The Oslo Agreement changed the nature of the Arab–Israeli conflict in a fundamental way, but it did not and could not end it. It enhanced the positions of Israel and Arafat and the PLO, mostly in the eyes of the outside world and in terms of their ability to deal with each other, but the euphoria which accompanied the signing was short-lived. Arafat’s concessions cast doubt on whether he would be able to carry his people with him; the most important issues had been relegated to the final status negotiations; and considerable ambiguity surrounded the articles of the Declaration of Principles. What had been achieved was mutual recognition and a commitment to end the conflict through diplomatic means. Everything else depended on Israeli and PLO goodwill.
In personal terms, the recognition of the PLO and of his individual leadership by the world community was a singular political triumph for Arafat. He loved his new status, and it showed in the way he walked and talked – the firm step, the broad smile, and the statesmanlike references to the ‘peace of the brave’ and ‘an end to war and conflict’. He took to speaking slowly and more deliberately, even making frequent references to his poor English. The participants in Oslo became ‘my friends’. He exhibited a sense of confidence, secure in the knowledge that the recognition put an end to the possibility that the PLO as it existed in Tunis might be marginalized and replaced by local leadership.
In Oslo and later, however, Arafat insisted that considerable financial support was required to underwrite the primacy of the PLO and make the agreement work in the face of Palestinian and Arab opposition. Abu ’Ala and Abu Mazen, both businessmen, became more important to his plans: he needed financial advisers more than political ones. He commissioned a number of studies to determine what it would take to enliven the economies of Gaza and the West Bank. Politically, he followed his own counsel; he equated the welfare of the PLO with that of the Palestinian people. Once again, the PLO’s financial situation became a major factor in determining the outcome of negotiations with Israel.
The recognition of the Tunis PLO by the United States and other major powers added to the problems of radical guerrilla groups and the local leaders Ashrawi, Husseini, Nusseibeh and Abdel Shafi. The latter group was against undermining the PLO, and opposing its policies was now a greater impediment to Palestinian ambitions than ever before. Questioning the unpopular terms of the agreement required the creation of a coherent alternative to Arafat, beyond the scope of the ‘too intimidated, divided and suppressed’ moderates.1 Meanwhile, the PFLP, DFLP and smaller groups were divided and bereft of meaningful political and financial support. Only the religious movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad were unaffected by the post-Gulf War political atmosphere which given rise to Oslo. Their position resembled Arafat’s and Fatah’s after the Arab defeat of 1967: by remaining on the sidelines they survived in good enough shape to benefit from a disaster.
The rising fortunes of the Islamists led the PFLP, DFLP and the rest of the rejectionist camp to negotiate with them to form a common front, an effort which eventually culminated in the creation of the Palestinian Forces Alliance. However, this proved to be just another grouping which failed to act as a cohesive unit. Arafat successfully neutralized the moderates at a time when the hard-liners were in no position to mount an effective challenge to his leadership.
Still, Arafat was astute enough to recognize that time was against him. He needed to turn his diplomatic victory on the world stage into something tangible for his people. Promises of financial help had been made, but it would take time for them to materialize and substantial progress in the negotiations was doubtful. This is when the master propagandist concentrated on broadening the base of support for the Oslo Agreement. His efforts to promote it with his people and the rest of the Arabs resulted in a reversal of his traditional role.
Before Oslo it was moderate Palestinians and pro-West Arab governments who had tried to ‘sell’ peace plans to Arafat. After Oslo, he was doing the selling. In the 1980s he had turned down King Hussein’s plan for a joint Jordanian–Palestinian position, acceptance of UN resolutions and direct overtures to Israel. He had rejected the Fahd Plan (even though he had initiated it) and vetoed the participation in negotiations with the United States by the leadership of the occupied territories. Oslo left him with less than what these efforts had promised, but Oslo was his alone and it cast him in the role of peacemaker.
Arafat’s first concern was to gain greater Palestinian support for Oslo. Although the agreement had originally been rejected by guerrilla groups, Hamas, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, most of the leadership of the occupied territories and Palestinian intellectuals, this did not affect the reception it received from the exhausted, impoverished people of the occupied territories. Initially, they accepted Arafat’s word that peace and economic wellbeing were on the way. They looked forward to freedom and the emergence of a Palestinian state. But this enthusiasm was short-lived and their joy soon gave way to doubt.
The Israelis continued to follow an iron fist policy, and the number of Palestinians killed and wounded after the agreement did not decrease. Arafat was unable to respond without endangering the accord, even when the Israelis killed the popular Fatah leader Ahmad Abu Rish (no relation to the author) on 28 November 1993. Of course, the rejectionists used this inauspicious start to effect. Coupled with the absence of tangible benefits from the agreement, the Israelis’ behaviour altered the perception of Oslo on street level. The sudden change in the situation increased support for the Islamists and they won the elections to the student council of Bir Zeit University, the largest Palestinian institution of higher education, in December 1993.
Because of the diminishing support for the agreement, Arafat steadfastly refused to convene the Palestine National Council to legitimize what he had done. Debating Oslo and what followed it was the last thing he wanted. Instead he invited dozens of Palestinian businessmen, landowners, journalists and ‘loyal’ leaders from the occupied territories to visit him in Tunis to ‘discuss’ the agreement. He was more comfortable relying on his personal ability to convert individuals than depending on the support of groups, organizations or anything which represented a structure. Even dealing with non-governmental charity organizations made him uneasy and he ignored them.
Arafat offered his visitors variations on the same refrain: ‘For every 100 reasons against the Declaration of Principles, I can give you 300 in support.’2 Then he would launch into a discourse about the PLO’s financial problems, ‘the perfidy of our Arab brothers’ and how fighting Israel was tantamount to fighting its ally, the United States, and hence unrealistic. He always concluded his discourse by making personal appeals to the listeners which recalled elements peculiar to them and their families; he made them feel as if everything depended on them. Some accepted his reasons, out of belief or because they saw no alternative to his leadership. But it was the well-known lawyer Mousa Mazzawi, a representative of educated Palestinians, who dealt a damaging blow to Arafat’s salesmanship efforts. When summoned to Tunis to endorse the agreement and accord it a measure of legal acceptance, ‘Brother Mazzawi’ steadfastly refused to accommodate him.3 Arafat’s efforts were inconclusive.
The second problem facing him was the position of King Hussein of Jordan. Arafat’s acceptance of less than what Hussein had secured in his 1987 London Accord with Shimon Peres threatened to cancel the reasons for Hussein’s rejection by the Palestinians and as a replacement for Arafat. Arafat went to Jordan several times to explain the agreement to ‘my brother King Hussein’, and embraced the King more warmly than usual. He made several references to an eventual confederation between Jordan and the Palestinian entity after Oslo had been implemented, saying that ‘the fate of Palestine and Jordan is one and the same’. Familiar with Arafat’s promises of convenience, Hussein listened without committing himself. The King remained a potential competitor.
Only Egypt saw in the agreement a fulfilment of Camp David and a vindication of Sadat’s policies which had been adopted by Mubarak. After rebuffing the initial US efforts to get them to back the agreement, the rest of the Arabs felt no pressure to adopt a clear position and took shelter in inactivity. Arafat was less concerned with their political support than with a resumption of their financial backing – at least in getting them to release tax money collected from Palestinians working in their countries. Some of them received Abu Mazen but refused to help, and all the oil-producing countries rejected Arafat’s attempts to visit them. In January 1994 he finally managed to visit King Fahd, only to hear the latter condemn PLO corruption and insist that Saudi aid, a mere $30 million, be channelled through the World Bank. Because the promised financial help from the rest of the world was dependent on progress in implementing the Oslo Agreement and this was taking longer than expected, the refusal of the Arab countries to rescue Arafat was particularly devastating.
The dwindling prospects of securing broad support from the Palestinians, forging an alliance with King Hussein and receiving financial help from the rest of the Arabs forced Arafat into greater reliance on the agreement itself and the political and financial support that the West, the United States in particular, was willing to put behind it. Because Western support was conditional on Israeli acceptance of the follow-up agreements to clarify Oslo and turn it into an actual plan, Arafat became dependent on his partnership with Israel to overcome the results of Palestinian and Arab opposition. An economic conference convened on 1 October 1993 to assess the needs of the occupied territories resulted in promises of $2 billion by twenty-eight donor countries, considerably less than the $8 billion Arafat had requested. Furthermore, this money was earmarked for specific projects with the donors supervising its use. These restrictions placed the promised aid money beyond Arafat’s reach and limited his ability to use it to promote himself and the PLO. On 17 November that year, Abu ’Ala openly admitted that the PLO was bankrupt.4
The financial crisis became a vicious cycle: the worse it got, the greater was Arafat’s need to make Oslo work. Making it work meant enticing the Israelis to move faster, and enticing the Israelis to move faster depended on making more concessions. Arafat had no time to haggle, bargain or conduct lengthy negotiations. Implementing Oslo in accordance with an Israeli interpretation of its vague terms became his only lifeline. To Rabin, the reluctant participant in the peace negotiations, Arafat’s problems represented an opportunity to give the agreement the harshest interpretation possible. The absence of Israeli goodwill was total, and very short-sighted.
The first point for negotiations between the two sides was the withdrawal by Israeli forces from Gaza and Jericho, scheduled to begin on 13 December 1993, exactly three months after the signing of the agreement. This would have allowed direct and controlled international financial aid to start filtering through to the new Palestinian Authority. Knowing this, Rabin decided to play for time. He repeatedly told the press that there was nothing sacrosanct about the 13 December date. Though not given to outbursts, he never hid his dislike of Arafat and eventually explained the reason for the delay in negative terms: ‘If Arafat is sweating, let him sweat.’5
Rabin was determined to undermine Arafat and his promises of a ‘Palestinian state, praying in Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and creating a democracy’. The Israeli leader’s early rejection of a Palestinian state was followed by his government’s aim to reduce the Palestinian presence in the occupied territories.6 The verbal blows to Arafat’s hopes were accompanied by uncompromising Israeli activities on the ground. Less than two weeks after the Washington ceremony, on 26 September, the Israelis responded to small disturbances in the Gaza Strip by demolishing seventeen houses, making sixteen arrests and carrying out two summary executions.7 Nothing had changed.
Meanwhile, Rabin’s adherence to the ban on the building of ‘political settlements’ did not stop him from approving the ‘thickening’ of existing ones – increasing their population by sponsoring more settlers. Rabin’s actions amounted to a rejection of Arafat’s attempt to form a common front with Israel and thwarted all steps to make Oslo a first step in a process which would culminate in Palestinian statehood, Arafat’s declared goal. The difference between Arafat’s and Rabin’s interpretations of Oslo was starkly revealed during their October 1993 meeting in Cairo.
The ‘summit meeting’ to overcome the deadlock between the negotiation teams resolved none of the outstanding issues. The negotiators were instructed to redouble their efforts. Arafat had already appointed Tunis loyalist Nabil Sha’ath, a money man and unqualified diplomat who had acted as his personal overseer at the Washington negotiations, to head the Palestinian team. His Israeli counterpart was General Amnon Shahak, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces and a man with considerable knowledge of the territory under discussion. The elevation of Sha’ath amounted to a demotion for the representatives of the intifada and their replacement by ‘outsiders’, the Beirutis who had run the Tunis PLO.
Ashrawi, Husseini, Shafi and others within the occupied territories continued to plead for PLO reform, for an end to Arafat’s inefficient personal style of management and for greater participation in the negotiations by people who knew Gaza and the West Bank, but it was to no avail. Arafat would not listen to them, resented their criticism and depended more and more on Sha’ath, Abu Mazen, Abu ’Ala and the old Tunis bureaucracy, most of whose members had little idea of conditions within the West Bank and Gaza. Even members of the technical committees who were negotiating the various aspects of Oslo came from Tunis. The only requirement for being appointed to a technical committee was closeness to Arafat.8 The Beiruti outsiders had an advantage.
At that point, Rabin’s idea of making Arafat sweat took the form of a deliberate attempt to humiliate him. The Israelis refused to accept the term ‘President’ to describe Arafat’s position.9 This was followed by a refusal to allow the putative Palestinian Authority to issue passports and stamps (some were supposed to carry Arafat’s likeness on them). Soon afterwards, during November and December 1993, the Israeli negotiators insisted on retaining control of the entry points to Gaza and Jericho.10 On this Rabin was his usual uncompromising, brusque self: ‘We will not give you control of our borders.’11 Later Rabin insisted on using the word ‘deployment’ instead of ‘withdrawal’ to describe the planned Israeli pull– out from Jericho and Gaza. ‘Deployment’ signalled Israel’s determination to retain the right to remilitarize these areas in the future. Meanwhile, the Israelis released a small number of Palestinian prisoners and showed little inclination to do anything about the rest. The Palestinian negotiators were offered nothing.
In February 1994, Peres and Arafat signed the first Cairo Agreement which incorporated Israel’s security demands, Israel’s right to veto Palestinian returnees to Gaza and Jericho, and a new stricture: Arafat accepted Israel’s decision to rename settlements and call them blocs.12 It was a new concession which ran counter to Arafat’s promises to his people that the settlements would eventually be dismantled. Taking into account also Israel’s control of water sources, Rabin’s uncompromising position on Jerusalem, the delays in the release of Palestinian prisoners, a new decision to build $600 million worth of roads to integrate the settlements into pre–1967 Israel and a determination to speak of the Palestinians as aggressors, the Israelis were succeeding beyond their most optimistic expectations. Arafat’s concessions during the period September 1993 to February 1994 confirmed the worst fears of those who considered Oslo an instrument of total surrender, described by Edward Said as a Palestinian Versailles.13 It certainly made credible the claim that Oslo and what followed it ‘exposed Israeli strengths and Palestinian weaknesses’.14 Yet, by approving these concessions, Arafat and the Tunis PLO were confirmed as the protectors of the agreement.
The small, isolated acts of violence during the negotations in Taba and Cairo (the venue changed back and forth) were ignored, but the Hebron massacre of 25 February 1994 came close to ending the whole peace effort. Wearing an Israeli army uniform an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, sneaked into Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in the early hours for the sole purpose of killing Arabs performing the dawn (fajr) prayer during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Using an Ml6 automatic rifle and taking advantage of the deliberate or accidental inattention of Israeli guards, he kept reloading and firing his weapon until twenty-nine worshippers were dead and over three hundred lay wounded. It was a supreme act of religious pornography – a religious fanatic murdering others in the midst of their religious observances.
Goldstein was a thirty-five-year-old transplanted New Yorker, a medical doctor, the type of Jew who moved to Israel for religious reasons rather than through homelessness or economic need. He was a resident of Kiryat Arba, a small settlement outside Hebron which had been set up immediately after the 1967 War. A member of the Kahane Chai (Kahane Lives) movement (followers of a certain Rabbi Kahane, who had advocated cleansing the land of greater Israel of all Arabs), Goldstein objected to the use of the mosque by Muslims. It contains the Tomb of the Patriarchs, as well as the tombs of Abraham, Jacob and Rebecca, and had been shared as a place of worship between Palestinians and Israelis on an unfair basis: there were 120,000 Muslims and fewer than 3000 Jews, yet they got equal time and space (in fact, time and again the space allocated to Muslims was reduced). Goldstein was a suicide assassin who was killed by enraged Muslim worshippers, but his act of lunacy contained an unmistakable message. In addition to denying Palestinians protection against the actions of the Israeli army, the Oslo agreement had overlooked the danger of extremist settlers. The settlers, armed by the Israeli government as they were and still are, became a real source of physical danger to the Palestinians.
The Israeli government reacted to the carnage in Hebron by placing the 120,000 Arabs of the town under curfew, and Israeli patrols operated under shoot-to-kill orders to contain the riots which broke out everywhere. But amazingly Kiryat Arba, the home of the fanatical followers of Kahane and the unrepentant friends of the assassin, was not placed under curfew.15 Member after member of Kahane Chai told television reporters of their approval of Goldstein’s action and their desire to eliminate the Arabs of Hebron – or at least to evict them. Though Kahane Chai had been banned because it advocated violence, the many incitements to murder Arabs went unpunished. One thousand people walked in Goldstein’s funeral procession and his tomb soon became a place of pilgrimage.16 The Israeli government expressed its regrets.
In fact, the Rabin government did not consent to the creation of a special commission to investigate the incident until international pressure forced it to do so.17 The Shamgar Commission, named after the judge who presided over it, was empowered to investigate collusion by other Kiryat Arba residents, the alleged involvement of soldiers in the incident and the methods of Kahane Chai. This perfunctory move aside, Rabin saw Arafat as the one person capable of defusing the situation. He tried to reach Arafat by phone ‘to discuss the problem’. But with Palestinian demonstrators throughout the occupied territories burning Arafat’s effigy in protest for the first time in history, the PLO leader responded with a dramatic, ‘I will not speak to him, not while my people are being massacred.’
This time the usual Arafat dramatics in front of the television cameras did not solve his problem. Shaking with anger and tearful over ‘the genocide being committed against the Palestinian people’, he asked for United Nations protection for the Palestinians of the occupied territories. But he would not suspend the negotiations, cast doubt on their future or condemn the Rabin government. Jordan, Lebanon and Syria suspended their negotiations with Israel immediately after the Hebron massacre, but Arafat would not act. On 1 March the PLO’s executive committee over-rode Arafat’s objections and voted to suspend the negotiations.18 Even Abu Mazen voted for suspension. It was a major defeat for Arafat which was accompanied by an improvement in the fortunes of his opponents, above all the Islamists. Arafat repeated his belief in ‘the true implementation of the peace process’ as if it were a sura from the Koran.
That month the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 904, which condemned the incident and called for the stationing of 160 unarmed UN observers in Hebron. Though the United States abstained and exposed Arafat’s untenable position further, his belief in Washington’s importance stopped him from criticizing the Clinton Administration. He was still determined to resume the negotiations and used the UN vote to do so on 18 March, without reconvening the PLO’s executive council. Soon afterwards he had a telephone conversation with the Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, in which he accepted Israel’s condolences. Even the Shamgar Commission’s suspect report– one with which the PLO officially disagreed, which claimed that Goldstein had acted alone, and which absolved members of the Israeli army who had failed to stop him before and during the shooting – elicited no response from Arafat. Members of Kahane Chai celebrated Shamgar’s findings.
Ironically, it was the hard-liner Rabin who underscored the unsound nature of the Israeli presence in Hebron and the rest of the occupied territories. In March 1994, following the killing of five more Palestinians during riots, he spoke at a Labour party conference and openly admitted that 120,000 Arabs were being ‘held hostage by 400 Jews’. In a later speech to the Knesset, the Israeli leader released his country’s official statistics relating to the intifada. According to these, 2156 Palestinians had died, 25,000 had been wounded and a staggering 120,000–140,000 (nearly 8 per cent of the population) had been detained or arrested. But Rabin used the figures to make a statement to defend his policies and not to help Arafat. He was demonstrating the unfeasibility of keeping a whole people enslaved, to justify his ratification of the peace agreement and to gain approval for the use of Arafat to solve the problem.
This coincided with Palestinian and Arab statements expressing disgust with Arafat’s subservient ways. The rejectionists, Islamists and Syria issued denunciations, but this time they were joined by Arab moderates. On 28 March the Egyptian magazine Rose Al Yussuf carried a cartoon depicting the boots of an Israeli soldier covered with Palestinian kisses. Arab anger was so intense that the Egyptian government allowed students at Cairo University to demonstrate against Israel, Oslo and Arafat. Inside the occupied territories, the old story of a post-crash Arafat lookalike working for Mossad gained renewed currency.
The emergence of an Israeli lunatic fringe determined to stop its country’s government from meeting Arafat’s ever-diminishing demands was followed by confirmation of Palestinian anger. On 6 April an Islamic bomber blew up an Israeli bus near the town of Afula. Eight people were killed and fifty-two wounded. A week later, on the 13th, the Islamists struck in Tel Aviv and this time there were six killed and thirty wounded. As a measure of Palestinian frustration, the people who had carried out the suicide bombings were spoken of as heroes. But Arafat condemned them outright. As he inched towards signing the second Cairo Agreement, the one which gave Oslo the worst possible interpretation, he was already isolated from mainstream Palestinian thinking. Even the young militant members of Fatah, the Fatah Hawks, were reaching out to Islamic Hamas to form a united front. Arafat’s only attempt to remedy the situation consisted of building bridges with the old elite of the territories, along with other hated groups including collaborationists. The people behind the intifada, the people who made world recognition of the PLO possible, were totally ignored by him.
On 29 April Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Paris signed the Protocol on Economic Cooperation, an agreement governing the economic relations between the two sides during the interim period. An extension of the Declaration of Principles, it linked the economy of any future Palestinian entity to Israel and made it dependent on and subservient to Israeli economic policy. The Palestinian Interim Authority was to follow Israeli rules and regulations governing imports and import duties. The Authority was to impose a value added tax similar to the one in Israel (this made products from the West Bank and Gaza uncompetitive in other Arab countries which had no such tax). The Authority was denied the right to reduce the price of fuel and other commodities and had to impose obligatory car insurance similar to that in Israel. The two sides were to cooperate in the fields of general economic issues, technology, the sciences and business relations between different elements of their communities. Furthermore, the protocol allowed Israel to suspend at will the use of Palestinian labour, the source of 25 per cent of the gross national product of the occupied territories.
All other issues, including consumption, production, investment and external trade, were left to the decisions of the Joint Economic Committee. Because Israel had a veto on the decisions of this committee and because the PNA was more dependent on a strong Israel than vice versa, the whole protocol amounted to an attempt to integrate the economy of the territories into that of Israel. Palestinian economists from the territories, Professor Jad Itzhaq in particular,19 objected to the agreement, but their opinions were ignored. Having conceded so much on the political front, Arafat was not about to make Israeli economic hegemony an issue.
Five months behind schedule and seven months after the start of the negotiations to detail Oslo, the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators finalized the Cairo Agreement on 4 May 1994. It covered the assumption by the Palestinian Authority of ‘responsibility’ for Jericho and Gaza and paved the way for further withdrawal or deployment agreements. But, typically, Arafat used the public ceremonies to endow what was happening with drama, and used this drama for personal gain.
The major point of contention between the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators had been the size of Jericho – whether it was a town, district or region. Under Jordan, Jericho had been a major district encompassing 360 square kilometres. But the Israelis would not accept this and used a stricter definition which limited it to 54 square kilometres. Bereft of bargaining power, the Palestinian team under Nabil Sha’ath, unlike other Palestinian negotiators an unqualified group who never questioned their masters’ instructions, finally accepted the Israeli definition.
Arafat appeared at the signing ceremony in Cairo worried about a Palestinian backlash. Although the 2500 guests included the US Secretary of State Warren Christopher and the Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozeyrev, and the occasion was held under the auspices of President Mubarak, most of the Palestinians and other Arabs who had been invited refused to attend. Faisal Husseini stayed in Jerusalem and wired Arafat with a pointed public plea, ‘Mr Chairman, please do not sign this agreement.’20 The Arab reaction to the agreement was similar: the Secretary General of the Arab League, Ismat Abdel Maguid, and various Arab ambassadors boycotted the ceremonies. Unable to respond to Husseini, the Arab boycott, or to twenty-five notables from the occupied territories who had also petitioned him not to sign, Arafat resorted to the theatrical. It was his way of assuming the mantle of a tough negotiator.
When the time came, Arafat signed the lengthy document and attachments and handed back copies to the Israeli side. But to everyone’s amazement he had not signed the map showing the size of Jericho. After determining that the omission was deliberate, Mubarak, the host, became livid. His and Egypt’s dignity at stake, he railed at Arafat in front of dozens of television cameras. When Arafat pretended to stomp out, Mubarak followed him to a corner and, wagging an angry index finger, ordered him back. Arafat signed the map while protesting its dissimilarity to the one he had been shown before – though without producing a copy of the one he liked – and made remarks about not trusting the Israelis. The only result of his last-minute histrionics was the embarrassment they caused. What often worked with local people failed in front of an international audience.
I was visiting the West Bank and Gaza at the time, and I can testify that not a single Palestinian, be they politicians, academics or ordinary citizens, mistook his performance for toughness or saw anything in it beyond a piece of play-acting. They knew that he had already accepted whatever fiefdom the Israelis had ceded to him and that the all-important issue of sovereignty had been progressively eroded. On a visit to South Africa a week after the signing, Arafat called for a jihad – a holy war – to liberate Jerusalem. The call fell on deaf Palestinian, Arab and Muslim ears. Nobody was listening to him any more. The Israelis sent him a message asking for clarification. No answer came back.
In addition to defining Gaza and Jericho, the agreement contained twelve further articles. These covered a schedule of redeployment of Israeli forces; transfer of authority; structure, jurisdiction, responsibility and legislative powers of the Palestinian Authority; arrangements for security and economic relations between Israel and the Authority; and the creation of a liaison committee to oversee the implementation of the terms of the agreement. The articles regarding security and the function of the Palestinian police occupied a whole page, while the one about human rights was a three-line exercise in vagueness. In essence, the articles dealt with how the Authority was to function and not with what it was. What it was had been determined by Arafat’s concessions, which left Israel in charge of water, entry points, settlements and Jerusalem and gave it the right to veto every single function of the new Authority.
The Palestinians were aghast, most of them angry to the point of being unintelligible. But it was Holocaust survivor and human rights activist Dr Israel Shahak who delivered one of the final judgements: ‘The agreement means that Arafat is now annexed by the American–Israeli security system. In return he will get nothing except permission to be a local dictator.’21 Meron Benvenisiti of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem said, ‘It was an Israeli victory and an abject Palestinian defeat.’22 The Israeli writer Amos Oz, as determined as ever to sugarcoat Palestinian losses by according the people behind them statesmanship, spoke of the PLO signatories being ‘the most moderate likely [Palestinian] leadership’.23
The gradual handover of Gaza and Jericho began on 13 May. Shahak was right – the retreating Israelis were replaced by elements of Arafat’s three sources of power: nine thousand security men who had been living in Arab countries since the debacle of Lebanon, the Tunis bureaucracy, and a small group of money men and notables who owed their loyalty to the chief and not to the Palestinian cause. To the people of the occupied territories the newcomers were an alien governing group, many of whom spoke with Lebanese, Syrian or other accents. Historically they resembled the Mamluks who ruled Egypt between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries – a privileged caste of mercenaries.
On 1 July 1994, Yasser Arafat returned to the occupied territories for the first time in twenty-seven years. Hundreds of thousands turned out to greet him, and there were unmistakable scenes of jubilation. But it was not for love of the agreements he had signed – it was a celebration of the only semblance of a Palestinian government in modern times. Hope was in short supply, and anything that contained the smallest grain of it would have been welcomed. After kissing Palestinian soil, Arafat played on the theme of hope while, unexpectedly, sounding a note of reality.
To Arafat what was happening was ‘a first step’, and he pleased the Gaza crowd out to greet him by promising to secure the release of Sheik Yassin, the Hamas leader who had been detained by the Israelis along with three hundred followers since 1989. But he admitted: ‘There will be hardship, there will be hunger and, as always, Palestinians must rely on no one but themselves.’ This time his call for Palestinian self-reliance had a hollow ring to it. The agreement which brought him back to Gaza showed that his policies of Palestinian self-reliance had failed to deliver what the Palestinian people wanted.
Arafat occupied the former British governor’s house in the town of Gaza, Mansion House, turned one floor into modest living quarters for himself and his wife, who arrived later, and proceeded to function as the president of the council of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). The council had not been elected, so this amounted to a granting of absolute power to the PLO pending the holding of elections. Not only did the chairman of the PLO become the president of the PNA, he was also its prime minister, the commander of the armed forces and president of the legislative council, and had the power to appoint, promote and fire members of the judiciary. The executive, legislative and judicial powers of the PNA were thus vested in the person of Yasser Arafat or subordinated to PLO bodies over which he presided. It amounted to installing a one-man, one-party system.
Yet even with such a system of government, Arafat was supposed to exercise the powers vested in the party through adhering to the articles of the basic law, something akin to a provisional constitution, a framework for self-government. Published by the PLO in three different versions late in July 1994, the articles of the law were to guide the PLO and Arafat during the transitional period. (Whether transitional referred to the period before the emergence of a state or pending elections was not totally clarified.) In fact, the whole exercise of publishing the basic law was just another attempt to placate the people. Though it promised adherence to democracy and United Nations human rights articles, the law was flawed in two major areas. It addressed itself to people and not territory – not a word about the areas covered by it – and the Israelis extended their control over the PNA by allocating themselves the right of veto over its articles.
Settlements within the areas evacuated by the Israelis were not covered by the law, nor were the roads leading to them and whatever occurred in them. The Israeli–Palestinian Legislative Sub-Committee was the interpreter of the articles of the basic law, and this automatically gave Israel the right to approve or disapprove the ways in which it was applied. The only functions over which the PNA exercised authority without having to defer to Israel were those of education, tourism, social welfare, health and direct taxation. In the case of taxation, some of the money was to be remitted to Israel to defray occupation costs. Israel was to retain control over thirty-three services until after PNA elections or final status negotiations. What was being transferred was, in effect, what a state delegates to a municipality and not what one state might cede to another. This is when the accusation that Arafat was creating nothing more than a small town government became popular. The words of the human rights activist Hussein Daif Allah summed up what was happening: ‘Even registration of cars remained in Israeli hands.’24
Arafat proceeded to create a structure for the PNA in line with his traditional thinking. The three areas of greatest concern to him were to form a PNA executive (essentially a cabinet), to establish a security apparatus and to control all aspects of propaganda. This was an opportunity for Arafat to depart from the unwieldy structure of the Tunis PLO and to build bridges with the people of the occupied territories, but he ignored it. Even loyalists from the PLO-in-exile warned against superimposing the inefficiencies and ways of Tunis and recommended a new approach. Bassam Abu Sharif, for instance, bluntly stated that the PLO must ‘adopt new ways or perish’.25 Arafat refused to listen. He paid little attention to the emerging chasm between the corrupt outsiders from Tunis and the educated, democracy-loving local people of ‘the inside’.
Angry over the terms of the agreement and their subordination to minor status, most local leaders refused to join the PNA Executive. Concerned, Hanan Ashrawi announced the formation of the Independent Palestinian Commission for Citizens’ Rights. Despite repeated offers, Heidar Abdel Shafi steadfastly refused to have anything to do with ‘Arafat’s government’. Faisal Husseini, a true Jerusalemite with endearing affection for his place of birth, accepted a position which gave him responsibility for the city. Jerusalem’s fate was in the hands of ignorant negotiators who reported directly to Arafat, and Husseini hoped to use his expertise to stop them making concessions.
The appointments to the twenty-person executive revealed a great deal about Arafat’s intentions. Nabil Sha’ath, Initissar Wazir (the widow of Abu Jihad), Yasser Abed Rabbo and Munib Masri were outsiders. The appointment of Masri in particular rankled; he was the man who had saved Arafat in Jordan in 1970, but also a Hussein loyalist who had been a member of the Jordanian cabinet after Black September. From the inside came Elias Freij, once accused of treason by Arafat himself and hardly an accepted local leader. There was also Mohammed Zuhdi Nashashibi, a member of an old family of landowners with no following. Of course, Saeb Irekat took whatever post was offered him. According to the head of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre, Ghassan Khatib, Arafat was using ‘individuals and families and not classes or representatives of classes or groups’.26 The refusal to rely on anyone who represented a point of view or had a popular base behind them was something Arafat had done since the days of Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunis. As it was, Arafat had little regard for his appointees and seldom told members of his executive what he was doing, even when dealing with what nominally fell under the control of their ministries.
Arafat followed the appointments to the executive by dealing with city councils. He replaced the elected or independent traditional leadership of the towns with an old guard of incompetent loyalists; in the case of the city of Nablus he replaced the whole council. In Gaza, he replaced the competent and popular mayor Mansur Shawa because the man questioned his orders.27 To make things worse, Arafat appointed Zakkaria Agha to the vague position of PLO representative in Gaza, to use against organized entities when necessary. Agha, though an insider, had not participated in the intifada and was resented by the people who had.
After the city councils had been neutralized Arafat turned his attention to the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), mostly humanitarian establishments with connections to the outside world. The NGOs had successfully contributed to the maintenance of services in education, health and social affairs – understandably, the ones Israel ignored and ceded to the PNA. Arafat placed all contacts with the outside world under the PNA and subordinated them to his government apparatus. Most members of the board of trustees of Al Makassed Hospital, the largest in the West Bank, were replaced by Arafat loyalists. The PNA claimed that the board was a political organization. This created an unnecessary bureaucratic layer made up of loyalists who judged everything by how it might affect Arafat’s political standing. Arafat’s bureaucrats allocated non-government aid money to groups which supported their boss.
The trades unions, with over 250,000 members, were already emasculated by the agreement with Israel which stipulated that all the taxes levied on their members working in Israel would be disbursed to the PNA. Weakening the unions was in line with generally eroding all organizations and structures. Even women’s organizations did not escape Arafat’s attention, and he replaced the leadership of those which had opposed the Declaration of Principles. Associations of doctors, engineers and lawyers suffered the same fate; individuals with a direct line to Arafat often replaced elected popular leaders.
Perhaps it was what Arafat did to the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PEDCAR) which told most about the direction of the Palestinian National Authority. PEDCAR was created by the World Bank immediately after Oslo for the purpose of controlling much of the aid money donated to help the new Palestinian entity. It was meant to subscribe to rigid financial controls and to follow recognized accounting procedures, the opposite of Arafat’s ‘flexible’ ways. Upon returning to Gaza, Arafat appointed himself chairman of PEDCAR and gave himself the right to approve everything it did. The organization’s director, Yusuf Sayigh, resigned in protest.28 Arafat used his departure to disempower the remaining members of the PEDCAR board. Financial control was back in his hands, but PEDCAR lost its credibility and there were many harmful delays in receiving aid because the donors’ wish to control the use of money conflicted with Arafat’s methods.29
After establishing an ineffective executive, destroying local organizations and seizing control of the finances, Arafat reverted to his old habit of utilizing an entourage of yes-men and sycophants, acolytes without official titles or job descriptions. Abu ’Ala, Abu Mazen and Nabil Sha’ath were reconfirmed as his closest advisers. Sha’ath doubled as a member of the cabinet. The Subservient Saeb Irekat, another cabinet member – the one person from the original negotiating team with no local following or stature – was added to this group. He became Arafat’s punchbag, the figure Arafat berated publicly whenever things went wrong. (The PLO leader is still in the habit of calling him ‘Gahel’, meaning ‘ignorant’, whenever Irekat dares question him.)30 Hakam Balawi, the man in charge of security in Tunis and boss of Mossad agent Adnan Yassin, became Arafat’s adviser on security. The results of the investigation into the Yassin case have never been published.
The personal style of leadership rejected the concept of organizations and ignored anyone with administrative experience. According to Arafat’s biographer Dany Rubenstein things were so bad that there were three drivers for every official car.31 Everything from distributing aid money to who got a telephone line was decided by the chief. The measure of anyone’s importance was their ability to meet him and to have their picture taken with him. Arafat reverted to his favourite role of tribal sheikh. The diwan which he had created in Tunis was expanded: instead of Palestinian businessmen trekking to see him, it was ordinary people who felt a direct link to him raised their status. Petitioners for jobs for their sons and relatives beat a path to his door, as did shopkeepers wanting a signed picture to show to customers and people engaged in land disputes and tribal feuds. Everybody was welcome – everybody, that is, except people who represented ideas, organizations or structures.
The other areas of concern to Arafat, security and propaganda, also had an inauspicious start. Article 9 of the Cairo Agreement stipulated the presence of ‘a strong police force’. While both sides needed it to protect themselves against opponents of the Oslo Accord, their conceptions of the function of this force were different from the start. The Israelis, still in overall charge of military affairs, were more concerned with their own security. Their vision of a strong police force was a narrow one: they wanted it as protection against militant Islamic groups and others inclined to resort to terrorism to undo the agreement.32 Arafat, though realizing the need to stop acts of terror, was implicitly opposed to reducing his police force to an extension of the Israeli security apparatus. He liked the idea of a PLO military force: he saw it as his private army, an expression of Palestinian separateness – perhaps its essence. In the past, reviewing troops and being with them had given him a psychological lift; now it became a substitute for having an independent entity, its only living symbol.
The disagreement regarding the function of this force has haunted both sides to this day. Seven thousand of the initial nine thousand force which began arriving in Jericho and Gaza on 13 May belonged to the Palestine Liberation Army which had been scattered in Arab countries throughout the Middle East. Fearing the development of empathy between the local population and the agreed ‘police force’, the Israelis had insisted that it should be made up of outsiders. The outsiders who arrived were trained as soldiers and not as policemen. Their lack of preparedness was underscored by the fact that they were the first department of the PNA to receive outside financial help: the USA, Britain and France made contributions to their maintenance.33 Incredibly, in another show of insensitivity towards the Palestinian people Arafat appointed Haj Ismael to command the first contingent to enter Jericho. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Haj Ismael had been accused by other Palestinians of cowardice and fleeing his post.
Other things followed which diminished the stature of this force in Palestinian eyes. Forbidden by the agreements from calling his troops an army, Arafat discarded the Palestinian Liberation Army title and renamed them in a way which defined their function. Though other formations were created later, the first arrivals were called the Preventive Security Service (PSS). They were empowered to arrest or imprison people because they belonged to particular political groups, opposed PNA policies or spoke against the terms of the Oslo and Cairo agreements. Events were to confirm this.
Two things added to Palestinian disquiet over the real function of the PSS. Among the first acts of Colonels Jibreen Rajoub and Mohammad Dahlan, respectively in charge of Jericho and Gaza and directly responsible to President Arafat, was the holding of security coordination meetings with Yacov Perry, head of the hated Shin Bet Israeli internal security police, and with General Amnon Shihak, the Israeli deputy chief of staff, who had been appointed chief Israeli negotiator. The latter meeting implied that Israel considered the question of security vital to the progress of negotiations. As a result of these meetings and other contacts, and in breach of the articles of the Cairo Agreement, the Israelis allowed members of Jibreen’s force to roam the West Bank freely in pursuit of suspects and opponents.34 Soon Rajoub’s men were conducting what amounted to a cleansing operation of dissident Fatah elements and others in Nablus, Qalqilya and Tulkarem. In the process one person died and fifty were wounded. A short time later the first reports of Palestinians dying under torture began surfacing.
The Arafat propaganda apparatus was similarly beholden to the Israelis, but in this case the different Palestinian and Israeli interpretations of its duties were more pronounced. The Declaration of Principles stipulated the creation of a radio and television network to promote the peace process; this later became known as the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation (PBC). To Arafat, this meant promoting the eventual emergence of a Palestinian state. The Israelis saw in it a way of confirming the concessions to the contrary which they had obtained from Arafat. Because Arafat could not afford a public display of disagreement and because the Israelis believed they could control the PBC, the two sides once again went ahead without resolving this very important problem.
Palestinian radio came into being on 1 July 1994, the day Arafat arrived in Gaza. Its director was Radwan Abu Ayyash, an Arafat loyalist from the occupied territories. He became director of PBC six months later, after television started. Radio Al Quds (Jerusalem), as it was called, carried Arafat’s speech and hailed the beginning of ‘a free Palestine’. Astonishingly, in a taste of things to come, it used the same frequency as the one used by Palestinian dissidents in Damascus.35 Arafat was determined to deny his people the benefit of the opinions of others.
The Israelis helped start Radio Al Quds, which was located in Ramla, by providing it with facilities which had belonged to a radio station run by Jordan before 1967. As in the case of the security apparatus, outside financial help was more readily available for disseminating propaganda than for alleviating poverty. The Germans provided the broadcasting authority with aid money to buy radio and television transmission equipment. The Israelis provided PBC with programmes and offered technical help. Subsidizing Arafat’s propaganda machine became a symbol of outside governments’ interest in helping the peace process move forward.
The start of radio broadcasting was followed by meetings with all local newspaper editors in which Arafat told them that it was their duty to promote the Authority and overlook its mistakes. In justifying his order, Arafat responded to their misgivings by repeating, ‘Mish wa’atu’ – ‘It is not the time for it.’ He meant it was not the time for self-criticism – without saying anything about when it might become appropriate. He advised the editors to rely on Wafa, the PLO news agency which had moved to Gaza with him and whose director reported straight to him. He ended his meeting by inviting the editors to deal directly with him on all issues of substance and gave them his private telephone number. After that he posed for pictures with each of them. Afraid, all of them saw fit to hang the signed pictures in their offices.36
Two groups became alienated from what was happening. In addition to Husseini, Ashrawi and Abdel Shafi, Sari Nusseibeh sought to distance himself and took a year’s sabbatical with a think-tank in Washington. The people behind the Beit Sahur civil disobedience campaign were given the cold shoulder. Ziad Abu Zayyad, an intifada leader and a participant in some secret talks with the Israelis, froze his activities. In addition to politicians, the PNA had very little contact with human rights organizations: even Ashrawi’s Centre for Citizens’ Rights received little cooperation. Think-tanks such as the Centre for Research and Studies, the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre and the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA) were viewed with suspicion. The politicians and intellectuals of the intifada were marginalized.
Israel’s intransigence in the negotiations left Arafat with nothing to offer his people and added to his desire for greater personal control of everything. Even though he was in his mid– sixties, much to the chagrin of his complaining young wife he worked an eighteen-hour day and devoted most of it to inter-Palestinian affairs. Nabil Sha’ath and Saeb Irekat shuttled between the venues of Cairo, Sharm Al Sheikh and Taba, held meetings with Israeli negotiators and came back empty-handed. The negotiations centred on phase two of the Israeli redeployment, a withdrawal from more Palestinian towns and villages. But as in the period before the Cairo Agreement, the Israelis persisted in their efforts to impose their own interpretations and to undermine Arafat. Because their behaviour helped his enemies who threatened his position, he was forced into ever more dictatorial behaviour.
The first problem facing the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators was the expansion of settlements. Because the Oslo and Cairo agreements did not contain any challenge to the Israeli occupation law during the interim period, the Israelis continued their expansion activities under the guise of ‘thickening, creating nature reserves and starting stone quarries’. According to Dilip Hiro, the magazine Jerusalem Report of February 1995 ‘revealed that ongoing Jewish settlement activity was in progress almost everywhere in the West Bank’.37 The Israelis introduced another invention of which I, as owner of land near a settlement, have direct experience. Arab landowners were denied the right to sell their land or build on it if it was ‘within strategic distance from a settlement’. The definition of ‘strategic distance’ was never articulated, and this regulation was definitely in violation of the spirit of the agreements.
Arafat and his negotiators argued and protested, and he himself could not understand why ‘they are out to undo the agreement’, but the Israelis were immovable. While the area of land confiscated during this period is disputed, there is little doubt that the Rabin government approved some measures and allowed Israeli municipalities and private groups to carry out others unimpeded. Rabin’s decision to stop the establishment of ‘political settlements’ still left the Israeli government free to confiscate land for roads, allowed it to look the other way while individual acquisition of municipal land and property took place (around 60 properties in the old city of Jerusalem)38 and provided it with an excuse not to interfere in land sales by poor Arabs.
The second problem between the negotiators centred on the repatriation of Palestinian refugees and the release of prisoners. Time and again Arafat had told his people – promised them, in fact – that four hundred thousand Palestinians would be repatriated. His belief was genuine and he actually counted on it to happen. The Israelis, however, spoke of a mere thirty thousand, a token effort to reunite families separated by wars, particularly that of 1967. Once again, Rabin showed no interest in anything except extracting the most out of the weak Palestinians and humiliating Arafat. This was followed by an Israeli refusal to release most of the Palestinian prisoners. Token releases took place, including five hundred after the Cairo Accord and a number of women prisoners who, illegally, were asked to sign promises of good behaviour as a precondition. But the Israelis held on to most of the prisoners, despite knowing that it would affect Arafat’s popularity.
The policies within the territories were followed by measures which proved that there was Israeli opposition to Palestinian self-determination and an independent Palestinian government. In June 1994 Israel and Jordan signed a preliminary agreement ending the state of war between them, and there was a final agreement the following October. In contrast to his attitude to Arafat during the signing ceremonies in Washington, Rabin was openly friendly with King Hussein and he and Foreign Minister Peres invited the King to pray in Jerusalem, something they had always denied Arafat. That invitation was a signal that the Israelis still preferred Hussein. In November that year the Israelis used their control of the entry points to Gaza to stop the Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, from visiting Arafat. In between, the Israelis told several governments that they could not open embassies, legations or other forms of diplomatic representation in Gaza.
Arafat’s position was deteriorating on all fronts. The only consolation came in October when he heard that along with Peres and Rabin, he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He used the occasion to make a new declaration regarding his commitment to peace and to praise his ‘friend in the White House’. Although this final act of rehabilitation meant a great deal internationally, the people of the occupied territories and Palestinians everywhere saw nothing in it except another confirmation that Arafat’s actions were pleasing to outsiders but producing nothing for them. With unemployment in Gaza and the West Bank hovering around 50 per cent, the disenchantment with the results of the agreements began to express itself violently.
On 9 October, unknown Palestinians kidnapped an Israeli soldier, Nachsohn Waxman. The Israelis blamed Arafat and held him responsible for the hostage’s safe return. The Palestinian security forces, acting on Arafat’s personal orders, began a methodical and extensive search and arrested and interrogated dozens of people. Arafat made his position abundantly clear: ‘I condemn this act and the people responsible for it and they will be punished.’ His gesture went unappreciated. The Israelis held him personally responsible for Waxman’s safety, insisted that the soldier was being held in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority and equated the failure to find him with violating the agreements. Ten days later, Israeli forces stormed a house in the village of Beit Naballah, still under Israeli control, and found Waxman dead. Conveniently forgetting their previous accusations regarding the kidnapped soldier’s whereabouts, the Israelis nevertheless continued to blame Arafat and to demand a better performance from the Palestinian security forces. Rabin was out to destroy him.
Foolishly thinking they could handle the situation better, the Israeli security forces were ordered by Rabin to target ‘Palestinian terrorist forces wherever they are’.39 A number of Islamists were targeted and assassinated, mostly in areas ostensibly under the control of the PNA. Alluding to the agreements and the efforts of the Palestinian security forces, Arafat made a personal appeal to Rabin to desist. Rabin added insult to injury and refused to respond. Despite Arafat’s persistent efforts Rabin never overcame a psychological barrier which made him treat the Palestinians’ leader as nothing more than a necessary evil, and he never did anything to ease his plight.
On 19 October a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up in a bus in the middle of Tel Aviv. Twenty-two people were killed and fifty others were injured. Caught between Islamic militancy and Israeli insensitivity, Arafat lashed out without restraint. He angrily attacked ‘the conspirators receiving orders from outside to destroy our dream of a homeland’. With his security forces facing problems controlling the Islamists he reinvigorated the Fatah Hawks, the militant wing of his political movement who had proved unruly and willing to cooperate with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and entrusted them with ‘dealing with the terrorists’. It was probably Arafat’s first use of a word which had been used to describe him for most of his life. A Palestinian civil war looked imminent.
On 3 November, still trying his utmost to balance his desire to maintain a Palestinian position while responding to Israel’s increasing security demands, Arafat attended a service in honour of Hani Abed, an Islamic activist who had been assassinated by the Israelis the day before. The reaction to his presence was the opposite of what he had expected – shouts of ‘Collaborator!’ echoed throughout the mosque. Another man would have left immediately, but Arafat stayed on – only to suffer physical humiliation. Angry young men snatched his kuffiya and made threatening gestures, and he was whisked away by his entourage in a state of shock and utter disbelief.
Nothing demonstrated Arafat’s predicament more than what happened during an emergency meeting between him and Rabin in Madrid to discuss the Tel Aviv bombing and a smaller one which killed three Israeli soldiers on 11 November. According to an aide who was present, Arafat spoke of a total commitment to the peace process, pleaded for understanding of ‘the critical situation facing all of us’ and cited facts and figures about his efforts against the bombers. He said, ‘I cannot do more without imprisoning all my people.’ Rabin could not wait for him to finish and hurriedly presented him with a threat that ‘Israeli forces would fire indiscriminately at Palestinians should these incidents continue’. When the meeting ended, both men found it difficult to shake hands.
On the 18th, something akin to a Palestinian civil war broke out. When over two thousand worshippers at the Great Mosque in Gaza demonstrated and shouted abusive slogans at Arafat, his security police responded by opening fire. Before calm had been restored, fourteen Palestinians were dead and three hundred injured.40 The casualty list was longer than on any day of the intifada, and many Palestinian began referring to him as ‘the military governor of Gaza’ or ‘Israel’s local chief of police’. A few days later militants assassinated Sheikh Assad Saftawi, a Muslim cleric whom Arafat had befriended and tried to use to enhance the PNA’s Islamic credentials and appease the Islamic movements. The Israelis viewed these developments with malevolent detachment.
The Israeli thinking during this period bordered on the perverse. That Rabin was under internal pressure to protect Israeli citizens against acts of terror is undoubtedly true – Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu never tired of accusing him of allowing terrorists ‘within a striking distance of Tel Aviv’. But Rabin showed no inclination to cooperate with Arafat on this subject and instead limited the Palestinian leader’s options. His behaviour regarding other issues was less than constructive, in particular his unwillingness to stop the expansion of settlements. And he did nothing to expedite the ceding of more territory or to make the Israeli army act in a less aggressive way. All things considered, he gave Arafat little reason to help him.
Rabin’s reaction to the bombing of a bus in Jerusalem on 25 November, for example, was to close the occupied territories to Palestinian workers for two weeks. This tactic had been tried in the past without any results, and in this instance all it did was increase the financial problems of the Palestinians – eighty thousand of them were stopped from entering Israel. In fact, the repeated closures towards the end of 1994 increased unemployment to the staggering level of 58 per cent.41 Instead of crippling the bombers, it helped them and allowed them to point out the economic failure of the agreement.
As it was, only $140 million of the $700 million allocated to the PNA for its 1994 budget was received. Arafat’s conflict with international donors regarding control of the money contributed to the delay, but lack of progress in the negotiations to increase the size of the territory controlled by the PNA was another factor, and the Israelis were behind this. In November 1994, with the PNA unable to pay salaries and threatened with collapse, Terje Larsen of Oslo Agreement fame declared that the international aid programme had been a failure. Delegated by the UN to remedy the situation, Larsen forestalled the PNA’s bankruptcy by arranging a $150 million package of emergency aid without any strings attached. By overplaying their hand, the Israelis had allowed Arafat to gain control of the aid money.
On 27 December 1994, Jewish zealots began to build a settlement south of Bethlehem. Efrat was a major new project rather than a thickening or expansion effort. At first Rabin claimed that it was a private enterprise in which the government could not interfere. Later he referred the whole thing to the Israeli Attorney General for consideration, but did nothing to stop the construction pending a final decision. Arafat’s statements that this was ‘a clear violation of the agreements with Israel’ went unheeded. The Attorney General decided in favour of the settlers. The mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert, announced that the municipality would build more houses in the old city. Again, Rabin refused to act.
With a Palestinian civil war looming, Israel’s actions lowered Arafat’s standing with his people while helping him become the sole arbiter of their fate. His diminishing popularity with the people of the occupied territories was forcing him into greater dependence on his Tunis PLO, the corrupt and unpopular outsiders. Meanwhile, Israel approved Arafat’s plans to expand his security forces and by the end of 1994 their numbers had risen to thirty thousand, more than the number of teachers. Much of the new UN aid money was used to pay their salaries and those of thirty to forty thousand bureaucrats. The Wafa news agency, the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation and Arafat’s press spokesmen received a disproportionate amount of the emergency funds. The PNA established military courts and empowered them to administer justice in a highly questionable fashion: among other things, people were tried and convicted so speedily that they were often denied the right of defence.42 In October, PSS served notice that its powers extended to press censorship and it blocked the distribution of the pro-Jordanian Nahar newspaper. This was followed by the detention for sixteen hours of a Palestinian human rights activist, Dr Raja Sourani. The less popular Arafat became, the more he resorted to arbitrary dictatorial measures which were enforced by the Tunis PLO.
In early 1995 the Israeli position was exposed, leading to more violence. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres no longer saw any need to deny what his government was doing: ‘We will build with or without declaring it.’43 Islamic fundamentalists responded by exploding two bombs in the Israeli town of Natanya, killing twenty-one and wounding many more. Arafat’s security forces rounded up hundreds of Islamists whom they imprisoned and tortured, but without finding the perpetrators. Israel ordered another punitive border closure against Palestinian labourers.
Arafat continued to follow policies which contributed to the developing problem between insiders and outsiders. He cancelled the results of a poll in which the local PLO nominated known insiders to run for the council elections44 and followed what he called ‘child’s play’ by creating his own list of candidates made up of outsiders unknown to most of the local people. The Arafat loyalists, including members of his close entourage, took commissions on business deals with the outside world,45 most of which involved the use of aid money to buy basic commodities and food.
Early in the year it was announced that Suha Arafat was pregnant. Although she had been denied any role, even the right to decorate her living quarters, she began to complain about her husband not having a home life and not devoting enough time to her. The Sorbonne-educated Suha was eventually allowed to participate in meetings of charity organizations and to speak to the press. Her simple, straightforward manner held considerable appeal and she was totally supportive of her husband’s ‘preoccupation with the cause’. Despite many reports to the contrary and claims that she was involved in business deals, I was not able to uncover any. There were two occasions when she helped foreign correspondents arrange exclusive interviews with her husband, but apart from that her activities remained peripheral and essentially decorative. In June 1995 she gave birth to a daughter whom the parents named Zahwa, after Arafat’s mother. Sensibly, the birth in a Paris hospital – remarked upon because Suha would not use the local health services – was not followed by any special celebrations.
Arafat was unable to develop permanent policies to deal with any of the problems facing him. Protesting that the Israeli settlement policy was in violation of ‘the agreements we reached in Oslo and Cairo’ and threatening the peace process, he did nothing beyond appealing to the United States and Egypt for help. Neither was in a position to do more than express disapproval of Israeli policy. Arafat followed this with several overtures to Islamic groups and tried to get them to join the PNA, but the basic differences between them outlasted temporary truces and announcements regarding a united front against ‘the common enemy’. Running his security forces took more and more of his time. He promoted Colonel Jibreen Rajoub, in charge of security in Jericho, to membership of his negotiating team and in so doing added to Palestinian non-acceptance of its membership. In addition to being involved in corruption in handling the aid money, the Beiruti outsiders within his entourage became sub-agents for Israeli companies which in the past had distributed imported goods to Palestinian areas.46
Still working a sixteen-hour day, Arafat had very little personal life and literally lived above the office. Constantly on the move, he solicited the support of governments in Europe and throughout the world, but no one could help. He was consuming more uppers and downers than ever before. His hands began to tremble and there was a glassy look in his eyes. Nothing of substance changed.
The Israeli shoot-to-kill policy was made official in mid-February 1995. In April there was another dual bombing, followed by yet another in August. Border closures between Israel and the occupied territories were becoming longer and more punishing. The Israelis heaped accusations of non-cooperation against the PNA and demanded stronger security measures. Because of the dramatic nature of the bombings, the Israeli demands for greater security overshadowed all the important issues being negotiated by the two sides. The USA ignored Israeli policy on settlements and closures and supported Israel’s ‘legitimate security needs’. In March 1995, both Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Vice President Al Gore pressed Arafat to take stronger measures to meet the Israeli demands.
On 24 September 1995, Arafat and Shimon Peres signed the Taba Agreement. Four days later, in an attempt to publicize progress in the peace process, it was countersigned in Washington. This time there was no enthusiasm among the Palestinians or worldwide – just ordinary press coverage. Taba, or Oslo II as it was later called, represented the conclusion of the first phase of the negotiations with the Israeli government. It was to be followed by more deployment, then the final status negotiations.
The agreement, consisting of 31 articles, 314 pages and 9 maps, divided the West Bank into three zones. The Palestinian National Authority was to have control of all civil affairs in Zone A, comprising the towns of Nablus, Ramla, Bethlehem, Tulkarem and Qalqilaya and accounting for 6.6 per cent of the West Bank’s land mass. (Because of the difficulty in reconciling the interests of 120,000 Arabs and 400 Israelis, there was no agreement on Hebron and this matter was left to a later date.) Twenty-four per cent of the area of the West Bank was designated Zone B and was placed under joint Israeli-Palestinian control, with Israel having the final say in what happened there. The remaining 69 per cent of the West Bank remained under direct Israeli control. Among the articles of the agreement was one which called for the strengthening of the Palestine security forces. The only positive aspect of the agreement was the release of more Palestinian prisoners, but this fell short of expectations and the Israelis continued to detain most of them. The actual number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons is unknown.
To assess what Arafat had achieved and how the context had an overwhelming influence, it is necessary to examine the background to the Oslo I, Cairo and Oslo II agreements. First, the negotiations for all three took place under unhelpful conditions: the poor state of the PLO finances and lack of political support following the Gulf War weakened the Palestinian bargaining position. Secondly, the Palestinian position was made worse by Arafat’s politicking, his fear of being replaced by the leadership of the occupied territories and his dependence on incompetents. Thirdly, the end of the Cold War found the United States in a position of undisputed leadership of the world, and Arafat’s dependence on an unswervingly pro-Israeli American president did not help the Palestinian cause.
The convergence of so many adverse factors meant that only Israeli goodwill could save Arafat, but there was none of it. In all three agreements, Israel refused to define its borders. Arafat found himself recognizing a state which reserved the right to define itself by actions such as the control of border entry points. Furthermore, there was no change in the rigid Israeli stance on the questions of Palestinian self-determination, Jerusalem, continued use of 80 per cent of the water of the territories, the building of settlements, the holding of prisoners and the subordination of the economic structure of the PNA to their own.
During a visit to the occupied territories immediately after Oslo II, I asked a well-known foreign correspondent what the agreement had achieved for the Palestinians. He thought for a minute, then, using the number of the original security forces, said, ‘You now have ten thousand goons in charge of your destiny.’ When I reminded him that the Arafat propaganda machine represented another important area and that it was busy promoting the agreements Arafat had signed, he answered, ‘In that case, it’s ten thousand goons and a goalie.’ The goalie is Marwan Kanafani, Arafat’s press secretary and a former footballer with a professional team in Cairo.