The first question to be asked about Arafat and the group of friends who eventually gathered in Kuwait is whether they went there to escape Nasser’s repression and lead ordinary working lives or to start a political movement. The answer is yes to both and no to each. There is little doubt that the pressure to which they were subjected dictated moving out of Nasser’s orbit of direct influence – Egypt, itself, his fellow UAR member Syria and Egyptian-occupied Gaza – and to avoid countries where he exercised a certain degree of indirect control, such as Lebanon, where the Muslim and Orthodox Christian elements of the population formed a strong pro-Nasser constituency. But though their subsequent involvement in politics after settling in Kuwait came as no surprise, there is nothing to suggest that it had been planned or was the sole impetus behind their decision, or that their Cairo activities had produced a specific political agenda. Politics was in their blood and on their minds, but they went to Kuwait because Egypt was no longer welcoming, other Arab countries considered them dangerous radicals, and so they had nowhere else to go or work.
Although at that time the oil-rich haven contained more than fifty thousand Palestinians, including some who later became sympathetic to Arafat, there is no record of Palestinians being involved in politics beyond the usual concern for events in their place of birth. Arafat’s preference, indeed, had been for Saudi Arabia, a country which never tolerated politicking by its own citizens or outsiders. Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest that his job as an engineer with the Ministry of Public Works and later with the Kuwait City Municipality was not to his liking or that he saw it as a vehicle for something else.
In 1960 he obtained a job as a schoolteacher for his friend and political associate Abu Iyad, who wasted no time in joining him. Abu Jihad, who had left Gaza to teach in Saudi Arabia, was already in Kuwait working as a teacher. Most teachers and civil servants in Kuwait were Palestinians, and increasingly Arafat’s friends and political associates secured Kuwaiti government jobs. The routine for settling there was always the same: intercession with the local authorities to secure a job, then obtaining a visa on the basis of the offer of employment. This was how they reunited as a group of kindred spirits with shared experiences in Gaza and Egypt. Unlike pro-Nasser Palestinians in other Arab countries, such as members of the Beirut-based Arab Nationalist Movement, they had experienced the Egyptian leader’s repression and the limitations that he placed on Palestinians who wished to fight Israel.
What is more interesting than the mechanics of moving to Kuwait and the immediate plunge into politics was what motivated the people who controlled the job offers and the visas to accept them. Kuwait’s population in the late 1950s was substantially smaller than it is today, with only about half a million native Kuwaitis, and for an outsider to secure employment in the country depended on the sponsorship of an important Kuwaiti citizen or company. It is safe to assume that people with influence sponsored Arafat and his friends. After all, though all of them were endowed with natural intelligence, Arafat had a dismal academic record and no meaningful work experience; Abu Iyad never finished his course at Al Azhar University; Abu Jihad’s university credentials were not much better; and no member of their original group possessed anything resembling impressive qualifications. As to who helped them get jobs, as on many other aspects of their early Kuwait days the original Arafat group have been uncharacteristically silent.
How they obtained their visas clouds the picture further. Kuwait was not then an independent country and remained a British protectorate until 1961: it was that country’s embassies in Cairo and other capitals which granted visas to work there. The British officials in charge of visas were as careful as their US and Saudi counterparts – the ones who had denied Arafat a visa for America or took their time in issuing one to Saudi Arabia. The backgrounds of applicants for jobs in Kuwait were always thoroughly investigated, creating in this case an unusual situation: Kuwait chose to hire and grant residency to relatively unqualified people with a history of political involvement, when it normally placed emphasis on qualifications and frowned on political activists. The job application forms completed by Arafat and his friends emphasized the importance of educational qualifications, while Kuwait’s attitude to political activists is attested to by its occasional arrest of expatriates who preached one ideology or another and its refusal to grant visas to members of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), members of the pan-Arab Ba’ath party and many others. The mystery deepens in the light of the treatment of the pro-Nasser ANM members whose appearance in Cairo had overshadowed Arafat and his friends and sealed their fate.1
In fact not a single member of the original Arafat group – Abu Iyad, Abu Jihad, Adil Abdel Karim, Mohammed Yusuf Al Najjar, Khalid Al Amira, Abdel Fatah Lahmoud and later Khalid Al Hassan – who eventually became the founding members of Fatah appears to have experienced any difficulty or delay in entering Kuwait, when many more qualified Palestinians and others did. The Palestinian writer Audeh Butrus Audeh subscribes to the conspiracy theory and says the British granted them visas because they were anti-Nasser.2 While there is no way of verifying or refuting this, there is ample evidence that in the late 1950s the West did use the Muslim Brotherhood to undermine Nasser and to promote right-wing policies based on Islam.3 This underlies the possibility that members of this group were indeed accorded special treatment, but because they belonged to a fully fledged conspiracy. To have promoted a relatively unknown and unorganized group as a counterweight to Nasser and his anti-British politics would seem highly unlikely.
Many of the founders of Fatah, including Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, had been card-carrying members of the Brotherhood, and others, including Arafat, had a close association with it. To advocates of the conspiracy theory this proves their allegation of Kuwaiti and British connivance. But one could argue the opposite case: all Palestinians were preoccupied with politics and, because members of this group had similar conservative backgrounds and nationalist inclinations, they could have been seen as benign and acceptable. Unlike the highly educated ideologue members of the ANM, they were unsophisticated and not extreme in their outlook.
Also, in contrast to other Palestinian groups of the time Arafat and his friends were exclusively Sunni Muslims. The total absence among them of Christians, by tradition the worldly, radical intellectuals of Palestinian politics, calls attention to other harmless aspects of their character. Although this was to change, most of them performed the Muslim prayers five times a day and fasted during the holy month of Ramadan, and not one of them drank alcohol or gambled. They behaved in an old-fashioned Arab way, and this pleased their hosts. It showed in their shapeless Western suits, cheap trousers and sports shirts; in their favoured rice-based Arab food mixed with lamb, which left them hefty at an early age; and in the fulsome praise they directed at each other in their greetings and forms of address. To cap it all, they played backgammon and smoked hookahs.
Except for the West German-educated Khalid Al Hassan, and this was to show in his later attitude, and Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad who both had natural but as yet undeveloped intelligence and instincts, none of them was learned enough or possessed enough intellect to understand the international ramifications of the problem which had occupied them in their youth and would occupy their future lives in Kuwait and elsewhere. Beyond this, none of them belonged to the Palestinian notability, until then the source of leadership for all political movements; Arafat’s Abul Saoud connection was the most they could come up with. One could say that they were too ordinary to be revolutionaries and too socially unimportant and uneducated to have been considered useful by the British against Nasser and other Palestinian groups. None the less this does not preclude the possibility that they were helped because of their essentially right – wing Islamic politics or because they were anti-Nasser refugees or both.
Moreover, reading too much into the largesse they received from Kuwaiti merchants and officials and the help they got in obtaining jobs is unjustified. It was true that the Kuwaitis, along with other conservative Arab regimes, were anxious to fend off the danger of Nasser’s brand of Arab nationalism, which preached subordinating their independence to the creation of a greater Arab entity. This could have led them to view with sympathy people who opposed Nasser – but there was no deliberateness behind what the Kuwaitis did to make this a substantial political decision which proves a conspiracy against Nasser. However politically active – and Palestinian political clusters existed everywhere – unorganized groups like Arafat’s were not as potentially dangerous as organized doctrinaire ones. Other Palestinians were shunned by the traditional regimes and by Kuwait because they belonged to organizations with threatening ideologies and were more cohesive and hence more of a danger.
The three major Palestinian political organizations in the late 1950s were the Arab Higher Committee, still under the leadership of the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Arab Nationalist Movement, led by the Christian ideologue Dr George Habbash, and the Islamic Liberation Front. The Mufti, who stayed in Cairo until 1959 and then became a self-imposed exile in Beirut, was the traditional claimant to Palestinian leadership. In 1949 in Gaza he had formed an All Palestine government, which still occupied a seat at the meetings of the Arab League. Arab support for him was open and official but, weary of his meddling ways, the Arab governments merely accorded him status and kept him and his followers in check. The Mufti’s relationship with the new pretender to Arab and Palestinian leadership, Nasser, was an uneasy one. The Mufti was not by nature a follower, and the pan-Arabism of the young Egyptian leader which was popular with the Palestinians threatened to supplant him.4
The Mufti eventually left Cairo after a policy quarrel with Nasser which drew accusations from the Arab Higher Committee accusations that the new Arab leader was seeking a peaceful solution to the Palestinian problem based on UN resolutions. To the Mufti this was something which undermined the Arab-Palestinian right to all of Palestine. The break with Nasser came two years after the latter’s pressure on Arafat and his friends forced them to leave for Kuwait and after they had severed direct links with the Mufti, who until 1958 tried to cooperate with Nasser.
George Habbash, the founder of the ANM, was a leader outside the traditional mould and he definitely operated above the folk mentality. A medical graduate of the American University of Beirut and a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, he was well-read, urbane and a firm believer in Nasser’s Arab nationalism. Habbash was a man with a keen awareness of the world and its ideologies and problems, and the way they affected the Arab–Israeli conflict. Believing in Arab nationalism at the time meant working to unite all the Arab states from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf into one vast country strong enough to face imperialism and its offspring, the state of Israel. Though the ANM placed the Palestine problem ahead of all else, this belief accounts for the presence of many non-Palestinians in its ranks. To Nasser, Habbash and their followers unity came first; indeed it was a prerequisite for eliminating the causes of the 1948 defeat and for liberating Palestine. Naturally Habbash’s ideology precluded cooperation with the traditional regimes of much of the Arab Middle East and which were held responsible for Arab backwardness and military ineffectiveness. Instead it advocated their overthrow and the incorporation of their lands into one country under Nasser, or else persuading them to follow Nasser’s policies and accept his leadership.
The third organization, the Islamic Liberation Front (ILF), was another Palestinian-led group with Arab membership. The fortunes of the ILF, which advocated a pan-Islamic solution, rose and fell in proportion to the support they received from those Arab governments in the habit of supporting Palestinian groups against each other in order to weaken and contain them. While popular when the Arab Higher Committee and Habbash’s Arab nationalists did not meet people’s expectations, it never figured seriously and proved to be short-lived.
It is no wonder that Nasser supported Habbash and promoted him against the self-centred Mufti and the ILF. Habbash was beginning to build a popular base among the Palestinians, and was already a help in blunting the challenge to Nasser’s popularity and authority posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and their sympathizers. He was also a Christian, and thus did not represent a challenge to the Egyptian leader’s primacy. Although an observing Muslim, Nasser was a totally secular leader and, unlike the rulers of countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, did not consider Habbash’s Christianity a problem. He needed Habbash’s solid following of Palestinian and Arab intellectuals and appreciated the inherent appeal of Habbash’s clean ways and clear thinking to Arabs from all walks of life, including Palestinians in refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Nor were the Arab divisions affecting the Palestinian problem confined to infighting between the various claimants to Palestinian leadership. Until 1958, which saw the union of Syria and Egypt into the United Arab Republic (UAR) and the overthrow of the monarchy in Iraq, the division among the Arab states was a clear-cut one between the Nasser-led radical believers in Arab unity and the conservative regimes. The latter were committed to maintaining the regional status quo and limiting their commitment to Palestine to supporting the decisions and declarations of the Arab League, the discredited organization behind the disastrous Arab involvement in the Arab–Israeli War of 1948.
But 1958 changed all that. Although Nasser had assumed Arab leadership after the Suez War of 1956, he was reluctant to accept the unification of Syria and Egypt under his leadership and form the United Arab Republic because of the lack of preparation behind the union. But Syria’s leaders insisted on the merger to save their own country from a Communist takeover. The emergence of the UAR strengthened Nasser’s hand and elevated the notion of Arab unity to an attainable goal which appealed to the Arab in the street. It threatened to snowball, overwhelm the traditional pro-West regimes, envelop the rest of the Arab Middle East and indeed create a country big enough and militarily strong enough to challenge Israel. More specifically, the creation of the UAR as a country capable of attaining military parity with Israel was especially significant to the Palestinians, who still dreamed of an Arab military victory. Nasser’s popularity among the Palestinians soared. Naturally the monarchies and sheikhdoms threatened by this prospect did everything they could to obstruct Nasser, which included heavier reliance on the West and the use of Islamic groups to undermine him.
The overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy on 14 July 1958, soon after the formation of the UAR, by a radical clique of army officers led by General Abdel Karim Kassem added to Arab divisions. Initially thought to be a pro-Nasser movement, the Iraqi revolution evolved into a populist independent regime in a major wealthy Arab country. The new Iraqi leadership sought closer ties with the USSR and the Communist parties within the Middle East. Iraq now became another magnet for the affections of the Arab masses: in addition to the popular Nasser-led call for unity and the traditional Islamically inclined pro-West supporters of limited Arab cooperation, Kassem’s Iraq became a third force, a socialist regime which shunned Arab unity schemes but had a greater commitment to egalitarianism and to liberating Palestine. Suddenly the Palestinians had several places to look to.
The new regional realities demanded a Palestinian response. Habbash thought the UAR would overwhelm all who stood in its way, and agreed not to operate within its boundaries. He stuck to his ideology and worked to undermine the other countries and annex them to Nasser. The Mufti, who had petitioned to join the UAR in 1958 but had been turned down by Nasser, who feared being drawn into a premature confrontation with Israel, switched sides: he saw the Kassem government as a possible source of salvation for the waning fortunes of his Arab Higher Committee and out-of-date leadership. Suddenly, all Palestinian political movements ‘belonged’ to established Arab regimes – even the ILF depended on Saudi financial help to survive.
In political terms, this explains the presence of Arafat and his anti-Nasser conservative Sunni Muslims in Kuwait. They lived in comfort but without any political patronage – certainly none that afforded them anything beyond survival – and they watched the Palestinian problem being toyed with between competing Arab countries with dismay. In 1959, with Habbash and the Mufti advancing different political programmes to win the affection of the Palestinian people and the ILF in decline, the Arafat group, though still not a structured political entity, began organizing to make its own appeal to the Palestinian people.
There is no official date for the setting up of Fatah, and the resulting confusion among historians and news correspondents is justified. Harakat Tahrir Filastin, its Arabic acronym reversed into Fatah to match the Koranic word for ‘conquest’, came into being by degrees. This accounts for the absence of a fixed date of birth and the different dates given by some of its founding members. It began to publish the monthly magazine Filastinuna, Nida’ Al Hayat (Our Palestine, The Call of Life) in 1959, shortly before it adopted the name Fatah. But it did so in an undercover way; like many dissident publications, it was printed in Beirut but would not reveal its backing or the names of editors and contributors and instead gave a PO box number. The people who published Filastinuna were those who created and led Fatah, and, since Fatah evolved rather than came into being by decree or through a single declaration or announcement, 1959 is as appropriate a date as any to use for its emergence.5
Filastinuna was edited by Abu Jihad, the most methodical member of the group and, being the only one with a flair for writing, also its foremost contributor. But the dynamo behind it, the moving spirit of the group who pushed this project forward, was Arafat. He insisted on writing his own inelegantly phrased articles, used his own money to finance it and supervised the magazine’s production. Once again, and despite Abu Jihad’s superior efforts, Arafat was the impetous, energetic, fearless innovator. With little justification, he claimed expertise through his editorship of Sawt Falastin in Cairo, and was able to talk others into backing him. Abu Jihad showed no resentment.
How many issues were printed in Beirut is unknown. The old Fatah leadership speak of a circulation of over five thousand, but this is an overstatement. While it was distributed in many Arab countries it did not reach ones with strict press censorship, such as Egypt and Syria, and others frowned on its Palestine First stance. Within certain literary and political circles there was considerable speculation as to who was behind it, but its overall impact was limited by its lack of quality. It certainly did not reach the average Palestinian.
As with Sawt Falastin, Filastinuna was high on passion and calls for the eradication of Israel and deficient in standard of writing and depth of analysis. Although Nasser’s popularity and widespread Arab belief in his unity schemes prevented counter-ideas having a broad appeal, neither this nor its amateurishness detracted from the nature of the magazine’s message and its uniqueness. In a major departure from other Palestinian movements, the Fatah group advocated the liberation of Palestine through an armed struggle to be carried out by the Palestinians themselves, which it called the Children of the Catastrophe. Instead of following or depending on the Arab regimes and their armies, it favoured an independent Palestinian policy and arming the Palestinians to liberate their country. To Fatah, liberation came before Arab unity, and liberation was considered the first step towards unity instead of the other way round. The Fatah programme, as articulated in Filastinuna, promoted a Palestinian nationalism without revolutionary ideology and was a vague call to arms – it was far less clear than what Habbash and others were advocating. In fact, the Fatah programme was so thin that it left unanswered the vital questions of how the liberation of Palestine was to be achieved by Palestinians against an enemy as strong as Israel, and the exact relationship between a Palestinian armed struggle and the admitted eventual need for total Arab support – Arafat has never been able to answer this question. But it was a new story line, and its adoption took place after considerable heated debate.
It was all Arafat’s invention, an extension of the anti-Arab governments line he adopted after 1948 and which was strengthened by the division in Arab ranks. Time and again he lamented the lack of Arab action, using phrases such as: ‘Violence is the only solution’ and ‘Liberating Palestine could only take place through the barrel of a gun.’ His justification for his hard line included pointing out the ineffectiveness of the Arab regimes and their Palestinian followers, dramatic stories of how the Palestinians were being mistreated by fellow Arabs, and analysis of how this was creating a unique sense of Palestinian identity which needed to express itself. The humiliation of the Palestinians and their relegation to the status of unwanted refugees, and the lack of Arab activity to recover Palestine, were very much on his mind, and all the recollections of the Fatah meetings which took place at the time, mostly late at night in members’ homes, show him leading the way. Although Nasser had created a border guard in Gaza and sponsored the fedayeen, he still kept them under his control. Arafat scoffed at the efforts of the Arab governments and their caution and made fun of them,6 often using another of his talents, telling jokes. But he shunned ideology and commitment to individual Arab governments in favour of a flexibility aimed at giving the Palestinians room for manoeuvre. It was his ally and close friend Abu Iyad who articulated this vital aspect of the ‘philosophy’ of Fatah: ‘We were convinced that the Palestinians could expect nothing from the Arab regimes.’7
According to Fatah, the Palestinians had to lead. But they knew that they needed Arab support, so they placed themselves in a position to receive it without alienating anyone, and decided to go for diversity of backing to avoid being dictated to. The need to maintain independence from the Arabs meant that the Palestinians could act in accordance with the interests of the separate identity being forced on them, and the decision to be flexible in dealing with the Arab governments meant working with all of them. Logic would suggest that this amounted to playing the Arab governments against each other, but Fatah denied this and promised not to interfere in their internal affairs or politics. Arafat was the severest critic of Arab governments among the Fatah group, but amazingly he also led in not wanting to alienate any of them.
Interestingly, in keeping with their nationalist but unrevolutionary approach, Fatah followed strictly traditional lines regarding two vital aspects reflecting political conditions in the Middle East. Its condemnation of the West for helping create Israel and continuing to support it held nothing new. Fatah’s statements resembled official Arab proclamations – more in the nature of protests against Western impartiality than warnings. Unlike the ANM it issued no serious threats to Western business interests in the region, and no statements which might jeopardize its presence in Kuwait. And there was not a single word about the social issues of the time and how they contributed to the maladies and weaknesses of the Arab regimes and their ineffectiveness. Nor did Fatah’s call for eventual Arab unity differ from what was generally accepted by the established regimes, and it contained nothing to frighten those who saw in unity an encroachment on their sovereignty. Instead there was total subscription to the idea of Palestine and the rights of its people, angry nationalistic rhetoric, and subsidiary devotion to Palestine’s Arab and Muslim character. This was openly anti-Nasser, but it also ended the Fatah group’s links with the Muslim Brotherhood because it conflicted with the idea of an Islamic identity to the Palestinian problem and the call to jihad – a holy war to recover Palestine. Even Abu Iyad’s relationship with the Brotherhood came to an end.
The Fatah ‘policy’, however new and vague, was a precise response to the political conditions of the time. After the Suez War Nasser openly admitted the limits of his power, saying that ‘[He] had no plan to liberate Palestine.’8 In Iraq in 1958 Kassem, at least initially, was doing nothing except promoting general plans aimed at wresting Arab leadership from Nasser’s hands. The conservative regimes – Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the oil sheikhdoms – conducted sporadic quarrels with Nasser. They pointed out the emptiness of his plans, because they relegated the Palestinian problem to a secondary position after Arab unity and Nasser’s personal ambitions, and would take centuries to achieve. Even the ILF and the Muslim Brotherhood’s constant calls for an Islamic jihad made little sense, and the Brotherhood was in any case more concerned with staying alive in the face of a regional onslaught against it by Nasser.
Meanwhile the brittle relationship between the Arabs and the Palestinians hit an all-time low. Both sides knew that cooperation between them was necessary – the result of a historical, unalterable Arab oneness – but simultaneously, and mostly in private, they accused each other of gross inadequacy before and during the 1948 War and of continued lack of commitment to the cause of Palestine in the years which followed. The Palestinians resented being treated as second – class citizens by all the Arab regimes except Syria; this was countered by the Arab governments’ accusations of Palestinian irresponsibility, attempts at dragging them into another war, meddling in their internal affairs and being more interested in amassing wealth and getting others to fight for them than in saving their country. Only Fatah’s plans, eventually contained in a document called The Structure for Revolutionary Construction, encompassed the Palestinian complaints and answered some of the Arab protests. The other Palestinian movements, which were beholden to specific Arab regimes, followed their financial backers. Naturally this, despite Nasser’s overwhelming hold on the Arab people, limited their scope for action and left the door open for Fatah and its new approach.
This situation underlines Fatah’s later success. But there was more to the Fatah position than what its programme stated or what was implied in bulletins and articles in Filastinuna. There was the history of the original advocacy of Palestinian responsibility for their ‘problem’ and how the Fatah call represented its natural culmination. It was this and Arafat’s appreciation of it which allowed a small band of men to rise to the occasion and to promote Palestinianness as never before. Their efforts eventually determined the future of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Fatah’s rise must be seen in the context of the times. The seeds of conflict between the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs as to who was best equipped to assume primary responsibility for the Arab–Israeli problem began to grow in the mid-1930s. This is when the Palestinians, already disenchanted with the rest of the Arabs because of their obvious lack of success against foreign control, stopped calling themselves Southern Syrians and began to see themselves as a separate and special case, the would – be victims of Zionist plans to build a national homeland on their land. In 1936 the Palestinians decided that the Palestine problem concerned and affected them more than the rest of the Arabs. This feeling had originally surfaced after the defeat of the occupying Turks in the first World War, and was a result of the subsequent Arab failure to create an independent Syria in 1921 and of the later relegation of the new Arab states to Western dependencies. It began to take concrete form after the Palestinian General Strike of 1936. The relatively successful anti-British civil disobedience campaign was brought to an end by the intercession of Arab leaders from Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia who subordinated the Arab interests in Palestine, the fate of the territory and its people, to their special relations with Britain.
This crystallized the Palestinian sense of isolation and separateness, feelings which were encouraged by the Mufti and the writings of the Palestinian historian Aref Al Aref. Promoting Palestinian nationalism rather than relying on the Arabs enhanced the Mufti’s political position with the people whose territory was promised to the Jews, and in promoting this the Mufti intercepted any attempts to marginalize him and made a solid bid for Palestinian leadership. However, unlike Fatah’s use of the 1948 defeat, the Mufti’s Palestinianness came too early and he never found a way to act without Arab support or to capitalize on the divisions within Arab ranks. Al Aref, a highly respected historian, judged the Arab leaders and found them so corrupt, so committed to their own narrow interests and so lacking in the right qualities that he began to promote Palestinian self-reliance.
The Arab defeat by Israel in 1948 and the open betrayal of the Palestinians by King Abdallah of Jordan’s Arab Legion and the Iraqi army, which also often refused to fight the Israelis, contributed to the emergence of an angry Palestinian identity. The considerable number of secret Arab attempts to settle the problem with Israel without consulting the Palestinians or informing the Arab people also added to Palestinian anger and their sense of betrayal. King Abdallah continued secret negotiations with Israel which had begun much earlier; President Husni Zaim of Syria used the American CIA to make his own peace offers; Charles Malik and Camille Chamoun of Lebanon developed their own settlement plans; King Farouk of Egypt’s brother-in-law, Colonel Ismael Shirine, and the Egyptian Prime Minister, Mohammed Nakrashi, wanted out of the conflict to devote themselves to Egypt’s problems; and Nuri Said of Iraq advocated accepting whatever Britain had to offer by way of a solution. Later, though supreme in his leadership of the Arab masses after the Suez War, Nasser made the Palestinian problem secondary to the elusive long-term aim of uniting the Arabs under his leadership. Nasser had come to power with CIA help, and suspicion lingered that he would accept an American-brokered solution to the problem. This is why the Muftis fled from Cairo.
It was true that the Arab governments had kept the Palestinian problem alive for fear of their people’s reaction, and this accounts for the secrecy in their negotiations with Israel. The Arab people, without any prompting, were more committed to the Palestinian cause than their leaders were, but Arafat’s group did not believe this could last long. Habbash, who also knew of the plans of some Arab leaders to settle the Palestinian problem, believed the masses would be steadfast and would overthrow anyone who gave up Arab rights in Palestine. Arafat, however, believed Arab leaders were capable of fooling their own people and of making peace at the expense of the Palestinians. Habbash thought time was on his side and revolution was on the way; Arafat feared the consequences of delay and wanted to thwart all attempts at making peace.
In retrospect it can be argued that for most of the twentieth century the Palestinians have conducted a struggle to seize responsibility for the fight against Israel. This is why, educated or not, Yasser Arafat must be credited as the one Palestinian leader who had the foresight and courage to capitalize on the disaffection of his people with the rest of the Arabs and to give their feelings some solid content. It was Arafat who had donned the kuffiya, the symbol of the 1936 Palestinian rebellion, in Prague and later adopted a chequered version of it in Kuwait. It was his amazing personal feeling for what mattered which led him to adopt the name Abu Ammar, thus attaching himself to the all-pervasive Islamic tradition which had such great appeal to the ordinary Arab and Palestinian. It was also he who provided the example for members of his group to adopt noms de guerre which used ‘Abu (father of)’, in keeping with a fading tradition which was dismissed by the more modern thinkers of the Arab Nationalist Movement and even the Mufti’s Arab Higher Committee.
In fact, as with the way he managed his chairmanship of the Federation of Palestinian Students and GUPS, it was Arafat who gave the participants in Fatah a sense of purpose beyond their small number, importance and means. Its founders remained committed to the idea of a collective leadership and this remained so until 1968, but it was an unnatural situation, particularly in view of Arab belief in individuals and their genius. Though he was later punished and came close to being ejected from the organization for acting on his own, Arafat was the dominant figure within Fatah from the start. None of the other members matched his energy and inventiveness. With the backing of Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad – they often stopped him from taking impulsive decisions and foolish actions – he overwhelmed the conservative members such as Khalid Al Hassan who wanted closer coordination with the Arab countries. Recalling their first-hand experiences in Cairo and Gaza, Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad agreed with Arafat that the staunchest anti-Israeli Arab leader, Nasser, was not to be trusted.
In 1959 and 1960, after steering Fatah into adopting his hardline policy, it was Arafat who divided his small Kuwait group into cells and saw to it that no one cell or member of it was privy to the activities of the rest. He eliminated doubters who questioned his overstated plans to conduct an armed struggle by forcing some of the original Fatah members like Yussuf Amira to resign. As with the adoption of the independent position, initially he appealed to them in the gentlest of voices. But stubborn ones who failed to be converted were subjected to verbal lashings after he lost his temper: Arafat berated, insulted and abused them in the way known as radih, the preserve of street Egyptians. On occasion he threatened some with physical violence. He did this despite paying lip service to the idea of collective leadership, and he got away with it because Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad were with him – the former to strengthen his arguments and make them credible, the latter to prevent him turning into a raving lunatic. He was the initiator, innovator and pusher, but he needed Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad to complement him.
More than anyone else, Arafat put into action the two strategic decisions which guaranteed Fatah’s continued existence and guarded its independence: he refused to join in Arab feuds and he detached the business of raising money from becoming politically dependent on the donors. Ignoring Arab feuds was a difficult option. In 1959 Nasser, though still making perfunctory moves and promises to maintain his leadership position, including arming Palestinians in Gaza though insisting on controlling them, suggested the creation of a Palestinian entity9 and got the Council of the Arab League to consider his proposal. In 1960 Kassem accused Nasser of inactivity in the sphere of liberating Palestine, and of not providing Palestinian fighters with enough support and freedom. Determined to outdo his Egyptian rival, the Iraqi leader began arming and training Palestinians in his own country and announced the formation of a Palestinian Liberation Army. He went further than Nasser’s proposal for an entity and called for the creation of a Palestinian government in exile,10 Jumhuriayat Falastin Al Khalida or the Eternal Republic of Palestine. Cooperating with Kassem, whose policies were relatively close to those of Fatah and whose success would have enhanced the chances of the Fatah exiles, must have been hugely tempting. But Arafat and his supporters steadfastly refused to do so. This was a difficult decision and there was more to it than avoiding confrontation with the most popular Arab leader of the time, Nasser. It was in line with Arafat’s basic thinking of refusing to create a Palestinian entity because that would end his flexibility of action, and avoiding entanglements in Arab feuds and anything that smacked of ideology or dependency. He was happy playing the chameleon. Kassem was a leftist, somewhat unlslamic, and Fatah would have had to follow Iraq.
There were many other occasions when the prospect of a rich Arab government’s financial backing with strings attached must have been equally tempting, and King Hussein, who had succeeded to the throne in 1952, was not averse to helping Fatah against Nasser. But Arafat would not succumb and only accepted money which did not place constraints on his freedom of action. The final chapter on the possibility of cooperating with Kassem came in 1962, when the Iraqi dictator, like other Iraqi leaders before him and Saddam Hussein in 1990, pronounced Kuwait part of Iraq and threatened to invade it. In a decision which sheds a different light on Arafat’s 1990 support of Saddam and makes it more complex than the adoption of a simple anti-Western position, Fatah refused to consider the potential rewards of siding with Iraq and supported the independence of Kuwait.11
When Fatah started, its small membership spent their own money to keep it alive and Arafat gave more than most. In 1960–1, the second strategic decision which faced them concerned raising money to support their expanding activities. It was the energetic Arafat who developed the plans for fund – raising and assumed responsibility for it. His approach was simple and direct. His first target was the wealthy Palestinians who resided in Kuwait and other oil-rich countries – people with an interest in promoting a conservative, independent Palestinian movement. In Kuwait he found a ready benefactor in Tala’at Al Ghosein, a successful businessman whom the Kuwaitis had appointed ambassador to the USA and other countries. Arafat used his friendship with this man’s cousin, Jaweed Al Ghosein, who had been his classmate in Cairo, to obtain financial help from him. After that there was Hani Al Qadoumi, a relation of an early Fatah activist, Farouk Al Qadoumi, and Arafat succeeded with him as well. Then came the very wealthy Muhsin Al Qattan, with whom Arafat established a direct line and from whom he received considerable assistance. Later, beginning in 1963, there was Hani Abul Saoud, a relation of Arafat’s on his mother’s side who later became head of the Kuwaiti Investment Fund. He provided both direct help and a means of reaching wealthy Kuwaitis.
But Arafat did not limit himself to the wealthy, and Fatah managed to endear itself to the thousands of Palestinian professionals working throughout the Gulf. This did not mean turning donors into Fatah members – Fatah was not organized enough to accommodate that – but it demonstrated the soundness of Arafat’s original decision regarding the existence of a separate Palestinian identity which shunned ideology and wanted to express itself through a Palestinianness committed to ‘armed struggle’. During this period, but again without compromising his independence, Arafat received some financial help from the Mufti, who was fearful of the success of Palestinian radical groups and was still committed to opposing Nasser.
The circle of contributors expanded and Arafat, a past-master at getting introductions to the rich and powerful and adept at selling ideas to them and pleasing them, met some members of the Kuwaiti royal family. He charmed them into donating to his cause by inflating the prospects of armed struggle and providing them with a way of contributing to Palestine. While some of them may have regarded their financial assistance as a way of supporting a political group committed to containing Nasser, there is no evidence whatsoever of Arafat deviating from his original neutral position among the ever-feuding Arabs, though this was to change in the years to come. The early success in collecting money from Kuwaiti royals was followed in 1961 by decision to expand into Qatar and to appeal to its royal family. Qatar too was under British control, but Arafat found a willing partner in Mahmoud Abbas, who was to become better known as Abu Mazen of Oslo Peace Accord fame. Arafat travelled to Qatar and got Abbas and other successful Palestinian businessmen in the country to help him. He also managed to get hefty, unconditional donations from the Qatari royal family.12 Soon afterwards, he and Abu Jihad travelled to Libya, then still under King Idriss, and the Qatari performance was repeated.
Arafat the student leader and instinctive strategist was also a fund-raiser par excellence, a very successful salesman. As would be expected, particularly in the Middle East and in small political movements, those who raised money had plenty of say about how it was used. But Arafat went beyond that. His characteristic sense of what mattered, enhanced by having watched the Mufti’s effective use of money to control the Arab Higher Committee, committed him to using it selectively. This was a trait which almost destroyed him but eventually elevated him to power. To him, money was a tool of power, and power ensured the means to raise further money.
During this period of intense debates, establishing sources of financial support and laying the foundations for an organization, Arafat lived alone. Housed in the Solaybiahat district of Kuwait in a small bungalow provided by the Ministry of Public Works and originally built for British officials,13 he led the lonely, confined life of an expatriate bachelor and had little contact with the local community; to this day no Kuwaiti friends are known of. He had a small garden outside his modest quarters, but there was a high fence around it, in keeping with the Islamic rules about protecting women, to prevent him from looking at the neighbouring houses. The strictures went further and precluded inviting large groups of people for an evening meal or a barbecue, two common activities in Kuwait. This did not bother him, for he never showed any particular interest in food or the comforts of life. Arafat often ate standing up, nibbling at whatever was within reach; his favourite foods were honey on toast and cornflakes mixed with tea. He very often slept on couches in friends’ houses, if not on the floor. At home, his only source of entertainment was watching cartoons such as Tom and Jerry and Road Runner on Kuwaiti television, a way of unwinding which he has kept to this day.
Arafat’s bungalow, sparsely furnished, reflected the austere life of the occupant. It was not as impressive as the house occupied by his younger brother Fathi, by then a practising doctor in Kuwait, and, not unexpectedly, it was smaller than the houses occupied by some of his married colleagues. The bungalow’s only distinguishing characteristic was the number of sports cars parked in front of it. He had two or three at a time but his favourite was his American–made Ford Thunderbird, which he was fond of driving at high speed. It was an ugly piece of design with crude lines and high fins, and he whizzed around in it wearing large, American–style dark glasses and waving to people as if wanting to be noticed. Kuwait was a place where this kind of behaviour was frowned on. People remember a hip young man jangling his car keys in his hand with a spring in his step, a ready smile and a willingness to talk to strangers. Yet there were no women in his life at the time; Kuwaiti society was even stricter than it is today, and the only ‘available’ women were ones who went there on brief visits to entertain a sheikh or a wealthy businessman. Moreover, Arafat himself displayed no interest in female companionship, and in any case his official and unofficial work and political activities occupied most of his time. When not watching television at home he was with the group, but, interestingly and unlike some of the other Fatah members, there is no record of him reading anything beyond a daily newspaper. The facility to relate to ideas, grasp and extend them was the more admirable because he acquired these ideas through listening to people.
As he has done throughout his life, Arafat later exaggerated his achievements – in this case the degree of his business success in Kuwait. According to him his unofficial work, over and above the demands of his official position, consisted of being a partner in a contracting company; he claims to have been very successful and to have quickly become a millionaire. This is not true.14 To begin with, he did not create a construction company or become partner in one, and there is no name for the so-called company. Like most civil servants in Kuwait he moonlighted, and he did so in partnership with an Egyptian civil engineer by the name of Abdel Muaz. Arafat was the contact man and salesman and Abdel Muaz carried out the actual work.
Because of the merciless heat, civil servants in Kuwait work only half a day. During the oil-boom years, many of them also offered their services on a private basis because there was a shortage of small companies to undertake maintenance and minor private building work. This was a common practice, and the people who carried out such work did so with the knowledge of their government employers, who saw their activity as alleviating a skills shortage. The small projects that Arafat undertook, however, yielded thousands instead of millions of dollars as he later insisted on mythologizing. Still, with his salary of $30,000 a year, free housing and modest needs, Arafat did indeed lead a comfortable life which allowed him to give money to Fatah, own sports cars and make one holiday trip to Europe. Here, Arafat is guilty of a misplacement of emphasis; it was not his construction work but politics was which the yardstick of his success.
But there is more to this story than simple exaggeration: Arafat has always used the untruth that he became a millionaire in Kuwait to answer questions about his subsequent use of Fatah’s money as if it were his own. Even in June 1997 he told interviewer Larry King of the Cable News Network, ‘I have never received a salary. I am still spending the money I made in Kuwait.’
The two events which were to transform the fortunes of Fatah, force it into involvement in Arab politics and elevate it from a marginal organization to a serious contender for the Palestinian leadership occurred in 1961 and 1962. The first was the break-up of the UAR in September 1961, while the following year saw the success of the Algerian revolution and the granting of independence to that country by France.
The secession of Syria from Nasser’s United Arab Republic and its reversion to an independent country diminished Nasser and Habbash, affected the public’s perception of their leadership and brought the bandwagon of Arab unity to a screeching halt. Those who believed in Arab unity as a necessary first step towards liberating Palestine were confronted with stark evidence of its failure. Journalists and historians listed the reasons behind the failure and, more importantly, why Arab unity might not work in the future. Even Nasser slipped into talking about a ‘combined Arab will’ and ‘a unity of purpose’ and stopped promoting actual union.
The Algerian revolution demonstrated the success of keeping an identity alive through reliance on Islam and the use of a guerrilla army against a superior conventional force. Superficial analysis of these events amounted to a vindication of Fatah: Arab unity was proved to be beyond attainment and the Algerian revolution was a model to be copied. Even today Arafat’s partisans, including former special adviser Bassam Abu Sharif, attribute foresight to Arafat and condemn Arab nationalism as having been nothing more than ‘windy rhetoric’.15 But others more learned and impartial have carefully analysed the background to the break – up and produced more complex answers. They suggest it was a combination of unique factors that led to the dissolution of the UAR and that the Algerian analogy was not pertinent to the conditions governing the Arab–Israeli conflict.16
The rights and wrongs of these assertions matter less than the effects of these developments in the Arab world on ordinary Arabs and the way Arafat’s unerring instinct turned the events into Fatah victories. Not for the first time, the natural strategist in the man demonstrated an uncanny sense of timing and a superhuman ability to move into the breach.
Late in 1961, Arafat and some of his colleagues made their first trip to Syria as representatives of Fatah. Kuwait was too far removed from the Arab–Israeli conflict, but Syria was not. Allying himself with an independent Syria bordering on Israel offered many advantages and a chance to start the armed struggle, even though it amounted to a decision to forgo neutrality and take sides. The new Syria which emerged from the UAR was anti – Nasser, and among the many things it did to maintain its reclaimed independence was to try to undermine him through taking a more militant stand vis à vis Israel. The new Syrian leaders, like many before them, considered Palestine part of Syria. In an act which demonstrated the oneness of purpose between the Palestinians and Syrians, they were already supporting small Palestinian guerrilla groups conducting raids into Israel – among others a group calling itself the Palestine Liberation Front, led by a Palestinian officer in the Syrian army, Ahmad Jibril. Above all, Syria was a safe ally because it did not have enough money to ‘buy’ Arafat and it had over a hundred and fifty thousand Palestinian refugees who, unlike the Palestinian civil servants and businessmen in Kuwait and the rest of the Gulf, represented potential recruits for Arafat’s plans to create a Palestinian fighting force. Whatever the pertinence of his Gaza and Egyptian experiences, it was in Syria that Arafat first became a guerrilla leader, and he had to take sides in an inter-Arab dispute to do it.
The Fatah visitors to Syria (they kept their Kuwait jobs just in case) had one advantage, money. Arafat and his associates, including some who are still with him and who were party to the decision to ‘investigate’ Syria, make false statements about how poor they were when they arrived in Damascus, and most biographers accept their word. This is another myth-making exercise aimed at concealing the financial source of their success and an attempt at attributing it exclusively to their own talents. Syria was host to a considerable number of Palestinian political groups and aspirants to leadership but, according to three former members of Fatah, Syrian-backed and independent Palestinian groups did not have the financial resources to compete with Arafat. The Palestinian writer Audeh Butrus Audeh, an Arafat critic, speaks of the mystery of the source of money, of how Arafat exercised total control over the Fatah war chest and how he bribed people to join him.17 Dr Tayseer Kamleh, a Palestinian political activist who was a member of the Syrian-sponsored Committee for Popular Mobilization to Liberate Palestine and who later became a Fatah spokesman, confirms the existence and importance of money but refrains from describing what Arafat did as a bribe.
According to the eyewitness accounts of Kamleh and others, Arafat offered Palestinians willing to join Fatah as recruits to be trained in Syria 18 sterling a month. This was at a time when Syrian soldiers and Palestinians belonging to pro-Syrian Palestinian paramilitary formations were receiving one-third of that.18 Furthermore, there were many Palestinian officers in the Syrian army of the 1960s and the line between their official Syrian positions and their membership of Palestinian resistance groups was a vague one, but they too did not have many followers for lack of funds. What is beyond question is that Syrian support for the Palestinians included allowing them to use the country’s territory to carry out raids against Israel. In reality, in 1962 and 1963 Fatah did not, could not, send infiltrators into Israel. They spent a considerable amount of time in Damascus while shuttling back and forth to Kuwait and using elaborate excuses to keep their jobs there. Arafat and his colleagues busied themselves recruiting and building a structure. In fact, though successful in raising money and keeping the source of much of it a secret, the Fatah which was divided between Kuwait and Damascus had no more than two to three hundred civilian members and no fighters.
Money and salesmanship worked, the young men of the refugee camps flocked to join Fatah and Syria was accommodating. Late in 1962 he began sending some of them to train in Algeria with the help of the new President, Ahmad Ben Bella, whom Abu Jihad had met and befriended when the Algerian lived in exile in Cairo. By 1963 things were looking even rosier. In February that year the Kassem regime was overthrown by a group of mostly Ba’ath army officers led by Colonel Abdel Salam Aref. Though the Ba’athists were believers in Arab unity they were independent from Nasser and their policy included a commitment to help create a Palestinian fighting force. A month later, encouraged by their comrades’ success in Iraq, Ba’ath army officers in Syria overthrew the elected government of their country and replaced it with a more pro-Palestinian military regime.
Both countries provided Fatah with training camps and facilities, but the Iraq-based training came to an end late in 1963 when the country’s government decided to impose an indoctrination programme for the Fatah recruits. Arafat would not accept this; he wanted exclusive control over the training and indoctrination of his fighters. The Syrians were less rigid. Arafat at first worked with Colonels Abdallah Shawkawi and Ahmad Sweidani, but soon he dealt directly with members of the army and Ba’ath party commands, who helped him as much as Ben Bella did.
The problem in Iraq was a small hiccup in a much larger picture. By late 1963, it was time to settle in Syria. Arafat was the first to leave Kuwait, using the disguise of a lowly official and driving an unsuspicious Volkswagen; the others followed. While the commonly accepted story gives a later date for the beginning of Fatah’s regional activities, two witnesses state that they started in early 1964. At that time Arafat began sending civilian infiltrators to advance the Fatah fortunes in the West Bank, then under King Hussein’s control, having been annexed by Jordan in 1949. Arafat did so with official Syrian approval and help,19 and only the lack of success of these efforts could have led him to avoid mentioning this afterwards. He also sent emissaries and organizers to Gaza. They caused problems for Nasser’s security apparatus and some of them were arrested by Colonel Tala’ at Al Alfi, acting on the Egyptian leader’s orders. Others went to Beirut, then the centre of Middle East journalism and home for many Palestinian thinkers and activists – throughout Lebanon there were two hundred thousand Palestinian refugees.
Nor was Arafat the chameleon above cooperating with revolutionaries or with countries which espoused alien ideologies. Abu Jihad was in Algeria getting up training camps, first under Ben Bella and later his successor, Houari Bu Middien. Khalid Al Hassan and his brother Hani, both German-educated, established firm connections with left-wing Palestinian students in that country and in other parts of Europe. They even received donations from students and sent some of them to Syria and Algeria for training. Simultaneously, this was the period which saw Arafat’s first attempts to obtain help from non-Arab friendly countries regardless of their politics. At the beginning, this took the form of sending Palestinian visitors sponsored by the Algerians, Syrians or Iraqis to Communist China, Cuba and other socialist republics with an interest in helping an ostensibly anti-Western revolutionary movement. In fact, the tireless Arafat travelled to China with Abu Jihad to attend a meeting of the Afro–Asian Solidarity Conference. The Fatah members in Damascus, Algeria and other places took every opportunity to meet foreign visitors to these countries and to ask them for support, as when Abu Jihad met and charmed Che Guevara in Algiers. In fact, Arafat’s political acrobatics went as far as using money raised from the pro-West oil-rich Arab countries to buy arms from Communist and socialist countries.
As events in 1964 were to demonstrate, everything was subordinated to Arafat’s single goal of keeping an independent Palestinian movement alive. On Nasser’s initiative, and nominally to respond to Israel’s plans to divert the waters of the Jordan River to irrigate the Negev Desert, the first Arab summit conference was held in Cairo in January 1964. Unable to respond to the Israeli threat militarily, the Arab leaders passed the buck and voted to set up the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the leadership of Ahmad Shukeiri, a Palestinian diplomat for hire who had represented Syria and Saudi Arabia in international forums and at that moment was an official of the Arab League. In May 1964 the new PLO held a conference at the National Hotel in Jerusalem, issued a National Covenant which committed it to the idea of an armed struggle and appointed itself the representative of the Palestinian people, the guardian of their interests in the Arab world and internationally.
This was a greater challenge to Arafat and Fatah than anything that had existed before. The backing of all the Arab countries for the creation of the PLO as an umbrella organization under which all Palestinian groups operated or should operate (though some, like the ANM, did so reluctantly and in a limited way) presented Fatah with two options. It could either join the new structure and relinquish its independence, or dissolve itself and disappear.
Cleverly, Arafat did not attend the Jerusalem meeting for fear of being pressured into accepting decisions not to his liking. Instead, and using a ploy which was to become one of his trademarks, he let a delegation of Abu Jihad and a dozen Fatah members attend. Abu Jihad’s group watched the elaborate proceedings and excitement in Jerusalem without participating; they acted merely as observers, and nothing escaped them.
The PLO which came into being as a result of a combined Arab decision formalized the maladies which had given rise to Fatah. Above all, it was Nasser’s brainchild and had been created to work with the Arab countries, to satisfy the Palestinians while keeping them under control.20 Moreover, the composition of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the parliamentary-style body which came into being in Jerusalem and which purported to control the PLO, weakened the appeal of the organization. The PNC members were appointed and, although the Arab Nationalists and other doctrinaire groups were supposed to be represented, it was a distinctly elitist assembly with little support among Palestinians in refugee camps and in the West Bank and Gaza. Finally, a Palestine Liberation Army was formed under the PLO. This move, which was supposed to appeal to ordinary Palestinians and Arabs, was no more than a gesture; the prospective fighting force was to be financed by the Arab governments and to obey their orders. In fact ‘armed struggle was not part of the original program of the PLO’ or its army,21 and the organization underscored its demerits by promising more than it could deliver. This showed clearly when another Arab summit in September 1964 put the PLO and PLA under total Arab control and stressed Nasser’s ‘unity of action’ approach.
Arafat used Abu Jihad’s clear analysis of what the PLO stood for to neutralize all opposition to his hard-line policies within Fatah. At first Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad had a difficult time controlling an angry, ranting and impulsive leader who hankered for immediate action, including violence, to undermine the PLO. Then, acting together, the three cleverly used the Jerusalem proceedings to prove that reliance on the Arab governments meant reverting to policies which had failed in the past. The leader of the conservative wing of Fatah, Khalid Al Hassan, could not counter their argument; this solidified the position of the Arafat-led ‘crazies’, who made him the de facto leader of the whole organization.
What followed was more deliberate, an anti-PLO campaign which rightly accused the new organization of being beholden to Arab regimes and of not representing the average Palestinian. But this was not enough for Arafat, who saw another opening and moved to capitalize on the Syrian and Saudi reluctance to back the PLO. Syria considered the organization too traditional and shackled to be effective, and wanted a more revolutionary stance. Arafat had a meeting with the country’s leaders, including the behind-the-scenes leader of the 1963 coup, General Hafez Al Assad, praised his government’s misgivings and presented himself as a natural expression of their doubts. For its part, Saudi Arabia had accepted the PLO and Shukeiri with reluctance and wanted something like an old-fashioned organization under the Mufti instead. After guaranteeing Syria’s willingness to continue to house him and provide him with support, Arafat courted Saudi Arabia, by then emerging as a new power within the Arab camp and determined to cut Nasser down to size for trying to control neighbouring Yemen and threatening the stability of the Arabian peninsula.
In this instance, Arafat the opportunist managed to use the leader of the conservative wing of Fatah and a man whom he had considered a competitor, Khalid Al Hassan, to establish a direct link to Saudi Arabia through the country’s Minister of Petroleum, Ahmad Zaki Yamani. Even at their first meeting Arafat talked the dapper Yamani into giving Fatah a considerable sum of money.22 Later in 1965, Yamani arranged for Arafat to meet King Faisal, Nasser’s chief rival among Arab leaders, and came back with millions instead of thousands. The Fatah contacts with Yamani and Faisal made Nasser furious: he attacked Arafat’s organization publicly and prevailed upon Lebanon to control Fatah’s attempts to infiltrate Israel from its territory.23 Then he announced several measures aimed at strengthening the PLA and resistance groups in Gaza, and put his Voice of Palestine radio under PLO control. Nasser’s response was as useless as Shukeiri’s repeated attempts to entice Fatah into joining the PLO and Habbash’s efforts to cooperate with it so as to avoid the fragmentation which would vitiate the potential of all Palestinian movements. Meanwhile, the Saudis continued to provide Arafat with enough money to pose a challenge to the PLO and Nasser’s hegemony over the Palestinian problem.
The battle lines were drawn. While Arafat spoke of Israel as the enemy and declared that ‘one enemy at a time was enough’,24 instead of remaining above Arab divisions Fatah was at their very centre. Nasser still commanded unrivalled loyalty at street level, and the raging battle for control of the fate of Palestine received little press coverage and escaped most people; but the Fatah challenge to Nasser’s leadership was stronger than ever before. Abu Iyad, Abu Jihad and Arafat were the trio at the top of Fatah, but in addition there were Qadoumi, Adwan, the Al Hassan brothers Hani and Khalid, Abu Mazen and a cabal of important money men whom Arafat always accorded special treatment. They were men possessed with the idea of independent Palestinian action and, though they never attacked Nasser publicly while heaping scorn on Shukeiri,25 their plans called for prevailing against both men. The only thing Nasser could do to outmanoeuvre them and to prevent Habbash and others from joining them was to embark on partial or total hostilities against Israel, and that he was not prepared to do.
Fatah’s success against Nasser gave its members breathing space, and they used Syrian, Algerian and Saudi support to build a structure worthy of their challenge. In a clear attempt to pre-empt the PLO they conducted a half-hearted and unproductive raid against Israel in December 1964.
While sympathetic to Nasser, the Lebanese government could not control the refugee camps on its territory. Fatah moved in, and training camps there were added to the ones in Syria and Algeria. Thousands of refugees volunteered, as well as Palestinian students from Europe and many who joined Fatah from the West Bank and Gaza. The actual training consisted of an improvised programme borrowed from the Algerians and whatever the Fatah leadership knew of the teachings of the Algerian revolutionary Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, the Vietnamese General Giap and Mao Tzedong. The trainees learned how to use light weapons, mostly Kalashnikov assault rifles, and received indoctrination covering refugee problems, Palestinian and Arab history and the philosophy of Fatah. There was much about how the PLO was full of corruption and nepotism and had been created to control rather than support the Palestinian people.26 The propaganda against the PLO was effective because the organization did nothing beyond building a small army, the PLA, which joined the Arab armies in their idleness. Shukeiri issued unrealistic threats to throw Israel into the sea, which reduced him to an object of mockery and further eroded the standing of the organization he chaired. But however impressive Fatah was at organizing and preparing a challenge to the PLO, an inactive Nasser and an Arab Nationalist Movement without the wherewithal to act independently, the realities of the Fatah military training programme told a different story.
In this context, Arafat was guiltier than others. Because of his volatility his colleagues had refused to appoint him Fatah’s military commander and awarded the post to Mohammed Yussuf Al Najjar. But Arafat used his propensity for hard work to make himself Najjar’s partner and, as usual, assumed responsibility for training. So while not alone in planning the training programme in Lebanon and Syria, Arafat oversaw it and has to be held responsible for the failure to create an effective Palestinian guerrilla force. However inventive and determined to lead he was, he could not bring himself to take measures aimed at breaking the unmilitary habits of people who belonged to a backward society.
To succeed, to turn illiterate refugees into modern fighters, Arafat would have to have instilled a strong sense of discipline. This would have included punishing recruits for not subscribing to the most elementary of command structures and making them accept the notion of belonging to an organization instead of being individuals. He was not willing to do so for fear of alienating them, and showed particular favour to the very few people who came from notable families. Moreover, Arafat himself has never been an organized person and what he did reflected his ways. Thirdly, and significantly, he was happy enough to turn the recruits into members of Fatah; to him, having followers was the most important issue. This exposed a new trait in the man: he placed more faith in acceptability and followers, particularly the elite, than in military training and competent people. And it confirmed the existence of an old trait: his statements on the recruits’ level of military competence were wild exaggerations.
Yet, despite the obvious unpreparedness of his ‘troops’, Arafat could not resist the urge to start the armed struggle. Once again his impulsiveness was not matched by that of his colleagues, many of whom wanted to wait until further training and preparation had been carried out. He prevailed, though the vote of the Fatah leadership was only five to four in his favour – perhaps a reflection of their doubts about his organizational abilities and his overblown reports. This showed clearly in the first military communiqué, issued on 31 December 1964 – the one which covered the raid from Lebanon mentioned earlier. It was a communiqué which reflected enthusiasm rather than facts. Issued under the name of Al Assifa (The Storm), which was designated the military wing of Fatah and used as a cover to protect the main organization against official reprisals, it was released before confirmation that the foray had actually taken place. In fact, this alleged raid into Israel never did take place because its perpetrators had been arrested by the Lebanese security forces the night before.27 Three days later, on 3 January 1965, and in an act aimed as much at the PLO as at Israel, Fatah finally managed to infiltrate commandos into Israel from the West Bank, reach the village of Beit Netopha and place sticks of dynamite at a water diversion canal. But the timer did not work properly and the dynamite was discovered before it exploded.
A month later, and once again acting without proper planning, Arafat despatched another group to infiltrate Israel through Jordan and the West Bank, but the raiding party was intercepted by a Jordanian army patrol which killed one of its members, Ahmad Musa. Even today Fatah uses this incident to claim that the first martyr of the Palestinian armed resistance was killed by Arabs. This is not true: other Syrian-based groups, including Ahmad Jibril’s Palestine Liberation Front and the Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had already lost men in direct combat with the Israelis. Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Israel were all aware of the military ineffectiveness of the initial Fatah forays, but the group’s efforts, particularly in attacking a water diversion installation, were a stunning propaganda success. As a result it was Fatah which above all others became associated with the idea of armed struggle.
It was 1966 which was to test and change the fortunes of Arafat. In Syria, a coup within the 1963 coup (it was carried out by one faction against another) took place and led to the emergence of Chief of Staff General Salah Jedid as Syria’s strong man behind an ineffective president. In Lebanon, the country’s largest bank, INTRA, collapsed after a conspiracy against it by the government and its Central Bank.28 Because INTRA was Palestinian – owned and managed, Fatah used the incident to demonstrate Arab perfidy in dealing with the Palestinians.
A short time after these events Arafat easily ousted Najjar as Fatah’s military commander; the latter had six children and feared for his home life. Immediately afterwards, Arafat’s expansion of military activity backfired. He was arrested in April for trying to blow up Tapline, the line carrying Saudi oil to the Mediterranean. This irresponsible act of sabotage was typical of the man, who could never understand why Arab interests could not be subordinated to Fatah’s total freedom of action. Although this endangered relations with the Syrians and the Saudis and enraged his colleagues, he made up for Palestinian disapproval by personally participating in the continuing infiltration raids into Israel from Lebanon. He was the one original Fatah member who did this and, however modest the outcome of his forays, they were testimony to his courage. It earned him considerable admiration within Palestinian ranks, was noted by other resistance groups and stopped some Arab governments from punishing him.
What was to become a pattern in the future eventually tripped him. On 2 May 1966 he was suspended from his position as military commander for refusing to accept the principle of collective leadership, organizing raids on his own and misuse of funds.29 Though the details of the charges against him remain a secret and it was a severe blow to his progress, the incident was to be overshadowed by what subsequently happened. One week after his suspension, on the night of 9 May 1966, he was at a house in the Mezzah district of Damascus when a murder took place. The consequences of this event and Syrian suspicion that he was personally involved have haunted him to this day.
The subject remains so sensitive that all three of my sources of the story, people who occupied important positions in Damascus at the time, spoke about it off the record and stipulated that no mention of their previous positions or nationalities be made. Arafat had gone to the house to negotiate with Yussuf Orabi, an ambitious young Palestinian who was serving as an officer in the Syrian army but doubling as a leader of the Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The specifics of what the two were negotiating are not known, but Orabi was a close friend of Hafez Assad, later Syria’s President and then Minister of Defence and second only to General Salah Jedid. In fact, Assad was grooming Orabi for leadership of the Palestinians. There is speculation that the ostracised Arafat wanted either Orabi’s support against the rest of the Fatah leadership or to form a new movement with him.
The meeting was attended by five people and an argument ensued which turned violent. Orabi fell or was pushed out of a third – floor window and died immediately. Another pro-Syrian Palestinian had been shot dead inside the house. Arafat was not at the scene of the crime when the police arrived, but soon afterwards he took refuge in the house of Colonel Munib Al Majdoub of the Syrian police. From there he sent word to his friend, the country’s leader Salah Jedid. Majdoub told Arafat not to worry and sent him home, but he was subsequently arrested by police loyal to Assad, as was Abu Jihad who had returned to Damascus from Algeria. On Assad’s orders they were kept at the Dammour air base and then moved to the Al Mezzah prison where they were kept in solitary confinement. Assad appointed a three-man panel to investigate the case.
The panel found Arafat guilty and Assad wanted him sentenced to death, but Jedid would not approve the sentence. Eventually Jedid released him and closed the file. Fatah’s story was that the intercession of the remaining Fatah leadership was behind the release. Abu Iyad and Qadoumi had indeed rushed to Damascus from Kuwait, met Assad and accused him of using an accident to undermine Fatah; but in reality this effort had no effect, and it was Jedid who was behind Arafat’s release.
This incident was to have consequences on the future of Fatah, Syrian politics and the Arab–Israeli conflict, and therefore merits further analysis. Throwing someone of Orabi’s size out of a window – and he was a stocky man – would have been beyond the physical powers of the diminutive Arafat. Even had he done such a thing, it was unlikely that he would have gone straight to the home of a police officer when he had ample opportunity to escape. Moreover, Arafat has insisted that he left the building during the argument and before the actual incident, and he was definitely not there when the police arrived.
Orabi’s death came close to widening the chasm among a Syrian leadership already quarrelling over whether to support Fatah or the Syrian-sponsored Al Sa’iqa, another Damascus-based Palestinian force operating under the aegis of the PLO. Jedid saw no problem in backing both, but Assad considered Fatah unruly and wanted it out of the picture. Like many others in Syria at the time, and as this case proved, Assad was running his own private police force and saw Arafat as the inevitable single leader of Fatah. Though Arafat’s accusation that Assad wanted to destroy Fatah through implicating him in a murder case is impossible to prove, it appears feasible. The importance of the case lies in its results; it soured relations between the man who became Fatah’s and the PLO’s supremo and his accuser, who in 1970 rose to power in Syria and was still there nearly thirty years later. The Orabi incident shaped and continues to influence relations between these two men.
The period from 1965 until the 1967 War is among the most complex of Arafat’s chequered career. Time and again he was tested by the conditions within Fatah, in terms of the organization’s relationship with other Palestinian groups and the attitude of the Arab governments – even friendly ones whose interests inevitably clashed with the behaviour of the dashing military commander. It was under the weight of this overwhelming pressure that the real Arafat we know today began to surface.
With the support of Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad, soon after the Orabi case was closed Arafat was reinstated as Fatah’s military commander. Nobody could equal his zeal or energy. In running the military and other operations of Fatah in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and beyond, Arafat the fast learner emulated the Syrian Deuxième Bureau, the dreaded secret police which kept the country’s people in line, and his mentor, General Salah Jedid. Though endowed with an incredible memory, Arafat kept personal files on all the important people within the Fatah organization, which became known as the black files. He used what he knew when necessary – which meant frequently – and to great effect. He always tried to reason and turn people who were opposed to his policies, but whenever that failed he would recite their misdeeds and give them their own black file to read: more often than not there were accusations of financial misdeeds, whoring or cowardice. This would turn most of the accused into subservient followers, but Arafat always saw to it that they were offered money or jobs which made them more beholden to him.
His coercive methods were secondary to the public image he was creating for himself. Whatever misgivings some of the Fatah members might have had about his judgement, there was no resisting the allure of his status as the one Fatah leader who was consistently ready to place his life on the line. He continued to infiltrate Israel personally from both Jordan and Lebanon, and only physical impossibility kept him from participating in every raid. When going to Lebanon and Jordan he began to perfect the use of pseudonyms and disguises including those of an Egyptian tourist, a Pakistani businessman, a shepherd, a lost old man and a Dr Mohammed. Wearing disguises appealed to something in his psyche; to this day he recalls some incidents with relish and a broad smile.
The number of raids and their results are subject to considerable contradiction – anywhere from thirty to three hundred raids and ten to two thousand Israeli dead and wounded. Some writers and analysts conclude that the infiltration campaign had no impact,30 but this is to judge them by the narrow yardstick of what they achieved militarily. It was the communiqués of Al Assifa which reported, exaggerated and occasionally invented individual raids, and which, accurate or not, served Arafat’s purpose. He knew he was not capable of defeating Israel,31 but he was using the raids for something else.
In conducting an armed struggle, regardless of its pinprick nature, Arafat was keeping alive the idea of a Palestinian armed resistance and the hopes of the Palestinian people. This placed him and Fatah ahead of all other Palestinian groups including the PLO. In using Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza and eventually friendly Syria as a base from which to infiltrate Israel he was exposing these countries’ positions of weakness. The Lebanese authorities arrested him while he was preparing for a raid late in 1966, but released him without realizing his identity. The Jordanians were on the lookout for him, but never managed to capture him. Egypt was embarrassed when his Gaza followers attacked the Kosovom settlement.32 On a number of occasions, the Syrians physically intercepted Fatah members when they tried to cross directly into Israel. But the Arab countries’ angry reaction did not compare with the panic shown by the Israelis, who increased their border patrols and responded with military threats.
Meanwhile, the popular results of his efforts were forcing the rest of the Palestinian movements into responding. Shukeiri never tired of sending emissaries to Fatah to ask them to join him, and when this failed he tried to turn the PLA into a guerrilla organization. George Habbash, after repeatedly advising against these raids because they were based on an analogy with Algeria which he regarded as unsound,33 followed the unsuccessful feelers he put out to cooperate with Fatah by opting to initiate armed resistance. Even people committed to action and with a solid record of having never wavered from that stance, like the Syrian-backed Ahmad Jibril, began trying to forge an alliance with Fatah. None of this worked. Unlike some of his colleagues, Arafat persisted in attacking Shukeiri and saw him as his immediate target instead of Arab leaders. He turned down cooperation with other Palestinian groups because he knew he could not control them. More importantly, he knew that the eventual outcome of the Fatah campaign would be to drag the Arab countries and Israel into war.34 This frightening manifestation of a Samson complex, the willingness to bring the house down on everyone, was very much Arafat’s personal work. Others within the Fatah group – and once again Khalid Al Hassan was in the lead – cautioned against the organization acting irresponsibly. But Arafat would not budge. It was not cynicism; Arafat genuinely believed the Arabs would win a war.
While it is impossible to judge accurately, the infiltration campaign by itself probably would not have led to war. Other important factors contributed to the Arab march towards disaster. Jordan and Saudi Arabia, once again quarrelling with Nasser, had unleashed a propaganda campaign which accused him of cowardice and hiding behind the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) which was still positioned between him and Israel as a result of the Suez War of 1956. Syria, ever ready to fight to the last Egyptian soldier, was anxious to battle Israel and it too criticized Nasser harshly. In that explosive environment, the raids acted like a trigger.
The Israelis, who could never measure their responses to any Arab provocations, retaliated against Jordan and then attacked a Syrian water diversion scheme in early 1966. Their massive campaign got out of hand on 13 November that year, when they carried out a major raid against the West Bank village of Samu’, killing more than 60 people and razing 125 homes. The pressure on King Hussein to hit back was intense, but he transferred the blame to Nasser and increased his accusations of cowardice. Arafat thought things were going his way and extended his activities.
From early 1966 until May that year, and against a background of persistent skirmishes on the Jordanian and Syrian borders, the Israelis issued repeated threats against Syria. Though he still refused to take them seriously, Nasser changed his mind when the USSR, on 13 May, advised him of an impending Israeli attack on Syria.35 On 16 May Nasser, faced with the prospect of losing his leadership of the Arabs, finally acted. He demanded the removal of UNEF and sent the Egyptian army into the Sinai peninsula, the former buffer zone against Israel. When the Jordanian and Saudi taunts continued, he had no option but to close the Straits of Tiran to prevent Israeli shipping entering the Red Sea. Whatever hope remained of avoiding a war disappeared. Even King Hussein recognized this and rushed to Cairo to sign a defence pact which placed his army, along with those of erstwhile enemies Egypt and Syria, under the command of Nasser. All diplomatic efforts to defuse the situation failed. Israel hit on 5 June 1967.