Back I went to the Muqata. This time Arafat was even more visibly mistrustful. “Why are they doing this?” he asked bitterly when I told him about my meeting with Sneh. He thought it was a trick, as if the Israelis were trying to get around him by making me the interlocutor and not him. “Labor needs us,” I tried to explain.
“Us who? Who do they mean by ‘us’? Who is ‘us’? Which ‘us’ is us? How many ‘us’s are there anyway? I’m ‘us’!”
It was obvious that to get a positive reaction from Arafat, Sneh would have to come calling personally. At any rate, the Old Man didn’t want me to be the middleman. Once again, Sneh and his friends in the party never heard from Arafat.
My last official trip to the Muqata was for a cabinet meeting. Labor had pulled out, and the Israeli elections were around the corner. After Arafat read out the meeting’s agenda, I asked that Israeli elections be placed as an additional item. Arafat murmured out an agreement.
When the discussion on the Israeli elections came, Saeb Erekat opened things up by emphatically warning our leadership not to do anything that would boost the extremist groups in Israel. By the time my turn came to speak, all eyes in the room were riveted on me. I repeated all the reasons that had made the so-called intifada so ruinous, and how the longer it lasted the less likelihood there would be a viable Palestinian state. “It is not the Labor Party’s future that hangs in the balance; it’s ours.” An argument I returned to half a dozen times was that the Israeli elections should really be seen as our elections. As our main negotiating partner for a future Palestinian state was going to be the Israeli government, it was in our interest that Israelis elect a government that believed in a two-state solution. This they would do only if they felt they had a reliable Palestinian partner, and as such we had to declare clearly our desire for a genuine and conclusive peace. The upshot was that it was in our national interest to endorse a clear and unambiguous framework for a political settlement based on the Destination Map.
There was dead silence. I sensed that most of the people in the room agreed with me, but no one made a sound of support. In matters of high politics, they were to a man slavishly dependent on Arafat, and since he didn’t want to lift a finger to help Labor, they weren’t about to.
A week later, I repeated all my arguments in a front-page article in Al-Quds. But it was a losing battle. Labor’s candidate was Avram Mitzna, a dovish ex-general and mayor of Haifa. Mitzna and his party did their best to win the Israeli public over to its peace stance; they even came out with the election slogan “Avram Mitzna is committed to the solution proposed by Ami Ayalon.” But the public wasn’t buying. Sharon trounced Labor, and not long after that I quit my post as Jerusalem man.
Quitting didn’t affect my relationship with Arafat in the slightest. He was known to rant and curse and throw things at ministers. Once, he slapped someone across the face during a meeting. In Jibril’s case, he waved a pistol. I never experienced any of this, and up until his death he continued to treat me with respect, as I did him.
Lack of respect wasn’t the problem. He simply wasn’t listening to me, or to anyone else, as far as I could tell. Trapped in his ruins, he was becoming increasingly fearful of possible challengers. At some point he may have gotten the impression—dead wrong, to be sure—that I had higher political ambitions. Word may have leaked out that someone at The Jerusalem Post was speculating on the “post-Arafat era.” “Who wouldn’t want a Harvard- and Oxford-educated president of the PA?” The writer, using an animal metaphor, then questioned whether a professor could ever become the leader of the Palestinian “pack.”1
For most of my friends, a prime example of this lack of appetite for political office was the project with Ami. Ami called his organization the People’s Voice. Mine was HASHD, an Arabic acronym for the People’s Campaign for Peace and Democracy. What both of us aimed for was “people power,” a hackneyed phrase perhaps, but one that captured well the logic behind our movements. We knew that leaders were well aware of the contours of an eventual solution. They just didn’t act on what they knew because no one was forcing them to. As long as their populations were responding to the bugle sounds of armed conflict, they could avoid engaging in the far more difficult task of hammering out the details of a negotiated peace. Therefore Ami and I decided to appeal directly to the grass roots. Speaking at a Tel Aviv news conference, we said that our aim was to send a million signatures to the decision makers as a fait accompli, a deal signed between the two nations. My old friend Danny Rubinstein at Haʾaretz called our scheme “Bypassing the political establishments to peace.”
Of the two, Ami’s organization got off to a much faster start. On his board sat some of Israel’s financial and social elite. A high-tech billionaire who pledged to devote some of his money and most of his time to the effort introduced Ami to other potential donors. Ami’s inner circle also included a former national chief of police and a top official in the Mossad. Ami and his team quickly set up a Web site and started a big advertising campaign. The People’s Voice had its headquarters in a wealthy Tel Aviv neighborhood near the stock exchange.
Things were not so easy in occupied, bombed-out, and lawless Palestine. “As compared to the financiers, managers and advertising experts who are working with Ami Ayalon,” wrote an Israeli journalist, we gave the impression of trying to “navigate around a blocked dirt road in the territories with a beat-up old car.”2
Indeed. Money was tight—there was a lot more of it when I was smuggling bags of it in fifteen years earlier. A Jewish philanthropist, a friend of my brother’s in England, gave us some initial funding. I put out some feelers to European and American funds and got some interest, just no hard cash.
With so little money in the coffers I couldn’t afford an ad agency, so my own staff at Al-Quds University did most of the work, helped out by volunteers from women’s organizations.
We first wanted to kick off the campaign with great fanfare in Ramallah. Invitations went out, and even Arafat pledged to send a representative. But late in the evening before the planned launch, a rumor reached me that armed gangs under the command of some members of the Fatah Central Committee were prowling the streets waiting to break up our meeting.
I made some phone calls, and the unanimous feeling was that I should delay the launch. It would be an embarrassment to kick off a peace campaign with a riot. An old friend who had worked with Arafat for years suggested I give the chairman a call and tell him about the rumor. If Arafat pretended he hadn’t heard anything—which he certainly had—I should take that as a sign there was definitely going to be trouble, in which case it would be wiser to wait. It was sound if convoluted reasoning. Sure enough, Arafat played dumb, and I canceled the event.
We launched in early June with full-page advertisements in several newspapers listing the names of two hundred grassroots supporters. Predictably, vituperative comments made the rounds. A couple of dozen signatories, upon receiving threats, asked to have their names scratched from the list. But we went on advertising for three consecutive days, and by the end of the third day we had gained another two thousand names. Thereafter, we started advertising once a week, each time announcing in bold print the rapidly growing number of signatures.
In Jerusalem, we invited hundreds of civic leaders to a Ramadan fast-breaking meal. HASHD wasn’t mentioned by name as sponsoring the event, though everyone knew what we were up to. The invitation said, “Let’s hope that our dream of establishing an independent state with Jerusalem as the capital will come true, under the leadership of our brother and symbol, Yasir Arafat.” Five hundred people turned up.
The campaign gained momentum on both sides. The more Palestinians signed off on our vision of peace, the easier it was for Ami to win over supporters. Suddenly the number one million didn’t seem quite so quixotic after all.
Getting people on board in peaceful East Jerusalem was comparatively easy, and largely symbolic. Success or failure depended on making inroads where most Palestinian
s lived—Jenin, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza, and the camps. The telephone and the Internet were useless there. Someone had to canvass from door to door, asking people to do something unfamiliar to them. Palestinians were used to seeing decision makers, pen in hand, signing accords in Washington or Cairo. No one had ever placed a pen in their hands. To make matters worse, we were asking people to do something that flew in the face of the public mood. One taboo is a hard thing to touch; we were going after several at once: the cult of violence, the myth of the martyr, and the delusions of actually “punishing” the Israelis. To top it off, the clause on the right of return asked people to give up their most cherished illusion at a time when illusions thrived most fiercely: war.
Beyond these more psychological hurdles came the practical problem of just getting around. Army checkpoints had turned the territories into an unpredictable maze. You would drive until a tank or a bulldozer forced you to take a different route. Getting from point A to point B became an entire alphabet of detours and dead ends before reaching your destination, if you ever did.
During the initial stage, even someone with a Jerusalem ID could move around the territories only with hard-to-get permits issued by the military. Sometimes I had to go around on improvised trails carved out of fields. Sitting at an equally improvised roadblock and feeling my anger surge, I constantly had to remind myself how much worse the people had it who got around illegally by foot or donkey at the risk of being picked off by a sniper.
I knew from the start that the people who could help win support countrywide wouldn’t be academics or urban professionals. They had to be activists themselves. I therefore sought out local Fatah leaders I knew, some from the first intifada. Already at the first signing event with Ami at the Imperial Hotel, I had brought aboard activists from Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron.
I also went to some of my oldest contacts in the West Bank to figure out the best way to create a grassroots base for HASHD. One of my first stops was at Sameer’s house in Ramallah. With two of his sons in an Israeli prison, Sameer listened and nodded his approval as I explained to him the logic behind the Destination Map. He liked the idea, but he warned me that the opposition was going to be ferocious, and if I didn’t want trouble I would have to get the major Fatah activists on my side. A word from them could open up all the doors I needed.
One day a visitor came to my office at the university in Abu Dis. It was Issa Abu Iram, a well-known activist from the Hebron area. He wished to participate in the initiative, he told me, and said he could help build support for it. The unexpected offer felt like a gift from heaven. His street credentials, I reasoned, could help win us access to militants. I had known Abu Iram for years. During the first intifada he was close to Abu Jihad, and he had belonged to the Fatah Higher Committee until he was arrested and spent nine years in prison for wounding a settler in a gun battle. In 1992, with Oslo, he was released and got a job with Jibril in Preventive Security. (He did most of the interrogations of would-be suicide bombers.) I knew his stance on the current fighting: he agreed with Jibril that it was Sharon’s trap to drive the Palestinians deeper into violence.
“We’re going to do this thing together,” he announced without hesitation after I explained some details about the Destination Map.
His suggestions were simple. “For both of us to avoid getting gunned down” we needed to find our leaders from among the “tigers,” the street designation for someone who had served time in an Israeli prison or had been hunted down and forced to slip into hiding. Time in prison or on the run would give them credibility in the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods and camps, and allow them to stand up and defend their position on nationalist ground, without being intimidated by a leaflet accusing them of treason, collaboration, or spying. Nearly all of the leaders we eventually recruited were tigers, and most had sat for years in Israeli prisons.
My friend Fahed, the head of the university’s Abu-Jihad Center for Political Prisoners’ Affairs, took charge in the Ramallah district. My pick to head up the office in Tulkarem was an activist who had spent eleven years in prison for killing a collaborator. Our man in Hebron, a Fatah leader from a refugee camp, had sat in prison for a decade before going to work with Jibril. The director in Nablus was once Abu Jihad’s assistant. Another—who happened to be one of my bodyguards—had been in and out of jail during the first intifada because of his expertise at making Molotov cocktails.
The most tumultuous place in the West Bank was Jenin, the hotbed of Al-Aqsa intifada radicalism. Nowhere had the fighting been fiercer, or more futile. The tiger we eventually recruited for Jenin was named Mohammed, the head of legal affairs at the university there. In the first intifada, at the age of sixteen, he was shot in the thigh during a demonstration. He did his best to flee, but with part of his leg gone he didn’t get very far. The Israelis locked him up. At the start of the second intifada he was finishing up his law degree and wasn’t involved in the fighting. This didn’t prevent his arrest, as the Shin Bet assumed he was a ringleader. The interrogator worked using the familiar formula of chains, a warlock’s peaked hood, sleep deprivation, and rapid-fire questions.
With such talent on board, HASHD quickly emerged as one of the most organized groups in the territories, perhaps second only to Hamas—which admittedly doesn’t say much, given the general collapse of civil society. We had a network of offices, by now adequate funding, and regular communication and meetings.
A high point for me was a training workshop in Ramallah for activists. If someone could have made me out through the dense cigarette smoke in the room, and watched me with my threadbare English tweed blazer discussing strategy with my tigers (Mohammed and dozens of others showed up from Jenin), he would have thought I was Mack the Knife building my own private army. In fact, during the training seminar I was making Immanuel Kant comprehensible to ex–street fighters.
As if to students in a classroom, what I hammered into them over and over was they mustn’t lose their humanity. I phrased it in terms they could appreciate, but the gist of it was that you could condemn dehumanization only if you hadn’t allowed yourself to be dehumanized. Resistance to occupation is justifiable only insofar as it does not undermine or blemish the principle from which it received its justification in the first place, namely, the safekeeping of human dignity. It was straight Kant, but it was also my father.
Putting moral theory into practice—never very easy—is a daunting task in a war zone. The first ads we put out may have stirred up opposition among some politicians, but the man on the street had more existential concerns. Danny Rubinstein, hoping for a journalistic scoop, wandered around for a few days after the ads appeared and described the anticlimax.
The owner of a shop that sells books and newspapers on Salaheddin Street in East Jerusalem says people buying Al-Quds last week barely noticed the ads, which appeared in the upper corners of the front page. But they carefully examined the photographs from the curfews, the destruction and the dead, which took up much of the front pages. He said that when Palestinians see and read about Israeli soldiers reoccupying the Palestinian cities, it’s nearly impossible to persuade anyone that they are partners for negotiations and peace in Israel.
Far more formidable obstacles lay in store for us. In Jenin trouble started the minute Mohammed opened the HASHD office. Mohammed looks the role of a street fighter, and with his slight limp, no one can question his devotion to Palestinian liberty. Or at least we thought so until thugs broke into the office. The leader of the gang, a youngster from a camp, came in waving a pistol randomly at our co-workers. “Who’s Mohammed?” he demanded. Mohammed stepped up to him and asked him what he wanted. Pointing his gun at Mohammed’s chest, he told him to close the office. “You are not allowed to operate here.” Mohammed promptly called the West Bank head of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, hardly a fan of HASHD, and told him what was happening. He then passed the phone to the teenage gunman, who took up the receiver and, as soon as he realized who was on the other end, went pale
. The leader of the Martyrs Brigade told the gunman never to step foot in our office again—or else.
On another occasion, I went to An-Najah National University in Nablus to drum up local support. My bodyguard got a call warning us against coming. En route, someone from the Israeli civil administration, acting on a tip from his collaborators who warned of terrible trouble, phoned my office back in Jerusalem with more or less the same message.
Upon arrival it was clear that the students from Hamas and the PFLP didn’t want me to have a public forum. The president of the university, who had invited me, was worried that things could get out of hand. I didn’t want to stir up unnecessary trouble for him. “Okay,” I told him, “so they don’t want to listen to me. I don’t want to impinge on their right to protest.” I agreed to cancel the public address and hold the meeting in the president’s office—only I made sure that the local television station was there. The result was a blessing in disguise. Instead of trying to shout down five hundred angry students, I calmly delivered my message to the television cameras, and the entire meeting was beamed into every home in the region.
Israelis also threw up various obstacles, and the timing of their actions was as counterintuitive as ever. A year earlier, authorities had closed down the university offices shortly after I made a public appeal for the cessation of suicide bombings—an appeal that earned me threatening leaflets, letters, and telephone calls from fellow Arabs who saw suicide bombings as “heroic acts” perpetrated by saintly martyrs. Now, a year later, with HASHD getting off the ground, the military police arrested one of our militants turned peace activists at a checkpoint while on his way to a peace meeting in Ramallah. On a different occasion Shin Bet agents brought in some of our workers in Jenin for interrogation, and then tried to enlist them as collaborators. “Look,” they reasoned, “you are already collaborating. You are working for Nusseibeh, right? Well, he’s working with Ami, and Ami was once the head of the Shin Bet. Get it? Your boss works for us.”
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