In hindsight, everything about the October War of 1973 was surprising. Above all, it was not inevitable; it happened because of Kissinger’s ambitions as expressed in his attempts to undermine Secretary of State William Rogers,1 Israeli lack of interest in peace efforts2 and total refusal to accept UN resolutions and mediation attempts, and Sadat’s ability to obtain Arab backing and create a rare instance of Arab unity and consensus. The war amounted to an act of despair on the part of its chief planner, President Sadat. Thwarted in all his efforts to secure a peaceful settlement, his patience running out, he now sought and achieved Arab backing to start a war he did not want. His junior partner in the effort, President Hafez Assad of Syria, was more committed to military action than Sadat, but it was the Egyptian leader who exposed the Israeli and American positions. This convinced the moderate pro – West Saudis and their Gulf allies. Naturally, he could count on the support of the anti-West Iraqis, Libyans and Algerians. Jordan reluctantly followed the rest.
Preparations for the war took place at a time when Arafat too was trying his utmost to establish a dialogue with the United States. Between August and October 1973 he had sent four messages to that effect to Kissinger.3 The latter rebuffed him; Kissinger did no more than arrange a meeting in Morocco between the American troubleshooter Vernon Walters and Arafat’s associate Khalid Al Hassan, which resulted in a warning to the PLO to refrain from any terrorism against US interests. Kissinger never accepted the PLO as a partner in any moves to achieve peace. Meanwhile the USSR, aware that Arafat was ‘playing’ the Americans, provided him with only light arms and lukewarm diplomatic support.
Right at the beginning of October PLO leaders Abu Iyad and Farouk Qaddoumi, in Cairo to attend a non-aligned nations conference, were told by Sadat himself of the plans to start the war.4 But Arafat the manipulator, though friendly with the Egyptian President, saw a conspiracy behind everything and was preoccupied with events close to home in Beirut. He did not believe Sadat’s message, and other PLO leaders were no less sceptical. They only woke up to the truth when Sadat summoned Abu Iyad and Qaddoumi back to Cairo on the 4th and confirmed his original statement. At this point, it was too late for Arafat to join the fighting in a meaningful way; on his instructions the Palestinian fighting forces were already deployed holding defensive positions against repeated Israeli reprisals and increasing pressure from the Lebanese army and Christian forces.
On 6 October 1973, the Egyptian and Syrian armies launched simultaneous surprise attacks across the Suez Canal and along the Golan Heights. They were successful, achieved deep penetration of Israeli lines on both fronts and held the initial Israeli counterattacks in check for four days. The October War – to the Israelis the Yom Kippur War because it fell on the Jewish holiday – was one of the bloodiest clashes of armour in history. It cost the Israelis 2800 dead, 109 aircraft and 840 tanks.5 Although Arab losses were greater and the tide of battle eventually turned against them, leaving the Israelis on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal and nearer Damascus than before the war, it was a considerable Arab achievement which produced shock waves in Israel. As with the Karameh operation, the prohibitive scale of the Israeli losses would have produced a different result from that of previous wars if it had gone on longer than its eighteen days.
While the fighting raged, on 16 October Sadat announced that his war aims were limited to achieving an Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied during the 1967 War. The Israelis treated his statement with ridicule and refused to discuss it. On the 17th the Arab oil-producing countries backed Sadat’s position, curtailed their production by 5 per cent and announced that they were considering further cutbacks until all the territories occupied in the 1967 War were restored to the Arabs. Three days later the United Arab Emirates decreased oil production by 10 per cent and forced the other Arab producers to follow suit.
These economic measures followed military moves by those Arab states capable of providing support: the Iraqis despatched an armoured expeditionary force of twenty thousand men to Syria, while Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco also sent reinforcements though in smaller numbers. The Egyptians were backed up by Algerian and Kuwaiti fighting units. The Palestine Liberation Army, operating under the command of host countries rather than Arafat, fought bravely on both fronts – though, despite the usual inflated claims, their activities were limited to small skirmishes and minor raids.
The Arab world had risen from the ashes. Arafat surmised this well before others did, and sent Kissinger another peace message in the middle of battle, on 10 October.6 There was no response.
For organized Arab armies to engage Israel in conventional warfare and achieve success was the fulfilment of a national dream which Arabs everywhere celebrated. Radio and television stations had new songs written to celebrate the occasion; millions of Arabs wore victory smiles; others recognized each other on the streets of foreign cities and exchanged exuberant brotherly salutes and hugs; and mosques filled with people giving thanks to the Almighty. Sadat, the hitherto underestimated successor to Nasser, was dubbed ‘the hero of the crossing [of the Suez Canal]’.
There was more to the war, however, than military performance and the healing of the Arabs’ damaged psyche. Oil, the most important weapon in the Arab arsenal, was used and the embargo was still in effect when the shooting war ended. The damage being done to Western economies was another cause for celebration, because the Arabs on the street and at official level believed that this would prompt the West to pressure Israel into accepting a just solution. The USA and USSR supported Israel and the Arabs respectively, and resupplied them with huge quantities of weapons during the fighting. Towards the end of the war, when the military situation tilted in favour of Israel, the USSR threatened direct intervention; both superpowers put their forces on alert and came close to a full-fledged military confrontation. The importance of the Middle East and the inherent dangers of the Arab–Israeli conflict were elevated from the level of intellectual discussion to stark reality. The Middle East would never be the same again.
On the surface, the war was an all-Arab show which undermined Arafat’s policy of exclusive reliance on the Palestinians and demonstrated the Arab nature of the conflict with Israel. None the less, the war was beneficial for the PLO and ensured Arafat’s survival as leader. Because resistance movements feed on momentum and there had been no progress, an inter-PLO leadership crisis had been brewing: there was a call for an effective unified command and curtailment of Arafat’s personal powers. His problems with the Lebanese Christians and the sporadic fighting along the Lebanese–Israeli border had weakened him. Suddenly the war marginalized these issues and the bigger picture which emerged looked more promising. In addition to dealing with the effects of the oil embargo, the USA and USSR wanted to eliminate the source of future confrontations. On 21 December 1973 both countries jointly, under Henry Kissinger (now Secretary of State) and Andrei Gromyko, convened an international conference in Geneva to formalize the truce ordered by the UN and to initiate steps towards peace. Sadat accepted the idea. Syria, angered by Sadat’s response to superpower initiatives, at first boycotted the proceedings. The PLO was not invited.
Sadat went further and used his new status courageously: in January 1974 he agreed to a disengagement between his country and Israel. To him it was a first step towards achieving the aims declared during the fighting without consulting others. He envisaged expanding the Geneva conference to include all parties to the conflict, with the PLO representing the Palestinian people, to achieve a comprehensive peace. Believing that the USA and USSR shared his vision and were willing to support him, he asked for the oil embargo to be lifted.7
Arafat’s reading of the situation was similar to Sadat’s, but the opposition of several Fatah leaders and other guerrilla groups denied him Sadat’s freedom of action. With some success he pointed out the dangers to the PLO of being left out of an international conference. Even with an ambivalent PLO position behind him, he tried to follow openly what he had pursued in secret. Though this exposed him to criticism from many quarters, and most of the Palestinian people were unaccustomed to the idea of a peaceful settlement, he still went for a strategic shift in PLO policy. He wanted an American-brokered peace, and this is what he pursued.
To Arafat, the real danger to the Palestinian position lay in Sadat’s new power to conclude a comprehensive peace agreement with or without Palestinian participation. Overall, Arafat covertly approved Sadat’s promotion of peace and his adoption of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, but the Egyptian President’s new elevated role limited Arafat’s options. The only way Arafat could guarantee a Palestinian stake in any peace initiative was by competing with Sadat. For Arafat, this meant presenting the primary party to the conflict, the Palestinians, as equal advocates of peace. He had finally to stop pretending to follow the armed struggle. Though it meant abandoning consensus politics and the idea of a united PLO, he wasted no time.
According to a former American diplomat stationed in Beirut at the time, ‘The pursuit of peace occupied much of Arafat’s time after the October War.’ An Arab summit conference in Algiers in November 1973 adopted the ideas of the ‘victorious’ Sadat and cancelled the three nos of Khartoum. It accepted the idea of a phased approach against Israel to liberate the Arab land occupied in the 1967 War to pave the way towards a final settlement. To make this palatable to Arafat, the conference, despite Jordan’s objections, named the PLO as sole representative of the Palestinian people. Arafat accepted the bargain.
In fact, Arafat used the resolutions of the conference to justify his past secret negotiations and asked two Palestinian moderates, Issam Sartawi and Said Hamameh, an Arab member of the Knesset, Ahmad Tibi, and others to increase their efforts to promote a peaceful settlement with anyone willing to listen. (Both Sartawi and Hamameh were to pay for this with their lives, in 1983 and 1978 respectively, and the later efforts of the PLO representative to Belgium, Nairn Kader, and other contacts bore no fruit.) Arafat undertook these steps with the cooperation of willing individuals, and without informing the collective leadership. Sadat and a minority of moderates endorsed his position, but his ideas were rejected by other Fatah leaders and militant Palestinian groups. The Israelis were adamant in their refusal to recognize the PLO as a negotiating partner, and Kissinger stuck to his rigid anti-PLO stance. With remarkable skill, and despite the odds against him, Arafat turned to bridging the gulf between his personal position and that of the official PLO.
In June 1974 Arafat convened the twelfth conference of the Palestine National Council in Cairo to obtain approval for the new policy adopted by the Arab states and endorsed by himself. He knew what was needed. To meet the challenge from within the PLO he increased the attention paid to the occupied territories and expanded the executive committee to include four pro-peace members from the West Bank and Gaza. No one could object to according the occupied territories greater importance; it was a stroke of genius which helped him pass his new programme against opposition from Fatah hardliners, radical guerrilla groups and the more militant of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries.
The people of the West Bank in particular were more supportive of a peaceful settlement than diaspora Palestinians, who always clamoured for the right of return to land occupied in 1948. Arafat too realized that reclaiming lands occupied at that time was no longer possible, because the USA, the UN and the rest of the world were not willing to consider it. To augment the appeal to outside powers of what he was doing, Arafat managed to get a consensus for amending the original Palestine National Charter, which repeated the call for ‘total liberation’ sixteen times; he also gained approval for the idea of a phased settlement and the setting up of a ‘national authority’ in any part of Palestine, and a qualified agreement to participate in an international peace conference. His new position had nothing original in it – in the main it was an amalgam of the ideas of Sadat and the DFLP. But his espousal of these ideas followed a clear political line which put principle above expediency, which was unusual for him. It was an extension of his secret commitment to peace, reinforced by a belief that the war had forced the Americans to be even-handed, which would lead to greater efforts towards settlement.8 This was Sadat’s line; Arafat adopted it as an enticement to the USA to overcome continued Israeli refusal to recognize the PLO and used it to convert other Palestinian groups to his new policies. But this misreading of the American ability to accommodate him was a near-fatal error.
Between the end of the October War and the convening of the Palestinian conference, Arafat had continued his attempts to initiate negotiations with America. He added to the efforts of Hamameh and Sartawi and encouraged Salameh to expand his contacts with the CIA. Through Salameh, he offered PLO protection for American citizens and interests in areas where the PLO predominated, mostly Lebanon. The CIA accepted Salameh’s undertakings without reciprocating. In June 1974, prior to the PNC conference in Cairo, Arafat sent a special emissary to meet former CIA chief Richard Helms, then Ambassador in Tehran. It was a one-sided dialogue: Helms listening without responding. Contrary to Arafat’s belief that the Americans would accept his new direction, Kissinger still believed that the PLO was ‘a largely terrorist group’. Meanwhile Israel was growing alarmed by Arafat’s peace policies and the widening support for, and diplomatic recognition of, the PLO within the third world and Europe. As a result it increased its contacts with Jordan, including setting up a meeting between Hussein and the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin,9 to hinder the PLO’s assumption of the role of Palestinian negotiator. But the attitudes of America and Israel did not discourage Arafat, who believed that persistence would overcome the objections of both countries and marginalize Hussein.
Arafat’s overtures to the USA and his seeming abandonment of the idea of armed struggle severely splintered the PLO. Habbash’s uneasy relationship with him ended when the PFLP froze its membership of the PLO and created what came to be known as the Rejection Front. Backed by Iraq, Libya, Algeria and South Yemen, the PFLP was joined by the PFLP–General Command (PFLP–GC), the Arab Liberation Front and civilian Palestinian groups which included the General Union of Palestinian Writers and the General Union of Palestinian Students.
Arafat’s opponents followed their verbal protests against his new policies with terrorist activity aimed at undermining them. In April 1974 the PFLP–GC carried out a raid on the Israeli town of Khiryat Shomonah which resulted in the killing of eighteen Israelis. This was followed by another incident at Ma’alot which left sixteen Israelis dead and sixty-eight wounded, mostly schoolgirls. More attacks and hijackings ensued, which Israel pointed to as an excuse for refusing to deal with the PLO and Arafat. All he could do to counter this strange convergence of interest between Arab and Palestinian militants and Israel was to ask his many intermediaries to emphasize his personal position and to point out that the PLO was an umbrella organization rather than a single cohesive entity. Essentially what he was trying to put across was that he and the PLO proper were not involved in terrorist attacks.
It was Syria which caused him the most trouble, not only because of its major role in the October War but also because of its proximity to Israel, the importance of its support for guerrilla groups and its close historical association with Palestine. And Syria took a middle position. Though it leaned towards negotiations, the fact that Sadat had reached a disengagement agreement with Israel without deferring to his erstwhile partner, the rest of the Arabs or the Palestinians dictated caution. Like Arafat, the Syrians were concerned that Sadat’s inflated self-image would again lead him to act alone. For a while, Egypt, Syria and Arafat watched each other and ignored Israel.
Kissinger’s policy of breaking the Arab consensus which had existed during the 1973 War by dealing with each country separately and offering each enticements peculiar to its conditions was succeeding. The oil-producing countries had lifted the embargo in March 1974 without achieving this move’s overall aim of an Israeli withdrawal, even a partial one. The Arab states were divided between open and secret support of Sadat and the Rejection Front. And structurally the PLO no longer represented a broad cross-section of the Palestinians. Even the Palestinians in the occupied territories watched things with dismay. Although the proposals for the establishment of a national authority that would include them increased their importance, and they had supported the indigenous pro-PLO Palestine National Front in its efforts to achieve this, the divisions resulting from Arafat’s policies confused them and despair had replaced their post-war sense of elation.
In fact, it was Arafat who was partly responsible for the divisions in Arab ranks. Without his blind support for Sadat, the oil embargo would not have been lifted since the Gulf states would have feared a backlash. He acquiesced with the decisions of the Arab summit conference because they confirmed his pre-eminence in the Arab arena and afforded him a way out of his immediate predicament, though without Israeli or US reciprocation for his moderate stand. Forsaking consensus, for the first time in PLO policy he pushed through changes without fear of the consequences of division within Palestinian ranks. His wish to compete with Sadat and follow America was more important to him than anything else; it offended those who were quarrelling with the USA over Palestine and ended the unity among the Arabs. Like Sadat, he believed that America held ‘95 per cent of the cards’ and America wanted a peace conference. His intermediate aim, therefore, was to participate in the Geneva conference. More than all the personal and political signs which Arafat had exhibited from his early days in Cairo, this confirmed him as a traditional nationalist leader, willing to work with the USA, rather than a revolutionary one opposed to its policies.
On 26 October 1974 another Arab summit in Rabat, Morocco, expanded the decisions of the November 1973 meeting in Algeria and gave Arafat what he wanted without any qualifications. The Rabat summit over-rode Jordanian objections and excluded that country by accepting the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, declaring that it should head ‘an independent national authority on any part of Palestine land that is liberated’. An ecstatic Arafat declared: ‘This summit conference has been like a wedding feast for the Palestinians.’ Hussein bowed to the majority vote; but he still refused to revoke the 1950 union agreement between his country and the West Bank and he continued to fund groups and individuals opposed to Arafat. Kissinger, now committed to step-by-step negotiations between Israel and Egypt and Jordan, saw in the Rabat decision a step backwards and a danger to Sadat’s efforts.
Rabat was followed by an invitation to Arafat, sponsored by most members of the United Nations (only the USA and Israel dissented), to address their General Assembly on 22 November. This was a triumph for his diplomacy. The PLO’s acceptance by the Arab world and the United Nations bestowed on Arafat a stature which pleased most Palestinians and gave them hope. His famous gun-and-olive-branch speech to the United Nations, in which he repeated three times, ‘Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand’ – essentially an offer to Israel to choose between peace or war – marked one of the greatest successes in history of a national movement fighting for independence. It is remembered by Palestinians the way Americans remember the landing on the moon. For Arafat, the PLO and those who believed in the ability of the Palestinians to produce results for themselves it was a milestone, a point of no return in terms of following a peaceful option.
Although Arab and international acceptance were triumphs for Arafat and his supporters, they were less so for the Palestinian people as a whole. The price paid was the division in Arab and Palestinian ranks. The PFLP and Iraq, among others, immediately rejected Arafat’s total reliance on diplomacy, and he needed to produce more concrete results than a mere propaganda success to make his stand palatable to the majority of his own people. With or without knowing it, Arafat was following in the footsteps of most Arab leaders in the twentieth century – the ones who deferred to foreign powers and valued pleasing them above the views of their own constituents. What would follow depended on the character and abilities of Arafat. He had failed to turn the opportunity of Karameh into a greater success – this time, would he manage to build on his diplomatic victories in the Arab League and the UN and do better?
Stories about Arafat dating even from this period tell us a great deal about his schizoid personality – the massive divide between the triumphant leader at Rabat and the UN and the crude street Arab. The habits and cultural legacies which characterize the man have always confounded people and inhibited him from following a consistent policy.
A few months before the Rabat and UN meetings President Tito of Yugoslavia despatched a film crew to record a Palestinian raid into Israel. Tito, a staunch supporter of the Palestinians, wanted to show a ‘model raid’ on Yugoslav television, perhaps to justify the considerable help he was giving the PLO. Arafat received the television crew in Damascus and promised to lead a raid himself. He instructed the Yugoslavs to wait for him at a certain spot near the Lebanese–Israeli border. They did so for two days, but returned to Damascus when he did not appear.
When the Yugoslav director complained about the wasted time, Arafat offered to organize a mock raid immediately. He instructed the crew to begin filming him sitting behind a desk in his headquarters. Cameras rolling, he shouted some orders and various young men ran in and saluted. He then indicated certain areas on a huge map of Palestine, after which the young men saluted again and departed. When he had finished, the director could not help himself. ‘You’re a good actor, Chairman Arafat.’ Arafat’s retort was to the point: ‘I used to be, you know.’
In another incident, just before the summit conference at Rabat, the Moroccan security forces uncovered a Palestinian plot to assassinate several moderate Arab leaders and arrested two of the hit-men.10 The plot’s aim was to eliminate those Arab heads of state opposed to the acceptance of the PLO as the sole legitimate voice of the Palestinians. But was the plot genuine or was it a hoax intended to frighten these leaders? The Lebanese journalist Ali Ballout, who was in Rabat at the time, claims it was nothing more than an effective plot that never was. And three PLO leaders who were interviewed off the record responded to my enquiries by smiling and refusing to discuss it. In fact, according to a Lebanese journalist close to the Black September leader and Arafat associate Abu Iyad, the plot was a mixture of fact and fiction. A PLO hit squad had been despatched to Rabat, but the PLO itself tipped off the police and revealed its presence. Arafat’s reaction was, ‘What plot, against my own brothers?’ However, the mere thought of assassins sent the right message to the Arab gathering and helped guarantee the desired result.
At the UN, a similar farce took place. Having rehearsed his speech which contained the general offer of peace and gave Israel a choice between the gun and the olive branch, Arafat wanted to deliver it carrying his gun. It took a great effort to talk him into leaving it behind and settling for an empty holster.11 The man who was forcing Palestinian identity on the world genuinely failed to understand why it was unacceptable to speak in the UN General Assembly carrying a sidearm.
Arafat’s antics and his mastery of the theatrical continued on his return from New York to Beirut. When leaders of guerrilla groups opposed to his policies asked for a meeting to demand reciprocity for PLO concessions, he arranged for it to be held in a building controlled by Fatah fighters. He then asked several of his ‘boys’ to hide on the balcony of the room where the meeting was taking place. When the discussions became heated, Arafat gave a prearranged signal and his men fired volleys into the sky. Thinking the building was under attack by Lebanese forces or Israeli raiders, Arafat’s opponents hit the deck. A smiling Arafat reclined in his chair and lamented that he was ‘being held to account by nothing more than a bunch of cowards’.
By 1975 there was no movement on the diplomatic front. The USA and Israel considered Arafat’s diplomatic success a setback to their efforts to reach a settlement based on Jordanian representation of the Palestinians (the Jordanian Option) and persisted in their refusal to negotiate with the PLO. Arafat was back in Beirut to confront the problems that had been temporarily overshadowed by the October War. He was faced with conceding yet more to satisfy America and Israel – what Sadat was urging him to do without any guarantee of success – or with trying to mend the broken fence behind him. It was a choice he would never have to make. The need to resolve the situation in Lebanon became more pressing than all other issues.
Like the conditions which had prevailed in Jordan before the Black September civil war, the PLO’s presence in Lebanon needed urgent resolution. Arafat’s Lebanese opponents, and even radical Palestinian groups, realized that America’s and Israel’s continued refusal to deal with him left him vulnerable. The unsoundness of what he had created in Lebanon began to undermine him. Arafat’s inability to establish a solid base behind him – something whose significance he never understood – diverted his energies to mending fences rather than moving forward diplomatically. This new civil war, towards which his followers’ misbehaviour contributed measurably, lasted longer and cost much more than the Jordanian debacle.
Beirut and Yasser Arafat suited each other. Like Arafat, the city had an international veneer and a tribal core. The only difference between them was his inability to match its glitter. Arafat’s belief in the power of money and in using patronage to achieve his aims were elements intrinsic to Beirut. Oil money made Beirut what it was, a cosmopolitan fleshpot which substituted modernity for substance, and Arafat used oil money to create noise instead of organizing. Considerable sums donated to the PLO by the oil-producing countries, and increased after the 1973 War, were spent on creating a huge, inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy. He divided the Fatah forces into several unwieldy groups to satisfy the number of people who wanted to be commanders. He never managed to balance his successful image-building with any strenuous efforts to correct the weaknesses inherent in the make-up of his Palestinian constituency. (Instead of having two or three efficient spokesmen, he had twenty useless ones.) Yet, despite the similarities in Arafat’s thinking and the atmosphere in Beirut, there was no possibility of Arafat succeeding there. Arafat and the PLO were always an alien presence, and there was nothing he could do to overcome it.
The Palestinians had been successful in Beirut even before the PLO arrived there after the 1970 defeat in Jordan. Thousands, mostly Christians, had assumed Lebanese citizenship and had become integrated in the growing service economy of the city. Many more remained Palestinian, but used the city as a centre of trade and banking for the rest of the Arab Middle East. There were Palestinian doctors, lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs. The largest construction company in the country, CCC, was Palestinian-owned, as was INTRA, Lebanon’s biggest bank until its collapse in 1965. Beirut was a magnet for Palestinian talent because it was free and thriving and because the Palestinians had a natural advantage. Their second language was English, rather than French as spoken by the Lebanese, and as a result they stole a march on their hosts in dealing with multinational corporations. There were also three hundred thousand less educated and able Palestinians who remained in refugee camps and who provided Arafat with soldiers.
Arafat, the man who never believed in ideology or showed any interest in social issues, belonged to both camps. He maintained good relations with businessmen such as Hassib Sabbagh, Kamel and Muhammed Abdel Rahman, Said Khoury and Badr Al Fahoum, and kept in constant touch with others outside Lebanon such as Abdel Hamid Shoman in Jordan and Abu Abbas in Qatar. He continued to receive financial help from them while building a powerbase among the destitute of the refugee camps whom he enlisted as the backbone of his regular forces and militias. By 1975 the fighting forces reporting directly to Arafat numbered more than fifteen thousand, with many more in paramilitary formations. But there was considerably more to this presence than the sheer numbers of his fighters and the fact that he paid them more than other guerrilla groups paid, expanded their training and acquired heavier weapons including tanks and an anti-aircraft defence system. Arafat was in effect creating the structure of a government-in-exile beholden and accountable only to itself.
Organizations and businesses sprang up to meet specific needs. SAMED (originally the Palestinians Martyrs’ Works Society) became one of the leading holding companies in Lebanon. Headed by banker Ahmad Krei’, years later the chief negotiator of the Oslo Agreement, it ran thirty-six separate companies. Its subsidiaries manufactured shoes, blankets, furniture, baby food and other products, and created the channels to distribute and sell them. On the non-commercial side were the Palestinian Red Crescent aid organization, unions of Palestinian teachers, doctors and workers, and scholarship committees and others entrusted with vocational and agricultural training. Various women’s groups complemented this work.
These organizations presided over transactions involving billions of dollars, but there was no official budget and some substantial amounts were never recorded except in a small notebook which Arafat kept in his breast pocket. SAMED’s reach extended to Palestinians throughout the Arab world and established business contacts in African and other third world countries. Overall, efforts by SAMED and the PLO to build a Palestinian infrastructure which dealt with the needs of Palestinian everywhere made for a great success story. The various associations and unions operated throughout the Middle East, including, importantly, in the occupied territories. Furthermore, following the political moves of the PNC conference in June 1974 in Cairo, the PLO paid the occupied territories special attention and spent money expanding its following there and promoting an organizations structure.
The dictatorial inclinations that always showed through in Arafat’s military and propaganda efforts led him to take personal control of everything done by SAMED and other Palestinian organizations. Even the awarding of a scholarship required his personal approval. Leaders of refugee camps, including many who had no official function, were bribed by him to support Fatah instead of other Palestinian groups, and to sing his praises. He personally selected cadets who were despatched to the USSR and other countries for military training. The Palestinian news agency Wafa, until then a minor entity, came under his direct control, as did all the publications of the PLO. Old-fashioned cronyism flourished; Arafat favoured those who had the knack of pleasing the chief, in this case a talent for introducing him to things he did not know and could not judge. Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, his original partners, on occasions protested against his unwillingness to delegate and argued with him heatedly. Neither was up to challenging him, however, and the two of them, by all accounts men of honour and integrity, put the interests of the PLO ahead of other considerations. They accepted his primacy because ‘the PLO had become more than a state-within-a-state, it was a state in exile’12 and they did not want to destroy it.
In Beirut, Arafat felt at home and vindicated. Not only was money the decider of all things, but as the centre of Middle East journalism the Lebanese capital afforded him a chance to practise his publicity skills in a more extensive way than Amman, Damascus or Kuwait had ever done. Even his human touches, like being photographed with refugee children, consoling weeping women in bombed refugee camps and inspecting the devastation caused by Israeli air raids, stopped being totally genuine and turned into a media event. More importantly, Beirut provided him with a new pool of talent willing to report directly to him without any consideration of the overall apparatus of the PLO. CIA contact Ali Hassan Salameh, to Arafat ‘Ibni’, or ‘my son’, was a leading representative of this breed of Palestinian Beirutis, as was Atallah Atallah, an utterly corrupt former Jordanian army officer who adopted the ways of the city and endeared himself to the ‘Old Man’, who came to depend on him more than on those with real knowledge of the refugee camps and their problems. Even PLO commanders outside the city behaved in a Beiruti manner: Major Muin, who controlled the Lebanese town of Nabatiya, collected taxes for personal use without being reprimanded.
The Beirutis, demanding chauffeur – driven limousines and bodyguards, fooled the unworldly Arafat with their shallow sophistication. Because he considered them his link with the outside world, the non-drinking, non-smoking Arafat provided them with all the ready cash they needed to maintain a life style which, though alien to him personally, he felt was helpful to the cause. He studiously overlooked their damaging and embarrassing peripheral activities. For example, the trucks used to carry arms and ammunitions to his troops in Lebanon brought back to Damascus contraband cigarettes which, along with other duty-free goods, were sold for considerable profit which the Beirutis pocketed. Within Beirut itself many of them formed partnerships with the city’s criminal elements and even sold surplus arms to Arafat’s Christian enemies.
Whatever the shortcomings of the old Fatah group, it is unlikely that any of them would have been as accommodating to Arafat as the Beirutis, notorious for their laziness, corruption and lack of commitment. Their lives in the Paris of the East had so removed them from the mainstream of Palestinian thinking that some of them had no appreciation of the conditions in the refugee camps – indeed, most had never even visited one. Theirs was official corruption: the money they pocketed was approved by Arafat as a means of using them, controlling them and weakening the old guard who still clung to the idea of collective leadership. In comparison, members of the original Fatah group were a bunch of innocents. While the Beirutis responded to outside influences, the old guard represented the native Middle East. They differed even in their manner of dress: unlike the conservative Abu Jihad, Abu Iyad, Qaddoumi and the rest, the Palestinian Beirutis dressed in the smart but casual fashions of French and Italian seaside resorts.
Arafat’s adoption of the Beirutis paralleled his new political direction, which called for cooperation with the West. He moved into a world new to him and it affected him personally. He began to wear built-up shoes to give himself added height, had his military uniforms properly tailored and took to carrying his slush money in a briefcase during his now non-stop travels. Naturally he distributed pictures of himself sleeping in planes to show how industrious he was – a totally unnecessary confirmation of his legendary commitment to hard work.
In fact, his constant self-promotion and glibness with journalists became embarrassing. He constantly referred to the number of honours given him by Islamic and third world organizations and prefaced his statements to journalists with ‘Because you are a friend’ or ‘I tell you frankly.’ Suddenly, out of nowhere, he developed an interest in women. For the first time he established romantic relationships, beginning with the widow Nada Yashrouti, a wealthy, pretty Palestinian who was to act as a go-between with the Lebanese and who was assassinated by an unknown gunman in 1973. Her death shocked him, but, to his credit, he obeyed the rules of gentlemanly behaviour and never discussed it. Later he had an affair with the Syrian Najla Yassin, and this too ended without publicity. There were more liaisons, too. Though little is known about them, they put an end to rumours of homosexuality which the Israeli Mossad and other intelligence services had foolishly spread and tried to prove though without success. Nor were those services able to prove any misuse of funds for personal reasons; though he believed in using money to corrupt others, his eighteen-hour day and personal inclinations precluded indulgences. In fact, there is no record of him ever buying the smallest present for any of his girlfriends, and he never frequented restaurants.
The adoption of Beirut was one-sided. Arafat and the PLO had remained outsiders in a country whose structure was delicately balanced among its seventeen politically recognized religious sects. Overall, Lebanon was half Christian and half Muslim, and the Muslims were demanding a change in the arrangement known as the National Pact which perpetuated their secondary status. The Christians, who opposed any change in a structure which ensured them the top political and military positions, feared that the Palestinian presence might tilt the balance of power in favour of their Muslim countrymen. In the 1960s the Christians began to expect the worst and started arming and training militias. The leaders of the Christian forces, Beshir Gemayel (the Phalange), Dany Chamoun (the Tigers) and Chebril Kassis (Order of Monks), among others, were determined to eliminate the Palestinian presence. The Phalange controlled more than twenty-five thousand armed men and their military hardware included recoil-less guns, some old tanks and 155mm artillery pieces.
The argument for and against the Palestinian presence in Lebanon in the early 1970s found the country fragmenting along religious lines, with the Christian-dominated government and groups of Christian militias opposing the PLO and most Muslims and leftists providing it with intermittent support. Because the Muslims were clamouring for an end to Christian control of all aspects of political and commercial life, the Muslim–PLO alliance, which naturally supported Muslim demands, amounted to flagrant interference in the country’s internal affairs. This support was undisguised. The PLO forces began training the Shias and other groups who might help them fend off the Christians in the future. The failure of the attacks against Israel13 and increased Lebanese demands to curb the Palestinian presence meant that one of two things was required to ease or eliminate the growing tension between the two sides. The PLO had to halt its activities against Israel and curb its followers, or the initiative towards peace had to succeed. Neither happened.
To Arafat, Lebanon was the last refuge. Since the Syrians were controlling Palestinian guerrilla activity in their country and the PLO had been ejected from Jordan, Lebanon was the only country from which he could continue whatever diminished military activity he was conducting against Israel. He refused to consider any changes in the Cairo Agreement and others which allowed him freedom of action within Lebanon, regardless of the heavy toll the Israeli retaliations were exacting and which was turning more and more Lebanese against the PLO.
The behaviour of the Palestinians made matters worse. By 1975 Beshir Gemayel, the leader of the largest Lebanese militia, the Christian Phalange, had established solid contacts with the CIA and Israel and was determined to eradicate the Palestinian presence in his country.14 To counter this, as with Jordan, Arafat accepted interim agreements, failed to implement them and did nothing to contain the situation. In Lebanon, too, there was total lack of appreciation of local conditions and a belief that the Arab countries would not allow the PLO’s presence to be endangered. This has always been one of Arafat’s blind spots; he feels the need to act independently but believes the rest of the Arabs will protect him from the consequences of independent behaviour.
This complex situation was behind Arafat’s disinclination to curb the behaviour of the PLO fighters within Lebanon – a combination of arrogance and thuggery – and explains why it was worse than in Jordan. The instinctive leader had not learned the lesson of the Black September Civil War. Arafat’s Lebanese realm was called the Fakhani Republic, after the district of Beirut where he had set up his headquarters. Within that area of Beirut, the refugee camps and long strips of southern Lebanon, his authority was supreme and the Lebanese government exercised little if any control. It was a flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty, and the way his followers conducted their daily lives exacerbated the situation. They set up road blocks, took over buildings, operated extortion rackets, protected criminals fleeing from Lebanese justice, requisitioned cars, drove out local residents, opened unlicensed shops, bars and nightclubs, and issued their own passes and permits. In short, they behaved like urban gangsters or armed Mexican banditos, but despite repeated pleas by his old guard Arafat did nothing to stop these. It was the consequent loss of control by the Lebanese government which underlined the divisions within the country and impelled anti and pro-PLO groups to create more militias.
There were seventy different armies in Lebanon by 1975, the year the civil war started. The murder in February of the pro-Palestinian politician Ma’arouf Sa’ad by anti-Palestinian followers of the Christian leader and former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun provided the initial spark. A month later, on 13 March, Christian Phalangist gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Palestinian trainees, murdered twenty-six of them and dashed all hopes of containing the situation. Lebanon was aflame.
To his credit, Arafat was reluctant to use force.15 But there was little he could do to appease the Christians beyond sending emissaries and appealing to the Arab countries to intervene to restore calm. Many in Fatah and the PLO were eager for revenge; other Palestinian groups, the DFLP in particular, had already conducted hit-and-run campaigns against the Lebanese army. The Christian forces decided the time had come to finish off the Palestinians. The pro-Palestinian Lebanese militias wanted the Christians reduced to size and President Suleiman Franjieh, a corrupt warlord with a criminal record, was too discredited and too Christian to hold things together. In fact Franjieh, who was openly in favour of ejecting the PLO from Lebanon, provided assistance to Christian groups and had formed his own militia. There were no responses from the rest of the Arabs to Arafat’s appeals; most of them had grown tired of the Palestinian game of becoming Arab when it was convenient.
The fighting took the form of senseless individual acts of violence. Christians dragged Palestinians out of cars, determined their identity by their pronunciation of certain words (tomatoes are bandoura to Palestinians and banadoura to the Lebanese) and murdered them in cold blood. Palestinians and their allies killed people for wearing Maronite Christian crosses. Women on both sides were raped, and mixed neighbourhoods suffered attempts by both sides to cleanse them of their opponents. In the most international part of Beirut, the district which contained some of the most elegant hotels in the world, hand-to-hand fighting took place. Beirut became uninhabitable and foreign residents, many of whom had originally believed that the situation was containable, left en masse.
Despite some efforts to defuse the situation which resulted in a number of truces which neither side observed, the situation soon escalated. On 15 May the Christian Tigers militia attacked one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps in the country, Tel Za’atar. Attacks on other refugee camps followed and resulted in hundreds of casualties. By December, after a joint effort by Christian militias led to the occupation and razing of the Dbaye and Karantina refugee camps, Arafat decided he would have to abandon all restraint. The atrocities continued. On 6 December, which became known as Black Tuesday, the Lebanese Christians went on a killing orgy throughout Beirut which left over three hundred dead, mostly innocent victims who just happened to be there.16 On 4 January 1976, the Christians laid siege to Tel Za’atar with the help of the army and refused several attempts by the International Red Cross and other organizations to evacuate the dead and wounded or move the residents of the camp altogether. This added to Arafat’s determination to survive through fighting. His hitherto lukewarm association with the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), headed by the politician Kamal Jumblatt, became a firm military and political alliance. He decided to go for a military victory.
Finally, on 20 January, an opportunity for retaliation presented itself. A combined Palestinian–Lebanese National Movement force attacked the Christian stronghold of Damour south of Beirut and occupied it. The victors looted, raped and murdered hundreds of innocent people and ex-President Camille Chamoun, a staunch opponent of the Palestinian presence in his country and a resident of Damour, had to be rescued by helicopter. Whatever the previous Christian atrocities – of which there were many, mostly against civilians – the behaviour of Palestinian fighters in Damour earned them dishonour. Arafat, forever speaking of ‘an hour of destiny’, did nothing to control his fighters. In fact he had never tried to control them, even when they looted the Banco di Roma and the British Bank of the Middle East during the fighting for the centre of Beirut. He avoided confrontation for fear of losing their loyalty.
By March the Lebanese army had begun to disintegrate. A splinter group headed by Colonel Ahmad Khatib defected and renamed itself the Lebanese Arab Army. At that point it became impossible for the central government to reimpose its authority. A few weeks later, General Aziz Ahdab called for the resignation of President Suleiman Franjieh and declared himself military governor of the country. Both moves had the backing of Arafat and the LNM. But Ahdab was unsuccessful and, though Franjieh remained as a nominal president, the militias of both sides took over Lebanon. According to Rashedah Mahran, 82 per cent of the country came under PLO and LNM control.17 In purely military terms, victory was within reach.
More was needed to achieve victory in Lebanon than what was happening on the ground. The fate of the country depended as much on what outside powers were doing as on the strength of the dozens of bloodthirsty guerrilla groups. The CIA and Israel were providing the Lebanese Christians with financial support, arms and training.18 King Hussein, still reeling from the decisions of the Rabat Conference and hoping to undo them, was encouraging Christian–Israeli cooperation19 against the Palestinians and helping the Christians directly. Syria, which had provided the PLO with support during the very early period of the civil war, was becoming uneasy about the ramifications of the conflict on its own security. The oil-producing countries were showing concern over links between radical Palestinians with Communist countries and international terror groups. They supported the Christians against the Palestinians and their fellow Muslims. And Sadat, having signed the second stage of his disengagement agreement with Israel, Sinai II, in September 1975, welcomed the pressure on the Palestinians. He hoped it would force them to follow his lead and concede more in order to reinvigorate his efforts towards peace. It is true that the countries which were inclined to help Arafat – Libya, Iraq, Algeria, South Yemen and some socialist states – were in no position to do so, but it was his inability to see beyond his immediate surroundings which mattered most. He never knew what he would do with Lebanon in the event of success, but his tribal feelings still drove him towards seeking a military victory.
Syria was the country most affected by the events in its neighbour. An unopposed PLO–LNM victory would radicalize Lebanon and threaten Syria’s ability to act independently. Syrian leaders watched the increasing cooperation between Israel and the Lebanese Christian militias with dismay: they wanted to maintain the status quo in Lebanon and feared being dragged into a war with Israel.20 They had to act. Time and again the Syrians appealed to Arafat to contain the situation and there were many meetings between him and President Assad. Because he needed the support of the Lebanese National Movement, which guaranteed his continued presence in the country, Arafat ignored Assad and backed the Muslim forces bent on total victory.
In June ten thousand Syrian soldiers entered Lebanon. Arafat cried foul and made another appeal to the Arab states, but they still showed no inclination to be involved. Black June joined Black September; he had miscalculated again. Not only were the Syrians willing to fight him and kill Palestinians to maintain the existing balance of power in Lebanon and beyond, but they would do so with US approval which guaranteed that Israel would not oppose them.21 They also had implicit Arab support. And to Arafat’s surprise, the Christian forces greeted the Syrians with open arms.
The survival of Arafat and the PLO in Lebanon became a matter of serious speculation. The besieged Tel Za’atar camp fell to Christian forces in August after several half-hearted or militarily unsound attempts to relieve its defenders and save its inhabitants. The Christians conducted a festival of ceremonial killings which lasted several days, surpassed Damour and produced between two and three thousand victims. Arafat and his military commanders, Abu Jihad in particular, shouldered some of the blame for not succeeding in organizing a rescue effort. A few days later the Syrian army entered Beirut, occupied the district controlled by Arafat and his allies and put an end to their chances of military victory. Meanwhile, and despite some recent PLO–CIA cooperation on the ground (which included protecting American neighbourhoods in Beirut and an unsuccessful attempt by Arafat to prevent the assassination of the US Ambassador to Lebanon, Francis Meloy, who was murdered by Palestinian dissidents in June), all moves towards peace were frozen.
Dismal as this picture was, there was one PLO achievement. Although overshadowed by events in Beirut, it would influence the future of Arafat and the PLO considerably. On 10 April that year the municipal elections held in the West Bank under Israeli supervision produced a stunning victory – PLO supporters got 85 per cent of the seats.22 Arafat’s policy of backing willing followers with money and of punishing those who would not toe a PLO line worked. As usual, he capitalized admirably on this success. First, he focused more than ever on the occupied territories, made the able Abu Jihad responsible for activities there and increased the PLO’s financial aid and involvement in daily affairs. He also convinced President Sadat that it was his popularity among the Palestinians of the territories that lay behind Syria’s attempts to thwart his pursuit of peace. Sadat’s acceptance of the idea that the territories rather than all of Palestine had become the issue between the Arabs and Israel led him to oppose both the Syrian moves against Arafat and King Hussein’s open and secret deals to reassume responsibility for Palestinian affairs, and to provide the PLO with help.
In October, Sadat joined Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in brokering an agreement in Riyadh to end the fighting in Lebanon and relieve the beleaguered Arafat. By the end of 1976, the Arabs had despatched the Arab Security Force and later the Arab Deterrent Force to control the situation. Though Syria was the primary source of troops for both, it acted in concert with the rest of the Arab countries and the conditions within Lebanon stabilized.
The election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States also afforded a way out of the Lebanese conflict and a chance to restart the efforts towards achieving peace. Unlike the policies of Kissinger, who had openly agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that the PLO was unacceptable, those of Carter and his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, offered the Palestinians direct if conditional participation in a peace conference. In March 1977, a mere three months after he became President, Carter, in an unprecedented American move, declared his support for ‘a homeland for the Palestinians’. Two months later, the State Department confirmed the US position.
Arafat’s dream of American even-handedness was coming true. American receptivity to the idea of a Palestinian homeland was conditional, however, on the acceptance of certain UN resolutions, in particular Security Council resolution 242 which called for Israeli withdrawal from the territories in return for its right to secure boundaries and a comprehensive peace agreement. Arafat personally had no problem with this;23 everything he had done, and the messages delivered by intermediaries, showed him recognizing the right of Israel to exist. He made overtures to Carter through Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and used Palestinian academics Edward Said and Walid Khalidy as well as the ever-willing businessman Hasib Sabbagh. Characteristically unable to organize anything, even a diplomatic response, he deluged the White House with messages full of peaceful intent. At one point his frustration with the lack of response led him to approve contacts with Israeli General Matti Peled aimed at resolving the problem directly. But Peled, though receptive and well-meaning, had retired and had no influence with the Israeli government.
On 1 August, reassured by Arafat’s many communications, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance joined the USSR Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, in announcing joint plans to reconvene the Geneva Conference with Palestinian participation, conditional on acceptance of the relevant UN resolutions. Things did not proceed smoothly, however. An astonished Vance was to discover, through a message delivered by Saudi Arabia while he was on a tour of the Middle East a short time later, that Arafat could not deliver on his previous promises. According to the PLO version of events, the pressure of senior figures within Fatah, other guerrilla groups and Arab states opposed to Geneva were behind Arafat’s retreat.
While these pressures did exist, this initial failure was also a clear reflection of the conditions within the PLO and the nature of its leadership. Arafat’s supreme position did not mean that he acted in a vacuum. Unlike dictators of actual countries, he had no secret police or state structure to impose his will on his people and his actions were always determined by whether or not the Palestinians would follow him. His people would not have followed but for his ability to speak for the whole PLO. In this case, the strong opposition to his plans made it doubtful whether he could ‘sell’ a deal to the USA. He lacked the necessary support of other major figures such as Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad. More than anything else before it, this retreat explains Arafat’s frequent resort to expediency: his leadership was secure because he had no equal, but his ability to act, though he used it frequently, was conditional on Palestinian acceptance of his policies. Realizing that he had nothing to offer without their approval, he was always in the business of balancing the game of internal power politics and his personal beliefs.
New factors contributed to his change of position, too. In May 1977, Menachem Begin’s Likud party won the Israeli elections and this was followed by the announcement of plans to expand settlement activity in the occupied territories. In Lebanon, the PLO and Syrians had achieved a rapprochement and the Syrians were once again turning against the Christians. Having been unable to convince the Carter Administration to expand its offer of a homeland to include ‘the right of self-determination’, Arafat wanted them to pressure Israel into halting settlement activity and did not want to lose Syria’s support. Acceptance of the US offer would have renewed his conflict with Syria, and this he could not afford. A new Syrian stand against the PLO in Lebanon would have weakened him to such an extent that the Carter offer of a Palestinian homeland might have been made exclusively to the people of the occupied territories. He was reacting to the potential challenge from the occupied territories for the first time.
Unable to overcome these obstacles, Arafat haggled. In the process he offended those Arab countries who had advocated contact with the USA–Egypt and Saudi Arabia – as well as his own intermediaries, and the USSR, neglected by his machinations, retreated into a state of inactivity. After the rejection of the Vance initiative the PLO and the USA maintained contact, particularly through American intermediary Landrum Bolling, a Quaker friend of Jimmy Carter, but there was little movement.
Eventually Sadat lost patience with Arafat’s vacillation and cut the ground from underneath him. On 8 November 1977, having ensured that Arafat was at the meeting of the Egyptian People’s Assembly, for which purpose he had summoned him from Libya especially, Sadat offered to travel ‘to the ends of the earth’ to pursue peace – then reduced his offer and invited himself to Jerusalem to address the Knesset. It was a declaration which stunned the whole world. The Israelis under Begin hurriedly issued an invitation. The Arabs fumed and began to regroup. But Arafat was the biggest loser; he had been pre-empted.
What everyone had suspected – that Sadat wanted out of the conflict – was formalized in the speech. The October War and the disengagement agreements with the Israelis had strengthened his position within Egypt and he was responding to the dire economic needs of his country. The political climate within Egypt gave him room for manoeuvre that was not available to any other Arab leader.24 Unlike the rest of the Arab peoples, the Egyptians were beginning to tire of the conflict and of shouldering most of the responsibility for it. Hussein had wanted a similar deal with Israel, but the presence of a Palestinian majority within his country had not allowed him to carry out his plans openly and he had had to resort to secrecy.
For Arafat Sadat’s sudden move changed everything. He had depended on Egypt and had competed with Sadat to maintain the PLO’s position as a negotiating partner in any peace agreement; now he was forced to take steps backwards to rejoin the Arabs who had opposed his and Sadat’s original plans. For a week, after a hasty departure from Cairo to Beirut, he still hoped that it had been a mere slip of the tongue by the Egyptian leader, who had spoken without a script, and that Sadat would find a way of not pursuing his offer. But it was no use: Sadat persisted, and before his journey to Jerusalem visited other Arab leaders to try to get them to join him. On 19 November the world held its breath while Sadat addressed the Israeli Parliament.
Sadat spoke well and with deliberation. He championed Palestinian rights and, as part of a comprehensive peace agreement, he wanted the Palestinians to have an entity of their own; but there was no mention of the PLO. Sadat overlooked the various decisions of the Arab League, and Palestinian representation was left wide open. Arafat watched the speech on television in a state of shock. The Egyptian leader was after a settlement with anyone who agreed with him, and pretended to speak for the Palestinians. By placing so much emphasis on Palestinian rights he was excluding King Hussein, and the encouragement to the indigenous leadership of the occupied territories was obvious.
Arafat’s inconsistent reading of political situations is a weakness which remains with him to this day. He has superior instincts which allow him to see openings in the bleakest of situations, but, being largely uneducated, he makes grave errors of judgement when confronted with totally new conditions. He totally failed to foresee the effect of his prevarications on Sadat, who had to act because Arafat had left him vulnerable and in danger of losing everything that the 1973 War had achieved. However, his response to Sadat’s decision to act alone showed him at his most astute. According to someone who was witness to the debates within the PLO’s command, the first thing Arafat did was to order his followers to refrain from any calls to murder Sadat (some still did so without his approval) and to stop referring to him as a traitor. He did not want to push Egypt’s president too far. Then, announcing that the focus of attention had completely shifted to within Palestine, he reviewed the situation in the West Bank and Gaza and sent orders to his people there, the mayors in particular, to boycott all peace initiatives led by Egypt. He followed that with instructions to the PLO secret cells in the West Bank and Gaza to threaten anyone who supported Sadat. Finally, in what was becoming an enjoyable habit, he contacted Arab leaders and flew off to meet all of them.
Clever as these moves were, Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem still left Arafat exposed. There were many voices within Fatah calling for a radical response, and there was always a danger of individuals or groups acting on their own. The rejectionists, the radical guerrilla groups, gloated and felt vindicated. George Habbash accused Arafat of paving the way for Sadat.25 Syria, Libya, Algeria and South Yemen created the so-called Steadfastness Front and called for continued confrontation with Israel and Sadat. Saudi Arabia as usual took time to make up its mind, but eventually threw its weight behind those rejecting Sadat’s effort though without actually joining them. The decision was taken by the mild, fatherly King Khalid despite support for Sadat by strongman Crown Prince Fahd, the present King, who had known about the Egyptian move in advance. The solid anti-Sadat stand by the Arab governments provoked the Egyptian leader into severing diplomatic relations with all his opponents. With the issue thus joined, Arafat, no longer independent or above Arab feuds, had to adopt a new posture in line with theirs. The next PLO executive committee meeting produced decisions which rejected all UN resolutions. On the surface, Arafat’s peace efforts had come to an end.
With Lebanon still on the boil under a new political configuration which found Syria backing him, Arafat was saved by the response of the people of the occupied territories to his orders. Refusing to contemplate going back to Jordan – not after the Black September Civil War – they followed Arafat’s orders and boycotted Sadat. The second National Guidance Committee, which had replaced most local political groups in the West Bank and Gaza and depended on new college graduates and professional associations, gave Arafat and the PLO their undivided support, as did the mayors. Though invitations were issued, only one mayor, Elias Freij of Bethlehem, met Sadat during the latter’s visit to Jerusalem and offered him support. Because Freij was also pro-Jordanian he represented all the support Egypt and Jordan had. He received over a hundred death threats, mostly from PLO activists.26 The other mayors stood by the PLO and the rest of the people became more Palestinian than ever before. Sadat was left unable to speak for the Palestinians.
Not for the first time in the history of Arafat’s leadership of the Palestinians, it was a violent incident and its consequences which provided him with a way out of his predicament. Among the many steps backwards Arafat had taken was a recommitment to attacking all targets within Israel, and it was Fatah itself which started the ball of violence rolling. On 11 March 1978, an eleven – man Fatah hit squad landed their boats just south of Haifa. They had meant to land much further south and sneak into Tel Aviv, but found themselves somewhere on the main road connecting the two cities. Briefly confused by their surroundings, they later managed to hijack a bus and shoot everything in their way. Before the carnage was over, thirty-four Israelis were dead and more than eighty wounded. The attack inflamed passions on both sides and came very close to forcing a reversion to traditional Arab and Israeli positions and to ending the ongoing negotiations being conducted by the USA, Israel and Sadat.
The Israeli response to the Fatah raid came within seventy-two hours, on 14 March. Operation Stone of Wisdom was overseen by Menachem Begin personally. It involved thirty thousand soldiers and represented the biggest response to Palestinian raids into Israel to date. Within eighteen hours the Israelis had achieved their primary military goal, which was to smash the guerrillas near their border in southern Lebanon and establish a security zone four to eight miles wide along the whole border with Lebanon. Skirmishes continued, and the Israeli success was not achieved without cost. Arafat inspiringly led the Palestinian forces in person, and the Israelis suffered fourteen dead and over two hundred wounded in the first forty-eight hours.
For the Palestinians, the effects of this invasion on the negotiations between Israel and Sadat had both positive and negative results. First, the whole invasion, a mini-war between Israel and the Palestinians, dramatized the absence of the Palestinians from the negotiations and the fact that there could be no peace without them. There was also the further confirmation of Arafat’s personal courage. Regionally, it guaranteed them further Arab support from many countries and added to Sadat’s isolation. Simultaneously, the Israeli occupation of a security zone in Lebanon added that country to those with land under Israeli control. The Americans, desperately trying to keep alive the stalled negotiations, understood the Palestinians’ violent message and counselled restraint on the Israelis. Behind those positive results, however, lurked another consideration: the increased support for the Palestinians made the overall Arab position more rigid and meant that Sadat had to go it alone.
On 17 September, after lengthy negotiations which hovered on the edge of failure for days, Sadat and Begin reached an agreement in principle to end the state of war between their two countries. The Camp David Accord, so called after the American presidential retreat where the two leaders concluded their negotiations, was reached under the auspices and constant prompting and cajoling of President Jimmy Carter. Even some American insiders admitted that the Palestinians had suffered one of their most significant defeats in a history replete with failure and suffering.
The peace agreement called for the withdrawal in stages of Israeli forces from Egyptian territory and the normalization of relations between the two countries. This was accompanied by a vague and totally illegal agreement regarding the West Bank and Gaza – a face-saving device for the Egyptians which the Israelis had no intention of observing.27 The vagueness lay in the failure to define the final status of the occupied territories after the stipulated transitional period of five years; would they be independent, autonomous or attached to Jordan? The illegality was in-built: Sadat had no authority to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians. And from the very start, Begin made it clear that he had no intention of withdrawing from the territories and planned to annex them to Israel instead.
Despite an open appeal by Arafat not to finalize the agreement, Sadat went ahead and signed it in March 1979. Arafat’s appeal came after meeting of Arab heads of state in Baghdad in November 1978, as a result of which Egypt’s membership in the Arab League was frozen, its ambassadors to the Arab countries were recalled to Egypt and the League’s headquarters was moved to Tunisia. Although Arafat had appealed to Sadat, the PLO was the one entity which did not close the door on contacts with Egypt and Arafat never withdrew his representative from the country. His course of action was perverse; had the Palestinian people known this it would most definitely have cost him his leadership. Moreover, his obvious inclination to stay in contact with Sadat puzzled and offended the Arabs feuding with the Egyptian leader on behalf of the Palestinians.
It was the people of the West Bank more than Arafat and the PLO who passed judgement on the Camp David Accord and cut it down to size. A national congress, convened in the West Bank in October 1978 for the sole purpose of debating the agreement, led 150 West Bank leaders to issue a declaration renouncing it and confirming their support for the PLO – in reality for its declared position. The hard-line message was a sharp contrast to Arafat’s machinations, which he noted. Sadat had no intention of allowing Palestinian interests to obstruct an Egyptian–Israeli peace. After all its efforts the Carter Administration considered Camp David a diplomatic triumph, but it had achieved nothing for the Palestinians.28
Neither the feeling of the people of the occupied territories nor being ignored by the Carter Administration deterred Arafat, and he continued his efforts towards peace.29 In so doing, he was responding to a new element in the process. The Palestinian businessmen, whom Arafat had always cultivated and on whom he depended for financial support, had solid connections with the moderate Arab camp and encouraged his personal inclinations.30 Instead of heeding the message from the occupied territories, some hard-liners within Fatah, the PFLP, DFLP and Saiqa, and the refugees in camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, Arafat followed the money men who made their contributions dependent on deference to their masters in the oil-rich countries.
With the backing of this wealthy clique, the PLO carried out a worldwide diplomatic offensive against the Camp David Accord. It included contacts with a long list of European leaders such as Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, French Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France, Romanian President Ceaucescu, Greek Premier Andreas Papandreou, UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim and many others. Beyond Europe, Arafat managed to get himself elected and re-elected to offices in the Islamic Conference and the Organization of Non-Aligned Countries. In a curious way, what Arafat was doing resembled what Shukeiri had done; his diplomatic efforts were guided by people who did not take the average Palestinian into consideration.
These contacts sought recognition of the right of the Palestinians, as represented by the PLO, to self-determination and they were relatively successful. The 1980 Venice Declaration of the European Economic Community accepted the Palestinians as a party to the conflict but failed to recognize the subsidiary right of self-determination and the creation of a Palestinian state. It was not enough for Arafat because it contained nothing new; in order to claim victory he needed more. But he had nowhere to turn.
Yet as usual it was within the Middle East itself that the real changes were taking place. On 22 January 1979, an Israeli hit squad slipped into Beirut and assassinated Ali Hassan Salameh, by then Arafat’s most trusted lieutenant, an adopted son and the man behind several Black September terror attacks. It was a clear sign that Israel still considered the PLO a threat deserving special attention – that regardless of any potential peace treaty, the two sides were still at war. It was tantamount to stating that Sadat’s initiative did not represent a solution to the issue between Israel and the Palestinians and admitting that it was still a source of conflict. Arafat sank into a state of utter gloom. The idea of being a sitting target without either the prospects of diplomatic success or the wherewithal to manage an effective military response frightened him.
The Iranian revolution, which overthrew the Shah on 31 January 1979, was a colossal event which altered the entire political balance in the Middle East. For six months, Ayatollah Khomeini provided Arafat with a new lifeline. The PLO leader was the first foreigner to visit Tehran after the overthrow of the Shah and he was treated as an important ally and head of state. The new Islamic regime had received help from the PFLP in their struggle against the Shah, including a gift of seventy thousand rifles and sub-machine guns. As chairman of the PLO Arafat claimed credit for this, as he had for so many other successes initiated by revolutionary guerrilla groups. Khomeini told Arafat that Iran was committed to his cause, in particular to liberating Jerusalem. Arafat’s response was more emotional than realistic: ‘Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine.’31
Arafat’s unnatural honeymoon with the Iranian revolution was short-lived. The Iranians began to doubt his motives at the time when they were holding US embassy staff as hostages. Arafat, responding to an American message delivered through Saudi Arabia, tried to intercede in the crisis on behalf of the US government. Blind to everything except Palestinian considerations, and misjudging the depth of anti-US feeling in Iran, he saw in the crisis an opportunity to improve his standing with Washington. It backfired; though he continued his verbal support for the Palestinian cause, Khomeini distanced himself from Arafat. At the same time the Palestinian money men, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – the last after determining Arafat was of no use in the hostage crisis – threatened to withdraw their financial support and forced Arafat to backtrack.32 When it finally came, the break with Khomeini was sudden and complete. From then on, the Iranians increased their support for Shia groups in Lebanon and used them to put pressure on Arafat to depart from total pro-West policies.
Once again the contradictions in Arafat’s behaviour, playing both the peacemaker and the revolutionary leader at the same time, tripped him. In this instance, he was prevailed upon to sever his relations with Iran despite the pro-Iranian feelings of his people and most of the guerrilla groups. There were other examples of his belief that the support of the oil-rich Arab countries and wealthy Palestinians was indispensable, whatever his desire to continue to follow a two-track approach until Palestinian rights, including that of self-determination, were recognized. For instance, one of Arafat’s close associates, Abul Zaim or Atallah Atallah, kidnapped the well-known Saudi writer and dissident Nasser Al Said in Beirut and delivered him to the Saudis in return for $2 million. Some time later, ‘unknowns’ assassinated Abdel Wahab Kayyali, one-time leader of the militant Arab Liberation Front and an outspoken critic of what he called ‘placing personal interests above those of the Palestinian people’. Both Said and Kayyali were anathema to Arab moderates. Pleasing the pro-West Saudis and looking the other way while true revolutionaries were silenced did not stop Arafat from establishing direct links to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, helping Ugandan leftists and continuing to depend on Communist countries for arms and training.
All this took place while he sent new messages to the Carter Administration hinting, while refusing to do so openly, at accepting UN resolution 242 and Israel’s right to live within secure boundaries. Characteristically, he extended whatever authorization he had from the PLO leadership and the PNC to compromise. Even his meeting in November 1979 with the American black leader Jesse Jackson, roundly condemned by Zionist groups and Israel, was only another attempt to keep the channels of communication with the US administration open.
Throughout 1979 and early 1980 Arafat’s and the PLO’s fortunes were at their nadir. Even though Abu Jihad’s efforts to organize cells in the West Bank and Gaza were proving successful, the local leadership of mayors, students and trade unionists was more independent and militant than was convenient for Arafat. He responded by keeping pro-PLO elements in the occupied territories on a short financial leash. Meanwhile, Abu Jihad’s success in the occupied territories prompted the Israelis to support a counterweight. They created the Village Leagues, a collection of small-timers who were supposed to help them develop an alternative to the PLO. When the collaborationist nature of the Village Leagues rendered them ineffective, the Israeli civilian governor of the territories, Menahem Milson, dissolved the pro-PLO National Guidance Committee, delayed postponed municipal elections and resorted to supporting Islamic groups. Towards the end of 1980 the Palestinian National Front (PNF), more independent and Communist-leaning than the NGC, was also dissolved.
Late in 1980, to Arabs and outsiders alike seeking a solution, Arafat assumed a position as the only man who could deliver peace.33 Still pretending to agree with the Steadfastness Front, he simultaneously went beyond using Palestinian academics and businessmen as intermediaries and hid behind Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In August 1981, the Fahd Plan called for a peace with Israel based on withdrawal from Arab land occupied in 1967 and, without naming Israel, the right of all the parties to the Arab–Israeli conflict to live ‘within secure and recognized’ boundaries. In fact, Arafat was the proponent of the whole scheme; once again he had used an associate to advance an idea the success of which was doubtful. The plan was the work of Arafat’s associate Basil Aql, a Palestinian businessman with solid Saudi connections and a direct line to Fahd. The offer of recognition of Israel that it contained went beyond what was approved by the PLO, whose executive committee had demanded Israeli recognition of the Palestinians as party to the conflict and their rights of self-determination in return for total abandonment of the armed struggle.
In September 1980 Iraq invaded Iran; Arafat tried to mediate between the two sides, but without success. The countries of the Steadfastness Front and leftist guerrilla groups backed Iran and saw in the war a diversion from the Palestinian problem. Arafat followed the Palestinian money men and the oil-producing Arab states and supported Iraq. Whatever divisions existed in the Arab world and among the Palestinians were magnified, and indeed the Iran–Iraq War replaced the Arab–Israeli conflict as the problem of primary concern to the countries of the Middle East.
In November 1981 Fahd presented his plan to another Arab conference in Fez, Morocco, but new considerations in addition to the Iran–Iraq conflict stood in the way of adopting the proposal of the Crown Prince. Signalling that it was determined to have a say in any solution to the Arab–Israeli problem, the USSR had recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people to give itself diplomatic leverage. The Syrians and Israelis refused to accept the plan. A month before, Sadat had been assassinated by Muslim militants opposed to peace with Israel. Arafat was shaken enough by what had happened to the Egyptian leader that he took to mentioning his fate to avoid taking a stand. The Fahd Plan, though resurrected later – also without success – was abandoned. Despite openly supporting the plan when it was first presented,34 after its failure Arafat disavowed any knowledge of it. This taught the Saudis a lesson: they never again trusted him.
As in 1977, Arafat refused to follow his own initiatives openly. His secret contacts with the Americans, since 1981 under Ronald Reagan, were extensive, particularly through the American intermediary John Mroz. Although American intentions were subject to considerable doubts and Reagan, unlike Carter, was openly pro-Israeli, Arafat still could not take a clear enough position for or against peace for fear of the cost. In July 1981, he received a de facto recognition by the US government when American envoy Philip Habib brokered a ceasefire agreement between the PLO forces and Israel, who had been conducting an escalating artillery war across the Lebanese border. Habib had to negotiate with the PLO and Arafat, mostly indirectly, but it was none the less an open recognition.
The door for another round of contacts with the USA was open. There were many willing intermediaries, but as ever things could not move forward because the USA demanded unconditional recognition of Israel’s right to exist and for the PLO to renounce terrorism, and Arafat failed to respond. Although a State Department psychological profile of Arafat described him as ‘pragmatist and opportunist’,35 an open, clear statement on recognition and terrorism was needed beyond the personal assurances offered through intermediaries. Arafat was caught; he could not accept recognition of Israel because he had told his people that he would never do that. His forces were observing a truce and becoming restless, and he knew the Israelis were planning an attack on Lebanon to destroy the PLO physically. The USA, Israel, Jordan and Egypt were critical of him because he would not make a total commitment towards peace; the rest of the Arab countries and most Palestinians opposed him because he insisted on a dialogue with America and everyone was preoccupied with the Iran–Iraq War. What looked like a stalemate was a prelude to war.