'Here I shall die'

A besieged yet optimistic Arafat, dreaming of living and dying in Jerusalem, meets David Hirst in Ramallah
Arafat: then and now
Yasser Arafat often describes his struggle as a "long march" to the "spires and minarets" of Jerusalem, capital of his Palestinian state-to-be. "And I hope that the next time you see me," he said, "will be in my mother's house." It was next to the Wailing Wall, he explained; and it had only been partially destroyed when the Israelis demolished the ancient Mograbi quarter, immediately after their conquest of East Jerusalem in 1967.
Here in Ramallah he is as physically close to his goal as he can get, a mere ten minutes by car. But whether, politically, this really is his last way-station on the road to Jerusalem depends on the outcome of the Intifada. At the moment, like all the town's inhabitants, he is under siege. He received me in the Muqata'a, or 'district headquarters', from which British, Jordanians and then Israelis had formerly administered the town. The night before it had come under fire, just another of those now almost banal intrusions of warfare into lives which otherwise have many outward aspects of normality.
Ramallah is beset by Israeli settlements. The exchanges between them and the Palestinian Shabiba, or 'youth', has taken on a routine pattern. Sometimes it is the Shabiba who start them, with the ineffectual Kalashnikovs which are the only weapons they possess, sometimes the settlers or Israeli army, with much heavier weapons, including tanks. On this occasion, locals said, it was the latter. From the settlement of Psagot, quite out of the blue, they shot and wounded a 12-year-old boy playing in the Hashimiyah School yard, a mere 300 yards or so away. The Muqata'a, said an Arafat aide, was hit several times by a "five-hundred" -- familiar short-hand here for a kind of machine gun used by the Israelis. "No", said his chief, with all the authority of his life-long familiarity with the acoustics of warfare, "it was an eight-hundred."
Intensifying the sense of siege, for Arafat, are the hazards and difficulty of movement. His private helicopter has been grounded. It was the former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, not Ariel Sharon, who deprived him of it, ever since, he explained, "he pushed his forces into our towns and cities on 28 September." Now he has to rely on a Jordanian helicopter. And simply to get to Gaza, the other segment of his domain now almost entirely cut off from the West Bank, he has to go first to Amman, take a flight to Al-Arish, and then go by road through dangerous, settler-infested territory to his local headquarters.
I first met the 'President', as he now styles himself, somewhere in Jordan's Ghor Valley in 1968, shortly after his guerrilla movement had emerged, in an aura of heroism and great expectations, from the clandestinity that both Israel and hostile Arab governments had imposed on it. At the time, as the mere 'spokesman' of the collectively led Fatah organisation, his rhetoric was fiery and his objectives uncompromising: the "complete liberation" of Palestine, and by "armed struggle" alone.
It was apparently owing to this long association that he agreed to be interviewed. Nonetheless it came as a surprise to me, and evidently to some of his aides, and all the more so in that, as a result of my last visit to the occupied territories -- Gaza 1997 -- when I had written about the corruptions of the Palestine Authority, he had instructed his representative in London to sue me in the British courts. But Arafat was ever a man of reconciliations. After all, he is about to consummate a far more spectacular one, to go to Damascus to see Bashar Al-Assad, son of the ruler he used to describe, in some of his darkest hours, as the co-conspirator, against the Palestinian cause, of Israel itself.
He began this interview with the paradoxical assertion that "I am not giving interviews." So what was this, then? "Just a chat." Furthermore, I observed, he hardly ever addresses his people. This seemed rather curious for a leader engaged in what many of his people clearly think is the climax of a long struggle, demonstrating, as they often do, under the slogan "this is the last time." "Yes," he conceded, "I speak little," and turning to his chef de cabinet, Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, he said: "I leave it to my mass media experts, they are better at it than me."
These things were humorously said. For he is in relaxed and buoyant mood, confident, some of his entourage say, that he is at least holding his own in the great trial of strength and stamina now under way. He must also know that, though still heavily criticized for the manifold flaws of his administration, he has regained much popularity, both here and in the Arab world at large, simply for standing firm as the leader of a patriotic struggle. He is also, he says, in very good health. Even as long ago as his last two great sieges -- the Israeli one of Beirut in1982 and the Syrian one of Tripoli in 1983 -- he was known to his followers as the Khityar, the 'old man.' Now, at 72, the Khityar shows his age. But there is no sign of mental decay, and even the celebrated trembling lips -- not the symptom, apparently, of any serious condition -- now tremble less than they used to.
This taciturnity is widely interpreted as the deliberate strategy which it clearly is. He just doesn't want to elaborate on the nature of the Intifada. Is it violent -- violence being banned under Oslo -- or non-violent? 'Armed struggle' or peaceable mass action? Spontaneous, or subject to his control and manipulation? Confined to the occupied territories or deliberately exported to Israel proper? Clearly, it contains all these elements. But you will be hard pressed to get him to explain his part in them. It is not his business, he repeatedly insists, but Israel's.
Sharon it was who started it all. He himself had been so alarmed, he said, at the right-wing leader's plan, last September, to visit the Aqsa compound that he, and several aides, had visited Barak at his home the night before to warn him of the likely consequences. "Unfortunately, he did not follow my advice. You know what happened the next day: they opened fire on those who were praying. That is what made the Intifada and the resistance of our people." So would the Intifada go on? "Before asking me, you must ask the Israelis whether they will go on with their military escalation."
"But they accuse you of going back to armed struggle." "It seems," he said with heavy irony, "that it is I who send helicopters, tanks, and armoured cars to seal all Israeli cities. Is it I who use uranium, and gas bombs? I who close the passages to Jordan and Gaza? We have funerals every day. Who can control a people who have funerals everyday?" But, "till now", he insisted, "I have not given any order to open fire. And they know that. Our policemen and soldiers have not been involved till now."
So it was individual, spontaneous acts? "Mainly. And self-defence against the settlers." It reminded him, despite the much lesser scale and intensity of the fighting, of the 1982 siege of Beirut -- except that in Beirut "we didn't have these settlers, who commit their crimes under the control and protection of the Israeli army. Attacking our towns and villages and uprooting trees, including even olive trees that go back to Roman times." So if they stopped causing funerals every day, you could tell your people to stop? "Definitely. But they also have to follow up the agreement." That is to say, to return to the peace process where it had been left off, not at last July's Camp David summit, but at the Taba talks held on the eve of the Israeli elections.
At those, he said, the two sides had come closer than ever to an agreement. He repudiated the Israelis' contention that it was he who had caused the peace process to collapse, by rejecting "the most generous offer" Israel ever made, an offer measured -- in its strictly territorial dimension -- as 96 per cent, or thereabouts, of the occupied territories. If there was a generous offer, he said, it was not the Israelis', but the Palestinians', with their renunciation of 78 per cent of their original homeland. But "some of their leaders refuse to understand just what the Palestinians offered -- for history and the whole region's history."
Nonetheless, at Taba, the Israelis had yielded far more than ever before -- far more than at Camp David. "For the first time they agreed to give up 80 per cent of the settlements. For those, along the frontier, that would not be removed, there would be a land swap."
But could he now make any headway with a man like Sharon, whose officially stated idea of territorial compromise is that the Palestinians should be content with 42 per cent of their 22 per cent, who refuses to shake hands with a "liar and a murderer," and who -- said Arafat himself -- had tried to assassinate him 13 times during the siege of Beirut alone? His aides think not.
But Arafat is conciliatory discretion itself: "I respect anyone the Israelis elect, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak and now Sharon." Besides, "I don't think he will try to kill me; he is now the first man in Israel -- and I have a hot line to him."
A hot line?
"Yes, Omri is my hotline" -- he is referring to Sharon's son, now becoming a regular visitor to the Muqata'a.
It would seem from such methods of communication that you are "Arabizing" the Israelis?
"But they are Arabs," he shot back, calculating that 70 per cent of them are of Middle East origin.
And the fact was that Sharon was beginning to falter. That is the interpretation that he and his aides put on a recent, inglorious operation in Gaza. The Israeli army had been obliged to beat a swift retreat from its punitive foray into Area A, that portion of the occupied territories, still very small, over which the Palestine Authority has exclusive control, as distinct from Area B, where it has joint control, and Area C, where Israel remains in sole charge. The "very important" thing here, he said, was that President Bush and the Europeans had told Sharon to stop.
So you believe that international intervention is indispensable?
"This is what happened all over the world, in Bosnia, in Kosovo."
Some Israelis believe that you will do anything, even engineer another massacre, another 'Sabra and Shatila', to bring that about?
"It has been done already. 25,000 people wounded. And what about all that destruction to houses, installations, schools, mosques and churches; even the synagogue of the Samaritans in Nablus has been bombed."
Was it not possible, if things got worse, that, instead of completing his "long march" to Jerusalem, he would be captured and put on a plane to Tunis, his former headquarters in exile, as some Israelis were urging?
"I will return. I have my ways, you know. I always used to come here secretly. This is my land. Here I shall die."
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The road taken 26 April - 2 May 2001
Intifada in focus
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