I got out of Ramallah without a scratch, and headed home with a hundred images and ideas jostling around in my mind. I thought about Dr. Shafi’s shattering words in Madrid: “We seek neither an admission of guilt after the fact, nor vengeance for past iniquities, but rather an act of will that would make a just peace a reality.” I thought about the strike called by Hamas; the immense crowd that had gathered to support the Madrid talks; the ex-prisoners now fighting for peace; and on top of everything, the ever-present danger of violent confrontation. All along the road back to Jerusalem I saw olive branches affixed to the doorways of the houses.
The rally in Ramallah put me in an unexpected leadership role. I’d always been averse to spotlights and especially to crowds, yet here I was standing in front of one. And my listeners weren’t fellow academics and students, as at Birzeit, nor was I acting as Faisal’s stand-in during the intifada. Instead, as our smartly dressed negotiators were talking to the Israelis and Americans, I was addressing average Palestinians. What’s more, that night I began my work with what could be called the “unsung heroes” of the negotiations: the unlettered ex-prisoners and Fatah activists, people whom the Israelis liked to describe as “terrorists.” Without these street activists, the peace process would have died at birth.
It was obvious to me, as it was to others, that our negotiators needed more than one rousing mass meeting. To sell the idea of speaking to our enemies, and just as important to marginalize Hamas and other radical factions that likened negotiating with Israel to speaking with the devil, we needed an ongoing campaign. My main partner in this was Jibril Rajoub. We had a big job cut out for us. Father would have called it “spade work.”
Jibril had spent a total of seventeen years in Israeli prisons, where he learned Hebrew well enough to translate into Arabic Menachem Begin’s The Revolt, a book about Begin’s underground war against the British. Never formally charged with a crime (they say he tossed a grenade at an army convoy), Jibril was released in the same prisoner exchange as my cousin Salim, who had planted a bomb after the 1967 war. The minute the intifada broke out, the Israelis picked Jibril up again, drove him to the border, and at gunpoint told him never to come back. During the Madrid talks he was still living in Tunis.
Jibril contacted me shortly after the Madrid Conference opened. I flew to London and met him at the Hilton. The venue could hardly have been more incongruous. Jibril looked as awkward in a suit as I did, and even more out of place in a five-star hotel lobby. Maybe this was the reason we felt such immediate affection for each other. People still poke fun at the fact that a vulgar-tongued muscle man—Jibril likes to curse—and a tweed-jacketed professor could get along so well. But he’s one of the rare cases in which a crude tongue is in some mysterious way wired to a vigorously strategic mind. We almost always see eye to eye on political issues.
Sitting with Jibril in London brought back memories of hammering out ideas with my Birzeit students over hummus and cheap Omar cigarettes. Jibril and I spoke late into the night, as we did the next night and the one after that.
Thinking back on it now, I’m amazed at the cavalier ease—others would soon see in it as a conniving “will-to-power”—with which the two of us, sitting in a fancy hotel lobby, put down on paper a strategy to revolutionize the PLO “revolution.” It was also a key to turning the meaningless autonomy that Israel and the Americans were offering us into something far closer to sovereign nationhood. We couldn’t state any of this openly because Fatah was still very much an illegal organization, and under Israeli occupation, mere membership in it led to long jail sentences.
What Jibril and I came up with was the establishment of a countrywide structure of political committees in support of the peace process. Members of those committees would be primarily Fatah activists or supporters who, because they were at the grassroots level, could get the word out to the masses. Then came a coordinating body, which would organize these committees. We called it the Higher Political Committee. It would have fourteen members from the West Bank and Gaza. I would be the chairman, and Ahmad Hazzaʾ the vice chair.
None of this would break any Israeli laws: the whole point was to support the peace talks, after all. That there was a secretive element to this can be inferred from the fact that we filled all the positions in the Higher Political Committee with ex-prisoners. The Higher Political Committee was the direct successor to the Unified Command of the intifada. Sameer Shehadeh, who had created the UNC with Abu Jihad, was the first name we thought of.
The Higher Political Committee was to be the public and legal cover for a clandestine body we called the Fatah Higher Committee. While the first would drum up public support for the Madrid talks, the second—with the same members switching caps—would transform Fatah, its power structure, its very nature, from a guerrilla movement into a democratic political party representing the interests of the people living under occupation. After liberation, the Fatah Higher Committee could become a party leadership capable of governing an independent state. In short, the plan was to shift control of the local Fatah groups from the likes of the brutish fellow with buffed wingtips I had met in Amman in the early 1980s, back to the grassroots leadership in the Occupied Territories.
Behind the plan was the fact that the old underground guerrilla movement was in need of a thorough overhaul. Under the old system, leaders living abroad controlled the Fatah movement in the territories. The branch offices were military cells or “Tanzim,” run by eighteen desk officers sitting in Amman.
If you’re running a partisan war, this may make a lot of sense; for a civil society, however, it’s a formula for a Baathist-type dictatorship. The old system of underground cells, without institutional anchoring in the society they were supposed to liberate, could never run a free society. To create our own state we needed leaders born and bred under occupation who were personally rooted in the country. The old guard sitting in Tunis or Amman was more in touch with the local Mercedes dealership than with the needs and concerns of the people under occupation.
The Fatah Higher Committee would be the main power center for younger leaders such as Jibril, Marwan, Sameer, and Dahlan. Once peace was concluded, the old guard would have to acclimatize itself to an open-party structure, with internal bylaws addressing how to advance our people’s social and economic concerns. Like it or not, the “liberators” would have to adjust to freedom.
The next element in the plan was to link up the Tanzim with this new leadership body. Just as the Higher Political Committee would be the legal face of the Fatah Higher Committee, the political committees drumming up grassroots support for Madrid would transform the Tanzim from secretive guerrilla cells into the grassroots leadership of a democratic political party. The Tanzim would be linked up regionally with one another so that regional representation could be established, with the Fatah Higher Committee running the affairs as a whole.
One effective way to do this was to change the way funds were distributed. In the old system, the PLO raised money from donors and then farmed it out through the eighteen offices in Amman; the directors took their cut, and then, if anything was left, it dribbled down to the cells. Our idea was for the money to be centrally managed by the Fatah Higher Committee, and then distributed to the local chapters. We wanted the new body to take control of these funds and distribute them in a transparent manner, in which the average man on the street would benefit. This also was the only effective way of combating Hamas, with its far-flung social network.
Jibril returned to Tunis to sell the idea to Arafat. Arafat supported it, over the objections of many of the people around him. Some vehemently opposed emasculating the Tanzim, these mighty centers of military prowess, by turning them into what they dismissively dubbed “peace leagues.” Others didn’t like the new way of doling out money. By redirecting all the funds flowing through this committee, functionaries sitting in offices outside Palestine could no longer subtract their “administration costs.”
I returned to Jerusalem a
nd began work. To create the committees, I drove around the West Bank and Gaza to meet with the Tanzim. The task was made considerably easier thanks to my earlier arrest by Jacob and the Shin Bet. On the Palestinian street, time in an Israeli prison was a prerequisite for respect. (“It is an unhappy country that needs heroes,” writes Brecht.)
The man I found to head up the political committees for supporting negotiations project was Ziad Abu Zayyad, the editor of the Al-Fajr, and one of the first PLO members to call openly for a two-state solution. His belief in dialogue with the Israelis was strong enough that he had picked up Hebrew and even put out a newspaper in Hebrew called Gesher, or “Bridge.”
Very quickly, a community of ex-prisoners countrywide and Fatah activists toiled day and night to ensure public support for our negotiation team and the peace process. We established a headquarters in Ramallah, where we often met. Hussein al-Sheikh, the man who pulled me away from the soldiers, ran the office.
Chapter Twenty-three
A Shadow Government
WITH THE CONCLUSION of the first round of talks in Madrid, the Palestinian team headed off to Tunis to meet with Arafat and the PLO leadership. There they stayed long enough to make sure everyone knew that they were taking their cues from the PLO. From Tunis they flew to Amman, and after a brief stopover, they boarded the buses and headed back for Jerusalem.
Ahmad and I wanted to roll out the welcome wagon for them and commemorate the triumph of common sense over a generation of ideology. And what better way to do this, we thought, than to bring together all the committees we had created to support them! It was like a surprise party, because no one on the bus knew what we had been up to.
We sent one of our activists to meet the buses at the bridge and tell Faisal about the hard work we had done drumming up support for his efforts. When the buses pulled up to the National Theater in East Jerusalem, where we were gathered, Ziad Abu Zayyad acted as master of ceremonies.
The party atmosphere we had expected didn’t quite materialize. I could already see through the tinted glass the worried looks on our negotiators’ faces. They didn’t know where all the celebrating people in the rowdy crowd had come from, and seeing that many of them were leading activists with strong street credentials, they feared our reception party was a coup d’état. Had they driven into a trap? Was Arafat behind it? Was he trying to burn them?
Suspicion turned in my direction. They had left me alone in Jerusalem, and a short while later they returned to find me leading a gang of ex-prisoners in what must have seemed to them a highly dubious grassroots project. Faisal was the most alarmed of all. Had his second in command suddenly developed independent ambitions? Was a Nusseibeh challenging a Husseini? From that moment on our relationship lost some of its trusting intimacy. It would never fully return.
My other role during the Madrid period tended to stoke suspicions. When the people in Tunis created the “team” to get around Shamir, they included three Jerusalemites: Faisal, Hanan Ashrawi, and me. Faisal became the head, and Hanan the official spokeswoman. In all fairness, they thought, scratching their heads, they had to come up with something for me. Someone suggested putting me in charge of the technical committees needed for the team. It sounded like a good solution, and everyone in the room agreed. The fact that there were no technical committees to manage didn’t bother anyone.
I first found out about this when Mohammad Shtayyeh, an ex-student of mine, an ex-colleague from my union days, and a friend who later became a Minister in the PA, gave me a call. He explained the difference between the official “delegation” and the “team.” “You’re a member of the team,” he announced. “You’ve also been given the job to create technical committees.”
“Great,” I told him. “But what does this mean? What should I do?”
“I don’t think anyone has a clue,” my friend said chuckling. “Just do what you usually do. You always seem to manage.”
All I had to go on were the words technical committee. I was glad the position didn’t come with a job description. As someone with a fondness for blank slates, my imagination wandered for several minutes before leading me back to the nub of the problem I had sensed at the outset of the entire Madrid process: namely that the Israelis and Americans were intent on buying us off with a fraudulent “autonomy.” Transforming Fatah into a real political party was one way to prevent “autonomy” from becoming just another name for Israeli domination, this time with PLO compliance. Could these nonexistent technical committees do the same? Under the nose of our Israeli occupiers—and PLO functionaries in Tunis—could they function as embryonic ministries of an independent state geographically anchored in East Jerusalem?
I was alone on the balcony. It was a warm evening, and in the distance the floodlights illuminating the Dome of the Rock had turned it into something otherworldly, a shimmering vision floating in midair. As often when pondering a riddle, I smoked one cigarette after the next, emptying out a packet of Camel Filters, my new brand, before some provisional answers began to crystallize. The negotiators, I reasoned, obviously needed information in order to negotiate. How could they talk about water without knowing where the aquifers were? The technical committees could be the brain of our emerging state by thinking through every issue, and presenting our negotiators with informed policy statements and advice, with data, position papers, and negotiation scenarios.
But these committees could go far beyond this. It came to me that they could become the shadow government I had pushed for when I penned the declaration of independence. With a bit of rumination it struck me that the technical committees were the linchpin of the peace process. I had found a solution to a problem pestering me since I first heard about the Madrid talks in prison.
As I had been preaching all along, the signs of sovereignty—a flag, handshakes, a national anthem, or the face of an Arab general on the currency—meant nothing without the meaty substance of independence. If our nation remained a ghostly entity with no institutions of its own, then Israeli recognition would be just as insubstantial. There wouldn’t be anything for them to recognize. It would be an “autonomy” that would only immortalize their domination. Only after the infrastructure for a future Palestinian administration was in place would the political negotiations on borders, refugees, and so on lead to a meaningful agreement.
The question of national freedom was similar to that of identity: the interrogator offers freedom from pain at the price of inner servitude. By contrast, the prisoner does not receive true inner freedom from his master; he seizes it without asking permission. Palestinians needed to seize sovereignty.
I accepted the job and then set about creating a shadow government.
Though I had obviously never created a state from scratch, No Trumpets, No Drums had sharpened my mind on ways of doing so. I had also actually learned a thing or two during my brief stint working for an oil company in Abu Dhabi. The job had taught me a lot about compromises in negotiations. I also got a bird’s-eye view of a country being built from the ground up. It was just starting while I was there, but in the years that followed, partly thanks to my brother Zaki, the sheikh’s most trusted adviser, the country was becoming the Singapore of the Middle East.
My first move was to find people who could help. I started calling up some professional colleagues, academics, economists, lawyers, and political scientists, and asked them to come by Mother’s house for a brainstorming session. Fahd, my contact man with the tanzim, showed up. Hassan Abu Libdeh was also there. Hassan had an uncanny knack for materializing ideas into detailed strategies, then executing them. Samir Hleileh, also a brilliant mind, showed up.
I explained to those gathered what the technical committees would do, their political importance, and the role I saw for them in a two-state solution. To get our enterprise off the ground, we needed to involve academics and professionals from all fields.
During the meeting my colleagues asked if I had any financial backing.
“None whatsoever.�
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“What about from the PLO?”
Not wanting to raise any false hopes, I leveled with them: “I wouldn’t count on it.”
What I admired about my friends—and it’s a quality I’ve noticed recurrently over the years—was their willingness to commit themselves to what sane people would regard as hopelessly pie in the sky. They had faith in our ability as a group to defy the laws of gravity. “Well,” said one of my colleagues after a moment of awkward silence, “we’ll just have to scrounge around for resources, won’t we?”
My friends and I worked hard over the following days and weeks to put together a skeleton for the structure we needed to carry out the work. Having identified the various sectors in need of committees-cumministries, we started headhunting for the right person who might act as coordinator. Sectors ran the gamut from security to electricity, tourism to education, economics to infrastructure. On paper, the emerging skeleton rapidly took the shape of a shadow government.
With what little money I could borrow from Mother, I rented a room in a building across from her house. I called in my secretary, Hanan, to run the office, and hired an ex-student who used to work with Faisal at the Arab Studies Society to help put together stationery with a letterhead and to scour the world for possible donors. Initially all we managed to get was printing equipment and a fax machine donated by the British consul general.
We soon moved the office over to the Orient House. But rather than occupy the room with the chandeliers—it was too public for our needs—I made my office out of two converted bathrooms that made my prison cell in Ramle look spacious. From this unlikely spot (the plugged pipe to the john was under my desk), my team and I set out to build our state.
For the first meeting of the coordinators, twenty-three people showed up at Mother’s. With the heads of what we called the human resources and strategic planning units, there were twenty-five in all.
Once Upon a Country Page 38