bitches” who had murdered Klinghoffer as dawn revealed the big ship following a tiny pilot boat to take station off the colonial stucco offices of the Suez Canal Authority. When other foreign ambassadors emerged from the vessel after visiting their nationals among the passengers, the full story was revealed. “This American man was on the deck,” the Austrian ambassador, Franz Bogan, told us. “I don’t know why he was there. He was in a wheelchair. It was night. The captain told me that when he heard the shots, he leaned over the side of the bridge and saw one of the terrorists with blood on his clothes.”
Then the sun rose across the canal and revealed a dark slick of what appeared to be paint down the side of the superstructure just below “A” deck: it was Leon Klinghoffer’s blood, sprayed across the side of the ship as the murdered old man was pushed overboard. Egypt put the hijackers, along with Abul Abbas, aboard an Egyptair Boeing and flew them out of a military base near Cairo en route to Tunis, where the PLO maintained its headquarters. But the Americans in turn hijacked the plane—“air piracy,” President Mubarak of Egypt angrily called what turned out to be another of Colonel Oliver North’s doomed adventures—and forced it to land at a NATO airfield in Italy. Here armed Italian troops at gunpoint prevented U.S. forces seizing the Palestinians; Abul Abbas was passed on to Yugoslavia. His later story was as intriguing as it was deadly. Ritually forgiven by the Israelis, he was allowed into Gaza after the 1993 Oslo agreement as a mini-statesman to vote in Palestinian elections but—ten years later—was living in Baghdad, where he was seized by U.S. troops who claimed, of course, that they had arrested “a major terrorist leader.” Months later, the Americans would admit, without any apology, that he had “died of natural causes” in their custody in Iraq.
Less than three years after the Achille Lauro fiasco, Yassir Arafat was turning up in Strasbourg to address socialist members of the European parliament. The local daily paper was asking—like the pro-Israeli demonstrators outside—when Arafat intended to “give up terrorism”—as if “terrorism” was a health complaint, like alcoholism. What was significant, however, was that within twenty-four hours the same paper was talking about Arafat’s “triumph.” Instead of being pilloried on his first visit to Strasbourg, the PLO leader was lionised. He had called for peace with Israel. He had conveyed Israel’s Jews greetings on the occasion of the Jewish new year—and he had done this not in Arabic but in Hebrew. He wanted a state in the West Bank and Gaza—this, remember, was September 1988, and he thought that being a friendly “ex-terrorist” would help his cause.
I cornered Arafat later—his eyes would always follow me like a wolf when I prowled up to ask a question—and when I asked him if any Palestinian refugee would be allowed to live in a West Bank state, any one of the 5 million Palestinians whose families originally came from that part of Palestine that is now Israel, he was not amused. Every Palestinian could have a passport, he told me lamely. Yes, but could they live in a new Palestinian state? “At least they can be buried there,” Arafat replied. It was an unfortunate answer, as his aides immediately realised. Sitting to his left, they immediately interrupted the PLO leader—but Arafat repeated his earlier, unwise reply: “At least Palestinians can be buried in Palestine.”
But could any Palestinian go and live in Palestine? I repeated again. Palestinians were interested, surely, in living in Palestine, not in dying there. What use was the land to them if they could only touch it when it became their grave? I tried a fourth time. Could the Palestinian diaspora go and live in Arafat’s West Bank state? There was muttered conversation with his aides. “Definite,” he boomed out. “It is his [ sic] right.” Which was both the correct reply and the wrong reply. Correct because it should be the right of any Palestinian to live in his or her country. Wrong because Arafat would never permit the millions of the Palestinian diaspora to enter the West Bank. The population of “Palestine” would then outnumber Israel—and this the Israelis would never allow. Nor, therefore, could Arafat. By December 1988, he was accepting the partition of Palestine. This was not how he presented his case to the United Nations special session in Geneva. To this august body—and especially to the Americans—he was accepting the existence of the state of Israel. But in his speech to the UN and at his press conference afterwards, he effectively renounced any idea of returning to the borders of Mandate Palestine. The land that now belonged to Israel would remain Israel’s, despite the three-quarters of a million Palestinians who had fled their homes there.
Then came Arafat’s classic and characteristic error: his support of Saddam Hussein after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. It was a decision taken in a moment of emotion rather than reason. Saddam, the hero of the Iran–Iraq War, he who had held the line against the Persian horde, he who was not afraid to fire his missiles at Israel: was this not a worthy partner in the cause of Palestinian statehood? Arab historians may one day question whether their leaders should use emotion less and reason rather more when deciding the fate of their people. Western leaders have veered wildly between the two, coldly advancing their imperial designs on the collapse of the Ottoman empire, cruelly calculating when they planned to invade Suez, pragmatic when they decided to liberate Kuwait, trapped by politics and guilt in their support for Israel, insanely emotional when they invaded Iraq. Arafat was emotional. He represented a people who had been dispossessed and occupied for more than four decades yet who were still portrayed in America—and in the media in general—as dangerous, mindless “terrorists,” a “threat” to the nation which had taken their homes and property and, since 1967, had occupied every square metre of their land.
But his greatest error, his support for Saddam, was to give him his greatest and hollowest victory. Financially cut off by the wealthiest Gulf Arab states— especially Kuwait itself—and derided by the world, Arafat shared the fate of King Hussein of Jordan: he was now weak enough to be accepted as a “peace partner” by Israel. The Palestinians were not at first allowed to represent themselves. President George Bush Senior’s Middle East “peace” was to permit the Palestinians to attend the Madrid Middle East conference only as part of a Jordanian delegation, a delegation moreover in which Arafat was very definitely not invited to participate. But in October 1991, the Arabs and the Israelis—the latter, under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, with considerable reluctance—did gather in the Spanish capital under the auspices of Bush’s “new world order.” Not that anyone wanted to wield the cane.
It was George Bush Senior’s right hand, slicing downwards in that familiar, supposedly decisive gesture of resolution, which defined a critical moment in the narrative of Middle East “peace.” “Let them sort it out,” he pleaded, “. . . we’re not here to impose a settlement.” Less than twenty-four hours before he was to enter the eighteenth-century folly of the Palacio Real for the opening of the conference, here was the American president breezily handing responsibility for the future to the peoples who inhabit what in Bush-speak was now repeatedly called “that troubled corner of the world.”
Those who wished to revisit history, of course, remembered another palace and another peace conference in which victors had shared out the spoils of the conquered. The Palacio Real in Madrid was not Versailles, but there were some distinct parallels. Mikhail Gorbachev was there, the “loser” in the Cold War, a smiling, compliant figure, agreeing demurely with all of the American president’s remarks. It was the future of Gorbachev’s former Arab allies that would be under discussion in this Bourbon mansion.
No one could dispute the difference in scale. More than 10,000 delegates attended the Paris peace conference of 1919. Armenia, the most bloody of victims, had forty independent delegations. King Feisal even supported the Zionist cause— and the Zionists wanted a nation that stretched deep into what is now southern Lebanon. In Madrid more than seventy years later, the delegates were fewer, the public larger. Six thousand journalists and television crew members arrived in Madrid, most of whom would not see Messrs. Bush, Gorbachev and the Middle East luminaries in the flesh. They would sit instead in a hen-coop auditorium and watch the peacemakers on giant television screens, the bleak equivalent of William Orpen’s final portrait of Lloyd George and Clemenceau in the Versailles Hall of Mirrors.
At least the nations of the Middle East were represented in Madrid. From Paris, Feisal had been taken on a tour of the 1914–18 war battlefields and then briskly betrayed by the British and French. The Zionists had to wait twenty-nine years for the Balfour Declaration to be honoured. But Woodrow Wilson—while in Paris—had stuck to his Fourteen Points. American diplomats in Madrid, however, noted George Bush’s refusal to comment on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which called for Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab land and which, for the Arabs, were the touchstone of any peace treaty. He would not talk of “land for peace,” nor would the obedient Mikhail Gorbachev. The man who in 1990–91 sent half a million soldiers to enforce a UN Security Council Resolution—which called for another Middle East army, Iraq’s, to withdraw from another occupied Arab land, that of Kuwait—felt able to dismiss the darkness of history. “It’s not my intention to go back to years of differences,” was what Bush said.84 For the Americans, the present was the future; for the Arabs and Israelis, the present was also the past. It was they rather than the Americans who recalled that Jews and Muslims once lived together in peace in Spain. The Palacio Real was built on the site of a castle that the Arabs constructed to protect Toledo.
At least the delegations in Madrid all agreed about God. President Bush had publicly sought His assistance at the start of the conference. Prime Minister Shamir of Israel credited Judaism with the belief in one God. Foreign Minister Abu Jaber of Jordan reminded the conference that God had “created mankind as tribes so that they may know each other.” Haidar Abdul Shafi of Palestine invoked God the most merciful, the most compassionate. “May God guide our steps and inspire us,” prayed Foreign Minister Farez Bouiez of Lebanon. God was about the only personality who received a clean bill of health at the start of the Madrid peace conference.
The English language, in which most of the conference delegates chose to speak, did not. If clichés could produce peace, the last shots would already have been fired in the Middle East. The pursuit of peace was “relentless” (Shamir), the “shackles of hatred” had to disappear (Abu Jaber), there was “light at the end of the tunnel” (Abdul Shafi), a “new dawn” (Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa) that would emerge from “a long night of darkness” (Abu Jaber again). The quotations were almost a relief: the Koran and Albert Einstein, the Prophet Isaiah and Yassir Arafat, Mark Twain, the Jewish philosopher Yehuda Halevy and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish were all recited with approval by the appropriate delegates. The creator of Huckleberry Finn was enlisted by Shamir to prove that Palestine was a wilderness before Israel’s existence, Darwish’s poetry to explain why a Palestinian homeland could no longer be represented by a refugee’s suitcase. Noble ideals were brandished like knives: “human rights,” “freedom,” “justice,” “peace,” “reconciliation,” “the integrity of nations,” “international legitimacy.”
At times, it seemed as if degrees of suffering rather than legitimacy were supposed to deliver peace. Shamir recalled the expulsion of the Jews (but not the Muslims) from Spain, and the Jewish Holocaust. The Arabs acknowledged the sins of Nazi Germany but asked why they should pay the price for them. The Palestinian exodus of 1948 and 1967 and the grief of occupation obsessed Abdul Shafi. Lebanon’s sixteen years of civil war and two Israeli invasions were recalled by Bouiez. There was, too, a kind of equilibrium of omission. Shamir wanted to know why the Arabs had ignored UN Resolution 181 which provided for a state called Israel.85 Abu Jaber demanded Israel’s adherence to Resolution 242. But beneath the substratum of rhetoric, another imbalance appeared. The Arabs wanted their land back and then they wanted peace with Israel. The Israelis wanted peace but wanted to keep some of the Arab land. Talk of territory would be “the quickest way to an impasse,” said Shamir. But when Abdul Shafi referred to Israel’s “dream of expansion,” the fingers of Shamir’s left hand drummed on the table.
The 1st of November 1991 became Madrid’s day of rage. The mullahs in Tehran, who that very week had organised their own “day of rage” against the Middle East talks in Madrid, must have loved it. Saddam Hussein may have been tempted to uncork a magnum. For inside the banqueting hall of the Palacio Real, the last day of the first session of the peace conference was little more than a disgrace. Had I not been there, I would never have understood the nature of the venom that the Arabs and Israelis displayed towards each other. It was not so much the mutual accusations of “terrorism” that created so shameful a spectacle. It was not the extraordinary decision of the Israeli prime minister to stomp out after making the first speech because, he claimed, he wanted to return to Israel by the Sabbath. Nor was it even the Syrian foreign minister’s decision to brandish an old British Mandate poster of a young Jewish “terrorist” called Yitzhak Shamir. It was because the Israelis and Arabs used the peace conference to talk about war.
Shamir accused the Syrians of hijacking aircraft, murdering civilians and subjecting their Jewish community to a life of “perpetual terror.” The Palestinians, he said, had a leader “who collaborated with the Nazis for the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust”—even Haj Amin al-Husseini, it seemed, had a place at the Madrid conference table—while Farouk al-Sharaa accused Shamir of lying and Israel of hijacking and shooting down civilian airliners. Then up came the old poster of “terrorist” Shamir. “He is 32 years old,” al-Sharaa quoted from the British wanted poster. “He is 1.65 metres tall . . .” Arabs and Israelis alike sat transfixed, perspiration condensing on their faces under the television lamps. There was something mesmeric about this fixation with the Middle East’s murderous history. “1.65 metres,” one kept thinking. So Shamir was over five feet tall when he was thirty-two years old. Not 1.64 metres, mind you. Al-Sharaa wanted to be precise.
U.S. secretary of state James Baker suggested they were merely posturing for the cameras. They were not. Watching the faces at the T-shaped table—sullen, watchful, suspicious, occasionally images of suppressed fury—it was clear that they really hated each other. Had automatic weapons been available to the delegates, there might have been a rush for the doors. Around the walls of the banqueting hall, arrogant busts of the great Caesars stared down with marble implacability at this lamentable failure of spirit. Shamir had already left, of course. A Jew is allowed to break the Sabbath if human life is at stake but he had chosen to depart the conference—negotiations that might save countless lives—without listening to the other delegates. However sincere his reasons, it was as if Shamir had excused himself for a dentist’s appointment. “Friday is a holy day for us,” Abdul Shafi reminded the Israeli with dignity. “But we chose to stay in this conference today rather than go to our religious rites.”
Syria’s criticism of Israel, Shamir had said earlier, “stretches incredulity to infinite proportions.” How dare al-Sharaa condemn Israel’s human rights record when Syria was “one of the most oppressive regimes in the world”? “Lies,” responded al-Sharaa. Israel’s accusations were “a total forgery.” The Israelis had murdered the first UN negotiator to arrive in the region, he said. Maybe all of us journalists, I began to wonder, will in future have to arrive at peace conferences with a “fact kit.” Yes, it will inform us, the Jews of Syria were not all free to leave the country—and were treated badly under previous regimes—but they are free to practise their religion today. Yes, the Israelis did shoot down a Libyan civilian airliner after it strayed into Israeli airspace. Yes, the Israelis forced a civilian airliner carrying Syrian government officials to land at Tel Aviv. Yes, Syria has an atrocious human rights record. Yes, Shamir and his colleages in the Jewish Stern and Irgun gangs murdered civilians. Yes, a Jewish hit squad murdered Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948. Yes, Haj Amin al-Husseini encouraged Hitler and Himmler to prevent Jewish emigration to Palestine and thus probably helped to doom thousands of European Jews.
But this was supposed to be a peace conference, a place of compromise, not a murder trial. Abdul Shafi emerged with credit, still pleading for an end to Jewish settlements, accepting Israel’s need for security, insisting that “it is the solution that brings about peace, not the other way round.” Egyptian foreign minister Amr Moussa besought delegates to avoid “passionate speeches” and condemned Shamir’s “wild dreams of expansion.” Yet it was a sorry enough affair, and the response to it was deeply inadequate.
Officially, the Madrid peace conference was meeting under the auspices of the United States, the Soviet Union—hence Gorbachev’s presence—and the United Nations. But in the auditorium beside the palace, there was no doubt who was running the show. The Americans had a bank of offices manned by hundreds of State Department officials. The United Nations had two offices, a bunch of bureaucrats and a fax machine. The Russians had one office, three officials and no fax machine. Shamir would later admit that his sole intention at Madrid was to prevaricate. Real work—real proposals for peace—was put together by the Arabs in the luxury hotels to which they had been appointed around Madrid.
Syria, for example, had drawn up an eleven-point plan for the Middle East which demanded a comprehensive and total Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab lands but which also accepted a demilitarised zone on both sides of the Israeli–Syrian frontier and the continued existence of an unspecified number of Jewish settlers under Arab sovereignty in a “liberated” Palestinian West Bank. In other words, Syria, which lost the Golan Heights in 1967 and was always portrayed as the most intransigent of the Arab “confrontation” states, was even at this early stage prepared to contemplate the maintenance of some Jewish settlements on Arab land. The plan, which represented Syria’s maximum demands, followed a confidential letter of assurance to President Hafez Assad from Secretary of State Baker in which, according to the Syrians, the United States refused to accept the Israeli annexation of Golan, its annexation of East Jerusalem or the legality of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.
The Syrian proposals, which tolerated no deviation from UN Security Council resolutions 242, 338 and 425,86 were drawn up after Baker had visited Damascus to talk to Assad. The Syrian president told Baker that UN resolutions were not “up for discussion” but had to be implemented in full, adding that “if you had let Iraq discuss the implementation of UN resolutions, the Iraqi army would still be occupying Kuwait.” Assad’s all-or-nothing approach to Israeli withdrawal was also influenced by America’s separate “letter of assurance” to the Lebanese government which, again according to the Syrians, might allow Israel to stage its withdrawal from Lebanon, claim it had given “land for peace,” and then refuse to give up Golan, the West Bank and Gaza. If any UN resolutions were dropped, Assad told his delegation, he would regard Madrid as “null and void.”
While not suggesting that all Jewish settlements could stay on the West Bank, Syria was prepared to contemplate Jewish residents in the territory who could have free passage to and from Israel but who would not be permitted to fly the Israeli flag over their settlements and who would have to accept Arab sovereignty. “If the Israelis refuse to accept this,” al-Sharaa said to me privately, “then we could demand Arab flags and sovereignty over Israeli Arab villages inside Israel.” But the Syrians could also be uncompromising. They would not accept what the Americans called “confidence-building measures”—the presence of military observers, an end to propaganda campaigns—before the start of Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab land. There would be no end to the Arab economic boycott of Israel and no agreements on water resources until the Israelis had undertaken “a comprehensive withdrawal from occupied territories.”
In their private discussions with the Americans, the Syrians had also insisted that they would negotiate on the Palestinian question as well as on Golan in order to prevent the Israelis exploiting what Damascus feared was the weakest Arab team at the conference, the joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation. The Palestinian right to “self-determination”—the all-important phrase that implied future statehood—must be “in association” with Jordan rather than “within Jordan.” The Syrians said a private letter from Baker to Assad also refused to recognise the Israeli expansion of Jerusalem’s administrative area. All Jewish settlements built around East Jerusalem since 1967—which the Israelis now claimed were part of the city (and thus part of Israel)—would be regarded as part of the West Bank, where the United States regards settlements as illegal. East Jerusalem itself must revert to Arab sovereignty but the Syrians would be willing to study “administrative procedures” which would allow all religions—including, of course, Israeli Jews— access to the Holy City. Syria believed that 60 per cent of Israel’s water resources came from the West Bank, Golan and southern Lebanon—which is why Assad wanted the Israelis to negotiate with the Arabs as equal partners in talks only after a military settlement—when Israel would no longer be able to make unacceptable demands.
Behind the Palestinians on the joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation, of course, Arafat’s leadership was not hard to discern. Though banned from Madrid—indeed, the Israelis would hunt for any evidence that the “terrorist” PLO was influencing the likes of Abdul Shafi or that most urbane of academics, Hanan Ashrawi—Arafat had met Assad prior to the talks and given his promise that UN resolutions must be rigidly adhered to, an obligation he would betray within two years. A Palestinian official quoted Assad as telling Arafat that “we will barricade ourselves behind international legitimacy because our demands are consistent with international legitimacy.”
President Bush’s electoral defeat in 1992 sapped the Middle East talks of their momentum. If they were one of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration, President-elect Clinton’s initial remarks were hardly encouraging. The only promise he made at his first press conference was an almost offhand comment that he would “keep the Middle East peace process on track” and do “whatever I can to make sure there is no break in continuity.” The phrase “peace process” was already a cliché, and in the years to come, peace—like a creaking railway carriage constantly derailed on a branch line—was always being put back “on track.” These were slim pickings for the Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians and Lebanese now wasting hours in their Washington hotel suites. By the second week of November 1992, their meetings at the State Department had been dominated by a farcical episode at the multilateral talks in Ottawa when the Israelis agreed to resume negotiations only when they were told that one of the Palestinian delegates—to whose presence they objected because he had been a PLO member—was eligible to participate because his membership of the Palestine National Council had “lapsed.”
In Washington, I found the chief Syrian delegate, Mouaffaq Alaf, depressed that Clinton seemed to have no grasp of the issues involved in the talks—even if the new president was going to sidestep his pre-election promise to move the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “At least the Bush administration was involved in this for four years and the peace process was linked to the personal efforts of Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker,” Alaf moaned. “But . . . any president, even if he comes with preconceived ideas not based on fair or balanced information, will very soon come to know more about the facts of the situation in the light of American interests.”
Arab delegates now feared more than ever that the amount of time it was taking to reach any agreement would prove increasingly damaging at home. In private, the Palestinians admitted that opposition to their participation in the talks was growing daily more violent in the West Bank and Gaza. The Syrians were deeply concerned at the effect on Syrian Muslim fundamentalist sentiment of any apparent failure at the talks. The detail in which they were now negotiating was excruciating. It took the Palestinian delegate Saeb Erekat, for example, months to persuade the Israeli delegation to stop calling the occupied West Bank by the biblical title of “Judaea and Samaria”—names that annulled the word “Palestine” from the Israeli narrative—and this was only achieved when Danny Rothschild, an Israeli delegate, leaned towards Erekat across a State Department table and said he would call them “territories” if the Palestinians would stop calling them “occupied.” Another compromise was reached: the Palestinians would refer to “Palestinian Occupied Territories” only by their acronym, “POT.”
That it took a whole year of negotiations merely to reach this level of verbal horse-trading was an unhappy commentary on the talks. The Palestinians wanted to talk about land; the Israelis wanted to talk about “devolved functions.” The Palestinians wanted to talk about “transition autonomy”; the Israelis wanted to talk about “interim autonomy.” The Palestinians wanted to talk about a country called Palestine; the Israelis would not hear of it. Jerusalem remained an unmentionable subject during these “interim talks,” open for negotiation only in the final stages of the negotiations.
The problem for the Palestinians was that the Israelis wanted to talk about “double territoriality” and overlapping jurisdictions. The Israelis would not have Jewish settlers ruled by Arabs in an autonomous “Palestine.” Nor would they accept the separation of East Jerusalem from Israel. Even though by 1992 Israeli taxi-drivers would no longer cross the city at night, Jerusalem had to remain the “permanent and unified capital of Israel.” The Israelis had come forward with “Arab zones,” “security zones,” “settler zones,” and an area where both Palestinians and Israelis were supposed to “cooperate” together. An Israeli spokeswoman in Washington said that her government realised that Arab-owned land existed in these areas and was willing to recognise this ownership, provided it was backed up by land and property deeds. But she said that most of the land was “disputed.” “Whose law is supposed to prevail in it? Israeli law? Jordanian law from before the 1967 war? British Mandate law? Ottoman law?”
The Palestinians would not accept this. An infuriated Erekat, still waiting for talks to restart in Washington, could scarcely control his anger when I called on him. “We are willing to give security guarantees. But it was the Israelis who created this problem in the first place. It was the Israelis who created the settlements. It was they who set up what they call ‘security zones’ on our land. Since 1967, only the Israelis have access to deeds and laws on West Bank land. Why should we have to accept all this overlapping of functions? We should be given more rather than less power. Then we will have the authority to rule our people and give the security guarantees that the Israelis say they need.”
Inevitably, the Palestinian delegates in Washington were playing the role of a conquered people, unable to make substantive concessions—since their land was occupied—but asked to match the concessions of their occupiers by reducing their own demands for autonomy. “When I go into that room at the State Department and see Rothschild, the man they call the ‘coordinator of the territories,’ ” one of the Palestinian officials said, “I feel as if I am sitting down with my own jailer.” And the Israeli response? “We are not on trial at these talks,” one of their delegates told me angrily. “This is not a trial where we discuss who did what to whom. Historycreated this problem.”
The Arabs, I wrote in a dispatch from Washington in November 1992, were fearful that Israel would reduce their strength by cutting a deal with individual Arab states, just as it did with Egypt in 1979. “Hence Syria is worried that Jordan will make a separate agreement with Israel and Arafat has said he fears Syria may do the same . . . Already Jordan has drafted an agenda for final peace negotiations with Israel, agreeing to the two countries’ mutual security . . . and to settle the conflict over two slivers of Jordanian territory . . .”
Within months, it would be revealed that “cutting a deal” was exactly what Israel was doing—but with the Palestinians rather than the Syrians and Jordanians. The Palestinian delegates to the Washington talks were taken aback to discover that Arafat had behind their backs opened his own secret channels to the Israelis and was even now negotiating for a separate but fatally similar peace plan. All that the Arabs had achieved—or worked to achieve in Washington—disappeared overnight. But the problems that had confronted them, the details that bedevilled them in all those long months since that gloomy conference in Madrid, would now turn up in the fatally flawed Oslo agreement of 1993. Arafat and his ill-trained officials—with not one lawyer among them—would now attempt to overcome arguments framed by Israel’s best-educated and shrewdest negotiators, lured on by the chimera of a Palestinian state and a capital in Jerusalem that they would never—ever—be given.
It wasn’t difficult to see why both the Israelis and Arafat saw common cause in a secret deal. Israel’s occupation was growing ever more brutal and the increasing strength of the religious Palestinian militias, especially Hamas, was frightening both the Israelis and the Palestinian leadership. For years, the Israelis had encouraged Hamas in its building of mosques and social services as a rival to the “terrorist” PLO and the leadership of the exiled “super-terrorist” Arafat. Just as America helped to create Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, so Israel nurtured Hamas and its leadership of imams and self-righteous fighters who now demanded Palestine—all of Palestine—for the Palestinians. In the end, what saved Arafat from obscurity was the power of these Islamic rivals among the Palestinians, and the degree to which they were bleeding Israel in the occupied territories. Without the opposition of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Israelis would have had no desire to withdraw. Without their existence—without those uncompromising pan-Islamic demands that far outstripped Arafat’s aspirations—the Israelis would have had little interest in recognising the PLO or giving back a speck of Palestine to Arafat.
GAZA. 20 APRIL 1993. The Israelis will not let the ambulances through. The United Nations have been turned away. As the smoke rises from the Tofah suburbs of Gaza City, the Israelis have even told the fire brigade to go away. We could hear the explosions all day, punctuated by rifle fire and the throb of a helicopter gunship that circled the slums. The Israelis are busy losing their war in Gaza. Of course, it did not feel like that to the Palestinians. For Abdul-Rahman al-Shebaki, groaning in front of the X-ray machine at the Al-Ahli hospital with a fragment of Israeli high-velocity bullet lodged three inches from his heart, the Israelis were doing what they wanted in Tofah. “I walked into the street during the curfew—I was very close to the soldiers—and I’d thought they’d let me go home,” al-Shebaki told me as Dr. Salah Saf applied a wad of bandages to the area below his heart.
The nurses produced a series of X-ray photographs that showed an ominous white smudge perforating al-Shebaki’s diaphragm, an image held up to the light before his angry, muttering family and friends. The twenty-one-year-old Palestinian had seen the Israeli soldier who shot him clean through the chest. Even before al-Shebaki had been brought out of Tofah, the fury of the Palestinians had been palpable. “Why are you here?” a bearded Palestinian asked me as I cowered in a pharmacy, trying to avoid arrest by the Israeli major who had already brandished a “closed military area” prohibition document in my face and ordered me out of Salahedin Street. “We need help,” the Palestinian shouted. “You’ve just come here to watch us dance.” We had already watched the first prisoners taken out of Tofah, heads bowed in the back of an Israeli jeep.
The Israelis would not say why they were raiding Tofah, but no one in Gaza City doubted they were searching for the Palestinian gunmen who had knifed and axed to death Ilan Feinberg two days earlier as he sat in the offices of the European Cooperation for Development agency. The “Popular Front for the Liberation Front” ’s so-called Red Eagles—how often we have to use “so-called” in the Middle East’s self-generating wars—had claimed responsibility for murdering the Israeli lawyer, quite possibly with the intention of provoking the Israelis into just the kind of military operation that would further embitter thousands of Palestinians. If so, they were successful.
What did all this achieve? I asked the Israeli major just that question as we stood in Salahedin Street, Palestinian urchins preparing to set light to the first tyres of the day scarcely a hundred yards away. Wasn’t Gaza simply a hopeless case, I asked, a war that was already lost to Israel? “What do you suggest we do?” the officer asked wearily. “What can we do?” Well, how about leaving Gaza? “It’s a political question,” he replied. And he was right. For no matter how many slums were blown up in revenge for Feinberg’s murder, no matter how many Palestinians were arrested, no matter how many ambulances were made to wait outside the curfewed “military areas,” the Israelis had lost the war in Gaza. The walls were heavy with the graffiti of hatred, claims of “collaborator” executions, threats of fire and blood from Hamas and the PLO’s Fatah guerrillas. The moment the Israelis left a street, it reverted to Palestinian control.
Next day, we found out what had really happened in Salahedin Street, what that major wanted to conceal from us. The Israelis had found an armed Hamas gunman in Tofah, a man called Zakaria Sharbaji, who belonged to the Hamas “Qassem Brigade,” and they had killed him with a light anti-armour weapon. Palestinians had made off with his head and the Israelis had kept his body—which, of course, created problems for Sharbaji’s widow and parents in the Jabaliya refugee camp. His blood still lay across the smashed breeze-block hut in which he was killed along with some remarkably undamaged pages from a Koran which— so his sympathisers unconvincingly claimed—had fallen from his pocket at the moment of death. “They picked up the bones from his head and the brains and took them away,” a visitor to the newly established shrine remarked. “But the Israelis had already taken the corpse.”
No one denied that the thirty-year-old “martyr”—his baby was only six months old—was a member of Hamas. For three months, so they said in Tofah, he had been on the run from the Israelis, hiding in Jabaliya and then in Tofah. Which was why, with their usual penchant for a little collective justice, the Israelis cleared the surrounding streets and blew up no fewer than seventeen Palestinian houses— homes to perhaps 200 people—within the space of just twelve hours. Those were the explosions I had heard from Salahedin Street. The rubble of Sharbaji’s last hiding place was therefore the scene of much shrieking and rage from almost a thousand Palestinians who gathered to view the wreckage of broken walls and roofs, fire-scorched furniture, shredded mattresses and clothes, smashed fridges, washing machines and television sets which the Israelis left behind them. Where, one wondered, did punishment end and vandalism begin?
It was not a matter that Sharbaji’s parents were likely to debate. Unable to retrieve either part of their son’s body, they nonetheless chose to mourn his death at their home in Jabaliya camp, a step to which the Israelis had their own unique response. Jabaliya, they decided, was under curfew. Jabaliya would become—and the phrase had long been part of the lexicon of Gaza—a “closed military area.”
This expression should be studied with great care. For in Gaza, a “curfew” existed—or was brought into being—whenever an Israeli officer produced a piece of paper and scribbled a name, date and hour onto it. It happened to me when we tried to visit Sharbaji’s parents. An Israeli border police patrol stopped my car with that imperishable command: “No pictures.” Where, I asked, was the law that prevented us taking photographs in Gaza? Quick as a flash, out came a printed sheet from the pocket of the green-uniformed policeman, an Israeli Arab in dark glasses who swiftly filled in the words “Jabaliya,” “April 21st,” and “0600 hours” beneath the title “Closed Military Area.” Would we like to take a picture of him signing the piece of paper? Of course we would. Kafka had nothing on this.
This whole charade had little effect on the streets of Gaza City. No sooner were stones thrown at the Israelis from behind the smoke of burning tyres than the first wounded were carried, yelping with pain, into the Al-Ahli hospital. One man arrived with a plastic-coated bullet buried deep in his thigh, another with blood streaming from a bullet wound in his ankle. The doctors routinely administered local anaesthetics, probed the wounds of the victims and brought out the bullets one by one, clinking them neatly onto a metal tray in the operating theatre.
Before dark that night, uniformed and hooded men—two of them carrying axes—appeared at the corpseless funeral rites for Zakaria Sharbaji in a wasteland of sand in the very centre of Gaza City. They took me to a shabby street where a cheap concrete breeze-block was lying in a square foot of newly smoothed sand below the wall of a tenement. “Here we buried our martyr’s brain,” a bearded Hamas official confided with solemnity, then pointed to a tree. “Over there we buried some pieces of his jaw.” There was a pause. “Would you like us to dig them up to show you?”
For three days, the shooting continued in Gaza City, the Palestinian victims— armed men, stone-throwers, kids, passers-by—gunned down as if gun battles were rainstorms, something from which you could shelter indoors if you wished, something that was no longer dreadful or unreal or even un-normal. In the chaos and hysteria of the Shifa hospital, it was impossible to ask the doctors, overwhelmed in bloodstained gowns amid the din of screams and shouting, for the identities of each victim. By the hour of curfew on 24 April, 27 Palestinians with gunshot wounds had been brought to the hospital, another 13 to Rafa hospital and another 25 to the Al-Ahli clinic, a total of 65 wounded by the Israelis in scarcely three hours. Trails of blood ran across the entrance to the Shifa hospital. Most of the wounded had still been demonstrating against the destruction of the homes in the Tofah district.
When I arrived at the hospital shortly after 6 p.m., distraught relatives were already shouting and weeping at the entrance. Young men and a small boy lay on the beds, blood covering their legs or chests, while another man, his clothes cut open, his chest streaked with blood, lay gasping on a table. His chin showed the mark of a bullet hole. On a screen above his bed, a green track described a wild stock exchange index. Life up, life down, life functions impaired. “The bullet entered his brain—he is critically ill,” a nurse shouted as doctors thrust a tube down the man’s throat and pushed a drip-feed needle into his arm. They were pushing their fingers into his mouth, trying to stop the man swallowing his own tongue. But he died in front of us, his eyes tight shut, his head lolling to the right, the doctors stunned by their failure to keep the man alive. The heartbeat on the screen now registered a thin green line. Within less than a minute, male relatives— all bearded and shouting religious chants—swept his shrouded body into the back seat of an old white Peugeot car. A crowd at the front of the hospital watched the car race away and chorused: “Kill the Jews.” This was the “Palestine” that Arafat was now supposed to inherit.
THE OSLO AGREEMENT, hatched in secret, heavy with unguaranteed dreams, holding out false promises of statehood and Jerusalem and an end to Israeli occupation and Jewish settlement building, was greeted by the world’s statesmen—and by most of the world’s journalists—as something close to the Second Coming. The “handshake on the White House lawn” between Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat on 13 September 1993 became a kind of ideology. Critical faculties had no place here. Enough of blood and tears. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb—just who was the wolf and who the lamb was not vouchsafed to us—and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares. No one noticed that of the three men on the White House lawn, it was President Bill Clinton who quoted the Koran. No one, for that matter, asked how a bunch of Norwegian politicians—some of whom had little practical experience of the Middle East—could have helped to produce this supposed miracle. “Peace,” briefly, could sell as many newspapers as war. And any of us who dared to suggest that Oslo was a tragedy for the Palestinians—and, in the end, for the Israelis—was accused of being anti-peace or “pro-terrorist.”
Under an “interim status” agreement, Arafat and his PLO cronies could create a “Palestinian Authority” in Gaza and Jericho and then, subject to a long and intricate timetable of withdrawal by the Israeli army, in the other major cities of the West Bank. But only a “permanent status” agreement five years later would resolve the future of Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and the “right of return” of at least 3 million—perhaps 5 million—Palestinian refugees. In other words, the statehood which Arafat believed—and which the world was led to believe—was inevitable had to be taken on trust. The Israelis and Palestinians had to marry before proving their faithfulness, and had to accept the word of a father-in-law— Bill Clinton, who as an American president would inevitably be the protector of Israel’s interests—that the marriage would work.
Before that handshake, Arafat had visited President Mubarak of Egypt and I travelled to Alexandria to look at the old man of the mountain, the PLO chairman who had once talked of being fifty thousand miles from Palestine but who now believed he was “going home.” Standing beside Mubarak in Alexandria, he looked a truly pathetic figure. His once-plump torso had shrivelled to near-starvation proportions while the ubiquitous, angry scowl of pride with which he used to address his audiences had been replaced by a constant, almost simpering smile. “The fingers of Egypt are on many pages of this plan,” he said of the proposal that would give him and his discredited PLO two little Palestines amid Israeli occupation. The word “fingers” made the plan sound like a crime—which many Palestinians suspected it was, although their voices were rarely broadcast in America or Europe— but Arafat was oblivious to this. He was trying to be nice to Mubarak. In fact, he was trying to be nice to everyone. He was now to accept, formally and on paper, the partition of Palestine which he had always refused and to shake hands, as Middle East journalist David Hirst so pointedly wrote, “with the prime minister of the Jewish state which he had once made it his sacred mission to remove from the face of the earth.”
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.
In his theatrically arranged kuffiah headdress,87 his khaki uniform and his silly pistol, Arafat was now a strangely dated figure, a revolutionary from the past who would soon have to put aside childish things. Even the word “revolutionary” sounded odd. Arafat’s revolution was now over. For the half-million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who could now never return to their 1948 homes in what is now Israel—for the final settlement of Oslo was scarcely going to allow them to “return” to Haifa and Netanya and Galilee—it was a betrayal. “I could accept him,” an Israeli soldier told me as he was helping to impose another curfew on Hebron in early September of 1993. “Compared to the others, he wasn’t that bad a terrorist.” What an obituary on the revolutionary life of Yassir Arafat.
Revolutionaries are supposed to be intellectuals. Robespierre, Lenin, Marx, Trotsky, Atatürk, Nasser, Castro, Guevara: they wrote books or talked grand philosophy amid their struggles. Not so Arafat. He could rarely be seen reading books, let alone writing them. What he had, however, was single-mindedness. There was a certain self-dedication in this—and a lot of arrogance—but it was a great strength. From start to finish, it was Palestine, Palestine, Palestine. For the Palestinian poor, his uniform and headdress—fancy dress to Westerners and Israelis—were necessary, part of the binding of the spirits amid exile. But those spirits were now to be abandoned.
I was in Egypt when first word of the Oslo agreement leaked out, and I called Mohamed Heikal. Arafat, I suggested, was like a man with a mortgage trying to sell his house back to the bank. “You’re wrong,” Heikal admonished me. “Arafat has already sold the house—twice over!” And from the very start—from those speeches on the White House lawn on 13 September—it was possible to see how Oslo would unravel. Israeli prime minister Rabin spoke movingly of his new “peace partners.” “Let me say to you, the Palestinians, we are destined to live together on the same soil on the same land,” he said. Arafat’s speech was more specific, as if he knew what would lead “this historic hope” to catastrophe. “Enforcing the agreement and moving toward the final settlement, after two years, to implement all aspects of UN Resolutions 242 and 338 in all their aspects, and resolve all the issues of Jerusalem, the settlements, the refugees and the boundaries will be a Palestinian and an Israeli responsibility,” he said.
“All aspects”? And then, a repetition, “in all aspects”? Jerusalem? Settlements? Refugees? He was asking the Israelis for gifts but offering no more than “peace” in return. He called it “the peace of the brave”—Arafat picked up the phrase from Clinton—and probably did not at first realise that this was an echo of General Charles de Gaulle’s “peace of the brave,” the final agreement that gave Algeria its independence. The parallel was more painful than Arafat—or the Israelis—understood.
In Beirut, Chafiq al-Hout, the PLO’s ambassador to Lebanon who organised Haj Amin al-Husseini’s funeral back in 1974, received a phone call from Arafat. “He has changed the charter of the PLO, he has given up the right of return of about three million Palestinian refugees and it was all done in secret,” he cried to me in despair. “It is not my PLO which now exists. Arafat telephoned me and called me ‘brother,’ but I cannot go on. I told him there had been no Palestine National Council meeting to discuss this. I said we did not know the details of this agreement. UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948 said that the Palestinians could return to homes in what is now Israel. Now Arafat has given it all up. I have resigned. I am no longer an ambassador.”
WHEN SHAKR YASIN lays the front-door key on the table of his Lebanese refugee slum hut, it glows a dull gold, the handle worn smooth, the bit glimmering in the light—as it must have done when he and his family fled their home in Palestine in 1948. From a black tin tube, Yasin, who was only five when he was made a refugee, pulls out a thick, torn wad of British Mandate deeds—British royal coat of arms at the top—to the Yasin family property, a house in the village of Ezzib, 10 kilometres from Acre, and a clutch of citrus groves. “I kept these because I believed I would one day go home,” he says. “But now I know the truth. Arafat has not included the 1948 refugees in his peace plan with Israel.”
Nineteen forty-eight. The date is sprinkled through every conversation in the huge, crammed, boiling, angry camp at Ein el-Helweh in Sidon, through every complaint and every formal speech. Almost all Lebanon’s Palestinians are refugees—or the children or grandchildren of refugees—of the Arab exodus that followed the original partition of Palestine. Some 65,000 of them live in the squalor of Ein el-Helweh. “The television and the papers say this is a wonderful peace but they never mention us,” Mohamed Khodr mutters as he limps along the alleyways that pass for roads in Ein el-Helweh. “Our leaders are liars. They told us we would go home. But the peace agreement will only cover some of the Palestinians who became refugees in the 1967 war. What are we supposed to do?” Khodr was an eight-year-old when he travelled out of Palestine and into Lebanon on the same dilapidated truck as the Yasin family, just four days before the declaration of the state of Israel.
Another 1.5 million of the 1948 refugees were scattered now across camps in Jordan and Syria, a further million in Gaza and the West Bank, some of whom will find themselves in Arafat’s little statelets. But they will not be going “home.” An estimated 3 million Palestinians—approximately half the entire Palestinian population—will not enjoy the “right of return” because their homes were in what is now Israel. In Ein el-Helweh, however, the towns and cities from which the refugees fled, frozen in time, each slum quarter named after the lost towns. Refugees from Acre live in a group of streets called “Acre,” those from Haifa in “Haifa,” those from Hittin in “Hittin.” Yasin lives in “Acre” because this was the nearest town to Ezzib. For twenty-seven years, he was a guerrilla in Arafat’s Fatah army, crossing the Israeli border at night in 1969, surviving the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982, even the camps war of 1985 and 1986, certain of Arafat’s promise of a return to “Palestine.”
“There was never a day we didn’t hope and live in hope,” he says. “One of my brothers was killed in 1981, by a shell fired at Sidon by Israel’s militia allies. We suffered so much, we couldn’t afford to lose hope. My father believed in God and his country. He wouldn’t let himself believe he wasn’t going home. Yes, we are for peace. We want peace. But it must be a decent peace and not this agreement which is unfair to us. I came from Ezzib, my father was from there, my grandfather and great-grandfather are buried there. We must all go back to our villages.”
It is hopeless, of course. Hopeless to explain that Israel would never allow 3 million Palestinians across its frontiers, hopeless to remind 1948 Palestinians that 400 of their villages were destroyed by the Israelis in the two years that followed their exodus, that in most cases their “home” no longer exists. Yasin knows this as a fact but does not comprehend it. His mother, Mariam, remembers the day she, Tewfiq and their fifteen children fled, and the clothes and lentils and oil she left behind in the house—because she thought she would be able to return in a week, a month at the outside.
“It was a village house, whitewashed with a big brown front door and wooden stairs,” she remembers. “It was pretty with the lemon trees round it. But a friend of ours managed to go back briefly some years ago and found that all our homes had been destroyed, even ours. The only building left is an old stone house that was at one end of the village. The Israelis have turned it into a hotel.”
Yasin picks up his key and turns it in his hand, clutching the bit in his fingers as if he is opening a door. “For twenty days now, since we first heard about all this, we’ve been living on our nerves, us Palestinians here,” he says. “Still I don’t know my fate. I hope that in the agreement—somewhere—Abu Amar [Arafat] says there is going to be something for those of ’forty-eight, that we can go back to our homeland.” Yasin weighs the family key in his hand—a key to a house that no longer exists—as if it might provide an answer. “I am the keeper of this key, this treasure, for over forty-five years. I have safeguarded this metal cylinder containing all these papers and deeds so that one day we could find a solution to our problem . . . I wouldn’t have carried these things for so long—looked after them under shells—if there was no hope . . .”