The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  The Labour government of Ehud Barak—billed as the most liberal and pro-Palestinian Israeli administration since Rabin’s—colonised the West Bank ten times as fast as Netanyahu’s Likud government. Just a day after “final status” negotiations opened between Israelis and Palestinians in September 1999, Barak—visiting the now vast colony of Ma’ale Adumim—announced that “we will not remove a settlement which has 25,000 people and which . . . all the Israeli governments helped to develop . . . Every house built here, every tree, is part of Israel for ever, that’s clear.” By November 2000, the Israeli pressure group Peace Now discovered that the Barak administration was planning to spend another $210 million on colonies the following year.

  The final, damning statistics were inescapable. Between 1967 and 1982, a mere 21,000 colonists had moved into the West Bank and Gaza. In 1990, the total was 76,000. By 2000, seven years after the Oslo accord, it stood at 383,000, including those settlers in annexed East Jerusalem.92 On 17 May 2001, René Kosimik, the head of the International Red Cross delegation to Israel and the Palestinian territories, felt it necessary to remind the world that under the Geneva Convention, “the installation of the population of the occupying power into the occupied territories is considered as an illegal move and qualified as a ‘grave breach’ . . . The policy of settlement as such in humanitarian law is a war crime.” Yet still, even as Arafat was dying in 2004 and when Israel’s “security” wall was stealing its way across yet more Arab land, the occupation and dispossession of Palestinians continued.

  More than any other event, this huge colonial expansion proved to Palestinians that Oslo was a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into the abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood. For the settlers, of course, Oslo was a threat to that very same government-backed colonial project of which they were a part. When Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin pressed on with the “peace process” after successive suicide bombings by Palestinians, he became, for the colonists, part of the same “terror” that Arafat and the PLO represented. On 24 July 1995, for example, a suicide bomber killed seven Israelis on a Tel Aviv bus; on 22 August a woman suicide bomber blew herself up at the rear of a Jerusalem bus, blasting herself and four other passengers to pieces. The day after the second bloodbath, Rabin said this would not deter him from “fighting extreme Islamic terrorism and continuing the negotiations” with the Palestinians. Just two months later, Rabin was denounced as a traitor at a Jerusalem rally at which Benjamin Netanyahu was the principal speaker. Leaflets distributed at the rally showed Rabin dressed as a Nazi officer. A video of the gathering showed a woman stabbing a picture of Rabin with a knife.

  A definitive biography of Rabin has still to be written. The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has shrewdly noted that he “inflicted more punishment and pain on the Palestinians than any other Israeli leader.” As chief of staff in 1967, Rabin captured the West Bank. For the next twenty-five years, he tried to hold onto the occupied territories by brute force, which “earned him his reputation inside Israel as a responsible and reliable politician.” Under his premiership, Israeli soldiers were allowed to break the bones of Palestinian protesters, a practice that continued until an Israeli cameraman inconsiderately filmed Israeli soldiers snapping the legs of a Palestinian prisoner. That Rabin continued colonising, even after Oslo, suggests that he wanted to give Arafat the honour of ruling those areas of the West Bank and Gaza that the Israelis did not need for security or for further settlement—a totally different interpretation than Arafat’s. But on 4 November 1995, after telling a Tel Aviv rally that “the path of peace is preferable to the path of war,” Rabin was assassinated by a twenty-five-year-old Israeli religious student called Yigal Amir who was an admirer of Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mosque murderer. At his trial, Amir said that once he was aware that something represented a religious commandment, “there is no moral problem. If I was conquering the land now, I would have to kill babies and children, as it is written in [the Book of] Joshua.” Change the religion, and this could have been the voice of a Palestinian suicide bomber.

  The parallels were facile, of course. As I was checking out of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem early one morning, the chief cashier, an Orthodox Jew with an impressively long beard who always wished me safety on my return to Beirut—the Lebanese capital was for him a “terror centre”—asked whether he reminded me of anyone I knew. “Don’t I look a bit like some of the Hizballah?” he asked with a broad smile. And I had to admit that, yes, he did look a bit like some of the Shia Muslim militants of Lebanon. Beards have something to do with orthodoxy, with fundamentalism in the most literal sense of the word, just as the “covering” of women—Orthodox Jewish women, Muslim women, Christian nuns—seemed to be a feature of the three Middle East religions. What is it, I used to ask myself, about hair, the growing of hair, the concealment of hair, male hair as a symbol of manhood, female hair as a devilish trap for men, the length of beards or the shape of beards? Why did Christ, in all those Bible pictures, always have a beard? Why did every Shiite imam in Iran sport a growth around the chin, white and fluffy or stubbly or tangled, an undergrowth of hair every bit as complex as the moral exegesis or treatise on Islamic jurisprudence which had earned him his place in the clerical hierarchy? Was a beard meant to symbolise wisdom or commitment or manhood, or was it supposed to earn respect?

  When Yitzhak Rabin illegally deported almost 400 Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters to Lebanon in 1992, he created an Islamic university on the slopes of Mount Hermon. Refused permission by the Lebanese government to travel north into the rest of the country, the Palestinians—many of them university teachers, engineers, clerics—were marooned in the summer heat and winter snows in a mountain wasteland called Marj al-Zahour, the “Field of Flowers,” and here they discussed modern Islam and philosophy and learned their Korans by rote and kept the fast of Ramadan beside a narrow, broken road down which, almost nine hundred years earlier, Saladin was said to have ridden on his way to Jerusalem. Abdul-Aziz Rantissi of Hamas would hold court here, and so would Sheikh Bassam Jarrar and some of the future leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Jarrar would ask me what good could come of a secret “peace” deal that dishonoured those who had died in the first (1987–1993) Palestinian intifada struggle. The deportees would beg for newspapers but as the months passed, the Hizballah and other sympathetic Lebanese Muslim groups furnished them with generators and television sets and books. There was even a university tent “library,” as well as a tent mosque and a tent infirmary. An entire male Islamic society grew up beside the great cartwheel cornucopia rocks of Marj al-Zahour.

  “I will miss this beauty,” one of them said to me before he was allowed to return to “Palestine”—and to an Israeli prison—in 1994. “The rocks here will have some special place in our minds in the future.” They gave me family phone numbers in Ramallah and Hebron and Jenin and asked me to call on them when next I visited “Palestine.” So many had negotiated with Israeli officials that one even gave me Shimon Peres’s home telephone number.

  And so, one cold December day in 1995, I walked up the drive to Hebron University and found Sheikh Jarrar, one of the “graduates” of the Field of Flowers. He was thinner, no longer dressed in the abaya that protected him from the snows sweeping across Lebanon, but in a new leather jacket, his beard neatly trimmed as he sat in the students’ union office. There were other Hamas supporters from Marj al-Zahour around him, greyer than I remembered them but still listening to their teacher with the same rapt attention they gave him during history lessons in the big tent at the freezing University of Marj al-Zahour. “It changed us all,” he said. “Marj al-Zahour had an effect on all of us. It has made me more relaxed because I realise the world noticed our plight and made me realise there were still values.”

  He paused a lot during our meeting in the crowded students’ office, awar
e perhaps that all those bearded faces would be looking for inconsistencies as well as wisdom in their history teacher. Here, after all, was a Westerner who had known Sheikh Bassam Jarrar in exile, a reporter from a decidedly different culture who might know things they did not know about how those 400 Palestinians behaved in their exile two years before. “Because the world proved to be less of a jungle than we thought, a lot of us have doubts about evaluating our experience in southern Lebanon,” Jarrar continued. “Our political speech was modified. In Marj al-Zahour, I had to talk to people from different cultures. We had to find a language that was convincing to others, not just to ourselves. That’s why we developed a certain language.”

  And the PLO–Israeli agreement that the exiles had so scornfully dismissed back in the snows of their mountain encampment? “Any solution is connected to the concept of justice,” Jarrar replied. “If there are mistakes in the plan, it won’t last long. There is a possibility that there will be peace, but there will also be a lot of violence. Everybody believes that this is a superpower solution that is not based on justice . . . Israel will not deal with us with justice.” All the young men around the room nodded obediently when Jarrar returned to a familiar theme: the massive, all-embracing power of Washington, whose interference in international affairs was dictated solely by the interests of the United States—in Bosnia as well as in the Middle East. “Bosnia is in the heart of Europe, it’s a special case. The solution they have reached is to keep the Muslims under supervision and to prevent third parties like the Islamists from gaining any power. But Palestine is in the heart of the Islamic world and here the Americans are looking after their interests in the Middle East—oil and Israel.”

  I pushed Sheikh Jarrar back to the subject of Jerusalem, of which he had spoken so many times at Marj al-Zahour. “Arafat maybe will be able to take control of some areas annexed to Jerusalem. The West Bank will be split into cantons by the Israelis who have built all these bypass roads for the settlers which divide up our land. Some of the settlers will leave but others will stay, especially in settlements in the Jordan valley, in the north-west, and in all those areas where the settlements are already virtual cities.” He was half-right. Arafat would be offered some meagre suburbs of Jerusalem. No settlers would leave—indeed, they would increase in number—but the settler roads would divide up the Palestinian land and ensure that no Palestinian state could come into being.

  Out in the hallway, hundreds of students clustered round the noticeboards of the militant Palestinian groups. To the Islamist board were pinned dozens of snapshots of Hamas and Islamic Jihad “martyrs,” holding pistols and automatic rifles and heavy machine guns. “That’s Bassam Imasalni,” another Marj al-Zahour veteran said, pointing to the portrait of a slightly bearded man with dark, serious eyes. “He was trapped in his home by the Israelis but came out fighting with his rifle— he only died because there were too many of them.”

  Was it self-deception or self-delusion that allowed us to believe that a just “peace” was still on offer? I look back over my own reports from the Middle East in the second half of the Nineties with a mixture of tiredness and horror. “The marriage is over,” I wrote in June 1996. “The show has long drawn to a close. The divorce was made final the moment Bibi Netanyahu became prime minister. The solemn and official agreements signed by the PLO and Israel turn out to be of no interest to the new Israeli government: the Israeli withdrawal from Hebron has not been honoured. Final status talks which were supposed to decide the future of Jerusalem and the Jewish settlements still expanding across the occupied Palestinian West Bank have become an irrelevancy.”

  And then, in December 1996, I find myself writing that “an explosion is coming in the Middle East, a detonation that may well change the region for ever. We in the west have largely chosen not to heed the signs of impending calamity, preferring instead to pretend that the long-dead and deeply flawed ‘peace process’ still has life in its decaying body . . . but the Arab world is bracing itself for the shock wave of terrible events.” What on earth, I ask myself today, did I think that explosion would be? I must have imagined that the “explosion” would detonate in the Middle East, inside Israel or Palestine. But I have a tape of an interview with a CBC anchorman in Toronto in November 1998 in which again I talk of “an explosion to come.”

  Torture and death in custody, arbitrary arrest and detention without trial, executions and unfair trials by both Israelis and Palestinians: five years after the Oslo agreement, could there have been a more wretched indictment of the “peace” than the report that Amnesty International published? So rapidly were human rights being sacrificed in the hopeless search for “security” between Israel and the PLO that the November 1998 report was too late to record the latest atrocities: two Palestinians shot by a PLO firing squad for murder and the apparent beating to death by Yassir Arafat’s henchmen of Hussein Ghali, who called at a Gaza police station to make a complaint. Amnesty’s own words were more eloquent than any reporter’s notes:

  . . . killings of Palestinians by Israeli security services or settlers have led to suicide bombings and the deaths of Israeli civilians. These have led to waves of arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, torture and unfair trials. The Palestinian population have been the main victims of such violations . . . the Occupied Territories have become a land of barriers, mostly erected by Israeli security services, between town and town and village and village.

  Methods of torture used by the Israelis included shabeh (sleep deprivation while shackled in painful positions and hooding), gambaz (forced to squat for more than two hours), tiltul (violent shaking that had already killed a Palestinian prisoner)93 and khazana (imprisonment in a cupboard). Other methods included beatings, pressure on the genitals and exposure to heat and cold. “There is general acceptance by the international community,” Amnesty said, “that Israel has legalised the use of torture.” Torture by Yassir Arafat’s authority included beatings, suspension from the wrists, burning with electricity or cigarettes, along with tortures learned from the Israelis, especially Shabeh. Twenty Palestinians had died in Palestinian Authority custody since the Oslo agreement, most of them during or after torture. Among those routinely tortured were “security detainees,” suspected collaborators and those Palestinians who had sold land to Jews.

  Amnesty was especially concerned about extrajudicial killings. They included the murder of Hani Abed, a Hamas member suspected of murdering two Israeli soldiers, who was killed in a Gaza car bomb; Fatih Shikaki, the Islamic Jihad leader shot dead in Malta, and Yahya Ayash, a Hamas bomb-maker killed by a booby-trapped mobile telephone. His death, during a self-proclaimed Hamas ceasefire, provoked another round of suicide bombings. Among the many innocents killed by the Israelis was eight-year-old Ali Jawarish. The organisation quoted Joel Greenberg of The New York Times , who later told the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem that he saw Israeli troops fire at the boy during a demonstration.

  I saw one of the soldiers kneeling and aiming his gun at the children . . . In my opinion it was a rubber [coated] bullet . . . but I am not certain . . . When the soldiers retreated I noticed a boy aged about nine or ten lying motionless on the ground . . . I saw . . . a wound on the right side of the forehead and a lot of blood flowing. Later the doctors at Muqassed Hospital and at Beit Jala told me that the child’s brain had spilled out.

  There was now a weird symbiosis about this bloody conflict. The greater the violence in Israel–Palestine, the darker the political future, the more optimistic the West would become about the “peace process” which was once more, of course, to be put “back on track.” This was, I suppose, an unconscious dress rehearsal for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003. As the results of that illegal military operation became steadily more disastrous, so the Americans and the British would repeat their absolute confidence that the invasion was worthwhile, the aftermath predictable and the final result a mixture of “freedom” and “democracy.” So, too, “Palestine” and Israel
in 1998.

  In May of that year, I travelled to London to watch the continued myth-making of Middle East peace played out around Downing Street. A police helicopter purred lazily over us when Benjamin Netanyahu came out of Number 10 to tell us how grateful he was to Tony Blair. The chopper drifted back in the English spring sunshine when Yassir Arafat in turn emerged from Downing Street to thank Blair for his commitment to the “peace process.” How they loved Tony. How they hated each other. And all the while, behind us, loomed the fateful building in which Lord Balfour had composed Britain’s 1917 declaration of support for a Jewish national home in Palestine.

  Bibi, immaculate as ever in dark suit and thick white hair, told us there could be progress if both sides showed “flexibility.” Israel, he claimed, “had already gone the extra mile.” The Palestinians took the view that Netanyahu’s extra mile was the distance that Israel’s latest Jewish colony had extended into occupied Arab land. Arafat—ashen-faced, lower lip quivering, his kuffiah for once untidy— warned only that “Netanyahu must take the responsibility of . . . the chaos that might take place in the region if the result of these talks is not positive.”

  A mile away, through the empty London bank holiday streets, the Israeli prime minister talked to U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright in the sumptuous suites of the Grosvenor Park Hotel. The foyer, with its fake log fire and oil painting of ice skaters, looked ominously like the smoking room of the Titanic; and within minutes, there was Israel’s spokesman, David Bar Ilan, with his ice-cold public school accent, strolling through the lobby to tell journalists—in response to Arafat’s statement—that “if the formula is ‘land-for-terrorism,’ we can’t go on with this.” It was the language of children that both sides spoke, the language of threat and false compromise. How Netanyahu and Arafat loved peace, strove for peace. But they could not even bring themselves to talk to each other. Arafat was so weakened that all he could do, pathetically, was accept Washington’s demand for a further 13.1 per cent Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, in itself a grotesque diminution of what the Oslo accords demanded. In Grosvenor House, Madeleine Albright—the supposedly tough-talking secretary of state who used all the anger of a sheep to persuade the Israelis to try to stop building settlements on occupied Arab land and adhere to the Oslo timetable—tried to persuade Netanyahu to cede more than 9 per cent of Palestinian land to Arafat in the next handover of territory. In vain.