20

1995–1999

‘The only light at the end of the tunnel is the flash of the next terrorist blast.’

Nahum Barnea, 19971

ASSASSIN OF PEACE

On the evening of 9 November 1995, three Palestinian VIPs were driven to the north of the Gaza Strip where they boarded an Israeli military helicopter which flew up the coast to Sdeh Dov airfield in Tel Aviv. Under heavy security they were escorted to the nearby home of Yitzhak Rabin to offer their condolences to his widow, Leah. Yasser Arafat, in olive green battledress but without his trademark keffiyeh – his head looking startlingly bald and wide in the lights of the cameras – sat next to the grieving woman, drinking tea against a background of flowers. It was a strange, almost hallucinatory event, Arafat showing off his very limited knowledge of Hebrew.² On the short flight the PLO leader had refused to look down at the twinkling lights of the Israeli landscape, even at the famous minaret of the old Hassan Bek mosque in Jaffa, instead ‘bowing his head and looking neither right nor left … throughout that strange journey, though it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for us to see our beloved country’. Ahmed Qurei, who had negotiated the Oslo accords, never asked Arafat why it was that he did not want to see the panorama of ‘historic Palestine’, but he speculated: ‘Perhaps he remembered how it was and did not wish to see what it had become.’³ It was the first time that Arafat – who was wearing a black coat and hat and was thus unrecognized by the crowds waiting outside the Rabins’ apartment on Rav Ashi Street – had set foot inside Israel since his clandestine mission to rally resistance to the occupation in the wake of the 1967 war.

Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing Jewish extremist five days earlier was a body blow to Oslo and the ‘peace of the brave’ that Arafat praised to Leah, her family and the assembled Israelis. A rickety, provisional structure that was already under heavy fire from determined enemies on both sides had just lost one of the two leaders who had had the courage to implement it. When Nabil Shaath broke the news of Rabin’s murder, Arafat responded: ‘Today the peace process has died.’4

Arafat had asked, via the US consul in Jerusalem, to attend the funeral, but Shimon Peres, who was now acting prime minister, refused, citing security concerns.⁵ Instead Qurei represented the PLO as Rabin was interred in a solemn ceremony on Mount Herzl, where Bill Clinton, King Hussein and Hosni Mubarak were among the 5,000 mourners. Qurei reflected afterwards on the solicitousness of the crew of the IDF helicopter that had flown Arafat, the Fatah veteran Mahmoud Abbas and himself to Tel Aviv; it was the same type of aircraft that had often been used to hunt down and kill Palestinian fighters. Times, it seemed, really had changed.

Yigal Amir, the right-wing Jewish extremist who fired the shots that killed Rabin at a pro-peace rally in Kikar Malchei Yisrael in Tel Aviv, was a man on a mission. The law student from Herzliya had been planning the murder for two years, once taking out his Beretta pistol to kill the prime minister but aborting the mission at the last minute. The previous year he had attended the funeral of Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre. The political mood in Israel was ugly and deeply divided. Rabin had been portrayed wearing a keffiyeh and in SS uniform, including at one anti-Oslo demonstration in Jerusalem where Binyamin Netanyahu had been the main speaker. ‘Crowds chanted “Rabin is the son of a whore” or “murderer” or vilified him for “leading the country to the gates of Auschwitz” or making a “pact with the devil” – Arafat.’⁶ Amir was a loner, but he had friends, supporters and a wider constituency. Extremist rabbis had formulated the notion that the prime minister’s policies constituted treachery that justified his killing for the sake of the Jewish people. Following his detention, moments after the shooting on 4 November, the twenty-five-year-old Amir stunned investigators with his sangfroid, even asking for a glass so he could drink a toast – ‘a schnapps’ – to Rabin’s death. ‘I acted alone on God’s orders and I have no regrets,’ he told them.7

Rabin had not gone ‘soft’ on terrorism or indulged Arafat. Six months before his murder, when Hamas suicide bombers killed seven Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip, the prime minister had cracked down hard.⁸ On paper Arafat remained committed to fighting the Islamists, arresting hundreds and repeatedly warning Hamas and Islamic Jihad to respect the Oslo accords. Yet whether he was unwilling or unable – or both – to crack down hard enough, every Palestinian attack boosted Israeli hardliners in a way that appeared to be following a clear strategy: a bus bombing that killed five elderly Israelis in Ramat Gan in July seemed timed to force a crisis in Israeli–PLO bargaining on the eve of a deadline for the completion of the next stage of the Oslo negotiations. In a poll conducted after that bombing, 52 per cent of Israelis said the talks should be broken off and only 37 per cent said they should continue. Fatah accused unnamed ‘traitors who hide behind headlines and slogans’ of sabotaging Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the freeing of Palestinian prisoners.⁹ Each bombing brought punitive Israeli counter-measures – mass arrests, curfews and, above all, prolonged crossing closures – that caused serious hardship to ordinary Palestinians and undermined the feeling that there was any benefit from the changes that had taken place.

Still they had ploughed on. In September 1995, the Oslo II agreement was finalized in talks at Taba, just over the Egyptian border near Eilat. It regulated relations between Israel and the Palestinians during the interim period towards negotiations for a ‘Permanent Status Agreement’. Its 300-plus pages and multiple annexes dealt with the entire West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, and a plan for a progressive Israeli military withdrawal. The expanded Palestinian security forces – now 30,000 police and 6 separate branches – took on responsibility for ‘combating terrorism and violence, and preventing incitement to violence’. District Co-ordination Offices were established. Border passage arrangements at the Allenby Bridge and Rafah crossing had separate wings for both parties, formal Palestinian control represented by uniformed policemen and a flag but a parallel Israeli presence that was concealed from view by one-sided mirrors.10 The establishment of a ‘Palestinian Interim Self-Government Authority’ and a Palestinian parliament were the most eye-catching parts of the deal – with provision for elections to be held for the first time.

Yet the more significant part was the territorial arrangements it laid down. The occupied territories were divided into three zones: Area A consisted of Palestinian towns and urban areas and comprised 2.8 per cent of the territory; here the PA had full responsibility for law and order. Area B was made up of villages and sparsely populated areas, comprising 22.9 per cent of the West Bank: there the PA looked after public order while the Israelis retained overall security control. By far the largest part, at 74.3 per cent of the territory, was Area C, which comprised important agricultural areas and water sources and where Israel retained full responsibility for security and public order. That meant that the PA was responsible for managing all Palestinian residents but had full control of just 2.8 per cent of the land.¹¹ The West Bank and Gaza Strip were recognized as a single territorial unit, but with a highly significant and overarching reservation – ‘with the exception of issues that will be negotiated in Permanent Status negotiations’. It was at this time that Palestinian support for the peace process was at its highest: 71 per cent. Even among students, typically the most hard-line group among Palestinians, support for negotiations increased from 44 per cent in January 1994 to 62 per cent in August – September 1995, with opposition to talks dropping from 47 per cent to 24 per cent over the same period.¹² Oslo II received 72 per cent approval in October 1995, the highest level of support for the peace process ever registered. In Israel, though, a hardening mood was reflected in the Knesset vote for Oslo II: it passed by a tiny margin of sixty-one votes to fifty-nine in early October. Right-wingers were unhappy, with the Likud claiming that Rabin’s government had been determined to sign the agreement at any price. Eliyahu Ben-Elissar, a senior Likud MP, called it ‘a black day in the history of Israel’. Shortly afterwards Netanyahu attended a ceremony reaffirming ‘loyalty to Eretz-Yisrael’ and visited the Hebron settlers, an eloquent expression of where his sympathies lay. Exactly a month later, Rabin was dead.

SETTLING ACCOUNTS

Settlement had been a highly sensitive issue since 1967, and especially since the Likud came to power in 1977. But its significance grew enormously after Oslo as Israel sought to establish more facts on the ground pending a final peace agreement. In January 1995, a week after Rabin, Arafat and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize, Rabin promised that Israel would stop building new settlements and would not confiscate land except what was needed for building bypass roads in the West Bank to separate Arab and Jewish traffic and reduce friction.13 Yet within days – following the Beit Lidd bombing and the deaths of the nineteen soldiers – the cabinet approved the construction of 2,200 more housing units in the West Bank. Building in East Jerusalem – always excluded by the Israelis from any concessions or change – continued apace. The timing of these announcements appeared to be deliberate. Plans were unveiled to construct 6,500 units at Jebel Abu Ghneim – known as Har Homa in Hebrew – south of Jerusalem. The forested area, within the city’s unilaterally expanded (but internationally unrecognized) post-1967 boundaries, was a popular picnic destination for Palestinian families from Bethlehem and the surrounding villages. Palestinian and Israel critics argued that it formed a natural hinterland to Beit Sahour, adjacent to Bethlehem, and that the move was provocative just weeks before the planned IDF pullout from the city. ‘Only someone completely cut off from reality can believe it is possible to build a giant project like this without fatally damaging the peace process’, Peace Now protested. Throughout the summer of 1995, as the second stage of Oslo approached, settlers began to speak out more forcefully, warning that they would open fire on PA security forces and fight any attempt to evict Israelis from their homes. Activists occupied new hilltop sites, setting up makeshift encampments near Jerusalem and Ramallah and bussing in supporters from inside the green line. In July a group of right-wing rabbis, including a former chief rabbi, issued a halachic declaration, invoking the twelfth-century scholar Maimonides that even the command of a king could be ignored if it violated the Torah: in contemporary terms that meant that troops should disobey any order to evacuate settlements. The ruling was condemned by right and left, religious and secular, but hailed by settler leaders. Yigal Amir took notice. Oslo II did not include an explicit commitment on settlements, stipulating only that ‘neither side shall take initiatives or any step that will change the status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations’.14 But the violation of the spirit of the agreement was unmistakable.

In late October Salfit, west of Nablus and within sight of the red roofs of Ariel, one of the biggest Jewish settlements in Samaria, became the first urban area to be handed over to the PA, as part of area ‘A’. The Israeli army HQ was dismantled and cranes removed its concrete car-bomb barriers, a sentry box and the steel gates, complete with cement foundations. Ahmed Faris, director-general of the PA ministry of civil affairs, accepted the building from Colonel David Barel, deputy head of the military government.¹⁵ Jenin, Qalqilya and Tulkarem followed. In December the Israelis left Nablus, Bethlehem – three days before Christmas – and finally Ramallah, on its way to becoming the interim capital of the emerging Palestinian entity, whatever it was. Israel’s departure sustained the feeling that for all Oslo’s flaws, significant changes were taking place. Mourid Barghouti, visiting the new Ministry of Civil Affairs in Ramallah, reflected that Palestinians were now greeted with smiles in the place where they had suffered repeated humiliations at the hands of the Israelis for so many years.¹⁶ Nabil Qassis, a university scientist and member of the Washington talks team, described people walking ‘unbelievingly’ and looking at the empty cells in the Muqataa where detainees had previously been held and tortured by the Israelis.¹⁷

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY, ISRAELI POWER

Under Oslo, the PA’s role was limited strictly to civil affairs and internal security. As the body took shape, power shifted from the intifada activists to PLO functionaries returning from Tunis, usually members of Fatah’s Central Committee and Revolutionary Council. PA ministers tended to be outsiders while their deputies were West Bankers or Gazans who had worked on Nusseibeh’s technical committees.18 Fatah built ‘a state-like institution based upon a pact between the bureaucracy led by the authoritarian Arafat and the local elites’, as one expert put it. ‘These elites enjoyed what they did not receive from Israel – a share of governmental rewards and political patronage in return for their support of the administration.’¹⁹ The Israelis were well aware of the tensions between the Tunis returnees and local people in the West Bank and Gaza.²⁰

Arafat’s appointments of district governors and mayors included pro-Jordanian figures who were bitter rivals of the intifada rank and file. In Gaza there was anger when a local ‘notable’ was appointed to lead Fatah. ‘The leadership has shoved aside the people who have struggled, who have sacrificed for the cause’, one activist complained. ‘We refuse to have leaders who have lived in five-star hotels eating fish and chocolate while our people starve. The real leaders are those who are in the fields and not in hotels, those who got their education in prisons.’²¹ The heads of trade unions and NGOs were replaced by Fatah loyalists ‘who judged everything by how it might affect Arafat’s political standing’.

The PLO leader replicated the governing style he had used in his years in Kuwait, Beirut and Tunis, receiving petitioners and supplicants like a tribal sheikh. ‘Everybody was welcome – everybody, that is, except people who represented ideas, organisation or structures’, commented one observer.²² Arafat heard two hundred dignitaries complain about the collapse of the Gaza road system, problems with drains, electricity and telephones, but at the end of the meeting they all stood in line to be photographed individually shaking hands with the chairman, ‘like a Hollywood star’.²³ His habit of control was most evident with financial matters. No one else could sign the cheques.²⁴ ‘Arafat understood from the outset that security, information, and money are the major cornerstones of leadership’, an adviser recalled.²⁵ PLO insiders joked about the ‘Fakhani Rules’, a reference to the methods Arafat had honed at his HQ in the Beirut suburb of that name from 1971 to 1982.²⁶ His specific concern was the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction (PECDAR), set up by the World Bank after Oslo to channel aid to the PA. Yusuf Sayigh, the eminent economist who was its director, resigned when Arafat appointed himself chairman.27 ‘If the money didn’t flow into his coffers, he would lose his ability to buy off possible challengers’, as Sari Nusseibeh put it.²⁸

Security was in the hands of returning Palestine Liberation Army forces – the names of personnel vetted by the Israelis²⁹ – which absorbed groups like the Fatah Hawks and Black Panthers, creating jobs and awarding status to the loyal foot-soldiers of the intifada, albeit on meagre salaries. This allowed a large number of men who had been forced to leave Lebanon for Tunis and elsewhere – and their families – to return to Palestine. Fatima Barnawi, who had spent ten years in prison for planting a bomb in a West Jerusalem cinema in late 1967, came to Gaza to command the women’s units of the Palestinian police. In the Dehaisheh refugee camp dozens of former prisoners were recruited into the security forces and others into ministries and agencies as clerks, managers and directors; many were previously unemployed. The PA functioned like most Arab states, buying loyalty by providing secure jobs for a grateful people.³⁰ ‘The effect upon Palestinian society was catastrophic’, lamented Mustafa Barghouti, an opponent of Oslo from the start. ‘People began to compete with one another for jobs and money, worrying about who would be the director, the sub-director, the vice-minister, and how much they would earn – because a lot of money was at stake, part outside funding, part tax revenues.’³¹ The creation of competing security agencies, ministries and departments with overlapping responsibilities allowed Arafat to intervene personally to impose his own control. ‘We have leaders,’ said one PA minister. ‘We don’t have a leadership.’³²

Elections for the eighty-eight-member Palestinian Legislative Council in January 1996, and for the position of president, were a first, limited and chaotic test of the PA’s legitimacy and popularity. ‘In a land where elections have never happened, effectively ruled by a man long notorious for his inability to delegate, it was always reasonable to expect a degree of muddle’, reported one correspondent. ‘But with the campaign under way, there is something more unpleasant in the electoral air.’ Instead of a single-constituency list system, which could produce proportional representation and encourage the electorate to think in national terms, the leadership opted for sixteen constituencies in which representatives were to be elected on a first-past-the-post basis. Opponents pleaded in vain that that would encourage clan-based voting in a society in which family still outweighed ideology, and discourage pluralist and coalition politics. ‘While a majority system might be suitable for stable democracies, it might not be appropriate for societies with deep political divisions and in which fundamental questions about national identity and territorial boundaries remain open’, commented the political scientist Khalil Shikaki.33

The only candidate challenging Arafat, and only for symbolic reasons, was Samiha Khalil, a respected campaigner for women’s rights as well as a forthright critic of Oslo. The race for the council was tilted in favour of Fatah. Opposition movements, including Hamas, boycotted the poll. Independent candidates included scores of disgruntled Fatah members who failed to get on the party ticket, or who were removed by Arafat.³⁴ Senior PLO officials who had come from Tunis, including Nabil Shaath, Ahmed Qurei and Abu Jihad’s widow Intissar al-Wazir, received more votes than local people in many constituencies.³⁵ An army of foreign observers included former US President Jimmy Carter and teams from the European Union, Japan, Norway and Canada. The international attention did much to boost the sense of legitimacy that mattered so much to the PLO leadership. It helped that high-profile figures like Hanan Ashrawi had been elected. ‘Everyone laughed’, Carter recorded, ‘when Arafat told me there were going to be about fifteen women on the council, adding that “Hanan counts for ten”.’³⁶ In the end, the polls turned out to be more about consolidating power, reinforcing recognition and legitimizing peace with Israel than establishing a genuine democracy. An election-day poll found 50 per cent support for the Oslo principles with just 16 per cent opposition. Fatah commanded the support of 57 per cent.³⁷

Security remained the most neuralgic issue of them all – and, as ever, Israel’s overriding priority. Days before the election the Israelis finally managed to get Yahya Ayyash, the ‘engineer’ of Hamas bombing fame. The most wanted man in Palestine was killed in Beit Lahiya in the Gaza Strip by an explosive device planted in a mobile phone given him by a Palestinian who was working for the Israelis. Ayyash had become a legend with an ‘unbelievable ability to survive … partly because he never spent more than an hour in one place’, in the words of Carmi Gillon, the Shin Bet chief who oversaw the assassination. Rabin had personally told Arafat that Ayyash had been located in Gaza but the PLO chief insisted he was in fact in Sudan. ‘I know he’s here and if you don’t find him and hand him over to us I’m tearing up this whole agreement and putting Gaza under siege’, the prime minister warned him.38 Hundreds of thousands turned out for Ayyash’s funeral in Gaza, chanting: ‘We want buses, we want cars.’ The hunt had begun under Rabin but the go-ahead for the killing was given by Shimon Peres. It followed in the tradition of Israel eliminating its most dangerous enemies – regardless of the consequences. The previous summer unknown gunmen, assumed to be Mossad agents, had gunned down Fathi Shikaki, the Islamic Jihad leader, who was visiting Malta on his way back from Libya to his base in Damascus.

HAMAS STRIKES BACK

Hamas took its revenge on 25 February 1996. In Jerusalem twenty-four people were killed when a powerful bomb packed with nails and ball-bearings ripped through a packed No. 18 bus near the central bus station on Jaffa Road. Another civilian was killed in an attack at a bus stop near Ashkelon. The Islamist movement said it was retaliation for the killing of Ayyash. Coincidence or not, it was also two years to the day since the Hebron massacre, when Baruch Goldstein killed twenty-nine Palestinians in the Ibrahimi mosque, an earlier test of the endurance of the Oslo agreement. Horror piled upon horror: a week later another Hamas bomber boarded another No. 18 bus near Zion Square in Jerusalem, detonating an explosive belt that killed sixteen civilians and three soldiers. The following day a bomber killed twelve in Tel Aviv:

Crumpled corpses were scattered around the junction of Dizengoff and King George Streets, among the busiest of thoroughfares in Israel’s busiest city. Debris from shattered shop fronts rained on to mangled cars, as dazed and terrified shoppers ran helter-skelter from the scene. Within minutes the junction was crammed with police and wailing ambulances. And before any semblance of order was restored, Israel’s television channels were on hand to broadcast live from the scene. In graphic detail, the cameras picked out bodies, some with their clothes blown off, and all horribly charred. There were heart-wrenching scenes of weeping children, some wearing fancy dress for the eve of the Purim festival.39

The unprecedented slaughter in the streets – sixty dead in eight days – cast a giant question mark over Israeli politics and over the future of Oslo. Peres was keen to step out of Rabin’s shadow and win power in his own right. In early February he had announced that he was calling an early election in which, for the first time, Israelis would be voting directly for the prime minister as well as for their party of choice. The winner of the prime ministerial vote would be in pole position to form a coalition. In mid-February Peres boasted of his government’s achievements, describing peace with the Palestinians as ‘flourishing, unlike those in Ireland and Bosnia’. Two weeks later, now that Hamas bombers had joined the campaign, that was an unconvincing claim. Talk of a ‘new Middle East’ – which gave rise to cynical jokes about the ‘visionary’ Peres – had never sounded so hollow. The Labour leader’s 20 per cent poll lead was wiped out.

Israeli troops sealed off the West Bank and Gaza, imposing a travel and trade blockade with curfews and checkpoints, cutting roads between patches of territory controlled by the PA and launching a manhunt for Hamas suspects. Hundreds of villages and towns were paralysed by strategically placed ditches and sand or stone barricades. Tanks were deployed along the green line for the first time since 1967. Scores were arrested in areas where Hamas had support, while Palestinian security forces made a similarly indiscriminate sweep and were accused of brutality to those they detained.⁴⁰ The homes of known suicide bombers were sealed prior to demolition.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians were again cut off from their jobs in Israel, the economy of the self-rule areas suffering huge losses (estimated to be roughly equivalent to what had been given or pledged by international donors in support of the PA). Hamas institutions were shut down. PA police faced stone-throwing crowds in Bir Zeit after Israeli paratroopers raided the university and surrounding villages, bursting into dormitories and apartments, rounding up students and herding them on to a football field for interrogation. Hundreds were arrested. ‘We don’t know who is more against us, our government or the Israelis,’ complained ‘Ibrahim’, a twenty-year-old Gazan student who escaped the round-up. Arafat faced more abuse when he visited Ramallah shortly afterwards.41 In the student elections a Hamas–Islamic Jihad list won twenty-three of the fifty-one seats, Fatah just seventeen. In Ramallah prison, one detainee was told by a PA security officer: ‘You are here because you’re divided into three types: type one are people that Israel wants arrested; type two are people that the Authority wants arrested; type three are those arrested to placate Israel, and most of you belong to that type.’⁴² The Israelis were satisfied when the man who had planned the recent bus bombings, Hassan Salameh, deputy head of the Qassam Brigades, was arrested, apparently by chance, in Hebron. It was a handy boost for Peres. Peres also accused Iran, an implacable though distant enemy, of pressing ‘Islamic Jihad and other subversive organisations’ to attack Israel before polling day. Behind the scenes, efforts to improve security co-ordination intensified, despite what was a prickly relationship at the best of times – the Israelis patronizing and condescending in the face of nepotism, corruption and incompetence on the PA side.⁴³ The Palestinians blamed the growing strength of Hamas on Israel’s crackdown, but Peres and Arafat still met to discuss the situation. Peres understood that there were limits to co-operation. ‘Arafat’, he explained,

cannot exist as an agent. You cannot give him orders. You have to offer him incentives too. Many people have asked me if Arafat is trustworthy … He didn’t become a Zionist, neither will he become a Zionist … He’s the leader of the Palestinians, and that’s what he will remain. We can meet as partners for peace, but we cannot make out of him an instrument to realise our policies.⁴⁴

The Labour leader was soon embroiled in a new crisis, this time in south Lebanon, where Israel had been shelling Hizbullah positions and hitting targets as far north as Beirut during five weeks of cross-border exchanges. But when, in the course of the 18-day ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’, Israeli shells hit a UN base at Qana and killed 108 terrified civilians sheltering in a shipping container, a routine military response took on far larger dimensions. Furious responses in Lebanon and across the Arab world were vindicated when a UN report dismissed as unlikely Israeli claims that the massacre was the result of a technical error. Palestinians naturally identified with the Lebanese victims. Israeli critics noted that the explanation given by the IDF was that it was attacking Shia villages in the south to cause a flow of civilians north, towards Beirut, in order to pressure the Syrian and Lebanese governments to restrain Hizbullah.45 Polls taken in May showed Peres ahead by 4–6 per cent, but just two days before the election on 29 May his lead was down to 2 per cent. Israeli-Arab voters – 14 per cent of the electorate – responded to a boycott call by community leaders who condemned the Labour leader as a ‘child murderer’ or ‘war criminal’. It transpired afterwards that 72 per cent of Arab voters cast blank or spoilt ballots.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, right-wingers had highlighted Arab support for Peres as a reason to oppose him and warned that he would divide Jerusalem. Peres lost the contest by just 29,000 votes. His smooth-talking Likud rival won a mandate to form a new government after campaigning under the slogan: ‘Netanyahu is good for the Jews.’

ENTER BIBI

Binyamin Netanyahu formed the most right-wing coalition in Israeli history. In his inaugural speech on 19 June 1996, he pledged to encourage ‘pioneering settlement’ in Eretz-Yisrael, including in the Negev, Galilee, Judaea, Samaria and the Golan Heights – conspicuously making no distinction between the two sides of the green line. ‘The settlers,’ he declared, ‘are the real pioneers of our day and they deserve support and appreciation.’ In August the cabinet voted unanimously to cancel restrictions on settlement, lifting the Labour government’s partial freeze. Netanyahu had been hostile to Oslo from the start; the PLO’s acceptance of it, he argued, was a deception because the organization remained committed to the destruction of Israel. Rafael Eitan, the former IDF chief of staff and Tzomet leader, who was appointed agriculture minister, said that Oslo would have to be reopened. Eitan was remembered for describing Palestinians as ‘drugged cockroaches in a bottle’. Still, contrary to fears at home and abroad, Netanyahu did not abandon the peace process, instead meeting Arafat for a brief and awkward encounter at the Erez border crossing into Gaza and agreeing to continue talks. ‘Oslo’, in Uri Savir’s optimistic view, ‘had created a new reality, which obliged Netanyahu to manoeuvre in constant dissonance among his beliefs, his political support, and the reality created by the process.’47

Serious trouble erupted in Jerusalem that September when the prime minister approved the opening by archaeologists of a new entrance into the Hasmonean tunnel, which linked the Via Dolorosa and the Western Wall, not far from the al-Aqsa mosque. The issue had been under delicate negotiation for a decade, so the decision, made against the advice of security chiefs, looked reckless. It was presented, however, as a matter of unchallengeable Israeli sovereignty – a position backed by Teddy Kollek’s successor as mayor of Jerusalem, the Likud’s Ehud Olmert. The PA described any interference with the Haram al-Sharif as ‘an assault on the Muslim faith and its institutions’. Netanyahu insisted he would not speak to Arafat directly. Arafat, furious at the slight, vowed to force the prime minister to contact him: he ordered demonstrations to provoke the Israelis. Netanyahu then immediately phoned him.⁴⁸ Clashes erupted around al-Aqsa and spread, leaving seven Palestinians dead. On 26 September the Israelis deployed Cobra helicopters and killed forty-four Palestinians, twenty-five of them in Gaza. Tanks were moved into the West Bank for the first time since 1967, while seven Israeli soldiers were killed during a firefight at Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, attacked by a crowd that included PA policemen. The PA, concluded the radical Palestinian-Israeli thinker Azmi Bishara, proved that even within its ‘Bantustan’ it was ‘not prepared to play a Quisling role like the Israeli-backed militia in the South Lebanon “security zone”’.⁴⁹ In the wake of the clashes the US stepped in more forcefully, summoning Netanyahu and Arafat to meet in Washington to discuss the next stage of the peace process: the planned Israeli redeployment in Hebron, which had been excluded from Area A as defined by Oslo II.

Netanyahu’s visceral opposition to Oslo gave way to a subtler policy of bargaining hard over every step, delaying implementation, taking unilateral decisions – and seeking always to blame the other side for any problems. ‘Our goals are different’ from those of the previous governments, he declared:

We are using the time interval in the agreement to achieve our goals: to maintain the unity of Jerusalem, to ensure the security depth necessary for the defence of the state, to insist on the right of Jews to settle in their land, and to propose to the Palestinians a suitable arrangement for self-rule but without the sovereign powers which pose a threat to the State of Israel.

Security and reciprocity were the twin pillars of his approach. Still, he went on to sign the protocol dividing Hebron into two zones; one, constituting 20 per cent of the city, under Israeli control for the benefit of its 450 settlers. In January 1997 that long-delayed move finally took place, fog and driving rain providing Israeli troops with welcome cover as the Knesset chamber echoed to the sound of impassioned speeches. ‘We are not leaving Hebron, the city of the patriarchs, we are redeploying in Hebron,’ Netanyahu told MPs. ‘I want to tell you, dear brothers and sisters, that we care about you.’ On Shuhada (Martyrs) Street – one of the tensest spots – someone had sprayed a Hebrew slogan in black paint: ‘Not Likud, not Labour, we trust only God.’ Elsewhere in Hebron scores of young men milled around the office of Jibril Rajoub’s Preventive Security Service, awaiting the arrival of a contingent of two hundred uniformed Palestinian policemen to be deployed in the remaining 80 per cent of the city.50 Arafat flew in the following day in his trademark white Russian helicopter, telling the settlers he wanted ‘a just peace’ and describing the city as ‘liberated’. The Hebron agreement was described later by a senior UN diplomat as a ‘case study in political madness’ – and a turning point from which Oslo never recovered.⁵¹

Netanyahu faced attacks and ridicule from both right and left. In the wake of the Hasmonean tunnel affair a popular TV comedy show – Hartsufim (an Israeli version of the British Spitting Image) – portrayed the prime minister with a scantily dressed young woman, who seductively urged a panting ‘Bibi’ to ‘enter my tunnel …’ It also showed Netanyahu and Arafat as bloated blubbery dolls, humping and sweating under rumpled sheets as the talk show host says: ‘We have here a couple who haven’t reached a climax in eight months – despite maintaining full relations.’ The punchline was obvious when the writhing couple finally made it. “Oh, Bibi, I adore those withdrawals of yours,’ a flushed and feminine Arafat whispers to her relieved, manly partner.52

Under the Likud, settlement became an even more combustible flashpoint than it had been before. Ariel Sharon, whom Netanyahu appointed minister of national infrastructure, promoted key projects. The most important was a road and tunnel that allowed direct access from Jerusalem to the Gush Etzion settlements, bypassing Bethlehem and neighbouring Beit Jala and Bet Sahour, whose residents were not permitted to use this new route. This spatial separation – labelled ‘apartheid’ by its critics – was the harbinger of a strategy of linkage across the green line to Jewish settlements while bypassing Arab areas. The issue came to a head in February 1997 when Netanyahu decided to go ahead with the construction of 6,500 housing units for 30,000 people at Har Homa/Jebel Abu Ghneim, first proposed under Rabin. Palestinians saw the project as intended to cut off their future capital from the northern part of the West Bank and, a familiar refrain from both sides, a violation of Oslo’s basic principles. Netanyahu gave his approval despite warnings from Arafat and Faisal Husseini, now the PA minister for Jerusalem, who was operating from a satellite office at the Orient House. The PLO responded by breaking off contacts. Construction began in March after Israeli troops, with sniper and helicopter cover, sealed off the area. Israeli raids on Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem seemed designed to underscore Netanyahu’s firm rejection of any role for the PLO in the city. ‘The relationship between Israel and the Palestinians declined from the modest level of understanding and partial reconciliation that had been achieved into an escalating and debilitating confrontation with the Netanyahu government over the building of settlements and other issues’, Ahmed Qurei recorded.⁵³ Marwan Barghouti, the leader of Fatah’s ‘young guard’, warned that many Palestinians were now questioning Arafat’s strategic choice of seeking peace with Israel. ‘Netanyahu’s policy is to strengthen Hamas and the opposition on the Palestinian street’, he said.⁵⁴ Barghouti had been deported by the Israelis during the intifada and allowed back after Oslo, part of that limited ‘return’ that was such an important part of the agreement for the Palestinians.

The impact of Har Homa was unusually powerful. Settlement activities generally attracted less attention than headline-grabbing attacks or carefully spun diplomatic manoeuvres. Israel’s settlement project was by its nature slow-moving, a process rather than single events, and was obscured by complexity, bureaucracy and subterfuge. Palestinians were, however, intensely aware of it. Arabic media monitored the construction of roads, land seizures and the number of homes being built – issues that were largely taken for granted in Israel. The cumulative effect was shocking. ‘Israeli leaders’ tearful declarations about peace didn’t tally with what they were doing with their bulldozers’, wrote Sari Nusseibeh.

By focusing on the details – a demolition order here, a new bypass road there, on thousands of new housing units on a hillside – it’s easy to lose sight of the systematic nature of the expansion. Years that were supposed to build trust between the feuding parties saw a doubling of the settlement population, from one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand: hardly what we had in mind when we danced on the streets after Oslo. That settlers got away scot-free with murder and other depredations quite literally added insult to injury.55

PARTNER OR ENEMY?

In July 1997 two Palestinian suicide bombers struck in the busy Mahane Yehuda market in West Jerusalem, killing thirteen people and triggering yet another closure of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel suspended negotiations. Over the following weeks Israel and the PA detained hundreds of Hamas supporters. In September, another bombing on Ben-Yehuda Street killed 5 and injured 180. ‘Arafat has gone from being a peace partner to a declared enemy’, wrote the influential Yediot Aharonot columnist Nahum Barnea, whose own son had been killed in a bus bombing eighteen months earlier. ‘After a year and a half in power, the government has no answer to give citizens who are asking “What now?” The only light at the end of the tunnel is the flash of the next terrorist blast.’56 Both bombings were claimed by the Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades, which demanded the release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, behind bars since 1989. ‘We cannot continue this way,’ Netanyahu said. ‘When Arafat embraces and kisses Hamas, instead of fighting it, the message is that Hamas can strike at Israel with impunity.’⁵⁷ Israeli intelligence officials claimed later that Arafat had freed Ibrahim al-Maqadmeh, a senior Qassam commander, to signal to the Islamists that he was giving them a ‘green light’ for attacks.⁵⁸ Netanyahu displayed no interest in an offer from Hamas, conveyed to Israel by the Jordanians, for a thirty-year hudna or truce.

Netanyahu faced widespread censure at home and abroad when another Israeli operation – this time to kill the Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal – went badly wrong. Mossad agents, who used Canadian passports to enter Jordan, sprayed a deadly nerve agent into his ear. It was an assassination that was supposed to go unnoticed. Two agents were caught, however, and four others fled to the Israeli embassy in Amman. It was a hugely embarrassing incident that infuriated King Hussein, put the peace treaty at risk and required the Israelis to provide the antidote needed to save the unconscious Meshaal’s life. The king ordered his special forces to surround the embassy and storm it if the Israelis did not surrender. The subsequent deal to free the bungling Mossad men also required the Israelis to release Sheikh Yassin, who returned a few days later to a hero’s welcome in Gaza. Arafat and Netanyahu met shortly afterwards, stung by the realization that their common Islamist enemy had benefitted from the row.

In fact, however, for all the strains, Israeli–Palestinian co-operation was still close, and the following year it helped reduce anti-Israeli attacks to a level that continued until late 2000. The Shin Bet maintained close liaison with the PA Preventive Security Service and had ‘a certain amount of understanding about the difficulties’ Arafat faced – and about his frequent passive behaviour.⁵⁹ Co-operation worked well in September 1998 when the Israelis killed the brothers Adel and Imad Awadallah, senior Hamas fugitives. Imad had been held by the PA in its Jericho enclave before escaping. The two were tracked down to a remote house surrounded by orchards west of Hebron. Adel, according to Ami Ayalon, the head of the Shin Bet, was commander of the Qassam Brigades in the West Bank. The operation was approved by Netanyahu despite fears that it would lead to a repeat of the suicide-bombing campaign that had followed the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, the ‘engineer’, the previous year. ‘Priceless’ intelligence allowed them to roll up the Hamas operational network. Ayalon reported first to Netanyahu and then went on to see Arafat in Ramallah in the early hours of the morning, telling him bluntly. ‘We killed him [Awadallah] and now we expect you to do everything together with us to ensure that the peace process survives – in both our interests – because it should be clear to you that if there is now a wave of terrorist attacks then there’s no peace process any more.’ Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan worked – successfully – to ensure there was no significant retaliation against Israeli targets, although protests erupted across the West Bank.60 US links with the Palestinians were also strengthened. The PA pressed the Americans to verify the seriousness of their counter-terrorist efforts, although the Israelis were unhappy with this because they felt it reduced their own leverage. The CIA trained Palestinian security officers and their experts removed booby-trapped bugging devices the Israelis had planted in the Serail compound in Gaza City before their 1994 withdrawal: one of them exploded and killed a Palestinian who was attempting to remove it.⁶¹ By 1998 PA security forces numbered 35,000, making the 2.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip among the most highly policed people in the world.⁶²

SELLING PALESTINE?

Oslo had attracted fierce opposition from Palestinians from the very start. And by the time the early excitement had faded, smooth behind-the-scenes relations with Israel did nothing to boost Arafat’s flagging popularity among his own people. Critics again pointed to his autocratic style and the way his old habit of promoting competition was exploited by the Israelis. Economic incentives flowing from monopolies on imports of cement, electricity, fuel, flour and tobacco into Gaza guaranteed a steady stream of revenues for Arafat. The price of a ton of cement was $74. Of that $17 went to the PA and $17 into Arafat’s private account in a Tel Aviv bank.63 Special Israeli-issued VIP passes for PA officials were another instrument of pressure and co-optation that reinforced the image of an elite whose interests lay with maintaining rather than challenging the status quo to preserve their own privileges.⁶⁴ Israeli officials recognized the advantages they enjoyed: ‘We control electrical power, water resources, telecommunications and so on’, one boasted to dubious Likud MPs. ‘We control everything. There are a number of natives who serve as middlemen. What could suit our purpose better? … The power imbalance between us and the Palestinians never served our interests better in the past, not even before the intifada.’⁶⁵

Arbitrary arrests carried out by Palestinian police and security services, and twenty deaths in custody since 1994, reinforced the impression that the Sulta – as the PA was universally known in Arabic – was just another unaccountable Arab regime. Rumours spread about extra-judicial killings of Palestinians who had sold land to Israelis. PA agents were blamed.⁶⁶ Journalists, human rights activists and academics were detained, harassed or intimidated. In summer 1995 the al-Quds newspaper was ordered to stop its presses because it had given prominent coverage to an interview with Farouk Qaddumi, the PLO ‘foreign minister’, whose opposition to Oslo and closeness to the Syrians annoyed Arafat.⁶⁷ B’Tselem reported that Rajoub’s Preventive Security Service was using methods learned from the Shin Bet. Heads of voluntary organizations were questioned by security officials.⁶⁸ The PA was also dogged by allegations of corruption. In July 1997 a parliamentary commission of inquiry reported that nearly half of that year’s $326 million budget had been misspent, mismanaged or embezzled.⁶⁹ It singled out the civil affairs minister, Jamil al-Tarifi, the planning minister, Nabil Shaath, and the transport minister, Ali Qawasmi as the worst offenders, cataloguing millions spent on hotel rooms, restaurants and overseas travel. It raised questions about the use of about $1 billion in foreign aid received since 1994. Tarifi was accused of building Israeli settlements.

In October 1997 Hayder Abdel-Shafi resigned from parliament in protest at the dominance of the executive. Hanan Ashrawi, minister of education and then tourism, followed, accusing Arafat of failing to curb abuses: one opinion poll showed that 56 per cent of Palestinians questioned believed their political institutions were corrupt. Lifestyle questions were linked directly to political choices and the conspicuous consumption of the new ‘Tunisian’ elite, which stood in stark contrast to an economy ravaged by repeated Israeli closures. Arafat’s critics described ‘a ramshackle, nepotistic edifice of monopoly, racketeering and naked extortion which merely enriches … [the leadership] as it further impoverishes society at large’. It was striking that among the fancy new villas springing up in Gaza, the most ostentatious was an especially opulent one belonging to Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), a key negotiator of the Oslo accords. ‘It is not clear who paid for this $2 million-plus affair, all balconies and balustrades in gothic profusion, but the graffiti which some irreverent scoundrel scrawled on its wall proclaimed that “this is your reward for selling Palestine”.’70 The image of the ruling elite as arrogant and out of touch was not improved by the example of the Casino Oasis, built near Jericho’s Aqabat Jaber refugee camp by an Austrian company with the involvement of Israeli and Palestinian investors and under the protection of PA security forces. Hamas objected forcefully, complaining of un-Islamic decadence and other risks, including the recruitment of collaborators. In late 1999 a score of prominent figures, including nine members of parliament, issued a statement accusing Arafat of tyranny, corruption and deceit. Eight of the signatories were arrested; the MPs, who enjoyed immunity, faced violent intimidation.⁷¹

For many Palestinians the economic situation worsened in the post-Oslo years. Between September 1995 and March 1997, unemployment in the Gaza Strip fluctuated between 24 per cent and 39 per cent. The daily wage in the winter of 1995 was $19 in the West Bank and $15 in the Gaza Strip. In winter 1997, the daily wage dropped to below $13. Travel became harder because of the failure to agree the promised ‘safe passage’ between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Security restrictions reduced exit permits, even for urgent medical treatment in Israel. Abu Aboud, who had worked in Jaffa for fifteen years, described his disappointment and frustration: ‘Most of the people in our village want to be connected to Israel, [and to] have the opportunity to work in Israel,’ he explained.

What good is an independent [Palestinian] state if we will be unemployed? Arafat doesn’t want me to live an honourable life in his state, so I won’t declare that I’m Palestinian. What does it mean to be Palestinian? Well, for example, in our village the schools close at noon; the kids spend the rest of the day on the streets. There isn’t even one computer in any of the schools. So I want to know, where does all the money [from the donor countries] go? You know, when I look around and see all the people of the PA who came from abroad [primarily Tunisia] I see them as one big mafia. So you tell me, what am I going to do with this kind of a state?72

UNCERTAIN BENEFITS

Arafat ignored the discontent and continued to follow Oslo. In September 1998 Bill Clinton convened another summit with Arafat and Netanyahu. Shortly afterwards Ariel Sharon – finally back in a big job despite his role in Lebanon in 1982 – was appointed foreign minister in place of David Levy, giving the prime minister ample cover on his right flank. The full talks took place in October at the secluded Wye River plantation in Maryland. Netanyahu, according to Qurei, asked that Arafat ‘see to’ Ghazi al-Jabali, head of PA preventive security in Gaza, who was wanted by Israel for orchestrating attacks. Arafat stormed out at what appeared to be a thinly veiled request to have Jabali killed. Clinton exploded, saying: ‘This is dreadful. I can’t bear this dirty business!’⁷³ Netanyahu also tried and failed to secure the release of the convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard – a longstanding irritant in US-Israeli relations. Sharon conspicuously avoided shaking Arafat’s hand but agreed to three more phases of Israeli military redeployment, comprising 13 per cent of West Bank land being transferred from the Israeli-controlled Area C to Areas A and B, the release of hundreds of prisoners, as well as stringent conditions for combating terrorism and extremism. The PLO pledged to convene the Palestine National Council to ratify, as promised in Oslo, the abrogation of clauses in the National Covenant relating to Israel’s right to exist. The Israeli cabinet ratified the agreement after a short delay: eight of the seventeen ministers voted yes, but five abstained and four voted against. Implementation was again delayed, with claims from the Israeli leader that the Palestinians had failed to meet the conditions that had been agreed. Sharon called on the West Bank settlers to seize more land to thwart any future Palestinian takeover. ‘Move, run and grab as many hilltops as you can to enlarge settlements because everything we take now will stay ours.’74

Still, at the end of December, when Clinton visited Gaza, the Palestinian parliament voted to approve Arafat’s letter to the American president, confirming the nullification of the offensive provisions of the National Covenant, dating back to the foundation of the PLO in 1964. It was ‘an effective renunciation’ by the Palestinians ‘of a crucial part of their history and a virtual apology for more than half a century of struggle for national liberation’,⁷⁵ wrote one Arafat foe. Clinton thanked the Palestinians

for your rejection – fully, finally and forever – of the passages in the Palestinian Charter calling for the destruction of Israel. For they were the ideological underpinnings of a struggle renounced at Oslo. By revoking them once and for all, you have sent, I say again, a powerful message not to the government, but to the people of Israel.

Clinton also spoke frankly of the limitations of what had been achieved so far. ‘I want the people of Israel to know that for many Palestinians, five years after Oslo, the benefits of this process remain remote; that for too many Palestinians lives are hard, jobs are scarce, prospects are uncertain and personal grief is great.’ He referred too to settlements and land confiscations, but urged the Palestinians to carry on even if they felt there were ‘a hundred good reasons to walk away’.⁷⁶ Clinton spoke with remarkable empathy⁷⁷ and could point to one example of genuine progress. Shortly before his visit, Palestinians had finally inaugurated Gaza international airport – long delayed by Israeli objections. It was an exciting moment, and a rare glimpse of something that looked like genuine sovereignty and independence. Clinton and his wife Hillary were welcomed there by Arafat and his wife Suha – surrounded by flags, protocol, guards of honour and all the trappings of statehood.⁷⁸ But, as with so much of what had been achieved since Oslo, outward appearances were deceptive. Israel continued to control the airspace and pre-approve flight schedules. It had the right to shut down operations at any time. Netanyahu, for his part, angered supporters on the right for making too many ‘concessions’, while Israelis further left were unhappy with the halting progress made towards a genuine peace. In late December 1998 the Knesset voted to dissolve itself and hold new elections – effectively freezing the faltering peace process. Inevitably, the fate and future of Israeli–Palestinian relations again hung in the balance.