Arafat had no choice but to accept the invitation to an international peace conference issued by President Bush and Chairman Gorbachov on terms the PLO had rejected in the past. On 18 October 1991 James Baker and Boris Pankin, his Soviet counterpart, finalized the work of their leaders and announced that the conference would take place on the 30th of that month in Madrid. The four months since the Bush and Gorbachov summit had produced nothing new, however, in the international situation which had prompted the initiative. For an ostracized and relatively powerless Arafat, things had worsened by the day.
Within the PLO, the conclusion of the Gulf War was followed by new calls for better management of finances and an end to dictatorial behaviour by those individuals and groups which had demanded the same in the past. But they were hollow calls which pointed out an inherent dissatisfaction with Arafat’s ways at a time when there was little money to manage and circumstances were compelling him into accepting compromises which even his detractors knew were inevitable. The PFLP and DFLP knew that divisive pressure for reform might lead to the disappearance of the Palestinian presence as represented by the PLO on the international stage, or at the least would weaken the organization further. Khalid Al Hassan and other advocates of reform felt the same. The problems of survival facing the Palestinians were too pressing and came ahead of tackling corruption and Arafat’s style of individual leadership.
The unavailability of money rather than its mismanagement became an immediate issue. The redirection of Gulf oil money from the PLO to Iraq during the nine-year-long Iran–Iraq War had produced a deficit in the PLO budget which from 1985 affected its operations. Continued mismanagement of finances made the problem worse. By the end of the Gulf War Arafat had all but depleted the PLO’s reserves, which, though unknown, were certainly less than the $10 billion alluded to by some writers.
The consequences of Arafat’s policies during the Gulf War turned a financial problem into a crisis. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates ordered a total stoppage of their already reduced subsidies to the PLO. Libya, though it never joined the coalition against Saddam, did the same because Qaddafi disapproved of Arafat’s position. Iraq, broke even before the war, was not exporting oil and had no money to give. Syria was sponsoring Palestinians opposed to Arafat and was determined to replace or weaken him. The money the PLO received from Palestinians in the oil-producing countries, mostly the taxes levied on them by the host countries and remitted to Arafat, also stopped. Even contributions from rich Palestinians slowed to a trickle because most of them were dependent on the oil-producing countries to make money, feared alienating them and had opposed the Arafat–Saddam alliance. (Jaweed Al Ghossein’s opposition towards the war typified the thinking of this group.)
Arafat compared the shortage of money to carrying an unloaded gun. The PLO was there, but was rendered ineffective. Acting completely out of character, Arafat took steps to control the expenditures of the various departments and unwieldy structure he had created. The PLO budget was halved,1 and he stopped dispensing money to please visitors whose loyalty he wanted to buy and titleless favourites in his entourage. The huge financial reallocation programme produced bottlenecks, and employees in the PLO’s offices throughout the world now had to go three months at a time without being paid.2 Some PLO professionals in Tunis started looking for jobs outside the organization. Perhaps more importantly, there was not enough money to support the structure created to maintain the intifada. Families of children imprisoned by the Israelis could no longer depend on receiving the financial support the PLO had provided in the past. Press offices which specialized in gathering information to feed to the foreign press closed down. Some leaders who had attached themselves to the PLO because they received hefty subsidies from Arafat started putting out feelers to Jordan.
Within the occupied territories, the money problem added to the already confused situation created by the threatening political marginalization of Arafat and the PLO. The local leadership was adrift, suffering the consequences of a PLO position which it had opposed without being able to dissociate itself from it. The crypto-PLO UNL – Husseini, Ashrawi, Nusseibeh and others – felt the diminution of their position, but still refused to contemplate the creation of an alternative leadership. As with those who wanted to control Arafat’s wasteful and dictatorial ways, they considered such a move counter-productive. The deteriorating economic situation, a stagnant Israeli economy and the use of fewer Palestinian workers, the absence of PLO money and remittances, and the arrival of tens of thousands of Palestinians who had been ejected from Kuwait and others who had their jobs in Iraq, all made for a dismal picture. To the local leaders, the declining standard of living threatened to produce greater support for the financially sound and better organized Islamic movements. They were right; the Islamists were gaining on the PLO.3 The Islamists were the beneficiaries of Arafat’s political failure and the largesse of the Arab countries which wanted to weaken him, Kuwait in particular.
Withholding financial support from the PLO and providing it to its enemies was just one aspect of Arafat’s isolation within the Arab world. The oil-producing countries boycotted him, and his attempts to organize visits to Saudi Arabia were turned down. Having read the international situation correctly and joined the pro-West coalition against Iraq, the leaders of Syria tried to befriend Jordan and add to his isolation. The support of ostracized Iraq amounted to nothing. Egypt, antagonized by Arafat’s Gulf War policies which included disapproval of Mubarak’s position, viewed him with a measure of malevolence. Jordan, Arafat’s erstwhile partner and supporter of Saddam during the Gulf crisis, saw fit to change direction and King Hussein, forever anxious to make himself available as a replacement for Arafat, did everything to draw closer to Syria and resume his position as the West’s favourite Arab leader. Hussein’s gestures of repentance towards the West were accepted and he was rehabilitated. Even Tunisia was having second thoughts about the presence of the PLO on its soil. Unable to travel and devote himself to using Arab divisions to Palestinian advantage, Arafat settled into a state of deep depression.
Arafat’s Palestinian and Arab problems were in addition to the fatal blow his Gulf War friendship with Saddam had dealt to the chances of resurrecting the suspended dialogue with the United States. He kept trying, but all former intermediaries turned down his entreaties to carry messages to America because the prospects of success were non-existent. (Although without important connections in America, I was one of the people approached by an Arafat adviser to assess the chances of restarting the dialogue.) The new USSR under Gorbachov was confirming its commitment to glasnost and perestroika and showing little interest in promoting the Palestinian cause, and Europe was powerless. Direct negotiations with Israel represented a way out of his predicament. But the pre-Gulf War attempts to open back channels to the Israelis,4 both Labour and Likud, had failed because Israel had seen little reason to accede to the PLO’s requirements, and there was even less reason for the Israelis to accept them at this juncture.
In the late 1980s there had been the Amirov–Nusseibeh, Sharon and Kimche openings with Likud and the Darawsha and Tibi efforts with Labour.5 The two sides’ different perceptions of what needed to be done to achieve peace produced insurmountable difficulties, and these activities were abandoned without leaving a term of reference. Even after the Gulf War’s effects and, according to Edward Said, a PLO anxiousness to meet US–Likud terms for negotiations,6 the Israelis would not accept the PLO as a negotiating partner.
It was, therefore, the closure of all avenues except that of participating in an international peace conference which compelled Arafat to accept the terms he had rejected in the past. To him, the problem became one of reconciling the rules and regulations governing the proposed conference and the American attitude behind it with his wish to manipulate it to guarantee his personal survival and that of the PLO. Whatever policies or positions the PLO had espoused in the past were subordinated to the issue of survival.
The job of getting the Palestinians and Israelis to accept the rules governing their participation in the Madrid Conference fell to US Secretary of State James Baker, the man who had already initiated contacts aimed at assessing the negotiating positions of both sides immediately after the Gulf War. Baker had made five trips to the Middle East before the Bush–Gorbachov Moscow summit. A stubborn, sharp-tongued and highly educated Texan with an iron will and a determination to succeed, he sought to overcome all obstacles to the start of a peace conference by browbeating both sides. The Bush–Gorbachov invitation was based on Baker’s positive assessment of the chances of a conference succeeding; he came to that conclusion well before the Palestinians and Israelis accepted either it or the invitation.
The problem Baker faced with the Palestinians was how to entice them into joining the negotiations as part of a Jordanian delegation – the most the Israelis would accept – without damaging their credibility with their people and the PLO. The original Jerusalem meetings between Baker and Hanan Ashrawi, Faisal Husseini and others (jokingly called Textine for Texas–Palestine) had Arafat’s personal approval. There were many occasions when meetings had to be delayed or interrupted because the Palestinians needed new or clearer instructions from Tunis. Baker knew this, but it did not throw him. He also knew that an independent Palestinian delegation or one separate from the PLO was not possible. Baker thus circumvented the Israelis’ non-acceptance of the PLO by negotiating with Arafat through intermediaries. Arafat reciprocated by bowing to the inevitable; he accepted Baker’s demand for the official PLO to be kept out of the talks.
This strange situation – Ashrawi and Husseini assuming the role of a front for Arafat and the Americans finally abandoning the idea of creating an alternative leadership – deserves examination. Being a woman and a Christian stood in the way of Ashrawi as an alternative to Arafat, but her eloquence, energy and selfless participation in the intifada and international forums had elevated her to the status of a Palestinian heroine. She was a star on the international stage, yet she had never shown any desire for primacy. To her credit, she turned down all offers to replace the PLO and Arafat.7
Husseini, decent, honourable, popular and the bearer of a proud Palestinian name, was a firm believer in peace. His father, a larger-than-life hero whom all Palestinians revered and to whose friendship Arafat had laid claim, had died fighting for Jerusalem in 1948. Faisal himself had received military training with the PLO in Damascus and had organized some of its original cells in the occupied territories, but had turned into a firm believer in peace as the only way out of the conflict. His frequent arrests by the Israelis had enabled him to master Hebrew, and he openly cooperated with peace movements within Israel. Husseini, then and now, was a real alternative to Arafat, but he was too much of a gentleman to do anything which might compromise the overall Palestinian position, and to this must be added his greater attachment to the honour of serving his people than to personal glory. Baker knew that Faisal, like Ashrawi, would not go along with any plans to supplant their leader.
Another potential leader among the Palestinian negotiators in Jerusalem was Sari Nusseibeh, a professor of philosophy at Beir Zeit University and also a descendant of an old Jerusalem family. Nusseibeh never showed any stomach for political combat and was much more at home with books than in public gatherings. His involvement in the negotiations was an act of public service and he did not want to go any further. With Ashrawi, Husseini and Nusseibeh unwilling to entertain a challenge to Arafat and paying him homage, the rest of the leaders of the occupied territories had to follow suit. Whatever thoughts Baker had about what this group should do were subordinated to getting the peace process on track. The Secretary of State directed his energies to affording the Palestinian leadership of the occupied territories the necessary disguise for acceptability to Israel and to pro-Israeli members of Congress.
The commendable attitude of Ashrawi, Husseini, Nusseibeh and the rest of the UNL did not stop Arafat from agitating. The signs of strain were everywhere, but there were no Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad to calm him down. In Tunis, his language became worse and he took to haranguing the closest of aides over the smallest mistake. On one occasion he not only railed against one of his senior advisers but slapped his face, knocked him down and kicked him repeatedly in the presence of visitors.8 His dependence on pills9 increased; he took uppers and downers and his sleeping and working hours became even more erratic. He raged like an animal behind bars, but one with a sharp tongue who never stopped denigrating other Arab leaders.
Because direct telephone links between Jerusalem and Tunis did not exist, he kept in constant touch with the Palestinian negotiating team through reconnections via the United States and Cyprus. The cumbersome nature of the exercise and the hours he kept meant that he often woke them in the early hours to ask them to do things that were not urgent. Undoubtedly he resented their direct contact with Baker10 and reacted to it jealously. He demanded and received the right to approve everything, which included a verbatim record of all discussions with the Secretary of State. On some occasions he fretted over minor differences in their recollections, and on others his instructions to individual delegates bore little resemblance to what he told others. Arafat had previously attempted to separate Husseini and Nusseibeh through getting the latter to head political committees which competed with those of Husseini, so they interpreted these latest moves as an attempt to drive a wedge between them, to weaken them and keep them loyal. There were times when discussions with Baker had to be stopped or delayed because Arafat was not available to give his personal consent to a specific point. Everything he did was tantamount to a declaration, unnecessary in the circumstances, that he was the boss.
But Arafat’s unhelpful attitude did not deter the patient negotiators. Their demands to Baker were a clear articulation of the PLO’s declared policy. They wanted the participants in the negotiations to be identified as Palestinians and accepted as a team who spoke for their people. The issue of Israeli settlements had to be addressed immediately, and new building had to be stopped as a precondition to attending the conference. They insisted that the right of Palestinian self-determination and the issues of a Palestinian government and Jerusalem be included in the agenda of the peace conference. Their refusal to assume any roles without accepting the PLO label showed in the scant attention they paid to concealing or encrypting their communications with Arafat. (Later, after they were made to accept Baker’s terms in September 1991, Ashrawi taxed the Secretary of State’s patience and announced to the world that she had given him a message from Chairman Arafat.)
The Israeli position was simpler. Because the Likud-led Israeli government did not want to attend a peace conference, they created obstacles. Instead of presenting Baker with Israel’s long-term requirements, Shamir and his government concentrated on the technicalities of convening the conference in the hope that they might force the Palestinians to withdraw. The Israelis objected to a separate Palestinian delegation, to any member of the PLO being included in a Palestinian–Jordanian delegation, to the presence in the Palestinian team of anyone from Jerusalem, and to the inclusion in the conference agenda of any reference to self-determination and an independent Palestinian state. Meanwhile their settlement expansion programme was accelerated.
In July 1991, after President Assad of Syria declared his willingness to attend the proposed conference, Shamir announced that Israel would do the same. But this acceptance was too tentative to be other than an empty gesture. Shamir still made no concession on his prohibitive preconditions and the settlement building programme. But unlike former Secretaries of State whose efforts had foundered on the rock of Israeli intransigence, Baker refused to be discouraged. He responded by assuming the role of ‘honest broker’ in terms of satisfying both sides without informing either what he was offering the other. He presented the Palestinians and the Israelis with conflicting letters of assurance which were aimed at satisfying their misgivings.
It was Arafat who saved the day for Baker by accepting the terms of the Secretary of State’s letter of assurance to the Palestinians. It contained promises that the settlement programme would be frozen, that Israel would recognize Palestinian sovereignty over some territory and that Jerusalem was subject to negotiations. When Baker presented his letter to the Palestinian negotiators during his seventh tour of the area in mid-September 1991 the occupied territories team turned it down as unsatisfactory, above all because Baker’s promises were not binding on Israel. But to their amazement, Arafat’s instructions from Tunis contradicted their stance. He told them, albeit with some ambivalence, to concede the points regarding self-determination, the idea of a Palestinian government and a delay in implementing any agreement.11 Two days later, after summoning Ashrawi to Amman to meet Baker, Arafat arrived in the Jordanian capital in person. Without hesitation he ordered the Palestinian delegates to accept the principle of a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation and confirmed his concession regarding self– determination.12
Not a single member of the original negotiating team from the occupied territories agreed with Arafat’s concessions. They felt betrayed and told him so. In a throwback to his old ways in Kuwait, Beirut and elsewhere, he tried to reason with them and to deflect their threats of resignation. Less than honest about his reasons for acceptance, he talked about the overall international situation but said nothing about the threat of PLO bankruptcy. They counter-attacked with solid reasons for refusal – mostly that Israel had not accepted the American promises, the implications for the Palestinians of being part of a Jordanian delegation, Israel’s track record of attaching its own interpretation to every international agreement and its ability to veto any negotiator with PLO connections. At this point Arafat got angry, ranted about them wanting to go their own way and threatened to torpedo the whole negotiations by resigning. The negotiators had no choice but to relent. As usual, by resorting to his Samson-complex threat to bring the whole house down Arafat had got what he wanted.
The terms he accepted precluded the participation of Ashrawi, Husseini and Nusseibeh, considered Jerusalemites by the Israelis, as full delegates to the conference. Because of their rising prominence, their demotion suited him. They were to become members of a Guidance Committee, an advisory group to the actual negotiators. With that behind him, Arafat immediately turned his attention to making a list of delegates without deferring to them, and in the process came close to forcing the resignations of Husseini and Nusseibeh.13 Not only had he promised hundreds of people that he would make them delegates,14 his list included incompetent, uneducated loyalists with no diplomatic experience or knowledge of conditions in the occupied territories. It was only through the stubbornness of Husseini and Nusseibeh that he finally agreed to amend his list, though there were still too many delegates. (It was the fear of resignations and defections which later forced him into appointing Heidar Abdel Shafi, a Gaza doctor and political activist of impeccable credentials and considerable courage, to head the Palestinian negotiating team to Madrid.)
Arafat the compulsive manipulator still needed greater confirmation of his pre-eminence over the original negotiators. In Amman he used the weakest member of the original negotiating team, Saeb Irekat, to propose the signing of a petition of loyalty to the PLO and himself. Irekat, a professor of politics at Al Najjah University in Nablus and an editor of Al Quds newspaper, had been no more than an adjunct to the original negotiating team and had no following on the ground. His suggestion, made to please Arafat, revealed him as the Achilles heel of the negotiating team. The others thought that signing a loyalty decree was like the swearing of an oath by someone who had been telling the truth all along, and turned down the gratuitous gesture without discussion.
After Arafat’s propaganda machine had trumpeted the substantial concessions he had made in Amman as a singular triumph, he turned his attention to convening the Palestine National Council to seek approval for his new policies. The decision of the PNC, which met in Algiers on 27 September, was a foregone conclusion. Mostly Arafat loyalists, the members knew that they could not go back on what he had conceded without damaging the Palestinian cause, and there were many absentees. Furthermore, the people who could have briefed the meeting on the background to the Amman concessions, Ashrawi and Husseini, could not do so openly because of Israeli laws forbidding ‘inside Palestinians’ to belong to the PNC and participate in its debates. Ashrawi and Husseini ended up attending the meeting silently and risking arrest on their return home.
On the surface the final PNC vote was 256 for and 86 against accepting UN resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for attending the conference, which the PLO had already accepted in 1989. In reality it was a vote for cancelling these resolutions, which should have been implemented by the UN without the need for a conference. Though the PNC delegates attached conditions regarding east Jerusalem, settlements, freedom in selecting delegates and the stipulation that autonomy was only a first step towards independence, Arafat accepted the vote of approval without deferring to these conditions. He acted as if he had an open– ended mandate; all the Palestinian objections to attending the conference were ignored.
The only positive outcome of Arafat’s concessions and the way he used the conditional acceptance of the PNC was that it exposed the Israeli position. The Israelis got everything they wanted, particularly the denial of an independent Palestinian presence which was behind Arafat’s 1989 UN address and related moves. They still refused to give a binding answer regarding going to Madrid, and continued to try to stall the convening of the conference. Among other things, they tried to inflate the importance of Ashrawi’s and Husseini’s so-called ‘illegal’ attendance at the PNC conference and considered arresting them upon their return to the occupied territories and utilizing the consequences of such a move. Though he lambasted Ashrawi and Husseini for providing the Israelis with an excuse, Baker refused to accept Shamir’s objections. Finally despairing of Israeli tactics, he prevailed upon President Bush to resort to financial pressure to force Shamir’s hand.
In a series of moves in late September 1991 the Bush Administration, in a rare display of public anger against Israel, announced the withholding of of $10 billion in loan guarantees, most of which the Israelis intended to use to expand settlements. The Americans, aiming to neutralize the issue of settlements and to force Israel to the negotiating table, asked for a 120-day delay to consider the Israeli request for guarantees. It was an unprecedented and courageous step, taken in the full knowledge that the pro-Israeli lobby could not muster the two-thirds Congressional vote needed to over-ride the President’s decision. Shamir was caught in a financial bind. After unsuccessfully lobbying Congress, a mere ten days before the start of the Madrid Conference he agreed to attend on the basis of what Baker had achieved. A few days later the co-sponsor of the conference, the USSR, re-established diplomatic relations with Israel, which had been severed after the 1967 War. The Israelis had run out of excuses.
The start of the Madrid Peace Conference on 30 October was a colossal media event. President Bush, Chairman Gorbachov, Secretary of State Baker, Foreign Minister Pankin, observers from the United Nations, the Arab League, Egypt and the European Union, and 4665 accredited journalists were in attendance. In a move which captured the hearts of hundreds of millions of television viewers throughout the world, the Palestinians arrived impeccably dressed, jubilant and carrying olive branches. Back in the occupied territories people were so hopeful that violence all but died down. The Israelis looked as if they were attending a funeral.
The opening speech at the Royal Palace was delivered by the host, the Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez. He was followed by Bush and Gorbachov, whose words were full of hope. The inaugural Palestinian speech, written by Ashrawi and delivered by Dr Heidar Abdel Shafi, was elegant, balanced and contained no provocation: ‘We wish to directly address the Israeli people, with whom we have had a long history of pain. Let us share hope instead.’ By contrast, Shamir’s speech concentrated on the past to justify Israel’s existence and an unwillingness to compromise, and he totally overlooked Arafat’s concessions. What followed amounted to an undignified spat between Shamir and the Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shra’a, in which each accused the other of terrorism. Shamir, determined to treat the proceedings as a matter of minor import only, returned home after twenty-four hours. The Israeli delegation he left behind was still determined to use anything and everything to prevent things moving forward. Instead of negotiating, they tried to make an issue of Saeb Irekat’s decision to wear the kuffiya emblem of the PLO. The two days in Madrid exposed a Palestinian desire for peace which the Israelis did not share.
When the negotiations were recessed, Baker, in a surprise move, announced that Washington would become the venue for the next stage of the bilateral meetings, scheduled for 4 December. The bilaterals were the one-on-one meetings dealing with issues between Israel and each individual delegation. The regional issues, the multilaterals, mattered less because they depended on the success of the bilaterals. The multilaterals were to be held in capitals all over the world to show the universality of the problem (in fact, over two years they were held in thirty separate cities). The Palestinian delegates viewed the move to Washington with misgivings, but, operating as part of a Jordanian delegation, they were bound by the Jordanian decision to attend. Furthermore, Arafat, forever a believer that America held the key to a settlement, accepted the move and endeared himself to Washington.
For months, meeting followed meeting without producing results. The Palestinian delegates, led by the respectable, well-mannered Abdel Shafi with Husseini acting as back-up, and speaking to the world through the reasoned, cultured voice of Ashrawi, made a good impression by addressing the substantive issues. Still determined to use delaying tactics, the Israelis refused to meet with the Palestinians separately – to them a move tantamount to recognition. They insisted on having the Jordanians in attendance – and intended to speak to them. The two sides would not enter the same room to begin talking, which produced a show which delighted the international press. Journalists called it ‘corridor diplomacy’ and press photographers took pictures of each side standing idly in corridors waiting for the other side to change its mind.
The bilateral peace talks in Washington were deadlocked. With the Americans determined to stay aloof from the day-to-day contacts in order to force both sides to compromise, the Israelis did everything to engineer a Palestinian walk-out. On 2 January 1992, they deported twelve Palestinian activists from the occupied territories and later defied a UN resolution to repatriate them. The Israeli budget for 1992 contained allocations for building settlements. Week-long demonstrations protesting the deportation order led to violence and the death and injury of many Palestinians. The period to March 1992 saw an increase in intifada violence, and things looked so bleak that 117 members of the PNC asked for the negotiations to be suspended. By April and the fifth round of non-meetings in Washington the Palestinian negotiators too were in favour of suspending the talks. Unsurprisingly, this was not the position of Arafat, who repeatedly ordered them back after they threatened to walk out.15
Arafat was in the unenviable position of not wanting the negotiations to fail or succeed. His commitment to a peaceful solution to the conflict was strengthened rather than weakened by the opposition he encountered in making the concessions to Baker. He knew that failure in Washington would be a personal failure which would probably end his leadership. Simultaneously, he was determined to be the architect of any peace accord and, despite all evidence to the contrary, still believed that an agreement achieved through the delegation in Washington would allow Husseini, Ashrawi and the others to wrest the leadership from him and the Tunis PLO.
Shortly before the start of the Madrid Conference, one of Arafat’s advisers arrived in London and succeeded in recruiting Arab journalists to spy on members of the Palestinian delegation on behalf of the Tunis PLO.16 (In May 1997, Ashrawi reacted nonchalantly when I confronted her with this and responded with: ‘There were many spying on us, but we had nothing to hide.’)17 During the talks of January 1992, acting on Arafat’s personal orders the PLO office in Washington delivered $20,000 to a senior delegate whose loyalty to the organization was suspect. He was bribed to act as a counterweight to Abdel Shafi, Husseini and Ashrawi.18 Furthermore, the same adviser who bribed journalists to spy on Husseini and Ashrawi told me that Arafat was expecting Ashrawi to ‘burn out from over-exposure’ and that Tunis was hoping to promote Saeb Irekat as her replacement.
In addition to the crass attempts to weaken the delegates’ position, Tunis undertook more deliberate action in the occupied territories. Special committees were created to support the peace process; they were supposed to take their orders from Tunis instead of from local leaders.19 Arafat spent money on these measures in the middle of the financial squeeze and while keeping Ashrawi and Husseini on a tight leash. Of course, there were dozens of Arafat– appointed advisers to the delegation who, in the words of Ashrawi, ‘had no function but to make long-distance telephone calls and drink coffee’.20 Maintaining them cost a great deal of money.
Meanwhile, Arafat instructed the delegates to hold a firm line. Without a strategy for the negotiations, he could not order them to make concessions he was obviously ready to make himself for fear that they might either resign or accept them and get the credit for reaching an agreement. The issue was not what the Palestinians were ready to offer, but who was going to make the offer and to whom. The resignation of the Shamir government in early February as a result of the defection of two extremist parties which had formerly supported him meant a moderate Labour government might come to power. Rabin had won the leadership of the Labour party and, though he had implemented harsh measures against the intifada, he ran on a platform promising peace. Unlike the knowledgeable people operating in the open in Washington, some of Arafat’s advisers in Tunis saw salvation in contacts with a Labour government.
As if decreed by fate, an accident dramatically exposed the various attitudes towards him of all the parties to the negotiations. On 29 April 1992 Arafat was flying to Tunisia in a small plane. Over the Libyan desert the plane crashed, killing the pilot and two others and injuring Arafat. Unusually, no accusations of conspiracy were forthcoming from the PLO because the plane had been delayed by headwinds and had run out of fuel. For thirteen long hours, no one knew whether Arafat was dead or alive and individuals, groups and governments had a chance to express their views of the man.
It was Arafat’s aide Bassam Abu Sharif who rose to the occasion in Tunis. Though neither an accomplished diplomat nor an educated adviser, Abu Sharif was capable of daring improvisations and anxious to assume responsibility during his boss’s absence. On receiving the news he put through a telephone call for help to former President Jimmy Carter, someone with whom the PLO had established a relationship after he lost his bid for a second term. Carter wasted no time in contacting the White House and the appeal eventually reached the President. The Bush Administration behaved as if Arafat was an irreplaceable asset and acted quickly. It was an American satellite which eventually located the wreckage of the plane and provided information for the successful rescue operation.21
In Sweden for a conference, the distraught Ashrawi was overwhelmed by the number of news organizations asking for a statement. When she finally held a press conference and expressed hope for Arafat’s safety while insisting that the Palestinian cause would survive whatever the outcome, the Arafat loyalists in Tunis accused her of treason and demanded a retraction. There was nothing to retract – she had behaved honourably.22 The reaction of Tunis was a measure of the fear the PLO-in-exile entertained regarding the loyalty of Ashrawi and her fellow delegates to the peace conference. Like Arafat, they thought she was paving the way for a takeover by the indigenous leadership.
In the occupied territories, for thirteen hours life came to a standstill. People did nothing else except talk about the the loss of their leader, the symbol of Palestinian nationhood. They analysed the plane crash in terms of the deadlocked talks in Washington; they thought Arafat was behind the firm stand of the Palestinian delegates. To them, the lack of a successor underscored the void created by the deaths of Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad and the unfitness of the second-tier characters who surrounded Arafat. Most people had a difficult time remembering who made up the new group. Because of the total commitment of Ashrawi, Husseini and the rest of the local leadership to the primacy of Arafat, no one in the territories thought any of these figures could assume his role. The news that he had escaped death was greeted by demonstrations of utter joy.
In the Arab world, most countries were still feuding with Arafat over his stance in the Gulf War. But this did not stop them from viewing the prospect of his disappearance with genuine unease. Whatever Arafat’s faults, Egypt and the moderates saw him as irreplaceable. They feared the end of the negotiations and the emergence of Islamic groups (which they were supporting nevertheless to keep him weak) as a replacement for the PLO. A more immediate prospect – violence and massacres in the occupied territories, and ensuing chaos – also haunted them. They were better off with Arafat than without him. Only Syria viewed Arafat’s possible demise, and the prospect of groups beholden to Syria attaining greater influence on Palestinian affairs, with a measure of equanimity.
The reaction from all corners of the world contained nothing surprising. To most governments and people, Arafat was Mr Palestine; overall, someone guilty of bad behaviour but a known quantity who could be relied on to pursue peace. All news editorials and analysis accepted him indirectly, through pointing out the danger of the growing power of the Islamists, the possibility that the intifada might reignite and turn more violent, and the absence of an heir apparent. In essence, the assessment of European and other countries resembled that of the USA, the delegates to the conference, Palestinians in the occupied territories and outside, and the Arab countries. Only the Israelis had nothing to say. The incident was reported without comment; Arafat was rescued before they had to address themselves to the implications of his absence.
The injured leader who emerged from the crash and was taken to Amman for medical treatment enjoyed hearing recitations of the premature obituaries. Though ordered to rest and await surgery to remove a blood clot on the brain, Arafat did not obey his doctors. Not one to accept even the most justified constraints on his activities, he received hundreds of people who paid him homage and told him of their distress when he was feared lost, and he read suras from the Koran. His hospital suite became a focus for re-confirming the fealty the Palestinians had accorded him over the years, and he loved every minute of it. Later he underwent a successful operation to remove the blood clot.
The crash was the most serious of dozens of close brushes with death. Outside reaction notwithstanding, its most important result was the effect on Arafat’s thinking. His mortality now preoccupied him and he became a man in a hurry. He knew his instructions to the delegates in Washington to insist on a multi-step peace that would guarantee an independent Palestine were not attainable, and was more ready than ever to settle for something less. Not only did the prospect of dying without a tangible achievement haunt him, his post-Gulf War isolation remained. The euphoria generated by the start of the negotiations among the Palestinians had all but vanished and money was running out. The reaffirmation of his primacy which followed the crash gave him a psychological lift but did not solve any of his problems. Finding a way out of his predicament became more pressing than ever before.
Amusingly, on the popular level, the stories told after his rescue differed substantially in feeling from the initial response to the plane crash. Because of lack of movement in the negotiations and increasing signs that he had no intention of abandoning the peace process, rumours of a new Arafat began to proliferate. According to the original story, this new Arafat was a Mossad agent replacing the real one who had died in the crash. An embellishment of this story claimed that the real Arafat was replaced during the surgery in Amman which removed the blood clot on his brain – again with a Mossad agent, who was planted as part of conspiracy between King Hussein and the Israelis. The third variation merely sought to explain Arafat’s later unpopular behaviour by claiming that he had been mentally incapacitated by the crash. It went on to attribute his refusal to take a firm stand against the Israelis to members of his entourage – aides who made decisions in his name in return for cash payments from the Israelis.
There was another unexpected revelation during the period which followed the crash, and it was confirmed a year later. News began filtering out that Arafat had a wife and that she had been involved in efforts to enlist the Americans’ help in finding him. A year later, in Paris, Raymonda Tawil, a Palestinian activist who had suffered Israeli detention in the occupied territories on several occasions, confirmed that Arafat had married her daughter Suha. Thirty years Arafat’s junior and a Christian, Suha was a tall blonde with green eyes who spoke several languages and had acted as Arafat’s assistant. The worldly daughter of a banker, she was fond of telling stories about Arafat’s hot temper, but played no public role until Arafat’s later return to the occupied territories.
Although Suha herself remained silent, the reaction to the marriage was widespread. The Palestinians liked the idea of a first lady and Suha’s Christianity was not an issue, not even with the Islamists. In fact, her refusal to charge into the limelight endowed her with the aura of a traditional Arab wife. Simultaneously this brought an end to the Israelis’ foolish pursuit of rumours regarding Arafat’s homosexuality. Arafat never said a word on the subject of his marriage, and this too endeared him to his countrymen and other Arabs and Muslims who believe ‘the household’ is not a subject for public discussion. He continued as if nothing had happened.
In May 1992, while Arafat was still convalescing in Amman, a meeting took place over lunch in Tel Aviv which was to change the future of the Middle East. The venue was a small Indian restaurant, the protagonists were Terje Rod Larsen of the Norwegian Institute for Applied Social Research (FAFO in its Norwegian acronym) and Yossi Beilin of Israel’s Economic Cooperation Foundation. The Norwegian, involved through FAFO with humanitarian studies in the Middle East, especially conditions in the Gaza Strip, was concerned with improving conditions within the occupied territories. The Israeli was a academic who believed that direct negotiations were the only way out of the state of war between the Arabs and Israelis. In addition, Beilin was one of the rising stars of the Israeli Labour party and was close to Shimon Peres.
Almost in passing, but with the stalemated negotiations in Washington as background, the Norwegian suggested the use of his country as a conduit for direct Palestinian-Israeli contacts. The suggestion fell on receptive ears. Beilin was not only a promoter of direct negotiations but had been involved in several such attempts in the past, including unfruitful ones with the pro-PLO West Bank leader Sari Nusseibeh. He promised to pursue the idea if Labour won the imminent elections. Three days later they did and Rabin was named Prime Minister. Shimon Peres became Foreign Minister, with Beilin as his deputy.
Among the first acts of the new Israeli government was an announcement by Rabin that he would achieve peace with the Palestinians within a year. This was followed by the lifting of the ban on crypto-PLO individuals, in particular Faisal Husseini, as fully fledged delegates in the Washington negotiations. Whether this was aimed at helping the Washington negotiations or promoting Husseini as an alternative leader to Arafat is unknown, but it still represented a change in Israeli policy. Almost simultaneously, Rabin declared that there would no more political settlements aimed at populating the occupied territories with Israelis rather than affording Israel security. America started the process of lifting the freeze on loans to Israel. The two moves increased the atmosphere of apprehension in Tunis. Arafat believed that the lifting of the ban was calculated to promote Husseini as a rival, and that the qualified end to settlement building and freeing of loans meant other settlement activity would continue and thwart all open or covert attempts by him to reach a peaceful solution.
Meanwhile Yossi Beilin was now in a position to act. Though many contacts had been made in the past, the Norwegian offer was attractive because Larsen was highly thought of by all sides, the Palestinians included, and because his wife, Mona Juul, was an assistant to the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Thorvald Stoltenberg. Three months after their initial meeting, in September 1992, Beilin used the presence in Jerusalem of Larsen, his wife and the Norwegian deputy Foreign Minister Jan Egeland to confirm the availability of an official Norwegian ‘channel’ that would supersede the sterility of the Washington negotiations. Egeland was enthusiastic about Norway playing a role in efforts to overcome the Washington impasse. Without Norway in mind, the PLO in Tunis was thinking along similar lines and was using Egypt and the Palestinian Ahmad Tibi to transmit messages to Israel reflecting considerable moderation regarding the thorny issue of Jerusalem.23
The unstructured exchanges between the Norwegians and the Israelis and the secret PLO position came together in early December 1992. The multilateral negotiations making the rounds of the globe were taking place in London. Yossi Beilin was a participant, along with Yair Hirschfeld, an academic junior colleague in his research institute. Hanan Ashrawi was doubling as a delegate to the multilaterals, and Larsen was there as an observer. Ashrawi, aware of Beilin’s negotiations with Nusseibeh, was determined to set up a meeting between him and Ahmad Krei’ (Abu ’Ala), the head of the economic department of the PLO and the director-general of SAMED, the PLO’s commercial arm. Though direct contact with the PLO by Israelis had just been made legal, Beilin was reluctant to take up Ashrawi’s offer. Finally a meeting between Abu ’Ala and Yair Hirschfeld was substituted by Beilin, who used the good offices of Larsen for the purpose.
Like Abu Mazen, the money man from the early days in Qatar, Abu ’Ala had grown close to Arafat after the deaths of Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, and the one-time mathematics teacher in Kuwait represented a new and different breed of Palestinian leadership. He hailed from the village of Abu Dis (the butt of Palestinian jokes, like the Irish in the UK and the Poles in America) east of Jerusalem, and Arafat trusted him because of his financial manipulation of SAMED and subsequent control of money. The elevation of Abu Mazen and Abu ’Ala signalled the transfer to money men of duties which had formerly belonged to Fatah’s original revolutionary group.
The London meeting found the representatives of two sides, Hirschfeld and Abu ’Ala, impressed by each other, lamenting the lack of progress in Washington and agreeing to meet again for general discussions. Hirschfeld, with Beilin and Larsen in the background, suggested Oslo as a venue. The surprised Palestinian accepted. But despite the good beginning, Larsen’s experience in the Middle East had made him weary of attaching too much importance to the behaviour of individuals, regardless of their status. Because Abu ’Ala was an unknown quantity, Larsen visited Tunis to assess Arafat’s attitude first-hand. Discursive and evasive, the PLO chairman finally told the Norwegian what he wanted to hear: he had a role to play similar to the one played by Sweden’s Sten Andersson, who had arranged Arafat’s meeting with Rita Hauser and the American Jewish group.24 Larsen was elated.
On 18 December, while Larsen was busy arranging a follow-up to London, the Rabin government came close to scuttling the Oslo channel and the negotiations in Washington. Over-reacting to the kidnap and murder of an Israeli border guard, Nassim Toledano, by Islamic militants, it deported 413 members of the Islamic movement Hamas to Lebanon. The international outcry which followed Rabin’s iron-fist measure gained momentum when Lebanon refused to accept the deportees. The Hamad members, tired and without proper winter clothes at the onset of an exceptionally cold winter, settled for establishing a camp in no man’s land between Israel and Lebanon, called Marj Al Zuhour, meaning ‘field of roses’. Their plight became the leading international news story of the time.
Arafat wanted to use the deportation to improve the Palestinian diplomatic position, but the delegates in Washington wanted to suspend all negotiations, declared this without deferring to Tunis and confronted Arafat with open rebellion.25 The confrontation had a familiar outcome: after failing to appease them, Arafat stormed out of the meeting and threatened to resign. He did not, but Heidar Abdel Shafi, though he continued as a member of the official delegation, gave up his leadership of the Washington group and took a back seat. In a rare act of defiance the PNC voted for a suspension, and in effect the negotiations were frozen for four months.
While they were in limbo, Arafat followed his own designs without much attention to the fate of the deportees. Abu ’Ala, aware that Arafat was committed to opening direct communications with the new Israeli government, had transmitted the results of his London meeting with Hirschfeld to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), who had become Arafat’s closest adviser. Later Abu Mazen and Abu ’Ala relayed the news to Arafat.26 The PLO chairman welcomed the Norwegian channel, and asked Abu Mazen to oversee it and to keep him informed. To Abu Mazen, a man who had written a thesis on Zionist politics at Moscow University, this opportunity differed from others the PLO had pursued in the past; he suspected that Hirschfeld and Beilin had the backing of Peres.
On 20 January 1993, when the plight of the deportees was the focus of world attention, Palestinian and Israeli delegations arrived in Oslo on their way to the small town of Sarpsborg, a two-hour drive from the Norwegian capital. Yair Hirschfeld was accompanied by a fellow academic, Ron Pundak; Abu ’Ala’s companions were Maher Al Kurd and Hassan Asfour. Because of Abu ’Ala’s poor English, Al Kurd was to act as a translator while Asfour, a member of the Palestine Communist party, had encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict, in particular the history of indirect negotiations and secret contacts.
Larsen, his wife Mona Juul and Egeland were there to greet them at Borregaard Manor, but the latter two withdrew and left Larsen with his five wards. There was no agenda and no attempt by Larsen to improvise one. Wisely, and noting that the Israelis looked like dishevelled men of letters while the Palestinians wore suits and silk ties, Larsen simply arranged for them to meet in the reception room of the old house. Both sides wanted to find out whether this was just another futile exercise or the start of a real alternative to Washington. That the Norwegians viewed the affair with seriousness was made clear by the initial presence of Egeland and the manner in which both sides had been met in Oslo and transported to Sarpsborg.
The Palestinian team’s official status was easier to determine than that of the Israelis. The PLO’s finances no longer allowed for unauthorized forays, so if the Abu ’Ala group had come into this category it would have been remarkable. The credentials of the Israelis, however, were unclear; there was no way to judge whether they had official sanction or represented anybody in the Labour party. Still, the Palestinians could not afford to delay and they proceeded without clarifying this critical point. The Tunis PLO was almost bankrupt27 and desperate to pursue any avenue of direct negotiations. There had been demonstrations in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria because payments to relatives of martyrs had not been made and hospital and social services offices were closing down.
When the two sides faced each other Abu ’Ala launched into a long speech in Arabic, focusing on the need to supersede what was happening, or not happening, in Washington. The speech was significant both for what it said and for what it omitted. The most important concession amounted to a Palestinian acceptance of a phased Israeli withdrawal beginning with the Gaza Strip – something the Israelis had desired for a long time. Peres had suggested it in 1980 and Rabin had expressed it through a wish that Gaza ‘would sink into the sea’.28 Not only was this contrary to the position held by the delegation in Washington on Arafat’s orders, but Abu ’Ala said nothing about the deportees whose fate was occupying Ashrawi, Husseini and Abdel Shafi. Emphasizing that he was in Norway ‘to find solutions’,29 and that his purpose was to arrive at a declaration of principles based on the hitherto rejected Gaza-first option, he came close to leaving the Israelis at a loss for words. Hirschfeld responded politely, then for two days asked for reiterations and clarifications and got them.
To Abu ’Ala, Abu Mazen and Arafat, the question raised by the Sarpsborg meeting was the same as the one which had preceded it: did the Israeli intellectuals represent anybody? Arafat instructed them to clarify this point with Larsen, but the latter, despite the solid contact with Beilin, would not commit himself because he simply did not know. On the Israeli side, the enthusiastic report by Hirschfeld to Beilin produced a different result. Beilin decided that the time had come to brief Shimon Peres on what was happening. After considering the information for two weeks, Peres, emphasizing the Gaza–first option, finally told Prime Minister Itzhaq Rabin of the Oslo channel.
The two Israeli leaders had fought an acrimonious battle for the leadership of the Labour party, and the Foreign Minister had been Israel’s leading dove while the Prime Minister was the hard-line architect of the iron fist policy. The enormity of the Gaza-first offer united them, but there was more to the sceptical Rabin’s decision to accept the Oslo channel. Israeli intelligence reports had informed him that Arafat was running out of money,30 Egypt had told him that the PLO was desperate to negotiate, and he had detected signs that the PLO was softening position through other contacts, in particular intermittent talks between the PLO’s Nabil Sha’ath and Yossi Sarid, his Minister for the Environment.31 Rabin decided the PLO approaches were serious; Oslo became an official function. Meanwhile, Arafat was issuing warnings to the Palestinian delegates in Washington to toe the PLO line or face the consequences.32
By the time the negotiations in Washington resumed in May 1993, after the repatriation of some of the deportees and a conciliatory statement by Rabin that the deportation did not represent a precedent, the Oslo channel had achieved considerable progress. In Washington, Ashrawi, Husseini and Abdel Shafi were determined not to leave anything to chance. They presented a detailed proposal which covered the issues of a timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories in accordance with UN resolutions, the status of Jerusalem, refugees, the spring water that Israel illegally pumped from the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners, and the vital questions of self-determination and Palestinian government. In the United States the Clinton Administration, unlike that of his predecessor George Bush, was unswervingly pro-Israeli. It had decided to take a direct role in the official negotiations and presented its own plan to overcome the impasse – a bridging proposal which reflected the opinions of Israel. Though informed by the Norwegians of the existence of the Oslo channel as early as April, the Clinton Administration viewed it with scepticism because they it had not been told of the changes in the Palestinian position. Secretary of State Warren Christopher decided in favour of shuttle diplomacy.
In February that year, following Stoltenberg’s appointment as UN representative to Bosnia, Johan Jorgen Holst had become Norwegian Foreign Minister. Under his enthusiastic direction the Oslo negotiations had continued and there was initial agreement between the Palestinians and Israelis on a declaration of principles; this was known as the Sarpsborg Document. Early in April, an enthusiastic Arafat had told Egyptian President Husni Mubarak of the existence of the channel and his hopes for its success. When Itzhaq Rabin visited Egypt the same month, Mubarak told him of Arafat’s report. Though apparently so unmoved that he was dismissive, on his return home Rabin approved the inclusion of official government representatives in the Israeli delegation to Oslo. He made this decision against a background of increasing violence in the occupied territories: March and April witnessed a reversion to the early days of intifada.
Uri Savir, the director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and Joel Singer, an international lawyer who had participated in the Camp David negotiations, joined the negotiators in late May. Except for the replacement of Al Kurd, probably as a result of Israeli objections,33 the Palestinian team remained the same. According to Abu Mazen, the Palestinians had decided against the presence of a legal consultant for fear of leaks.34 In reality, Arafat had committed himself to reaching agreement in Oslo at any price; the PLO’s financial problems were affecting his bureaucracy in Tunis and resulting in complaints, defections, paralysis and disintegration. To Arafat, lack of money and Arab support meant that the alternative to reaching an agreement via Oslo was the collapse of the PLO.
From May onwards, the meetings in Norway produced the clearest evidence of how disadvantaged the Palestinians were. The tough and abrasive Singer and Savir subjected Abu ’Ala to something akin to a courtroom interrogation, during which they attacked the Palestinian negotiators in Washington.35 Amazingly, the Palestinian kept his cool and did not defend them. However, having made concessions regarding the major issues of Jerusalem, the refugees and a Palestinian administration, Arafat needed a cosmetic Israeli concession over and above the ceding of Gaza. He instructed Abu ’Ala to ask for the addition of Jericho in any withdrawal agreement. Presented as an Arafat invention when final agreement was reached, this combination had been offered to (and rejected by) the Palestinians by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1977 as part of a multi-step settlement.36 The Israelis accepted the inclusion of Jericho without defining what it meant. The only remaining points of contention between the two sides were subsidiary ones: official confirmation that the delegation represented the PLO, the manning of crossing points between Israel and its neighbours, and the Israeli insistence that the Palestinian National Covenant be amended to eliminate all references which questioned Israel’s right to exist within safe and secure boundaries.
There were hitches and threats of walk-outs by the Palestinians, but they were no more than negotiating ploys. At one point Arafat backtracked and tried to reintroduce Jerusalem into the negotiations, but the Israelis refused to compromise and forced him to confirm his relegation of this issue to final status negotiations. Even Abu ’Ala was surprised. On 10 July, Abu ’Ala returned to another round of negotiations with a letter from Arafat confirming his position as PLO representative.37 Later in July, an Israeli army attack on Lebanon by planes, helicopters and tanks was totally ignored by the PLO negotiators. Nothing beyond what was happening around the Oslo negotiating table seemed to concern them.
Realizing that the PLO was hooked, the Israelis decided to expedite the proceedings and overcome all the remaining obstacles, technicalities and problems of definition. They offered Arafat something he desperately wanted, perhaps the only thing he wanted – the recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. The Israelis suggested that an exchange of letters of mutual recognition should accompany the declaration of principles; the Israeli letter would accept the PLO as representing the Palestinians. Arafat agreed to the offer; it was the survival of the PLO that had been his principal concern. Holst was so astounded by the modest PLO demands that he travelled to Tunis in the company of Larsen to verify their acceptability by Arafat and to overcome the obstacles which remained.
The Oslo Agreement was finalized in Sweden in the early hours of 19 August 1993, nine months after the first meeting in London. Peres, anxious to intercept any possibility of Arafat changing his mind or introducing new elements, had arrived in Stockholm the previous day determined to settle the remaining minor points separating the two sides. He had invited Larsen and the ever-willing Holst to Stockholm and spoke to Arafat on the telephone through the Foreign Minister. The telephone calls lasted well into the morning, but Arafat agreed to everything. This meant mutual recognition by the two parties, limited autonomy for the Palestinians in Gaza and Jericho and the PLO’s early empowerment there, the democratic election of a Council (Palestinian Parliament), and Palestinian control over the non-strategic areas of health, sanitation, education and postal services. All else was to be settled in future negotiations. The Israelis and Norwegians were ecstatic. In Tunis, without giving much thought to the negotiators in Washington, Arafat too celebrated. With him were Abu Mazen, Hassan Asfour, Yasser Abed Rabbo, a defector from the PFLP who had become his spokesman, and a Lebanese friend. After kissing each other on the cheeks three times in the traditional Arab style, all of them started crying.
Summoned to read the agreement in Oslo on 19 August, the Egyptian lawyer Taher Shash, another participant in the Camp David negotiations, found the legal language acceptable, but telephoned the immovable Arafat and told him that it was worse than Camp David.38 The agreement was initialled at the Plaza Hotel in Oslo. Though it still needed approval by the Knesset and the executive committee of the PLO, its acceptance was a foregone conclusion. The Palestinians were to inform the by then inward-looking Russians, and the Israelis would advise the United States. In the case of the Israelis, Peres and the whole Norwegian team flew to Santa Barbara, California, where Secretary of State Christopher was on vacation. Christopher welcomed the agreement, but not without expressing surprise.
A day later, Arafat set up a meeting of the PLO Executive Committee for 3 September. News of the agreement began leaking in many corners of the world. In a final act of humiliation, it was Israeli journalists in Washington who, on 27 August, told Ashrawi, Husseini and Abdel Shafi of what had happened. The Palestinians were preparing themselves for the eleventh round of negotiations. Two months earlier, they had asked Arafat about the existence of a secret channel of negotiations and he had denied it. Bitter and disillusioned, the official Palestinian delegates tendered their resignations.
Although Likud voted against the agreement, the Knesset accepted it by a relatively wide margin: the final vote was 61 in favour and 50 against. Only 13 out of the 18 members of the PLO’s executive committee attended the 3 September meeting. Several members abstained, and the final vote, carried by a majority of one, was questionable. The Palestinian poet laureate Mahmoud Darwish resigned from the executive committee and accused Arafat of embarking on an adventure. The combative PLO leader replied, ‘All my life has been a historical adventure.’39 Darwish was joined by Shafiq Al Hout, the leader of a group totally ignored by the agreement: the four hundred thousand Palestinians in Lebanon. Farouk Qaddoumi, the man in charge of the PLO’s foreign affairs, also announced his opposition and objected that he had been kept in the dark. Much more surprising was Abu Mazen’s reluctance to vote for the agreement – he had viewed Arafat’s latest telephone concessions to Peres with misgivings.40 Despite such antipathy, the margin of one vote was all Arafat needed.
Arafat subsequently had a stormy meeting with Ashrawi, Husseini, Abdel Shafi and Irekat, who were subjected to their leader’s screams of ‘We’re broke, we couldn’t continue!’ The revered Abdel Shafi would not rescind his resignation and returned to Gaza to continue his humanitarian work. Husseini and Ashrawi did relent, but only because of their belief in the need for a united Palestinian front. Ashrawi in particular offered her services to help the PLO in any way she could. Irekat withdrew his resignation and drew closer to Arafat, to be used as a token representative of the Washington delegation to endow the agreement with legitimacy.
To Faisal Husseini, what was achieved in Oslo ‘was not peace, just a declaration aimed at achieving peace’.41 This very important distinction, flagrantly ignored by Arafat, determined the outlook of the whole world towards the Oslo Agreement. Everyone agreed it should be signed in Washington to guarantee it American support, but, because it was not a final peace agreement, the arrangements called for just Peres and Abu Mazen to do the signing on the White House lawn. Arafat the master of drama would not have that: it was his hour and he insisted on being invited.42
To Rabin, Arafat’s exaggeration of the importance of the agreement was an unexpected gift and he too accepted an American invitation to go to Washington. The presence of the two leaders thus elevated an interim accord to a peace agreement. For Israel, this meant they did not have to concede more to achieve real peace. Meanwhile, Arafat was occupied with other things. Hours before the ceremony was due to start another problem emerged similar to the one which had occurred at the UN in 1974. Arafat wanted to appear carrying his gun. When the Americans would not allow it, he disingenuously suggested that he should drop it in view of everyone as a sign of the abandonment of violence. After his offer to give a performance was turned down, he finally agreed to part with it. Later, he held up the proceedings because the Israelis had failed to mention the PLO by name as the representative of the Palestinian people. The Israelis agreed to amend the text and the ceremony followed soon afterwards.
Noting that Arafat was determined to play the occasion for maximum effect, the Americans decided to go along with this. On 13 September 1993, the world held its breath. Thousands of people were in attendance and 400 million others were glued to their television sets to watch the signing of the Declaration of Principles of Interim Self-Government Arrangements. Three former American presidents and several one-time secretaries of state were there, along with dignitaries representing dozens of international organizations. So were numbers of Palestinian and Israeli children, wearing T-shirts extolling peace which had been specially made for the occasion. President Clinton occupied centre stage, flanked by Rabin, Peres, Abu Mazen and Arafat. The documents were signed by Abu Mazen and Peres after Clinton, Rabin and Arafat had made their speeches. Then, as if a reminder were needed, the first sign of what it all really meant jarred the proceedings. With Clinton’s arms spread wide to nudge Arafat and Rabin closer to shake hands, a beaming Arafat extended his hand across Clinton while Rabin hesitated. The brief hesitation of the Israeli leader eventually gave way to a half-hearted handshake, but Arafat pumped his erstwhile enemy’s hand repeatedly while savouring the applause which the event generated.
Except for Middle East specialists, nobody paid much attention to the title of the basic document, which betrayed its limitations, or to the contents of the mutual letters of recognition. Even the word ‘autonomy’, used to describe what would follow the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and an undefined Jericho, escaped analysis. It was a Menachem Begin invention, coined by him during the Camp David negotiations to express his refusal to accept Palestinian independence or a Palestinian state. Everybody was enamoured with the idea of a comprehensive Middle East peace, but to the knowledgeable, and to Palestinians belonging to PFLP, DFLP, Hamas and more than twenty other political groups, the agreement, the speeches accompanying the ceremony and the behaviour of the protagonists revealed a great deal.
Even the memoirs of the moderate Hanan Ashrawi, This Side of Peace, condemned the Arafat speech. Above all, having suffered from American one-sidedness, she found his statement to Clinton, ‘We’re relying on your role, Mr President,’ unpalatable. Her bitter reaction to Arafat’s speech was summed up by ‘We wouldn’t have recognized ourselves in it.’43 To the celebrated Egyptian writer Mohammed Heikal, Arafat looked like a Hollywood actor ‘collecting an Oscar’.44 To Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post, ‘The declaration of principles was defective.’ In a lengthy interview with the author in May 1997, Ashrawi elaborated on her original objections by stating, ‘Peres made fools of them, smiled and got everything. I believe firmly that we could have got more [in Washington].’ Husseini refrained from using the first sentence, but used the very same words about getting more in Washington.
The objections to the agreement within Palestinian ranks were matched by misgivings among the Arabs. King Hussein saw the agreement as something less than he had achieved with Peres in London in 1987 but he still chose to back it. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia too compared it to his 1982 plan, the one Arafat backed and then abandoned, and refused to provide open support. The Egyptians, though they supported the agreement, could not help but compare it to what the Camp David Accord gave the Palestinians. They came to the conclusion that the agreements were the same and that the only difference was the presence of more Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. (By then their numbers had reached over 200,000 in the West Bank and 3500 in Gaza.) Algeria and Iraq were preoccupied with internal problems. As usual, Syria lamented the divisions in Arab ranks, gave the agreement ephemeral support and hoped that it might weaken Arafat.
In terms of how the agreement was reached and the brutal treatment of the official delegation to Washington, there is no better summation than the words of Faisal Husseini. Because of Arafat’s repeated statements describing the Washington delegates as ‘my sons and daughter, my team’, Husseini states, ‘Everybody thought we were PLO except the PLO.’45 While the injury to their psyches and positions mattered, it was the contents of the agreement which most embittered the Palestinian delegates to Washington. To Ashrawi, ‘Whoever initialled the agreement never lived under the occupation [of the occupied territories].’46 Even Abu Mazen’s memoirs, Through Secret Channels, despite deliberately overlooking the efforts of the Washington delegates and the way they were compromised, admit that ‘The Israelis refused any reference to Palestinian national rights.’47
What was celebrated in Washington was a nine– page document with seventeen articles, plus another fourteen pages of annexes and minutes. The letters of recognition had been signed on 10 September, but they too were exchanged in Washington. Arafat’s letter to Rabin was detailed, in most texts more than one page, but Rabin’s to Arafat was a terse four-line paragraph. In his speech, Arafat was explicit and determined to give his own gloss on what was happening: ‘My people are hoping that this agreement which we are signing today marks the beginning of the end …’ Rabin, dealing with the knottiest problem dividing the two sides, stuck to a rigid Israeli line: ‘We have come from Jerusalem, the ancient capital of the Jewish people.’ Although the declaration reflected Israeli demands, the general terms used meant that any final judgement of it depended on how it was interpreted and implemented. Nevertheless, the contents of the letters of recognition were irreversible. In other words, while Israel and the PLO recognized each other, there was nothing in the declaration for the Palestinian people.
The interim agreement contained no solutions or guarantees regarding the size of territory to be ceded the Palestinians, a Palestinian state, the future of the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, water, the Palestinian refugees and Jerusalem. These issues were relegated to the permanent status negotiations, which were to begin after three years of the interim agreement and to be finalized before five years had passed. Even the functions of the interim authority were couched in vague language. To the Palestinian lawyer Burhan Dajani, the basic document and letters of recognition amounted to ‘a complete presentation of Israeli requirements and utter neglect of the rights of the Palestinian people’.48 The Palestinian writer Edward Said assessed that ‘Israel got its tactical and strategic objectives.’49 The objections from Dajani, Said, the important members of the Washington team and other Palestinian moderates made for a long list:
1. There was no coordination and consultation with the Arab governments regarding Oslo. This meant that there would be no Arab support in interpreting and implementing it. Honourably, Husseini had kept the Arab governments informed of developments in Washington.
2. The PLO/Arafat letter of recognition offered the Israelis total cooperation and implied that the intifada would be ended. This too eased the pressure on Israel and left it in a position to attach its own interpretation of the terms of the agreement.
3. Rabin’s letter did not mention the UN resolutions which were supposed to provide an overall framework for the agreement. This deliberate omission provided Israel with the ability to interpret the agreement selectively.
4. The provisions for the election of a Palestine Self-Government (subsequently referred to as Council) reduced Palestinian demands for a state to an assembly representing small towns. The Council was to represent the Palestinian people living in the occupied territories, but there was no mention of the land over which it exercised its jurisdiction.
5. The mention of resolutions 242 and 338 in the basic declaration, weakened by Rabin’s failure to refer to them in his letter of recognition, failed to state what the resolutions meant. Because the resolutions had been subject to different interpretations since 1967, it amounted to nothing.
6. Even issues which did not merit being deferred to a later date, such as the fate of over ten thousand Palestinian prisoners held by the Israelis, were not resolved and there was no timetable for releasing them.
7. The central issue of Jerusalem was deferred to final negotiations.
8. The whole agreement was tantamount to nothing more than recognition of the PLO as a representative of the Palestinian people in future negotiations.
To Shimon Peres, the agreement saved Jerusalem for Israel– Arafat had conceded Jerusalem to get Gaza.50 Moreover, the Israelis had no intention of accepting the principle of free elections as called for by the agreement. On 5 May 1994, former deputy chief of Mossad and political adviser to Prime Ministers Rabin and Golda Meir, Shmueil Toledano, told me, ‘If Hamas wins the Council elections, then we will cancel them.’51 This was an admission that the Israelis would not accept any results except ones which guaranteed the primacy of the PLO and Arafat. Perhaps it was the inclusive statement of the Israeli writer Amos Oz which went to the heart of the matter. He hailed the agreement as ‘The second biggest victory [after the creation of the state of Israel] in the history of Zionism.’52
The world’s media continued to ignore the substance of the agreement and the recognition letters, and concentrated on rehabilitating Arafat the former terrorist. In a short time he became a statesman. Arafat cherished his new international image, while telling the Palestinian people that what he had done was a victory for them. To the annoyance of the Israelis, he declared, ‘Soon Palestinian flags will fly on top of every minaret and church.’ Enemies of the agreement, to Arafat ‘enemies of peace’, were lumped together under the labels of extremists (fundamentalists) and terrorists, even the Christians among them.
On 2 November, less than two months after the signing of the agreement on the White House lawn, the Tunisian authorities traced an unauthorized radio transmission. They arrested a Palestinian, Adnan Yasin, and handed him over to the PLO for interrogation.53 Yasin was an assistant to Hakam Balawi, the man who had succeeded Abu Iyad as PLO security chief. A Mossad agent, Yasin had succeeded in planting bugging devices in the offices of several PLO leaders, including that of the negotiator Abu ’Ala. Though he was the only PLO official to be charged with spying, and the whole affair became the subject of a huge cover-up, little doubt exists that Israel knew all about the conditions under which the PLO was negotiating. The Israelis had negotiated an agreement with an organization which had suffered from lack of Arab support and internal divisions and was threatened by bankruptcy. According to Itzhaq Rabin, the PLO which negotiated Oslo was no more than a shadow of its former self.54