CHAPTER TWELVE

The Last Colonial War

And the Lord spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan, near Jericho, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan; Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places: And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it . . . But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.

—The Bible, Numbers 33:50–53, 55

BEN GREENBERGER DOESN’T TRUST the Arabs. He doesn’t trust the Americans. He doesn’t trust a lot of Israeli politicians either. Only God unites the Jewish people with their land. God, I have to say, occupies a lot of space in my Middle East notebooks. It is spring 1992. The Oslo agreement is just eighteen months away. Judaea and Samaria are safe—for the moment.

The land in Greenberger’s case happens to be Arab—it lies just inside the occupied West Bank—but the deputy mayor of the Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, the largest in the West Bank, doesn’t accept this at all. His face betrays not a scintilla of doubt about the propriety of building new Jewish homes on the hills of rock and poppies that stretch out towards the Mount of Olives. His manner conveys more than conviction. The Arabs would claim it was fanaticism, although they would be wrong. Righteousness is the word that comes to mind.

“Of course it’s our land,” he says in his New Jersey accent, pale blue eyes studying my face. How dare I question this assumption? “If Tel Aviv is Jewish then Hebron is more Jewish. It’s unfortunate that other people live there. But we’ll all have to learn to live with that.” It is the Arabs who refuse to compromise, whose leaders are demanding the return of Arab land—“Jewish land,” Greenberger insists—as the first stage in the liquidation of Israel. “I don’t trust them. By all means, let the Palestinian Arabs have “autonomy,” let them govern their own lives, but that does not mean a state. This should all be Israeli. We should have annexed this place in 1967. If we had done so, we would not have these problems with the Arabs now.”

Listening to Greenberger, a forty-two-year-old lecturer in law at the Hebrew University, one keeps asking: Are you sure? And: Are you quite certain? But of course, he is absolutely, irrevocably, morally certain of everything he says. “Every Jewish child who studied his history and Bible recognises this as being the only place which the Jewish people can claim as their home. If Israel today was within its 1967 borders and if Israel was looking with prying eyes towards Hebron, I agree there would be no excuse to start a war for it. But a war was forced on us in 1967. We won and now I find myself in land which I consider mine. So why should I leave?”

There is nothing odd about such views. If Ma’ale Adumim is still expanding— its 16,000-strong Jewish population will grow by 25 per cent in the next year with two-room homes at $90,000 apiece—the settlement of Efrat on the Hebron road, with 3,500 inhabitants, is set to expand almost twice that fast in an area of almost daily confrontation between Arab and Jew. And Bob Lang, native of Manuet, New York, graduate of the University of Wisconsin and resident of Efrat, makes Greenberger sound like a moderate.

“If there is a Jewish people, Judaea and Samaria are their home,” he says. “To tell a Jew he cannot live in Hebron is to deny the existence of the Jewish people and the history of the Jewish people. Ninety per cent of the places mentioned in the Bible are in Judaea and Samaria. So if anything, Judaea and Samaria should form the state of Israel, rather than the coastal strip which is where the Philistines came from—from which we get the name ‘Palestine.’ ” Lang talks with the fierce energy and speed of a true believer, his language at once passionate and biblical. “The land is mine. I feel it in my bones. It’s mine. My grandfather thought he had a home in Germany. He fought for Germany in the First World War but then he fled after Hitler’s Kristallnacht when the synagogues were burned. But here is our land, whether our homes are here or not. It is Jewish land and I feel the history in my bones. I need no other guidebook here but the Bible. When the bulldozers are working to make new homes, they always hit ancient sites—and always those ancient sites are Jewish.”

Of course, there is a problem. More than 1.7 million Arabs also live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which were never part of modern Israel—and their first intifada rebellion owed more to the presence of 115,000 Jewish settlers than to any other phenomenon. Not one state recognises Israel’s right to continue holding the occupied territories a quarter of a century after their capture; and although Israel has not annexed them, it has allowed Greenberger and his fellow settlers at Ma’ale Adumim to buy their homes on forty-nine-year leases. Is it any surprise that President George Bush—and we are talking about Bush Senior here, of course—has conditioned U.S. loan guarantees to Israel on a freezing of settlements?

Greenberger and Lang want an end to this shilly-shallying. Forgo U.S. government aid. Ignore Israeli as well as Arab calls for land for peace. Nothing less than outright Israeli sovereignty over the land—annexation—will do. “No wonder we have these problems,” Lang says. “The status quo today is no good. As long as the Arabs living here think they will one day have a Palestinian state, they have no reason to come to terms with us. So Israel should stop the military occupation and annex it all outright and tell the Arabs: ‘Your nationalist rights on this side of the River Jordan are finished.’ The Arabs will accept this when they realise we are serious. After the 1948 war, Arabs in Galilee lived under police control until 1956 when they came to the conclusion that Israel was here to stay. They decided that the only way forward could be by becoming citizens—which they did in 1957.”

If there appears to be an element of generosity buried deep in this ferocious solution, you only have to listen to Greenberger’s version of this scenario to understand its true meaning. “When Arabs in Israel were granted citizenship after 1948,” he says, “it was an evolving process. With a firm hand, that process can be repeated in Judaea and Samaria. If we persevere—once everyone realises there is no turning back—we’ll end this problem.” But what if the Arabs don’t realise this? And what is this “firm hand” of which Greenberger speaks? “Every country has a police force,” he replies ominously. “If there were problems, we’d deal with them.”

It is something of a relief to find Israelis eloquent and brave enough to challenge this colonial mentality, although Dedi Zucker, a liberal member of the Knesset and leader of the Civil Rights Movement, is very much in a minority; he is the sort of man—broad-minded, bespectacled, academic in appearance—whom visitors to Israel seek out to hear what they want to hear. This is our Israel, we say to ourselves when we meet folk like Zucker. This is the Middle Eastern democracy we want to believe in, the one that represents our Western values, the one whose army really does abide by a doctrine of “purity of arms,” that really doesn’t support this loathsome colonial project of building houses for Jews on Palestinian Arab Muslim land. But Zucker has few illusions about the desire of Israeli governments to continue building colonies in the occupied territories, and no doubt at all about what the colonists represent.

“They are a new type of Israeli,” he says. “They have about them the element of victim—of people who think of themselves as victims—despite the fact that these ‘victims’ have potential nuclear weapons. There is an element of the Israeli macho. And another origin is that of reviving the old archetype of the Israeli pioneer who goes to new lands and tries to conquer them by blood, by education, by bringing children to them. This fits some of the American ethos of going West surrounded by wild enemies . . . In a very narrow way, you can see a settler who lives—and whose kids live—in daily danger. But this narrow perspective does not recognise the fact that the settlers were injected there by the state as fingers of occupation. The fourth element is religious fundamentalism. We are talking about a ‘clan’ whose orientation is the holy books—they are isolated from modernism, in arrogant opposition to Western philosophies and Western achievements.” For Zucker, there is no alternative but re-partition, with two countries achieving part of their nationalist ambitions. “Settlers,” he says sternly, “will have to decide between their Zionism—their ambition to live in the Jewish state—and their desire to live in a place that is religiously important. Most would prefer to live among Israelis.”

Rare indeed are the Israelis who regard the colonists as a threat to the existence of Israel, although Yeshayahu Leibowitz has been warning since Israel’s 1967 victory that permanent occupation of the West Bank would contaminate his country. The ninety-year-old former editor of theEncyclopaedia Hebraica was once head of the Department of Biological Chemistry and Professor of Neurophysiology at Hebrew University. He is a guest professor in the philosophy department, a role he carries into the logic with which he argues in his small library in East Jerusalem.

“We must start with fundamentals—beyond theory, beyond ideology, even beyond faith,” he says. “In relation to this country we call Eretz Israel and they call ‘Palestine,’ two peoples are in existence, each of them deeply conscious in their mind—and feeling in their bones—that this country istheir country. And history cannot be amended or corrected. From this terrible situation, there is one of only two possible results and there is no third.” Professor Leibowitz, stooped in his chair, his kippa almost falling off his bald head, pauses for a long time at this point. He has no political influence, but it is not hard to see the moral authority which has made him so influential among young left-wing Israelis.

“One of these two peoples conquers and occupies the other country and deprives the other people of the right of national independence. The Arabs tried to do this in 1948 and they lost. But since 1967, we have done this—and this situation has brought about all the contemporary horrors. The domination of the state of Israel over another people can be maintained only by violence. The only alternative is partition. Both parties will have to renounce a claim to the entire country. Partition is technically very difficult, but psychologically it’s even more difficult— because both peoples have a very deep consciousness that this country is their country. But it is an absolute necessity if we are to avoid a catastrophe.”

Leibowitz does not claim partition should be carried out along the original borders the United Nations laid down for Israel. Nor does he forget that Jordan annexed the West Bank after the 1948 war, that the Arabs did not allow “Palestine”—as a state originally envisaged by the UN—to exist.

“But I state unequivocally that we are responsible for the terrible situation we have today, just as the Arabs were responsible for the war of 1948 when we had the whole world behind Israel. And if there is no partition, if—if—the existing situation continues, two consequences are unavoidable: internally, the state of Israel will become a full-fledged fascist state with concentration camps not only for the Arabs but even for Jews like me. And externally, we will have a war to the finish against the Arabs, with the sympathy of the entire world on the Arab side. This catastrophe can be averted only by partition. It will be psychologically very difficult to renounce our claim to Jerusalem as the sovereign capital of Israel. For if partition is realised, then Jerusalem will have to be partitioned too.”

It is not difficult to see why the Jewish colonists—even, perhaps, most Israelis—dismiss the old professor who fled Germany for British Mandate Palestine in the early years of the Third Reich, before the worst Nazi persecution of the Jews. Greenberger calls Leibowitz a “media freak.” Leibowitz sees Greenberger and his fellow colonists as the greatest danger to the state. The two men present opposing versions of reality, a reality that one is trying to create and the other is desperate to avoid. But one has God and logic on his side. The other has God and a bulldozer.

OSAMA HAMID set off to blow himself to pieces just after saying his prayers at the Bilal mosque. All his friends claimed that he was an unlikely car bomber, but Hamdi Hamid was not surprised when he was told of his son’s death. “He talked a lot about martyrdom, about dying in battle against the Israelis,” the old man said as he sat by the wall of the mosque where he had last seen his son. “He told me that if he became a martyr in this cause, he would attain a higher place in paradise.” Hamid had prepared himself for death three months to the day after Arafat’s handshake on the White House lawn.

Every few seconds, a weeping relative or friend would interrupt Hamdi Hamid’s remarks to embrace the father of the second Palestinian “martyr” in forty-eight hours. Just a day earlier, Anwar Aziz had driven a bomb-laden ambulance into a jeepload of Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip, wounding three of them; for six hours after the explosion, his blackened and shrivelled corpse lay on the roadside while his friends recalled his preparation for death—a ritual washing and praying at his local mosque—and their much-trumpeted pride in his departure.

For the Israelis, it had been a frightening week: the suicide bomber—the fearful, unstoppable instrument of mass destruction which had helped to drive Israel’s occupation army back to the south of Lebanon a decade earlier—had come of age in Gaza. Another two would-be suicide bombers were captured during the week and their explosives defused. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin understood what this meant. “Since Hamas became strong a year or more ago, we have witnessed suicide attacks for the first time,” he told a Knesset meeting in Jerusalem on 13 December 1993. “Palestinians, until Hamas, did not do it—just as the Lebanese did not do it before Hizballah.”

He did not, of course, remind his audience that it was Israel that originally encouraged the creation of Hamas as an opponent of the PLO. Nor could he have known that, only hours after his prescient warning, Osama Hamid, a twenty-fiveyear-old pharmacist at Gaza’s Islamic University, would have shaken hands with his unsuspecting father at the Bilal mosque and set off—his bomb in the trunk of his car and a Kalashnikov rifle on the passenger seat—on the second suicide mission of the week.

The brothers and cousins who were comforting his father afterwards—a group of hard young men in black leather jackets—all spoke of his growing interest in religion. Walid Hamid tried to describe his dead cousin in one of those barren sketches that always emerge after a suicide bombing. “He read the Koran all the time and he gave speeches in the mosque about the need to die in the war against Israel. He never smiled. He played table-tennis from time to time, but that was all. The Israelis kept arresting him. He spent four years in jail as a Hamas member and he was always being beaten.” On the walls of the Bilal mosque, the family had pasted a series of coloured snapshots of Osama Hamid. They showed a bespectacled, bearded young man posing melodramatically on one knee with a Kalashnikov in his hand and a Koranic inscription behind his head. But the Hamas posters announcing the death of their latest “martyr”—the seventh Palestinian suicide bomber to have attacked the Israelis—did not hint at the failure of his mission.

For, far from killing his enemies, Osama Hamid headed down a road in the Sejaya area of Gaza in the hope of ramming his car into an army truck—only to find himself being chased by an Israeli border patrol which noticed that he was driving a stolen car. Instead of stopping, Hamid tried to shoot his way out but was killed instantly by two Israeli bullets.

“Osama was against the Arafat peace,” his father remarked as the muezzin wailed prayers across the fly-blown streets around the funeral tent. “He said it would never be implemented but he had talked of dying for the liberation of Palestine weeks before that. The last time I saw him, he asked me if there was anything I and his mother wanted. He didn’t spend the night at home. And next day I heard what he did.” The man paused, aware that his son was—in Israeli eyes—a “terrorist.” “I am proud of him,” Hamid Hamdi said.

But why do such young men set off so easily for their deaths? On the day of Osama Hamid’s funeral, I found five Palestinian men in the Shifa hospital, covered in blood from stomach and leg wounds. The Israelis shot them but provided no explanation. Half an hour later, on the road out of Gaza, I was stopped by soldiers who were screaming at a group of youths. Beside the soldiers was the corpse of a Palestinian. “The Israelis tried to arrest him,” one of the young men told me. “The Palestinian pulled out an axe and attacked them. The Israelis shot him dead.” The Israeli army later confirmed that they had killed eighteen-year-old Ashraf Khalil when he attacked a soldier with a hatchet.

The “Arafat peace” was what it was now called; Osama Hamid believed that Oslo would never be implemented, and he was right. The very first signs were made manifest in Cairo on 12 December 1993, when Arafat agreed to hold a joint press conference with Rabin at which—so he thought—the first Israeli withdrawals would be announced. But the moment I saw Arafat, I guessed what had happened. All the old fire had been knocked out of him. Usually, Arafat loved the television lights—he was, after all, now “President of Palestine”—but he stared unblinking, almost frightened, at the battery of cameras. For once he had nothing to tell us, not even a scrap of cheer to brighten the eve of what he had repeatedly called a “sacred day.” He could announce no Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories, no agreements on the release of Palestinian prisoners, on road passages for Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza or on the size of the Palestinian “autonomous zone” of Jericho. The word “Jerusalem” did not pass his lips. Asked if there would be negative repercussions in the occupied territories because of the failure of the PLO and the Israelis to meet the withdrawal deadline, Arafat gloomily replied: “I hope not.”

We knew something had gone wrong in the talks between Arafat and Rabin the moment the Israeli prime minister walked into the room, equally grave-faced, flanked by unsmiling negotiators. The words came out in Rabin’s familiar drawl but without the vigour he showed those three short months ago at the White House. He talked of “difficulties” over security, over those settlers’ passages, over the “frontiers” to be drawn between Palestinian “autonomous zones” and Israeli-occupied areas.

Of course, he told us it would make no difference. A delay of ten days before further talks would help to clarify the issues. “I don’t see any reason why, if we reach agreement in ten days from now . . . there will be any difficulty in achieving, in the time frame of the negotiations, the implementation of ‘Gaza–Jericho first.’” In other words, the first Israeli withdrawal could still be completed by April 1994. Arafat was left talking about “some points of diversity” and “some differences.” Having failed to demand international guarantees for the Oslo accord, he had pleaded with the Norwegians to put pressure on the Israelis to start their withdrawal on 12 December. He had pleaded with Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher, to urge Israel to make at least a token withdrawal on his “sacred day.” And with growing concern, the PLO learned that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East—always a reliable weather vane when plans start to go awry—were beginning, even now, to distance themselves from the agreement that the world was encouraged to applaud as the potential end of a hundred years of conflict. There were, the diplomats suggested, “holes” in the Articles of Agreement signed on 13 September 1993. The accord, U.S. embassies were telling American correspondents, should be seen as a “step” on the road to peace, rather than an end in itself.

None of this prevented “our” experts—all those who believed that Israel and the United States would sustain the peace—from maintaining their flawed analysis that the Israelis would carry the day for peace. The Independent’s Middle East editor, Charles Richards, managed to tell readers on 14 December that “the historic breakthrough is irreversible . . . Mr. Rabin has made up his mind. He carries the country with him. And it is Israel as usual that is calling the shots, not the Palestinians.” The Israeli delay, however, was to become a feature of the coming years and would contribute substantially towards the collapse of the Oslo agreement. Indeed, within twenty-four hours of that depressing press conference, Rabin would say that “it would be a mistake to think that an agreement would be signed within the next ten days.”

Back in Hebron, I found Hamas men talking of renewing the intifada, of their “triumph” in understanding the nature of Arafat’s “surrender.” Newly painted graffiti on the walls beside Hebron University threatened the settler who killed a Palestinian civilian in November. “The Islamic Movement of Hamas will kill the man who killed Talal Bakri,” warned a slogan in black paint. “Our guns are speaking and we will strike down the seller of our country.” The “seller,” of course, was Arafat. Ibrahim, collecting a plastic bag of flat Arab loaves from the bakery on the main street of Hebron—most Palestinians preferred not to divulge their family names—declared himself a Hamas supporter. “We thank Rabin for refusing to help Arafat,” he said. “And you see that now the Israeli army wants to talk not to the PLO but to us.”

And remarkably, Ibrahim was correct. For the Israeli army itself—again, to the detriment of Arafat—admitted opening a “dialogue” with Hamas in which Hamas officials met with Brigadier General Doron Almog, the Israeli commander of the Gaza Strip. General Almog talked of how Hamas preferred “the continuation of the Israeli occupation over Arafat’s control under autonomy.” Yet even Hamas was mystified as to why the Israelis would do so much to undermine the PLO leader. The truth, of course, was that within the Israeli army there were those who were dedicated to destroying the Oslo agreement—just as there were Israelis murderous enough to kill their own prime minister in 1995 to extinguish all hope of agreement with the Palestinians.

Arafat had meanwhile to explain his secret escapades to his fellow Arabs. Yet again, I travelled to Cairo for this embarrassing performance, a one-man stand by Arafat at the 100th session of the powerless Arab League. “Antics” was the word used by one Levantine delegate—readers may guess which nation he belonged to—and Arafat did indeed appear before his fellow Arabs in the manner of a schoolboy who had much to explain. Why, they wanted to know, did he negotiate behind their backs after claiming that all Arabs should negotiate with Israel together? What about the “comprehensive” peace which all Arab leaders—including Arafat himself—had demanded?

He carefully placed a pair of spectacles on his face and read from an equally carefully prepared script. Arabs, he said, must “confront” the “New World Order” lest they be excluded. Palestine would always remain part of the Arab nation. “Though we bear the pain and words of our nation and its aspirations towards the future, we are standing at the threshold of a new stage of our history,” Arafat lectured. Yes, there would be an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. There would be debates in the Palestine National Council. But after all, it was long ago that the PLO had decided “to set up a state on any part of liberated Palestine.”

And then came the blow. “After twenty-two months, no progress was being made on the Palestinian and Israeli talks [in Washington] while the Israeli oppression on our occupied Palestinian people was growing worse.” He had undertaken secret talks “to break the deadlock, to bridge the gap in the dead end” of the Washington peace talks. So that was it. The Arabs were supposed to feel grateful to Arafat who had single-handedly saved the entire “peace process” by starting his own secret negotiations with Israel. At the other end of the room, Farouk al-Sharaa, the Syrian foreign minister—President Assad’s grey-suited policeman at the back of the hall—sat smoking Silk Cut cigarettes, his aides taking notes. Here was a school report that would make very interesting reading, one that the headmaster, back in Damascus, would find most unsatisfactory. But there was no end to the Arafat admissions.

“In order to confront the Israeli intransigence,” he told us all, “we had to retreat away from the terms of reference of the negotiating process.” The Palestinians were “on the verge of a new era.” An Arafat history lesson reminded us of the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897, but at last the world acknowledged that the people of Palestine “have lived on this land since the beginning of time.” No, the whole solution was not to be had just yet. “The phased process is regaining a dear part of our Palestine, in Jericho and Gaza, and the establishment of Palestinian self-government . . . What is most important is not the text or the start of Israeli withdrawal but that the executive Palestinian Authority will cover all the occupied territories.” Only through this solution—Arafat’s deal—could a “comprehensive” peace come about. Arafat made no mention of Palestinian critics, of armed Islamic opposition. Of those millions of Palestinians left out of his agreement with Israel, Arafat said: “I will tell you later what will happen to those 1948 refugees.” He never did.

When he went to make his excuses to Assad in Damascus, the Syrian leader took his place on Arafat’s right and sat in silence while the PLO chairman explained his secret agreement with Israel. Then Assad told Arafat, slowly and in a low, harsh voice: “You are sitting on the chair that Sadat sat on when he came to see me before his peace treaty with Israel—and look what happened to him.” Sadat’s murder in 1979—by one of his own soldiers—had lain over every Arab leader since. In 1982, the Lebanese president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, had expressed his desire for peace with Israel—and died within weeks in a bomb explosion during a Phalangist party meeting in Beirut. Abdul Khalim Khaddam, the Syrian vice president, would later privately describe the Oslo agreement as “the worst document the Arabs have signed since the 1948 partition of Palestine.”

From the start, we did not appreciate how stubbornly Oslo was opposed by right-wing Israelis as well as by Islamist—I suppose we might also call them right-wing—Palestinians. The degree of Arafat’s betrayal somehow obscured the extent of Rabin’s treachery in the eyes of the Israeli colonists in Gaza and the West Bank. So when Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli army reserve officer in uniform, decided to massacre Palestinian worshippers in the mosque at Abraham’s tomb in Hebron on 25 February 1994, we—journalists, Americans, Europeans, Israelis—did not know how to react. The “terrorists” were supposed to be Arabs. But Goldstein was an educated man, an American-born doctor—for heaven’s sake—who must have known that his mission was suicidal. The survivors of the slaughter literally beat and strangled and tore him to death.

First reports spoke of more than fifty Palestinians dead in Hebron—the figure was accurate. After Goldstein had cut down more than two dozen Palestinians and wounded up to 170 others in the blood-spattered mosque, Israeli troops shot and killed at least another twenty-five enraged Palestinians outside who pelted them with stones and tried to break through the military cordon that was supposed to protect the sacred area—though it had failed to protect the worshippers. But within thirty-six hours, the Associated Press altered the statistics. Goldstein himself had killed only twenty-nine Palestinians—and this then became the “total” figure for the bloodbath. The other twenty-five dead became a “cut-out,” another story, the aftermath of the killings rather than part of the total death toll.

The identity of the Israeli suicide killer underwent an even more mysterious transformation. “Just imagine if this crime had been committed by a Palestinian in a synagogue,” Arafat’s newly resigned ambassador in Beirut, Chafiq al-Hout, said to me. “Imagine this: almost fifty Israelis slaughtered by a lone Palestinian gunman. What would have been the world’s reaction this morning? Answer me! What would have been the world’s reaction?” It was a difficult question. For a start, the world would have called the gunman a “terrorist.” Any group with which he was associated would have been dubbed a “terrorist group.” Any country harbouring such a “terrorist group” would have been threatened with immediate sanctions. And the American president would no doubt have condemned the deed, quite rightly, as a “wicked crime.”

But that, of course, was not the case. Goldstein was an Israeli. He was an Israeli reserve soldier. He was a Jewish settler. And only two Western news reports called him a “terrorist.” Goldstein was associated with the right-wing Jewish Kach movement. But the Kach was legal in Israel. It had offices in New York. And President Bill Clinton—following the policy of previous U.S. administrations when an Israeli, rather than a Palestinian, was to blame for a massacre—described the slaughter at the Tomb of the Patriarch as “a gross act of murder,” which it clearly was, but also a “terrible tragedy.” It was the same old weasel phrase. The victims were not victims of terrorism but of tragedy, of some natural disaster, a tidal wave, perhaps, or an earthquake.

Down the road from al-Hout’s home in Beirut, around the Palestinian refugee camp at Mar Elias, black flags snapped from lamp-posts, telephone wires and walls. “You damned people helped the Zionists,” a woman screamed at me. “We don’t count for you. We are animals.” In the cramped offices of the “Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” Suheil Natour’s voice growled in fury. “I wonder why the West was prepared to act to protect the Bosnians when sixty-eight of them were killed in the Sarajevo market,” he said. “And then I wonder why, when almost the same number of Palestinians are killed in and around a mosque, you people do nothing to protect us. The Palestinians are so weak that the Israelis repeat their crimes against us.”

It should be said that the Arab states, so loud in their condemnation of the Hebron massacre, had little moral authority to point the finger of guilt. Egypt could denounce the murders, but its police force was systematically torturing hundreds of Muslim prisoners in Cairo and Assiout. Jordan could condemn the bloodshed while forgetting the slaughter of infinitely more Palestinians by the Jordanian army in 1970. Syria could denounce Israel while ignoring the thousands exterminated by Syrian special forces in Hama in 1982. Israelis, too, had a list of atrocities to hold against the Palestinians: a bomb that killed 12 Israelis in a Jerusalem market in 1968; a Palestinian-inspired shooting at Tel Aviv airport that killed 25 people, including several Israelis, in 1972; the deaths of 11 members of Israel’s Olympic team at Munich the same year; the killing of 16 civilians at Kiryat Shmona in 1974; the killing of 21 children at Maalot in 1974. It is a sign of just how dangerously the whole “peace process” folly would collapse that these figures would seem mild by comparison with what was to come.

But the special fury of Arabs in 1994—of ordinary Arabs, not their unelected leaders—was directed at the double standards of the West. Why were we so surprised at the murders in Hebron? I was repeatedly asked. Had we forgotten the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre by Israel’s Phalangist allies which left up to 1,700 Palestinians dead? Had we forgotten how, every time a Palestinian murdered an Israeli, he was a “terrorist,” but every time an Israeli murdered a Palestinian he was a “deranged Jewish settler,” an “American immigrant,” or from a group of “underground Jewish fighters,” but never, with two exceptions, a terrorist?

Trawling through my archives in the aftermath of the Hebron massacre was therefore a very unsettling experience. On 9 April 1948, the Irgun gunmen— “terrorists” by any measure—who committed the Deir Yassin massacre were described by the Associated Press as “radical underground Jewish fighters.” In October 1956, forty-three Palestinian civilians in the Israeli town of Kafr Kashem were massacred by Israeli troops for innocently breaking a curfew. Then there was the Sabra and Chatila bloodletting. Curiously, the latter does not appear in the Associated Press list of major “attacks between Israelis and Palestinians” since 1948. Yet Israel’s own Kahan commission of inquiry, which held Sharon “personally responsible” for the killings, noted that over a period of thirty-six hours, Israeli soldiers around the camps witnessed some of the killings by Lebanese Phalangists—and did nothing. On 20 May 1990 an Israeli soldier lined up a group of Palestinian labourers at Rishon Lezion and murdered seven of them with a sub-machine gun. This slaughter was fully covered by the international press, of course, although the word “terrorist” was not used. The soldier, it was explained, was “deranged.” Five months later, Israeli police opened fire on Palestinians in Jerusalem, killing nineteen men. As U.S. secretary of state, it was James Baker’s lot to comment on this massacre. But he did not call it a “massacre.” He spoke of it as a “tragedy,” the same word Clinton was to use after the Hebron outrage.

This list of horror is not comprehensive, but a pattern emerges from it. When Palestinians massacre Israelis, we regard them as evil men. When Israelis slaughter Palestinians, America and other Western nations find it expedient to regard these crimes as tragedies, misunderstandings, or the work of individual madmen. Palestinians—in the generic, all-embracing sense of the word—are held to account for these terrible deeds. Israel is not. Thus, over the years, a strange confusion has emerged in the Western response to Israeli misdeeds, a reaction that is ultimately as damaging to Israel as it is to the West itself. When Israeli soldiers or settlers murder Palestinians, they are semantically distanced from their country.

Baruch Goldstein held the rank of major in the Israeli army reserve. But in news reports of the time, his identity underwent a now familiar transmogrification. No longer referred to as an Israeli soldier, even though he was wearing his army uniform and carrying his military-issue rifle when he set out to kill, he was now called “an American Jewish immigrant.” In the space of just twelve hours, the United States had been gently touched by the man’s guilt; and by the same process, his Israeli identity had begun to fade. Yet when Israel as a state was clearly involved in the taking of innocent Arab life—in the massive air raids on Beirut in 1982, for example, in which the Israeli air force was, in early June of that year, killing more than 200 civilians a day—moral guilt was also avoided. These were not “terrorist” actions; they were military operations against “terrorist targets.”

The same skewed semantics were applied to the July 1993 Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon. In revenge for the killing of nine Israeli soldiers inside its occupation zone in Lebanon, Israel attacked the villages of southern Lebanon, killing more than 100 men, women and children—almost double the number of innocents killed by Goldstein—and putting 300,000 refugees on the road to Beirut. As one of the few reporters in Lebanon at the time, I watched women and children shrieking with pain in the hospital wards, their bodies tormented with burns from Israeli phosphorus shells. This “operation” cost, according to the Israeli finance minister, $33 million, a bill that Washington helped to underwrite. And President Clinton’s reaction? He blamed the Hizballah—which killed the nine Israeli soldiers—for all the deaths, then called on “all sides” to exercise “restraint.”

Amid this obfuscation, a new rationale had been laid out in the Middle East, one which—on a far greater geopolitical as well as geographical scale—continues to this day. It goes like this: America is running a “peace process.” Anyone supporting it is a friend. That includes Israel and, for the time being—unless he had to metamorphose back into being a “super-terrorist”—it included Arafat as well. It also included Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But any Arab who believed that the Arafat–Rabin agreement was flawed—or who believes today that Washington’s monumentally ambitious and hopeless plans for Iraq and the entire Middle East are based upon lies or deceit—anyone who opposed this policy, objected to it, disagreed with it—however nonviolently—or said anything that might damage it, was treated as an enemy. Or, more specifically, in the words of the U.S. press, an “enemy of peace.”

Thus, by extension, anyone opposing America’s policy in the region—which also means anyone opposing Israel—is an enemy of peace. The all-embracing phrase leads to grotesque distortion. When those Palestinian protesters demonstrated against the Israeli dynamiting and rocketing of seventeen houses in the Tofah district of Gaza in 1993, CNN showed a tape of one of the young men stoning Israeli troops. But CNN’s commentary described the young man as “protesting at the peace process.” If he was fighting Israelis, he must have been an “enemy of peace.” Even if that had been his cause of complaint, it was clearly regarded as illegitimate.⁸⁸ Yet it was the PLO–Israeli Oslo agreement that—in many Palestinian eyes—permitted Israel to keep both troops and settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was Arafat, for tens of thousands of his detractors, who “legitimised” the Jewish settlements, from which came the killer who massacred the Palestinians of Hebron. Because American newspapers and television networks also did not want to be regarded as “enemies of peace,” many in the West still did not realise just how disastrously Arafat’s “peace” accord with Israel was disintegrating, nor why Israel was being directly blamed by Palestinians for the Hebron massacre. The Israeli government denied any involvement in the slaughter. But that did not mean that Israel was not responsible for the slaughter. For it was Israel’s policy of colonisation, Israel’s arming of the colonisers, and the subsequent Palestinian resistance to that occupation, which led directly to the killings in Hebron. If the murderer’s act was an “individual” one, it was also inevitable. In any environment where opponents of Israel are dehumanised into “terrorists,” where Israeli criminals are treated on a different moral plane from Palestinian criminals, such crimes will be committed. Goldstein saw Arabs as “terrorists”— the same corrosive word that had led the Israelis into their Lebanon adventure in 1982 and which persuaded the Americans to embark upon their folly in Iraq twenty-one years later—and walked into the Hebron mosque to exorcise the demons that we had all helped to create for him.

Arafat, too, had his demons. And when the old conjuror turned up, late as usual, in Gaza, he had another illusion to foist upon us. His face was the same as it was in Beirut twelve years earlier, when he claimed victory over the victorious Israelis and inspected his troops on the quayside before fleeing Lebanon. He looked older, the cheekbones more pronounced, but the eyes were the same as he pushed his way through the frenzied crowd, halfway between ecstasy and fear. Only minutes before, a young gunman had shrieked through a police Tannoy that Arafat would lead them to Jerusalem, and many of the Palestinians seemed to believe it.

The illusions thickened. Arafat had come, he told us in that packed, sweating square in Gaza two hours later, “to build a homeland, a nation of freedom, equality and democracy.” Who could deny these Palestinians their dreams after the terrible years of occupation? Yet who could deny the familiar scenes on the road, from the Egyptian border-crossing point at Rafah: the screaming gunmen, the armed youths joy-firing from the car windows, the horse bolting in panic outside Khan Younis, its cart crashing into the olive tree by the roadside? Lebanon came to mind.

Even before Yassir Arafat staged his homecoming before the world’s television cameras, there were Palestinian mukhabarat security men on the roads, pistols in their belts, overweight and suspicious, the very same apparatchiks—as they happily reminded me at one checkpoint—that once ruled the streets of Beirut. There could be advantages in this. Journalists were urged to watch every second of Arafat’s triumphal arrival in “Palestine”; but, in faithful imitation of their oppressors, Palestinian officials would only allow journalists with Israeli credentials—or papers issued by the “Palestinian Authority” in Gaza—to reach the border at Rafah. My Beirut press card—issued by the Lebanese government—was of no use. The Independent’s brilliant young correspondent in Jerusalem, Sarah Helm, had all the right documents. “Don’t worry, Robert,” she told me and a colleague as we stood in the muck at the roadside, forbidden to proceed to the Egyptian frontier. “When I get to Rafah, I’ll find an official, come back and rescue you.” She did not.⁸⁹But a tall, lean Palestinian with a Kalashnikov rifle came to our rescue. “Mr. Robert? Is this Mr. Robert from Beirut?” he asked. “You don’t remember me? You gave me tea outside your home during the Beirut siege.” And I had the vaguest of memories of an exhausted, frightened young gunman with his arm in bandages sinking onto the porch of my home in 1982 and begging for water. Now it was my turn to do the begging. “Of course, you will come to Rafah with us,” he said. The gunman and his colleagues from Beirut were now all soldiers; another conjuring trick, like the parade at Rafah of smartly dressed men from the Palestinian navy— their drill immaculate, their dressing impeccable—who did not have a fishing boat to their name. But we had arrived just in time to witness this splinter of history.

And there was Arafat, a Hitler to the Israeli settlers down the road in Gush Qatif who had been so slow to recognise his transformation from “terrorist” to “statesman.” He might have driven over the border in his usual fatigues and kuffiah, but Arafat quickly realised that the reception awaiting him—of esteemed and elderly village dignitaries sitting in the heat—was not worthy of his time. He swept past them in a mob of security men, greeting only the widow of his old comrade Abu Jihad—assassinated by the very nation whose troops were now watching him from the roadside.

“Never,” said one of those Israeli soldiers to me—a veteran of the Lebanon war, wearing the purple beret of the Givati Brigade—“did I ever imagine in all my life that I would have to help protect Yassir Arafat.” Across that same road, I found Captain Abu Shamra, a Palestinian Lebanon veteran with the black beret of the Palestine Liberation Army on his head, who insisted that in Beirut he never, ever doubted that he would “return to Palestine.” The old conjuror had confounded the Israeli, but not the Palestinian.

It had taken him nearly all of ten months since he first shook hands with Rabin to negotiate his entry into “Palestine.” But it was easy to be churlish that hot morning of 2 July 1994. Standing with his head through the sunroof of his car as it raced towards Gaza, Palestinian women and children waving to him from the palm groves, Yassir Arafat was seen by his bodyguards to be crying uncontrollably. As his voice echoed later round the hot concrete façades of Gaza City, we heard him address himself to his enemies among both the Israelis and the Palestinian Hamas movement. For the Israelis, he announced that illusive “peace of the brave.” For Hamas, he praised the courage of their imprisoned leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He saluted the “steadfastness” of the Palestinians in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan without mentioning that his peace agreement doomed them to remain for ever in their misery. Then he told the crowds they would “all pray together in Jerusalem.”

Had Arafat not seen the Israeli soldiers along his route into Gaza City, dug in behind their earth revetments in combat jackets, belt-fed machine guns pointing at the highway? Had he not noticed the forest of Israeli flags—before any Palestinian flags—as he entered his homeland? Did he not see the notice announcing that entry to the Palestinian “autonomous” area was “by co-ordination with the Israel Defence Force”?

His rule crept slowly across Gaza City. First came the commercial eulogies, the cloying praise of the new Palestinian president in advertisements printed on the front and back pages of the morning papers, eulogies from mayors and restaurant owners and construction company managers who, no doubt, hoped to earn a few contracts from the Palestinian “authority.” “Congratulations to our brother and leader Yassir Arafat and all his brothers on their return to our precious Palestine,” the Raghab Mutaja Company of citrus exporters and motor importers of Gaza announced. “We thank you for starting to build a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.”

Down at the Palestine Hotel, Arafat was holding court with his servants, the Fatah leaders who ran the resistance battle against Israeli occupation—and whose absolute loyalty he must have in the coming years. He met the Jerusalem consuls of Britain, France and Germany—whose countries’ financial assistance he needed almost as much as he did the support of his gunmen. Escorted by dozens of armed men, he drove through the refugee camp of Jabaliya—where the first intifada against Israeli rule began—and addressed thousands of refugees in a decrepit schoolhouse. “With our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you,” came the tired response. No, Arafat roared back, in future they must shout that they sacrifice themselves “for Palestine.” Aware at last of the deep and widespread dissatisfaction with the Oslo peace accords, he now spoke more ruefully about them. “The agreement we have made is not to our taste,” he said as an Israeli helicopter flew over the schoolhouse. “But it’s the best we’ve got at a time when the Arab predicament could not be worse.” All the while, Arafat’s men covered the crowd with their Kalashnikovs.

“Arafat’s men” soon became a common expression in Gaza. Some of them were Gazans, but many were Palestinians who played no part in the resistance, who rotted away in Baghdad or Cairo or grew old fighting in Lebanon’s internecine wars. They had arrived here now to rule Gaza with many of the characteristics of their countries of exile. The Palestinian soldiers and policemen who came from Egypt adopted that special mixture of Ottoman bureaucracy and British colonial arrogance that rubbed off on the Egyptians a hundred years ago. The Palestinians who spent too much time in Baghdad shouted and gave orders. “They want to use the stick,” as one Gazan put it. Those who lived in Lebanon were more acquiescent, prepared to turn a blind eye to transgressions or even take a bribe or two.

In Omar Mukhtar Street, they were sitting outside the police station manning a set of ancient typewriters, trying to organise a new car registration scheme. Palestinians were handing over Israeli military papers in return for a document headed “Palestine Authority.” But the symbols of statehood do not give a nation reality. Anyone walking through the streets of Shati or Jabaliya camps in Gaza quickly realised that most of Arafat’s new Gaza subjects—perhaps 90 per cent of them— did not come from Gaza at all.

They were refugees—or the children of refugees—from that part of southern Palestine that is now southern Israel, having lived for almost half a century amid the rubbish pits and squalor of Gaza waiting for Arafat to honour his promise of sending them home to Ashkelon or Beersheba. Just as the Galilee Palestinians had washed up in the camps of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, so the Palestinians from the south had ended up in the wasteland of Gaza, over which—unlike the other locations to the north—Arafat would now have to rule. But they, too, had now to face the reality that they would not be able to go “home,” indeed that they must live on in Gaza with two-thirds of the original Israeli occupation force who were still guarding Jewish settlements here and patrolling the borders of the nation that those newspaper advertisements lauded so fulsomely.

In Shati camp, the day after Arafat’s arrival in Gaza, I found Ibrahim, a taxi-driver from the town of Ramleh which is now in Israel, standing at the door of his slum home, waiting to catch sight of Arafat. “Ten years ago, I drove my mother to Ramleh and she found her home and I knocked on the front door,” he said. “There was a Jewish family inside. The Israeli man asked us to come in and said ‘Welcome to our home.’ And my mother—and it was her home, remember, that she was driven out of—broke down in tears. The Israelis were kind to us and understood that this had been our family’s property. My mother died a year later. No, I know I’ll never get our home back. Anyway it has been destroyed now for a new estate. Maybe I’ll get compensation. And maybe also some statement from the Israelis that they took our homes away in 1948.”

Elsewhere in Shati, men from Beersheba, Jaffa and Lod said that yes, they really did believe they would one day return to these towns—now in Israel—“with God’s help.” That, of course, is not what the Israelis had in mind for them. The Israelis wanted to see an orderly, well-policed “autonomous area” on their doorstep—and had chosen Yassir Arafat for the job. A few hours later, I was trekking through the sand dunes back to my run-down hotel when two plainclothes men in a green saloon car stopped me in Shati. The PLO’s security men were suspicious, abrupt. “What are you doing here? Where are you from? Give me your papers!” they demanded. Arafat’s “Palestine,” I reflected, might, after all, turn out to be just another typical Arab state.

To his economic advisers, Arafat had promised Palestinian postage stamps in three weeks, passports in three months. “There will be no problems with the Israelis about this,” one of those advisers commented wistfully to me as he strode the sand-encrusted lawn of my hotel. “The protesters don’t matter. The Israelis are now what we call the ‘enemy-friends.’ ” It was an exclusive point of view. In Gaza, PLO officials now talked about the “good Jews” with whom they could negotiate, the honest Israelis they could trust. But the moment I drove out of Gaza, en route across Israel and the West Bank to Arafat’s other borough of Jericho, all the old double standards reasserted themselves. At the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel, two elderly Palestinian women were forced to sit on the pavement in the sun while their papers were checked, hands upraised and begging an Israeli officer to allow them to pass. An Israeli border policeman forced a Palestinian with out-of-date papers to stand beside his car while he screamed abuse at him.

That morning’s Jerusalem Post maintained the same double standards. The front page announced the wounding of an Israeli Jew by Arab “terrorists” while the back page carried a smaller article reporting that “Jewish extremists” might have been responsible for the murder of a Palestinian Arab. My Israeli Arab taxi-driver watched fearfully as a squad of bearded Israelis in yarmulkas erected a huge banner across the Ashkelon–Tel Aviv highway intersection calling for Arafat’s assassination. Yet within four days of his appearance in Gaza, Arafat was performing the same trick all over again, this time in Jericho.

It was such stuff as dreams are made on—Yassir Arafat arriving by air in the West Bank escorted by an Israeli helicopter gunship; Yassir Arafat, microphone in his right hand like a crooner, pleading to be heard as his supporters stormed the platform in “free Jericho”; Yassir Arafat promising an “industrial revolution” in the oldest city in the world; Yassir Arafat solemnly swearing in a “government” whose “Minister of Jewish Affairs”—himself a Jew—was the only cabinet member not to recognise the state of Israel. Was there anything left to surprise us, now that the old man had arrived in his ramshackle capital? His features had become so familiar that only now, on the last day of his first return to “Palestine,” did we notice that his pepper-and-salt beard now matched the black-and-white kuffiah on his head. His habit of raising his eyebrows to compensate for his small eyes gave him the appearance of a surprised walrus, a characteristic caught with uncanny and cruel accuracy by the amateur wall artists of Jericho.

His rasping voice, which grew ever harsher as he sought to shout down the crowds until he lost it altogether, and the constantly moving, whiskery features somehow made him appear both passionate and at the same time outrageous. “Listen to me! Listen to me,” he screamed. “I have returned to Palestine . . . Don’t touch those people”—this to the Palestinian police who were manhandling the crowds. “Stay calm . . . just hear me, listen to me like Dr. Saeb told you to . . . listen to me . . . in 1948, the Israelis said they had found a land without people and that they were a people without land . . . listen to me . . . now we remind them that nobody can erase the Palestinian people . . . I want to tell you we are devoted to a just peace, committed to it . . . I want to know who is preventing people from coming here to Jericho today . . . unity, unity, unity . . . we shall pray in Jerusalem— till we pray in Jerusalem, till we pray in Jerusalem.”

It was painful to transcribe his speech—and to hear that failing voice, his ideas and phrases crashing into each other—as a lone, massive woman pushed her way through the armed security men and shrieked her desire to embrace “the President of Palestine.” Arafat stood stunned but suddenly relented and the lady was hauled to the dais. She hurled herself at Arafat who recoiled in horror and then, with a frozen smile, put his arms around her.

He had spotted the real problem when he demanded to know who “prevented” Palestinians from coming to Jericho. For after the crowds had broken through the security fences and trampled through the journalists and photographers, it was evident—and it must have been even more so to Arafat as he stood above us—that the field behind was empty. Not half, perhaps not a quarter of the people of Jericho had bothered to turn out to see him. There were rumours that the Israeli army had turned back busloads of West Bankers—an Israeli soldier on the nearest checkpoint admitted he had stopped them but then said the opposite; settlers certainly stoned cars on the Jerusalem–Jericho road. But a million Palestinians lived in the West Bank. There were no curfews to keep them at home. Those who gathered to greet Arafat were fewer than the Lebanese who gathered to bid him farewell from Beirut after the 1982 siege.

Most Palestinians had already gathered the purpose of Arafat’s return. The Hebron massacre had been followed by a bloody bus bombing in the Israeli town of Afula—a “terrorist” attack, CNN was quick to tell us—and the Palestinian leader was clearly required to put an end to “terror.” As the months and years went by, this became the agenda tabled by Israel and the Americans—and the usual, compliant journalists—and the question itself became a cliché: can Arafat control his own people? That Arafat was supposed torepresent his people, rather than control them, was a point never made by journalists or Western politicians. Nor did anyone ask whether Sharon could “control” his own increasingly shambolic army as it gunned down Palestinian child stone-throwers ever more frequently with live bullets.

The “Palestinian Authority” was at times prepared to do the same. By November 1994, Arafat was participating in a form of parallel theatre. While his own policemen were shooting down Palestinians during violent protests by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Israelis were shooting down Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. Within days, Arafat was reduced to the claim made by all Middle East despots when they are attacked by their own people: his opponents, he said, were participating in “a foreign plot.” It was an essential part of the Arafat story—anything to avoid the reality that those Palestinians who hated Arafat’s rule were home-grown and objected not so much to the notion of peace but to what they saw as the grotesque injustice of the “Declaration of Principles” that Arafat had been so quick to sign a year before. “Foreigners” are always a card in the hand of those who will not confront the identity of their opponents; the Americans were to use just such a lame excuse when they faced an all-out Iraqi insurgency in 2003 and 2004 and 2005. The beauty of the trap into which Arafat had driven with such messianic confidence must already have been clear to him. If he refused to confront the Islamic movements opposed to Oslo, this would prove that he could not be trusted with more territory—as he was entitled to receive under the Oslo agreement. On the other hand, if he fought the Islamists into a civil war, the ensuing chaos would provide proof that Arafat presided over anarchy—which was also good reason why he should be given no more territory. And the longer the Palestinians waited for Israeli withdrawals, the weaker Arafat became.

In the years to come—as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians degenerated into Palestinian suicide bombings, Israeli air attacks, extrajudicial executions, house destruction and further massive Israeli land expropriation—the Palestinians would be blamed by both Israel and the Americans for their failure to “control” violence and to accept a deal that would have given the Palestinians a mere 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of Mandate Palestine that was left to negotiate over. So before we embark on this shameful story of tragedy and loss, it is vital to establish that Israel reneged on every major accord and understanding that was signed in the coming years.

UNDER THE OSLO AGREEMENT, the occupied West Bank would be divided into three zones. Zone A would come under exclusive Palestinian control, Zone B under Israeli military occupation in participation with the Palestinian Authority, and Zone C under total Israeli occupation. In the West Bank, Zone A comprised only 1.1 per cent of the land, whereas in Gaza—overpopulated, rebellious, insurrectionary—almost all the territory was to come under Arafat’s control. He, after all, was to be the policeman of Gaza. Zone C in the West Bank comprised 60 per cent of the land, which allowed Israel to continue the rapid expansion of settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. Arafat, as Edward Said was the first to point out, had already conceded Jerusalem; he had already agreed that it would be discussed only during “final status” talks. It thus fell outside the “zoning” system, remaining entirely in Israeli hands.

The truth was that Oslo—far from holding out the possibility of statehood for the Palestinians—allowed Israel to renegotiate UN Security Council Resolution 242. Whereas 242 demanded the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territory captured during the 1967 war, Oslo permitted the Israelis to decide from which bits of the remaining 22 per cent of “Palestine” they would withdraw. The “zoning” system represented this new Israeli reality. The Israelis had the maps—Oslo, incredibly, was negotiated without proper maps on the Palestinian side—and the Israelis decided which zones would be “given” to the Palestinians at once and which would be haggled over later.

Indeed, a detailed investigation in 2000 of Israeli withdrawals under the Articles of Agreement would prove that not a single one of these accords had been honoured by the Israelis since the 1991 Madrid conference.⁹⁰ In the meantime, the number of settlers illegally living on Palestinian land had risen in the seven years since Oslo from 80,000 to 150,000—even though the Israelis, as well as the Palestinians, were forbidden to take “unilateral steps” under the terms of the agreement. The Palestinians saw this, not without reason, as proof of bad faith. Little wonder that by 1999, Edward Said, who had for many years shown both compassion and understanding for Arafat’s brave role as the sole representative of a forgotten and dispossessed people, felt able to describe the Palestinian leader not only as “a tragic figure” but as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

From Beirut, I would journey every few months via Cyprus or Jordan to Arafat’s little fiefdoms in Israel—still in a formal and sometimes actual state of war with Israel, there were no direct flights from Lebanon—and each trip would reveal two parallel but totally contradictory narratives: the awesome optimism of the United States and Western correspondents that Israeli–Palestinian peace was a certainty (albeit that the “peace process” was always being put “back on track”) and the steady deterioration of all hope among Palestinians that they would ever achieve statehood, let alone a capital in East Jerusalem. A trip to Gaza on 8 August 1995 was pure Alice through the Looking Glass.

“By the blood of our martyrs, take your cars from the race-track,” a man in a white shirt screamed. “Take away your cars or we will burn them. Abu Amar is coming.” In the old days, Palestinians were asked to perform stirring deeds for the blood of their martyrs. But the dead of the Palestinian revolution had never hitherto been summoned to sort out a parking problem. It was Arafat’s sixty-sixth birthday and they had laid on a party for him at the beach racetrack, complete with a flurry of Arab steeds ridden by members of the “Palestinian Society of Equitation” of which President Arafat of Palestine also happened to be the honorary secretary. And when he came, preceded by blue police cars and jeeploads of gunmen and soldiers and security men, it had to be said that the chairman looked his age. He was tired, very tired, his eyes puffy from lack of sleep—angry meetings of the Palestinian Authority now dragged on till dawn—and his old generals and colonels in their faded uniforms with their eagles and crossed swords on equally faded epaulettes looked like men of the past, smoking too much, for ever fingering their moustaches. About the only fit creatures at the party were the horses that pranced past the Palestinian leader as he sat down on a blue-and-pink armchair beneath an awning and stared out across the Mediterranean. He did, it’s true, try to look happy.

He embraced children, kissing a girl four times on the cheek, a little boy in a military uniform five times on the cheek and once on the hand. He had already opened the new children’s park named after his eleven-day-old daughter Zahwa— “The Amusement Park of Palestine’s Zahwa,” it was cloyingly called—and a children’s zoo with a mangy lion for the entertainment of Palestinian youth. And when the Palestinian boy scouts trooped past him, Arafat was on his feet saluting them. He saluted the girl guides, too, saluted the Palestinian Kung Fu society, all dressed out in black overalls and white headbands, saluted a child acrobat. And when a rider persuaded his mount to kneel before the president of Palestine, Arafat leapt to his feet and saluted the horse.

He laughed and grinned his way through a musical performance of dabkeh dancers and actors who rhetorically discussed the difficulties of the “peace process.” “We have Gaza and Jericho because of your presence,” they chorused confidently. “Jerusalem will come back to us with Abu Amar’s efforts,” they went on, less confidently. “Do we want to sell this land?” one actor asked. And his colleague replied: “I will not forget Jerusalem or Haifa or Bisan.” And the crowd roared because half of Jerusalem and all of Haifa and Bisan are in present-day Israel, not in Gaza or the West Bank. And at the end, before the races began, the actors embraced, old friends who disagreed about the peace but would never fight each other. Arafat clapped and laughed. Ah yes, if only it was that easy, if only there was no need for the Palestinian midnight security courts and the twenty-fiveyear prison sentences and the after-dark arrests that were now part of life in Gaza for those who disagreed with Arafat. Then the president of Palestine opened the races while his men handed out baskets of sweet wafers to the hundreds of sheikhs and family leaders who sat beneath the awning. The people ate, the horses raced. Yes, the old man gave his people bread and circuses to mark his birthday.

For Arafat was running a little dictatorship down in Gaza, with the total approval of Israel and the United States. Under the pretext of stamping out “terrorism” on Israel’s behalf, he now had more than ten competing Palestinian intelligence services under his command, a grand total exceeded only by Arab leaders in Baghdad and Damascus. New press laws effectively muzzled Palestinian journalists, many of whom were “invited” to security headquarters in Gaza City for after-dark meetings with plainclothes intelligence officers who now liaised with the Israeli security services.

Ostensibly aimed at Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of whom had carried out suicide bombings against the Israelis, the carapace of new “security” measures being lowered over every aspect of Gaza life meant that Arafat was turning into just another Arab despot. The secret midnight courts were sentencing alleged Hamas members to up to twenty-five years in prison while at least three Palestinians died in custody. In April 1995 a newly-released prisoner was shot dead by Arafat’s police in what many Palestinians regarded as an extrajudicial execution; he was said to have seventy bullets in his body.

Around Arafat there were now constructed “Military Security,” “Political Security,” “National Security” and “Preventive Security” units, along with a Palestinian intelligence service and a praetorian guard of three more paramilitary organisations: Amn al-Riyassi (presidential security), Harass al-Riyassi (presidential guard) and Force 17, the special security unit that had charge of Arafat’s personal protection. In time-honoured Arafat fashion, the heads of these different outfits were encouraged to suspect and hate each other. Colonel Mohamed el-Musri, a former officer in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, for example, would collaborate only with his nominal boss, General Youssef Nasser, the head of the Palestinian police force. “Preventive Security” was run by Colonel Mohamed Dahlan, an officer who had developed close relations with the Israeli intelligence services even though his men were largely composed of “Fatah Hawks”—who played a leading role in the first armed uprising against Israeli occupation—and former long-term prisoners of the Israelis. All heads of security were summoned each night to hear Arafat discourse upon their duties and the dangers to his statelets, a meeting which they now called “The Lecture.”

Far from condemning the ever-increasing signs of despotism on the other side of their border, the Israelis lavished only praise on Arafat’s new security measures. U.S. State Department spokesmen, while making routine reference to their “concern” for human rights, welcomed and congratulated Arafat on the vitality of his secret midnight courts—a fact bitterly condemned by Amnesty International. Equally secret meetings of Arafat’s inner cabinet, which led to mass arrests of political opponents, were ignored by the U.S. administration.

That Arafat’s cabinet did meet in secret was revealed only when the Palestinian leader signed a series of harsh new measures against the press on 25 June 1995. Of the fifty Articles, the thirty-seventh stated that it was “strictly prohibited” for journalists to publish “the minutes of the secret sessions of the Palestinian National Council and the Council of Ministers of the Palestine National Authority.” To comprehend these new press laws, it was necessary to visit Marwan Kanafani, special adviser to the president—the president of Palestine, of course—who happened to be the brother of the militant (and murdered) poet Ghassan Kanafani.

“We closed Al-Watan because of the report about the president,” he announced to me. “The editor was arrested for something else—he is under arrest, yes. He is being questioned. We have also closed Al-Istiqlal. They have been involved in disinformation.” And Kanafani glanced at his computer screen as if it contained the very law under which Imad al-Falouji, editor of the Hamas newspaper, was taken from his home the previous Saturday morning by plainclothes PLO security men. Al-Falouji’s sin, it seems, was to have carried a small news item on his paper’s back page which claimed to quote a report from The Independent that Yassir Arafat had sold to a French company the right to use the name of his newly-born daughter Zahwa on its products. In fact, my paper had carried no such report, but its provenance was of no interest to the PLO.

“Hamas only printed this article to hurt the credibility of President Arafat,” Kanafani said with contempt. “Nobody believes it. President Arafat is a very generous man—he’d never do such a stupid thing. This has only been done to discredit the president. Yes, I talked with the president about it. His response was more in sorrow than in anger. I hope the suspension will be temporary. I hope the writers of that paper understand that this kind of ‘news’ has got nothing to do with what is called ‘the people’s right to know.’ Why, I know of three news agencies which refused to carry the story.” Writers on magazines like this were hurting the basis of the development and freedom of the press.

“We don’t have any taboos here,” he said. “Yes, these State Security courts, do you know whom they embarrass most, who complains most? The Palestinians. And me. I don’t like them. Yes, they have passed a lot of sentences, some of them harsh. Yes, there are rules that the public are not allowed to attend. But these are just the regulations that go with these courts. And under current conditions here, we may have certain rules that may not be democratic. But didn’t Britain have special courts when it was at war? We’re almost in a state of war against those who don’t want us to implement peace here. It’s a very critical situation. When 1.2 million Palestinians are punished for what one or two [militants] have done, then we are in a state that calls for extraordinary measures. We are trying to punish justly those who are jeopardising the security, property, lives and human rights of the Palestinian people.”

This was quite a speech. And this, I kept telling myself, was Arafat’s special adviser. But more was to follow:

The Declaration of Principles signed in Washington was based on three words: land for peace. We will do anything humanly possible to satisfy Israel’s security needs. But they must do everything humanly possible to satisfy our need for land. President Arafat knew when he signed this agreement that there were big holes in it. And the Israelis got praise for making peace. Rabin shared the Nobel prize with President Arafat. But now when we come down to the nitty-gritty, the Israelis want both peace and land. And if they want to keep their soldiers in the West Bank to protect settlements and keep most of our land under different pretexts, then we’re not going to have peace. Yassir Arafat took a lot of chances for this. He took personally all the decisions that were necessary, yes, including arrests and unpopular decisions, as well as raising the hopes of our people . . . He did this because he believes in peace. Heads of state don’t take these chances but leaders do—and he is a leader. He wants it to work but he is exhausted. He is worried. He is not satisfied that the peace process is moving.

Which is clearly what al-Falouji also thought. So I paid a call on General Youssef Nasser, commander of the Palestinian police, hero of Golan, PLO fighter in Lebanon, refugee from 1948 Palestine. And when I walk through General Nasser’s door—its Israeli security lock snapping open at the touch of a card— there is the great bespectacled man, all smiles, overweight but smartly uniformed, a big clammy hand extended in welcome. He is an optimist. “How do you think we’re doing in the Palestinian Authority?” he asks. So I mention the endless delays in implementation of the Palestinian agreements with Israel, the continued presence of Israeli troops in Gaza, the suicide bombs, the deaths in custody, Amnesty International . . .

“All peace treaties are imposed by a leverage of power and so is this one,” the general replies. “But look, after 1917, the ‘world order’ of the period gave the Jews a homeland and divided us. In 1948, another ‘world order’ created the state of Israel and nullified the Palestinians from both the geographic and demographic map. But now we have managed to re-locate ourselves on the international map and re-establish our identity as Palestinians . . . The Palestinian entity is now international, created under the same resolutions that created Israel.”

But this is not true, I tell the general. Israel was internationally recognised by the United Nations; no UN resolutions safeguard the PLO’s agreement with Israel. “OK,” General Nasser replies. “OK—but no one can shoulder the responsibility of destroying the peace process. The Jewish settlers have two options: to evacuate [Palestinian territory] or to become Palestinian citizens. Israel can’t have both the peace and the land . . . Things are not easy, it’s true. But there is an existing reality—a fact: three million Palestinians are on the ground in the West Bank and in Gaza. Israel has two choices: independence for the Palestinians or a complete merger with the Palestinians—but they can’t keep on with their imperialistic policy . . .”

This was wilful self-delusion, a characteristic normally reserved for Israelis. Israel was backed by the world’s only surviving superpower. No Israeli settler would elect to become a Palestinian and very few settlers would leave the West Bank. The responsibility of “destroying the peace process” would be easy to shift onto Israel’s antagonists, the Palestinians—as indeed it would be in the years to come—the moment Israel decided that the next suicide bombing was one too many.

“Arafat is finding out what it’s like to be Israel’s man,” one of his detractors told me in the cool of one August evening in Gaza that summer of 1995. “The Israelis know that he is a dictator and that the more internal power he has, the more he will do their bidding. So they approve of all this. They don’t want a real democracy because Arafat might lose elections—and a new leader might not obey their wishes. Now they are even turning Arafat against Assad of Syria by persuading the PLO to claim part of the Golan Heights as Palestinian . . . And all the while Jewish settlements continue to be built . . .”

I have sought in vain to discover the origin of our journalistic use of the word “settlements.” By its nature, the expression is almost comforting. It has a permanence about it, a notion of legality. Every human wants to “settle,” to have a home. The far more disturbing—and far more accurate—word for Israel’s land-grabbing in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 is colonising. Settlers are colonists. Almost all the Israelis in the West Bank are living on someone else’s land. They may say that God gave them the land, but those Palestinians who legally owned that land— who had property deeds to prove it, since the British Mandate, since the Ottoman empire—are not allowed to appeal to God. Successive Israeli governments have supported this theft of property, and by 2003, 400,000 Israeli Jews were living in the occupied territories in explicit violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention—which states that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

In all the long, fruitless negotiations with the Palestinians, the Israelis would always maintain that the return of any territory was “giving” land for peace—as if the occupied territories were legally Israeli property of which it could dispose if it was generously minded. So it is important to recall that the policy of implanting Jewish colonists on occupied Arab land since 1967 has been consistently and enthusiastically supported by successive Israeli governments.

As long ago as 1978, the U.S. administration under President Carter was condemning the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, asking why 9,000 Israelis were now living in the occupied territories in thirteen “unofficial” colonies when the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, supposedly wanted to make peace with President Sadat of Egypt. Already, thirty-nine settlements had been built since the 1967 war. In November 1978 the Jewish Agency drew up a plan—and here I will quote from The Guardian’s highly biased report of the time—for “housing 16,000 Israeli families in 84 new villages on the West Bank of the Jordan, and a further 11,000 families in existing outposts” (my italics). The project would cost $1.5 billion and would be completed within five years—the deadline set for what was intended to be the end of a “transitional period” of Palestinian self-rule. Readers must here understand that the language and hopes of “peace” in the Middle East are a debased coinage. This “transitional period” had nothing to do with the later Oslo agreement but applied to the Begin–Sadat Camp David summit of 1977 which ultimately provided no “self-autonomy” for the Palestinians.

In May 1979, President Carter was appealing for Israeli “restraint” in expanding settlements because they were “inconsistent with international law and an obstacle to peace.” But, he said—and here was a refrain that would be used by successive U.S. administrations as successive Israeli governments ignored them— “there is a limit to what we can do to impose our will on a sovereign nation.” In December of the same year, there was a muted protest by Palestinians against an Israeli government decision to move a settlement onto Arab land near Nablus. In his coverage of the demonstration—the Arabs spread prayer rugs over a neighbouring road because the local Israeli military governor forbade the protest to be held in a mosque—The Times of London correspondent in Tel Aviv referred to the West Bank only by its Jewish name of “Samaria.”

There was, in fact, an oddly subdued quality to the reporting of these successive land thefts by Israel. On 14 March 1980, for example, Christopher Walker of The Times was writing that “friction between Israel and Egypt over Jewish settlements in the occupied territories has been increased by the Israeli decision to seize 1,000 acres of land in east Jerusalem to build a new Jewish suburb. Two thirds of the land is owned by Arabs.” That this was a scandal, rather than a cause of mere “friction,” over a “suburb,” scarcely came across. When in the same year Israel passed a “Basic Law” declaring Jerusalem its capital, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 476, stating that Israeli actions to change the status of Jerusalem “constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” It had no effect. In March of that same year, the last Arab family living in the old Jewish quarter of Jerusalem—Ayub Hamis Toutungi’s house overlooked both the Wailing Wall and the Al-Aqsa mosque—was forced to accept compensation for his property and leave. “I am a Jerusalemite,” Toutungi protested in Hebrew. “I want to remain here. When a Jew loves Jerusalem, it is considered a spiritual value. An Arab who loves Jerusalem is suspected of supporting the PLO.” The Israeli writer Amos Elon protested at this “violence.” To no avail.

When the world was unimpressed by the “Basic Law” which upheld Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as its capital, the Israeli authorities proceeded to seize land— 1,000 acres for a $600,000 settlement (or “suburb” as The Times called it again)— in March 1989. By now, 60,000 Jews lived in “Arab” East Jerusalem, more than 50 per cent of the area’s 100,000 Arab population. In the following year, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin said he would hold onto occupied Arab land for the new wave of Soviet Jewish immigrants arriving in Israel, explaining that “past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep the land of Israel from the [Mediterranean] sea to the River Jordan for the generations to come . . .”

The moment the Oslo accord was revealed, the Israeli Likud party foresaw the end of Jewish colonies on Palestinian land. Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that “these Israeli islands, isolated in a PLO sea, will not last long.” He need not have worried. On 27 September 1994—when 140 Jewish colonies already existed in the West Bank but when the Oslo agreement was only a year old—Israeli prime minister Rabin approved the construction of an extra 1,000 apartments at the settlement of Alfei Menache close to Jerusalem. By 1996, 86.5 per cent of East Jerusalem had been removed from Palestinian residents’ control and use; 34 per cent of East Jerusalem land was expropriated for the building of Jewish colonies. The Jerusalem municipality announced plans to build another 70,000 new housing units over the next ten years. Then came the opening of the “archaeological tunnel” from the Wailing Wall—attended by Irving Moskowitz, a Florida multimillionaire who owns hospitals and a bingo parlour in California—which ran beneath Muslim East Jerusalem; violent protests against the opening of the tunnel, which was paid for by the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs, left 43 Palestinians and 11 Israeli soldiers dead.

In February 1997, Israel approved the construction of a massive new Jewish colony at Jebel Abu Ghoneim, with 3,546 houses and a population of 25,000 Israelis in just the first stage of the project. The hill upon which the settlement was subsequently built is outside East Jerusalem—which Palestinians had once hoped would be their capital. Palestinian protests were ignored and the United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on Israel to abandon construction. In the same month, the Israeli Housing Ministry announced the sale of land for 5,000 new Jewish homes inside existing colonies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that the Jebel Abu Ghoneim colony—its identity changed to Har Homa in Hebrew—would be matched by the construction of 3,015 houses for Palestinians was denounced as “disinformation” by human rights groups. They pointed out that 18,000 permits for Palestinian homes had been promised in 1980—yet not a single one had been honoured seventeen years later.

Nor was this huge illegal colonial expansion—which continued throughout the Oslo “peace process”—without active encouragement from within the United States. On 18 April 1997, The New York Times carried a full-page advertisement signed by ten Christian “spiritual leaders”—including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell—all supporting “the continued sovereignty of the State of Israel over the holy city of Jerusalem . . . we believe that Jerusalem or any portion of it shall not be negotiable in any peace process. Jerusalem must remain undivided as the eternal capital of the Jewish people.” This “spiritual” message claimed that Israel had “demonstrated sensitivity to the concerns and needs of all Jerusalem’s residents, including the Palestinians’ and that Israel’s right to Jerusalem as a sovereign capital came by “divine mandate.”⁹¹

Under Netanyahu, the Israeli authorities seemed almost anxious to enrage their Palestinian opposite numbers and to further undermine Arafat. When in 1997 the UN proposed a new resolution urging member states to “actively discourage” settlement-building on Arab land, Netanyahu’s spokesman, the piano-playing David Bar Ilan, described the proposal as “shameful” and “morally bankrupt” because it ignored world dangers while condemning what he mischievously called “the building of apartments for young couples.” U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright was positively mouselike when in September 1997 she urged Israel to “refrain from unilateral acts, including what Palestinians perceive as the provocative expansion of settlements.” Such words were clearly understood. If the continued building of Jewish colonies on stolen Arab land during the Oslo “peace process” was merely “what Palestinians perceive” to be provocative, then what on earth did the United States perceive them to be?

If they weren’t building homes for Israelis on Palestinian land, the Israelis were busy demolishing Palestinian houses. Between the signing of the Oslo accord in 1993 and March 1998, 629 Palestinian homes were destroyed by Israeli bulldozers, 535 in the West Bank and 94 in Jerusalem, more than a third under an Israeli Labour government and the rest under Likud. Another 1,800 demolition orders were waiting to be carried out. Palestinian outrage at this wholesale attempt to force them out of Jerusalem—in many cases because Israel would not issue building permits for Arabs living there—was merely exacerbated by the April 1999 decision of an Israeli ministerial committee to recommend building an additional 116,000 houses for colonists over the next twenty years.

The Labour government of Ehud Barak—billed as the most liberal and pro-Palestinian Israeli administration since Rabin’s—colonised the West Bank ten times as fast as Netanyahu’s Likud government. Just a day after “final status” negotiations opened between Israelis and Palestinians in September 1999, Barak—visiting the now vast colony of Ma’ale Adumim—announced that “we will not remove a settlement which has 25,000 people and which . . . all the Israeli governments helped to develop . . . Every house built here, every tree, is part of Israel for ever, that’s clear.” By November 2000, the Israeli pressure group Peace Now discovered that the Barak administration was planning to spend another $210 million on colonies the following year.

The final, damning statistics were inescapable. Between 1967 and 1982, a mere 21,000 colonists had moved into the West Bank and Gaza. In 1990, the total was 76,000. By 2000, seven years after the Oslo accord, it stood at 383,000, including those settlers in annexed East Jerusalem.⁹² On 17 May 2001, René Kosimik, the head of the International Red Cross delegation to Israel and the Palestinian territories, felt it necessary to remind the world that under the Geneva Convention, “the installation of the population of the occupying power into the occupied territories is considered as an illegal move and qualified as a ‘grave breach’ . . . The policy of settlement as such in humanitarian law is a war crime.” Yet still, even as Arafat was dying in 2004 and when Israel’s “security” wall was stealing its way across yet more Arab land, the occupation and dispossession of Palestinians continued.

More than any other event, this huge colonial expansion proved to Palestinians that Oslo was a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into the abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood. For the settlers, of course, Oslo was a threat to that very same government-backed colonial project of which they were a part. When Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin pressed on with the “peace process” after successive suicide bombings by Palestinians, he became, for the colonists, part of the same “terror” that Arafat and the PLO represented. On 24 July 1995, for example, a suicide bomber killed seven Israelis on a Tel Aviv bus; on 22 August a woman suicide bomber blew herself up at the rear of a Jerusalem bus, blasting herself and four other passengers to pieces. The day after the second bloodbath, Rabin said this would not deter him from “fighting extreme Islamic terrorism and continuing the negotiations” with the Palestinians. Just two months later, Rabin was denounced as a traitor at a Jerusalem rally at which Benjamin Netanyahu was the principal speaker. Leaflets distributed at the rally showed Rabin dressed as a Nazi officer. A video of the gathering showed a woman stabbing a picture of Rabin with a knife.

A definitive biography of Rabin has still to be written. The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has shrewdly noted that he “inflicted more punishment and pain on the Palestinians than any other Israeli leader.” As chief of staff in 1967, Rabin captured the West Bank. For the next twenty-five years, he tried to hold onto the occupied territories by brute force, which “earned him his reputation inside Israel as a responsible and reliable politician.” Under his premiership, Israeli soldiers were allowed to break the bones of Palestinian protesters, a practice that continued until an Israeli cameraman inconsiderately filmed Israeli soldiers snapping the legs of a Palestinian prisoner. That Rabin continued colonising, even after Oslo, suggests that he wanted to give Arafat the honour of ruling those areas of the West Bank and Gaza that the Israelis did not need for security or for further settlement—a totally different interpretation than Arafat’s. But on 4 November 1995, after telling a Tel Aviv rally that “the path of peace is preferable to the path of war,” Rabin was assassinated by a twenty-five-year-old Israeli religious student called Yigal Amir who was an admirer of Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mosque murderer. At his trial, Amir said that once he was aware that something represented a religious commandment, “there is no moral problem. If I was conquering the land now, I would have to kill babies and children, as it is written in [the Book of] Joshua.” Change the religion, and this could have been the voice of a Palestinian suicide bomber.

The parallels were facile, of course. As I was checking out of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem early one morning, the chief cashier, an Orthodox Jew with an impressively long beard who always wished me safety on my return to Beirut—the Lebanese capital was for him a “terror centre”—asked whether he reminded me of anyone I knew. “Don’t I look a bit like some of the Hizballah?” he asked with a broad smile. And I had to admit that, yes, he did look a bit like some of the Shia Muslim militants of Lebanon. Beards have something to do with orthodoxy, with fundamentalism in the most literal sense of the word, just as the “covering” of women—Orthodox Jewish women, Muslim women, Christian nuns—seemed to be a feature of the three Middle East religions. What is it, I used to ask myself, about hair, the growing of hair, the concealment of hair, male hair as a symbol of manhood, female hair as a devilish trap for men, the length of beards or the shape of beards? Why did Christ, in all those Bible pictures, always have a beard? Why did every Shiite imam in Iran sport a growth around the chin, white and fluffy or stubbly or tangled, an undergrowth of hair every bit as complex as the moral exegesis or treatise on Islamic jurisprudence which had earned him his place in the clerical hierarchy? Was a beard meant to symbolise wisdom or commitment or manhood, or was it supposed to earn respect?

When Yitzhak Rabin illegally deported almost 400 Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters to Lebanon in 1992, he created an Islamic university on the slopes of Mount Hermon. Refused permission by the Lebanese government to travel north into the rest of the country, the Palestinians—many of them university teachers, engineers, clerics—were marooned in the summer heat and winter snows in a mountain wasteland called Marj al-Zahour, the “Field of Flowers,” and here they discussed modern Islam and philosophy and learned their Korans by rote and kept the fast of Ramadan beside a narrow, broken road down which, almost nine hundred years earlier, Saladin was said to have ridden on his way to Jerusalem. Abdul-Aziz Rantissi of Hamas would hold court here, and so would Sheikh Bassam Jarrar and some of the future leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Jarrar would ask me what good could come of a secret “peace” deal that dishonoured those who had died in the first (1987–1993) Palestinian intifada struggle. The deportees would beg for newspapers but as the months passed, the Hizballah and other sympathetic Lebanese Muslim groups furnished them with generators and television sets and books. There was even a university tent “library,” as well as a tent mosque and a tent infirmary. An entire male Islamic society grew up beside the great cartwheel cornucopia rocks of Marj al-Zahour.

“I will miss this beauty,” one of them said to me before he was allowed to return to “Palestine”—and to an Israeli prison—in 1994. “The rocks here will have some special place in our minds in the future.” They gave me family phone numbers in Ramallah and Hebron and Jenin and asked me to call on them when next I visited “Palestine.” So many had negotiated with Israeli officials that one even gave me Shimon Peres’s home telephone number.

And so, one cold December day in 1995, I walked up the drive to Hebron University and found Sheikh Jarrar, one of the “graduates” of the Field of Flowers. He was thinner, no longer dressed in the abaya that protected him from the snows sweeping across Lebanon, but in a new leather jacket, his beard neatly trimmed as he sat in the students’ union office. There were other Hamas supporters from Marj al-Zahour around him, greyer than I remembered them but still listening to their teacher with the same rapt attention they gave him during history lessons in the big tent at the freezing University of Marj al-Zahour. “It changed us all,” he said. “Marj al-Zahour had an effect on all of us. It has made me more relaxed because I realise the world noticed our plight and made me realise there were still values.”

He paused a lot during our meeting in the crowded students’ office, aware perhaps that all those bearded faces would be looking for inconsistencies as well as wisdom in their history teacher. Here, after all, was a Westerner who had known Sheikh Bassam Jarrar in exile, a reporter from a decidedly different culture who might know things they did not know about how those 400 Palestinians behaved in their exile two years before. “Because the world proved to be less of a jungle than we thought, a lot of us have doubts about evaluating our experience in southern Lebanon,” Jarrar continued. “Our political speech was modified. In Marj al-Zahour, I had to talk to people from different cultures. We had to find a language that was convincing to others, not just to ourselves. That’s why we developed a certain language.”

And the PLO–Israeli agreement that the exiles had so scornfully dismissed back in the snows of their mountain encampment? “Any solution is connected to the concept of justice,” Jarrar replied. “If there are mistakes in the plan, it won’t last long. There is a possibility that there will be peace, but there will also be a lot of violence. Everybody believes that this is a superpower solution that is not based on justice . . . Israel will not deal with us with justice.” All the young men around the room nodded obediently when Jarrar returned to a familiar theme: the massive, all-embracing power of Washington, whose interference in international affairs was dictated solely by the interests of the United States—in Bosnia as well as in the Middle East. “Bosnia is in the heart of Europe, it’s a special case. The solution they have reached is to keep the Muslims under supervision and to prevent third parties like the Islamists from gaining any power. But Palestine is in the heart of the Islamic world and here the Americans are looking after their interests in the Middle East—oil and Israel.”

I pushed Sheikh Jarrar back to the subject of Jerusalem, of which he had spoken so many times at Marj al-Zahour. “Arafat maybe will be able to take control of some areas annexed to Jerusalem. The West Bank will be split into cantons by the Israelis who have built all these bypass roads for the settlers which divide up our land. Some of the settlers will leave but others will stay, especially in settlements in the Jordan valley, in the north-west, and in all those areas where the settlements are already virtual cities.” He was half-right. Arafat would be offered some meagre suburbs of Jerusalem. No settlers would leave—indeed, they would increase in number—but the settler roads would divide up the Palestinian land and ensure that no Palestinian state could come into being.

Out in the hallway, hundreds of students clustered round the noticeboards of the militant Palestinian groups. To the Islamist board were pinned dozens of snapshots of Hamas and Islamic Jihad “martyrs,” holding pistols and automatic rifles and heavy machine guns. “That’s Bassam Imasalni,” another Marj al-Zahour veteran said, pointing to the portrait of a slightly bearded man with dark, serious eyes. “He was trapped in his home by the Israelis but came out fighting with his rifle— he only died because there were too many of them.”

Was it self-deception or self-delusion that allowed us to believe that a just “peace” was still on offer? I look back over my own reports from the Middle East in the second half of the Nineties with a mixture of tiredness and horror. “The marriage is over,” I wrote in June 1996. “The show has long drawn to a close. The divorce was made final the moment Bibi Netanyahu became prime minister. The solemn and official agreements signed by the PLO and Israel turn out to be of no interest to the new Israeli government: the Israeli withdrawal from Hebron has not been honoured. Final status talks which were supposed to decide the future of Jerusalem and the Jewish settlements still expanding across the occupied Palestinian West Bank have become an irrelevancy.”

And then, in December 1996, I find myself writing that “an explosion is coming in the Middle East, a detonation that may well change the region for ever. We in the west have largely chosen not to heed the signs of impending calamity, preferring instead to pretend that the long-dead and deeply flawed ‘peace process’ still has life in its decaying body . . . but the Arab world is bracing itself for the shock wave of terrible events.” What on earth, I ask myself today, did I think that explosion would be? I must have imagined that the “explosion” would detonate in the Middle East, inside Israel or Palestine. But I have a tape of an interview with a CBC anchorman in Toronto in November 1998 in which again I talk of “an explosion to come.”

Torture and death in custody, arbitrary arrest and detention without trial, executions and unfair trials by both Israelis and Palestinians: five years after the Oslo agreement, could there have been a more wretched indictment of the “peace” than the report that Amnesty International published? So rapidly were human rights being sacrificed in the hopeless search for “security” between Israel and the PLO that the November 1998 report was too late to record the latest atrocities: two Palestinians shot by a PLO firing squad for murder and the apparent beating to death by Yassir Arafat’s henchmen of Hussein Ghali, who called at a Gaza police station to make a complaint. Amnesty’s own words were more eloquent than any reporter’s notes:

. . . killings of Palestinians by Israeli security services or settlers have led to suicide bombings and the deaths of Israeli civilians. These have led to waves of arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, torture and unfair trials. The Palestinian population have been the main victims of such violations . . . the Occupied Territories have become a land of barriers, mostly erected by Israeli security services, between town and town and village and village.

Methods of torture used by the Israelis included shabeh (sleep deprivation while shackled in painful positions and hooding), gambaz (forced to squat for more than two hours), tiltul (violent shaking that had already killed a Palestinian prisoner)⁹³ and khazana(imprisonment in a cupboard). Other methods included beatings, pressure on the genitals and exposure to heat and cold. “There is general acceptance by the international community,” Amnesty said, “that Israel has legalised the use of torture.” Torture by Yassir Arafat’s authority included beatings, suspension from the wrists, burning with electricity or cigarettes, along with tortures learned from the Israelis, especially Shabeh. Twenty Palestinians had died in Palestinian Authority custody since the Oslo agreement, most of them during or after torture. Among those routinely tortured were “security detainees,” suspected collaborators and those Palestinians who had sold land to Jews.

Amnesty was especially concerned about extrajudicial killings. They included the murder of Hani Abed, a Hamas member suspected of murdering two Israeli soldiers, who was killed in a Gaza car bomb; Fatih Shikaki, the Islamic Jihad leader shot dead in Malta, and Yahya Ayash, a Hamas bomb-maker killed by a booby-trapped mobile telephone. His death, during a self-proclaimed Hamas ceasefire, provoked another round of suicide bombings. Among the many innocents killed by the Israelis was eight-year-old Ali Jawarish. The organisation quoted Joel Greenberg of The New York Times , who later told the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem that he saw Israeli troops fire at the boy during a demonstration.

I saw one of the soldiers kneeling and aiming his gun at the children . . . In my opinion it was a rubber [coated] bullet . . . but I am not certain . . . When the soldiers retreated I noticed a boy aged about nine or ten lying motionless on the ground . . . I saw . . . a wound on the right side of the forehead and a lot of blood flowing. Later the doctors at Muqassed Hospital and at Beit Jala told me that the child’s brain had spilled out.

There was now a weird symbiosis about this bloody conflict. The greater the violence in Israel–Palestine, the darker the political future, the more optimistic the West would become about the “peace process” which was once more, of course, to be put “back on track.” This was, I suppose, an unconscious dress rehearsal for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003. As the results of that illegal military operation became steadily more disastrous, so the Americans and the British would repeat their absolute confidence that the invasion was worthwhile, the aftermath predictable and the final result a mixture of “freedom” and “democracy.” So, too, “Palestine” and Israel in 1998.

In May of that year, I travelled to London to watch the continued myth-making of Middle East peace played out around Downing Street. A police helicopter purred lazily over us when Benjamin Netanyahu came out of Number 10 to tell us how grateful he was to Tony Blair. The chopper drifted back in the English spring sunshine when Yassir Arafat in turn emerged from Downing Street to thank Blair for his commitment to the “peace process.” How they loved Tony. How they hated each other. And all the while, behind us, loomed the fateful building in which Lord Balfour had composed Britain’s 1917 declaration of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine.

Bibi, immaculate as ever in dark suit and thick white hair, told us there could be progress if both sides showed “flexibility.” Israel, he claimed, “had already gone the extra mile.” The Palestinians took the view that Netanyahu’s extra mile was the distance that Israel’s latest Jewish colony had extended into occupied Arab land. Arafat—ashen-faced, lower lip quivering, his kuffiah for once untidy— warned only that “Netanyahu must take the responsibility of . . . the chaos that might take place in the region if the result of these talks is not positive.”

A mile away, through the empty London bank holiday streets, the Israeli prime minister talked to U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright in the sumptuous suites of the Grosvenor Park Hotel. The foyer, with its fake log fire and oil painting of ice skaters, looked ominously like the smoking room of the Titanic; and within minutes, there was Israel’s spokesman, David Bar Ilan, with his ice-cold public school accent, strolling through the lobby to tell journalists—in response to Arafat’s statement—that “if the formula is ‘land-for-terrorism,’ we can’t go on with this.” It was the language of children that both sides spoke, the language of threat and false compromise. How Netanyahu and Arafat loved peace, strove for peace. But they could not even bring themselves to talk to each other. Arafat was so weakened that all he could do, pathetically, was accept Washington’s demand for a further 13.1 per cent Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, in itself a grotesque diminution of what the Oslo accords demanded. In Grosvenor House, Madeleine Albright—the supposedly tough-talking secretary of state who used all the anger of a sheep to persuade the Israelis to try to stop building settlements on occupied Arab land and adhere to the Oslo timetable—tried to persuade Netanyahu to cede more than 9 per cent of Palestinian land to Arafat in the next handover of territory. In vain.

So much for the Palestinian state. But outside Number 10, the networks were telling their viewers—in the words of the man from the BBC—that Netanyahu had “little room for compromise” because of his divided cabinet. There was no hint in his broadcast that Israel was not abiding by the terms of the signed Oslo agreement. Bar Ilan spelled out the situation all too well. Israel wanted more security from Arafat and demanded that he reduce the number of his Palestinian policemen. Better security, fewer policemen. Who dreamed up these crazy formulas?

There was a moment that captured the hopelessness of the Middle East “peace process.” On a sofa just outside the coffee salon of the Churchill Hotel in London on the second day of the talks, I came upon a familiar figure slumped on the sofa. There was no obvious security, no policemen, just the tall, dark-haired State Department spokesman and the woman sitting white-faced with exhaustion in the corner of the settee. Madeleine Albright looked on the point of collapse. Only hours before, she had telephoned Arafat to plead her excuses. She could not come to see him as agreed, she said. She was simply too tired to drive over to Claridge’s for their meeting. Arafat burst into laughter when the call was over. Never mind that his own state of health—shocking to behold when only a few feet from him, his right hand clutching his shaking left hand, his lower lip moving helplessly when he wasn’t speaking—was far worse than Mrs. Albright’s. But when it came to Netanyahu a few hours later, Albright was off in her limousine to meet the Israeli prime minister at his own hotel.

What came over most strongly—even more shocking than the state of Arafat’s health—was Albright’s fear of Netanyahu, indeed perhaps of Israel. Arafat and the PLO had already accepted America’s conditions for the 11 May 1998 invitation to meet President Clinton in Washington. Netanyahu had not responded. He was flying back to Israel to “consult” his cabinet. But when Albright talked to us all later—hesitant and sometimes confusing or forgetting questions—she was all praise for the Israeli leader who was forging ahead with Jewish settlements on the land Arafat wanted as part of his Palestinian state. Netanyahu was “encouraging.” He had produced “new ideas.” He was enthusiastic. He was “helpful.” She was very grateful to Netanyahu. “It is obviously up to Israel to decide what its security demands are”—goodbye, then, to those Palestinian policemen. But when we asked Albright what all those “new ideas” were, we were informed that “more details do not help us to move forward.”

This was meaningless. Yet still she talked of “progress”—I counted the word at least eighteen times in just a few minutes. And so did Tony Blair in his own appearance before the press. Here was another of those verbal punctuation marks, its increasing frequency making its use ever more suspect. Arafat said he had “heard” from Albright that there had been “progress.” It was when I asked him if he did not now regret signing the Oslo accords that the old man’s eyes suddenly widened and his voice took on its old strength. “The peace agreement I signed was the peace of the brave,” he replied. “I signed with my partner Yitzhak Rabin, who paid for his life with this peace. It is our firm duty that we continue with the just endeavour we signed with Mr. Rabin and Peres.” There was no mention of Netanyahu. And in what Netanyahu and Albright said, there was no mention of the “peace of the brave”; with inappropriate flippancy, Albright remarked of America’s peace-making efforts that “it’s up to the parties [to decide] as to whether we are serving the vegetables well.” Perhaps that would be written on Oslo’s tombstone.

At an autumn 1998 private dinner party in the White House with junior members of the Jordanian royal family, President Clinton unburdened himself of a few thoughts on Benjamin Netanyahu. There were fewer than a dozen guests and he was talking to men and women who would sympathise with his remarks. “I am the most pro-Israeli president since Truman,” he announced to his guests. “But the problem with Bibi is that he cannot recognise the humanity of the Palestinians.” Stripped of its false humility—Clinton was surely more pro-Israeli than Truman— the president had put his finger on Netanyahu’s most damaging flaw: his failure to regard the Palestinians as fellow humans, his conviction that they are no more than a subject people. This characteristic comes across equally clearly in his book A Place Among the Nations, which might have been written by a colonial governor. Clinton got it right. He understood the psychological defect that lay at the heart not just of Netanyahu’s policies but of the whole Netanyahu government.

Yet within just a few days, he was presiding over yet another “peace” accord— at Wye—which effectively placed the Palestinians in the role of supplicants. The main section in the Wye agreement was not about withdrawals but about “security”—and this was liberally laced with references to “terrorists,” “terrorist cells” and “terrorist organisations,” involving, of course, only Palestinian violence. There was not a single reference to killers who had come from the Jewish settler community.

Arafat’s torture was exquisite. Each new accord with Israel involved a subtle rewriting of previous agreements. Madrid—with all its safeguards for the Palestinians—turned into Oslo—no safeguards at all, and a system of Israeli withdrawal that was so constructed that deadlines no longer had to be met. This turned into the 1997 Hebron agreement—which allowed Jewish colonists to stay in the town and made an Israeli withdrawal contingent upon an end to anti-Israeli violence. In 1998 the Wye agreement even dropped the “land for peace” logo. It was now billed as the “Land for Security” agreement, “peace” being at least temporarily unobtainable. Peace means respect, mutual trust, cooperation. Security means no violence—but it also means prison, hatred and, as we already knew, torture. In return, the Palestinians could have 40 per cent of their territory under their control—as opposed to the 90 per cent they expected under Oslo. And the CIA, that most trustworthy and moral of institutions, would be in the West Bank to ensure that Arafat arrested the usual suspects.

The Palestinian Authority had not prevented Hamas from attacking Israelis— any more than Israel could prevent it from doing so before Oslo—but now, miraculously, they would succeed with the help of the CIA. Palestinians holding illegal weapons would be disarmed. The thousands of Jewish settlers on Palestinian land who had weapons—and who condemned even the watered-down version of Wye as “treachery”—would not be disarmed. Israelis should have been able to live without fear. So should Palestinians. But security comes from peace, not the other way round. And 3 per cent of the Palestinian land from which Israel would now withdraw was to become—perhaps the most farcical of Oslo’s many manifestations—a “nature reserve” upon which Palestinians could not build homes. One wondered what kind of wild animals were supposed to roam inside this protected area. And what kind of wild animals would now roam outside its walls.

No word in Wye, then, of the Jewish “terror organisations,” no hope of controlling settler groups that would attack Palestinians in the future. In July 2001, for example, one such group—a “terror” group by Israel’s own definition, although the international press called them “guerrillas” or “vigilantes”—fired dozens of bullets into a car carrying eight Palestinians home from a pre-wedding party in the small town of Idna on the West Bank. Mohamed Salameh Tmaizeh and his relative Mohamed Hilmi Tmaizeh died on the spot. Five others were wounded. The third fatality was Diya Tmaizeh, a baby just three months old. This is not an excuse for Palestinian violence or “terror”—a Palestinian sniper also killed a Jewish baby at a settlement in Hebron—but there was a vital difference. Palestinians were to be disarmed. Jewish colonists were not.

How did the United States allow this to happen? Ignorance, weakness in the face of Israel’s powerful American lobby groups, intellectual idleness when confronted by issues of massive complexity: all these may provide a clue. But it was a general irresponsibility that pervaded U.S. policy. Clinton wanted to be the author of a “peace” that he stubbornly refused to guarantee. We heard the old refrain from Clinton, that while Washington could “bring the parties together,” it was for “the parties themselves” to take the “hard decisions.” Thus Israel, infinitely the more powerful of the two parties—Palestinian tanks, after all, were not occupying Tel Aviv—could act as it wished within or outside the framework of the Oslo accord. Off the record, we would be told—like the Jordanian dinner guests at the White House—of Clinton’s exasperation with Netanyahu.⁹⁴ Publicly, he would be silent. Yet when Palestinian violence was inflicted on Israelis, Clinton was in lionlike mode, calling the killers “yesterday’s men” in Amman, and at Wye lecturing the world on the “hate” that would undoubtedly greet the latest success for “peace.”

Sloppy use of language was also one of the most dangerous aspects of successive American “peace” accords. Clinton was good on cliché and rhetoric but— ironically, in view of his pedantry in responding to the grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky—lazy when it came to points of detail. Despite all the handshakes and platitudes at Wye, for example, both Palestinians and Israelis went home with diametrically opposite ideas of what had been achieved. Netanyahu was able to assure Jewish colonists that there would be no Palestinian state, while Arafat’s men could persuade their few remaining supporters that another Israeli withdrawal would be another step towards statehood. No sooner had Netanyahu returned to Israel than his foreign minister, Ariel Sharon, urged settlers to “seize every hilltop they can” in the West Bank.

In a real battle of wits between equal partners, Arafat might have made a few Netanyahu-like conditions: no continuation of the “peace process” unless Israel renounced its exclusive claim to Jerusalem as a capital—which precluded “final status” talks; no more Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land; no more negotiations until Netanyahu ended Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians. But Arafat could not do that—and Washington would not talk to him if he did. So the Wye talks probably ended any Palestinian hope for a just peace. Israel would be allowed to go on building more Jewish settlements on occupied land, confiscating Palestinian identity papers, demolishing Palestinian homes. And Arafat—for perhaps 14 per cent of the 22 per cent of mandate “Palestine” that was left—had promised to protect the Israelis who were building the settlements, confiscating the identity papers and demolishing the homes.

All the while, U.S. “peace envoys” continued to visit Netanyahu and Arafat as part of America’s “impartial” stewardship of the Middle East “peace.” Every Palestinian knew that the four principal members of this team were Jewish. There was no public discussion in the Western press of the ethnic makeup of the American team. Nor, in principle, should there have been. American foreign service officers or appointees—like any other citizens of a democracy—should hold their posts regardless of their ethnic or racial origins. But Dennis Ross, the lead negotiator, was a former and prominent staff member of the most powerful Israeli lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This was rarely mentioned in the American press, but was surely a matter of vital importance. If the chief negotiator had been the ex-staffer member of an Arab lobby group, Israel would have made its views known at once. And if all four main negotiators had been Muslims, be sure that this would be a matter of legitimate discussion in the world’s press. In the Israeli press, however, the membership of the American team was a matter of comment. When the Ross delegation came to Jerusalem, the Israeli newspaper Maariv called it “the mission of four Jews” and talked about the Israeli connections of the men. Israeli journalists noted that one of them had a son undergoing military training in Israel. It was the Israeli writer and activist Meron Benvenisti who highlighted this in Ha’aretz. The ethnic origin of U.S. diplomats sent to the Middle East to promote peace, he wrote,

may be irrelevant, but it is hard to ignore the fact that manipulation of the peace process was entrusted by the U.S. in the first place to American Jews, and that at least one member of the State Department team was selected for the task because he represented the view of the American Jewish establishment. The tremendous influence of the Jewish establishment on the Clinton administration found its clearest manifestation in redefining the “occupied territories” as “territories in dispute.” The Palestinians are understandably angry. But lest they be accused of anti-Semitism, they cannot, God forbid, talk about Clinton’s “Jewish connection” . . .

Nor did we as journalists dare to raise this issue. To do so would have brought the inevitable charges of anti-Semitism, racism, bias. It was quite acceptable for Israel’s supporters to raise issues of family or national origin if others criticised its actions. When, for example, the UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, instructed his military adviser, Dutch Major General Franklin van Kappen, to conduct an investigation into the Israeli massacre of 106 Lebanese refugees at the UN base at Qana in southern Lebanon in 1996, a pro-Israeli newspaper condemned the decision on the grounds that van Kappen came from a country which had surrendered its Jews to the Nazis in the Second World War. Yet when a former AIPAC staff member was appointed America’s top peace negotiator, no questions were asked. Thank God, I often remark, for Israeli journalism.

Every few months in the Middle East, the Chamberlain bell is rung. “Peace in our time,” it tolls. And anxious not to be blamed for its failure, the Arabs and Israelis leap to express their support. The moment Ehud Barak was elected Labour prime minister of Israel in 1999, the satellite television boys and girls—along with the ever-supine BBC World Service—were putting the “peace process” back “on track” once more, even though Barak had made it clear that Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel, that major Jewish settlements would stay and that no Palestinian refugees from 1948 could expect to return to their original Arab villages.

Barak wanted talks with the Syrians, and the same old negotiating routine was quickly re-established. The Syrians still wanted the return of all of Golan. But why wouldn’t the Syrians accept just a bit of Golan? Or Golan with the settlements? Or part of Golan plus an unknown number of Israeli troops to maintain early warning stations? The world was reminded that Syria had “threatened” Israel from Golan before the 1967 war.⁹⁵ But Assad called Barak an honest and “strong” man, for he, too, did not want to be blamed for any new failures. When Clinton travelled to meet Assad when Labour was previously in power in Israel, Syria had been portrayed as the nation that rejected peace, “the spanner in the works,” in the words of CNN’s reporter. In truth, nothing had changed. Israel wanted diplomatic relations and economic links with Damascus before any discussion of how much of Golan might be returned to Syria. Having watched Arafat writhing with this equation— only to find that having recognised Israel and compromised the very idea of statehood, Israel would decide Palestine’s future—Assad was not enamoured of the idea that this was, in Clinton’s own words, a “golden opportunity” to make peace. It was a familiar scenario. Accept Israel’s version of peace and Syria could be overwhelmed by conditions she could not meet. Refuse, and Syria would be blamed for opposing peace and become an enemy of peace and—ergo—an enemy of the United States.

The pumpkin of the Oslo agreement could never be turned into the golden carriage of peace, but it took the collapse of the Arafat–Barak talks at Camp David in 2000 to prove this true. Even then, Clinton was reduced to claiming that the Oslo negotiations were “based” on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338— which was not what Oslo said at all—and even Arafat must have realised that the end had come when Madeleine Albright made her preposterous offer of “a sense of sovereignty” over Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem. Only the silly villages that Arafat might have controlled outside his would-be capital would have “virtually full sovereignty,” according to the Americans. There then followed the wilfully misleading leaks to the effect that Arafat had turned down 95 per cent of “Palestine”—in reality around 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” that was left. Barak would not give up Jerusalem or abandon the settlements. Arafat would not make the “concession” of ceding Israeli control over all of Jerusalem. So the sons of Abraham acknowledged what so many Israelis and Palestinians knew all along: that Oslo didn’t work. Clinton predictably saw fit to praise the stronger of the two parties; he spoke of Barak’s “courage” and “vision,” but merely of Arafat’s commitment. So much for America’s role as “honest broker” of the Middle East peace. Offered virtual sovereignty to secure virtual peace, the Palestinian leadership—corrupt and effete and undemocratic—preferred failure to humiliation.

Arafat thus returned to a hero’s welcome in Gaza. For once, the old man had not offered another capitulation. He had stood up to the United States. And Israel. He was a “Saladin.” “Saladin of the century,” no less. It was all sorry stuff. This Saladin was not going to gallop into Jerusalem. Instead, the city was to be the scene of repeated carnage as Jew and Arab Muslim attacked each other in the coming months. In September 2000, Ariel Sharon marched to the Muslim holy places—above the site of the Jewish Temple Mount—accompanied by about a thousand Israeli policemen. Within twenty-four hours, Israeli snipers opened fire with rifles on Palestinian protesters battling with police in the grounds of the seventh-century Dome of the Rock. At least four were killed and the head of the Israeli police, Yehuda Wilk, later confirmed that snipers had fired into the crowd when Palestinians “were felt to be endangering the lives of officers.” Sixty-six Palestinians were wounded, most of them by rubber-coated steel bullets. The killings came almost exactly ten years after armed Israeli police killed 19 Palestinian demonstrators and wounded another 140 in an incident at exactly the same spot, a slaughter that almost lost the United States its Arab support in the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War.

Sharon showed no remorse. “The state of Israel,” he told CNN, “cannot afford that an Israeli citizen will not be able to visit part of his country, not to speak for the holiest for the Jewish people all around the world.” He did not, however, explain why he should have chosen this moment—immediately after the collapse of the “peace process”—to undertake such a provocative act. Stone-throwing and shooting spread to the West Bank. Near Qalqiliya, a Palestinian policeman shot dead an Israeli soldier and wounded another—they were apparently part of a joint Israeli–Palestinian patrol originally set up under the terms of the Oslo agreement. “Everything was pre-planned,” Sharon would claim five weeks later. “They took advantage of my visit to the Temple Mount. This was not the first time I’ve been there . . .”

JUST OUTSIDE JERUSALEM, a Jewish settler from Efrat was screaming abuse at a group of Israeli soldiers. His car had been stoned by Palestinian children on a nearby hill. He demanded military intervention at once. “Are you one of the journalists that lies like CNN?” he rounded on me. “You people should write that a rock is like unto a lethal weapon. It’s the same as a bullet. Someone who throws a rock at a bus is trying to murder fifty people.” It was an instructive little outburst, for it turned the children on the hill behind Beit Jalla into mass murderers, gunmen without guns, worthy of the biblical fury so beautifully captured in that phrase “like unto a lethal weapon.” It was obviously not only Palestinians who believed in “days of rage.” The anger was just as palpable among Israelis this October of 2000, even if the sense of proportion—or lack of it—was profoundly disturbing. Again and again, in Israel, the bestialisation—and fear—of Palestinians betrayed a total inability to grasp reality: you might think that Israel was under Palestinian occupation, that Israelis were being shot down in their dozens by Palestinian “security forces,” that Palestinian tanks and helicopters were blasting away at Israeli towns, that Yassir Arafat had taken time out from diplomacy, something that Barak had publicly declared his intention to do.

What was going on now in the occupied territories was a form of low-intensity warfare which was, week by week, creeping into an armed conflict between two peoples. The Palestinians now believed they had nothing to lose by fighting the Israelis. Trapped in their autonomous villages, a whole society under town arrest, they no longer had anything to gain by their silence or their acquiescence. A young Palestinian woman who worked for one of Arafat’s security outfits explained it with candour. “Arafat has to go on fighting—he mustn’t give in now. The intifada will force the Israelis to understand that Oslo is dead and that only a total withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem will bring peace.” When I pointed out to her that Arafat was not doing the “fighting”—that it was the Palestinians and their various satellite organisations that opposed Oslo that were providing “Palestine” with its dead—she changed her argument. “We must make sure that the people and the Palestinian Authority are together and united,” she said, “when the real fighting starts.”

“Real” fighting? What did that mean? Ten years ago, Ariel Sharon—then the outcast ex-defence minister shamed by Sabra and Chatila—said that Israeli tanks might one day have to shell Nablus or Ramallah. How we roared with laughter then. Yet now, a decade later, with Sharon on the verge of returning to the Israeli cabinet, those tanks were indeed shelling Palestinian towns. Tanks fired into Ramallah. Helicopter gunships rocketed Palestinian towns so frequently that their attacks no longer made headlines. And in those towns and in the foetid streets of Gaza, I found not a soul who wanted the new intifada to end. Nor did I find a Palestinian family that did not watch the Lebanese Hizballah’s Manar television station, satellited from Beirut, beaming into the occupied territories a constant message: in Lebanon, Israel was driven from occupied land because its people fought for liberation; they believed in God; they were not afraid to die. And now Lebanon is free. Why not the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem?

This was a powerful but dangerous lesson to send to the Palestinians. For Gaza is not southern Lebanon, and Ramallah and Beit Jalla are not Tyre and Sidon. Jerusalem is not Beirut. But Oslo had proved so great a betrayal for the Palestinians, their trust so perverted by Israel’s continued settlement building and land confiscation and its refusal to allow the Palestinians a capital in part of Jerusalem, that politics was no longer a viable instrument of progress. Faithfully continuing the bankrupt policy of beating the Arabs into submission—the policy that destroyed Israel in Lebanon—the Israelis responded to stones with bullets, to bullets with missiles. But in their hovels, the Palestinians of Gaza could absorb this punishment. They knew that if the Israelis wanted to invade Palestinian land, all of it—an idea floated by the less balanced Jewish settlers but later to be adopted by Sharon himself—then they would have perpetual war.

Nor was there much doubt that the terrible threats of Islamic Jihad to resume their war of suicide bombs were real. Nabil Arair might have failed to kill any Israelis with a bicycle bomb in Gaza but there were many others ready to take his place. Jerusalem’s buses were already travelling three-quarters empty. The suicide bombers had struck—even before setting off their bombs. Hamas now ruled Gaza. Needless to say, Israel’s once close relations with Hamas were no longer mentioned in news reports from Jerusalem.

So—and here I use the rubric of the Israelis, faithfully parroted by CNN and the BBC—did Arafat “control his own people”? The question was pointless, for the Palestinians now controlled Arafat. Their despair mirrored his own conviction that Oslo was dead; their fury at the Israeli killing of so many Palestinians paralleled Arafat’s anger at both the Americans and Israelis. Their political explosion occurred—it was a fact—and Arafat could only acknowledge it by repeating the foundation of those talks so long ago in Madrid: that the only just peace lies in the direct and total implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242. He said as much at the end of October 2000. Responding to Barak’s call for a “political separation” between Palestinians and Israelis, Arafat said that he was “for a political separation that is based on the 1967 borders and international resolutions . . . and will lead to the setting up of a Palestinian state.”

And how did Israelis respond to the Palestinians one month into the new intifada? “Palestinians are racist,” said a letter-writer to the Jerusalem Post, a paper that ran a feature article on child victims with the memorable headline: “Child Sacrifice Is Palestinian Paganism.” Yes, Palestinians are pagans, racists, child-sacrificers, “terrorists,” animals, “serpents”—this from Barak in September 2000. But—a tragedy for both Palestinians and Israelis—they were likely to fight on, even if their Israeli antagonists were armed by the Americans.

For the Palestinians, this fact was no political point-scoring. Just after dark on 27 October 2000, at least two missiles smashed into the corner of the Ksiyeh family home in Beit Jalla, the first blasting a cavity in the wall, the second flying right through the hole and punching through the corridor floor before exploding in a neighbour’s kitchen. An Israeli helicopter gunship fired both missiles and the evidence was there for all to see. One of the missiles was a Hellfire manufactured by Lockheed Martin. The second was a more modern projectile, carrying the U.S. designation number 93835C4286 and manufactured in June 1988. It wasn’t hard, looking at the metal computer strips with their tell-tale factory markings, to see why the people of Beit Jalla didn’t weep over the seventeen American sailors of the USS Cole, attacked by al-Qaeda suicide bombers in Aden just over two weeks earlier.

Yet the villagers here—60 per cent of them Christian—were not vengeful people; and the Palestinian gunmen firing across the valley at the Jewish settlement of Gilo were not from Beit Jalla. The Palestinian hamlet with its fine dressed-stone Orthodox churches, frescoes of St. George and the Dragon and massive, thick-furred street cats was not exactly a battlefield, but it now stood on a West Bank front line, regularly punished by Israel for the bullets that smacked through the windows of the Jewish settlers across the wadi. A week earlier, gunmen—almost certainly a Tanzim militia unit—fired first at the Israelis. In return a Merkava tank—I could see it sleeping under a blue tarpaulin on the opposite hillside—put three shells into one of Beit Jalla’s narrow streets. One blasted into Margot Zidan’s garage, destroying her brand-new VW Golf and crushing the ancient stone gateway above. War and the hand of God exclude insurance payments. Another shell blew a hole in the second floor of Jamil Mislet’s home down the road.

The Plot—the essential ingredient in any Middle East folly—now engulfed this tourist-pretty village. The local Palestinian version went like this: true, some Tanzim men fired rifles from between the houses, but Israel also sent Palestinian collaborators with guns into the village to fire at the settlement and thus provide the Israelis with an excuse to deploy four Merkava tanks on the other hill. The Israeli version of the Plot was even more ingenious: the Palestinian Authority deliberately provoked Israeli gunfire onto Christian homes in the hope of bringing the Vatican onto the Palestinian side in the new intifada.

The truth seemed more prosaic. The settlement of Gilo, on the heights above Beit Jalla—Gilo is the Hebrew version of Jalla—is in sight of Jerusalem; and by targeting its houses, the Palestinians were sending a message to the Israeli government: settlements are part of the new war, even colonies which are part of “Jewish” Jerusalem. However, the Christian and Muslim villagers also claimed that the most recent attack—the double missile strike on the Ksiyeh family home—was unprovoked, that there had been no shooting from the town before the assault. Which is why they were taking no chances. Three workmen were building a parapet of concrete blocks around the local telephone switching box at one end of Beit Jalla. Pasted to a telegraph pole next to it was a photograph of thirteen-year-old schoolboy Mrayad Jawaresh, who had died a week earlier while returning home from school to the neighbouring refugee camp. He smiled out of the picture in his school tie, another child “martyr”—killed by gunfire, provenance unknown—to support the Palestinian cause.

Margot Zidan’s daughter Ghadir made a clucking sound with her tongue as she looked at the portrait. “You people protect the Israelis and blame us for this,” she said. “You say we are responsible for killing our own children. But this is not true. We are one people here. There is no difference between Christian and Muslim.” And the latter was most certainly true. Walking from house to house in Beit Jalla, Christian families took me to Muslim homes, Muslim children to the houses of Christian friends—without prior arrangement or introduction. But did the villagers support the Palestinians who fired into Gilo? They would shrug when I asked this question. “These men have silly little guns and they fire from between our homes,” one said. “What can we do? But how can we stop the Israelis? They know it’s not us that’s shooting at them.”

Routine. That is what insurrection is about. A routine of violence that continues until it is suddenly and irreversibly detonated to a new and more bloody routine. Ramallah was the scene of what journalists liked to call “clashes.” A “clash,” you see, is an act in which Palestinians can die without anyone being held responsible—as in “Three Palestinians were killed in clashes yesterday.” Perhaps they were killed by their own people—or expired due to over-exertion during protests. When Israelis were killed, the culprits were usually identified as Palestinians. Not so when the victims were themselves Palestinians. So I drove across to Ramallah to watch a “clash” day.

Clash. How amorphous, dull, indifferent, how very politely neutral the word sounds. But Israelis and Palestinians use it when they speak in English. And the “clash point” was an equally neutral stretch of roadway below the City Inn Hotel, its bedrooms now occupied by Israeli soldiers with sniper rifles. Across the muddy construction site to the north is an unfinished apartment block in which Palestinians also occupy bedrooms, with their own rifles. And up the road, towards the setting afternoon sun, is the day’s “clash.”

It is called Ayosha junction and it is also the place—if you are a Muslim and if you are religious and if you believe in “martyrdom”—where a live round may just send your soul to paradise. For the Israeli soldiers fire so many rubber-coated steel bullets—as well as live rounds—that they have a fairground’s chance of hitting someone holding a stone. As for the bullets shot across the valley at the Palestinian gunmen, they appear to have little effect. The casualties are usually the stone-throwers.

It has a choreography all its own. A few burning tyres in the morning to enrage the Israeli soldiers in their clapped-out jeeps. Then two or three or four funerals for the previous day’s Palestinian stone-throwers—capital punishment now being an unquestioned, routine penalty for chucking stones at Israelis—and then another “clash” at Ayosha junction. The tyres were already burning when they freighted Hossam Salem to the cemetery near his home, a cortège of black-dressed women, serious, bespectacled men and cars in which a convoy of trucks had become entangled. There was the old wooden coffin and a squad of men shouting Allahu akbar, then a bright orange lorry bearing the words “Bambini Fruit Juice,” then a group of women carrying green flags which announced that there was no God but God and Mohamed was his Prophet. And, of course, everyone was remembering the unmarried twenty-four-year-old who worked in his father’s grocery store and who—at Ayosha junction, of course—received a bullet full in the face scarcely eighteen hours before.

“He was religious, he had a big beard when he died and he was with Hamas,” a family friend told me. “He was a supporter of Hamas for a long time, then he became more ‘active’ three months ago. All his family are with Hamas. When the Jerusalem intifada began three weeks ago, his brothers all said he would be a martyr. He also said he would be a martyr. Yesterday, he just said goodbye to his mother and went to Ayosha where there was a clash.” Active? Did Hossam Salem carry a gun? No one knew. But he was throwing stones and his grisly post-death portrait—a massive coloured photograph taken in the morgue—showed that the front of Hossam Salem’s face, much covered with a fluffy beard, had been powerfully stove in below the nose. Did he go to paradise? I asked a middle-aged man with a grey moustache and thin-framed spectacles. “If you are a real believer, then you go to paradise. I believe he went there, inshallah .”

The mourners drifted away from the little mosque where a group of nineteenth-century buildings of pale grey stone spoke of an earlier, gentle, Ottoman Ramallah. And within an hour, more candidates arrived to take Hossam Salem’s place at the “clash point.” There were at least four hundred young men throwing and catapulting stones down the road—forget the cliché about “rock-throwing,” these were garden-size stones, about five inches wide—and the Israeli soldiers were hiding behind their armoured jeeps and firing tear gas back at the Palestinians in a slow, almost lazy way.

One of the Israelis sat in the back of his jeep 3 metres from me, pulling on a cold can of Pepsi-Cola. Then he heaved himself from the vehicle, fixed a grenade to his rifle and fired it into the air above the jeep. It soared like a constellation, plummeting 400 metres down in a trail of white smoke to burst amid the crowd. Then his colleague, with an equally casual effort, used the door of the jeep to aim his rifle and fired off a rubber-coated steel bullet that bounced and skipped down the road. The Israelis were on the edge of Oslo’s Area A (total Palestinian occupation) and the Palestinians were in Area C (Israeli control) of the West Bank and the truly ridiculous theatre played out here showed just how insane the Oslo agreement had been. If the Israelis left, the Palestinians would stop throwing stones. If the Palestinians left, the Israelis would drive away. But each side was here because the other side was here—and because Area A and Area C had to be defended.

Every few seconds, the cartridge case of a rubber-coated bullet would ping at my feet. Then a Molotov cocktail would blaze harmlessly in a rusting telegraph pole, and a rain of stones would patter on the road. At mid-afternoon, an ambulance drove at speed into the centre of the highway to retrieve a stone-thrower who had been hit. And so it went on, more “clashes” for Clinton to bewail before the microphones in Washington. And I was struck, listening to his words on my radio in Ramallah, by the sheer vacuity—the absolute other-planet irrelevance—of what Clinton said. He wanted the young people of one side to re-establish contact with the young people of the other—as if these “clashes” were taking place in a vacuum, despite the wishes of thousands of young Palestinians and Israelis. The problem was that the soldier drinking Pepsi-Cola and the soldier firing the tear gas and the young man with the Molotov cocktail and Hossam Salem are the young people. Salem didn’t want to join Clinton’s merry reunion of youth. He wanted to go to paradise. And the Israelis were quite prepared to send him there. So, I wrote, let’s keep calling them “clashes,” child’s play, just a little routine violence from which we can all withdraw and jump aboard the Oslo train once it’s been put back on its little toy track. Or from which you can speed your way—if you believe in it—straight to heaven.

In every village, a tragedy. I drive into Yabad in the West Bank. Who’s ever heard of Yabad? I can’t even find it on a map, a forgotten hamlet south-east of Jenin. But the story is easy to write. They grew up together, they attended the same school together, they slept in the same room together, they became partners in the same village restaurant together. And on 29 October 2000, they were shot dead together by the Israelis and next day, in the small graveyard on the windy hilltop above Yabad, Bilal and Hilal Salah were buried together.

The brothers were hit, according to their family, by 50-calibre bullets as they shouted abuse at an Israeli army unit on the road below their village. “Bilal’s brains spilled out of his head onto the ground just here,” his eldest brother, Zuheir, said on the embankment of rubbish-strewn earth above a Jewish settlers’ road. “We took Bilal to the hospital and it was only then that we realised Hilal was missing. When we got back, we found him lying just ten metres away. He had also been hit in the head. They had died together.” Zuheir insisted that the brothers—Bilal was twenty-one, Hilal two years younger—were doing no more than shouting at the Israeli soldiers on the road beneath them, although one villager said that stones had been thrown at the Israelis by some of the seventeen youths on the embankment. Stone-throwing, as every Palestinian knows, is a capital offence. Hunks of concrete had been laid around the blood-stained earth where the brothers died.

It was the intifada in microcosm, a lunatic mixture of exaggerated Israeli fear and hopeless sorrow. On the road below, Israeli soldiers—perhaps the killers of Bilal and Hilal Salah—had warned me against visiting the village. “I wouldn’t go there,” their officer said bleakly. “There’s a funeral.” But the funeral was long over, and all I found was a circle of middle-aged men weeping in a room full of framed Korans and red plastic flowers, and the brothers’ mother, Sada, sitting on the floor and crying beneath a cheap pink blanket. The two youths were Yabad’s first “martyrs.” “The soldiers guard five Jewish settlements near here and we are exposed to gunfire every day and fifty-calibre bullets are not normal ammunition,” Zuheir Salah said. “Those bullets go right through cinder-blocks and we had to close the school in case bullets came inside.” The family story was as mundane as it was ultimately tragic. Bilal and Hilal Salah had four brothers and five sisters; Zuheir, like their dead father, was a labourer. Only two days before their deaths, they had put up the nameplate on their café, the “Flowered Traffic Circle Restaurant.” The family had already printed up a set of postcard portraits of the dead brothers, their heads surrounded by handwritten Koranic inscriptions and the insignia of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.

Down on that fatal road, the villagers lit tyres in protest at the killings, but by late afternoon the black smoke had drifted off over the stone fields, leaving coils of rusting wire on the burned tarmac. All around Yabad were the same pathetic signs of opposition to Israel’s continued occupation. High up on the hills around the village, the red roofs of Jewish settlements glowed in the afternoon sun, their army-escorted convoys throbbing along the settlers’ roads. Did their inhabitants know that, just across from them, Bilal and Hilal Salah were being lowered into their graves?

Israelis are more introspective about their history than Palestinians; they find it easier to be self-critical, but then that is one of the luxuries of being the winner, the occupier, the master. Halfway to Jerusalem, as our minibus began to climb the hill from the plains east of Tel Aviv, Simon began telling me about his Israeli war service. At seventy-three, his army life was over, but he’d fought in 1967 and 1973 and ended up in Beirut in 1982, landing on the beaches north of Sidon. Mercifully, there was no talk of “terrorists,” only of peace, and when his wife asked why the Palestinians should not have Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of their new state—and this, remember, just four weeks after the death of the Oslo agreement— I wondered if there wasn’t an undiscovered Israel.

The bus was negotiating the sharp curves around Harel and we could see the remains of the 1948 Jewish convoy by the highway, left as a memorial to the struggle of the Jews to keep open the road to Jerusalem more than half a century ago. That was when Simon’s wife announced that everything had gone wrong in 1967. “We got used to the land we had taken then, to being in occupation. That made the Lebanon invasion easier, to be an occupier. We shouldn’t have occupied someone else’s land.” Then she suddenly asked me about Mohamed al-Dura, the twelve-year-old shot dead by Israeli soldiers on 30 September as he cowered in his father’s arms in Gaza. “What was he doing at the time?” she asked sharply. “Why was he on the street?” In fact, he had accompanied his father to buy a car—because the father had to walk to the Gaza border at two each morning for permission to work in Israel—and had been returning home when they were trapped by gunfire.⁹⁶ But I understood the implication of these questions at once: if Mohamed al-Dura did not have good reason to be on the streets of Gaza at the time—if he had been participating in a demonstration—then maybe the little boy had got what he deserved, another child sacrifice born of “Palestinian paganism.”

This disconnection from reality comes in many forms. After I landed at Ben Gurion Airport in late October 2000, the young female Israeli immigration officer cheerfully asked me to remember that Israel was “a small country threatened by people from outside who want to take it.” I suggested that the Palestinians had been living in “Palestine”—or modern-day Israel—for generations, that they were not “outside” (save those who had been expelled from their lands by Israel) and that UN Security Council Resolution 242 might, in the end, bring real peace. “What is 242?” she wanted to know.

How strange that 242—whose three figures alone are shorthand for any Palestinian who wants to refer to the UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal from occupied lands—would mean nothing to a young, educated Israeli immigration officer. Oslo, of course, had a meaning for her, the very word used with such contempt by the Palestinians of the occupied territories. Deir Yassin would not. The same disconnection creeps into the Israeli and Western press.

Israelis are invariably “murdered” or “lynched” by Palestinians—often a perfectly accurate description, especially of the two Israeli reservists butchered in a Ramallah police station and then hurled from a window—but Palestinians were inevitably killed in those “clashes” with which I was so familiar. Reuters dutifully followed this skewed narrative. On 30 October 2000, its report on killings by Israeli troops in the occupied territories referred to Palestinians wounded in “stone-throwing clashes” and “killed in earlier clashes,” adding that the “clashes” began on 28 September, that “the clashes have halted peace talks” and that Israeli Arabs have complained about “the killing of their brethren in clashes.” But when on the same day an Israeli security guard was shot dead, his killer was accurately described by Reuters as a “suspected Palestinian gunman.” On the same day, the Associated Press reported “Palestinian shooting attacks on Jewish settlements” but spoke of a Palestinian who was, of course, merely shot in “clashes.”

This double standard of Israeli and foreign reporting would find its way into the most unexpected of places. Staying at the King David Hotel in Jewish West Jerusalem, I found myself watching the hotel’s home-video history on the television in my room. So what did the video tell about the destruction of the British military headquarters in this very same hotel by Menachem Begin’s bombers, an act which—if committed by Palestinians—would be described by Israelis as an act of bestial terrorism? Well, the video proudly boasted that the King David was “the only hotel in the world that was bombed by a future prime minister” and referred to the perpetrators—whose victims included at least 41 Arabs, 28 British and 17 Jews—as “activists” who were dedicated to their cause.

Ariel Sharon is condemned as a “hawk” in the Israeli press, a “right-winger,” a man who has wilfully sacrificed the lives of Israeli soldiers in war—but not, in Israeli newspapers, as the man chiefly responsible for the Sabra and Chatila massacre. This inversion of moral horror reminded me of the Serbs who loathed Slobodan Milošević for Serbia’s economic collapse and the loss of Kosovo—but not for his ethnic cleansing of half a million Kosovo Albanians—and of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of three-quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948, most of whom ended up in the muck of Gaza.

Every day now, we reporters would go to watch these fierce battles between stone-throwers and Israeli soldiers—“clashes,” of course—and the Israeli tear-gas grenades were falling like Chinese fireworks one day near the Karni crossroads when my mobile phone rang. There had been a bomb in Jerusalem. One of the Palestinian policemen watching the stone-throwers was listening to my call. “How many dead?” he asked. Two, I said. The man looked disappointed. “Is that all?” he asked. There wasn’t much compassion in Gaza for the enemy who used to be Yassir Arafat’s “partner in peace.”

Gaza is so physically tiny that it has to be a place of contrasts. At midday, I am sitting amid long grass, amid lemon and fig trees, bushes of pomegranates and gardenia, listening to one of Arafat’s most trusted lieutenants telling me of George Tenet’s threats. Indeed, the head of the CIA—so frequent a visitor to Gaza— seemed strangely present, because my host knows the CIA boys well. Then, a couple of hours later, I am back at Karni and I am watching an Israeli soldier run from the border fence and squat in the muddy dunes to take aim at a boy holding a slingshot. There is a high-pitched crack, the thwack of a bullet hitting something and the youth is on the ground, two men running towards him with a stretcher. The rifle cracks again and, just once, I hear the bullet literally whizz through the air to my right. Yes, Arafat’s man had told me in his orchard, the CIA knew that the Israelis were deliberately trying to kill stone-throwers. “We have shown them the statistics and taken them to watch these unequal battles,” he said. “Personally, they agree with us that the Israelis are shooting at the upper part of the body. But the CIA obey their American political masters.”

From the orchard, with its fruit flies and sparrows, to the mud of Karni was possibly 1,500 metres. And it was interesting how the threats and anger of Camp David fitted in so naturally with the blood and tyre-shrieking ambulance down the road. Arafat’s officer did not restrain his words. The story had come to him from Arafat himself, at the very end of the Camp David talks which had brought us all— within weeks—to the catastrophe that now embraced “Palestine.” And, some would say, Israel as well:

Tenet had gone to Arafat with a warning: “We can make new borders, we can make peoples, we can make new regimes.” This is what Tenet told Arafat at Camp David. And when Arafat would not make the capitulation that Clinton and Barak wanted, Tenet threatened Arafat. Tenet said: “So you will go back to the Middle East alone.” He meant that Arafat would not have the support of the CIA. And Arafat replied: “If this is the case, you are most welcome to come to my funeral—but I won’t accept your offers.”

Round us, the flies and birds moved through the hot trees. Arafat’s grey-haired factotum chewed his way through a mandarin, the juice dribbling down his chin, occasionally taking calls on his mobile phone as his two sons picked olives off a tree behind us. “You have to understand that . . . the worst is yet to come,” he said. “We may have a few days of less trouble. But that is all. We know how to start things and we don’t know where it will end. But we believe that if it lasts longer, the results will be better. Nobody knows how the mechanism of war develops.” He felt more comfortable with the “sacred” right of return of refugees—perhaps a symbolic 100,000 in ten years, he suggested—and with the influence of his boss. “At the start, we advised the Israelis that they had no partners for peace except Arafat. Yes, he controls Palestine. But if Barak controls the Israeli army, why doesn’t he control the Jewish settlers who are on the loose with guns?” I mentioned Oslo. “It died with Rabin,” he replied.

At Karni, Arafat’s officer had ordered restraint. A flock of police captains swept their arms in front of the crowd of youths halfway down the road. “Go back up there,” they shouted. There was a momentary movement in the crowd; then the policemen were ignored. About 400 youths stood on the narrow road and advanced together in a mass, shoulder to shoulder, almost falling off the edge of the track, offering the Israelis a target they could not miss, seeking that very “martyrdom” that the Israelis—and most of us—could not understand. It was an extraordinary scene. A group had unified without a word of command for a commonly understood goal. They wanted to be targets. The Israelis obliged. A cluster of tear-gas canisters failed to shift the crowd; a single live round fired into the pack of people did the trick. There were shouts and a stretcher bobbing through the screaming youths and an ambulance driving through the dust for the Shifa hospital.

Yet behind us, at the top of the road, a man was selling orange ices and bread filled with thyme for the tired stone-throwers and black-uniformed policemen. The television crews were standing there in their spaceman blue flak jackets and helmets, along with ambulance crews and truck-drivers and families from the concrete hovels across the highway. Anyone can turn up in Gaza to watch tragedy and farce. This is Shakespeare, Scott Fitzgerald and pantomime rolled into one, revenge and vaudeville. No wonder, I think as I drive back to Jerusalem, that Palestinian poetry is so bitter. “All I possess in the presence of death/Is pride and fury,” wrote Mahmoud Darwish.

No one understands this better than Hanan Ashrawi. She bursts into her Ramallah home with an energy born of total exhaustion, jet-lagged, angry, scornful of Israel and Western journalists in about equal measure, complaining of toothache, wolfing through chicken, potatoes and hot peppers, her white cat Labneh watching aloofly from the carpet. The future will be difficult. “It’s not just ‘the dark night of the soul’ when you have the resurgence of hostilities and a loss of faith in the ‘peace process,’ ” she says. Oslo is dead. That is what she means. Only UN resolutions are left.

Palestine’s most famous woman—with the exception of Yassir Arafat, Palestine’s most famous citizen—has just returned from lecturing American universities on the catastrophe now befalling her people, trying to persuade the Gore and Bush foreign policy teams in this American election month to comprehend the realities of the Middle East, condemning the powerful American press for its biased reporting of the new Israeli–Palestinian conflict. A member of the original 1991 Madrid Palestinian team, Ashrawi’s job as an English literature don allows her to speak with unique eloquence and contempt. Outside, a November gale buffets her villa, the wind moving the trees in the small back garden.

When I ask if it’s all over for Oslo, she nods. When I ask if the UN’s Security Council Resolution 242 is now the only possible peace, she nods twice more, between gulps of tabouleh and rice. When I ask if that means the closing down of all Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land and the return of East Jerusalem, her voice sharpens. “All the settlements will have to go—the moment you accept otherwise, you have legitimised the acquisition of territory by force. The basis of Oslo was 242 . . . but Oslo violated that. It reinterpreted 242. The Israelis never respected any of the Oslo withdrawal timetable. What is happening now is a result of Oslo. We’ve been saying this would happen, we’ve been warning this would happen, that there would be an implosion or explosion. And now we’re proven right, it’s too late and there’s a tragic loss of life.”

To listen now to Hanan Ashrawi—a voice of moderation and humanity—is to experience the historical shock of what has happened in the Middle East these past six weeks. “The Palestinian people feel victimised by this ‘peace process,’ ” she says angrily. “The ‘process’ is reinvented all the time to suit Israel. And America thinks all the time that as long as there is a ‘process,’ God is in his heaven. Now the Americans are indulging in crisis management and individual legacies—the people involved in Washington have come to the end of their careers.”⁹⁷

It’s also clear that Ashrawi would like the careers of several reporters to come to an end. “When I visited The Washington Post, I asked them what had happened to the idea of journalistic integrity. There’s now a total disjunction between the pictures of what is happening—the Palestinian casualties—and the language; this is the product of America’s processed language and the Israeli spin machine.” Ashrawi leans back on the sofa in exhaustion. “Now we are all being fed well-worn phrases: ‘peace process,’ ‘back on track,’ ‘ceasefire,’ ‘time out,’ ‘put an end to violence,’ ‘Arafat to restrain/control his people,’ ‘do we have the right peace partner?’ This is a racist way of looking at the Palestinians and it obscures the fact that we’ve suffered an Israeli occupation all along. When newspapers ask if Palestinians deliberately sacrifice their children, it’s an incredibly racist thing to do. They are dehumanising the Palestinians. The press and the Israelis have rid us of the most elemental human feelings in a very cynical, racist discourse that blames the victims. Of course we love our children. Even animals care about their children.”

The phone rings—it’s like a clock chime in the Ashrawi home in Ramallah, the chirruping of the mobile, the repeated, tiring explanation of why Oslo does not work—and only after a minute of silence can she continue. “I always said Oslo could lead to a disaster or a state. It’s not an agreement, remember. It says specifically that it is a ‘declaration of principles.’ The danger was always that the ‘peace of the brave’ could turn into the ‘peace of the grave.’ ” The new intifada will continue—“in different shapes, different forms”—Ashrawi says. “We are not fond of mass suicide, but we want the right to resist occupation and injustice. Then the moment we say ‘resist,’ the Israelis pull out the word ‘terrorist’—so a child with a stone becomes the ‘legitimate’ target for Israeli sniper fire and a high-velocity bullet.”

On the floor, Labneh is purring. The food is gone. Ashrawi has almost fallen asleep. The television news announces two more Palestinians killed by Israeli bullets. In the first month of the new intifada, a hundred Palestinians, including twenty-seven children, were killed by Israeli soldiers and border police. But the most alarming statistic is the contrast between the losses of the two sides. By 2002, 1,450 Palestinians will have been killed in the al-Aqsa intifada. Israel will have lost 525 lives, just over a third of the Palestinian death toll. And the Palestinians are the aggressors.