Emergence of Palestinian Identity -- Part 1, Arafat, Fatah, and the PLO

Listening to the Better Angels of Our Nature: Ethnicity, Self-Determination, And the American Empire Chapter Thirty-Two The Emergence of Palestinian Identity Part 1 – Arafat, Fatah, and the PLO David Steven Cohen The late Columbia University professor and author of Orientalism (1978), the classic book in post-colonial studies, Edward W. Said describes in one of his essays growing up in the 1940s as a Palestinian in exile in Cairo, Egypt. Said’s parents were Palestinian and Protestant. His father was from Jerusalem and his mother from Nazareth. His mother was educated at American mission schools and colleges in Beirut, Lebanon. His father’s side of the family converted to Anglicanism and his mother’s side to Baptist. In 1911 his father left Jerusalem to avoid being drafted by the Turks to fight in Bulgaria. He made his way to the United States and volunteered for the American Expeditionary Force in the hope that he would be sent to fight the Ottomans in Palestine. Instead he was sent to France, where he was wounded and gassed. As a result of his wartime service he was made an American citizen, but two years after the war he returned to Palestine, where he expanded the family business into Egypt. Said describes his upbringing as “a Palestinian, Anglican, American boy, English, Arabic, and French speaking at school, Arabic and English speaking at home, living in the almost suffocating, deeply impressive intimacy of a family all of whose relatives were in Palestine or Lebanon, subject to the discipline of a colonial school system and an imported mythology owing nothing to that Arab world among whose colonial elites, for at least a century, it had flourished.” Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 270. In the 1940s the city divided the British Cairo, the French Cairo, the American Cairo as well as the Belgian, Italian, Jewish, Greek and Syrian Cairo. His family lived two blocks away from the Gezira Club on an island in the Nile River. “It was carved out of the island’s center, a pure creation of the colonial imagination: there were polo fields, cricket pitches, a racetrack, football fields, and bowling greens, all grass, all perfected tended by armies of gardeners whose intensive labors kept the club at a level of beauty and calm designed to reproduce someone’s idea of a vast and noble meadow basking in the sun of an English summer’s day.” Ibid., p. 269. Said attended the Gezira Preparatory School, where his fellow students were half English and half Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Syrians, and Egyptian Muslim and Coptic Christian. At the age of thirteen he entered Victorian College in Cairo, where one of his fellow students was Michel Chalhoub (who became the famous movie actor Omar Sharif). http://www.lonelyplanet.com/maps/africa/egypt/cairo/map_of_cairo.jpg Egypt at that time was ruled by the Albanian-Turkish-Circassian dynasty that began with Muhammad Ali in 1805 and ended with King Farouk in 1952. All of this, however, was wiped out in 1952, when Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Egyptian army officers overthrew King Farouk and “made Cairo into what it had principally always been: the Arab and Islamic metropolis par excellence,” according to Said. “I recall, for instance, that after the Revolution of 1952 in Egypt a great deal of emphasis was placed on the Arabization of the curriculum, the Arabization of intellectual norms, the Arabization of values to be inculcated in schools and universities.” Ibid, pp. 268, 391-392. Said came to the United States in the 1950s to attend school and then college. In 1963 he became a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. “In my own experience Palestine has always been identified partly elegiacally, partly resolutely with dispossession and exile whereas for many others it is known principally as Israel, an ‘empty’ land returned to according to biblical fiat,” writes Said. “Like so many others, I belong to more than one world. I am a Palestinian Arab, and I am also an American. This affords me an odd, not to say grotesque, double perspective. . . . What complicates matters is that . . . the United States is also the principal sponsor of Israel, the state that as a Palestinian I identify as having destroyed the society and world into which I was born.” Ibid, pp. xxxiii, 39. Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago notes that place names used by Israelis and Palestinians reflect their dispute over the same territory. Jews refer to the city as Yerushalaim in Hebrew, which is derived from Aramaic, meaning “city of peace.” Arabs refer to the city as al-Quds al-Sharif, meaning “the Noble Place.” The most prominent geographic feature in Jerusalem is the large plateau in the southeastern section of the Old City. On top of this mount is a huge stone, which is the remains of Mount Moriah, where it is believed that Abraham was ordered by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad landed on this stone on his night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem. In Arabic it is known as al-Haram al-Sharif (“the Noble Sanctuary”). There are two mosques located here, al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. However, Israeli’s refer to the same place as the Temple Mount, because it was the location of the Temple built by Herod, which was destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Roman general Titus, the son of the Emperor Vespasian. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997),pp. 14-17. The only above-ground remnant of the Temple is the Western Wall or what Jews call the Wailing Wall. http://israelstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jerusalemtemplemap.gif Khalidi sees four stages in the emergence of Palestinian identity. The first stage was prior to World War One, when Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire. The sense of Palestinian identity was confined to a small group of the urban, educated elite. In May 1919 a Christian and Muslim assembly met in Jaffa and demanded the end to Jewish immigration to Palestine, the prohibition of Jewish land purchases, and the establishment of a coalition government of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. However, the assembly wanted Palestine to remain an autonomous part of Syria. The second stage was during the time of the British Mandate, when the Palestinians struggled to resist the colonial power of Great Britain and the Zionist efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1920 and 1921 there were riots among the Palestinians against the Jewish settlement in Palestine (known as the Yishuv). The 1921 riot began in Jaffa and spread throughout Palestine. Another riot took place in Jerusalem, when Jews erected a screen in front of the Wailing Wall. Word spread that the Jews were trying to rebuild the Temple in the location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. The riots escalated and lead to a massacre in 1929 of the Jewish population in Hebron. In 1929 there was another riot which led to the evacuation of Jewish community in Hebron that had lived there continuously for 800 years. Again, in 1936 through 1939 there was a full-scale Arab Revolt against the Yishuv. In response, the British government established the Peel Commission, which in 1937 recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Yishuv under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion accepted this recommendation. The third stage began after the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, when according to Khalidi “the Palestinians seemed to many to have disappeared from the political map as an independent actor, and indeed, as a people.” During the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 nearly 750,000 Palestinians were either forced or decided themselves to flee their homes to camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, creating the refugee problem that continues to the present day. One of the unresolved issues is the fate of the Palestinians who once lived in the cities of Jaffa (which today is a rundown suburb of Tel Aviv) and the port city of Haifa, which according to Khalidi were “cultural, intellectual, and economic centers” of pre-1948 Palestinian life. The right of return was based on UN Resolution 194 in December 1948 which gave Palestinian refugees the option either to return to their homes in Israel or be compensated for them. During this period the Palestinians were no longer a majority within Israeli-controlled areas; and East Jerusalem and the West Bank became part of Jordan. It was in this context of what Palestinians refer to as the “lost years” that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said that “there was no such thing as the Palestinian people.” Ibid., pp.177,178, 181, 191, 193. The fourth stage began with the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Yasser Arafat founded Fatah in Kuwait in 1962. Like Edward Said, Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo in 1929 to a Palestinian family in exile. Arafat often told people that he was born in Jerusalem, but this was not true. According to Palestinian journalist Saïd Aburish: “Early in his career, when the young Arafat sought to establish his Palestinian credentials and promote his eventual claim to leadership, he could not afford to admit any facts which might reduce his Palestinian identity.” Saïd Aburish, Arafat: From Defender to Dictator (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 8. His full name is Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Rauf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini. Abd al-Rahman means “slave of Allah the justice-giver,” Abd al-Rauf means “son of” his father first name, al-Qudw means “son of” the name of his father’s clan, al-Husseini was the name of his mother’s clan. He took on the name Yasser later in life in tribute to Yasser bin Ammar, a Muslim warrior and friend of the prophet Mohammed. Arafat is the name of a mountain outside Mecca where Muhammad delivered his Farewell Sermon. Technically, Yasser Arafat belonged to his father’s clan, the Qudw, rather than his mother’s powerful and aristocrat clan, the Husseini. Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, Yasser Arafat: A Political Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 12. In modern usage the name Mohammed and the name of the clan are often dropped. Arafat also used the nom de guerre, Abu Ammar (“father of Ammar”) in keeping with the Arab tradition of being named the “father” of someone as a sign of respect. Arafat’s father was a small shopkeeper who moved his family from Gaza to Cairo circa 1927. The Egyptian did not accept the exiled Palestinians as their equals, and the Palestinian could not obtain government employment. Arafat’s mother died when he was five years old, and his father remarried. His father sent Yasser and Yasser’s younger brother, Fathi, to be raised by his mother’s brother, Salim Abu Suud, in Jerusalem. The house was in the Magharba district of the old city near the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock, and the Mosque of Omar, but it was torn down after the Six-Day War in 1967 to make room for Jewish worshippers at the Wailing Wall. In 1937 Arafat returned to Cairo, where he lived with a family of relatives in the Sakakini district. It was a mixed neighborhood of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but Arafat probably had little dealing with the Jewish children. In late 1946 the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al Husseini, moved to Cairo. The Mufti’s chief assistant, Sheikh Hassan Abul Saoud, was a distant relative of Arafat on his mother’s side. The Mufti was the head of the Arab Higher Committee, and Arafat used his family connections to volunteer for the Committee. In 1947 Arafat was admitted to King Fuad University in Cairo to study civil engineering. There he became involved in organizing Palestinian students, and he helped supply arms to the Holy Strugglers, the irregulars of the Arab Higher Committee fighting the Jewish settlers in Palestine. At this time he became the friend of Abu Iyad, who was born in Jaffa and became a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and later a member of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War rather than joining the Palestinian Holy Strugglers Arafat joined the mostly Egyptian, irregular forces sent to fight with Al Ikhwan Al Muslimeen (the Muslim Brotherhood) in the region around Gaza. He made the acquaintance in Gaza with Khalil Al Wazir (known by the nom de guerre Abu Jihad), who was another Palestinian in the Muslim Brotherhood. Abu Jihad’s family had fled Ramle in 1948 and settled in Gaza, where as a teenager he was involved in a raid across the border in Israel. He then became a student of Alexandria University. Abu Jihad and Arafat http://www.ynetnews.com/PicServer3/2012/11/04/4247155/424715401000100396220.jpg The Muslim Brotherhood was committed to overthrowing the Egyptian government and replacing it with an Islamist state, but Arafat did not share its Islamist ideology. Nor did he share the pan-Arab ideology of Gamal Abdel Nasser (who came to power in 1952 in a military coup) or the socialism of the Syrian Ba’athist Movement. Nasser granted Palestinians equal employment, free medical care, and even special privileges in obtaining commercial licenses. After the Muslim Brotherhood attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Nasser in October 1954, Yasser Arafat was arrested because of his connections with the Brotherhood. But he was freed after two months in prison. Upon obtaining his degree in civil engineering, Arafat in 1957 took a job as an engineer for the Kuwait Ministry of Public Works and later for the Kuwait City Municipality. Kuwait at that time was a British protectorate. There was an existing Palestinian community there of about 65,000 people. They were fairly affluent, and they sent money back to their families in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip. But they were looked down upon by the Kuwait’s made rich by the oil boom there. Arafat worked as an engineer in Kuwait’s Department of Public Works. In October 1959 Arafat and his associates in Kuwait formed Fatah as an alternative to the Arab Higher Committee, the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), and the Islamic Liberation Front (which then was in decline). The name Fatah came from the Arabic Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya (Palestinian Liberation Movement), whose acronym spells in reverse F.A.T.A.H or Fatah (meaning “conquest”). One of co-founders of Fatah in Kuwait was Abu Jihad. He became the editor of Fatah’s monthly publication, Filastinuna Nida’ Al Hayat (“Our Palestine, The Call to Life”), which was published in Beirut, Lebanon. http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/asia/lgcolor/kwcolor.htm In the 1950s Arafat began to wear an Arab kuffiya (the traditional Arab headgear). Aburish notes that “during the 1936-9 anti-British rebellion the kuffiya had been the emblem of the Palestinian fighters, the undeniable symbol of Palestinianness.” Aburish, op. cit., p. 31. Arafat was committed to an armed struggle against Israel to restore Palestinian identity. He stated: “Armed struggle restores a lost personal and national identity, as identity taken away by force which can only be restored by force. Palestine had been taken away by fire and steel, and it will be recovered by fire and steel.” Rubin and Rubin, op. cit., p. 28. After helping to found Fatah, Arafat left his engineering job to become a full-time revolutionary. http://america.aljazeera.com/content/dam/ajam/images/articles/yasser_arafat_110613.jpg Not all Palestinians agreed with Arafat and Fatah that there should be an independent Palestinian state. In the late 1950s there were three major Palestinian political organizations: the Arab Higher Committee led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM) led by the Orthodox Christian Dr. George Habbash in Lebanon, and the Islamic Liberation Front (ILF). The Mufti, who remained in Cairo until 1959, eventually split with Nasser, suspecting that the latter was seeking a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Habbash, on the other hand, was a supporter of Nasser’s Arab nationalism. The Islamic Liberation Front, which advocated a pan-Islamic (as opposed to a pan-Arab) solution, was supported by Saudi Arabia. “Unlike the ANM it [Fatah] issued no serious threats to Western business interests in the region, and no statement which might jeopardize its presence in Kuwait. . . .,” writes Aburish. “Nor did Fatah’s call for eventual Arab unity differ from what was generally accepted by the established regimes, and it contained nothing to frighten those who saw in unity an encroachment on their sovereignty. . . This was openly anti-Nasser, but it also ended the Fatah group’s links with the Muslim Brotherhood because it conflicted with the idea of an Islamic identity to the Palestinian problem and the call to jihad—a holy war to recover Palestine.” Ibid., p. 43. http://ocw.nd.edu/arabic-and-middle-east-studies/islamic-societies-of-the-middle-east-and-north-africa-religion-history-and-culture/Images/european-colonialism-in-the-middle-east Fatah received support and training in Algeria from its new president, Ahmad Ben Bella, whom Abu Jihad had met when Ben Bella was living in exile in Cairo. Algeria had gained its independence from France in 1962 after a successful armed struggle. This aid continued under Ben Bella’s successor, Houari Bu Middien. Another Arab leader who offered support to Arafat was half-Sunni, half-Kurd General Abd al-Karim al-Kassem (Qasim) of Iraq, who criticized Jordan and Egypt for occupying Gaza and the West Bank. Soon after the formation of the United Arab Republic (the union of Syria and Egypt) by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a radical group of army officers led by Kassem in 1958 had overturned the Hashemite Iraqi monarchy of King Faisal I established by the British after World War One. “Initially thought to be a pro-Nasser movement, the Iraqi revolution evolved into a populist independence regime in a major wealthy Arab country. The new Iraqi leadership sought closer ties with the USSR and the Communist parties within the Middle East . . . ,” writes Aburish. “Kassem’s Iraq became a third force, a socialist regime which shunned Arab unity schemes but had a greater commitment to egalitarianism and to liberating Palestine.” Ibid., pp. 39-40. In February 1963 the Kassem regime was overthrown by a group of mostly Ba’athist army officers led by the Sunni-Arab Colonel Abdel Salam Aref, who was a proponent of Arab nationalism. The new regime then executed Kassem. http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/asia/synewzzz.gif The next month another group of Ba’athist army officers in Syria overthrew its elected government. “The new Syria which emerged from the UAR was anti-Nasser, and among the many things it did to maintain its reclaimed independence was to try to undermine him through taking a more militant stand vis à vis Israel. The new Syrian leaders, like many before them, considered Palestine part of Syria. In an act which demonstrated the oneness of purpose between the Palestinians and the Syrians, they were already supporting small Palestinian guerrilla groups conducting raids into Israel—among others a group calling itself the Palestine Liberation Front, led by a Palestinian officer in the Syrian army, Ahmad Jibril.” Ibid., p. 53. Arafat cultivated the Syrian General Hafez Al-Assad, who participated in the 1963 coup. In December 1964 Arafat left Kuwait and established his headquarters in Syria, where Fatah troops were receiving training. With Syrian help, Fatah began to send civilian infiltrators into the West Bank, which was then under the control of King Hussein of Jordan. From Syria and Jordan, Fatah launched a series of attacks into Israel. King Hussein of Jordan considered the PLO to be a tool of Egypt and Fatah to be a tool of Syria. When Jordan attempted to restrict Fatah attacks from its territory, Arafat threatened to overthrow the Jordanian regime. In addition, Nasser continued to support the PLO instead of Fatah, and Egyptian and Lebanese authorities even arrested Fatah activists. In 1966 a group of Syrian military officers led by Salah Jadid overthrew the Ba’athist government, and a feud broke out between the air force commander Hafez al-Assad and the supporters of Jadid. Because Jadid was allied with Arafat, Assad became an enemy of Arafat. In May 1966 Arafat and Abu Jihad were suspected of being involved in suspicious death in Damascus of a Palestinian named Yussuf Orabi, who happened to be the friend of Assad, by then the Syrian Minister of Defense. Arafat and Jihad were imprisoned and found guilty by a three-man panel. Assad wanted them sentenced to death, but Jadid refused to accept the sentence and later released them. Hafez al-Assad and Arafat https://syrianfreepress.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/hafez-al-assad.jpg In January 1964, in response to Israel’s plans to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River to irrigate Israeli settlement in the Negev Desert, Nasser convened the first Arab Summit Conference in Cairo. At the conference, they voted to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the leadership of Ahmad Shukeiri. “This was a greater challenge to Arafat and Fatah than anything that existed before,” writes Aburish. Ibid., p. 57 Arafat decided not to attend the organizational meeting of the PLO held in Jerusalem in May 1964. But he did send Abu Jihad and some other Fatah members. The Jerusalem conference also created the Palestine National Council (PNC) and a Palestinian Liberation Army. The Palestine National Charter reflected Nasser’s Arab nationalism. It stated that “Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the greater Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.” Turning the tables against Golda Meir’s assertion that Palestinians were not a people, the charter asserts that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality. It claims that the boundaries of Palestine were the same as the British mandate and were an “indivisible territorial unit,” and asserted the legal right of the Palestinian Arab people to “self-determination.” According to the charter, Palestinians included those people born of a Palestinian father after 1947, whether inside or outside Palestine, but it was only willing to include within its definition those Jews “who had resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion.” The charter called “armed struggle” as the only way to liberate Palestine from Zionism, which it characterizes as “a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and the geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress. Israel is a constant source of threat vis-à-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world. Since liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence and will contribute to the establishment of peace in the Middle East.” The charter declares the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate as “null and void.” It expresses the belief of the Palestinian people in “the principles of justice, freedom, sovereignty, self-determination, human dignity, and the right of peoples to exercise them” and commits the Palestine Liberation Organization to the goal of “the liberation of Palestine.” The Israeli government interpreted the above language as tantamount to calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. The Palestine National Charter 1964), http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/PLO_Covenant.html Unable to undermine the PLO, Arafat approached the Saudi Minister of Petroleum, Ahmad Zaki Yamani, and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia to support Fatah against the Nasser-supported PLO. According to Aburish, “The Fatah contacts with Yamani and Faisal made Nasser furious: he attacked Arafat’s organization publicly and prevailed upon Lebanon to control Fatah’s attempts to infiltrate Israel from its territory.” Aburish, op. cit., p. 59. Nevertheless, Fatah was able to establish training camps among the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. In January 1964 Fatah commandos from the West Bank infiltrated Israel and made an unsuccessful attempt to blow up a water diversion canal at the village of Beit Netopha. Aburish says that Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria accused Egypt of cowardice and hiding behind the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) separating Egyptian and Israeli forces after the 1956 Suez Conflict. Concerned with losing his leadership of the Arab World, Nasser in May 1967 demanded the removal of UNEF and sent Egyptian forces into the Sinai Peninsula. “When the Jordanian and Saudi taunts continued, he had no option but to close the Straits of Tiran to prevent Israeli shipping entering the Red Sea.” Ibid., p. 67. The Six-Day War in June 1967 resulted in the total defeat by Israel of the combined force of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, the Palestinian Liberation Army and units of the Iraqi and Kuwaiti armies. By the end of the war, Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and parts of the Golan Heights. http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/willow/history-of-israel1.gif In November 1967 the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242 calling for Israel to return the territories it had captured in 1967 as well as a “just settlement” of the refugee problem. UN Security Council Resolution 242 adopted November 1967 expressed “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and affirmed the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” It also affirmed “respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area” (italics added), a wording that seemed to exclude the PLO and called for “achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.” Egypt, Jordan, and Israel accepted the resolution, but Syria and the PLO rejected it. After the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Syria finally changed its position and accepted the resolution, the PLO continued to object to the fact that the resolution referred to the Palestinians as “refugees” as opposed to a people with sovereign rights. It wasn’t until 1988 the PLO accepted the resolution in exchange for the U.S. willingness to open contacts with it. After the war Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol ordered the razing of the Magharba district of Jerusalem to provide great access to the Wailing Wall. Aburish says: “The Magharba neighbourhood was adjacent to the Al Aksa Mosque, and, responding to what they considered an open assault on the Islamic character of Jerusalem, the Arab people and governments called for a jihad to remedy the situation and commit themselves to following those who believed in the armed struggle.” Ibid., p. 71. This was the neighborhood in which Arafat and his brother as boys lived with their uncle. Aburish says that Arafat came out of the Six-Day War as the “second victor” besides Israel. “In a pure sense, because he triumphed over the pan-Arabists, defeatists, and Islamists his victory was greater than the Israeli one.” Ibid., p. 70. In its aftermath Arafat become a hero in the refugee camps and streets of Amman, Damascus, Beirut and other Arab capitals. His photograph was displayed with him wearing the desert Arab kuffiya on his head, while his men wore their kuffiyas around necks, according to the Arab tradition of not wearing on their heads until their shame was avenged. In December 1968 Arafat was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Arafat began to recruit followers to Fatah throughout the West Bank. Previously, its recruits came mainly from the refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. In August 1967 Arafat set up his headquarters in the West Bank town of Nablus. Over the next four months Fatah launched 61 raids against civilian targets in Israel. Arafat then moved his headquarters from Nablus to Ramallah. http://takemeback.to/media/cover/cover-Time-19681213-96139.jpg “Defeat in that war had nearly brought down Nasser who, desperate for some success, was ready to forget Egypt’s old antagonism toward Arafat as a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer and Syrian client,” write Barry and Judith Rubin. Rubin and Rubin, op. cit., p. 38. But the PLO and the Arab Nationalist Movement had suffered a decline because of their willingness to ally themselves with Nasser. Unlike the Arab nationalism of Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who saw all Arabs as a single people with the same language, history, and culture, the Palestinian nationalism espoused by Arafat entailed a more particular brand of identity. According to Aburish, “Arafat believed that the Arab governments who had fought the Israelis—Egypt and Jordan, supported by Iraq and Syria—had lost because of corrupt and incompetent leadership and that, left alone, the Palestinians would have won the war.” Aburish, op. cit., p. 18. http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/asia/jonewzzz.gif Israeli pressure eventually forced Arafat to move his base of operations from the West Bank to Jordan. Aburish argues that the Arab Summit in Khartoum in September 1967 legitimized Fatah’s use of Jordan as its base. “The Arab leaders, including King Hussein, agreed to bury their differences and committed themselves to no negotiations, no recognition and no peace with the Israeli state. . . . These considerations left King Hussein with no choice but to accept the presence in Jordan of a force over which he had no control,” says Aburish. Ibid., p. 76. King Hussein bin Tal (1935-1999) was the grandson of the Hashemite King Abdullah I, who was placed on the throne of Transjordan by Winston Churchill, when he divided it from the British mandate of Palestine in 1923. In July 1951 King Abdullah I was assassinated as he exited the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by a Palestinian from the Husseini tribe. Abdullah I was succeeded briefly by son his Talal, who was not mentally up to the task, and so Talal’s son, Hussein, became the Jordanian king in August 1952 at the age of seventeen. Hussein had been educated at Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, Harrow School in England, and the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. In 1978 he married Syrian-American Princeton graduate, Lisa Najeeb Halabi, who became Queen Noor. King Hussein of Jordan http://en.ammonnews.net/img/big/201027big6383.jpeg After 1967 King Hussein began a series of secret contacts with Israel with the goal of reaching a comprehensive peace agreement and a return of conquered territories. The Israelis responded by saying that Jordan alone could not guarantee peace with the Arab states. There were still 17,000 Iraqi troops in Jordan since the 1967 war, and General Salah Jedid of Iraq was a supporter of Arafat. Furthermore, Arafat thought he could count on Syria for help against King Hussein. “What Arafat failed to take into consideration was the degree of commitment in Israel and the United States to maintaining Jordan and assisting Hussein,” writes Aburish. Ibid.., p. 106. Furthermore, in King Hussein’s meetings with the Israelis, Defense Minister Yigal Allon had offered him help in crushing the Palestinians. During this time Arafat was opposed to a two-state solution with the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian state. His goal was an Arab state that incorporated all of Israel. In 1969 he said that the PLO wanted to “liberate the Jews from Zionism.” He explained the PLO would “set up a free and democratic society. . . for all Palestinians, including Muslims, Christians, and Jews,” and he described this as “a humanitarian plan which will allow the Jews to live in dignity, as they have always lived, under the aegis of an Arab state and within the framework of an Arab society.” Rubin and Rubin, op. cit., p. 68. Arafat’s call for a democratic Palestinian state comprised of Muslims, Christians, and Jews was conceived as “freeing the Jews from the yoke of Zionism,” writes Aburish. “Despite the call for the creation of a democratic state of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, the total lack of Israeli response to all peace moves meant that the PLO’s real aim was the defeat and dismantling of the Zionist state. Total or partial success in the declared aim of creating a multi-religious state depended on the Jews of Israel accepting Palestinian rights, and the Israelis would not entertain that. Arafat and the PLO could not abandon the idea of an armed struggle to achieve a change in the Israeli stance toward them without undermining their new position of primacy.” Aburish, op. cit., pp. 97, 99. Arafat made his headquarters in the town of Karameh on the road connecting the West Bank with Jordan. In February through March 1968 Israelis attacked the town to eradicate the guerrilla activity based there. Despite recommendations from the Jordanians that Fatah withdraw to the hills, Arafat decided to resist the Israeli assault. Finally, Israel decided to withdraw its forces. Despite the fact that the Palestinians had more casualties than the Israelis, Arafat declared the battle for Karameh a victory. Tension also existed between Jordan and the sometimes lawless guerrilla fighters in Fatah. In May 1968 there was a clash between the Jordanian Bedouin army and Palestinian guerrillas who tried to free some Palestinian prisoners in a police station. The government of Jordan was in a weak position because by then two-thirds of its population was Palestinian. In November King Hussein demanded that the Palestinians curb their activities in Jordan, which included setting up their own road-blocks, molesting women, levying their own taxes, and kidnapping Arab diplomats and unfriendly journalists. In July 1968 Arafat and Nasser had traveled to Russia to meet with the Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, after which the USSR began to secretly supply weapons to Arafat. In December the PLO executive committee decided to remove Shukeiri from office and replaced him with Yahya Hammouda. Hammouda suggested that Fatah join the PLO as member organization, which made Fatah the most important component of the PLO. There were more than thirty Palestinian groups operating under the umbrella of the PLO. One of them was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command (PFLP-GC as opposed to the PFLP) supported by Libya, Iraq, Syria, and others. Another was the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a Marxist group with connections to other guerrilla organizations throughout the world, such as the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany. In late 1968 Arafat extended Fatah’s presence in Syria and Lebanon, especially in the Fakhani district of Beirut. In November 1968 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) under the leadership of Dr. Wadi’ Haddad, hijacked an El Al plane en route from Rome to Tel Aviv and redirected it to Algeria. The following month the PFLP attacked an Israeli aircraft at the Athens airport, and the Israelis responded by attacking the Beirut airport. “The Lebanese were being drawn into the conflict without having any say in the matter,” writes Aburish. “The need to control groups with such diverse aims, backing and connections is obvious, but Arafat never understood this requirement.” Ibid., p. 94, 102. Arafat eventually renounced the hijackings by the PFLP, but he took no action against them and Haddad had seats on the Palestine National Council and the executive committee of the PLO. In February 1969 Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO and the Palestinian National Charter that had been adopted in Jerusalem in 1964 was amended to replace a commitment to Arab nationalism with the goal of establishing a Palestinian state. The PLO began to receive funds from the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Egyptians, the Syrians, and the Iraqis. The PLO’s military units, the Palestine Liberation Army, in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, however, were under the control of the Arab host states. This image-building was a success, and aid to Fatah came from Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab nations. After 1969 the newly installed governments Colonel Qaddafi in Libya and General Ja’afar Numeiri in Sudan also offered aid. Part of the reason for this support of Arafat was to undermine the influence of the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser and Hussein both accepted the peace plan proposed by in July 1969 by US Secretary of State William Rogers that the principle of land for peace be the basis of a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This caused rifts between Arafat and Nasser and between Arafat and Hussein. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir also turned down the Rogers Plan, because she thought it was an attempt to force Israel to evacuate the occupied territories. Arafat tended to ignore the activities of the various groups in the PLO, including repeated clashes with the Jordanian army between February and June 1970. In June there was a failed attempt by Palestinian activists to assassinate Hussein by attacking his motorcade. In July Hussein met with Nasser in Cairo and the two agreed that Egypt would support an attempt to suppress the Palestinians in Jordan. On September 6, 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked a Swissair DC-8 and a TWA Boeing 707 and diverted them to Dawson Field in Jordan. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was a Pan-Arab, Marxist-Leninist group founded by a Palestinian Christian from Lydda named George Habbash in 1967. The PFLP joined the PLO in 1968 as the second largest Palestinian group after Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Six days after the first two hijackings, the PFLP hijacked a British Overseas Airline Company (BOAC) VC-10 and also forced it to land at Dawson Field. The hijackers freed the passengers, except those who were identified as Jewish. At the same time another PFLP team hijacked a Pan American Boeing 747 to Cairo and threatened to blow it up. On September 15 the hijackers destroyed the planes at the Jordanian airport. The day after the incident at the Jordanian airport King Hussein declared martial law and formed a military government under the Palestinian-born General Mohammed Daoud. Then the Jordanian army attacked PLO strongholds and refugee camps. Rather than coming to Arafat’s aid, the Iraqi army retreated to safe areas, which Arafat considered a betrayal. On September 19 units of the Palestine Liberation Army and the Syrian army crossed the border into northern Jordan and advanced toward Amman. Israel put is forces on alert and the United States sent naval units into the eastern Mediterranean to reinforce the Sixth Fleet. Fighting broke out in the streets of Amman, but Jordan counter-attacked. The commander of the Syrian air force, General Hafez Al-Assad, refused to deploy his aircraft, and the Syrian army was forced to retreat. “What lay behind the Syrian move was Assad’s calculating conviction that the use of his air force would bring the United States and Israel into the conflict, the one thing Arafat never understood.” Ibid., p. 112. On September 27, 1970, Nasser convened an emergency Arab summit meeting in Cairo, attended by the rulers of Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. The Libyan leader General Qaddafi took Arafat’s side and insulted King Hussein. Despite the fact that Arafat and King Hussein exchanged accusations, they agreed to disengage from trying to overthrow each other. At the end of the meeting, Nasser had a fatal heart attack, and he was succeeded as president by Anwar al-Sadat. Despite the fact that President Richard Nixon ordered the Sixth Fleet into the Mediterranean and Israeli planes flew over Palestinian positions, Jordan did not win a clear military victory against the Palestinians. Upon returning from Cairo, Hussein appointed Wasfi Tel, a former British army officer, as prime minister. By July 1971 the Jordanians had pushed the Palestinians out of Amman and other towns into a corner of Jordan bordering on Israel and Syria. During the ensuing two weeks of intense fighting between the Palestinians the Jordanian Bedouin troops, Israel took advantage of the situation to enter the Gaza Strip and arrest and destroy the homes of suspected Palestinian guerrillas. Arafat fled across the Syrian border and then into Lebanon with two thousand of his fighters. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JKkXY4bu0oE/T7eg-zwTwOI/AAAAAAAADEk/G1IjIvrmE7o/s1600/Map.gif Aburish describes Beirut as having “an international veneer and a tribal core.” Ibid., p. 145. The city was built on oil money, and Palestinian businessmen there had been successful even before the PLO moved their headquarters there after the 1970 defeat in Jordan. The largest construction CCC was owned by Palestinians. These wealthy Palestinian businessmen helped finance Arafat’s operations in Lebanon through a holding company named SAMED (the Palestinians Martyrs’ Works Society). Lebanon’s population was half Christian and half Muslim. Under the so-called National Pact the president was always to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the president of the National Assembly a Shi’ite Muslim, the deputy speaker of the Assembly a Greek Orthodox, and the chief of the general staff a Druze Muslim. Fearing that the Palestinian presence might overturn this balance, the Christians began creating their own militias, include the Phalange led by Beshir Gemayel, the Tigers under Dany Chamoun, and the Order of Monks under Chebril Kassis. In November 1969 Nasser had brokered an agreement between Arafat and the Lebanese army commander, Emile Bustani. This so-called Cairo Agreement established conditions under which Palestinian guerrillas would be tolerated in southeastern Lebanon but under regulation by the Lebanese authorities. It also shifted the control of the sixteen camps in southern Lebanon housing about 300,000 Palestinian refugees from the Maronite-Christian dominated Dieuxième Bureau of the Lebanese army to the Palestinian Armed Struggle Command. The net effect was to create a Palestinian state within the state of Lebanon. As PLO raids into Israel from Lebanese territory increased, the Lebanese Christians wanted to repeal the 1969 Cairo Agreement, but the Lebanese Muslims considered the Palestinians as allies. The PLO meanwhile began training Shi’a militias to counter the Christian militias. “In Lebanon, Arafat’s new base of operations after the expulsion from Jordan, he repeated many of his old mistakes yet again survived,” according to the Rubins. “Soon after arriving there in 1971, he was helping to make Beirut a chaotic copy of what Amman had been like. Arafat created a war zone on Lebanon’s border with Israel like the one he had made in the Jordan Valley.” Rubin and Rubin, op. cit., p. 57. At a meeting in Dar’a, Syria, Arafat had created a covert terrorist group within Fatah known as Black September named after the Palestinian defeat in Jordan in September 1970. Its leader was Abu Iyad. In November 1971 four members of Black September assassinated the Jordanian prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal, in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo, as he was returning from an Arab League meeting. The next month in London the group attempted to assassinate Jordan’s ambassador to Britain, Zeid Al Rifai’. Throughout the spring of 1972 there were additional terrorist attacks and hijacking in Europe and Israel carried out by Black September, PFLP, and other groups, including an attack on an oil refinery in Trieste, Italy. In May 1972 two male and two female members of Black September hijacked a Belgian Sabena airliner en route from Brussels to Tel Aviv. The hijackers ordered the plane to fly to an Israeli airport where they threatened to blow up the plane unless more than 300 Palestinian guerrillas were freed from Israeli prisons. Instead of complying with the demand, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan ordered commandos to storm the plane, killing the two male hijackers. The leader of the commandos was Ehud Barak, who later became prime minister of Israel and currently is its defense minister. One of the commandos was Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current Prime Minister. Four months after the hijacking another group of Black September stormed the quarters of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich and killed 11 Israeli athletes. In March 1973 members of Black September stormed the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum and took hostages. The American chargé affairs, J. Curtis Moore, the American Ambassador, Cleo Noel, and the Belgian chargé d’affaires, Gy Eid, were killed in the attack. In April 1973 Israeli commandos, including the young officer Ehud Barak, landed in Beirut and killed their PLO leaders affiliated with Black September. This incident and pressure from the Arab states convinced Arafat to stop overseas terrorism, but not terrorism within Israel. It led to Abu Nidal, a former Fatah member, to organize the Fatah Revolutionary Council to attack PLO officials as well as overseas victims. On the issue of terrorism “Arafat straddled the fence but was dead set against any such acts taking place under the name of PLO. In fact, except for suggesting the use of a new name, the final decision to create the Black September Movement was carried without his vote,” writes Aburish. “Even after more than twenty years no evidence has been uncovered to suggest that Arafat was personally involved, or that he approved any one single operation. But he was in a position to stop the operations, at least most of them, and that he did not do. . . . By not acting against attacks committed in the name of Black September across the board, he gave them his implicit approval.” Aburish, op. cit., pp. 123, 124. Hafez Al-Assad was now the president of Syria, having overthrown Salah Jedid in November 1970. Assad was a member of the minority Alewite sect of Shi’ite Islam in a country in which the majority is Sunni Muslim. In October 1973 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Syria’s President Hafez al-Assad launched a war against Israel to regain the territory lost in 1967. The Israeli counterattack forced the Syrians back to Damascus and the Egyptians to the Suez Canal. The Soviet Union threatened to intervene, and the UN passed Resolution 338 reaffirming the principles of Resolution 242 and calling for a peace conference. The Geneva Peace Conference which convened in December 1973 was chaired by the United States and the Soviet Union. Egypt, Jordan, and Israel attended, but the Palestinians were not invited. The resulted Sinai agreement signed by Egypt and Israel in January 1974 separated the Egyptian and Israeli forces in the Sinai by UN observers. However, the Palestinians continued commando raids within Israel. In May 1974 three terrorist from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a PLO member group, killed three people and held more than ninety children hostage in the Israeli village of Maalot. The Arab summit in Algiers in November 1973 cancelled the “three no’s” (no peace with, no recognition of, and no negotiations with Israel) passed at Khartoum and recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people despite Jordan’s objection. In June 1973 Arafat convened a conference of the Palestine National Council in Cairo, which amended the original Palestine National Charter which had called for the “total liberation” of Palestine in favor of a phased settlement and the creation of a “national authority” in any part of Palestine. Another Arab summit in Rabat, Morocco, in October expanded on the November conference by declaring over Jordanian objections that the PLO should lead “an independent national authority on any part of Palestine land that is liberated.” In July 1974 the Palestine National Council passed a resolution calling for the establishment of “a national authority on any lands that can be wrested from Zionist occupation.” The resolution stated that the first duty of this “national authority” would be to complete “the liberation of all Palestinian soil.” Rubin and Rubin, op. cit., p. 69. In October the Arab League recognized Arafat and the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people. The next month Arafat was invited to address the United Nations General Assembly. In his speech Arafat said that Zionism and Israel were “imperialist, colonialist, racist, . . . and profoundly reactionary and discriminatory.” Furthermore, he stated, that anyone fighting “for the freedom and liberation of his land from the invaders, the settlers and the colonialist cannot possibly be called terrorist.” He concluded by saying: “I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighters gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” Ibid., pp. 71, 72. The United States policy under Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was that the United States would not negotiate with the PLO until it abandoned terrorism, accepted UN Resolution 242, and recognized the state of Israel. Meanwhile, Lebanese Prime Minister Beshir Gemayel, who had established contact with the CIA and Israel, was committed to expel the Palestinians from Lebanon. In February 1975 followers of the former Christian President of Lebanon Camille Chamoun assassinated a pro-Palestinian politician named Ma’arouf Sa’ad. The next month Christian Phalangists ambushed a bus carrying Palestinian guerrilla trainees. The fighting then escalated into a civil war. Arafat appealed to other Arab countries to intervene, but they didn’t respond, because, according to Aburish “most of them had grown tired of the Palestinian game of becoming Arab when it was convenient.” Aburish, op. cit., p. 152. During the conflict Arafat’s PLO forged an alliance with the Lebanese National Movement (LNM) headed by the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt. King Feisal of Saudi Arabia was Arafat’s main financial backer during these years. In May 1975 the Lebanese President Suleiman Faranjiyyah accused Arafat of inciting a civil war between Muslim and Druze Lebanese (who were allied with Arafat) and Christian Lebanese (who were aligned with Israel). Hafez al-Assad in Syria was determined not to allow Arafat and his allies to take control of Lebanon. In June 1976 Syria invaded Lebanon and conquered virtually all the areas previously held by Arafat and his allies. Asad maintained that the Syrians were invited by the Lebanese government to help them end the civil war. Later that year, the Arab League urged a cease fire under which the Syrian army remained in Lebanon. This was followed in June 1977 by the Shtourah agreement between Syria, Lebanon, and the PLO in which the PLO agreed to restrict its activities to southern Lebanon from where it continued to launch attacks into Israel. The election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States in November 1976 brought about a change of policy toward the PLO. Secretary of State Kissinger under Nixon and Ford had refused to negotiate with the PLO, but Carter and his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, were willing to allow the PLO to participate in peace negotiations. In March 1977 Carter declared his support for “a homeland for the Palestinians” conditional on the acceptance of the UN Security Council resolution 242 calling for Israel to withdraw from the territories in return for a comprehensive peace agreement. At first Arafat was willing to accept these conditions, but others in Fatah, including Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, did not, and Arafat backed away from the proposal. In May 1977 the right-wing Likud Party defeated the Labor Party in Israeli elections, and Menachem Begin became the Israeli prime minister. Then in November Egypt’s President Sadat announced his willingness to travel to Jerusalem to negotiate a separate peace with Israel. This trip led to a more formal negotiation mediated by President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in September 1978. The Palestinians were not party to the negotiations. At Camp David Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin agreed to a two-step process under which an interim agreement would deal with the less difficult issues prior to a final settlement. During the interim period there would be autonomy for the Palestinians. The more difficult issue of permanent status issues of Jerusalem, the refugees, and the borders were left to be decided at a later date. Israel agreed to withdraw its troops from the Sinai and accept autonomy for the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. President Carter says that Sadat’s first priority was “self-determination” for the Palestinians, but Carter had doubts whether Begin would have agreed to an independent Palestinian state. Ibid., p. 169. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, mentions a private meeting between Begin and Carter in July 1977, in which Begin reportedly said to Carter that Israel would never accept “foreign sovereignty” over the West Bank and Gaza. A peace treaty between Israel and Egypt signed in March 1979. After a transition period of five years, the occupied territories would become independent, autonomous or part of Jordan. Aburish called this agreement “totally illegal” because “Sadat had no authority to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians. And from the very start, Begin made it clear that he had no intention of withdrawing from the territories and planned to annex them to Israel instead.” Ibid., p. 162. The other Arab nations meeting in Baghdad in November condemned the Camp David agreement and vowed to punish Egypt. Arafat also opposed the Camp David agreements, and when Sadat was assassinated Arafat stated: “This is what happens to people who betray the Palestinian cause.” Rubin and Rubin, op. cit., p. 82. Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin and his Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had made an alliance with the Lebanese Christian militia to push the PLO out of Lebanon and install the Christian militia leader, Bashir Gemayel, as the new Lebanese president. Aburish says that Arafat misread the situation in Lebanon. “The instinctive leader had not learned the lesson of the Black September Civil War. Arafat’s Lebanese realm was called the Fakhani Republic, after the district of Beirut where he had set up his headquarters. Within that area of Beirut, the refugee camps and long strips of southern Lebanon, his authority was supreme and the Lebanese government exercised little if any control. It was a flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty, and the way his followers conducted their daily lives exacerbated the situation. They set up road blocks, took over buildings, operated extortion rackets, protected criminals fleeing from Lebanese justice, requisitioned cars, drove out local residents, opened unlicensed shops, bars and nightclubs, and issued their own passes and permits.” Aburish, op. cit., p. 151. In March 1978 eleven Fatah fighters landed their boats south of Haifa and hijacked a bus, killing 34 Israelis and wounding more than 80. Menachem Begin responded with Operation Stone of Wisdom, ordering 30,000 Israeli soldiers into southern Lebanon to suppress the guerrilla camps and establish a security zone on the Lebanese side of the border. The Iranian Revolution in January 1979 “provided Arafat with a new lifeline,” writes Aburish. Ibid., p. 164. The revolutionaries had received arms from the PFLP in their fight against the Shah, and Arafat took credit for this. Arafat visited Tehran shortly after Ayatollah Khomeini took power, and the Ayatollah assured Arafat of his support in liberating Jerusalem from the Zionists. In September 1980 Iraq invaded Iran. Arafat decided to support Iraq, following his need for continued aid from Saudi Arabia. Aburish says that “the Iran-Iraq War replaced the Arab-Israeli conflict as the problem of primary concern to the countries of the Middle East.” Ibid., p. 167. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan won the U.S. presidential election in November 1980. Aburish writes that “Reagan, unlike Carter, was openly pro-Israel.” Ibid., p. 167. Reagan sent a Lebanese-American envoy named Phillip Habib to negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and the PLO. Aburish says that by Habib’s negotiating indirectly with Arafat and the PLO, the United State, in effect, had recognized de facto the Palestinians. The United States official policy nevertheless was that the PLO had to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to renounce terrorism, neither of which Arafat was willing to do. At the same time, the Reagan administration overlooked the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. In December 1981 Israel officially annexed the Golan Heights. Former President Jimmy Carter says that “President Reagan’s administration has shown little interest in diplomacy as a means of resolving regional disputes. Contrary to the policies of his Democratic and Republican predecessors, Reagan has tended to prefer the threat of use of American military force instead of negotiation.” Carter distinguishes Reagan’s approach to the shuttle diplomacy of Henry Kissinger in the Nixon and Ford Administrations and his own Camp David talks. “Under Reagan,” he writes,” the peace process has come to a screeching halt, and the debacle in Lebanon severely damaged or destroyed our influence in that area.” Furthermore, he says, “there have been no sustained efforts to bring peace to the region by dealing with the basic causes of animosity and warfare.” Ibid., pp. 201-202. In late 1981 Israel began planning a full-scale invasion of Lebanon to destroy once and for all the Palestinian presence there. In March 1982 the Israelis gained a tentative green light from Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, if the Palestinian violated a truce then in place. In June members of the Abu Nidal terrorist group shot and wounded the Israeli ambassador to the Britain, Shlomo Argov. Aburish says: “Although Western intelligence source absolved the PLO of responsibility (Abu Nidal had been ejected from the organization in the 1970s after trying to assassinate Arafat), this was the pretext Israel needed to put its plans into effect.” Ibid., p. 170. In June 1982 the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) crossed into Lebanon in what they called Operation Peace for Galilee and pushed to the north to besiege Beirut. Even though Arafat and Assad had agreed to resist any Israeli attack, when the Israeli air force destroyed the Syrian SAM missile system, Assad agreed to a unilateral truce with Israel in June. By the end of July, Israeli troops completely surrounded Beirut. Arafat appealed to the Arab nations for help, but they did not respond. He also asked the United Nations to order a cease-fire and to condemn Israel, but this was vetoed by the United States. Finally, in August President Reagan personally called Prime Minister Begin and demanded that the fighting stop. Arafat already told the new Lebanese Prime Minister, Shafiq Wazzan, that he would leave Lebanon. An international force consisting of French, American, Italian, and British soldiers was dispatched to oversee the PLO’s withdrawal from Beirut. Arafat himself left by the end of August, going first to Athens and then to Tunisia to establish his new base of operations. The Lebanese Parliament then elected Beshir Gemayel as president, but a few days before he was to be inaugurated in September Gemayel and forty of his followers were killed in a bomb set off at the Phalange headquarters. The Israelis used this as an excuse to occupy West Beirut in violation of a guarantee by Habib that the Israelis would not enter this district inhabited still by Palestinian refugees. In September 1982 US Marines landed in Beirut to oversee the departure of PLO fighters to other Arab countries. Thinking that the Palestinians were behind the assassination of Gemayel, about 300 Phlangists led by Elie Hobeika, a former aide to Bashir Gemayel, with Israeli acquiescence moved into West Beirut. This resulted in the massacre of more than unarmed 2,000 Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila that were supposedly under the protection of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Defense Forces. A joint American, Italian, and French force was dispatched to Lebanon to prevent a repeat of this massacre. http://uahsibhistory.wikispaces.com/file/view/sabra_and_shatila_map.jpg/94857740/434x635/sabra_and_shatila_map.jpg Among Arafat’s critics was a senior PLO military officer named Said Musa Muragha (Abu Musa). As an officer in the Jordanian army, he was educated at Britain’s Sandhurst military academy. During the Jordanian civil war in 1970, Abu Musa left the Jordanian army to join the PLO and became one of its main commanders in Lebanon. In May 1983 Arafat sought to replace Abu Musa because of his accusation of corruption and incompetence leading to Arafat’s expulsion from both Jordan and Lebanon. While Abu Musa had support in Lebanon, the Palestinians in Jordan, the West Bank, and the Persian Gulf remained loyal to Arafat. During the Lebanese fighting there developed rift within the PLO over Arafat’s leadership during the Lebanese fighting. In May 1983 Arafat flew to Damascus to confront these rebels who were supported by the Syrians under Hafez Assad. However, Assad ordered Arafat to leave the country, while attempting unsuccessfully in June to assassinate him. The Palestinian rebels took control of the Lebanese Bekaa Valley and the city of Tripoli. Arafat returned secretly to Lebanon in September 1983 and attempted to make Tripoli as his new headquarters. Israel and Lebanon signed a withdrawal agreement in May, but Syria rejected it. In December 1983 Arafat and 4,000 of his followers by December he again was forced to leave the country by Lebanese militia groups supported by Syrian artillery. Under protection of a French fleet, they went first to Greece and then to Tunis, where he established his new headquarters under the protection of the Tunisian President-for-Life Habib Bourguiba. But in May 1985 the PLO attempted to smuggle fighters into the refugee camps in Lebanon, and Syria responded by attacking the camps in what became known as the War of the Camps. In an effort to block the PLO’s return to Lebanon, Syria formed the Palestine National Salvation Front with the backing of George Habbash. http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/country/tunisia.html Unwilling to alienate Syria, Algeria and Kuwait refused to host the meeting of the PNC in November 1984, and Arafat had to ask his old enemy King Hussein of Jordan to allow the meeting in Amman. This led to an agreement signed by Arafat in February 1985 in which Arafat stated his willingness to see the creation of a Jordanian-Palestinian federation, although he later backed away from this agreement. Terrorist attacks against Israeli targets continued, many conducted by Arafat’s personal bodyguard unit known as Force 17. In retaliation Israel bombed the PLO offices in Tunisia in October 1985. Shortly after, four gunmen from the Palestine Liberation Front, a group led by PLO Executive Committee member Abu al-Abbas, hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro off the cost of Egypt. They shot an elderly, wheel-chaired bound American Jew and threw his body overboard. In 1986 Yitzhak Shamir became the prime minister of Israel for the second time. In December 1987 an automobile accident in which an Israeli driver killed several Palestinians in Gaza led to a series of riots by stone-throwing children, which became known as the first Intifada. American diplomat Dennis Ross writes that this uprising “was unquestionably an expression of Palestinian frustration and anger. .. . It was a statement in effect, that that the Palestinians in the territories would not settle for occupation. ” Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for the Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), pp. 41, 42. Unwilling to alienate Syria, Algeria and Kuwait refused to host the meeting of the PNC in November 1984, and Arafat had to ask his old enemy King Hussein of Jordan to allow the meeting in Amman. This led to an agreement signed by Arafat and Hussein in February 1985 in which Arafat stated his willingness to see the creation of a Jordanian-Palestinian federation, although he later backed away from this agreement. Abu Jihad had remained on the West Bank in charge of building support for the PLO in the occupied territories. In September 1985 PLO guerrillas under the command of Abu Jihad attacked an Israeli yacht in the Cypriot port of Larnaca, killing three Israelis. In retaliation in October the Israelis attacked the PLO headquarters in Tunis, destroying Arafat’s office and killing 58 Palestinians and 14 Tunisians. A few days later, four members of the Palestine Liberation Front hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro as it was leaving the Egyptian port of Alexandria. The raiders killed an elderly American invalid passenger named Leon Klinghoffer and threw his body overboard. The head of the Palestine Liberation Front was Mohammed Zeidan (a.k.a. Abul Abbas) had sided with Arafat during the Syrian invasion of Lebanon and the anti-Arafat rebellion in 1983. When the ship docked at Port Said in Egypt, Zeidan and the hijackers were allowed to leave Cairo for Tunis on an Egyptian airliner. However, the aircraft was intercepted by American fighter aircraft and diverted to Sicily. The Italians allow Zeidan to escape to Yugoslavia, and the hijackers were exchanged later on. “Even after the damage done by the hijacking became abundantly clear, Arafat never disowned Zeidan and the Palestine Liberation Front,” notes Aburish. Aburish, op. cit., pp. 191-192 After the Achille Lauro episode, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak convinced Arafat to renounce acts of terrorism outside the borders of Israel in what became known as the Cairo Declaration. This satisfied one of the United States preconditions for starting a dialogue with the Palestinians. In 1986 Yitzhak Shamir became the prime minister of Israel for the second time. Under Shamir, Israel was diverting spring water from the West Bank and redirecting it to Israel. Israel also was taxing the Palestinians to pay for the Israeli military presence in the occupied territories. Israeli Defense Minister Itzhak Rabin imposed emergency decrees for administrative detention of Palestinians without being charged and with no right to appeal. Under this policy 25,000 Palestinians were imprisoned. All efforts of to have the United Nations condemn these actions as violations of the Geneva and Hague Conventions were vetoed by the United States. In December 1987 an Israeli merchant, named Shlomo Sakal was stabbed to death in Gaza. Two days later an Israeli truck ran down a group of Palestinian laborers waiting at a check point on the Gaza border with Israel. The Palestinians believed this was an act of revenge for the murder of Sakal. The next day a resident of the Jabaliya refugee camp, named Hatem Sissi, was killed by Israeli troops chasing Palestinian children who were throwing stone at them. This was followed by an uprising of young children and teenagers from the refugee camps wearing chequered kuffiyas as masks and armed only with stones in what became known as the intifada (meaning “tremor” in Arabic). Aburish says that the throwing of stones had an important symbolic meaning. “Using stones was a reversion to an Islamic stance: rajm or throwing stones against evil spirits is what pilgrims to Mecca do from the top of a mountain,” writes Aburish. “It also had the added support of a formerly disenfranchised group, the women, who adhered to the rebellion to express their social frustration and who felt close to and protective of their children.” Ibid., p. 206. At first Arafat didn’t know what to do about the intifada, but his associate Abu Jihad advised him to support it. Rabin called to the IDF to “break the bones” of the rock throwers. American diplomat Dennis Ross writes that this uprising “was unquestionably an expression of Palestinian frustration and anger. . . . It was a statement in effect, that that the Palestinians in the territories would not settle for occupation.” Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for the Middle East Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), pp. 41, 42. In April 1988 Israeli commandos landed on the Tunisian coast and assassinated Abu Jihad in front of his wife and children. “For Israel, the assassination was a failure,” says Aburish. “Instead of subduing the intifada, Abu Jihad the martyr became one of its more inspiring symbols, perhaps more effective dead than alive.” Aburish, op. cit., pp. 209-210. In July 1988 King Hussein ceded Jordan’s longstanding claim to the West Bank and withdrew his financial support for West Bank institutions. In November Arafat convened a meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers, Algeria, at which he declared the creation of a Palestinian state with it capital in Jerusalem and himself as president. He also called for an international conference to bring about a two-state solution to the Middle East problem. The next month the UN General Assembly invited Arafat to address them, but the Secretary of State George Shultz refused to grant him a visa on the grounds that Arafat was an “accessory to terrorism.” The General Assembly then moved its session to Geneva, Switzerland, to circumvent the visa ban. In his speech Arafat said the PLO would support an international conference to work towards a “comprehensive peaceful settlement” between “the State of Palestine and Israel” taking into account “the right of our people to freedom and national independence, and the respect of the right to live, and the right of peace and security to everyone.” In a press conference the following day, Arafat clarified what he meant, saying “In my speech yesterday, it was clear that we mean . . . the rights of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security, and, as I have mentioned, including the state of Palestine, Israel and other neighbors.” A few hours later Secretary Shultz announced that the United States was willing to talk with the PLO. “With that,” says Aburish, “the Reagan Administration opened a door which had been closed except for receiving messages since Henry Kissinger’s 1975 promise to Israel that the USA would not deal directly with the PLO.” Ibid., p. 215. In January 1989 George H. W. Bush, who was formerly the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, became President, and he appointed James Baker as Secretary of State. Baker wanted the PLO to stop all terrorist activities in exchange for territorial concessions on the part of Israel, but the Israelis still refused to deal directly with the PLO. In May 1990 a group of commandos from the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) landed at a beach near Tel Aviv and attempted go on a killing spree, but the four were killed by Israeli security forces. Secretary of State Baker wanted Arafat to take action against the PLF, it had the backing of Iraq, and Arafat needed Saddam Hussein’s support. With the end of the Iraq-Iran war in August 1988, Saddam Hussein began to make threats about using nuclear weapons against Israel if the United States took military action against any Arab country. Coupled with Saddam’s opposition to the Shi’ite-favoring Assad regime in Syria, Arafat was drawn into an alliance with Iraq. In response to pressure from the US Senate, Baker suspended contact with the PLO in June. Iraq emerged from its war with Iran with $60 billion, of which $8 billion was owed to the oil-rich sheikhs in Kuwait, who wanted Iraq to pay off its debt immediately. At the same time, the Kuwaitis pumped more oil than was needed, thus lowering its price. Saddam also claimed that Kuwait was stealing oil from the Rumeilah oilfields that were shared by the two countries. In August 1990 Iraq resurrected its historical claim to Kuwait by invading it. Saddam then linked any withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait to Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories. An Arab Summit was convened in Cairo, which voted to use force against Iraq. The PLO voted against the proposal along with Yemen and Jordan. “The consequences of Arafat’s policies during the Gulf War turned a financial problem into a crisis,” writes Aburish. “Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates ordered a total stoppage of their already reduced subsidies to the PLO. Libya, though it never joined the coalition against Saddam, did the same because Qaddafi disapproved of Arafat’s position. . . . Syria was sponsoring Palestinians opposed to Arafat and was determined to replace or weaken him.” Ibid., p. 231. In January 1991 a coalition led by the United States, Britain, and Saudi Arabia launched an attack on Iraq. The day after the attack, Abu Iyad, the PLO security chief who opposed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, was assassinated by the pro-Iraqi Abu Nidal terrorist group. Abu Iyad had been the main critic of Arafat’s pro-Iraq policy. Abu Iyad (left), Abu Jihad (center) and Arafat (right) http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_TmED4DTHvIY/S_gOwKiT3dI/AAAAAAAAMgc/ZdGmfQsghws/s1600/474311775.jpg Arafat’s support for Saddam not only alienated him from the Arab Gulf states and Egypt, it was a factor in changing the PLO policy from terrorism to negotiating a peace settlement. In July 1991 at the end of a US-Soviet Summit Conference in Moscow, President Bush and Chairman Mikhail Gorbachov called for an international peace conference to resolve the Middle East conflict. The PLO was to be represented only as part of the Jordanian delegation. Even though Arafat had rejected this arrangement previously, he had no alternative but to accept. The Israeli government under the leadership of the Likud administration of Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir was reluctant to attend the conference and created obstacles to it. But in late September the Bush administration threatened to withhold $10 billion of loan guarantees to Israel (that it intended mostly to use to expand settlements in the occupied territories). As part of the deal the Soviet Union re-established diplomatic relations with Israel that had been suspended after the 1967 war. The conference convened in October 1991 in Madrid. The Palestinian delegation consisted on non-PLO members from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, because the PLO had not yet recognized Israel nor rejected terrorism. The delegation was headed by Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian Christian peace-activist; Arafat remained in Tunis. The conference was to be followed by bilateral meetings between Israel and each delegation, but the bilateral meeting between Israel and Jordan in Washington became deadlocked over the participation of the Palestinians, with whom the Israelis would only talk if the Jordanians were in the same room with them. In late 1991 two Israeli scholars met with Hanan Ashrawi in her Ramallah home to discuss possible Israeli-Palestinian economic relations. Ashrawi suggested that the discussions continue in London in December. This led to additional, secret discussions hosted by the Norwegian sociologist, Terje Larsen of the Institute for Applied Social Sciences. http://ih.constantcontact.com/fs128/1101404879761/img/1451.jpg In February 1992 the Shamir government resigned and the Labor Party came to power. In May there was a meeting in an Indian restaurant in Tel Aviv between Yossi Beilin of Israel’s Economic Cooperation Foundation and Terje Rod Larsen of the Norwegian Institute for Applied Social Research. With the negotiations in Washington in stalemate, Larsen suggested that there be informal contacts between Palestinians and Israeli in Norway. Three days later, Yizhak Rabin became prime minister with Shimon Peres as foreign minister. During the War of Independence, Rabin commanded the brigade that attempted to defend Jerusalem resulting in Israel gaining control of the western part of the city. Peres named Beilin as his deputy. It also turned out that Larsen’s wife was an assistant to the Norwegian foreign minister. Rabin was committed to negotiating with the PLO toward a possible two-state solution. In January 1993, talks were held outside Oslo, Norway, between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. Arafat appointed his new closest advisors, Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. Abu Mazen), to oversee the talks in Norway. The two delegations met at Borregaard Manor in the town of Sarpsborg outside Oslo. While at first the relationship of the Israeli government to this back channel was unclear, it was decided to resume the talks in Washington in May, after Rabin agreed to repatriate some of the deportees. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton had become president of the United States in January 1993. Aburish argues that Clinton “unlike that his predecessor George Bush, was unswervingly pro-Israeli.” Ibid., p. 252. In February Johan Jorgen Holst became the Norwegian foreign minister, and he mediated a declaration of principles known as the Sarpsborg Document. In May 1989 Arafat told a French reporter that the provision in the Palestinian National Charter calling for Israel’s destruction was null and void, but only the PNC had the authority to change the charter and it had not done so. But in September 1993 after the secret peace talks in Norway, Israel and the PLO exchanged letters of mutual recognition. Arafat wrote to Rabin that the PLO “recognize[s] the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security” and “renounces the use of terrorism.” In April 1996 the PNC met in Gaza and voted to remove the articles calling for Israel’s destruction from its charter. However, Benny Morris notes, during the following 13 years the PNA/PLO failed to redraft and ratify the amended charter. In April 1998 Arafat wrote to President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair that in 1996 the PNC had amended the charter, but neither Netanyahu nor the Americans were reassured. So during Clinton’s visit to Gaza in December 1998 the PNC, the PLO Central Council, the PNA (the Palestinian National Authority) ministers and Arafat endorsed the 1996 resolution by a show of hands. Nevertheless, Morris says that neither the PNA or the PLO produced the amended charter. Morris, One State, Two States, pp. 130-132. The final signing of the agreement was scheduled to take place in Washington, DC, originally by Abu Mazin and Israeli foreign minister, Simon Peres. Abu Mazin was born in Safed in northern Israel and fled with his family to Syria in 1948. He joined Fatah in 1965 and became a member of the PLO Executive Committee in 1980. He had participated in the talk from a remote location in Tunis. Arafat then said he would attend, and Rabin decided to attend as well despite his distaste to be seen with Arafat. Arafat wanted to wear his pistol to the ceremony, but President Clinton said no. When Clinton insisted that Rabin shake hands with Arafat, Rabin said: “Well, I suppose you don’t make peace with your friends.” And then he added, “But no kissing.” Rubin and Rubin, Yasser Arafat, p. 138. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Bill_Clinton,_Yitzhak_Rabin,_Yasser_Arafat_at_the_White_House_1993-09-13.jpg The Oslo Agreements called for a five-year transition period in states. In stage one, Israel would withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, but retain control of international borders, overall security, East Jerusalem, and Jewish settlements in the West bank. The Palestinians would end terrorism, govern the territories, discontinue hostile propaganda. In stage two, the Palestinian Authority would take control of the Palestinian communities on the West Bank, hold free elections, and take control of Hebron. In stage three, so-called “final status” negotiations would produce a peace treaty, including the fate of East Jerusalem, refugees, Jewish settlements, security arrangements, and borders. Rabin made it clear that Israel was not ready to compromise on the status of Jerusalem, by stating: “We have come from Jerusalem, the ancient capital of the Jewish people.” When Clinton asked Rabin why he had reached the conclusion to negotiate a withdrawal from the West Bank, Rabin said that he realized that the occupation of the West Bank had made Israel less secure, not more secure. He also said that if the West Bank remained part of Israel, and the Palestinian were eventually given the right to vote, they would soon outnumber the Israelis. Clinton writes that “[o]vertime, Rabin’s analysis of the meaning of the West Bank to Israel would become widely accepted among pro-peace Israelis, but in 1993 it was novel, insightful, and courageous.” Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 545. In 1993 Israel and the PLO signed a Declaration of Principles under the auspices of the U.S. government, under which according to Khalidi, “Palestinian identity would appear to be firmly established today.” Khalidi, op. cit., p. 201. This was followed by the Gaza-Jericho agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and Yasser Arafat in May 1994 created the Palestinian Authority headed by Arafat with authority over East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In July 1994 Yasser Arafat returned to the occupied territories and established his headquarters in the house of the former British governor in the town of Gaza. Arafat began to function as the president of the council of the Palestinian Authority, the prime minister, the commander of the armed forces, and president of the legislative council even though there had been no elections. Arafat also took control of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction created by the World Bank after the Oslo Agreement to control aid money donated to the Palestinian Authority. Hanan Ashrawi and the other members of the official PLO delegation in Washington, who were left out of the negotiations in Norway, didn’t feel the agreement went far enough. Aburish and other Palestinians from the West Bank were disillusioned by the agreement, saying that “the retreating Israelis were replaced by elements of Arafat’s three sources of power: nine thousand security men who had been living in Arab countries since the debacle of Lebanon, the Tunis bureaucracy, and a small group of money men and notables who owed their loyalty to the chief and not to the Palestinian cause. To the people of the occupied territories the newcomers were an alien governing group, many of whom spoke with Lebanese, Syrian, or other accents.” Aburish, Arafat, p. 275. Ashrawi refused to join the Palestinian Authority and instead formed the Independent Palestinian Commission for Citizens’ Rights. The Gaza-Jericho agreement put Jordan in an awkward position because it had laid claim to Dome of the Rock in the Old City of Jerusalem. King Hussein initiated secret talks with Prime Minister Rabin about a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan. This eventually led to a peace treaty between the two countries signed in October 1994. In the same month, it was announced the Arafat, Peres, and Rabin had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The concept of joint control of the West Bank was fraught with problems. Israel wanted to establish, three zones in the West Bank, one in which the Palestinians would have military and civil control, the second in which Israel would retain civil and military control, and the third in which the Palestinians would have civil control, but the Israelis would have military control. The Palestinians thought joint control meant that Israel would control security and the Palestinian Authority would control civil government. In September 1995 Arafat and Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, signed the Oslo II Agreements. It divided the West Bank into three zones: Zone A (the towns of Nablus, Ramla, Bethlehem, Tulkarem, and Qalquilaya) consisting of about 6 percent of the land in which the Palestinian Authority would have control of all civilian affairs, Zone B consisting of 24 percent placed under Israeli-Palestinian joint control with Israel having the final say, and Zone C consisting of 69 percent of the land under direct Israeli control. In November 1995 Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli fanatic named Yigal Amir outside a peace rally in Tel Aviv, and Shimon Peres became the acting prime minister. This was followed by elections of the Palestinian Legislative Council in January 1996 monitored by former President Jimmy Carter. Fatah received 30 percent of the vote, but it translated into 58 percent of the seats in the council. The opposition parties and Islamists boycotted the election. In February Arafat was sworn in as president, prime minister and commander in chief. In the Israeli elections of May 1996 the Labor Party under Shimon Peres was defeated by Likud, and Benjamin Netanyahu became the prime minister. Netanyahu, who had been educated at MIT, was an outspoken opponent of the Oslo Agreements. He was also against Israel withdrawing from the Golan Heights, the establishment of a Palestinian state, negotiations of the future of Jerusalem, or the return of Palestinian refugees. The United States diplomat Dennis Ross described Netanyahu as “near insufferable, lecturing and telling us how to deal with the Arabs.” Ross states that Netanyahu told Clinton Israel would respect the Oslo agreement, but there would have to be certain changes and new negotiations. President Clinton said about Netanyahu in private: “He thinks he is the superpower and we are here to do whatever he requires.” Ibid., pp.260- 261. In September 1996 Netanyahu approved the construction of an exit from the Hasmonean Tunnel that runs along the Temple Mount. After Israel gained possession of the Old City, it began archeological excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem. An underground walkway was dug along the Western Wall with an entrance in front of the Wailing Wall. Another walkway known as the Hasmonean Tunnel was constructed as an aqueduct during the Hasmonean period. It had an entrance in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. In 1987 the Israelis connected the two tunnels. The Waqf (the Muslim Religious Authority) objected to opening the exit in the Muslim Quarter. The new exit was to be at Via Dolorosa in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. This would enable tourists to visit the archeological artifacts without backtracking to the entrance of the tunnel. In the middle of the night the Israelis unsealed the gate to the Hasmonean Tunnel. Predictably, this action resulted in 72 hours of rioting marked also by Palestinian police armed with weapons supplied by Israel under the Oslo Accords firing at Israeli soldiers. In the aftermath of the rioting the date for the final status negotiations passed without notice. In October 1998 Arafat and Netanyahu attended a summit meeting called by Clinton at the Wye Plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland. King Hussein flew to the meeting from the Mayo Clinic, where he was receiving chemotherapy for cancer. After nine days, Arafat and Netanyahu signed an agreement. The Palestinians would be guaranteed a safe-passage route between Gaza and the West Bank, an airport, and a seaport, and Israel would make three redeployments from West Bank territory. While Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, approved the Wye agreements, Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition called for new elections in May 1999. The winner of the election was Ehud Barak, who was more willing than Netanyahu to resume final status talks. Ehud Barak had been the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from 1991 to 1994, but he wanted to pursue a peace strategy with Israel neighbors, especially Syria. He offered to withdraw completely from the Golan Heights, but Syria rejected Israel’s demand for an early warning system on Mount Hermon and a partial demilitarization of the Golan Heights. The negotiations broke down in March 2000 with Hafez Assad becoming terminally ill. Barak also unilaterally withdrew IDF forces from southern Lebanon in compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 425. In July 2000 Clinton again tried to negotiate a peace agreement at a thirteen-day summit meeting at Camp David in Maryland. At this summit Barak was willing to cede all of Gaza, almost all of East Jerusalem (7 or 8 of the Arab neighborhoods plus the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City), and 92 percent of the West Bank. In addition, Israel insisted that any new Palestinian state had to be demilitarized. The Palestinians wanted to return to the 1967 borders, which meant the entire West Bank and all of East Jerusalem, as well as the right of return for all Palestinian refugees. The United States proposed that the UN Security Council would make the Palestinians the custodians of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, while Israel would retain sovereignty over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif itself. The arrangement was describe as akin to the status of a foreign embassy within another country. In addition, Israel offered to compensate Palestinian refugees for their property losses in 1948 and proposed their resettlement within the new Palestinian state. Arafat said he turned down the offer in 2001, because all that Israel was offering was a cluster of “bantustans” rather than a sovereign Palestinian state. He did not make a counter offer other than the return to the 1967 borders. At the end of the Camp David negotiations, President Clinton reportedly said to Arafat, “You have been here for fourteen days and said no to everything. These things have consequences; failure will mean the end of the peace process.” Jack L. Schwartzwald, Nine Lives of Israel: A Nation’s History Through the Lives of its Foremost Leaders (Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland, 2012), p. 171. Ross argues that the key “moment of truth” in the failure of the peace process in the Middle East was a meeting between President Bill Clinton and Chairman of the PLO Yasser Arafat in the closing days of the Clinton administration on January 2, 2001. Arafat was considering the proposals on the table at the Camp David summit that would have created a Palestinian state in Gaza and most of the West Bank, a capital in East Jerusalem, a security arrangement that allowed Israel to fly over Palestinian air space, and a right of return of Palestinian refugees to the new Palestinian state but not to Israel. Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel had agreed to these conditions, but Arafat vacillated. He told the President that he had reservations about the deal. Dennis Ross says that Arafat should have known that Ariel Sharon was going to become the new Israeli Prime Minister, and the peace process would be dead.” Ross, The Missing Peace, p. 13. After the failure of the Camp David peace talks, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Yasir Arafat’s Fatah political party, was organized as a terrorist group. In December Barak had called for new elections in which his opponent would be Ariel Sharon, not Netanyahu. In February 2001 Ariel Sharon, the leader of the Likud Party, became Prime Minister of Israel. In September he visited the Temple Mount with a contingent of Israeli police. This act provoked the Palestinians to launch a new Intifada. In September Sharon made a one-hour visit to the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount under heavy police guard. Scuffles broke out been the police and Palestinians. Jack Schwartzwald explains Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in terms of the fact that from 1948 until 1967, when Jordan controlled the Old City of Jerusalem, Jews were not permitted to visit the Western Wall. After the Six Day War in 1967, Israel permitted to Temple Mount to remain under Muslim custodianship (under a civil body known as the waqf). However, Israeli archeologists claimed that under the pretext of building a second exit from the mosque built in 1996 in the underground rooms known as “Solomon’s stables,” the Palestinians had demolished Judaic artifacts. This is why Ariel Sharon said he wanted to make a dramatic gesture of the Jewish people’s right of access to the Temple Mount, but saying he would not attempt to enter the mosque. Schwartzwald, Nine Lives of Israel, pp. 162-163. The next day the Palestinians held demonstrations at which stones were thrown at the police, who responded with rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition. By the end of the week, more than 60 Palestinians and 5 Israelis were killed. In October two Israeli army reservists accidently drove into Ramallah and were murdered by a Palestinian mob. Israel responded with air raids on Ramallah, Gaza, Jericho, Nablus, and Hebron. This act provoked the Palestinians to launch a new Intifada. His visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 was followed by the so-called Second Intifada (a.k.a. the Al-Aqsa Intifada). Whether his visit caused the intifada or whether it was the excuse for its outbreak remains a matter of dispute. A commission chaired by U.S. Senator George Mitchell concluded that it was not the cause, but the New York Times published an editorial saying that the “precipitating incident was a provocative and irresponsible visit by Likud leader, Ariel Sharon. . .” Ibid., pp. 178, 179. http://www.orientemidia.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Eduard_Said.jpg In July 2000 Professor Edward Said of Columbia University was photographed throwing a rock toward an Israeli watchtower on the Lebanese Israeli border. According to a statement Said made to the Columbia University student paper, he and his family had spent the day visiting the notorious El-Khiam prison, where members of the Lebanese resistance force were "tortured and incarcerated in appalling conditions." After speaking to former prisoners who "spoke of their harrowing experiences," Said and his family drove to Kafr Killa, the border village, where Israel maintains a military post. Members of the crowd near the border were throwing stones merely to "see whether in this disputed area they could reach the barbed wire." Caught up in the moment, Said joined in and threw the stone as a symbolic act. "There were many people [at the border] all of them...elated by the absence of Israeli troops," Said stated, "For a moment, I joined in: the spirit of the place infected everyone with the same impulse, to make a symbolic gesture of joy that the occupation had ended." He added, "one stone tossed into an empty place scarcely warrants a second thought. . . . As if that could ever outweigh the work I have done over 35 years on behalf of justice and peace, or that it could even be compared with the enormous ravages and suffering caused by decades of military occupation and dispossession." Sunni Kim, “Edward Said Accused of Stoning in South Lebanon,” Columbia Spectator (July 19, 2000), http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2000/07/19/edward-said-accused-stoning-south-lebanon In conclusion, contrary to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s assertion that the Palestinian Arabs did not constitute a separate people, a sense of Palestinian identity did develop in stages culminating in the merger of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat Fatah organization in 1968. The charter of the PLO turned the argument on Meir by asserting that Judaism was a religion not a nationality and committing the PLO to military action to replace the Jewish state with a secular Arab State with a Palestinian majority and a Jewish minority. This is true meaning behind the Israeli claim that the PLO charter called for the “destruction” of the State of Israel. Arafat offered an alternative to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arab Nationalism for the Palestinian people. He promoted a secular Palestinian nationalism, independent from other Arab countries such as Jordan, Egypt, and Syria that had their own eyes on Palestine. In 1948 the Arab states of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, united in rejecting the UN partition plan for Palestine into two-states, invaded the newly independent State of Israel. In the ensuing war, Israel turned back the Arab armies and increased the size of the Jewish state. The 1948 war created a refugee problem as Palestinians were force to and voluntarily left their home in Israel for refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Gaza Strip. Another war in 1967 initiated by Egypt and Syria resulted in Israel occupying East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians, constituting a majority of the population in Jordan, had an opportunity to make Jordan the Palestinian state. Arafat opted for using military force instead of negotiations, which resulted in his defeat and expulsion from Jordan. He then relocated in Lebanon, which upset the balance between Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shi’ite Muslims, and Druze. Israel sought to make an alliance with the Christians and Druze, but a civil war developed, Israel invaded to stop the Palestinians from using southern Lebanon as a base for terrorist raid, Syria invaded to protect the Shi’ite Lebanese in the Bekaa Valley. This resulted in Arafat having to relocate from Beirut to Tunis, and the Palestinians remaining in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila were massacred by Christian militia while the Israeli Defense Forces stood by. The United Nations had lost the opportunity to mediate the issue, when in November 1975 the General Assembly had passed Resolution 3379 declaring that Zionism was a form of racism. Although it later was repealed in December 1991, this was one of the things that turned the Israelis against the United Nations. It remained to the United States President Jimmy Carter to negotiate the Camp David Agreement between Egypt and Israel, but it left the PLO and Fatah out of the negotiations because they were committed to a one-state solution under Arab Palestinians. Israeli’s considered this to be a commitment to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. In November 1988 the PLO adopted the so-called Algiers Declaration in which they voted to support to a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was the first time since their rejected the UN partition plan that the Palestinians showed signs of accepting the existence of Israel. Back channel negotiations between Israelis and the PLO, mediated by Sweden, bore fruit with the so-called Oslo Agreement. It called for a two-stage approach, with the creation of a Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza, and the outstanding issues of a Palestinian state and the status of Jerusalem being left for final status negotiation. The right-wing Likud Party under Benjamin Netanyahu came to power with agenda to overturn the Oslo Agreement. Bill Clinton’s eleventh-hour attempt to get a negotiated settlement before he left office would have created a Palestinian state on the West Bank with its capital in East Jerusalem, but it came was too late and a dollar short. Arafat also made the mistake taking the side of his fellow Sunni Muslim, Saddam Hussein, during the Iranian-Iraq war and the two American-Iraqi wars, which ended his prior financial support from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Today, it is quite clear that Netanyahu, who is in his second, non-consecutive term as Israeli prime minister, has no interest in changing the status quo in which Israel continues to occupy Jerusalem and the West Bank. Netanyahu’s insistence that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state as a pre-condition for negotiations would undermine the Palestinian claim to the right of return.