Waiting For History To Happen

By Scott Macleod/Gaza City

Yasser Arafat is sitting in his office, at the head of a boardroom table that has been set with a fraying yellow tablecloth and dime-store English china. Around him are a dozen officials and cronies, in suits and ties or military fatigues, who are joining his nightly communal meal. Various peace awards are scattered on shelves in Arafat's inner sanctum, looking more like dust collectors than trophies. On the wall are framed pictures of Palestinians who have died fighting and a satellite map of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The hour is 11 p.m., and outside Arafat's window, the tide of the Mediterranean Sea lashes the shoreline in the blackness of the night. But the soft splashes of the waves do nothing to cut the foreboding that fills the room. On a TV in the corner is a live broadcast of the Israeli elections. Tonight Arafat's dinner seems more like a wake. His archenemy, Ariel Sharon, hasn't claimed victory yet, but with the earliest projections, Arafat has seen enough. He begins spooning up his daily bowl of vegetable soup, listening blankly as his companions talk approvingly of how Israeli Arab voters have deserted incumbent Ehud Barak.

"Try these," Arafat says, changing the subject, as if he can't cope with the results just yet. He uses his delicate, pasty fingers to pick up some hard-boiled eggs with the yolks removed, specially prepared for him, and put them on the plate of the guest beside him. Then he swirls a piece of toasted flat bread into a bowl of black paste called kazha, a blend of molasses and black cumin seeds. "Try this," he insists, his lips trembling with age.

Doing his best to hide his concern--secrecy is his middle name--Arafat is terrified to the point of paranoia, some of his confidants say, about Sharon's coming to power. Here is the former general who tried to kill him with air strikes on his Beirut bunker, who was found by an official Israeli report 18 years ago to bear "indirect responsibility" for the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Maybe the coming of the old warrior is what recently led a clearly unnerved Arafat to grab a machine gun from a bodyguard and leap out of his car when Jewish settlers in Gaza blocked the road.

Only yesterday a Palestinian dream seemed within reach. Trying to finalize the Oslo peace accords signed by the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993, Barak had agreed to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He threw in some sovereignty over Jerusalem. But Arafat bargained for more and didn't get it, then gambled on the new intifadeh, demolishing Barak's re-election hopes. So Arafat must now face Sharon, who calls him a liar and refuses to shake his hand. The dread is, it could be Beirut all over again.

Arafat is a civil engineer by training, and he sees himself as more of a plodder than a brinksman. He will tell you about his long march, starting in '48 salvaging World War II rifles in the Egyptian desert. Yet the allure of a knockout punch has always proved his undoing. He envies the F.L.N. triumph over the French in Algeria, Khomeini's thundering revolution in Iran. His Palestine Liberation Organization gambits to become the de facto leader in Jordan and later in Lebanon dragged both countries into civil war. In the Gulf War, he bet on Saddam. This was all well before Arafat was ever on speaking terms with the Israelis, prior to winning the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Shimon Peres for Oslo. That was supposed to be the old Arafat. So why has he gone to the brink again?

Months of unparalleled access to Arafat, interviews with dozens of his officials and a look at confidential Palestinian papers help untangle some of the complexity of Arafat's motivations. What emerges is the journal of an aging autocrat, anxious about his place in history, alarmed by rising discontent over his leadership, feeling outmaneuvered by Israel and mishandled by the U.S., veering between peace and war. Ultimately it's the tale of a leader who found himself unwilling to risk the highest prices--his own life, the death of his dream for a prosperous, free Palestine--for a peace he couldn't believe in.

DAYS OF RAGE

Sept. 28, 2000. Two months earlier, cheering crowds greeted Arafat's return home following the Camp David summit. Now the mobs are back, hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails and firing guns and mortars at Israeli troops and settlers.

It's hard to understand the fury of the intifadeh until you spend a few hours on the Palestinian side of the lines. Mornings tend to be calm. But as schools let out or after the tumultuous funeral cortege of yesterday's dead protester, the gangs of young men and little boys stream toward the front, psyched for a new attack on "the Jews." Filled with anger and bravado, they fight their war into the night, choking from tear gas and burning tires, some felled by the bullets of the enemy.

The street is the source of all Arafat's strength. From Day One, he ensured that the intifadeh was run by the Tanzim, his Fatah organization's street militia. Controlling the street is no easy proposition. Prior to his hero's return from Camp David, impatience with the peace process was mounting. So were gripes about corruption, cronyism, press curbs and human-rights abuses in Arafat's Palestinian Authority. The discontent with his rule is still there, as thick as the tear gas and the smoke. During the second week of the intifadeh in Gaza, a mob broke away from an anti-Israel protest and marched near Arafat's office. They besieged a nearby hotel known as a watering hole for Arafat's cronies and burned the place down.

Sharon's showy tour of the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, one of Islam's holiest places, home of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, is what sparked off the intifadeh. A new intifadeh looked like a good bet to Arafat, or else he would not have fanned the flames by unleashing the Tanzim. The 1987-93 uprising he directed against Israel from Tunis was a watershed in Palestinian history. It made Israel start dealing with the P.L.O. "If you are reaching a historic agreement, you need a big shock first," notes an Arafat aide who was with him at Camp David. Says adviser Bassam Abu Sharif: "He thought he was cornering Barak. If he knows he will achieve a political point that will get him closer to independence and if that will cost him 10,000 killed, he wouldn't mind."

Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti, 41, knows a lot about body counts. So far, 329 Palestinians have died in the uprising (compared with 57 Israelis), and he delivered fiery speeches at all the funerals he could attend. Barghouti is more popular than Arafat in the West Bank. They call him Napoleon. Despite Sharon's electoral win, he actually comes across as gleeful, an ambitious prizefighter finally getting a shot at the champ. As he wolfs down a plate of lamb and rice, too rushed to take off his black leather jacket, he rattles off the reasons to be happy. The intifadeh not only brought Barak crawling back to the table, he believes, but also pressured him to give new concessions until the violence drove him from office. Now Sharon's election will give Palestinians a chance to show Israelis that not even "the Bulldozer" can protect them. "Sharon can make speeches," Barghouti warns, "but he will discover when he receives the reports from his security services that the intifadeh will continue."

Barghouti and Arafat regularly communicate by phone and fax. The Tanzim leader makes it clear just how crucial the uprising is to Arafat's plans. "This intifadeh is strategic," Barghouti explains, tapping a forefinger. "Not for one month, two months. I think it will continue for one year, two years, more than people expect. "

MY PEOPLE, YOUR PEOPLE

Arafat was clearly apprehensive about inflaming the streets. Three days before the intifadeh, he warned Barak personally that he would not be able to prevent the mayhem if Sharon went ahead with his visit to the Haram. "Please stop Sharon," Arafat pleaded during a dinner, according to an aide who was present. He instructed his chief negotiator, Saeb Erakat, to bring it up with Israeli negotiators and U.S. mediator Dennis Ross the next day. Says Erakat: "I told Dennis, 'This is our worst nightmare, for you, for us and for Barak. Do something about it.' He said, 'I'll see what I can do.'"

Sharon's visit was a prod to the bitter resentment still harbored in every Palestinian household over injustices dating back to Israel's establishment in 1948. To Palestinians, it is al-Naqba, the Catastrophe, in which Jewish forces--among them thousands of immigrants escaping persecution in Europe who had poured into Palestine--sent 800,000 Palestinians fleeing into Arab countries as refugees. The U.N. counts 3.7 million refugees today, including 1.2 million people living in 59 camps, many still clutching keys to former homes.

Everything was supposed to change after Arafat signed Oslo. But while Israelis saw Oslo as the end of the war, Palestinians saw it merely as the first, conditional step toward peace. Today they still live with no state, no capital in Jerusalem. Israeli forces still occupy much of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, requiring Palestinians continually to move through humiliating military checkpoints. Jewish settlements housing 180,000 Israelis dot the territories. Palestinians have seen economic decline, while Israel's GDP initially took off.

Although it was never agreed in writing, Palestinians expected they would at last achieve their cherished goal of an independent state by the May 1999 date set for fully implementing Oslo. Israel seemed committed to withdrawing from something like 88% of the West Bank before final-status negotiations, but deadlines came and went. As of last week, Israeli forces continued to occupy at least 55% of the territory.

When hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu took over in 1996, he made Arafat's life miserable. He delayed troop withdrawals and proceeded with construction of Jewish settlements. Later, under Barak, building continued apace. As Israelis became angry with outbreaks of violence and terrorism, ordinary Palestinians too grew disillusioned with the peace process. Palestinians felt Israel would never agree to their genuine independence. Without an end-of-conflict pact in sight, Arafat's place in history was never more on the line. When he signed the Oslo compromise, cries of betrayal arose from the militant Islamic group Hamas and such respected intellectuals as Edward W. Said.

A yawning psychological gulf made the prospects unlikely for a quick settlement of issues such as Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlements and the status of Jerusalem. Arafat went into the final stretch demanding to be treated as an equal party. But he felt the Israelis never accorded him that status. "They act like they are 'giving' something to the Palestinians," complains Mohammed Dahlan, Arafat's security chief, "rather than making a historical deal."

Dahlan, 39, is a veteran leader of the first intifadeh. With his looks and street smarts, he could have been John Travolta if he had been born in California instead of Khan Yunis. Like most Palestinians, he insists that the talks center on how, not whether, Israel should evacuate the territories it conquered in 1967. U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 stipulated a "land-for-peace" formula, a principle that had formed the basis for the Madrid Peace Conference cosponsored by the U.S. in 1991, as well as the Oslo accords. By recognizing the state of Israel at Oslo, Palestinians felt they made the most magnanimous gesture possible. They acknowledged the Jewish people's right to take 78% of the original land of Palestine, though Arabs still consider it all theirs. Naturally, says Dahlan, Palestinians expect to get back the full remaining 22%.

TALK IN THE WOODS

Justice was supposed to emerge last summer at Camp David, when President Clinton spent more than two weeks trying to bring Oslo to fruition. Camp David, site of Egypt's 1979 peace deal with Israel, is Arab shorthand for a sellout. The Palestinians came with an old, unspoken grudge about perceived U.S. bias. They felt that the American team headed by Special Middle East Coordinator Ross had been strongly biased in favor of Israel for several years. The summit nearly collapsed on the third day, according to notes taken by the Palestinians, after Clinton submitted a draft proposal that described Jerusalem as the "united, eternal capital of Israel." Arafat banged his fist and sent it back.

Looking for traction, Clinton locked two negotiators from each side in his private office for 12 hours "to think courageously, openly, without any restrictions." According to the Palestinian notes, the Israelis insisted on keeping at least 11% of the West Bank for most of the estimated 140 Jewish settlements and on maintaining military access to the territory. On U.N. Resolution 194 of 1948, which stipulated that the refugees who fled during Israel's war of independence "should be permitted" to return to their former homes, Israel rejected any "right of return" that would be suicide for the Jewish state. And they demanded that the Old City and most of the Arab quarters of Jerusalem be under Israeli sovereignty, with only administrative "functions" granted to the Palestinians. As Palestinians saw it, the Israelis were not agreeing to a genuine independent state.

Jerusalem eventually stalemated the summit. Clinton called for a one-on-one with Arafat, pleading with him to consider a compromise granting Palestinians sovereignty over the Haram but giving Israelis sovereignty beneath it, where Jews believe the ruins of Solomon's temple lie. "Mr. President, I invite you to my funeral" was Arafat's reply, explaining that he would be a traitor if he agreed. "We may not be able to liberate Jerusalem," he said. "But someone will come and liberate it and raise his flag over it."

Clinton exploded, according to the Palestinian notes. "You are denying your people a Palestinian state," Clinton warned. "Barak came a long way. You did not." When Arafat got back to his cabin at 2 a.m., Erakat began reading out the minutes of the tense exchange and then burst into tears. The other Palestinians, some of them also weeping, got up and embraced Arafat one by one.

CAMP DAVID TO KING DAVID

Today Erakat, 45, a political-science professor in owlish glasses and neatly pressed business suit, seems like the saddest man in the Palestinian territories. As Sharon takes over, Erakat is sitting behind his desk in Jericho, trying to make a joke about becoming unemployed. He reveals that following the Camp David impasse, Arafat and Barak were still conducting indirect but intensive secret negotiations aimed at achieving the comprehensive deal that eluded them in Maryland. He says a total of 53 working sessions, held as Barak was publicly refusing to talk until the violence ended, moved the two sides considerably closer toward a historic settlement. "What happened was real engagement," Erakat says. "Details on every issue--substance, maps--were discussed for the first time thoroughly."

The talks were interrupted by the concluding days of Barak's campaign, but Erakat says his Israeli counterpart, Gilead Sher, who had teamed up with Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami, agreed they could be successfully concluded by April 30 if Barak remained in office. Israeli sources confirm the talks took place and say that had Barak been re-elected, they might have been able to conclude a deal in two months. Assuming, they add, the Palestinians really wanted a deal.

Most of the sessions took place in a suite at Jerusalem's King David Hotel. According to details provided by Erakat and his partner in the talks, security chief Dahlan, Israel agreed to withdraw from as much as 95% of the West Bank, compared with 89% at Camp David. The Israeli side dealt in terms of recognizing Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem and most of the Old City. The Palestinians agreed to cede 3% of the West Bank so large Jewish settlements could be incorporated into Israel. The Palestinians approved an Israeli demand for U.S. and other forces to be stationed for a certain period inside the new Palestinian state to help ensure Israel's security. Arafat instructed his negotiators to accept early-warning stations, demanded by Israel in case of an attack, such as by Iraq or Iran. The Palestinians were also ready to accept Israeli sovereignty over the Old City's Jewish Quarter.

Jerusalem continued to be the rawest nerve. The two sides spent hours discussing borders and details like roads, police, sewage, telephones and electricity. On the core issue of the holy sites, Israeli negotiators were prepared to recognize Palestinian sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif. The Palestinians say they were ready to grant "anything less" but not sovereignty--perhaps administrative rights--over the adjacent Western Wall, the Jewish cemetery on the nearby Mount of Olives and the ancient City of David in the nearby Arab village of Silwan. But the Palestinians refused to discuss Israeli sovereignty over the land beneath the Haram. "This is the main sticking point," Erakat says. "We cannot give them that. Period."

DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

Feb. 6, 2001. It's past midnight when Arafat settles into a chair decorated with Palestinian embroidery. He's irritable, bitter about Barak, paralyzed when it comes to Sharon, rejecting any suggestion he brought some of the disaster on himself. Sure, Barak made some offers, Arafat acknowledges. "But on the ground, we got nothing," he adds.

Regarding Sharon: though clearly worried, Arafat plays the statesman. He sounds a hopeful note, pointing out that Sharon helped negotiate the interim Wye River agreement with the Palestinians in 1998, though he refused to shake Arafat's hand. "I don't care for what everybody speaks about me," he says, when asked about Sharon's insults. "I am dealing with facts and realities, not with my dreams."

Perhaps, but the dreams are surely sweeter than the realities today. The guerrillas have called Arafat the Old Man since Beirut, but now he really is old. He will turn 72 in August, and some around him are whispering that he is too frail, distracted and out of touch. The tantalizing Israeli and American proposals are now off the table. Recriminations have begun, with Arafat's negotiators squabbling over who screwed up. Arafat's more ambitious men are preparing for the coming succession struggle.

Meanwhile, Arafat's personal Force 17 commando group has taken control of the streets after fresh rumblings of discontent. Recently, an angry mob besieged a police station and set free a youth arrested by one of Arafat's officers for gun running. With each passing day the intifadeh becomes more of a guerrilla war, including armed attacks by Arafat's security men working underground. Last week in Gaza, as Sharon forged a unity government with Barak, Israel assassinated a Force 17 commander, alleging he attacked a Jewish settlement. The following day, a Gaza bus driver in Israel killed eight Israelis by ramming his vehicle into a crowd of soldiers at a bus stop.

Money is near the top of Arafat's worries. He bitterly complains that Barak's government has frozen $320 million in Palestinian tax remittances. He doesn't say so, but Arab states, concerned about corruption, are also holding up $237 million in support. Half a billion dollars would keep some discontent at bay.

So Oslo, the greatest trophy of Arafat's career, is history. The gap in expectations turned out to be too wide for Israelis and Palestinians to close, the peace process itself too flawed to produce a magic solution. Even if Sharon comes and goes, as Barak, Netanyahu, Peres and Rabin did before him, Arafat must discover a new way of dealing with the Israelis. Otherwise, he will never persuade them to give the Palestinians what they want. Many Palestinians believe their fortunes will improve only when Arafat's domination of their affairs ends. "Democracy is needed," says Haider Abdel Shafi, who headed the Palestinian team at the Madrid Peace Conference. "Arafat will never admit that he made a mistake. He will simply blame Israeli aggression."

There's always the old way, of course: the armed struggle, terrorism, intifadeh. But Arafat is getting a little old to lead another guerrilla war. And that way didn't work either.

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