19

1992–1994

‘Peace of the Brave’ or ‘a Palestinian Versailles’?

RABIN’S RETURN

In June 1992, Yitzhak Rabin led the Labour party to victory in Israel’s general election. Subsequent events would imbue this event with great significance, but even at the time his ascendancy seemed an important milestone. Rabin’s reputation, at home and abroad, was of a gruff soldier who was high on credibility but low on vision. And he was no dove. Older Palestinians remembered him as the man who had expelled thousands from Lydda and Ramle in 1948 and commanded the Israeli army in 1967. Twenty years later, as defence minister, his response to the intifada was to ‘break the bones’ of troublemakers. His first stint as prime minister had been curtailed by scandal and overshadowed by the Likud’s mould-breaking election win the following year. Having beaten Shimon Peres to the party leadership he had a strong appeal to centrist voters. The 1992 campaign focused more on social and economic issues than on war and peace. Rabin moved cautiously on that front, offering Palestinian autonomy and a partial settlement freeze but still opposing what he called ‘political’ outposts in heavily populated parts of the occupied territories. Otherwise his strategy appeared to be to blur the difference between Labour and Likud to appeal to floating voters.

In the first half of 1992 there had been no significant movement on the tracks laid down at Madrid. Shamir’s strategy was to simply stonewall. When follow-up talks were launched in Washington the Israelis initially refused to attend unless the other side was run by the Jordanians, to avoid giving the PLO any independent status. The Americans took a back seat. James Baker was unwilling to invest much more in the hard slog of Arab–Israeli peacemaking in the final year of George H. W. Bush’s presidency.1 When negotiations did begin, Israeli settlement activity and expulsions of Palestinians caused inevitable tensions. ‘The last time I came back to Jericho from talks in Washington they showed me a piece of land that was Palestinian when I left and is now Israel,’ complained negotiator Saeb Erakat. ‘If such actions continue, it won’t be very long before our constituents tell us to stay at home.’² The Palestinian team suffered from ‘virtually worthless’ planning as well as micro-management from Tunis by Arafat, who assumed, probably correctly, that the Americans or the Israelis were tapping his phone conversations and wished to demonstrate to whoever was listening that no concessions would be made without his approval.³

Violence intruded all too often. In February 1992 Israel’s helicopter-borne assassination of the Hizbullah leader, Sheikh Abbas al-Musawi, with his wife and son – after the killing of three conscripts at an IDF camp inside Israel – came as Syria and Lebanon announced their readiness to attend more talks. But four rounds with the Palestinians produced only irreconcilable drafts of what interim self-rule should look like. In the foreign ministry in Jerusalem one official made paper aeroplanes with reports of the proceedings and launched them down the corridors.⁴ And when two of Shamir’s far-right coalition partners bolted, the Likud leader was left without a majority: his first response as a new election loomed was to promise to continue the settlement enterprise.⁵ ‘The notion of territorial compromise will fade away like a bad dream,’ he promised.⁶ Shamir later revealed his hand: had he been re-elected he would have dragged the talks out for ten more years and worked to increase the Jewish presence in the West Bank to half a million. ‘I didn’t believe there was a majority in favour of a Greater Israel, but it could have been attained over time,’ he said. ‘Without such a basis there would be nothing to stop the establishment of a Palestinian state.’⁷

Rabin’s victory was narrow but decisive, with the support of sixty-two MPs to fifty-eight for the Likud and its right-wing and religious allies. It was still the first time since 1984 that Israelis had broken the deadlock that produced unity governments which could agree only on the lowest common denominator – and fell when tough issues were on the table. The pro-settlement party Tehiya disappeared, and although there was a boost for the far-right anti-clerical party Tzomet, the ‘Judaea and Samaria’ lobby was not represented. The coalition Rabin put together included the newly created left-of-centre Meretz, with 12 seats in the 120-member Knesset, as well as the ultra-Orthodox Shas, which had dovish leanings. Rabin retained the defence portfolio and made his old rival Shimon Peres foreign minister. It was the most dovish and pragmatic government in Israeli history – a dream for the centre-left. The US loan guarantees to finance Soviet Jewish immigration, which had been held up under Shamir, were then released. In one of its first acts, the government said it was freezing contracts for housing in Jewish settlements, although ‘natural growth’ and projects already under way were allowed to continue – a significant qualification that did nothing to assuage either Palestinian suspicions or instinctive hostility from the Israeli right. When further restrictions were announced, settler leaders condemned a ‘massive assault on the Zionist enterprise’ by ‘a malevolent and treacherous government’. The language they used was emotive and hyperbolic. The policy of approving some settlements and undermining others was even compared to ‘the Nazi selection in the death camps’.8 Shamir called the situation ‘a nightmare’. Around the same time there was a peaceful end for a potentially serious crisis that erupted when Fatah gunmen were pursued on to the campus of al-Najah University in Nablus by the IDF and a tense four-day siege ended with negotiations between Faisal Husseini and Israeli military officials.

HIGH HOPES, WIDE GAP

Expectations for positive change in Israeli–Arab relations had rarely run higher. In late August 1992, when the sixth round of the Madrid-track talks resumed in Washington, even Syrian spokesmen praised a newly ‘reasonable’ and ‘constructive’ Israeli attitude. Seeking to build confidence, Rabin rescinded an order expelling eleven Palestinian activists. Strikingly, Israeli negotiators stopped using the terms ‘Judaea and Samaria’ and referred simply to the ‘territories’ or the ‘West Bank and Gaza Strip’. In another subtle but significant shift, the fictitious non-presence of the PLO gave way to a far more visible one, despite the organization’s formal exclusion by the US and Israel. ‘Yasser Arafat can now give public instructions to the negotiators and nothing happens,’ boasted Nabil Shaath, the PLO leader’s adviser. ‘There is no longer a cover-up of the relationship between our delegation and the organisation. Nothing can be submitted without authorisation from PLO headquarters in Tunis. We use open fax lines – not codes.’9

If the atmosphere was improving, the gap between the two sides was still enormous: Israel was prepared to accept a 12-member Palestinian administrative council, while the Palestinians demanded a 180-member legislative assembly to serve as the basis for full self-government and eventual independence. Arafat complained that Rabin was using ‘sugar-coated words’ while pursuing ‘iron-fisted’ policies on the ground.¹⁰ In East Jerusalem Palestinian preparations for the next stage were co-ordinated by technical committees headed by Sari Nusseibeh. Excited volunteers churned out papers on the Palestinian economy, infrastructure, administration and future planning. They were based in the Orient House in Sheikh Jarrah, a dilapidated former hotel that had housed Faisal Husseini’s Centre for Arab Studies and had been closed by Israel in 1988. It reopened in 1992 to serve as the HQ for the Palestinian delegation to Madrid and came to be seen as the seat of a shadow Palestinian government, evoking comparisons with the Jewish Agency building in Rehavia in Mandate days. ‘Capturing knowledge about our emerging nation was for us like wiping away decades of powerlessness by showing ourselves what we were made of, that we, like other peoples, could govern ourselves’, Nusseibeh wrote later.¹¹ Fairly soon there was talk of tensions between PLO officials in Tunis and home-grown experts. ‘There are bound to be problems’, commented the journalist Daoud Kuttab,

for the simple reason that people who have not been here for 25 years will have a hard time dealing with issues on the ground. Those of us who live here know the Israelis and our own situation inside out. These are problems we eat, drink and sleep. In Tunis, it’s just a job, not a reality.¹²

Differences between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ were becoming a significant theme in Palestinian politics. But optimism about progress under the new Israeli government was not universally shared. ‘There will be autonomy’, predicted an alarmed Mahmoud al-Zahar, a Hamas leader in Gaza. ‘It will be a disaster and our people will discover it very quickly – within months. It is a trap.’13 The Hamas view was that recognition of Israel was an act of treachery. But some Fatah loyalists were unhappy too. Arafat’s behaviour at meetings of the PLO executive committee in Tunis was ‘intolerable’, complained Shafiq al-Hout, who felt ‘disenfranchised’ when documents about the Washington talks were withheld from him and other critics.¹⁴ Hayder Abdel-Shafi convened a crisis meeting after the Islamist movement accused Fatah of targeting mosques. Hamas, the DFLP and PFLP formed an ad hoc anti-autonomy alliance and won a trial of strength in the West Bank when a general strike they called to revive the terminally flagging intifada and protest over the talks was strictly observed. In some ways this was a re-run of what had happened in 1978 as Menachem Begin went through the motions of negotiating self-rule with Sadat: the crucial difference was that now the mainstream Palestinian leadership was actively engaged, and pushing hard to secure the recognition it craved.

Arafat, surveying developments from Tunis, was said to have been ‘horrified’ to discover the growing strength of Hamas, which stepped up armed actions in the autumn of 1992 ahead of the fifth anniversary of the intifada. In just two weeks five Israeli soldiers were ambushed and killed by Hamas in Gaza and Hebron. It then kidnapped an Israeli border policeman and demanded the release of the gaoled Sheikh Yassin – who appeared on TV from his prison cell and appealed to the kidnappers not to kill their hostage. The policeman’s body was found the next day near Jericho, his hands bound and throat cut. Rabin was accused by the Likud of allowing terrorism to thrive. Abdel-Shafi, from Washington, condemned the killing. In mid-December the Israelis detained 1,600 alleged Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists and deported 415 of them to south Lebanon, giving each a little food, $50 and a blanket. It was the biggest single expulsion of Palestinians in peacetime. None had been tried, charged or allowed to appeal. Ehud Barak, the IDF chief of staff, was asked to explain to the High Court why the move was necessary: he responded that although 14,000 Palestinians were currently in prison, and 100,000 had been gaoled since the intifada had begun, only severe measures could deal the required blow to Hamas. As the deportees remained stranded between the Israeli and Lebanese armies in a makeshift ‘camp of return’ run by Hizbullah at Marj al-Zuhour – reliving the Palestinian experience of forced exile in microcosm for the TV cameras – the court ruled that it could not intervene further. The PLO suspended its participation in the Washington talks. It tried to secure the return of the deportees, but relations with Hamas worsened when Arafat refused to accept the Islamists’ demand for 40 per cent of the seats on the PNC.15 Hamas denounced the expulsion and warned that while it had previously attacked only soldiers, it would now target ‘every Zionist in Palestine’.

ROAD TO OSLO

It was against this tense backdrop – punctuated by reminders of the cost and difficulty of maintaining the status quo – that the first moves took place to initiate direct talks between Israel and the PLO. The seed had been sown earlier at a meeting between the Labour politician Yossi Beilin, a protégé of Peres, and Terje Rød-Larsen of the Norwegian Institute for Applied Social Research, which had worked in the occupied territories. Over lunch at an Indian restaurant in Tel Aviv, Larsen suggested that Norway – which had long had good relations with the PLO and was not a member of the European Community – could be a conduit for discreet Israeli–Palestinian contacts, and a formal offer was made by Oslo when Beilin was serving as Peres’s deputy in the foreign ministry. In December the Knesset passed the first reading of a bill removing a ban on contacts with PLO representatives. Starting in January 1993 some fourteen meetings took place in Norway between Israeli academics and Palestinian officials. None of this, crucially, was known to the participants in the still-suspended Washington talks. The backchannel remained a fairly well-kept secret for nearly nine months. ‘Keeping secrets’, as Peres observed dryly, ‘is not usually one of our national characteristics.’¹⁶

Initially the involvement was asymmetrical: the Israelis, Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak, were university political scientists linked to Beilin, who was operating on his own initiative. Hirschfeld, a veteran of ‘track-two’ diplomacy, was close to Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi. The PLO, by contrast, was involved at a high level, represented by Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa), Arafat’s adviser and head of the PLO economic department, and two colleagues. Neither the PLO Executive Committee nor the Fatah Central Committee was informed. The intention was not to circumvent the Washington talks but to overcome the obstacles they had encountered. Progress was surprisingly fast. By March, after three rounds of talks, the parties agreed a draft declaration of principles constructed around a crucial distinction between interim and permanent status issues. The former included Israeli withdrawals and the creation of Palestinian self-government. East Jerusalem was a permanent status issue, along with refugees, settlements, borders, sovereignty and security arrangements. Leaving the thorniest elements of any agreement to one side was a huge concession by the PLO. Beilin informed Peres, and Peres Rabin, of what had been happening. ‘The PLO men in Oslo were more flexible, more imaginative and more authoritative than the West Bank-Gaza team negotiating in Washington,’ Peres told the prime minister.17 Rabin initially resisted, arguing that ‘the Tunis group’ were ‘the extremist element among the Palestinians … and they are preventing the more moderate elements from advancing in the negotiations with us’.¹⁸ But he then changed tack and agreed to pursue the Oslo channel. Another calculation played a significant role in this shift: the Israelis were well aware of the PLO’s grave financial crisis – a disastrous legacy of Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein during the Kuwait crisis, and of internal divisions over it. No official figures were available, but the organization was believed to be effectively bankrupt. The Israelis’ insights may have been enriched by the fact that an aide to Hakam Balawi, Abu Iyad’s successor as the organization’s security chief, had been spying for the Mossad.¹⁹ The aide, Adnan Yassin, reportedly installed bugging devices in a chair and desk light in the office of Arafat’s veteran deputy, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), as the Oslo talks proceeded. Abbas, the surveillance revealed, was on very bad terms with the PLO leader.²⁰ It was clear to Israel that Arafat was weak and had few options. It made sense to try to capitalize on that.

While all this was going on behind the scenes, violence escalated. In March 1993 alone fifteen Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed by Palestinians, many in stabbing attacks. That triggered a new policy of permanent closure of the green line ‘until further notice’. After that, approvals to enter not only Israel but also East Jerusalem ‘were granted sparingly and according to criteria unknown to Palestinians’.21 The country’s most famous cartoonist, Dosh, deployed his iconic character Srulik – Israel’s fresh-faced equivalent of the defiant Palestinian Handala, in his trademark biblical sandals, khaki shorts and kova tembel (dunce) hat – to peer sceptically at a map of the country, with the 1967 border clearly marked, in the shape of a fearsome-looking knife, as a genial-looking dove explains: ‘Don’t worry, there is a political solution to terrorism.’²² Seventeen Palestinians were killed by Israelis in the same period, though that, as ever, attracted less attention. ‘Separation from the Palestinians was meant to define once more the psychological borders within which Israeli citizens could feel safe’, commented Meron Benvenisti.²³

When the sixth round of the secret Norwegian talks began in May, Israel for the first time sent official representatives to meet the PLO – a significant commitment that meant the stakes were higher because any leak would expose the process to intense and potentially fatal scrutiny, especially at home. Uri Savir, director-general of the foreign ministry, and Joel Singer, a legal adviser, proposed that any agreement on self-rule be implemented first in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians responded that Jericho should be added (apparently fearing that ‘Gaza first’ might also prove to be ‘Gaza last’) and the two areas linked via a ‘safe corridor’. That issue and others, including a Palestinian police force, were also being discussed in the talks in Washington, and were thus the subject of public statements. ‘I cannot let it be said that I sold out the West Bank for Gaza,’ Arafat told Haaretz in mid-June.²⁴ Shortly afterwards, at the seventh round in Norway (coinciding with the resumption of sessions in the US capital) the Israelis introduced the notion of ‘mutual recognition’ between Israel and the PLO – a concept that was very attractive to Arafat. ‘I believed that the PLO was keen to win Israeli recognition as a legitimate negotiating partner, and would be willing to pay a high price for this’, Singer explained.25 Beilin also spelled out how Israel saw the move: ‘If there were to be mutual recognition the PLO could promise an end to the intifada and the cessation of all acts of terror on its part, the disarming of other groups – on its arrival in Gaza – and so forth.’²⁶ In the light of decades of animosity, this was a truly stunning change. But Rabin, for the moment, remained cautious.

By July they were discussing details of Israeli redeployments and numbers of Palestinian police. The Declaration of Principles (DOP) was signed in Oslo by Savir and Qurei on 19 August. It was not made public, and the two sides had still not recognized each other. News of a meeting in Norway between Peres and Mahmoud Abbas broke a week later and caused a sensation. When details of the agreement began to leak out, denunciation followed – first from Hamas and then by the Yesha (Judaea and Samaria) settlers council, which decried the DOP as ‘national treason’. Qurei had expected ‘concern and alarm, with fears of treachery and betrayal’.²⁷ He was right. Fatah did accept the accord, though there were strong misgivings in Palestine and beyond about what one observer called Arafat’s ‘secretive, devious, whimsical, autocratic style … financial mismanagement and his abuse of funds for personal and political ends’.²⁸ Talks, no longer secret, continued about the hyper-sensitive question of recognition.²⁹

Shafiq al-Hout, who represented the PLO in Beirut, resigned from the executive committee, as did his colleague, the poet Mahmoud Darwish. ‘We, the Palestinian people, have given everything to Israel in return for one concession: that Israel recognises the PLO. That recognition rescued Arafat at a very difficult juncture in his life. We should ask ourselves why Israel wanted to save him.’ Criticism of Arafat and his supporters was harsh and unyielding. ‘I left him’, wrote al-Hout, ‘in the company of the group of hypocrites who were going to build him Hong Kong and Singapore on the sands of the Gaza Strip and the hills of the West Bank.’³⁰ In Israel there was profound shock – especially given the demonization of Arafat over many years. Tens of thousands of right-wing Israelis protested outside Rabin’s official residence on Jerusalem’s Balfour Street. Binyamin (‘Bibi’) Netanyahu, who had succeeded Yitzhak Shamir as Likud leader, was cheered wildly as he denounced the prime minister’s ‘lies’, and there was loud booing every time he mentioned Arafat.

HANDSHAKE ON THE LAWN

The Oslo agreement was signed on 13 September 1993 on the White House lawn. President Bill Clinton had to coax a visibly reluctant Rabin to shake Arafat’s hand, a vivid display of body language that betrayed deeply held feelings to the millions watching on TV around the world. Israelis looked on in disbelief, many flocking to bars and beaches in Tel Aviv to celebrate. Palestinians were exhilarated by the prospect of an end to occupation. It meant ‘no more harassment by soldiers, no more road blocks, no more random arrests, no more land confiscation, no more settlements, no more settlers with their Uzis playing feudal masters’, as Sari Nusseibeh exulted. But Fatah activists were assailed by opponents from left and right.31 The documents were signed by Peres and Abbas on the same walnut table that had been used to sign the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979. The ‘Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements’ comprised seventeen articles and four annexes. It was intended to install an ‘elected Council for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338’. The timetable was spelled out, with the five-year-period beginning with ‘the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho area’. That would be followed by negotiations on an ‘interim agreement’ for a ‘transfer of powers and responsibilities from the Israeli military government … to the Council’. No more than three years into the transition, negotiations were to be held on issues including Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, security arrangements, borders, relations and co-operation with other neighbours.

Alongside the DOP was an exchange of letters between Arafat and Rabin. The PLO recognized ‘the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security’ as well as committing itself to resolve ‘all outstanding issues through negotiations’. It renounced the use of ‘terrorism and other acts of violence’ and spelled out that ‘those articles of the Palestinian covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist … are now inoperative and no longer valid’. Rabin’s terse but ground-breaking response was that ‘Israel has decided to recognise the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations with the PLO within the Middle East peace process’. Israel notably made no mention of either Palestinian rights or a Palestinian state. The Israelis also insisted that Arafat sign his letter to Rabin as the chairman of the PLO, and not, as he had done in his correspondence since the declaration of independence in 1988, as the president of Palestine. The Arabic word Rais carried both English meanings. It was an important distinction.32

The Oslo agreement deserved the overused adjective historic. It did not resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict but it set out a series of steps for doing so, with advantages to both sides along the way. Mutual recognition superseded what Arafat had announced at the UN in Geneva in 1988. It was an extraordinary step given the history of the Arab–Zionist confrontation and the hostility and mistrust that had accumulated over a century. It gave the Palestinians authority on their territory for the first time – though, crucially, not over the Israelis who were living there, nor control of its borders. It meant a return to Palestinian soil, albeit a limited one, from a base 3,000 miles away.

Yet Oslo was a fragile construct that gave innumerable hostages to fortune. It was vague and open-ended: the final goal was not spelled out. And the imbalance in power between the two sides was enormous, to the extent that the agreement’s many critics were to denounce the whole exercise as a form of ‘outsourcing’ by Israel to the Palestinians, of ‘occupation by remote control’³³ or the substitution of direct colonial rule for indirect or ‘neo-colonial’ rule. Each side had an unspoken fallback: the Israelis to hold on to the occupied territories; the Palestinians to return to resistance. Israel’s most important gains – recognition by the Palestinians and the pledge by them to stop fighting – were immediate. But the core issues of the conflict – still the subject of enormous gaps – remained untouched. That was a fatal flaw that would be endlessly debated in the years to come. ‘Because Israel had already received most of what its leaders wanted, the incentives to make further painful concessions were low, especially ones that involved huge domestic costs’, one expert argued later. ‘The fact that Israel had most of its gains in hand … meant that the Palestinians had very few levers with which they could influence Israeli negotiators.’ Another serious problem was the absence of an official arbitrator in case of disagreements.34 And the refugee question, so central to Palestinian identity and politics, was marginalized as the PLO prepared for a limited return home from its North African wilderness. For the 1948 refugees there was no answer to the poignant question posed by Mahmoud Darwish: ‘Where will the birds fly after the last sky?’³⁵

The scale of the challenge was clear even to the keenest Palestinian supporters of Oslo: ‘This agreement,’ Abbas told the PLO central council in Tunis,

carries in its bowels either an independent state or the consecration of the occupation. It all depends on our mentality as we deal with it … We are an educated people. As individuals, we have built much around the world. Now comes the test: can we build the institutions that can rebuild this scorched land? The mind of the revolution is very different from the mind of the state. We must all put on new robes and think with new minds if we are to build this state.³⁶

Fatah’s central committee approved the declaration by twelve votes to six. Hamas and Islamic Jihad objected forcefully. For the PFLP, Oslo was ‘the biggest blow to the Palestinian national struggle in its history’. Ahmed Jibril of the PFLP-General Command threatened to kill Arafat, warning that the agreement would ‘trigger a civil war’ and liquidate the intifada.³⁷

In Israel, two days of debate in the Knesset ended on 23 September with sixty-one votes in favour of the accord, fifty against and eight abstentions. Arab parties, outside Rabin’s coalition, supported the government. It was a small margin for such an important agreement. Labour supporters framed the issue as a strategic choice for both sides. ‘The Palestinians understand that they are struggling not to get what they have wanted, but to save what they can,’ commented the eloquent but now politically marginal Abba Eban. ‘There are better things for Israelis to do than chase Palestinian stone-throwers in the squalid alleys of Gaza.’³⁸ Eban’s Labour Zionist view captured the most positive elements of support for Oslo in Israel. But sceptics expressed grave concern that the Palestinian move was a tactical one, consistent with the PLO’s old strategy of setting up a ‘national authority’ on any liberated territory until the entire territory could be freed. Palestinian recognition of Israel was thus dismissed as a ploy in the service of the ‘true’ long-term goal of the elimination of the Jewish state. Yitzhak Shamir, the former Likud prime minister, condemned the ‘indecent haste’ and ‘total secrecy’ with which Rabin had moved to seal a ‘formerly unthinkable partnership’ with Arafat – who, he argued, was bankrupt, discredited and facing the collapse of the PLO. ‘For the first time ever, an Israeli government had consented to give away parts of the Land of Israel, thus helping to pave the way to the virtually inevitable establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza – though its leaders have repeatedly pledged that this grim possibility will never be realised.’39 In January 1994 West Bank settlers began a campaign to set up new outposts – ‘Operation Machpil’ (Double) – to ensure that territory was not surrendered. For the liberal commentator Meron Benvenisti, the true meaning of Arafat’s move was crystal clear:

By shaking the hand of the first and only native prime minister of Israel, scion of the Zionist founding fathers, he committed an act of surrender. Out of responsibility for his vanquished people, he asked for terms and begged for the magnanimity of the victors. For he reckoned that there was no other option but to admit defeat.⁴⁰

Support for Oslo among Palestinians was highest in Gaza and Jericho, perhaps reflecting the local impact of the now-imminent change.⁴¹ Still, there too concern was expressed that the agreement included no commitment by the Israelis to remove settlements. Even more fundamental objections were expressed by members of the Palestinian negotiating team in Washington who had been kept in the dark. Abdel-Shafi, stung by the discovery of the Oslo channel, noted that the agreement was ‘phrased in terms of generalities that leave room for wide interpretations’.⁴² Faisal Husseini described Oslo as ‘not peace, just a declaration aimed at achieving peace’.⁴³ Hanan Ashrawi was highly critical of the failure to obtain any guarantees from Israel. ‘It is not who makes the agreement, but what it is,’ she told Abbas, rejecting the suggestion that she and her colleagues felt manipulated. ‘I have no ego problems about being excluded or kept in the dark. We know the Israelis and know that they will exploit their power as occupier to the hilt and by the time you get to permanent status, Israel will have permanently altered realities on the ground.’44 The American-Palestinian intellectual Edward Said attacked the ‘supine abjectness’ of the PLO, and argued that Israel’s leaders never intended to promote Palestinian self-determination and statehood, but rather to perpetuate the occupation and confine autonomy to strictly municipal matters. Oslo had been ‘a Palestinian Versailles’, he concluded angrily, barely a month after the signing.

Now that some of the euphoria has lifted, it is possible to re-examine the Israeli–PLO agreement with the required common sense. What emerges from such scrutiny is a deal that is more flawed and, for most of the Palestinian people, more unfavourably weighted than many had first supposed. The fashion-show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people’s rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a 20th-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance: all these only temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation.⁴⁵

ENEMIES CO-OPERATE

Enemies of the agreement gathered on both sides, but steps towards implementation went ahead. The mood was a strange mixture of excitement and suspicion. In October Palestinian and Israeli negotiators agreed the release of a first batch of the total of 12,000 Palestinian prisoners. Officials met in Cairo and El Arish. Warren Christopher, the US secretary of state, marked a first by meeting Arafat in Tunis. Shimon Peres and Yasser Abed-Rabbo met in Paris but failed to agree on the size of the area round Jericho to be evacuated. In November Yaakov Perry, the head of the Shin Bet, and Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the IDF deputy chief of staff, held talks with the Fatah security chiefs Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub in Geneva and concluded an agreement on anti-terrorist co-operation.⁴⁶ The two Palestinians had spent years in Israeli gaols and spoke Hebrew peppered with the coarsest slang, helping establish ‘a backslapping relationship’.47 Perry also met Amin al-Hindi, the Fatah intelligence chief, whom the Israelis believed had been involved in planning the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972. Their first encounter, arranged by the Americans, was understandably tense – perhaps because another of the alleged Munich planners, Atef Bseiso, had been assassinated, presumably by Israeli agents, in Paris in 1992. But the two spooks stayed in touch when Hindi was allowed to return to Gaza shortly afterwards.⁴⁸ Rabin, tellingly, had been especially keen to devolve security matters to Arafat: ‘The Palestinians will be better at it than we were’, he argued, ‘because they will allow no appeals to the supreme court and will prevent the Israeli Association of Civil Rights from criticising conditions there by denying it access to the area. They will rule by their own methods, freeing, and this is most important, Israeli army soldiers from having to do what they will do.’⁴⁹ Israeli human rights activists took this as a backhanded compliment to their effectiveness.⁵⁰

Then, in February 1994, came a hammer-blow, wielded by a fanatical opponent of Oslo. Baruch Goldstein, an American-born settler living in Kiryat Arba, dressed in army uniform and armed with an assault rifle, mowed down twenty-nine worshippers at the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron. In the ensuing carnage, five more Palestinians were killed in Hebron and a further six elsewhere in the occupied territories. Scores more were injured. Goldstein fired more than a hundred rounds before his gun jammed and he was overpowered and beaten to death by survivors. Goldstein’s was the act of one individual, but his views were far from unique. It was the worst incident of its kind in twenty-six years of Israeli rule and one of the bloodiest in the long and bloody history of the conflict. Goldstein, a doctor, was a supporter of the Kach movement, the most extreme manifestation of anti-Arab prejudice in Israel. He was also vengeful: in December 1993 a father and son, friends of his from Kiryat Arba, had been murdered in Hebron. Rabin, in condemning the killings, was keen to emphasize Goldstein’s American background. ‘The process by which demonised enemies were becoming legitimate adversaries haggling over details of a historical compromise was blocked and possibly reversed’, commented Amos Elon. ‘The event showed how the sinister passion of one man could affect Arab–Israeli affairs.’⁵¹ Talks in Cairo and Taba were broken off and by the time they resumed, over a month later, the death toll had risen further. Arafat called for international protection for Palestinians. Furious settlers denounced Rabin and hundreds gathered at Goldstein’s tomb to honour his memory. Pressure mounted to remove the Hebron settlers, but Rabin failed to respond. That was seen later as a tragically missed opportunity.

Retribution was not long in coming. In Afula on 6 April, eight Israelis were killed and forty-four injured when a car bomb exploded at a bus stop. Hamas called it a reprisal for the Hebron massacre. It was a terrifying and highly significant novelty – the first suicide-bombing attack to be carried out by Palestinians against civilians in Israel. ‘The strategy of Hamas is to increase actions against military targets and settler targets,’ a spokesman said. ‘We think Hamas has the right to take any action inside Palestine.’ The attack, it transpired, was planned by the movement’s chief bomb-maker, Yahya Ayyash, whom the Israelis nicknamed ‘the engineer’ and was soon being described as ‘the most wanted man in Palestine’. A week later a bus bomb in Hadera killed five Israelis as well as the teenage West Banker who detonated the device. The incident was described by Hamas as the second in a series of five attacks. Fatah, apparently alarmed by the growing appeal of its rival, began to emphasize Islamic terminology in announcements and slogans. On a visit to South Africa, Arafat compared Oslo to the Treaty of Hudaibiyah that the Prophet Muhammad had signed, from a position of weakness, with the Quraysh, an Arabian tribe that had refused to accept Islam, but which he breached when his power increased. According to the interpretation favoured in Israel, his comments implied that he would breach the terms of Oslo without hesitation and return to war in the future. Gazans saw Arafat as ‘going to great lengths to offer some comforting quasi-historical comparisons that would perhaps help to sweeten his people’s bitter sense of impotence and frustration’.52

On 4 May 1994 Rabin and Arafat met in Cairo, under Hosni Mubarak’s auspices, to sign the Gaza–Jericho self-rule accord. It called for a final peace agreement to be reached within five years. The size and weaponry of the Palestinian security forces and arrangements for joint patrols with the IDF were fixed. Arafat baulked, in front of the TV cameras and hundreds of VIP guests, at endorsing a map of the Jericho area. It was a show of histrionics that was simultaneously embarrassing and unconvincing. ‘Not a single Palestinian … mistook his performance for toughness or saw anything in it beyond a piece of play-acting’, noted one critic. ‘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.’53 Mubarak was furious at Arafat for spoiling the ceremony, audibly calling him ‘kalb, ibn kalb’ (son of a dog).⁵⁴

In the following days Gaza and Jericho were evacuated by the Israelis, who turned over army bases and police stations to Palestinian units. PLO officials, including well-known former prisoners such as Rajoub and Dahlan, arrived from Tunis and Lebanon. Nasser Youssef, a PLA general, was in overall command. Excitement mounted: ‘There is palpable delight among virtually all Gazans to be rid of the occupation, and to have among them instead the men universally known as “our brothers” ’, one journalist reported.

It shows in the spontaneous gifts of food, furniture, building equipment, TV sets and other comforts for the troops. It shows too in the window of the Studio Lina, a photographic shop opposite the main gate of the military headquarters, where there are scores of pictures of the new heroes posing with their relatives, friends, or simply with people who want to be seen with a Palestinian in uniform.⁵⁵

Linked to the accord was the Paris Protocol, which regulated economic relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) for the interim period. It preserved a Palestinian economy that was both integrated into and dependent on Israel, reflecting the disparity in power and the Palestinian need for access to Israel’s labour market. Israel had sole control over external borders, the collection of import taxes and VAT, and was thus able – crucially – to withhold financial transfers as a means of pressure or punishment.

THE RETURN

Arafat, escorted by President Mubarak to the Rafah border crossing, entered the Gaza Strip on 1 July 1994, to be welcomed by cheering crowds waiting under a scorching sun. It was the first time the PLO leader had set foot on Palestinian soil since 1967, over a quarter of a century earlier. On the way to Gaza City, at Kfar Darom, one of the fifteen Jewish settlements in the enclave, his motorcade passed protesters waving blue and white Israeli flags, guarded by Israeli troops who were sharing control of this section of the road with Palestinian police. ‘Kill the murderer’ one of their banners said. Another read: ‘Arafat = Hitler’. On arrival Arafat spoke from the balcony of the old legislative council, until a few weeks earlier Israel’s military headquarters, and defended his ‘peace of the brave’ with Rabin. ‘I want to remind you that we have a big mission ahead of us … to build this homeland, to build our institutions and to rebuild the institutions that Israeli occupation destroyed,’ Arafat declared. ‘We need national unity. National unity. Unity. Unity. Unity.’56 In that vein he demanded the release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the gaoled Hamas leader, and pledged, in the name of the ‘martyrs’ of the Palestinian revolution, that Jerusalem would be the capital of their independent state. It was a highly significant moment. Two days later he visited a school in the Jabaliya refugee camp – the largest in the strip and the birthplace of the intifada in 1987 – as an Israeli helicopter hovered overhead and his guards struggled to protect him. ‘I know many of you here think Oslo is a bad agreement,’ Arafat told the chanting crowd, surprisingly frankly. ‘It is a bad agreement. But it’s the best we can get in the worst situation.’⁵⁷ Arafat, it transpired, had exploited the occasion to smuggle in an adviser, Mamdouh Nofal, who had been military commander of the DFLP when it carried out the Maalot attack of 1974 – and was on an Israeli blacklist: the Israelis insisted he and three others leave the territory.⁵⁸ It was a blunt reminder of where power really lay: ‘Beside the shining symbol of “the Return” walked its shadow – submission to Israel’s overwhelming might and reliance on its magnanimity and willingness to assist … in the process of Palestinian nation-building.’⁵⁹ But Arafat, Nofal recalled later, had been convinced that Israeli recognition would lead inevitably to a Palestinian state, and he was ‘overjoyed’ by the redeployment of Israeli forces out of Jericho and Gaza.

It was this conviction that led him – and the Oslo team – not to scrutinise the text of the Oslo agreement very carefully. He had supreme confidence in his ability to change the rules of the game after accepting them, just as he had done at Madrid when he agreed to the PLO’s exclusion from the Washington talks, only to impose its participation later.60

Progress continued over the summer. Joint Israeli–Palestinian patrols began, though the disparity between the two sides in numbers, equipment and capability was striking. ‘From the moment we entered Gaza it looked like, my God, peace has come,’ reminisced Fatah’s Nabil Shaath. ‘We were doing things fast, we were building trust.’⁶¹ The Shin Bet established a close relationship with Rajoub in Jericho and Dahlan in Gaza, who carried out Arafat’s instructions, though without any defined legal framework. Their men arrested criminals and opposition activists, including alleged Hamas supporters, and triggered objections from a few outspoken individuals. Amnesty International counted more than eight hundred people detained by the end of 1994 on political grounds. They were not allowed to meet lawyers and most were never brought to trial. Hamas called on Palestinian security officers to ‘end their collaboration with Israel against the resistance fighters and to join the Jihad’.

In October 1994 a new crisis blew up when Hamas kidnapped a young Israeli soldier, Nachshon Wachsman, and gave the government 24 hours to free 200 Palestinian prisoners, including Sheikh Yassin. Rabin phoned Arafat to say that he held him and the PA responsible for the soldier’s safety. Just as this bleak drama unfolded, the two were imminently expected to be awarded the Nobel Prize for the peace agreement they had signed. The Israelis initially believed the soldier was being held in Gaza but in fact he was in a village near Jerusalem that was still under IDF control, where he was killed by his captors in a failed rescue attempt, along with an Israeli officer and three men from the Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing. It was believed that the kidnappers had been traced by Palestinian intelligence and the information passed to the Israelis. Hamas supporters marched on Gaza’s central prison to mourn the kidnappers. Hundreds were rounded up. Rabin’s cabinet – again lambasted by right-wingers – voted to resume talks with the PLO.

Then, a week later, twenty-two Israelis were killed on Dizengoff Street in the heart of Tel Aviv during the morning rush hour when a suicide bomber targeted a No. 5 bus. It was the worst terrorist attack inside Israel since 1978. Arafat condemned the bombing and offered his condolences. But outside the defence ministry hundreds of protesters held a torchlight vigil, chanting ‘Death to Rabin’. Netanyahu said the prime minister was ‘personally responsible’ for the attacks since Oslo. Hamas, warned Peres, wants Israelis to ‘lose our heads and stop the peace process. No way on earth.’ But that process, just over a year since the drama on the White House lawn, was already in trouble.

Good news intruded on this gloomy atmosphere in late October when Israel and Jordan finalized their peace treaty – the product of decades of clandestine contact and the logical outcome of King Hussein’s 1988 disengagement from the West Bank, and of the Oslo accord, which was negotiated without Jordan’s knowledge. Hussein, Rabin, Bill Clinton and 5,000 guests met for the signing ceremony between these ‘best of enemies’ on the border in the Arava desert. Arafat was conspicuously not invited; he condemned an agreement which sidelined Palestinian ambitions and grievances, and which formally recognized Jordanian custodianship of the Muslim holy places in East Jerusalem. The apparently genuine cordiality between Rabin and the Hashemite monarch also stood in stark contrast to the suspicious and troubled relations between the Israeli and Palestinian leaders – and the very great difficulties they faced. Still, continuing attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad forced them to work closely together.

In November, squeezed between Rabin and his own people, Arafat attended a memorial event for Hani Abed, an Islamic Jihad activist who had been assassinated by the Israelis. He was greeted with jeering and shouts of ‘collaborator’ and had his keffiyeh torn off his head. Arafat moved more decisively against the Islamists after that: a few days later fourteen Palestinians were shot dead by police in Gaza on ‘Black Friday’ – the worst display of internal unrest since the Israeli pullout. Now there was no missing the alarming signs that popular support for Oslo was dwindling in the face of disillusion and the absence of obvious benefits – and that the Islamists were gaining ground. The PA security forces were opened up to Fatah activists and the number of Palestinian policemen increased from 8,000 to about 18,000.62 ‘Neither Rabin nor Arafat can stop Hamas’, warned Abdel-Shafi. ‘Only the people can. But they must have something precious to defend.’⁶³ The Israeli government was under heavy pressure too. In January 1995 a double suicide bombing killed nineteen soldiers at a bus stop at Beit Lidd outside Netanya, near a coffee stand used by IDF personnel returning from weekend leave. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for that attack, naming the two ‘martyrs’ as residents of the Gaza Strip. When Rabin visited the scene of the carnage his car was attacked by a furious crowd crying ‘Traitor!’ and ‘How much longer?’