Officially, the uprising known as the intifada began on 9 December 1987 when Hatem Sissi, a resident of the Jabaliya refugee camp, was killed by Israeli troops chasing Palestinian children who were pelting them with stones. This happened a day after an Israeli truck had run into a group of Palestinian labourers and killed four of them at the Erez checkpoint separating Gaza from pre-1967 Israel, an entry spot for Palestinians working in Israel. To the Israelis it was a traffic accident, but the Palestinians believed that it was a deliberate act of revenge for the stabbing to death of an Israeli merchant, Shlomo Sakal, in Gaza on 6 December.
In hindsight, the incidents themselves were not significant; it could have been another collection of events. The sequential acts of violence, particularly what happened to the Palestinian workmen waiting to be searched and have their permits examined, were the final explosive expression of an atmosphere already seething with revolutionary ferment. Little was needed to ignite the dormant passions of the Palestinian population of the occupied territories.
The unnatural and unhealthy conditions in the territories had pointed towards an impending uprising for some time. Since 1967, the Israelis had insensitively carried out countless measures of suppression and land confiscation which were in clear violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions governing the behaviour of conquerors in occupied territories. All United Nations attempts to pass resolutions condemning Israeli violations of international law and human rights had been vetoed by the United States, which insisted that they be equated with the activities of the PLO and balanced by UN calls for the suspension of all Palestinian resistance activity. Meanwhile, the helplessness of the Arab governments had been made official when the November 1987 Arab summit in Amman devoted itself almost exclusively to the Iran–Iraq War and offered little to the PLO and the people of the occupied territories; Arafat was treated like an uninvited guest. Thirdly, the PLO in Tunisia was far away and ineffective. Its guerrilla efforts, real or exaggerated, fell short of providing a relief valve for the frustrations of the people of the West Bank and Gaza. Lastly, all moves on the diplomatic front had been frozen since 1982; the USA had rejected the PLO as a negotiating partner, and the Jordanian and Egyptian efforts had faltered.
Israel was thus able to continue its unchecked policies of oppression. The government used vague laws concerning the ownership of public land to confiscate much of the territory of the West Bank and Gaza (while the exact figures are disputed, human rights and other impartial groups state that this covered more than 80 per cent of the West Bank and over 40 per cent of Gaza) and to build ‘strategic settlements’. The Israelis allocated themselves a huge share of the spring water of the West Bank and channelled it to pre–1967 Israel (again, the conflicting figures suggest somewhere between 60 and 75 per cent of all spring water). Even had they been residents in the West Bank, on a per capita basis the Israelis gave themselves twelve times what they allocated to the Palestinians. Punitive taxes were imposed, which the Israelis used to pay for their military presence. The people could not afford them, and those who failed to pay were imprisoned. Israel capped all this by adopting an iron fist policy under Minister of Defence Itzhaq Rabin. By 1985 existing laws which had led to the imprisonment of twenty-five thousand people were proving unequal to the task of controlling the Palestinians.1 The following year Rabin resurrected the emergency decrees of administrative detention which had originally been enacted under the British mandate of Palestine in the 1930s. These laws allowed Israel to imprison people without charge and with no right of appeal, and they were used to justify the detention of thousands.
All these repressive measures followed the banning of indigenous political organizations such as the National Guidance Committee in 1982 and 1983 under the Likud government of Menachem Begin. While no Israeli government since the 1967 War had had any long-term policy for the occupied territories – they simply did not know what to do with them – Begin’s considered the land as part of the concept of Eretz Israel, greater Israel, and did not want the Arab population. His government hoped these harsh measures would make the Palestinians leave; to have made this its official policy would have alienated the international community. In fact, an unknown number of people did leave and the educated Christians led the way; their numbers declined from 11 per cent of the Arab population in 1967 to 3 per cent in 1986.
In 1987 things considerably worsened on all fronts. Early in the year 17 Palestinians were killed, 129 wounded and hundreds imprisoned without trial.2 By the end of the year there were daily individual acts of violence, beatings, stabbing and occasional shootings, mostly by armed settlers, which the Israeli law courts always found a way of justifying. During October, the Israeli security forces killed four members or a new local organization in an ambush. Unlike the banned groups beholden to the PLO and advocating an Israeli–Palestinian dialogue to achieve peace, the fundamentalist Islamic Jihad to which the four Palestinian victims belonged was a secret group committed to violence. On 25 November, a member of the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command landed by hang-glider in northern Israel where he killed six Israelis and wounded seven more.
Hundreds of Palestinians were detained and many more were beaten and tortured during interrogations. Tourism, one of the main sources of income, declined and the overall standard of living, already well below what the Israelis enjoyed, sank further. Everything suggested that the atmosphere of despair in the occupied territories was on the verge of erupting, through either an increase in the level and nature of acts of violence or a mass protest movement. Some writers and journalists – Dany Rubenstein, Yehuda Litani and notably the Israeli author of The Yellow Wind, the admirable David Grossman – had gone on record with predictions of an impending disaster, but nobody listened to them. In the end it was the nature of the eruption, to be followed later by its amazing power to sustain itself, which exposed the conditions which had created it. What led to the intifada became part of its story.
The killing of Hatem Sissi in Gaza at the end of 1987 was followed by a rebellion of staggering proportions. The children of the Gaza refugee camps, including the most densely populated spot on earth, the camp of Jabaliya, rose as one. Using chequered kuffiyas as masks, they formed small mobile groups which had the advantage of knowing their terrain and attacked Israeli patrols and soldiers with the only weapon available to them, stones. Within a week the rebellion had spread to the West Bank and an army of children joined the original Gaza stone throwers. Schools were shut down, barricades were built, curfews were imposed, hundreds of children were arrested and countless others beaten with sticks and rifle butts. When that did not work, the Israelis had to augment their heavy military presence by calling up thousands of army reserves and declaring a state of emergency.
The international press corps became witness to one of the most startling journalistic events of the century. Thousands of young children and teenagers – what the locals and later the international press called the shabab (young men) – donned the kuffiya emblem of Palestine and, raising their fingers in a V for victory sign, engaged the most successful army in the Middle East in an unequal confrontation which dazzled the world. The children were angry, determined and fearless. The Israeli soldiers lacked the proper training to put down the intifada and over-reacted. The story perpetuated itself dramatically.
It was impossible for outsiders, even the US government, to condemn the children of the intifada or to equate what they were doing with anything but a call for freedom. They were not raiders or hijackers but innocents fighting a colonial occupier, and they were being beaten, imprisoned and shot at random. These events were recorded in despatches and still pictures and on television, and their message was rendered more appealing because the children used slogans such as ‘We want a country of our own’, and ‘We are fighting for our freedom.’ In a short time the base of the rebellion expanded: even five-year-olds and illiterate women threw stones, scuffled with Israeli soldiers and adopted the V for victory gesture to represent their defiance.
The PLO was stunned by what was happening but remained afraid to commit itself. It did not want to attach itself to what might turn out to be only a flash-in-the-pan affair and end up looking foolish. This is why it took the leadership a month to adopt the intifada.3 Although he instructed the PLO radios in Baghdad and other places to exhort the local people to greater effort and personally recorded some appeals to that effect, it was Arafat who during the early days of the intifada manifested the most reluctance to provide the rebellion with support because he feared the effects of another failure on his already reduced position. Abu Jihad, the man responsible for the occupied territories within the PLO command, had an impressive knowledge of local conditions and pleaded for an immediate PLO response. When the intifada would not die and Arafat finally bowed to the inevitable, Abu Jihad ran after it with remarkable speed. Because he knew every village, school and large family in Gaza and the West Bank, he ‘adopted’ the intifada and provided it with the necessary financial backing and logistical support to keep it alive. Abu Jihad became the manager, the brain in exile, of the spontaneous movement. Hard-working, methodical and selfless, he was the right choice.
The initial Israeli response was even more confused than that of the PLO, and in view of the Israeli presence on the ground less excusable. Defence Minister Itzhaq Rabin had a history of advocating violent responses to Palestinian protests (although after the Oslo Agreement and his assassination he was praised for his peaceful intentions) and favoured tough measures to end the uprising.4 In fact, he believed his call for ‘breaking their bones’5 would be so successful that he saw fit to leave on an official trip to the United States; however, the deteriorating conditions caught up with him in Washington and forced him to return home. The rest of the Israeli government, including the Prime Minister, Itzhaq Shamir, were in agreement with Rabin, and the records of their statements and reactions show a government trying to nip in the bud what it considered a passing phenomenon. They did not understand the nature of what was happening. Only the veteran politicians Shimon Peres and Abba Eban saw things for what they were and wanted all measures aimed at restoring order accompanied by steps to alleviate the conditions which had led to the intifada. Ironically, for about two weeks the thinking of the PLO and Israel was quite similar.
The rest of the world also misjudged the nature and significance of the intifada during its initial stages, but soon got the message. The newspaper, magazine, radio and television reports, together with dozens of detailed studies by human rights organizations including the Israeli B’Tselem group, made it impossible for any leader, however friendly to Israel, to deny the ‘children of the intifada’ sympathy. This sympathy, a rare outpouring of individual feeling which eventually gathered world opinion behind it, led to profound changes in the official attitude of many governments, particularly that of the United States. Arafat’s quest for Palestinian identity could be dismissed or accommodated as the work of a politician whose very existence depended on continuing this quest, but the children were that very identity, its living picture. They sought recognition of their inalienable human rights; they were the undeniably attractive face of Palestine.
To the USA the Jordanian Option, the wish to have Jordan deputize for the Palestinians and eventually to incorporate the occupied territories into Jordan, was dead. King Hussein had no appreciation of the animosity with which the Palestinians viewed him, and this foolish dream of his was among the rebellion’s first casualties. When Muslim and Christian holy places in Jerusalem became centres of resistance, another casualty was the Israeli pretence of a united Jerusalem in which Israelis and Arabs lived happily together.
These developments led to soul searching and a new perception of Palestine by Western governments. They concluded that Israel’s policies of oppression had failed. Instead of focusing on the hijacker, they now had to cope with the picture of a crying child being beaten by an Israeli soldier for raising the Palestinian flag. The armed raider became a thing of the past, his image replaced by that of women in traditional dress shielding their children from violence. Everybody agreed that a solution had to be found for the plight of the Palestinians. In the words of the Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh, ‘The intifada achieved in weeks more than the armed struggle achieved in years.’6
Like the PLO, the Arab governments were caught unprepared, but the Arab reaction was the opposite of Arafat’s. The initial reaction on official level was one of wholehearted support, but it eventually became more cautious. During the intifada’s early phase, Arab media celebrated the Palestinian children and women and what they were doing more than any other event in the century, including the October 1973 War. What surfaced was a genuine feeling of Arab unity, which often surprises outsiders at times of severe Arab adversity. But, echoing what happened during and after the 1973 War, it did not last long.
King Hussein knew that his claim to leadership of the Palestinians had been dealt a fatal blow. The initial street– level euphoria in Jordan to which the government responded gave way to a more careful official attitude in handling the news of the intifada. The last thing Hussein wanted was for this populist movement to spread to his own country. Syria was the one Arab state which stood solidly behind the movement, and occasionally radio stations run by anti-Arafat guerrilla groups in that country provided greater guidance to the people of the West Bank and Gaza than Arafat’s own news outlets. The rest of the Arab governments also abandoned their unqualified support and resorted to playing down the nature of the rebellion, particularly after pro-intifada demonstrations in some Arab countries aroused official concern. Overall, the Arab governments had no interest in a new populist movement succeeding and infecting their people, and this translated into an Arab summit decision in Tunisia in January 1988 to support Arafat as the intifada’s creator or leader. They provided him with more money to finance and control the movement. Arafat did not threaten them, but a genuine rebellion did. The official Arab perception of the intifada was exactly what Arafat wanted.
However, the intifada was much more deep-rooted, stronger and more revolutionary in nature than either of the parties directly concerned, Arafat and Israel, had thought. Literally translated, ‘intifada’ means ‘tremor’, but one specifically aimed against the forces which caused it and therefore a reaction to these forces. There is a precedent within the Arab Middle East for using the word: it is what the popular uprising against the Iraqi monarchy in 1952 and some uprisings in Egypt had been called.
What distinguished the Palestinian intifada from others was its dependence on children to lead it. The emergence of children reflected a generation gap which demonstrated how far the Palestinians had progressed since their rebellions in the 1930s and the 1948 War. The non-acceptance of the older generation and their ways by the better educated young was universal, and the difference in their thinking represented a healthy multiple of the normal generation gap – perhaps a difference of a hundred years. I remember being taken aback during an interview of eight intifada children by their insistence on attributing their organizational skills to having watched the Israelis at work and hearing them call their fathers ‘a generation of treason’. There was more to the stones which they used to attack the Israeli army and security forces than a simple resort to what was available. Using stones was a reversion to an Islamic stance: rajm or throwing stones against evil spirits is what pilgrims to Mecca do from the top of a mountain. And then there were the women supporting the activities of their children – in their case it was a rebellion against the minor role hitherto allocated to them in the Palestinian conflict.
In fact the intifada was an open-ended rebellion, an attempt by children to destroy everything which had surrounded them and left them without hope, the PLO included. To attain that, they were ready to sacrifice everything they had. It was a revolt against local conditions by children who claimed greater knowledge than their elders and who viewed their fathers with derision while hating the Israeli occupier. There was anger against a leadership-in-exile which had grown comfortable and corrupt.7 It was a movement anchored in Islamic and Arab traditions of resistance. It also had the added support of a formerly disenfranchised group, the women, who adhered to the rebellion to express their social frustration and who felt closer to and protective of their children. They wanted freedom from oppression but had no ideology.
Within Palestinian ranks, even groups against which the intifada children directed their anger – for example, the traditional elite – could not but support them, and as such the movement was a unifier of the Palestinians. On street level, it was also a unifier of the Arabs. The Syrian poet Nizar Kabbani, perhaps the leading Arab poet of the times, joined the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish in celebrating the event in emotional verse which was recited throughout the Arab countries.
None of this escaped Arafat. His initial reluctance or misjudgement produced countless accusations against him, but the rumours that he was against the movement per se are too thin and ridiculous to be considered. During this period he managed to dispel the image of a late-comer by his usual exaggeration and because the PLO were cast in the role of intifada organizers, something which he gave up after determining that it generated a negative reaction among the rank and file of Palestinian children.8 The continuation of the uprising, the breadth of its appeal and its eventual ability to force all strata of society to join it, along with Arafat’s isolation and the absence of an alternative, meant that he had little choice but to go along with it and try to incorporate it under the aegis of the PLO.
Yet the movement did contain dangers to his position which were very much on his mind. Firstly, its populist nature ran counter to his neglect of social issues and attachment to wealthy Palestinians. In particular, it was not led exclusively by what he considered a dependable elite, the guardians of the social status quo with whom he felt comfortable. And within the PLO, to support the stone throwers the remarkable Abu Jihad activated every cell he had created since the early 1970s. He was rightly identified with the PLO’s efforts to support the intifada and, through his ingenious use of private voluntary organizations (trade associations, student groups, medical relief agencies and charities), became the guiding light to people of the occupied territories. Having suffered diminution and humiliation at the hands of Arafat over the years, Abu Jihad was using this new opportunity as a springboard for reforming the PLO. He made it clear that the intifada should not be sacrificed to Arafat’s diplomatic initiatives and that it had to be followed by greater control on his dictatorial ways and management of the PLO’s finances.9
Not bullets, arrests, beatings, house demolitions, the use of tear gas, the closure of schools, economic pressures including the closure of Israel to 125,000 Palestinian labourers, or even the burying alive of four men while CBS news recorded the event could stop ‘one of the great anti-colonial uprisings of our time’.10 But in order to continue, the intifada had to produce an indigenous leadership. The acceptance of the PLO’s primacy, despite widespread misgivings about its leadership, was a foregone conclusion. It was tantamount to accepting an overall Palestinianness through association with the one organization which had kept the dream of that identity alive. To organize and sustain day-to-day events, however, needed direct local guidance. Equally, the nature of Israeli thinking meant that a more serious and dramatic attempt to cripple the uprising was bound to be made. This was particularly true because of the rebellion’s success in establishing a Palestinian identity. That was unacceptable to the Israelis, but became acceptable to the rest of the world and ended Hussein’s role, which the Israelis reverted to in times of trouble. And last the USA had to resurrect its efforts towards peace and thaw what it had frozen in 1982.
The United National Leadership (UNL) came into being one month after the start of the intifada, and it was Arafat himself who announced its existence. But there was a built-in contradiction in the act of its creation; Arafat insisted on making the announcement personally to pre-empt an inevitable event, and he secured the agreement of the local leaders that their names and the organizational structure should remain secret. The actual proposal to create a local leadership had come from the DFLP. By not revealing their names and accepting the need to operate secretly, the leaders of the UNL served notice that they would not supplant Arafat. They were a mixed bag of people who included Faisal Husseini and Sari Nusseibeh as representatives of the Palestinian elite, and Hanan Ashrawi, Radwan Abu Ayyash, Ziyyad Abu Zayyad, Hanna Seniora, Sam’an Khoury and others who represented a new local breed of leaders who did not fit the traditional mould. The activists of the UNL came from all factions comprising the PLO; the intifada forced them to cooperate and they did so while praising the PLO and Arafat.
One of the first things the UNL did was issue a fourteen– point programme which accepted the overall leadership of the PLO and asked for adherence to United Nations resolutions and the right of self-determination. In addition, the leadership asked local people holding jobs in the Israeli occupation apparatus to resign, called for strikes and for businesses to close, and issued specific instruction to the children ranging from how to throw stones to what to say under interrogation. But even with their acceptance of the PLO umbrella, the UNL still represented a threat to the PLO leadership.11 The reasons for that were simple: unlike the PLO, which had fallen under Arafat’s control and deferred to traditional regimes and wealthy Palestinians, the UNL responded to local conditions and the voice of the average Palestinian. The UNL had established popular committees in every village, town and neighbourhood. Its leadership was more methodical, responsive and effective, and less corrupt, than the Palestinian exiles in Tunisia. But a measure of independent action was inevitable; even Faisal Husseini, who until the intifada was accepted as Arafat’s personal representative in the occupied territories, initially directed the various departments of his Centre of Arab Studies to address immediate issues without deferring to Tunisia. Later, Arafat did not give them room to operate independently and even the most unimportant of handbills bore the PLO signature.
Meanwhile two independent Islamic groups, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, came into the open. Unlike the UNL, they had no direct connection with the PLO but had grown as the beneficiaries of the usual reversion to religion in times of stress. Their fortunes improved after the intifada turned mosques into virtual centres of resistance. The Islamic movements acted in a similar fashion to the UNL while avoiding competition with it. They had their own special areas, neighbourhoods and camps, trained children in methods of resistance, supported needy families and called their own strikes. They represented another challenge to the PLO, in this case an open one which tolerated no moderation in facing the Israelis. Even opponents to Islamic fundamentalism found it difficult to criticize its organized, clean ways. The qualities of the leaders of the UNL and of Hamas and Islamic Jihad made them, intentionally or not, competitors to Arafat.
Israel’s dramatic move came in April 1988, six months after the start of the intifada, by which time the Israelis had finally accepted that it would not disappear. On 9 April 1988 the Israeli cabinet, led by Premier Itzhaq Shamir and Defence Minister Rabin, decided to assassinate Abu Jihad.12 Led by pathfinders who had entered Tunisia under false passports weeks before and managed to obtain considerable intelligence, on 16 April an Israeli hit squad guided by aircraft landed from small boats on the Tunisian coast and shot the intifada leader. It was a gruesome murder carried out in the presence of his wife and young child, and he was hit with more than 150 bullets while vainly trying to resist with a small handgun.
Publicly, Arafat mourned Abu Jihad, made the usual accusations of US collusion in organizing his assassination, and arranged a funeral for his lifelong comrade in Damascus in which hundreds of thousands walked. There was no doubt, however, that one of the two men with the ability and stature to stand up to Arafat had been eliminated. Because of his successful leadership of the intifada, Abu Jihad was the PLO’s counterweight to the growing importance of the local leadership. For Israel, the assassination was a failure; instead of subduing the intifada, Abu Jihad the martyr became one of its more inspiring symbols, perhaps more effective dead than alive.
One immediate result was Arafat’s assumption of his murdered colleague’s duties. Except for Abu Iyad he was, as Edward Said described him on BBC radio, surrounded by ‘sycophants, yes-men and mediocrities’, and he personally took charge of all activity in the occupied territories. This coincided with Israeli activities which accidentally helped Arafat – again, rumours to the contrary are totally unfounded. The Israeli attempts to destroy the intifada led to the detention of forty thousand people and the deportation of sixty-nine others.13 This weakened the local leadership and strengthened Arafat. In fact, the combination of PLO control of finances and direction and Israeli pressure destroyed any chances of the UNL turning itself into a national command for the Palestinians. Suddenly, the door was open for the PLO leader to begin acting against the challenge facing him.
In responding to the challenges from the occupied territories and the opportunities created by Israeli short-sightedness, Arafat behaved in character. He had no clear plan for realizing the potential of the uprising and limited himself to following his instincts and protecting his position. Lacking the means to influence or control Islamic groups on the ground, he settled for making appeals to Arab governments to stop providing them with direct financial help and to outlaw such help from independent groups in their countries. Towards the UNL he adopted proven methods. He used money to support individual leaders and withheld it to weaken others. Husseini’s Centre for Arab Studies, concerned with the vital issues of land confiscation, water allocation and human rights violations, was denied funds, which went instead to less effective groups dealing with the same issues. Husseini, Hebrew– speaking, moderate, honourable and with open lines to Israeli kindred spirits seeking a just solution to the Arab–Israeli problem, had grown too popular for comfort. I myself traced a PLO payment of $500,000 to an Arafat lackey in Ramla and discovered that the man used most of the money to line his own pockets. In addition to exerting influence through control of money, Arafat moved to claim responsibility for one of his traditional redoubts. He decreed that no major statement regarding the aims of the intifada could be made without his personal approval. Then, capitalizing on the fears of the traditional establishment which had been overtaken by the populist rebellion, he opened channels of communication with some of them. Arafat even sent friendly messages and provided support to the one Palestinian mayor who had backed the Sadat peace effort, Elias Freij of Bethlehem. Arafat’s moves worked: he took control of the intifada.
On 31 July 1988, nearly three months after Abu Jihad’s death, King Hussein, also unwittingly, gave Arafat another victory. The monarch finally gave up his claim to the West Bank and to representing the Palestinians. Although he had ostensibly accepted the 1974 decision of the Rabat Arab summit meeting which appointed the PLO the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, everything Hussein had done until this final renunciation of his claim was aimed at preventing the implementation of this decision. The 1988 announcement helped Arafat by ending Hussein’s pretension to Palestinian leadership in negotiations with Israel and the USA. It was readily accepted by the rest of the Arabs and, more significantly, by the people of the occupied territories. This time Hussein stopped paying the salaries of people who had been part of the Jordanian administration before 1967 and the Israeli occupation.
With Arafat in total command of the situation, the United States felt the need for a new peace initiative to such an extent that the Secretary of State, George Shultz, visited the Middle East four times in little over a year. Unfortunately he had nothing new to offer, and beyond the historical demands for the PLO to accept UN resolutions he called for cessation of the intifada in return for a freeze in Israeli settlement activity. Except for a single meeting with local leaders Hanna Seniora and Fayiz Abu Rahma, which earned them a strong rebuke from Arafat, Shultz’s offer led the local leadership of the occupied territories to boycott the American. Beyond the emptiness of the US offer, they were obeying the PLO. Arafat did not want any negotiations to be started unless they were with himself. In fact, Arafat and the PLO had suspended contacts with the USA14 because he did not want to appear as arrogating this right to himself – something which could have offended the local leadership – and because he could not judge the final outcome of the uprising. Although having the UNL obey this strategic order was another victory for Arafat, the intifada was determining his behaviour and that of the rest of the Palestinians.
Arafat’s attitude towards the intifada has been subjected to rigorous examination by journalists and biographers for over a decade. Most of them analyse it through the single prism of his attitude to the UNL and some of its individual leaders and the natural challenge to his leadership that they represented. Although undoubtedly a valid approach towards exposing Arafat’s tactics and the jealousy with which he protected his own leadership, it still ignores the bigger strategic considerations which dictated his tactics and explained Arafat’s jealousy and fear. In judging the intifada, its achievements and its relationship with the PLO, it was Arafat’s attitude towards a populist movement, with or without individuals who might have replaced him, which tells us more about him. It was, as Abu Jihad had suspected, his determination to turn the gains of the intifada into diplomatic successes for himself and for the PLO which mattered. Whatever conclusions examining these strategic considerations yields, whether replacing or weakening Arafat and dividing the Palestinians at that critical stage would have produced more for them, occupies the last pages of this book. What is of immediate concern is Arafat’s use of the rebellion and response to it.
In July 1987, four months before the intifada started, Arafat’s adviser Bassam Abu Sharif, a Palestinian Beiruti transplanted to Tunisia and, like all the Beirutis, never one to question his master’s word or instructions, declared that he was willing to meet the Israelis to start negotiations towards a political settlement.15 No one bothered to respond to his offer. Later, during the early stages of the intifada, Israeli leader Shimon Peres revealed that the PLO had sought direct dialogue with Israel.16 Whether Peres was alluding to the Abu Sharif offer is unknown, but, as shown before, Arafat never tired of sending peace messages to both the United States and Israel which both sides ignored. The intifada changed all that. Arafat’s ability to assume leadership of it reinstated him as a potential negotiating partner.
In June 1988, during an emergency Arab summit conference to discuss the intifada, Abu Sharif released a paper in which he offered to accept UN resolutions 242 and 338 and to accept Israel’s right to live within secure boundaries in return for the acceptance of the idea of a Palestinian state – in other words, mutual recognition. Although ostensibly his work, the new proposal had Arafat’s fingerprints all over it. The ‘unofficial’ nature of the proposal, however, spared the Arab delegates at the conference the need to discuss it and take an official stand for or against it, but it was noted by them and received worldwide publicity. Secretary of State George Shultz declared that the suggestion contained in the paper fell short of what was required and asked for any Palestinian proposals to be made official – to bear the signature of Arafat himself.
The absence of Arab and strong Palestinian opposition to the contents of the Abu Sharif proposal opened the door for Arafat to espouse openly what he had been promoting through his aide. First, he sent Shultz repeated messages through the Swedish Foreign Minister, Sten Andersson, and Palestinian academic Mohammed Rabi’, declaring his acceptance of the proposal. When that failed he prevailed on the pro-West Arab leaders, Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Mubarak of Egypt and Hussein of Jordan, to intercede with the Reagan Administration and recommend resumption of direct contacts with the PLO. When that too failed, in November that year he convened the Palestine National Council in Algeria. At that point his identification with the intifada was so total that he managed to outmanoeuvre the opponents of his pursuit of peace, including the PFLP and DFLP which had reconciled with him in April to render the intifada more effective.
With George Habbash of the PFLP watching in utter disbelief, during the first few days Arafat left it to the loyal Abu Iyad to lobby delegates and inform them of the aims of the conference. His popularity ensured success, and on 15 November Arafat marched to the podium in military style to receive a standing ovation. Looking every inch a victorious general, he declared the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and himself as its president, spoke of a two-state solution, accepted all UN resolutions and asked for the holding of ‘an effective international conference concerning the Middle East issue’. In what was to become one of his favourite slogans, he adopted words originally used by the former French President Charles de Gaulle and called for ‘a peace of the brave’. Then, announcing the death of ‘prevarication and negation’ and the dawn of a new epoch, he concluded his speech with an appeal to President-elect George Bush to respond positively to his gesture of peace.
Although the White House, including both President Ronald Reagan and President-elect George Bush, would not go further in their reaction than admitting that the Algiers declaration contained some ‘positive aspects’, they saw it as being too vague to merit a change in US policy towards opening negotiations with the PLO and were adamant in their refusal to consider recognizing a Palestinian government. Soon afterwards, on 4 December, the United States and Israel were the only two countries to vote against a UN General Assembly invitation for Arafat to address the international body; 154 countries voted for the resolution. Shultz, the leading American advocate of a hard line against Arafat, accused him of being an ‘accessory to terrorism’17 and announced that the USA would not grant him a visa.
Arafat refused to be discouraged. On 6 December, he arrived in Stockholm to participate in a meeting with American Jewish leaders arranged by Sten Andersson. Rita Hauser, Stanley Scheinbaum, Menachem Rosensaft and two other Jewish activists had met with the PLO’s leading dove, Khalid Al Hassan, two weeks before. On 7 December, sitting next to the diminutive Hauser, a lawyer and the moving spirit behind the Jewish group, Arafat amplified his previous positions and accorded Israel unequivocal recognition. Hauser, an articulate, tireless worker for peace, was delighted. But the United States needed more and conveyed their demand to Arafat through Andersson.
On 13 December Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly, which had protested against Shultz’s visa ban and moved itself to Geneva for the purpose of listening to Arafat. To the Americans, this was the occasion for Arafat to satisfy their need for clarity. Arafat tried:
The PLO will work to reach a comprehensive peaceful settlement between the sides involved in the Arab– Israeli struggle, including the State of Palestine and Israel, as well as the other neighbouring states, within the framework of an international conference for peace in the Middle East to realize equality and a balance of interests, particularly the right of our people to freedom and national independence, and the respect of the right to live, and the right of peace and security to everyone; namely, all the sides involved in the struggle in the area in accordance with resolutions 242 and 338.
He coupled that with a total renunciation of terrorism. But the USA still would not accept Arafat’s wording and turned him down.
Finally, in a frantically organized press conference on the 14th, Arafat gave the US government what it needed. Shifting words, he declared, ‘In my speech yesterday, it was clear that we mean … the rights of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security, and, as I have mentioned, including the state of Palestine, Israel and other neighbours.’ Arafat uttered these words in the presence of eight hundred news correspondents but refused to answer any additional questions, concluding his press conference with the now famous ‘Enough, do you want me to striptease?’18 The initial American response came from ambassador-at-large Vernon Walters who was in Geneva for that purpose. A mere four hours later Shultz announced that the United States ‘is prepared for substantive dialogue with PLO representatives’. With that, the Reagan Administration opened a door which had been closed except for receiving messages since Henry Kissinger’s 1975 promise to Israel that the USA would not deal directly with the PLO. On 15 December the US Ambassador to Tunisia, Robert Pelletreau, held a meeting with PLO representatives there.
Throughout the world Palestinians celebrated what they saw as a substantial victory. Even within the occupied territories, Palestinians held demonstrations of joy and the word everyone repeated was ‘Mabrouk’ or ‘Congratulations’. The Israeli reaction was the opposite. Prime Minister Itzhaq Shamir condemned the US decision, and he was joined by Israelis of all political persuasions including the dovish Shimon Peres. Israeli children burned an effigy of Arafat in downtown Jerusalem and spoke bitterly of a US betrayal. In reality, what appeared like an unqualified victory for the PLO was a mixed bag.
Starting a dialogue with the Americans was a victory in one sense. It stripped Israel of the excuses it had always hidden behind not to deal directly with the Palestinians and face the realities created by the intifada. But judged by the USA’s stubborn and consistent refusal to accept the idea of a Palestinian state, or to pressure Israel into changing its policies in the occupied territories during the negotiations which led to the final acceptable statement, Arafat’s achievement was considerably less than it appeared. Nevertheless, his total control of the propaganda apparatus of the PLO allowed him to tell only one side of the story. To the Americans he was willing to offer total cooperation. The terrorist bombing of the Pan American flight over Lockerbie in Scotland on 23 December 1988 found him rushing to offer the USA help against the perpetrators; he even accused fellow Palestinians opposed to his policies.19 Disgustingly, at the same time some of his aides attempted to make money by selling information about the bombing to the media.
What followed the Arafat concessions and the start of the US–PLO dialogue amounted to a kind of post-natal depression that neither side would admit to. The Israelis persisted in their refusal to respond to the PLO’s new position, and the departure of Ronald Reagan and George Shultz and their replacement by George Bush and James Baker produced natural delays. Even after that, there was the problem of the different interpretations of what had been agreed on and what should follow. The American perception of what a dialogue with the PLO involved fell short of accepting the principle of self-determination and the idea of a Palestinian state and, to America, progress depended on what Israel would accept. However, unlike Shultz, Baker worked against Israeli immobility and tried to pressure the Israelis into revealing their position.
For the first time since the beginning of the intifada, Baker’s efforts exposed differences within the Israeli coalition government. In early 1989, the Labour Defence Minister Itzhaq Rabin came out in favour of a dialogue with the Palestinians. It was aimed at encouraging the local leadership, particularly the moderate Faisal Husseini, in an attempt to circumvent and isolate Arafat and the PLO in Tunisia. Dead set against the idea of a Palestinian state and still committed to an iron-fist policy, he automatically made it impossible for Husseini to contemplate accepting the implicit Israeli invitation to assume Palestinian leadership.
In April 1989, bowing to the need for an official Israeli response, the Likud party finally offered what came to be known as the Shamir Plan. This stipulated the exclusion of an internal (Husseini) or external (Arafat) PLO in deciding the fate of the occupied territories. It envisaged the holding of local elections, with Israel maintaining the right to disqualify candidates on the basis of political affiliation, as a first step towards autonomy. The so-called autonomy for the Palestinians would come after an interim period of three to five years, but it would leave Israel in charge of land, water and security. The Plan made clear that settlement activity would continue. Carrying out even this programme would depend on cessation of all terrorist activity – to the Israelis, that meant the intifada. The Israeli press took to describing the Plan as a piece of ‘constructive ambiguity’. As everyone including the Israelis expected, the PLO rejected it.
The Shamir Plan left Baker little room for manoeuvre. But again unlike Shultz, he was determined to expose the Israeli position and undermine it. Working closely with the Egyptian President Husni Mubarak, he adopted the Shamir Plan in terms of Israeli willingness to cede some territory and tried to get the PLO to stop all acts which the Israelis would label as terrorist activities. Deferring to the Israeli refusal to deal with the PLO, he tried to explore these possibilities with the local leadership of the occupied territories. Following Arafat’s instructions, the local Palestinian leadership had nothing to offer him.
To Arafat, Baker’s plan amounted to a call to end the intifada and a retreat from the commitment to UN resolutions. The ensuing deadlock reduced the whole US– PLO dialogue to nothing more than a tactical and publicity victory for Arafat. As on other occasions when the Americans failed to provide him with a way out of a logjam, Arafat turned to Europe as a theatre for airing his efforts towards achieving peace. On 1 May 1989, after a meeting with the French President François Mitterrand, for the first time he announced that the articles in the Palestine National Covenant calling for Israel’s dismantlement were ‘caduc’, a French word meaning ‘obsolete’. The statement, well received in Europe, was dismissed by the Israelis and elicited no official response in the USA. Meanwhile the intifada would not stop. The local Islamic groups, Hamas in particular, expanded their activities and carried it forward. This led to an Israeli crackdown and the arrest of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and over two hundred followers. The need by non-Islamic groups to maintain momentum found them inventing new ways to challenge Israeli rule. Without intending it, the methods they adopted became a source of danger to Arafat’s leadership.
The most serious intifada challenge to Israel and the PLO came from Beit Sahur, a small town two miles south of Bethlehem. Its twelve thousand relatively prosperous and highly educated inhabitants, 75 per cent of whom were Christians mostly of the Greek Orthodox persuasion, represented the more advanced segment of the population of the occupied territories. The townspeople had fully participated in the intifada and suffered for it, but in April and May 1989 they started to turn themselves into a model and became its leading innovators. The Beit Sahuris began a highly organized campaign of civil disobedience.
Like most educated Palestinians, the majority of these people were followers of PFLP, DFLP and the local Communist party. During the early stages of the intifada, they had created a number of committees to help them cope with the brutal methods of the Israeli occupiers. There was a committee to organize young resisters, another to encourage the planting of fruit and vegetables to attain self– sufficiency, a third to coordinate the activities of the various political groups, and others to oversee the provision of medical care and to organize contacts between the different religious leaders. With this solid organizational structure behind them and a leadership made up of impressive young men (the economist Jad Itzhaq, Professor Ghassan Andoni and the pharmacist Makram Sa’ad among others), the Beit Sahuris decided to stop paying any taxes to the Israeli government.
The Israelis accorded this new challenge the importance it deserved and reacted accordingly. Defence Minister Itzhaq Rabin vowed to ‘teach them a lesson’.20 A wave of arrests followed and ninety-five people were placed in detention; however, this would not stop the Beit Sahuris, who not only refused to pay taxes but began making appeals to other towns to follow suit. For three months the Israelis stepped up their counter-measures, including the uprooting of hundreds of olive trees which until then had been a major source of food to the Beit Sahuris – to no avail. Late in August the town was surrounded by Israeli troops, a curfew was imposed and, acting on lists drawn up by the various taxation departments and personally approved by Rabin, dozens of houses were ransacked and their contents confiscated. Even a YMCA rehabilitation centre set up to treat children traumatized by the intifada was raided several times and the children kicked and beaten by Israeli soldiers.21 More than $1.5 million worth of household goods were taken, from wicker chairs to refrigerators and television sets. Pharmacies and grocery stores suffered the same fate, and the inhabitants of Beit Sahur were left without food and medicine. The curfew lasted forty-four days and was supervised by Rabin personally.
Three weeks after the start of the siege, the world began to wake up to the heroic struggle of Beit Sahur. Once the press had printed dramatic pictures of the Christian and Muslim leaders of the town marching together with their bibles, crosses, Korans and crescents raised high, and holding joint prayers to protest against the siege, the story could not be ignored. The Arab states tabled a UN resolution calling for the condemnation of Israeli measures and the lifting of the siege, but it was vetoed by the United States. Inhumane as it was, the American veto did not compare with the betrayal of Beit Sahur by the Tunis PLO.
To Arafat, the campaign of the Beit Sahuris was the last thing he needed. Their civil disobedience movement was autonomous, the product of a local leadership which he did not control, and he never supported any moves by the local population unless they had his personal sanction and approval. Furthermore, the campaign threatened to expose the emptiness of his acceptance by the Americans and to undermine his dialogue further. He still believed the USA held the key to an overall resolution of the conflict. Arafat’s initial response to the unexpected problem which faced him was to deny the Beit Sahuris publicity, to ignore or play down what they were doing in the official PLO bulletins. When the townspeople persisted, the PLO advised the leaders of the UNL and others to work to stop other towns from following Beit Sahur’s example. Meanwhile, the Beit Sahuris were denied financial help and support.22 Arafat went further and deliberately courted some traditional leaders who feared the spread of the civil disobedience movement, including the Bethlehem mayor, Elias Freij – the man he had threatened with death when the latter met Sadat during the Egyptian leader’s historic visit to Jerusalem.23
Because of PLO opposition and the absence of an organized and determined leadership in other towns, the Beit Sahur campaign failed to spread. Eventually, bereft of support and help, the Beit Sahuris gave up. Soon afterwards the local PLO, acting on the personal instructions of Arafat, moved in to assert its control of the town through leaders more to its liking.24 On Christmas Eve 1989 the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a man of peace with considerable experience in the effectiveness of civil disobedience campaigns, visited Beit Sahur and conducted prayers of support for its people. The local people, desperate for recognition, were elated by his presence and message. The world’s press gave this event considerable coverage. The PLO’s propaganda machine, however, was less enthusiastic.
The lack of progress in the US-PLO dialogue and the challenge of Beit Sahur took place amidst developments which were to change the fortunes of every single country and political entity in the Arab Middle East. Gorbachov’s USSR had opened the doors for Jewish emigration to Israel. The consequent arrival of tens of thousands of immigrants augured poorly for any attempt to stop the government of Israel from building new settlements and confiscating more Arab land. This and the lack of progress in the dialogue with America eroded Arafat’s position and increased support for his opponents, mainly the Islamic fundamentalist movement Hamas. Moreover, the intifada, though alive through the infrastructure which maintained it, was showing signs of spinning out of control. In late 1989 and early 1990 Arab had turned against Arab and small organizations, the Black Panthers and Red Eagles among them, were killing Arab collaborators in their dozens. Activities against Israel became only occasional events.
Regionally, the Iran–Iraq War had ended in August 1988 and, although Iraq was left carrying a huge debt of over $60 billion, nominally Saddam Hussein came out of it victorious. To Arafat, this was an opportunity to move the Palestinian problem back to centre stage, but Saddam and the nature of Middle East politics were to intercept his efforts and usher in a new disaster.
Relations between the PLO and Iraq, often expressed violently because of Iraqi rejection of peace efforts and support for anti-Arafat Palestinian elements, had improved considerably after the start of the intifada. Even in the middle of its war with Iran, Iraq had provided the PLO with $40 million in emergency aid to keep the uprising going. Immediately following the assassination of Abu Jihad, Arafat had moved several PLO offices to Baghdad for fear of more Israeli raids on Tunisia, and there was talk of moving all of the PLO there. Some Palestinian volunteers fought with the Iraqis against Iran. More importantly, the end of the conflict found Saddam refusing to demobilize and commanding a million-man battle-tested army. The PLO leader began to see Saddam as a military counterweight to Israel.
In February 1990 Saddam joined Egypt, Jordan and North Yemen in forming the Arab Cooperation Council, an economic alliance intended to compete with the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council. However, simultaneously with the reintegration of Iraq into a regional bloc and Saddam’s emergence as a regional leader, relations between Iraq and the United States worsened. Ostensibly America had supported Saddam during his war with Iran in order to stem the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, but the Irangate affair and the secret delivery of US arms to Iran convinced Saddam that America had backed him as a matter of convenience and would eventually turn against him. After the war with Iran ended the Americans began trying to contain him through withholding economic aid and exposing the brutality of his regime, and Saddam decided that they were out to overthrow him. Saddam responded by attacking American hegemony in the Middle East and asking for the withdrawal of the US fleet from the Gulf. He coupled that with threats to ‘burn half of Israel’ if it resorted to military action against any Arab country. This was a clear reference to the potential use of non-conventional weapons. Along with assurances to Arafat that he had fifty-four army divisions to use in any confrontation with Israel25 and the fact that he was acting against Arafat’s enemy, Assad, in Lebanon, this drew the Palestinian leader into the Iraqi orbit. With hundreds of thousands of Russian immigrants now flooding into Israel and America unable to stop the government’s settlement programme, Arafat was beginning to despair of the success of the dialogue with the USA and desperately wanted to re-establish a foothold in Lebanon. Above all, he believed in Saddam’s military capabilities.
On 20 May 1990, a young Israeli shot and killed seven Palestinians in the occupied territories. Six days later the United States vetoed a UN resolution, backed by fourteen of the fifteen members, calling for an investigation of the conditions in the occupied territories. On 30 May, with the atmosphere which surrounded the start of the dialogue all but destroyed, a hit squad belonging to the Abul Abbas Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), the group responsible for the 1985 Achillo Lauro hijacking, landed on a beach near Tel Aviv with instructions to kill everything in their way. The landing took place at a time when the plight of the people in the occupied territories was the focus of international attention and during a joint hunger strike by Israeli–Palestinian peace activists including Hannan Ashrawi. To Ashrawi, it was a stab in the back.26 For though the attackers failed and all four of them were killed by Israeli security forces, the issue of terrorism and PLO responsibility for it was resurrected and the moral position of the territories’ leadership was eroded.
US Secretary of State Baker gave Arafat a chance to act against the PLF and continue the dialogue. He kept up his pressure on Israel to stop expanding and building settlements and reacted angrily to Shamir’s attempts to improvise obstacles to delay the start of negotiations. On 13 June, Baker reacted to a new set of Israeli pre-conditions by announcing, ‘Our telephone number is 202–456–1414. When you’re serious about peace call us.’ This dramatic gesture failed to move Arafat, who convened the Palestine National Council in Baghdad and set up a committee to investigate the Tel Aviv incident, but failed to act decisively. The PLF had Iraqi backing and Arafat needed Saddam’s support. When over forty members of the US Senate demanded the ending of the dialogue with the PLO, James Baker had no choice but to accede to their demand. After eighteen months of unsuccessful efforts, on 20 June 1990 Baker announced the suspension of US–PLO contacts. Justified or not, the move forced Arafat into the arms of Saddam irrevocably; he had nowhere else to turn.
Despite appearing to have beaten a larger country, and despite the verbal threats against America and Israel which made the Arab masses regard him as a hero, the end of the Iran–Iraq War left Saddam with fundamental problems which he could not solve. Iraq was carrying a huge debt, the people were demanding the fruits of victory, and the oil-rich Arab countries were no longer willing to provide Saddam with financial assistance to protect them from Iran. He had enjoyed US support against Khomeini; now the Americans were seeking to reduce him to size, and publicizing his atrocities against the Kurds and the dangers of his non-conventional weapons programme. Saddam was in deep trouble, but Arafat did not seem to appreciate this; with Abu Jihad gone and Abu Iyad receiving less and less of his attention, Arafat accepted the analyses of his Beiruti cabal, the uneducated lot who could never oppose their leader’s instincts regardless of the importance of any issue.
To Saddam Kuwait, the historical object of Iraqi hate and long claimed by its larger neighbour, represented a possible way out of his predicament. Because he needed Kuwaiti money, either by blackmailing the small country as Iraq had done in the past or by occupying it, he resurrected the historical claim. Foolishly, the Kuwaitis played into his hands by behaving in a manner which turned them into an enemy of Iraq. On their own, or in cooperation with Western powers determined to undermine Saddam’s rising fortunes, Kuwait pumped more oil than it needed,27 which caused the price to collapse, and demanded immediate payment of an $8 billion Iraqi debt. During an Arab summit conference held in Baghdad in May 1990 to address the problem of Russian emigration to Israel, Saddam registered a strong complaint against Kuwait for pumping the surplus oil, stealing oil from the Rumeilah oilfield which ran across both countries, and causing Iraq serious economic problems which left it unable to borrow money on the international market. The accusations were true. On 15 July 1990 the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tarik Aziz, repeated Saddam’s accusations and added that the Kuwaiti oil policy was costing Iraq billions of dollars that the country could not afford; he stated that a $1 per barrel reduction in the price of oil cost Iraq a billion dollars a year. This was followed two days later by a personal warning from Saddam to Arab countries not to harm Iraq. In response several US warships were despatched to the Gulf; then there were more Iraqi threats against Kuwait and a meeting on 25 July between Saddam and the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, in which the latter appeared to give Saddam a green light to continue hounding Kuwait. On 1 August a last-ditch attempt by the Saudis to defuse the crisis failed. Saddam moved forward whatever plans he had and the following day invaded Kuwait.
During the early part of the crisis Arafat assumed the role of mediator, something he always loved but at which he was never successful. The small gathering of Saddam, the Emir of Kuwait, King Hussein of Jordan and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia during the May 1990 Arab summit in Baghdad, which produced the first Iraqi threat to Kuwait, found him appealing to the Kuwaitis to change their policies and accommodate Iraq. When the Kuwaiti Emir gave an ambiguous answer regarding the pumping of oil and insisted that the $8 billion debt be paid immediately, Arafat exploded. Trembling and pointing at the Emir, he screamed, ‘The consequences of this will come to haunt all of us. Won’t you just understand and relent!’28 When the Kuwaitis would not be moved he made trips to Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other countries in an attempt to marshal support for a way out of the crisis. He failed.
Arafat’s pro-Iraqi inclinations became official after the invasion and after Saddam, on 8 August, linked any withdrawal of his forces from Kuwait with an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. Despite the West’s refusal to discuss this linkage, Arafat continued to misjudge the extent of Western determination to eject Iraq from Kuwait unconditionally. The appeal of linkage was too strong; some have claimed that he and King Hussein were behind Saddam’s move.29 Though this is unproven, Arafat nevertheless threw in his lot with Saddam wholeheartedly. On 10 August, after Arafat had tried to form an Arab Good Offices Committee to mediate, but failed, an emergency Arab summit meeting was convened in Cairo. The PLO was one of three entities (twelve Arab countries opposed, and Tunisia boycotted the proceedings) to vote against the use of force on Iraq. With that move, Arafat practically severed relations with the oil-producing countries and Egypt.
Those decisions were Arafat’s alone, taken without convening any of the PLO quasi-parliamentary bodies to which such decisions were usually referred. The chairman of the Palestinian National Fund, Jaweed Al Ghossein, Khalid Al Hassan, Hani Al Hassan and, perhaps more importantly, Abu Iyad, were among those who opposed an open invasion of Kuwait.30 Within the occupied territories there was unanimous condemnation of the invasion by the local leadership, who rightly saw their position of opposing the idea of occupation weakened by Saddam’s military adventure and informed Arafat of their view.31 However, he would not listen to them.
Nor was there any shortage of signs suggesting that a more cautious stance was needed because the Iraqi leader’s decision to invade had been based largely on lack of understanding of the Western position. During a trip by Arafat to Baghdad, Saddam asked the PLO leader whether he believed the Western threats to attack him. When Arafat refused to give a clear answer and referred Saddam to his special adviser, Bassam Abu Sharif, the latter said that they would indeed attack and cited cover stories in Time and Newsweek magazines as evidence that there was nothing to stop them from carrying out their threats. At this point Saddam asked his own advisers why no one had told him that he had been on the covers of America’s leading news weeklies.32 That absolute power had corrupted Saddam absolutely, isolated him and blinded him to facts easily available in high-circulation magazines should have been enough to show Arafat the unsoundness of his thinking, but the PLO leader still refused to act on what was becoming clear to everyone else.
Some time later, on 28 August, Arafat joined King Hussein in proposing an Arab solution to the conflict, which became known as the Hussein Plan. It was stillborn; the USA was leading the UN to adopt more and more resolutions approving the resort to arms, and nobody was interested in personal initiatives. Because Arafat’s assessment of the importance of his own initiatives had always been an inflated one, he failed to see the bigger picture. In that he stood alone, with only Jordan and Yemen following similar policies. He embarked on a breakneck schedule of visits to all Arab and Muslim countries that would receive him – King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, among others, would not grant him an audience. Meanwhile, new UN resolutions were making ever louder calls for an unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, and an avalanche of countries, including Arab ones such as Syria and Egypt, were joining the armies gathering in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries to attack Saddam.
The ramifications of the Arab–Israeli conflict went beyond the idea of linking an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait with an Israeli pull-out from the occupied territories. With Iraq displaying clear signs that it would respond to any attack on its forces by using missiles against Israel, keeping Israel out of the conflict became a problem. An Israeli response to an Iraqi missile attack would upset the international nature of the opposition to Saddam and embarrass the Arab countries which had joined the anti-Saddam coalition, or force them into supporting Saddam against Israel.
In addition, the conflict had a direct effect on the youth of the intifada and the rest of the population of the occupied territories. With the atmosphere there growing tenser by the day and Saddam’s picture and songs in his praise everywhere, there was fear of Palestinian mass protests in the territories spiralling out of control. That did not happen; instead it was an Israeli over-reaction to an everyday stone-throwing incident which came close to scuttling the whole alliance against Saddam and forcing the call for linkage he had made on the international community.33 The Temple Mount (Harram Al Sharif) is a hotly disputed area of Jerusalem which houses Islam’s third holiest shrine, the Mosque of Omar. The mosque backs on to the Wailing Wall, and the Israelis would like to demolish the mosque and erect in its place a new Temple. Because of the closeness of these two holy places there are frequent clashes between Muslim and Israeli youths, and on 8 October 1990 this was probably the catalyst for an Israeli massacre of twenty Palestinians. The following day large-scale rioting broke out and more Palestinians were killed.
The local leadership of the occupied territories, notably Faisal Husseini, tried their utmost to contain the situation. Israel’s willingness to use its armed forces to quell the spread of disturbances worried them, and the spectre of a huge massacre loomed. Arafat reacted differently. The inflamed atmosphere in the territories was matched by bouts of uncontrolled Arafat rhetoric. Throwing all caution to the wind, he sounded more and more like an expression of Saddamism. To him the Gulf Crisis exposed a US–Zionist plan to destroy Iraq and deny the Arabs a military counterweight to Israel. With the clock ticking and hundreds of thousands of troops from the Coalition led by the USA, the UK and Saudi Arabia gathering for the start of a military campaign against Iraq, on 6 January 1991 Arafat made a famous speech and addressed America with the words, ‘Welcome to war.’34 A day later, he declared that the Palestinians would fight ‘side by side with their Iraqi brothers’.
On 16 January 1991, the Coalition partners attacked Iraq with an air offensive of unprecedented ferocity. A day later Abu Iyad, an opponent of the invasion of Kuwait, was assassinated by a gunman from the pro-Iraqi Abu Nidal terrorist group; two Arafat aides who happened to be with him died too. Sadly, the departure of this major Palestinian leader was overshadowed by the atmosphere of war. Arafat appointed the ineffectual Hakkam Balwai to replace Abu Iyad. Coupled with taking over responsibility for Abu Jihad’s functions after his assassination three years earlier, this appointment expanded Arafat’s personal control of the PLO.
The Iraqi aerial defence system proved ineffective. Hundreds of Coalition aircraft roamed the skies unopposed, and inflicted untold damage on the Iraqi forces in Kuwait and within Iraq itself. They unjustifiably bombed power stations, bridges, sewage plants, baby food factories and other civilian and non-strategic targets. On 22 February, after the cream of the Iraqi air force had escaped to Iran, the land offensive began. Three days later, the Iraqis managed to hit Israel with conventional missiles and continued to do so for four days. On 28 February, a ceasefire came into being. The Iraqi army was defeated and Arafat along with it.
Arafat’s behaviour during the Gulf War deserves closer scrutiny. There was considerably more to it than his belief that Saddam’s call for linkage might work and the inflated picture of the capabilities of the Iraqi army promoted by Saddam. At the crux of it was his inability to analyse the international situation and the absence of able advisers who understood the world. He had already distanced himself from knowledgeable academics such as Edward Said, Ibrahim Abu Loghoud and Walid Khalidy, stopped listening to the voices of the PLO old guard (Ghossein, the Al Hassan brothers and Abu Iyad) and become more dependent on the Beirutis. He now relied on Bassam Abu Sharif, who lacked the intellectual competence of Said, Abu Loghoud and Khalidy without possessing the wisdom of the tried original Fatah members. Beyond that, he responded to immediate considerations without thought for the long-term effects of the conflict.
Maintaining his position with the people of the occupied territories was Arafat’s greatest concern during this period. He had already decided in favour of negotiating a peaceful settlement to the Arab–Israeli conflict. That automatically meant that his important constituency was the people of the occupied territories and not the diaspora Palestinians in the refugee camps of the Arab world or, more importantly, those in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. In contrast with most PLO leaders, the simple people of the occupied territories were solidly behind Saddam because Iraqi intransigence and lobbing rockets against Israel provided them with emotional satisfaction. Arafat felt that he had to go along with them or lose them.
This was indeed short-sighted. The leadership of the occupied territories, which represented a threat to his primacy with the people of the West Bank and Gaza, was made up of pro-PLO moderates who were unlikely to forsake their position of moderation and assume the role of extremists in the conflict. Faisal Husseini, Hanan Ashrawi, Sari Nusseibeh35 and Heidar Abdel Shafi understood what was happening and showed no signs of changing their positions. Moreover, the so-called extremists, led by the Islamic movement Hamas, did not provide Iraq with support and openly called for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, albeit conditional.36 His only competitors in his backing for Iraq were the PFLP and DFLP, and he knew better than anyone else that they were weak, riven by divisions and in no position to mount a challenge to his leadership. He ignored all these facts because of an inherent insecurity and consequent wish to undermine others.
To the combination of a frozen peace initiative which was exposing his position, lack of understanding of the international picture (including the results of the faltering USSR’s wish to accommodate America), the hope that the idea of linkage might prevail, and unjustified fears of challenges to his leadership in the occupied territories, Arafat added a small, insignificant element which his mental workings had inflated beyond its natural importance. For some time his relations with the Gulf states, Kuwait in particular, had been deteriorating because they had begun to circumvent the Palestine National Fund and Arafat’s personal control and to offer direct aid to health, education and other institutions in the occupied territories.37 With these same countries providing Islamic groups with financial help, Arafat saw a risk to his continued ability to control the purse strings as a way of protecting his leadership. Iraq was different. Iraq had given up on supporting other groups and forged an alliance with him.
Immediately after the cessation of hostilities, on 6 March, President George Bush’s message to Congress addressed the Arab– Israeli problem in unusually clear terms. ‘The time has come to put an end to the conflict … A comprehensive peace must be grounded in UN resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of territory for peace,’ the President announced. Though he had opposed linking the forcing of Iraq out of Kuwait to any plans to settle the Arab– Israeli conflict, in a United Nations address in October 1990 Bush had made a promise to turn his attention to it.
Bush’s speech to Congress was followed on 12 March by a trip to the Middle East by Secretary of State James Baker. On 8 April, after another Baker trip, a nine-point peace plan was announced by the USA and Israel. Because it called for a regional peace conference and contained a number of preconditions, Arafat rejected it while reaffirming the PLO’s acceptance of an international conference to implement UN resolutions in accordance with the decisions of the November 1988 PNC conference. Other efforts to break the deadlock, including more visits by Baker, followed. On 31 July, at the end of the US–Soviet Summit Conference in Moscow, President Bush and Chairman Gorbachov announced the convening of an international peace conference in October to settle the Middle East conflict. Arafat was left with no option but to join the conference on their terms or be marginalized. The Palestinians were to be represented by leaders from the occupied territories with no ostensible PLO connection, and they were to be part of a Jordanian delegation. Arafat instructed Faisal Husseini and Hannan Ashrawi to start a dialogue with Baker. He accepted the invitation. Oslo beckoned.