117. For details of the PLO’s initially ambiguous position on the Iraqi invasion, as well as its votes at the Arab summit (initially it voted against the Saudi position and the day after changed its vote to one of abstention), see Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, “The Inter-Arab System and the Gulf War: Continuity and Change,” The Carter Center, November 1991; Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, pp. 641–42. For the PLO’s shift from ostensible neutrality to unmistakable support for Iraq, see Sayigh, pp. 641–43. An Arafat associate stressed to me that the PLO chairman genuinely wished to mediate the crisis between Iraq and the Gulf states. Arafat, he said, had sympathy for Kuwait, where he had worked as an engineer and where Fatah had been informally founded. His decision was driven not just by a calculation that Iraq was capable of confronting Israel and the coalition led by the United States, but also by his desire not to antagonize Saddam Hussein. Phone interview by the author with Arafat associate, August 18, 2016.
118. For the PLO flight from Kuwait (six months after the war, in August 1991, only 70,000 Palestinians were left in Kuwait; Jordan alone absorbed some 250,000), see Mattar, Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, p. 290. For the PLO’s inability to pay the families of workers, see Rubin, Revolution Until Victory?, p. 96. For the PFLP leader’s quote (“we burdened the uprising”), see Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, p. 647. For the public exultation at the Soviet coup attempt, see Sayigh, p. 643.
119. For more on the period following the Soviet collapse, see Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, pp. 643–50, 690–91; see also Khatib, Palestinian Politics, pp. 51–55. For figures on Soviet emigration to Israel (from several hundred per year during the mid-1980s to 185,227 in 1990), see “Total Immigration, from Former Soviet Union (1948–Present),” Jewish Virtual Library, accessed October 5, 2016, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Immigration/FSU.html.
120. For details of the Madrid conference, see Menachem Klein, Jerusalem: The Contested City (London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2001), p. 131; Elie Rehkess, “The West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” in Middle East Contemporary Survey, vol. XV: 1991, Ami Ayalon, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 260–62; Youssef M. Ibrahim, “The Middle East Talks: 2 Scholars Act as Palestinians’ Data Base,” The New York Times, October 30, 1991. The PLO sought to circumvent the ban on Jerusalem residents in two ways: first, the renowned Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, a Jerusalemite who was a research fellow at Harvard and had not lived in the city in decades, was a member of the Jordanian delegation; second, the Jerusalem leader Faisal Husseini headed a PLO committee—which included other Jerusalemites—that was sent to the Madrid talks but not permitted in the negotiating room. For the Qaddumi statement (“join the peace process or exit history”), see Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, p. 643.
121. For Shimon Peres’s remark, see Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 530. For Arafat’s quote (“a male bee that fertilizes”), see Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, pp. 654–55. For the PLO Executive Committee member’s quote (“paranoid enough already”), see al-Hout, My Life in the PLO, p. 267. For Sayigh’s quote, see Sayigh, p. 655.
122. For Arafat’s strategy of obstruction, see Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, p. 655; Indyk, Innocent Abroad, p. 79. For Rabin’s decision to leave the Washington talks when he discovered that the Palestinian negotiators were taking orders from the PLO leadership in Tunis, see Itamar Rabinovich, The Lingering Conflict: Israel, the Arabs, and the Middle East, 1948–2012 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012), p. 37. For more detail on Arafat’s use of the Jerusalem issue to end the Washington talks and force Israel to deal directly with the PLO leadership in Tunis (which, as an enticement, took a softer line on Jerusalem), see Klein, Jerusalem, pp. 134–35. Klein writes: “Under pressure from the PLO leadership and from Arafat personally, the Palestinian delegation in Washington demanded that all Palestinian legislation apply to Jerusalem. Israel, of course, refused.… The Palestinians fiercely opposed the American proposal [to postpone discussion of Jerusalem until final status negotiations], both because of the instruction Arafat had given (intended to bring the talks to a dead end) and because of the fact that several members of the delegation lived in East Jerusalem.… While the Palestinians in Washington were raining down fire and brimstone on the U.S., the PLO had already agreed in its secret contacts with Israel in Oslo to put off discussion of Jerusalem to the talks on the permanent settlement.” See also chapter 8.
123. For the Rabin quote (“on the ropes”) and the statement to Rabin from the head of Israeli military intelligence, see Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 533. For the PLO cutting payments to up to one-third of personnel, the severe drop in assistance to the West Bank and Gaza, the PLO budget being halved, and the thousands of Fatah layoffs, see Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, pp. 656–57. For the protests in front of the home of the PLO representative in Lebanon and the deaths from conditons that went untreated due to lack of funds, see al-Hout, My Life in the PLO, p. 271.
124. For the concessions contained in the Camp David framework, see section i of this chapter; for the pressures that pushed Israel toward Oslo, see section ii of this chapter. For the Brzezinski “Basutoland” analogy, which he mentioned twice to Begin, see FRUS, VIII, pp. 870, 1077. For the Amos Oz quote, see Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 8.
125. For Abbas as “holy spirit” of Oslo and his quotes (“achievement” that “ended a twentieth-century conflict”), see Abbas, Through Secret Channels, pp. 38, 175. For Nabil Sha‘ath quote (“full peace with Israel”), see Usher, Dispatches from Palestine, p. 43. For Arafat’s quote (“it is a bad agreement”), see Graham Usher, Palestine in Crisis: The Struggle for Peace and Political Independence After Oslo (London: Pluto Press, 1995), p. 1.
126. Before 1993, the year of the first Oslo agreement, unemployment in the West Bank and Gaza hovered at 5 percent. By May 1996, despite the fact that the PA had created new jobs, unemployment had reached 28.4 percent, and then lowered to 18 percent in September 1997. See Leila Farsakh, “Under Siege Closure, Separation and the Palestinian Economy,” Middle East Report, no. 217, Winter 2000; Leila Farsakh, “Palestinian Employment in Israel: 1996–1997,” MAS—Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, August 1998, p. 36; see also chapter 7.
127. For the first Said quote (“before that occupation had ended”), see Said, Peace and Its Discontents, p. xxix. For Said on the African National Congress and the second quote (“rid of an unwanted insurrectionary problem”), see Said, The Politics of Dispossession, p. xxxviii; Said, Peace and Its Discontents, pp. 6, 8. For Said’s growing skepticism that a Palestinian state would arise and his later support of a single binational state, see “The One-State Solution,” The New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1999. For the resignations of Darwish and al-Hout, see Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, p. 658. Whereas the vote in the PLO Executive Committee barely approved the agreement, thanks only to these resignations and the absence of several other opponents, there were just two abstentions in the Israeli cabinet, which approved Oslo unanimously. See Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 534.
128. For an example of an Israeli leader admitting that negotiations were used cynically to continue settlement construction and unilaterally shape the contours of a final settlement, see comments by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir shortly after he lost power in June 1992, following more than half a year of Israeli-Palestinian talks in Madrid and then Washington: “What is this talk about ‘political settlements’? I would have carried on autonomy talks for ten years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria.” Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 517. This was why the Palestinian intellectual and future Knesset member Azmi Bishara said Oslo was Israel’s “brilliant chess move.” Under the agreement, he asked, “Where is the incentive for Israeli withdrawal? The aim of autonomy is separation without withdrawal, and it’s realizable. Why would the Israelis throw it away?” See Usher, Dispatches from Palestine, pp. 60, 63. When Israel first conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Golda Meir asked Prime Minister Levi Eshkol what he planned to do with a million Arabs. Eshkol jokingly replied, “The dowry pleases you but the bride does not.” Oslo provided a perfect solution to Meir’s dilemma: Israel could keep all the dowry while rejecting the bride, so long as it called the arrangement temporary. For the Eshkol quote, see Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 273.