When the military operation came to an end, I went back to Ramallah to try to work again. Ramallah was a different city, as I had been warned. It was a patchwork of miseries: scarred wastelands, faceless buildings, rotted roads ploughed with trenches, service pipes and cables disemboweled from their earthly guts and spewed out by IDF bulldozers. Indoors, people were picking through the layered remnants of their homes and workplaces: soldiers had made a point of ripping, smashing, stealing, and piling up mounds of detritus, all sprayed over with soldiers’ shit and piss. The shit said what so many words could not—the stench of loathing, unalterable contempt: nothing—you are nothing.
Work had already been difficult because of the closures. Now it was even more difficult because of the damage to the health system. Operation Defensive Shield had set back Palestinians “quite a long way,” explained Rita Giacaman, head of Birzeit University school of public health. She liked understatement. I had transferred to her unit after Sholto’s arrival. Her reputation in the world of public health meant that her name came up in conversations in London, Cairo, Beirut, emails from New York, and later in Senegal, where I met an EU envoy who knew her work. I caught up with her at a pizza restaurant in Ramallah, where we sat outside at round tables and watched Palestine go by.
She said simply, “Tell me about yourself.” I gave a brief summary, and she asked more questions. Within a few minutes she had understood exactly. Not that I had told her; I had consciously tried telling people from time to time, but without success. The most I ever managed was mutual grumbling with other women in the same state: career on pause, new baby, the tyranny of children, and a husband mystified by the stranger—me—we both lived with. Now, unconsciously, I had told Rita everything or, more accurately, she had seen it. She laid out research programs she would attach me to, objectives to be decided on, goals to achieve. The subjects were childbirth, maternal health, and healthcare access and policy.
But there were obstacles. “Not the usual obstacles to healthcare,” she said. “No, these are a little different.” She described, with disdain and pragmatism in equal measure, the extent of IDF damage to the clinics, ambulances, equipment, records, dispatching stations, “even hospitals.” And how patients had suffered: people needing dialysis, hemophiliacs, children with epilepsy, and people with cancer who ran out of medications, individual cases needing urgent surgery— “and none of them capable of lifting a finger against anyone.” She had spent days and nights manning a makeshift ambulance dispatch station, trying to send help to, and calm, the hundreds of people needing doctors, midwives, transport, help of any sort. “Everybody did what he or she could. We were totally united.”
Most Palestinians were shrugging even at Operation Defensive Shield, picking themselves up and starting again. “We have no choice,” Rita said, adding, “That cliché makes me sound like an Israeli.”
Palestinians said they knew this would not be the last IDF attack, only the biggest so far in a continuing series. They would adapt and find a way around the layers of damage and blockade. One of my new colleagues commented on the irony of the military operation: “It will take us months, years—maybe we’ll never manage to get back all that the IDF have destroyed. But our extremists,” she said, “it will take them no time at all to get going again—the IDF has made it so much easier for them. They’ve got more volunteers and recruits than ever now. The IDF is the best recruiter Hamas and Islamic Jihad could ever hope for.”
Rita adapted the department to ease people’s daily lives as far as she could. Many of the researchers lived in Ramallah, so she moved the main office from Birzeit, a village to the north, to Ramallah in order to cut out their hours of trudge across the grueling Surdah checkpoint that lay between the two communities. She relocated the staff, computers, data, and records in a colleague’s garage: an upheaval, and not an ideal destination, but the only way to counter the IDF closures. Since I was based in Jerusalem, Rita and my co-worker Laura tailored my research into childbirth policy to center on al-Makassed Hospital on the Mount of Olives so that I had to make only occasional trips to the new office in Ramallah.
Adaptation was going on all through Palestinian society. “Whatever they think up to block us, we will find a way around. They won’t make us give in,” said a biostatistician after a more than usually arduous checkpoint experience one morning. Since children and students were so often barred from schools and universities by checkpoints and curfews, educators were mobilizing information technology for students to study at home using the Internet. Some Palestinians in the health industry decided to look on the destruction as a chance to create something groundbreaking. Closures permitting.
At al-Makassed Hospital Dr. Ibrahim, one of my new colleagues, listened to my reaction to the resilience of Palestinians and told me about sumud. Sumud, being steadfast in the face of all difficulty, was one of the qualities that kept Palestinians going. That, he said, and the conviction that one day the law would be upheld and their internationally recognized rights granted.
In the Occupied Territories, the sense of injustice was acute. Not only were Palestinians suffering and dying but their suffering and dying went largely unrecognized. It appeared to them that the West just didn’t care about Palestinians, or if it did, it couldn’t say so. Worse, some in the West blamed the Palestinians for what was happening. Another colleague, Dr. Jamal, whose Nablus estate had been taken by settlers, said during a break between a C-section and a laparoscopy, “The Palestinians’ greatest misfortune is that we are the victims of history’s greatest victims. If we defend ourselves or if anyone defends us—the victims of the victims—this is the same as siding with their oppressors, and being anti-Semitic. We seem unable to get around this problem.”
Through the suicide bombings the Palestinians had become invisible, inhuman. Their rights could be ignored because of the actions of extremists. “Should we judge everyone by their extremists?” asked Rym, a paramedic.
Despite the steadfast approach, people needed to talk about what had happened to them. And talk meant hearing what my colleagues had been through.
Rym happened to be under curfew at home in Ramallah when she was called out to help distribute first aid and emergency food and medicines. Her family tried to stop her breaking the IDF’s curfew but she went anyway. “Everything—everything—was destroyed. I’ve been working with the NGO for seven years. Here is our life—what was happening to me?” She was dazed.
“We were all wearing our first-aid vests. We all said over and over, ‘we’re health workers, we’re here to help the injured, we’re not doing anything wrong,’ but the soldiers rounded us up like animals and put us into a parking garage, with families—and one mother; they wouldn’t even let her get milk for her baby. One of the doctors, Dr. Mohammed, they took him and put a gun to his head and they used him as a human shield so they could search the building.”
Rym was sitting in her office at a small table talking to a British nurse and me over thin plastic cups of coffee. She didn’t touch hers. Her red sweater and dark hair listing over her shoulders were glamorous, but her face was a picture of fear. We were meant to be discussing the effects of Closure on childbirth policy, but Rym was in no fit state. She pressed her fingers to the corner of her eyes to stub out the tears as she told us that she had seen a man peering out of an upper floor window opposite, hesitate, then jump rather than be shelled to death. Rym and a doctor had rushed to help him. He was still alive. But the soldiers refused to let them tend him. Shooting randomly, they picked up the injured man and took him away.
Rym’s unit used “walking teams” to get food and medicines to families and the old and the sick: going out under curfew, trying to talk to the soldiers, sometimes let through, sometimes not, but always afraid. “There were many lessons learned,” she said, putting on a professional face. “Now we have plans in place for the next invasions.” As for the shock and horror of the troops’ behavior, “You get used to it. You have to help.” Then her fear flooded back: “I was in an ambulance with three women helping—one was from Denmark—and it was hit by bullets. We got out and lay on the ground. And there were soldiers there in a tank who didn’t know why their own snipers were firing on us from above. At an ambulance. And if they didn’t know why their own troops were firing on an ambulance...” She let this go.
“And your family...?” I asked. Rym grimaced. “When I went back they were so afraid for me that they wouldn’t let me out again.”
Keeping services going was hard, Rita said. On top of all that the IDF had done, thousands of people had been arrested. Many were now in “administrative detention”—prison without charge or trial. And many were suffering from the psychological effects of the war. Counseling services coping with them were overloaded. “All the counselors,” said Rita, “have the very symptoms they’re asking about in support groups, focus groups, and questionnaires.” Ambulance drivers were badly affected; constantly in the front line—literally, fired on, arrested, beaten up, forced to strip, and sometimes threatened with death. Three ambulance workers in the Ramallah dispatch station told me their experiences. As usual now, I took notes while they talked. They were sitting in their common-room with the TV playing quietly above us, ignoring the bustle of other teams heading out from time to time. Their trousers and shirts were prim white, the trimmings blood-red.
“People think we’re not well-trained because we don’t always stabilize patients in the field,” said one.
His friend joined in: “They think we’re unprofessional, you mean.”
“They do.” The first paramedic laughed. “Try stabilizing the wounded when the IDF’s shooting at you.”
“That guy,” he said, pointing to a man snoring on the sofa next to us, “went to help an injured person—a teenager who’d been throwing stones.” He had been on duty all night—a heavy night—they explained, and had fallen asleep where he had laid his head. He looked unrousable. “So, he ran to the injured man, and—boof! He gets shot in the thigh by a sniper. Hit his femoral artery. Blood pouring out of him. So now look, there are two patients,” the others are laughing, “and another ambulance comes, picks both men up, and then they run for cover before anyone else in Red Crescent gear gets hit.”
“The shooting’s not what I find so hard,” said the first paramedic, “it’s the checkpoints. Every day of our lives we’re stopped—how many times? No, we’re never allowed through without being checked, but it always takes fifteen minutes minimum. They go through everything, every little thing. They want you to show them. They’re too frightened to test things themselves, like the oxygen cylinders, or lift anything up, like the coverings on the stretchers.”
“Some of them are good with us, you can see they hate having to do this work. But some are shit. They want to hurt us, to humiliate us.”
The second was unwilling to tell me about the humiliation, so the first took over. “We all have these experiences, we’ve all been forced to strip naked, in front of other people, and kneel on the floor, and get beaten sometimes, hit, struck. I don’t mind so much when they hit us. It’s when these kids at the checkpoints want to humiliate us, and they can. They do.”
“Why us?” said the second. “Why ambulance drivers? I had a time—remember how cold it was when the invasions started? There was a huge IDF attack on the communications center here in Ramallah, and three ambulances were called out to deal with the wounded. Our way was stopped by tanks. We tried to turn around but another tank came up behind, blocking us in. The soldiers made us get out—it was freezing. The first thing they did was make us take the batteries out of our phones so that we couldn’t call base for help. They made us take up all our clothes, and then get down in the muddy water. Then they made us kneel, we were blindfolded, and they handcuffed us. If any of us tried to talk the soldiers fired guns beside our heads. They held us for hours.”
He slowed down his reliving, watching me write. He looked up at a third colleague who sat stiffly next to the sleeper. “Tell her your story.”
“I don’t feel like telling my story.”
“Yes, you do. Tell it. You were in Nablus, go on. What happened?”
The man was scowling, unwilling to go over his encounters with the IDF. He sat; I sat. The other two cajoled him, he closed his eyes for a moment, and then he told his story.
“I was on duty, at night, in Nablus. The curfew was on, heavy. We got a call that a little girl was sick. So we asked for clearance from the IDF to go pick her up and bring her in. It wasn’t far. We got clearance.”
He stopped for a moment. Then— “We were blocked by a tank even though we had clearance from the IDF. This happens all the time, we’re used to that. We tried another route; that’s what you do when you get stopped. But there was another tank, blocking us again. You have to learn the language of the tank. It’s the barrel that talks. You have to know what it means—side-to-side means ‘no’—okay, that’s easy, but try it for yourself when you’re so scared and it’s dark and they’re scared too. All you are asking is to fetch the wounded, or, this time, a little girl who’s sick, and they stop you, search you, fire on you, pull you out of your ambulance, strip you, handcuff you—all right, all right.” The others were slowing him down, stopping him from running on with his thoughts too fast for me to write.
“This tank made us stop. The soldiers came over, made us get out. They tied our hands and blindfolded us. One of them was crazy with anger. He seemed to be in charge, and he just screamed ‘Kill them!’
“That was it—the angel of death was on me. Looking at me. ‘Kill them!’ he shouted again. I knew I was going to die. The soldier was so angry, so out of it, completely crazed. And he was in charge. We stood there for thirty minutes, blindfold, waiting to be killed. He kept saying, ‘Kill them!’ I kept waiting. Then something happened and they just let us go.” He stopped to think, those thoughts rolling back in his head. “I don’t know if the little girl got to the hospital or not.”*
Other Palestinians took sumud even further and turned the destruction into creativity. An artist in Ramallah created a huge installation out of cars smashed flat by IDF tanks. The artist watched, locked in under curfew, listening to the bored drinking of the soldiers stationed there. They took a look at her art. She could see their puzzlement as they wondered what were these Palestinian crazies thinking, piling up useless cars like that? One soldier unzipped his uniform and pissed an arc of urine over the twisted cars. The artist, filming his response, was delighted. And, better still, the living art was completed when an IDF tank-driver drove his machine over the pile of cars to flatten them anew.1
My colleagues—pediatricians, neonatologists, anesthetists, obstetricians, and gynecologists—talked between cases about the psychology of Operation Defensive Shield and of soldiers serving in the IDF. They were strangely detached, as though they were discussing a patient, one needing multidisciplinary medical care. At other times the professionalism wore thin. After one ward round and morning meeting, a doctor mentioned “Let the IDF win,” the Israeli cry that I had heard so often during the build-up to the big offensive. “The Israeli government did let the IDF win,” he said. “It let the army loose, and the army won.”
“And now,” said an anesthetist, “we’ve got an IDF with its morale sky-high. Now they really know they can do what they want.”
The first doctor was weighing up Israelis’ horror at two things: IDF soldiers marking Palestinian detainees’ arms with numbers, and the news that an IDF officer had recommended learning Nazi tactics used in the Warsaw Ghetto.2 “They didn’t seem to mind about the bad stuff,” he was saying, “not about burying people alive, using human shields, stopping patients getting to the hospital and dying as a result, or about their troops stealing and shitting and looting like thugs, but they did mind about marking prisoners’ arms with numbers.”
“No,” said the anesthetist. “Israelis did mind about the looting, because it made them look bad, it went against their image.”
“But marking our arms with numbers was the least of our problems,” said the doctor. “There were hundreds of worse things—like shooting a nurse in uniform and killing a handicapped man in his wheelchair—but it seems that the only things they feel bad about are things that bring back what was done to them by the Nazis.”
“Don’t underestimate the sensitivities of the Israelis,” said the anesthetist cynically. “Things like that are burned into their collective memory. Don’t underestimate them.”
Some doctors were also angry with the UN. The UN had tried to send a commission of enquiry to Jenin, Nablus, and other centers affected by Operation Defensive Shield, but the Israeli government forbade the investigators access. The commission had carried immense expectations for most of our Palestinian friends as well as moderate Israelis, who saw it as a mechanism for restoring peace. Others saw it as the world beating up on Israel: where was the commission investigating those who sent out suicide bombers?
One doctor said, “Let’s have the commissions investigating suicide bombings—let’s ask exactly why it is that young people are ready to die and kill.”
“And,” said another doctor, “while we were being killed the West stood by and did nothing—but they say it’s a war on ‘terror,’ not a war on a people, so that’s okay. And the Arabs do nothing either.”*
There was a logic, they told me, behind the IDF decimating everything, even the Palestinian police, thereby creating a security vacuum in the Occupied Territories: it drew attention away from the ongoing building program, the creation of the Israeli government’s “facts on the ground.” The West Bank had long been a building site but now the pace had quickened. The diggers and bulldozers cut quickly into the loam and hills of the West Bank: ribbons of ocher soil across the Palestinian valleys expanding the settler road network and linking the planned industrial sites; swinging cranes and troops of trucks building settlements; loops of new-cut earth among the stripes of rocky land becoming the concrete drives and layouts of new suburbs. All growing visibly each time I went by.
“It’s all about making sure that when the final peace settlement comes, Israel will keep control of most of the West Bank land and its resources.” The speaker was a Palestinian American who had been involved in negotiations and was disillusioned on many levels, not least with the role of the American government. (“My friend understood US ‘balance,’” he said, “when one senior White House official stated frankly during talks, ‘We don’t want to hear from the Palestinians.’”) And “ironically,” said the Palestinian American, these “facts on the ground” may physically prevent the two-state solution* from happening. “Ask why no one really tries to stop this happening beyond a little meaningless posturing by the West.” The West let it happen: Arafat just provided the excuse to let Israel continue.
The small figure of Arafat lurked like a djinn in the background. The word “Arafat” came up in countless conversations: terrorist, scapegoat, leader, figurehead, proxy, betrayer. Almost everyone called him betrayer at some point; Israelis because he had not brought them security,** Palestinians because he had not brought them freedom, and internationals because they weren’t sure where their donated money was going or whether, if ever, he was telling the truth.
Many Palestinians were almost as harsh about their own leaders’ shortcomings as they were about IDF practices. Many regretted the presence of the “Tunis crowd,” those Palestinians including Arafat who had been in exile for years, most recently in Tunis, and who had been swept back in by the Oslo agreement. There were home-grown leaders—Haider Abdel Shafi, Mustafa Barghouti, Hanan Ashrawi, Marwan Barghouti—who, some believed, would not have sold out to the Israelis, imposed authoritarian rule, or been stained with corruption. One of my workmates put it simply: “Our struggle has two stages. First we get rid of the Israeli occupation, then we get ourselves some decent leaders.”
Occasionally I had to go to Gaza to work. I was permitted to cross Israel and enter Gaza; my Palestinian colleagues were not. During my work there I met Dr. Haider Abdel Shafi, who had been head of the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to Madrid in 1991, and was described by many as the greatest man in Palestine.* He was widely admired, not least for having done his best to uphold Palestinian rights. After we talked in his office one spring morning about healthcare delivery during the Intifada, I asked him about Madrid. His descriptions of the negotiations and Oslo said much about the Palestinians’ current situation. A tall and elegant man, suited in tweed, his kindly smile showed no bitterness. He was quiet and reassuring, his considerate manner, honesty, and decency unmistakable, as was his care for his people. At more than 80 (he was born in 1919) his disappointment was visible, not as anger, but as regret at the lost opportunities for peace.
At Madrid, he explained, Israel’s negotiators vacillated over Resolution 242, which called for an end to the conflict based on the concept of “land for peace,” withdrawal from territories occupied as a result of the war of 1967. “What are you asking?” they said. “We are settling in our own territory.” The US tried to stop the Palestinians from pushing for Resolution 242, saying that Israel was ready to allow Palestinians some autonomy—in education, for example—so why not delay on the rest? When Dr. Haider and the other negotiators stuck to Palestinian rights under international law,4 refusing to relinquish them even under American pressure, the PLO was wheeled in for secret negotiations in Oslo in the hope that the exiles would prove more pliable.
Dr. Haider found himself summoned suddenly to Tunis. There, Arafat showed him the Oslo document that had been settled in secret while he and the other Madrid negotiators held out: it was three days before it was due to be signed. “I read it. It was very bad, full of difficulties, and I explained that Mr. Arafat had to open his eyes, to see what was really going on. But he wasn’t listening. He simply said, ‘Of course, you’re going to attend the signing.’ I said, ‘Mr. Arafat, you’re not listening.’ But it was useless.”
Dr. Haider’s disappointment was colored with disdain for his compatriots’ failure to see the meaning of Oslo. “Everyone was euphoric. We went to Washington, and the euphoria continued. The press asked me what I thought of Oslo, and I condemned it. Nabil Sha’ath [who became the Palestinians’ foreign minister] was not pleased: ‘For heaven’s sake, why so pessimistic all the time? Can’t you see this is the beginning of the Palestinian state, that this is already a reality?’”
He paused, thinking of the repercussions of Oslo. “Abu Mazen and Abed Rabbo* wanted to know my reaction. I asked, ‘Was there a legal representative with our delegation?’ They answered, ‘No.’ I asked them simply, ‘How could you?’ They said nothing.”
I went back to Ramallah and talked about my conversation with Dr. Haider. Some of my colleagues suggested that the PLO negotiators’ long exile, and the fact that they had never lived under occupation, explained something of their failure. They never grasped the link between what was being negotiated at Oslo and the Israeli expansionism that was continuing on the ground. And the PLO negotiators appeared to believe that the “spirit of Oslo,” plus the undertaking that “neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations,” would be enough to halt the expansion of the settlements.
“They were fools,” said my friend Rahman, a Palestinian lawyer now working for an organization set up to remedy the PLO’s earlier legal unpreparedness. Abu Ala, the chief Palestinian negotiator (he later became prime minister), had boasted to these lawyers that he had stood alone against the ranks of Israeli legal brains and skilled negotiators.
Rahman added, “Thanks to that arrogance they were taken for a complete ride at Oslo. The result was the Intifada and the miserable situation we are now in.”
Over the weeks I heard more from colleagues, for example about how, once they were installed as the Palestinian Authority, the incoming exiles from Tunis were no less disappointing than they had been as PLO negotiators. About how the PA undermined its own legitimacy not only by having signed up for continued Israeli control, but also by eroding what institutions the Palestinians did possess, and replacing them with nepotistic, ineffective, and duplicative organizations, all of which fell under the ultimate control of Yasser Arafat. I met Palestinians who had worked for years in NGOs providing important “pre-state” services, but these were swept away by Arafat, who offered nothing better in their place, only a corrupt Palestinian Authority. People complained about the style of his leadership: creating a web of security forces and agencies with no clear division of labor, encouraging bickering among his team, and relying on a close inner circle cut off from the Palestinian reality.5
Eyad Surraj, a human rights activist and mental health doctor, joined Andrew and me for dinner in Gaza under the crimson lamps and draped hangings of the Deira Hotel. We drank red wine out of white teacups—alcohol being forbidden in the conservative Gaza Strip—and listened to Dr. Surraj’s tales about life as a Gaza psychiatrist. His anecdotes said much about Arafat’s leadership: authoritarian, unpredictable, and reliant on shaming and sycophancy. On one occasion Arafat summoned Dr. Surraj to his presence. At the time, he was imprisoned—at Arafat’s instigation—for having spoken out against the many human rights abuses by Palestinian forces. He was brought—unwashed, unshaven, and in prison clothing—to Arafat, who set about trying to recruit him as one of his ministers. Dr. Surraj had no intention of leaving his work with the Gaza Mental Health Program, let alone of joining the PA. Politely, he declined the post. Arafat pressed him. He declined again.
This went on until eventually Dr Surraj insisted that he could not accept a post, because “Rais, I am not qualified.”
Arafat swept his hand around the room, which was filled with his crony-ministers. “Look at all these people, you think they’re qualified?” They all laughed obsequiously.
Before I left New York in 2000, an American acquaintance working for the UN, Rick Hooper, described the PA to me: “Seven years after Oslo and all the billions the international community has ploughed into the PA, what have the Palestinians got? Egyptian standards of bureaucracy, Syrian standards of human rights, Lebanese standards of accountability—and all to serve the interests of the Israelis.” A harsh judgment perhaps, from a man who had spent ten years working to improve the lot of the Palestinians, but few would say it was entirely unfair.*
PA corruption was very evident, and very painful for those Palestinians who were doing their best to make do with less and less just to keep the children fed and clothed. People would not complain, unless I asked, about the non-payment of their salaries or about the fact that when their salaries did come through they had been cut.
An EU official came back from Gaza in a rage after seeing a new Cadillac being delivered to a PA cabinet minister. “You know, their insensitivity is mind-blowing. Even in the good times this would have been sick enough, with so much of Gaza on less than $2 a day. But now... how can they not see?” Arafat’s wife lounged in Paris on vast sums that were later investigated by the French authorities. Visitors to the Muqata in Ramallah would ask politely, in English, after Mrs. Arafat. Mr. Arafat would answer politely, in English, that she was well, thank you, but then, aside in Arabic to his aides: “I haven’t set eyes on her in three years,” showing, as his Arabic-speaking guests also noted, no regret.
Rumors accused Abu Ala, speaker of the Palestinian parliament, of supplying the cement that went to build the illegal settlements. “You can understand the Palestinian laborers,” said Maha, “those who have to take construction jobs in the settlements—they’re desperate. But the fat cats, why do they have to sell the concrete that steals our land?”
“Abu Ala doesn’t have to worry about feeding his family,” said another. “He’s so rich he sends taxi drivers from Abu Dis to Ramallah to fetch a tub of his daughter’s favorite ice cream—and charges it to the parliament.” Hatred of officials, the PA, and Arafat was never far from the surface.
Arafat’s many failures were bemoaned in private: he failed to react to continued settlement building and to ongoing Israeli strategies to deprive Palestinians of East Jerusalem, failed to offer leadership or strategy when the Intifada broke out, failed to communicate effectively with the Israeli public to counter the claims made against him, or to present the Palestinians’ case internationally. He had become, many Palestinians admitted, a liability. Yet, loathed and blamed, at the same time Arafat was still revered as Palestinians’ leader and father, the man who had given international recognition to their cause when the rest of the Arab world’s incompetence had failed to do so.
Periodically and like repeats of a bad TV soap opera when everyone is almost sure they know the ending, Israeli threats were aimed at Arafat. He was besieged in the Ramallah Muqata (HQ); his Gaza Muqata was destroyed and then destroyed again. There was talk of expelling him to Gaza or beyond, and sometimes, when tempers were particularly jagged, there would be talk of killing him. This would trigger protests from embassies and governments and resuscitate his flagging popularity—there would be demonstrations of support from Palestinians on the streets of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and among the refugees in the camps of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
I was caught up in the middle of one Gaza demonstration in support of Arafat. It was larger than normal, by all accounts. A New Zealander was in the driving seat; he took one look at the big black 4x4s packed with men in dark masks, spiked with automatic weapons, and festooned with Hamas flags. “Let’s not hang around these guys,” he said, calmly enough, but turning the car in the opposite direction.
“I suppose a bullet-proof vehicle would be comforting,” I said, missing the point.
“No,” he said. “Not the guns. Helicopter missiles. They turn even the heaviest armored cars into lumps of metal.” Now I saw the point. The IDF were assassinating people regularly, and it was more or less open hunting season on big black 4x4s draped with Hamas flags.
We left the scene in a hurry but half an hour later I was back in the middle of the demonstration by mistake, this time being driven by a Palestinian friend, Basem, who was taking me to the health ministry. I mentioned to him the matter of the Israeli helicopters, saying I wanted to avoid being “collateral damage.” It was too late. We had turned into the thick of the march and were surrounded. On television the scene would have looked dramatic and threatening, potentially violent; but on the ground, from where I sat, it looked more like a long, sober party. The demonstrators were meandering, and where I had initially seen guns, masks, black-and-white keffiyehs, and jeepfuls of trigger-light machine-gun-laden “warriors,” I began to see people. Women and children were marching with the crowds, men smiled at each other in greeting, there were songs and laughter—albeit pockmarked with “happy-fire.” People waved to Basem, who seemed to know everyone. Many came over to the car and shook my hand through the window as he introduced us.
The street filled with color against the white of the Gazan sky, the clothes of the marchers outdone by the flags of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PA, and Palestine. Greens, gold, black, and red; sweeping trails of Arabic script across the colors; posters and declarations of support for Arafat were everywhere. And so was the humiliation: the march, an attempt to show strength, only emphasized that all Gazans were like ducks in a fairground shooting-range if an Israeli helicopter chose to liquidate one of them. Like the Palestinians’ bombing attacks, their self-defensive measures, ranging from gunfire to laying anti-tank mines, not only invited more retaliation, they were also largely useless. Palestinians were incapable of protecting themselves against the massively armed Israeli forces, just as incapable as the imprisoned Arafat.
Our new Ramallah office was not far from Arafat’s Muqata, so from time to time our work was interrupted. There would be clashes between stone-throwing youths and the IDF, and then gunfire. My workmates were used to hunkering down when the shooting started and the tear gas began to fly. They had a ritual: cars would be pulled off the street and into driveways so the tanks could not crush them. Tables and chairs set out for us to enjoy the sun during meetings would be abandoned, everyone rushing indoors. Volleys of phone calls began, locating and instructing family members at risk. The most urgent calls were from parents trying to make sure their children in nearby schools were safe.
The first time I was caught up in the shooting I stared at the others who swept me along, and then watched my car from a distance—I had not been quick enough to move it—hoping the tanks would not take to the idea of trying to flatten a Land Rover. As I watched, I listened to the gunshots and the fear of the other mothers checking on their children, and was glad that mine were relatively safe. I asked Rita why the children were at school at all, given the dangers. A number of children were shot by IDF snipers while inside their schools.
“With so many curfews we have to give them some normality, some routine and a pattern to their days. If we were to give in, if we stopped school... well, it’s no life at all to be imprisoned at home, and they all know how important it is to go to school,” came the patient reply. “And I’m sorry to say they’re not safe from snipers’ bullets—even at home.”
Not long after Sholto was born, I was taken to meet Arafat in his prison-office. He was walled in behind layers of buildings and a coterie of flunkies, bored secretaries, and ministers. The women eyed me like slow-moving fish while we waited. They were used to visitors, and the visitor of the hour was my father-in-law, who had first met Arafat in a slit trench in Jordan decades before. We were led into a long room hung with pictures of Jerusalem, furnished with stiff chairs and low tables. Drinks and sweets were brought in, and then Arafat. He greeted us, his gray face luminous like a creature who never sees the sun; he rarely did, for fear a sniper might pick him off. He was even smaller than I had expected, dressed in his signature military green and a draped keffiyeh. Someone told him I had given birth in Bethlehem and his smile broadened. The Israeli government, he grumbled, had not allowed him to travel there from Ramallah, even to attend the Christmas Eve service at the Church of the Holy Nativity.
He wanted to talk about the increased numbers of Christian Israelis. When the million or so immigrants from the former Soviet Union had exercised their right to Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, many people had doubted the authenticity of their Jewishness. Sharpening their sense of injustice was the knowledge that many of the new immigrants had never had any connection with the land whereas the Palestinians and their forbears had lived there for generations. The immigrants were in no ordinary sense of the word “returning” anywhere. Exiled Palestinians wanted genuinely to return—home.
“He’s going to show you his filing cabinet,” someone whispered. Arafat stood up and turned his backside toward us, patting his butt. Out of his back pocket he pulled a sheaf of old but neatly preserved pieces of paper.
“Here,” he stuttered, finding an old cutting from Ha’aretz. “Seventy percent, nearly three-quarters, of the Russian immigrants are not Jewish at all, they’re Christians, and my people, many of them Christian, are forced to remain in exile from their ancient homes.”6
Arafat’s function in Israeli eyes lay in giving Israel an excuse not to negotiate and at the same time in being a useful object of humiliation: it was so easy to humiliate him and through him, the entire Palestinian people, whose predicament he mirrored. There he sat, month after month, cooped up in the blitzed carcass of his compound, confined to a shrinking space, kept alive by the very forces that occasionally, when it was politically useful, rattled his cage to threaten him and stoke the anger of his people.
* Many health workers were not so lucky. In the first two years of the Intifada (to June 2002), two PRCS personnel were killed, 129 injured, and 71 ambulances attacked and damaged. By September 2005 the attacks on ambulances numbered 341. Dr. Khalil Suleiman was killed trying to evacuate an injured girl from Jenin refugee camp, on March 4, 2002. The ambulance he was traveling in was fired on and hit by machine-gun fire and a grenade launcher, and caught fire. The paramedics in the back of the vehicle managed to jump clear, suffering severe burns. Dr. Khalil was seen screaming, trapped inside. Camp residents and a second ambulance tried to rescue him from the burning vehicle but were fired on by the army.
* Arab countries are vocal about Palestinian rights and use the issue as an excuse to maintain their current political systems, but in reality do little to help.
* Two-state solution: two independent and sovereign states, Israel and Palestine. The alternative some advocate is the “one-state solution”: a bi-national state for Israelis and Palestinians.
** Whereas he had been acceptable enough to the Israeli government for the Oslo process to take place, he now fell short of Israeli requirements: to maintain Israel’s security while the occupation deepened, and to sell to the Palestinian people whatever final deal the Israeli government wanted him to accept. As one Israeli journalist noted of the end of Arafat’s role as Israeli proxy, Arafat “stopped doing our dirty work, now his presence is great, it’s buying us time.”3
* Israeli historian Avi Shlaim described Abdel Shafi’s speech in Madrid as the “most eloquent and the most moderate presentation of the Palestinian case ever made by an official Palestinian spokesman since the beginning of the conflict.” Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Penguin, 2000) 488–90.
* Two PLO officials. Yasser Abed Rabbo, whose support for Oslo was muted, became minister of culture and arts. Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) later became Palestinian prime minister, briefly, in 2004, and then president after Arafat’s death in November 2004.
* Rick, one of the best and the brightest in all the UN, was later blown up and killed with 18 others in the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003. After the bombing the UN was assailed by celebrity US law professor, Alan Dershowitz, who wrote that the “UN deserved the attack because of its protection of Palestinian rights.”