[GushShalom] Turning point in Mes'ha? // The Prisoner of Ramallah

[Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)]

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     Gush Shalom
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August 3, 2003

[] Turning point in Mes'ha?
[] The Prisoner of Ramallah - Avnery column

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[] Turning point in Mes'ha?

For once we have a piece of good news. 

Yesterday we passed on an alert regarding the home of Hani and 
Munira Amer and their six children - at the village of Mes'ha on the 
West Bank. ("The Separation Wall" was to be constructed in their 
garden, making the house into an enclave, with the family  members 
virtual prisoners on their own land.)

Today we can tell you that at least for the moment this threat has 
been averted. Many thanks  to those who came to the spot & those 
who sent their protest. 

Bulldozers started work at 7.00 AM some twenty metres from the 
Amer house. Some sixty international activists - among them a 
contingent of Israelis - were present to confront them, together with 
many Mes'ha villagers. 
When police and army seemed about to start evicting the protesters, 
the Palestinians, Internationals and Israelis linked arms. The media 
representatives on the spot were invited to a press conference from the 
protest tent, and addressed by the house owner and  representatives of 
various participating organizations.

With the international spotlight turned on the Wall and the Sharon 
Government involved in a public debate with the Bush Adminstaration, 
the authorities apparenty decided to avoid confrontation. The bulldozers 
halted work, and the contractor informed the protestors there will be no 
work on the site of Hani A'amer's house for the next two months. (He 
refused, however, to repeat this verbal pledge in writing.) 

The activists intend to keep the Mas'ha peace tent  in front of the 
house - so as to hold the contractor to his promise, as well as 
maintain the campaign against the Wall in general. 

[] The Prisoner of Ramallah - Avnery column

Uri Avnery
2.8.03

				The Prisoner of Ramallah

     Every television viewer recognizes the bridge between the last two 
buildings left standing among the ruins of the Mukata'ah (compound) in 
Ramallah.
     During one of my last visits, a Palestinian officer pointed to a 
simple table and chair near one of the windows of this bridge. Through 
this window a stretch of the Palestinian landscape beyond the town is 
visible. "Here Abu-Amar likes to sit between meetings and look out," 
he explained. Abu-Amar is the affectionate name for Yasser Arafat.
     21 years ago, when I went to Beirut and met him for the first time, 
he was one of the most mobile leaders in the world, if not the most 
mobile of all. Once he told me that during the last five days he had 
visited seven countries, sleeping on the plane between destinations. At 
the time, his neck was in a surgical collar. 
     Now he has been imprisoned in the compound for more than two 
years. For some of the time, the conditions were worse than in an 
ordinary prison: he lived in a closed room without fresh air and almost 
without water, with the sewage blocked. He knew that at any moment 
Sharon's soldiers could storm in and kill him.
     In a few days, he will be 74 years old. He will spend his birthday in 
his prison.

     This is a good opportunity to take stock of the man and his work.
     He has been on the world stage longer than any other current 
leader, apart from Fidel Castro. Many of today's world leaders, like 
Bush and Blair, were infants when he took the responsibility for the 
destiny of the Palestinian people in his hands.
     His face is well known throughout the world.
     He is one of the most maligned statesmen in the world, perhaps 
the very most.
     He is the most hated person in Israel. Rightists and Leftists 
compete with each other in expressing their hatred of him. There is 
hardly an article by an Israeli "Leftist" which does not include some 
words of abhorrence about him.
     He is the most admired and beloved leader of his own people, and 
apparently the leader most admired by the masses throughout the 
Arab and Muslim world. 
     Not bad for a person who is turning 74.

     The title most often attached to his name is "symbol". Even the 
Palestinian opposition groups call him "the symbol of the Palestinian 
people". That is true, but also misleading.
     Misleading, because a "symbolic" person is usually someone in 
honor of whom statues are erected and whose likeness adorns the 
walls. The President of Israel is a symbol, and so are the presidents of 
Germany and Italy, while Arafat is very much an active leader, 
dominating the Palestinian scene.
     Yet the title is also appropriate. Arafat's progress, from leader of a 
tiny group of refugees to the present stage, when the whole world 
supports the idea of a Palestinian state, symbolizes the Palestinian 
struggle for survival. No one symbolizes the condition of the Palestinian 
people, its suffering, determination and courage, more than the man in 
the besieged Mukata'ah, a prison within a prison (Ramallah) within a 
prison (the Palestinian territories as a whole).

     Much has already been written about his early life, about his father, 
a merchant from Gaza who had settled in Egypt; about his mother, 
who died when he was still an infant; about his childhood with his 
mother's family in Jerusalem.
     Lately, Arafat likes to recount to his guests - Palestinians, Israelis 
and foreigners - about those happy years, when he played with Jewish 
children near the Western Wall. His years with his father's family in 
Cairo seem to evoke much less nostalgia.
     He likes to remind people that he studied engineering. He attributes 
his legendary memory - especially for numbers and facts - to his 
profession. More than once he has corrected me on numbers - how 
many ultra-religious members were in the Knesset, exactly what 
percentage of the West Bank Sharon has said he was ready to "give" 
to the Palestinians as part of his "painful concessions".
     His political career started in the Palestinian Students' Association 
in Cairo. It assumed historical significance when he was the main 
founder, in the late 1950s, of the Fatah organization, the first 
Palestinian liberation movement since the catastrophe of 1948.
     Liberation - from who? Well, obviously from Israel. But in reality, 
from the domination of the Arab leaders, too. It is impossible to 
understand Arafat without knowing this important chapter of his life. At 
the time, the Palestinian cause served as a football in the inter-Arab 
game. Each Arab ruler used it in order to reinforce his claim for 
leadership of the Arab world and to beat his competitors. Gamal Abd-al-
Nasser in Egypt, Abd-al-Karim Kassem in Iraq, the young King 
Hussein in Jordan and their equivalents in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and 
the other countries - each proclaimed himself the Defender of the 
Palestinian People while mercilessly suppressing any sign of 
independent Palestinian activity in his own realm. In the eyes of Arafat 
and his comrades, the "independence of Palestinian decision-making" 
became a sacred goal.
     Fatah was born into this reality. Arafat and his group wanted to 
wrest the Palestinian cause from the hands of the Arab rulers. The new 
movement had no power, no money, no arms. It had no base anywhere 
where it could operate freely. Its activists were at the mercy of the 
secret services of any Arab country, if they did not fulfil the demands of 
the local dictator. That happened many times. The climax was reached 
when the Syrian dictator put the whole Fatah leadership, including 
Arafat, in prison. Only the wife of Abu Jihad, Umm Jihad (now the 
minister for social affairs in the Palestinian government) was left 
outside and so she  assumed the command of all Fatah forces.
      For the movement to survive, Arafat had to manoeuvre between the 
leaders, flatter people he despised, suck up to leaders who did not give 
a damn for the interests of the Palestinian people. As an important 
Palestinian personality told me: "For the survival of our people he had 
to dissemble, lie, trick, be equivocal, use ruses. At was then that the 
typical Arafat language evolved."
     In spite of sabotage by the Arab regimes and with the help of these 
methods, the power of Fatah slowly grew. In order to block it and to 
subordinate the Palestinians to Egyptian interests, Abd-al-Nasser 
initiated the founding of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) 
and appointed an aging and ineffectual demagogue, Ahmad Shukairy, 
as its leader. But the June 1967 war destroyed the respect for the 
rulers of Cairo, Amman and Damascus. The battle of Karameh (1968), 
in which the Fatah fighters, led by Arafat in person, won a victory 
against the Israeli forces sent to destroy them, caused Fatah prestige 
to rise sky-high. After three Arab armies had been shamefully defeated 
by Israel, the fighters of Fatah had held on heroically. The result: Fatah 
took over the PLO, the 39 years old Arafat became the leader of the 
nation.  
     All the Arab leaders with whom Arafat had to contend at that time 
have in the meantime died natural or unnatural deaths. Arafat remains.

     Perhaps his greatest achievement as a national leader lies in his 
ability to hold the Palestinians together.
     Most liberation movements have known fratricidal wars, bitter splits 
and desperate internal struggles. The pre-state Hebrew underground, 
too, experienced the fratricidal "saison" and the bloody Altalena 
incident. But the Palestinians, whose situation was incomparably more 
difficult, were spared this fate.
      Almost all other movements grew from populations that lived on 
their land, under one particular foreign regime. But the Palestinian 
people were dispersed in a dozen countries, almost all of them 
oppressive dictatorships. The name "Palestine" had disappeared 
altogether from the map, and even the Palestinians who had remained 
in their homeland lived under oppressive rulers - first the Jordanian and 
Egyptian, and then the Israeli military governor.
     When the PLO grew, all the Arab regimes tried to gain influence 
over it. Damascus, Baghdad, Riad, Cairo, in addition to Moscow, set 
up Palestinian organizations in order to impose their agendas on the 
Palestinian people. Secular and religious, Leftist and Rightist 
organization tried to play their games inside the movement. Arafat had 
to cope with all of them, manoeuvre, cajole, threaten, appease. He 
became a past master of this art, perhaps its outstanding practitioner 
in the world.    
     At the same time, he had to lead the national struggle. Like almost 
all leaders of modern liberation movements, from Garibaldi to Nelson 
Mandela, he was convinced of the need for the "armed struggle" 
(always called "terrorism" by the opposing regime.) The PLO 
organizations carried out many bloody attacks, many of them brutal, 
some of them outright monstrous, even if most of these were made by 
organizations who also fought against Arafat.) All PLO leaders believed 
that the "armed struggle" was necessary, considering the vast 
disproportion between the might of Israel and the almost negligible 
force of the Palestinians.
     Arafat himself, according to the testimony of his assistants, is far 
from being cruel or blood-thirsty. Only in rare instances did he confirm 
death sentences, and that only when the public demand was 
irresistible. The number of executions carried out in his domain is 
incomparably lower than in former Governor's George W. Bush's 
Texas. 
     It is accepted by most authorities that without the "armed struggle", 
the Palestinians would not have achieved anything and would have lost 
their homeland long ago. They believe that the violent attacks enabled 
the Palestinian people to return to the world map and allowed the PLO 
to attain its historic achievements: its recognition as the "sole 
legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people, its invitation to the 
UN, its international standing, the Oslo agreement, its return to 
Palestine  and the creation of a world-wide consensus supporting the 
idea of a Palestinian state.

     But Arafat did not see the "armed struggle" as an end in itself. 
Violence is for him a means among others.
     At the end of 1973 he did something that is rare among leaders. 
After making one revolution (the creation of Fatah and the start of the 
"armed struggle") he initiated another. (Years later, Yitzhaq Rabin did 
something similar.)  
     The October 1973 war changed his strategic concept. Until then he 
believed that Israel could be overthrown by force. The Palestinian 
struggle was designed, primarily, to cause a general military 
confrontation between Israel and the Arab world, as happened in 1967. 
In October 1973 Arafat realized that this hope had no basis in fact. The 
armies of Egypt and Syria did indeed attack Israel and achieved initial 
surprise, giving them a resounding victory, but within two weeks the 
Israeli army had turned the tables and was advancing on Cairo and 
Damascus. Arafat, forever the rational engineer, drew the logical 
conclusion: there exists no military option.
    From there it was but one step to the second conclusion: the 
Palestinian state can only be founded on compromise, by a political 
settlement with Israel. He started to work on it.
     The necessary effort was immense. A whole generation of 
Palestinians saw in Israel a monstrous enemy that had expelled half 
the Palestinian people from their homes and lands and continued to 
oppress and dispossess th
e other half. In their time of desperation, the Palestinians clung to their belief that the very ex
istence of Israel is illegitimate and that some day, somehow, it will be eradicated. Arafat had to 
uproot this belief and 
to cause his people to accept a compromise that left the Palestinian people only 22% of their histo
ric homeland.
     He worked as he always has done: with infinite patience, sensitivity to human beings, tactical
 manoeuvres, zigzags and equivocation. He started secret contacts with a tiny group of Israeli peac
e activists (including 
myself), hoping that they would open the way to the heart of the Israeli establishment. He encourag
ed some of his people (mainly Sa'id Hamami and Issam Sartawi, who were both murdered because of thi
s) to express his hidde
n thoughts publicly. He caused the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile, to gradua
lly change its resolutions. In this effort, which lasted from 1974 to 1988, he was mainly assisted 
by Abu Mazen.
     At that time, Yitzhaq Rabin still was an extreme opponent of a peace settlement with the Pales
tinians, and Shimon Peres was the godfather of the settlements. Both advocated the "Jordanian optio
n" (returning parts of 
the West Bank to Jordan and make peace with the king, ignoring the will of the Palestinians). If an
yone deserved the Nobel Prize for the Oslo agreement, it was Arafat.

     One of the attributes that endear him to the Palestinian public is his rare personal courage.

     When Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon in 1982, in order to expel the Palestinians and kill their l
eader, Arafat could have easily left Beirut in time. This would have been accepted by everyone as a
 sensible step. But he 
remained with his fighters in the besieged city until the last day. After a long battle, his men le
ft with their heads held high, bearing their arms, led by Arafat.
     Another, almost forgotten, episode brought him even more esteem. A year after the exit from Be
irut, the Syrians and their agents attacked the Palestinian forces in the North Lebanese refugee ca
mps near Tripoli. At th
e time, Arafat was the guest of the UN in Geneva. He did something almost unbelievable: he secretly
 returned to Lebanon, slipped into the besieged camp and, in the end, left with his fighters, who d
id not surrender this t
ime either.
     Most of his life he has spent in constant danger, with a dozen secret services trying to kill 
him. He survived several assassination attempts. Once he escaped with his life when his plane had t
o perform a tough emerg
ency landing in the middle of the desert. His bodyguards were killed.
       In the middle of the battle of Beirut I asked him where he would go if he got out alive. Wit
hout hesitation he said: "Home, of course!" Twelve years later, on his first day in Gaza, he whispe
red to me: "Remember wh
at I told you in Beirut? Well, here I am."
     As head of the new Palestinian Authority he was confronted with one of the toughest jobs of hi
s life. He faced a challenge unknown to any other liberation movement: to set up a kind of state wh
ile the liberation stru
ggle was still far from over.
     Arafat returned together with the veterans of the struggle, who believed, quite understandably
, that it was their right to control the National Authority. The same was claimed by a new generati
on of fighters, veteran
s of the intifada, the prisons and the underground. The same was claimed by thousands of profession
als who had studied in universities the world over. (One of them told me: "OK, let's give medals to
 all the fighters. But 
the state must be governed by people trained for it.") Arafat had to give a part of the pie to the 
Christian minority, to the representatives of the various regions, and, most importantly, to the he
ads of the great famili
es who have dominated Palestine society for centuries and without whom one cannot rule. Altogether,
 an almost impossible task.
     It cannot be said that the establishment of the Palestinian Authority was an unqualified succe
ss. But, considering the objective pressures, Arafat did not do too bad a job either.
     One of the weak points was the centralism of the new administration. During the decades of str
uggle, Arafat has got used to deciding alone and quickly. His colleagues had all too willingly let 
him take the historic d
ecisions that demanded courage and personal risk. Most of his closest comrades in arms had been kil
led during the struggle, some by Israel, some by the Iraqi agent Abu Nidal and his ilk. Like all le
aders who have been at 
the center of internal struggles and responsibility for a long time, Arafat has become lonely and s
uspicious.
     Some of the Palestinian personalities believed that with the establishment of the Authority, t
he struggle had come to an end. They started to look out for their own personal interests, some bec
ame corrupt, assimilati
ng the norms of the neighboring countries (and not only theirs.) This aroused resentment among the 
Palestinian public. Israeli Leftists began to condemn the "corrupt Authority", the official Israeli
 propaganda machine too
k the story up and gleefully distributed it around the world. This caused grievous damage to the Pa
lestinian cause at a most sensitive time.
     But not the slightest hint of suspicion ever attached itself to Yasser 
Arafat himself. While Ariel Sharon is sinking in a morass of corruption 
affairs and world leaders like Helmut Kohl in Germany and Jacques 
Chirac in France have starred in major scandals, Arafat has remained 
above suspicion. Neither his opponents at home nor the Israeli 
intelligence agencies have succeeded in discovering any spots. He 
lives a very simple life, has no home of his own, his clothes are his 
khaki uniforms. 

     Throughout his life, Arafat has made many mistakes. He may have 
exaggerated his opposition to the 1977 Sadat initiative, surrendering to 
the pressure of his enraged colleagues. His support of Saddam 
Hussein during the first Gulf war was a major mistake that cost dearly. 
More than once he erred in choosing assistants and confidants.
     But to his own people he has remained the only leader who can be 
trusted unconditionally. Foreigners are unable to understand this. They 
find it odd that the very same attributes that made him abhorrent to 
many people in the West make him a hero to his people.
     For example: when, at Camp Davis, Arafat emphatically rejected 
the proposals of Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton, he was condemned by 
most of the Israeli "peace camp". But in Palestinian eyes, it was the 
epitome of courage and national pride. When he went to the summit 
meeting, many Palestinians were afraid that he was walking into a trap 
and would not have the strength to extricate himself. It was clear that 
the "generous proposals" of Barak did not meet the minimum demands 
of the Palestinians. When he came back without having surrendered, 
he received a hero's welcome. 
     Now the Palestinians are ready to give some credit to Abu Mazen, 
who believes that he can get some concessions from Israel and the 
US. Abu Mazen is an old partner of Arafat and respected by the public. 
But no Palestinian can imagine entrusting him with the destiny of the 
nation.
     One person only enjoys that kind of trust: the man besieged in the 
Mukata'ah. He remains the ultimate judge. 
     
      
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