by Robert Fisk
While not suggesting that all Jewish settlements could stay on the West Bank, Syria was prepared to contemplate Jewish residents in the territory who could have free passage to and from Israel but who would not be permitted to fly the Israeli flag over their settlements and who would have to accept Arab sovereignty. “If the Israelis refuse to accept this,” al-Sharaa said to me privately, “then we could demand Arab flags and sovereignty over Israeli Arab villages inside Israel.” But the Syrians could also be uncompromising. They would not accept what the Americans called “confidence-building measures”—the presence of military observers, an end to propaganda campaigns—before the start of Israeli withdrawal from occupied Arab land. There would be no end to the Arab economic boycott of Israel and no agreements on water resources until the Israelis had undertaken “a comprehensive withdrawal from occupied territories.”
In their private discussions with the Americans, the Syrians had also insisted that they would negotiate on the Palestinian question as well as on Golan in order to prevent the Israelis exploiting what Damascus feared was the weakest Arab team at the conference, the joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation. The Palestinian right to “self-determination”—the all-important phrase that implied future statehood—must be “in association” with Jordan rather than “within Jordan.” The Syrians said a private letter from Baker to Assad also refused to recognise the Israeli expansion of Jerusalem’s administrative area. All Jewish settlements built around East Jerusalem since 1967—which the Israelis now claimed were part of the city (and thus part of Israel)—would be regarded as part of the West Bank, where the United States regards settlements as illegal. East Jerusalem itself must revert to Arab sovereignty but the Syrians would be willing to study “administrative procedures” which would allow all religions—including, of course, Israeli Jews— access to the Holy City. Syria believed that 60 per cent of Israel’s water resources came from the West Bank, Golan and southern Lebanon—which is why Assad wanted the Israelis to negotiate with the Arabs as equal partners in talks only after a military settlement—when Israel would no longer be able to make unacceptable demands.
Behind the Palestinians on the joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation, of course, Arafat’s leadership was not hard to discern. Though banned from Madrid—indeed, the Israelis would hunt for any evidence that the “terrorist” PLO was influencing the likes of Abdul Shafi or that most urbane of academics, Hanan Ashrawi—Arafat had met Assad prior to the talks and given his promise that UN resolutions must be rigidly adhered to, an obligation he would betray within two years. A Palestinian official quoted Assad as telling Arafat that “we will barricade ourselves behind international legitimacy because our demands are consistent with international legitimacy.”
President Bush’s electoral defeat in 1992 sapped the Middle East talks of their momentum. If they were one of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration, President-elect Clinton’s initial remarks were hardly encouraging. The only promise he made at his first press conference was an almost offhand comment that he would “keep the Middle East peace process on track” and do “whatever I can to make sure there is no break in continuity.” The phrase “peace process” was already a cliché, and in the years to come, peace—like a creaking railway carriage constantly derailed on a branch line—was always being put back “on track.” These were slim pickings for the Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians and Lebanese now wasting hours in their Washington hotel suites. By the second week of November 1992, their meetings at the State Department had been dominated by a farcical episode at the multilateral talks in Ottawa when the Israelis agreed to resume negotiations only when they were told that one of the Palestinian delegates—to whose presence they objected because he had been a PLO member—was eligible to participate because his membership of the Palestine National Council had “lapsed.”
In Washington, I found the chief Syrian delegate, Mouaffaq Alaf, depressed that Clinton seemed to have no grasp of the issues involved in the talks—even if the new president was going to sidestep his pre-election promise to move the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “At least the Bush administration was involved in this for four years and the peace process was linked to the personal efforts of Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker,” Alaf moaned. “But . . . any president, even if he comes with preconceived ideas not based on fair or balanced information, will very soon come to know more about the facts of the situation in the light of American interests.”
Arab delegates now feared more than ever that the amount of time it was taking to reach any agreement would prove increasingly damaging at home. In private, the Palestinians admitted that opposition to their participation in the talks was growing daily more violent in the West Bank and Gaza. The Syrians were deeply concerned at the effect on Syrian Muslim fundamentalist sentiment of any apparent failure at the talks. The detail in which they were now negotiating was excruciating. It took the Palestinian delegate Saeb Erekat, for example, months to persuade the Israeli delegation to stop calling the occupied West Bank by the biblical title of “Judaea and Samaria”—names that annulled the word “Palestine” from the Israeli narrative—and this was only achieved when Danny Rothschild, an Israeli delegate, leaned towards Erekat across a State Department table and said he would call them “territories” if the Palestinians would stop calling them “occupied.” Another compromise was reached: the Palestinians would refer to “Palestinian Occupied Territories” only by their acronym, “POT.”
That it took a whole year of negotiations merely to reach this level of verbal horse-trading was an unhappy commentary on the talks. The Palestinians wanted to talk about land; the Israelis wanted to talk about “devolved functions.” The Palestinians wanted to talk about “transition autonomy”; the Israelis wanted to talk about “interim autonomy.” The Palestinians wanted to talk about a country called Palestine; the Israelis would not hear of it. Jerusalem remained an unmentionable subject during these “interim talks,” open for negotiation only in the final stages of the negotiations.
The problem for the Palestinians was that the Israelis wanted to talk about “double territoriality” and overlapping jurisdictions. The Israelis would not have Jewish settlers ruled by Arabs in an autonomous “Palestine.” Nor would they accept the separation of East Jerusalem from Israel. Even though by 1992 Israeli taxi-drivers would no longer cross the city at night, Jerusalem had to remain the “permanent and unified capital of Israel.” The Israelis had come forward with “Arab zones,” “security zones,” “settler zones,” and an area where both Palestinians and Israelis were supposed to “cooperate” together. An Israeli spokeswoman in Washington said that her government realised that Arab-owned land existed in these areas and was willing to recognise this ownership, provided it was backed up by land and property deeds. But she said that most of the land was “disputed.” “Whose law is supposed to prevail in it? Israeli law? Jordanian law from before the 1967 war? British Mandate law? Ottoman law?”
The Palestinians would not accept this. An infuriated Erekat, still waiting for talks to restart in Washington, could scarcely control his anger when I called on him. “We are willing to give security guarantees. But it was the Israelis who created this problem in the first place. It was the Israelis who created the settlements. It was they who set up what they call ‘security zones’ on our land. Since 1967, only the Israelis have access to deeds and laws on West Bank land. Why should we have to accept all this overlapping of functions? We should be given more rather than less power. Then we will have the authority to rule our people and give the security guarantees that the Israelis say they need.”
Inevitably, the Palestinian delegates in Washington were playing the role of a conquered people, unable to make substantive concessions—since their land was occupied—but asked to match the concessions of their occupiers by reducing their own demands for autonomy. “When I go into that room at the State Department and see Rothschild, the man they call the ‘coordinator o
f the territories,’ ” one of the Palestinian officials said, “I feel as if I am sitting down with my own jailer.” And the Israeli response? “We are not on trial at these talks,” one of their delegates told me angrily. “This is not a trial where we discuss who did what to whom. Historycreated this problem.”
The Arabs, I wrote in a dispatch from Washington in November 1992, were fearful that Israel would reduce their strength by cutting a deal with individual Arab states, just as it did with Egypt in 1979. “Hence Syria is worried that Jordan will make a separate agreement with Israel and Arafat has said he fears Syria may do the same . . . Already Jordan has drafted an agenda for final peace negotiations with Israel, agreeing to the two countries’ mutual security . . . and to settle the conflict over two slivers of Jordanian territory . . .”
Within months, it would be revealed that “cutting a deal” was exactly what Israel was doing—but with the Palestinians rather than the Syrians and Jordanians. The Palestinian delegates to the Washington talks were taken aback to discover that Arafat had behind their backs opened his own secret channels to the Israelis and was even now negotiating for a separate but fatally similar peace plan. All that the Arabs had achieved—or worked to achieve in Washington—disappeared overnight. But the problems that had confronted them, the details that bedevilled them in all those long months since that gloomy conference in Madrid, would now turn up in the fatally flawed Oslo agreement of 1993. Arafat and his ill-trained officials—with not one lawyer among them—would now attempt to overcome arguments framed by Israel’s best-educated and shrewdest negotiators, lured on by the chimera of a Palestinian state and a capital in Jerusalem that they would never—ever—be given.
It wasn’t difficult to see why both the Israelis and Arafat saw common cause in a secret deal. Israel’s occupation was growing ever more brutal and the increasing strength of the religious Palestinian militias, especially Hamas, was frightening both the Israelis and the Palestinian leadership. For years, the Israelis had encouraged Hamas in its building of mosques and social services as a rival to the “terrorist” PLO and the leadership of the exiled “super-terrorist” Arafat. Just as America helped to create Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, so Israel nurtured Hamas and its leadership of imams and self-righteous fighters who now demanded Palestine—all of Palestine—for the Palestinians. In the end, what saved Arafat from obscurity was the power of these Islamic rivals among the Palestinians, and the degree to which they were bleeding Israel in the occupied territories. Without the opposition of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Israelis would have had no desire to withdraw. Without their existence—without those uncompromising pan-Islamic demands that far outstripped Arafat’s aspirations—the Israelis would have had little interest in recognising the PLO or giving back a speck of Palestine to Arafat.
GAZA. 20 APRIL 1993. The Israelis will not let the ambulances through. The United Nations have been turned away. As the smoke rises from the Tofah suburbs of Gaza City, the Israelis have even told the fire brigade to go away. We could hear the explosions all day, punctuated by rifle fire and the throb of a helicopter gunship that circled the slums. The Israelis are busy losing their war in Gaza. Of course, it did not feel like that to the Palestinians. For Abdul-Rahman al-Shebaki, groaning in front of the X-ray machine at the Al-Ahli hospital with a fragment of Israeli high-velocity bullet lodged three inches from his heart, the Israelis were doing what they wanted in Tofah. “I walked into the street during the curfew—I was very close to the soldiers—and I’d thought they’d let me go home,” al-Shebaki told me as Dr. Salah Saf applied a wad of bandages to the area below his heart.
The nurses produced a series of X-ray photographs that showed an ominous white smudge perforating al-Shebaki’s diaphragm, an image held up to the light before his angry, muttering family and friends. The twenty-one-year-old Palestinian had seen the Israeli soldier who shot him clean through the chest. Even before al-Shebaki had been brought out of Tofah, the fury of the Palestinians had been palpable. “Why are you here?” a bearded Palestinian asked me as I cowered in a pharmacy, trying to avoid arrest by the Israeli major who had already brandished a “closed military area” prohibition document in my face and ordered me out of Salahedin Street. “We need help,” the Palestinian shouted. “You’ve just come here to watch us dance.” We had already watched the first prisoners taken out of Tofah, heads bowed in the back of an Israeli jeep.
The Israelis would not say why they were raiding Tofah, but no one in Gaza City doubted they were searching for the Palestinian gunmen who had knifed and axed to death Ilan Feinberg two days earlier as he sat in the offices of the European Cooperation for Development agency. The “Popular Front for the Liberation Front” ’s so-called Red Eagles—how often we have to use “so-called” in the Middle East’s self-generating wars—had claimed responsibility for murdering the Israeli lawyer, quite possibly with the intention of provoking the Israelis into just the kind of military operation that would further embitter thousands of Palestinians. If so, they were successful.
What did all this achieve? I asked the Israeli major just that question as we stood in Salahedin Street, Palestinian urchins preparing to set light to the first tyres of the day scarcely a hundred yards away. Wasn’t Gaza simply a hopeless case, I asked, a war that was already lost to Israel? “What do you suggest we do?” the officer asked wearily. “What can we do?” Well, how about leaving Gaza? “It’s a political question,” he replied. And he was right. For no matter how many slums were blown up in revenge for Feinberg’s murder, no matter how many Palestinians were arrested, no matter how many ambulances were made to wait outside the curfewed “military areas,” the Israelis had lost the war in Gaza. The walls were heavy with the graffiti of hatred, claims of “collaborator” executions, threats of fire and blood from Hamas and the PLO’s Fatah guerrillas. The moment the Israelis left a street, it reverted to Palestinian control.
Next day, we found out what had really happened in Salahedin Street, what that major wanted to conceal from us. The Israelis had found an armed Hamas gunman in Tofah, a man called Zakaria Sharbaji, who belonged to the Hamas “Qassem Brigade,” and they had killed him with a light anti-armour weapon. Palestinians had made off with his head and the Israelis had kept his body—which, of course, created problems for Sharbaji’s widow and parents in the Jabaliya refugee camp. His blood still lay across the smashed breeze-block hut in which he was killed along with some remarkably undamaged pages from a Koran which— so his sympathisers unconvincingly claimed—had fallen from his pocket at the moment of death. “They picked up the bones from his head and the brains and took them away,” a visitor to the newly established shrine remarked. “But the Israelis had already taken the corpse.”
No one denied that the thirty-year-old “martyr”—his baby was only six months old—was a member of Hamas. For three months, so they said in Tofah, he had been on the run from the Israelis, hiding in Jabaliya and then in Tofah. Which was why, with their usual penchant for a little collective justice, the Israelis cleared the surrounding streets and blew up no fewer than seventeen Palestinian houses— homes to perhaps 200 people—within the space of just twelve hours. Those were the explosions I had heard from Salahedin Street. The rubble of Sharbaji’s last hiding place was therefore the scene of much shrieking and rage from almost a thousand Palestinians who gathered to view the wreckage of broken walls and roofs, fire-scorched furniture, shredded mattresses and clothes, smashed fridges, washing machines and television sets which the Israelis left behind them. Where, one wondered, did punishment end and vandalism begin?
It was not a matter that Sharbaji’s parents were likely to debate. Unable to retrieve either part of their son’s body, they nonetheless chose to mourn his death at their home in Jabaliya camp, a step to which the Israelis had their own unique response. Jabaliya, they decided, was under curfew. Jabaliya would become—and the phrase had long been part of the lexicon of Gaza—a “closed military area.”
This expression
should be studied with great care. For in Gaza, a “curfew” existed—or was brought into being—whenever an Israeli officer produced a piece of paper and scribbled a name, date and hour onto it. It happened to me when we tried to visit Sharbaji’s parents. An Israeli border police patrol stopped my car with that imperishable command: “No pictures.” Where, I asked, was the law that prevented us taking photographs in Gaza? Quick as a flash, out came a printed sheet from the pocket of the green-uniformed policeman, an Israeli Arab in dark glasses who swiftly filled in the words “Jabaliya,” “April 21st,” and “0600 hours” beneath the title “Closed Military Area.” Would we like to take a picture of him signing the piece of paper? Of course we would. Kafka had nothing on this.
This whole charade had little effect on the streets of Gaza City. No sooner were stones thrown at the Israelis from behind the smoke of burning tyres than the first wounded were carried, yelping with pain, into the Al-Ahli hospital. One man arrived with a plastic-coated bullet buried deep in his thigh, another with blood streaming from a bullet wound in his ankle. The doctors routinely administered local anaesthetics, probed the wounds of the victims and brought out the bullets one by one, clinking them neatly onto a metal tray in the operating theatre.
Before dark that night, uniformed and hooded men—two of them carrying axes—appeared at the corpseless funeral rites for Zakaria Sharbaji in a wasteland of sand in the very centre of Gaza City. They took me to a shabby street where a cheap concrete breeze-block was lying in a square foot of newly smoothed sand below the wall of a tenement. “Here we buried our martyr’s brain,” a bearded Hamas official confided with solemnity, then pointed to a tree. “Over there we buried some pieces of his jaw.” There was a pause. “Would you like us to dig them up to show you?”
For three days, the shooting continued in Gaza City, the Palestinian victims— armed men, stone-throwers, kids, passers-by—gunned down as if gun battles were rainstorms, something from which you could shelter indoors if you wished, something that was no longer dreadful or unreal or even un-normal. In the chaos and hysteria of the Shifa hospital, it was impossible to ask the doctors, overwhelmed in bloodstained gowns amid the din of screams and shouting, for the identities of each victim. By the hour of curfew on 24 April, 27 Palestinians with gunshot wounds had been brought to the hospital, another 13 to Rafa hospital and another 25 to the Al-Ahli clinic, a total of 65 wounded by the Israelis in scarcely three hours. Trails of blood ran across the entrance to the Shifa hospital. Most of the wounded had still been demonstrating against the destruction of the homes in the Tofah district.