Arafat Quotes

In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.

I'm aware I can be exhausting - "you exist too much," my mother often told me.

I enjoyed occupying blurred lines. Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space.

I used to think love was two people sucking on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger, but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape, traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth. I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers from a phone line, and you promised to always smell the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts. I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep’s clothing and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord around my ankle and yanked me across the continent. And now there are three thousand miles between the u and s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing at a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much I’d jump off the roof of your office building just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see what the other sees. But you’re here, I’m there, and we have only words, a nightly phone call - one chance to mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver, hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire. And lately - with this whole war thing - the language machine supporting it - I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they’re injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants, naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes: Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers, so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo, and it’s the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint, washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes, like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth, like I’m the executioner’s fingernail trying to reason with the hand. And I don’t know how to speak love when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste, and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself with the thought that we’ll name our first child Jenin, and her middle name will be Terezin, and we’ll teach her how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers, and to never neglect the first straw; because no one ever talks about the first straw, it’s always the last straw that gets all the attention, but by then it’s way too late.

In 1974, Mahmoud Darwish wrote Yasser Arafat’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations: Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

Palestinians no longer blamed Yasser Arafat or Hamas for their troubles. Now they blamed the Israelis for killing their children. But I still couldn't escape a fundamental question: Why were those children out there in the first place? Where were the parents? Why didn't their mothers and fathers keep them inside? Those children should have been sitting at their desks in school, not running in the streets throwing stones at armed soldiers.

Those primarily responsible for the current desperate situation of the Palestinian people have been their own leaders, from Haj Hussaini (the late Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) to Yassir Arafat, to the leaders of Hamas and the other terrorist groups. These leaders have placed a higher priority on the destruction of Israel than on the construction of Palestine.

Your worries are like water,' she often said. 'The moment one flows out, another floods in to fill the space.

But did it count as deception if it was done in the name of self-protection? Withholding vulnerable information was a habit born of survival. I’d been lulled into letting my guard down before, only to later regret it, the admissions used against me as I bore her wrath.

Arafat had said that the womb of the Palestinian woman was a "biological weapon," which he could use to create Palestine state by crowding people into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

They are an American Delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologize for the crusades', said Arafat. Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.

On Egyptian television during a 2010 talk show, a Muslim cleric, Sa’d Arafat, reviewed the rules for beating one’s wife. He began by saying, “Allah honored wives by installing the punishment of beating.”21 Beating, he explained, was a legitimate punishment if a husband did not receive sexual satisfaction from his wife. But he added: “There is a beating etiquette.” Beatings must avoid the face because they should not make a wife ugly. They must be done at chest level. He recommended using a short rod.

I'm devastated that you could be so careless with my heart.

Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn't seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life—the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier—would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic. Again, he could accede politely to my point but carry on somehow as if nothing had been conceded. I came slowly to realize that with Edward, too, I was keeping two sets of books. We agreed on things like the first Palestinian intifadah, another event that took the Western press completely off guard, and we collaborated on a book of essays that asserted and defended Palestinian rights. This was in the now hard-to-remember time when all official recognition was withheld from the PLO. Together we debated Professor Bernard Lewis and Leon Wieseltier at a once-celebrated conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Cambridge in 1986, tossing and goring them somewhat in a duel over academic 'objectivity' in the wider discipline. But even then I was indistinctly aware that Edward didn't feel himself quite at liberty to say certain things, while at the same time feeling rather too much obliged to say certain other things. A low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to Interview magazine in the late 1980s.

Aku percaya apa pun pekerjaan yang dilakukan seseorang tertentu pasti mendatangkan manfaat, bentuknya bermcam-macam dan tidak nyata. Tidak mungkin orang melakukan sesuatu tanpa ada tujuan kalau bukan orang tersebut salah urat. (dari buku "Burung Terbang di Kelam Malam")

When realized I'd been right about him, I didn't feel vindicated, or smug, or pleased. I felt frightened, and disturbed by the familiarity. Worse than receiving rage was the ability to detect its remnants.

_ (Omar ibn el Khattab) lorsque j'ai entendu le Prophète, que la grâce de Dieu lui soit assurée, nous dire: "Aujourd'hui j'ai parachevé mon bienfait à votre égard", certe oui, j'ai pleuré. Ce même jour d'Arafat, le Prophète m'a demandé la raison de mes pleurs, j'ai répondu: " Ce qui me fait pleurer, c'est que, jusqu'à présent, nous étions dans un accroissement constant dans notre religion, mais si, à présent, elle est achevée, il faut dire qu'il n' y a pas de choses qui atteignent leur plénitude sans que, par la suite, elles ne s'amoindrissent!" Et le Prophète m'ayant écouté a répondu après un long moment: "Certes, Omar, tu as dis vrai!

Appetite is embarrassing enough; visibly trying to satiate it, utterly mortifying.

In the year 2000 at Camp David, Yassir Arafat claimed that ‘the Temple never existed in Jerusalem, but rather in Nablus’ – three years later he was claiming it was in Yemen

The question of borders doesn’t interest us… From the Arab standpoint, we mustn’t talk about borders. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it…The P.L.O. is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism. What you call “Jordan” is nothing more than Palestine.

I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as 'Abu Nidal' ('father of struggle'), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat's main enemies. The meeting began inauspiciously when Abu Nidal asked me if I would like to be trained in one of his camps. No thanks, I explained. From this awkward beginning there was a further decline. I was then asked if I knew Said Hammami, the envoy of the PLO in London. I did in fact know him. He was a brave and decent man, who in a series of articles in the London Times had floated the first-ever trial balloon for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. 'Well tell him he is a traitor,' barked my host. 'And tell him we have only one way with those who betray us.' The rest of the interview passed as so many Middle Eastern interviews do: too many small cups of coffee served with too much fuss; too many unemployed heavies standing about with nothing to do and nobody to do it with; too much ugly furniture, too many too-bright electric lights; and much too much faux bonhomie. The only political fact I could winnow, from Abu Nidal's vainglorious claims to control X number of 'fighters' in Y number of countries, was that he admired the People's Republic of China for not recognizing the State of Israel. I forget how I got out of his office.

But Arafat's devotion was to the Palestinian cause and not to the Palestinian people. [...] As a result, Arafat delayed the conflict's solution, leaving a legacy of avoidable disaster and unnecessary suffering.

O God, my Lord, destroy the Jews for making us endless refugees and condemn Yasser Arafat for causing another Palestinian exodus. O my Lord, burn the Americans and burn the Jews. They are behind all these wars.” “Amen,” Mama said.

Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as 'the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.' But the main problem, alas, remained the same. In Edward's moral universe, Arafat could at last be named as a thug and a practitioner of corruption and extortion. But he could only be identified as such to the extent that he was now and at last aligned with an American design. Thus the only truly unpardonable thing about 'The Chairman' was his readiness to appear on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton in 1993. I have real knowledge and memory of this, because George Stephanopoulos—whose father's Orthodox church in Ohio and New York had kept him in touch with what was still a predominantly Christian Arab-American opinion—called me more than once from the White House to help beseech Edward to show up at the event. 'The feedback we get from Arab-American voters is this: If it's such a great idea, why isn't Said signing off on it?' When I called him, Edward was grudging and crabby. 'The old man [Arafat] has no right to sign away land.' Really? Then what had the Algiers deal been all about? How could two states come into being without mutual concessions on territory?

In 1974, Mahmoud Darwish wrote Yasser Arafat’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations: Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. 346 I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.

Eventually she begins to open up and allow herself to trust me. And as she does, I find that I love this version of her, with all of its circumstance, even as the initial excitement gives way to cozy routine, with its own kind of intimacy. I find that I enjoy the stability even more than the highs, certainly more than the lows. And whenever she catches me projecting idealized versions of herself onto her, she calls me out for doing so. Throughout our relationship, she insists on remaining real.

If my mother was Hamas—unpredictable, impulsive, and frustrated at being stifled—my father was Israel. He’d refuse to meet her most basic needs until she exploded. Then he would point at her and cry, “Look at what a monster she is, what a terror!” But never once did he consider why she had resorted to such extreme tactics, or his role in the matter.

When you don’t want to lose someone, it’s so tempting to deceive them.

I find that I enjoy the stability even more than the highs, certainly more than the lows.

Remember,” I said aloud, and it echoed through the empty chamber of yet another new home. “You have to make room for the real thing.

Öykü, öykünmek kokar, yeteri kadar sıcak ve yerli değil. Hikaye ise, "Dinle neyden kim hikayet etmede" dizesinde görüldüğü gibi şiirsel ve köklü, bize ait.

Maybe I didn't want the professor to end up like the real people in my life. The people I kept things from because I couldn't face them myself. Maybe she offered the possibility of escape.

The ultimate source of power, here as in the whole course of Arab history, is the personality of the commander. Through him, whether he be an Abbasid Khalif or an Amir of Nejd, the political entity holds, and with his disappearance it breaks.” The echo of her words would ring throughout the region for the rest of the century, in men like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein.

To make a Jewish state we have betrayed our history - we have done unto the Palestinians what the Christians have done unto us: systematically transformed them into the despised and subjugated Other, thereby depriving them of human status. Irrespective of terrorism or terrorists or the political stupidity of Yasir Arafat, the fact is this: as a people the Palestinians are totally innocent and as a people the Jews are totally guilty.

To be a woman who desired other women seemed even worse, especially shameful and shocking in its lack of reverence for the male-centric culture. Why would you want to exclude men, the stronger, better gender, from the equation?

Since that time, Muslims have quoted the “Quraysh Model” as justification for deceptive treaties. This model means: “Negotiate ‘peace’ with your enemy until you become strong enough to annihilate him.” This is the justification Chairman Yasser Arafat quoted in Arabic to the Muslim world when he signed the Oslo Agreement. Muslims believe that no infidels really understand what the Quraysh Model means—and for the vast majority of non-Muslims, that is a correct assumption.

The Fatah mutiny was bitter and costly and intensified the concern of ‘Arafat and his colleagues about the emergence of rivals, especially those under the influence of hostile regimes. The concern was well founded, given the efforts by the movement’s adversaries to create alternatives, such as the village leagues in the Occupied Territories. Notably, Hamas, founded in 1987 (and initially discreetly supported by Israel with the objective of weakening the PLO19), was already beginning to develop into a formidable competitor.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

Starting in the early 1970s, members of the PLO responded to these pressures, in particular to the urging of the Soviet Union, by floating the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in effect a two-state solution. This approach was notably promoted by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (which had split off from the PFLP in 1969), together with Syrian-backed groups, discreetly encouraged by the leadership of Fatah. Although there had been early resistance to the two-state solution by the PFLP and some Fatah cadres, in time it became clear that ‘Arafat, among other leaders, supported it. This marked the beginning of a long, slow process of shifting away from the maximalist objective of the democratic state, with its revolutionary implications, to an ostensibly more pragmatic aim of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, to be achieved via negotiations on the basis of SC 242.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

The one Asian nation with which we have, alas, made no headway whatsoever is China. … The Chinese government, in fact, is totally committed to the Arab war against Israel, and Mr. Arafat and his comrades are constantly given arms, money, and moral support by Peking, though I, for one, have never understood why, and for years, lived under the illusion that if we could only talk to the Chinese, we might get through to them. Two pictures come to my mind when I mention China. The first is the horror with which I picked up a mine manufactured in China – so far away and remote from us – which had put an end to the life of a six-year-old girl in a border settlement in Israel. I stood there near that small coffin, surrounded by weeping, enraged relatives. ‘What on earth can the Chinese have against us?’ I kept thinking. ‘They don’t even know us.’ Then I remember, at the celebration of Kenya’s independence, sitting at a table near that of the Chinese delegation. It was a very relaxed, festive occasion, and I thought to myself, ‘Perhaps if I go over and sit down with them, we can talk a bit.’ So I asked Ehud to introduce himself to the Chinese. He walked over, held out his hand to the head of the delegation and said, ‘My foreign minister is here and would like to meet you.’ The Chinese just averted their gaze. They didn’t even bother to say, ‘No, thank you, we don’t want to meet her.

Target killing of Palestinian leaders, including moderate ones, was not a new phenomenon in the conflict. Israel began this policy with the assassination of Ghassan Kanafani in 1972, a poet and writer, who could have led his people to reconciliation. The fact that he was targeted, a secular and leftist activist, is symbolic of the role Israel played in killing those Palestinians it ‘regretted’ later for not being there as partners for peace. In May 2001 President George Bush Jr appointed Senator George J. Mitchell as a special envoy to the Middle East conflict. Mitchell produced a report about the causes for the second Intifada. He concluded: ‘We have no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the [Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.’13 On the other hand, he blamed Ariel Sharon for provoking unrest by visiting and violating the sacredness of the al-Aqsa mosque and the holy places of Islam. In short, even the disempowered Arafat realized that the Israeli interpretation of Oslo in 2000 meant the end of any hope for normal Palestinian life and doomed the Palestinians to more suffering in the future. This scenario was not only morally wrong in his eyes, but also would have strengthened, as he knew too well, those who regarded the armed struggle against Israel as the exclusive way to liberate Palestine.

As I noted in Chapter 14, “The Earthquake,” there was a supermarket in Jerusalem where I shopped for fruits and vegetables almost every day. It was owned by an Iraqi Jewish family who had immigrated to Israel from Baghdad in the early 1940s. The patriarch of the family, Sasson, was an elderly curmudgeon in his sixties. Sasson’s whole life had left him with the conviction that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst and that any concessions to the Palestinians would eventually be used to liquidate the Jewish state. Whenever Sasson heard Israeli doves saying that the Palestinians really wanted to live in peace with the Jews, but that they just couldn’t always come out and declare it, it sounded ludicrous to him. It simply ran counter to everything life in Iraq and Jerusalem had taught him, and neither the Camp David treaty with Egypt nor declarations by Yasir Arafat—nor the Palestinian uprising itself—had convinced him otherwise. As I said, as far as Sasson was concerned, the problem between himself and the Palestinians was not that they didn’t understand each other, but that they did—all too well. Sasson, I should add, did not appear to be ideologically committed to Israel’s holding the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was a grocer, and ideology did not trip easily off his tongue. I am sure he rarely, if ever, went to the occupied territories. Like a majority of Israelis, he viewed the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip primarily in terms of security. I believe that Sasson is the key to a Palestinian–Israeli peace settlement—not him personally, but his world view. He is the Israeli silent majority. He is the Israeli two-thirds. You don’t hear much from the Sassons of Israel. They don’t talk much. They are not as interesting to interview as wild-eyed messianic West Bank settlers, or as articulate as Peace Now professors who speak with an American accent. But they are the foundation of Israel, the gravity that holds the country in place. And, more important, years of reporting from Israel have taught me that there is a little bit of Sasson’s almost primitive earthiness in every Israeli—not only all those in the Likud Party on the right side of the political spectrum, but a majority of those in the Labor Party as well; not only those Israelis born in Arab countries, but those born in Israel as well. Indeed, the Israeli public is not divided fifty-fifty on the question of peace with the Palestinians. The truth is, the Israeli public is divided in three. One segment, on the far left—maybe 5 percent of the population—is ready to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow, and sincerely believes the Palestinians are ready to live in peace with the Jews. Another segment, on the far right—maybe 20 percent of the population—will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are committed to holding forever all the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments. In between these two extremes you have the Sassons, who make up probably 75 percent of the population. The more liberal Sassons side with the Labor Party, the more hard-line Sassons side with the Likud, but they all share a gut feeling that they are locked in an all-or-nothing communal struggle with the Palestinians. Today the

Whether or not Islam ever becomes dominant in Western Europe or elsewhere in the former lands of Christendom, the wars will not end. Militant Islam will not go away with the death of bin Laden, or Arafat, or Saddam Hussein, or anyone else. It will clash increasingly with the weary secular powers that it blames for all the ills of the umma. No one can predict the features of the world that will emerge from these conflicts, except that it will be new, and that it will be difficult-unless there is some wondrous intervention from the Merciful One.

Eban said of Yasser Arafat that he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Incidentally, in 1951, a close relative of the Mufti named Rahman Abdul Rauf el-Qudwa el-Husseini began study at the University of Cairo. The student decided to conceal his true identity and enlisted under the invented name—Yasser Arafat.” Alex, stunned by what he was hearing, finished the story. “Who went on to found the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO.

And yet despite the expansiveness of Barak’s offer, Arafat did not simply reject Barak’s offer; he refused even to make a counteroffer, signaling that he and the Palestinians were not interested in making peace with Israel. They indicated instead that it would be impossible for Israel to satisfy their demands and still exist as a nation.

Apart from this critical letter, the Bush administration largely ignored Israel for most of his first seven years, discovering it as a final eighth year issue. Secretary of State Rice was a regular commuter to Israel, all the while “pushing” Israel to give up land to obtain a peace treaty. However, prior to the Bush assurances, which were so hastily withdrawn, Israel has for some appreciable length of time enjoyed the military protection umbrella of American support. The United States of America, on March 26, 1979, guaranteed Israel that if she were to be militarily invaded, America would militarily respond. Israel bargained for this American military commitment and treaty promise as a condition of the Camp David peace agreement with Yassar Arafat and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, brokered by then President Jimmy Carter. The President of the United States of America on that date signed a Memorandum of Agreement between the Governments of the United States of America and the State of Israel.

You do not represent Palestine as much as we do. Never forget this one point: There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, there is no Palestinian entity, there is only Syria. You are an integral part of the Syrian people, Palestine is an integral part of Syria. Therefore it is we, the Syrian authorities, who are the true representatives of the Palestinian people. [Addressing the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat]

An idol is anything apart from God that we depend on to be happy, fulfilled, or secure.”2

I thought of the young Saul of Tarsus in November 1995, when the then prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by a student called Yigal Amir. Rabin had taken part in the Oslo Accords, working out agreements toward peace with the Palestinian leadership. In 1994 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with his political rival Shimon Peres and with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. He also signed a peace treaty with Jordan. All this was too much for hard-line Israelis, who saw his actions as hopelessly compromising national identity and security. The news media described the assassin as a “law student,” but in Europe and America that phrase carries a meaning different from the one it has in Israel today and the one it would have had in the days of Saul of Tarsus. Amir was not studying to be an attorney in a Western-style court. He was a zealous Torah student. His action on November 4, 1995, was, so he claimed at his trial, in accordance with Jewish law. He is still serving his life sentence and has never expressed regret for his actions. The late twentieth century is obviously very different from the early first century, but “zeal” has remained a constant.

Yasser Arafat and his PLO held the records for the largest hijacking,6 the greatest number of hostages held at one time,7 the greatest number of people shot at an airport, the largest ransom collected,8 and the greatest variety of targets.9 Yasser Arafat was the man who ordered the murder of the schoolchildren in Avivim, Ma’alot, and Antwerp; the murder of eleven Jewish Olympic athletes in Munich; the murder of synagogue worshipers in Istanbul; the murder of a child and his pregnant mother in Alfeh Menashe; and the murder of a mother and her children on a bus in Jericho. This was the man who ordered innocent Arabs in Nablus to be hanged by their chins on butchers’ hooks until they died; by whose orders the bellies of pregnant Arab women were split open before the eyes of their husbands and the hands of Arab children were chopped off while their parents looked on.10 And he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and celebrated on the White House lawn in a forced handshake with both the leaders of the very people he had sworn to destroy.

I'm not scared of my life's demons. I've been strong enough to defeat them.

Clinton said he liked Arafat personally, didn’t care for nor trust Netanyahu, and the only Israeli the PLO trusted was the right-wing general Ariel Sharon, their foe, but a man of his word.

Yasser Arafat got a Nobel Prize,

But surely you understand why Kuwaitis would be upset with Palestinians? Yasser Arafat betrayed them by siding with Saddam Hussein.

Israel’s trials continued in 1975. Backed by the Arab nations, the oil-dependent Europeans, and many of the newly independent states of Africa and Asia, the PLO was granted observer status at the UN, and Chairman Yasir Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly. Only days before his address, he had declared, “We shall never stop until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed. The goal of our struggle is the end of Israel, and there can be no compromise or mediations. We don’t want peace—we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction, and nothing else.”17 Arafat toned down his rhetoric at the UN, but Israelis felt his mere presence there gave legitimacy to calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. Even more disheartening was when later that year the UN passed a resolution equating Zionism as a form of racism. “A great evil has been loosed upon the world,” the U.S. delegate thundered, calling the resolution an “infamous act.”18 The cumulative effect was that the Jewish state was more isolated than at any time in its history before the 1956 war.

But old wounds, and the lure of violence over compromise among factions on both sides, proved too much to overcome. Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli extremist in 1995. His liberal successor, Shimon Peres, served for seven months before losing a snap election to Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party, whose platform had once included total annexation of the Palestinian territories. Unhappy about the Oslo Accords, harder-line organizations like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad set about undermining the credibility of Arafat and his Fatah party with Palestinians, calling for armed struggle to take back Arab lands and push Israel into the sea.

Wondering whether he had stumbled upon a scoop the journalist asked the Chairman who the Americans in the next room were. ‘They are an American delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologise for the crusades,’ said Arafat. Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.

I wonder sometimes if that day was the start of something Whether it's when I began this habit of constant seeking, of endlessly striving to earn my way back, a pattern that would send me on a misguided and self-destructive quest for love. I communicated something to my mother as I stood there smiling in a pair of men's pants, a message I didn't know I was sending her. She has always known first what I have yet to discover, has always seen it before I could.

It's a good thing I don't trust you," she had written. "Because if I did, I wouldn't have had a reason to search for confirmation.

We'd speak occasionally, sometimes in Italian, mine still rudimentary, and sometimes in Arabic. He asked why I chose to live in Italy, and not Palestine or Jordan. "I don't know," I said, feeling a pinch of guilt for being in Italy and not the West Bank, volunteering with refugees or resisting the occupation, or at least something related to my heritage. Every country outside of my own felt like a luxury, and at twenty-three, I wanted to indulge. In a way I felt I deserved to.

I'm still in love with him." I felt like I'd been pricked with a pin, the air escaping from inside me. "Oh," I said. I hesitated before deciding to press further. "Sorry, but what are we doing, then?" "What do you mean?" she asked, as if she hadn't been there for any of it. The question crushed me in its honesty. Until then, I didn't know. I thought that the intensity of sex was correlated with love. That passion was specific and that adultery meant something was wrong.

several proved particularly helpful: Every Spy a Prince, by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman; Gideon’s Spies, by Gordon Thomas; Israel: A History and The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, by Martin Gilbert; The Gun and the Olive Branch, by David Hirst; By Way of Deception, by Victor Ostrovsky and Clair Hoy; The Hit Team, by David B. Tinnin with Dag Christensen; My Home, My Land, by Abu Iyad; The Quest for the Red Prince, by Michael Bar-Zohar and Eitan Haber; The Palestinians , by Jonathan Dimbleby; Arafat, by Alan Hart; and The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, by Donna F. Ryan. Finally, to the

Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli extremist in 1995. His liberal successor, Shimon Peres, served for seven months before losing a snap election to Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party, whose platform had once included total annexation of the Palestinian territories. Unhappy about the Oslo Accords, harder-line organizations like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad set about undermining the credibility of Arafat and his Fatah party with Palestinians, calling for armed struggle to take back Arab lands and push Israel into the sea.

Arafat. “Landing in Tehran felt like I was approaching Jerusalem,” said the Palestinian leader. “Iran’s revolution doesn’t belong only to Iranians, it belongs to us too. What you have achieved is an earthquake and your heroism has shaken the world, Israel, and America . . . Your honorable revolution has lifted the siege on the Palestinian revolution.

Some of those who would come to oppose Arafat’s leadership would be Palestinian Islamists, like the Hamas movement, and they would look to Iran for support.

After Netanyahu was defeated in the 1999 election, his more liberal successor, Ehud Barak, made efforts to establish a broader peace in the Middle East, including outlining a two-state solution that went further than any previous Israeli proposal. Arafat demanded more concessions, however, and talks collapsed in recrimination. Meanwhile, one day in September 2000, Likud party leader Ariel Sharon led a group of Israeli legislators on a deliberately provocative and highly publicized visit to one of Islam’s holiest sites, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It was a stunt designed to assert Israel’s claim over the wider territory, one that challenged the leadership of Ehud Barak and enraged Arabs near and far. Four months later, Sharon became Israel’s next prime minister, governing throughout what became known as the Second Intifada: four years of violence between the two sides, marked by tear gas and rubber bullets directed at stone-throwing protesters; Palestinian suicide bombs detonated outside an Israeli nightclub and in buses carrying senior citizens and schoolchildren; deadly IDF retaliatory raids and the indiscriminate arrest of thousands of Palestinians; and Hamas rockets launched from Gaza into Israeli border towns, answered by U.S.-supplied Israeli Apache helicopters leveling entire neighborhoods. Approximately a thousand Israelis and three thousand Palestinians died during this period—including scores of children—and by the time the violence subsided, in 2005, the prospects for resolving the underlying conflict had fundamentally changed. The Bush administration’s focus on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror left it little bandwidth to worry about Middle East peace, and while Bush remained officially supportive of a two-state solution, he was reluctant to press Sharon on the issue. Publicly, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states continued to offer support to the Palestinian cause, but they were increasingly more concerned with limiting Iranian influence and rooting out extremist threats to their own regimes.

Israel rightly pointed out that Yasser Arafat was an unrepentant terrorist and

These were major political shifts for the PLO, the culmination of an evolution toward acceptance of Israel and advocacy of a Palestinian state alongside it that had begun in the early 1970s, although these changes were unacknowledged by its Israeli adversaries. A more significant shift was yet to come. On December 14 that year, ‘Arafat accepted US conditions for entering a bilateral dialogue. In his statement, he explicitly accepted Resolutions 242 and 338, recognized the right of Israel to exist in peace and security, and renounced terrorism.21 This capitulation to American conditions finally obtained for the PLO the long-sought opening with Washington, but it neither moved the Israelis to agree to deal with the organization nor led to peace negotiations, at least not for three more years.

242 effectively gave Israel a chance to expand its pre-1967 borders further. Whether they realized it or not, by accepting Resolution 242 as the basis for any negotiations, ‘Arafat and his colleagues had set themselves an impossible task.

In the late 1980s and the 1990s, it appeared as if the PLO, under Yasser Arafat, might be abandoning the one-state goal and adopting a two-state paradigm, envisaging a Palestinian Arab state arising, on 22 percent of historic Mandate Palestine, alongside Israel, and coexisting with it in peace. Such a vision, at least from the Israeli side, underlay the Oslo peace process. But already at the time the sincerity of Arafat’s newfound commitment to a two-state settlement was doubtful in view of some of his public pronouncements, his incitement to hatred and terrorism vis-à-vis Israel, and his serial nonimplementation of various provisions, especially those related to curbing terrorism, of the interim agreements he signed during the 1990s.

Yasser Arafat

We drove to Ramallah, to the presidential compound called the Mukata’a, where former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is buried in a mausoleum and where the current president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is headquartered.

on July 25, 2000…Barak had offered Arafat about 90 percent of the West Bank, the entire Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem as the capital of a new Palestinian state. In addition, a new international fund would be established to compensate Palestinians for the property that had been taken from them. This “land for peace” offer represented a historic opportunity for the long-suffering Palestinian people, something few Palestinians would have dared imagine possible. But even so, it was not enough for Arafat. Yasser Arafat had grown extraordinarily wealthy as the international symbol of victimhood. He wasn’t about to surrender that status and take on the responsibility of actually building a functioning society.

Yasser Arafat and the other PA leaders had been determined to spark another intifada. They had been planning it for months, even as Arafat and Barak had been meeting with President Clinton at Camp David.

Palestinians were back to the all-or-nothing mentality of the past. And now it was Hamas rather than Arafat that was fanning the flames.

Arafat himself sometimes spoke even more candidly. On January 30, 1996, he said in a closed meeting to forty Arab diplomats in Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, “We intend to destroy Israel and to establish a pure Palestinian state…. We will make the life of the Jews miserable and take everything from them…. I don’t need any Jews.”12 In a radio address on the Voice of Palestine on November 11, 1995, he said, “The struggle will continue until all of Palestine is liberated.” Lest anyone had doubts that by “all of Palestine” he meant not only Judea and Samaria and Gaza but all of Israel, he had proclaimed two months earlier, on September 7, 1995, “O Gaza, your sons are returning. O Lod, O Haifa, O Jerusalem, you are returning, you are returning,” in Arabic to a Palestinian audience. True to his deceptive character, he was careful not to mention places like Haifa and Lod, which were well within pre-1967 Israel and ostensibly not in the PLO’s plan for a state, when he spoke before Western audiences. On September 13, 1993, the day he signed the Oslo Accords, Arafat used more oblique language in explaining to a Palestinian audience that the agreement was nothing more than the PLO’s “Phased Plan.” This plan, calling for the destruction of Israel in stages, had been adopted by the PLO in 1964 and was well familiar to Palestinians. The unchanging and thinly disguised PLO strategy of destroying Israel in stages completely contradicted Oslo’s ostensible message of peace and reconciliation. So did the post-Oslo flood of official Palestinian exhortations dehumanizing Jews as pigs and teaching schoolchildren to glorify Palestinian suicide bombers. As usual, little of this entered the international discourse or caused governments to rethink the much-vaunted Oslo Accords. There was supposedly a honeymoon between the PLO and Israel under Prime Minister Rabin; Arafat and Rabin were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.” It was inconceivable that the prizewinning Arafat could be swindling the entire world. Of course, anybody with a sober view of the facts could see that this was precisely what was happening. But what Yoni had written years earlier about some in Israel was now true of many in the international community: “They want to believe, so they believe. They want not to see, so they distort.”13

Middle East pundits, like most pundits, seldom bother to review their past political prognostications. But in this case it is clear who got it right and who got it wrong. As I predicted, the PLO’s Fatah did not stand up to Hamas and indeed often joined it in terrorist attacks. In 1994, shortly after Arafat was brought to Gaza from Tunis, an unprecedented wave of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israel began. After Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Fatah caved to Hamas, which has since used the territory to launch more than ten thousand rockets into Kiryat Gat, Ashkelon, Beer-Sheba, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and many other parts of Israel.

The cascading terrorist attacks emanating from PLO-controlled areas did not cease for a moment. This blunted the effect on public opinion of the White House signing ceremony of the Oslo Accords, in which Rabin was clearly seen uncomfortably shaking Arafat’s hand. Equally, Palestinian terrorism cast a dark shadow over the august ceremony in Sweden, where Rabin, Arafat and Peres were given the Nobel Peace Prize. The Peace Prize was greatly devalued when, after Oslo, the arch-jihadist recipient of the prize, Arafat, steadfastly continued to foster terrorism. In my long tenure as prime minister I could never be tempted with a Nobel Prize to do things that I thought would endanger Israel. Posterity is a better judge of historic achievement than politically correct committees meeting in Scandinavia.

Throughout these long centuries, no people claim the land as their distinct homeland except the Jews. Alone they cherish Jerusalem as their eternal capital, proclaiming on each Jewish New Year “next year in Jerusalem.” Dispersed for centuries, suffering unparalleled persecution in their rootless sojourn among the nations, the Jews never lose hope of returning to the Promised Land. Individual Jews continue to return throughout the ages, joining the tiny Jewish communities that never left. But the land is barren, sparsely populated and undeveloped. Visiting the Holy Land in 1867, Mark Twain echoes many contemporary travelers when he says, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… the desolate and unlovely land is hopeless, dreary and heartbroken.”17 A century later, Arab propaganda depicts things differently. It describes Palestine in the nineteenth century as a lush land teeming with a flourishing Arab population. “The Jewish invasion began in 1881,” says Arafat at an infamous United Nations speech in 1974. “Palestine was then a verdant area.”18 It wasn’t. Visiting the Holy Land in 1881, the famous British visitor Arthur Penrhyn Stanley reaffirms Twain’s observation fourteen years earlier: “In Judea, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or habitation.”19 In the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigration brings the fallow land back to life. The Jews build farms, plant orange groves, erect factories. This induces immigration of Arabs from neighboring countries who join the indigenous Arab population. From 1860 on, the majority of Jerusalem’s inhabitants are Jewish. Even so, by the turn of the twentieth century the total population in the Holy Land doesn’t exceed four hundred thousand, less than 4 percent of the present population. As the visiting German Kaiser notes in 1898, “There is room here for everyone.”20

The reason behind Israel’s engagement with Lebanon was justified at the time as based on national security grounds, with other nations admiring the Jewish state’s actions and wanting to learn from them, but there was something more existential at work. In his 1998 book on the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem, the New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman gave an anecdote from 1982 about the real, less acknowledged mission of Israeli forces: Two targets in particular seemed to interest [Ariel] Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab life in Palestine and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, this is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: [/block]Palestinians? What’s that?[block] And [/block]Palestinians, fuck you[block], and [/block]Arafat, I will hump your mother[block]. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)56 It is not hard to see why this attitude was and remains so appealing to some governments. It is a desire to militarily destroy an opponent but also erase its history and ability to remember what has been lost. When surveillance technology is added to the mix, tested on unwilling subjects, it’s even harder to successfully resist.

Secrets keep us sick.

I was homesick for America. I’d make a list in my journal of the things I missed most about the States: peanut butter, cow’s milk, Nickelodeon, grass, Heather, my next-door neighbor and best friend. From a distance, the U.S. seemed so beautiful, so welcoming, so easy. How could I spend a minute unhappy there? I promised myself that when I returned I would appreciate every little thing.

There’s a text from Anouk: Everything all right? She knows that home is hard.

Our mutual sacrifice creates wounds that may never heal. I will carry sadness for her pain, and also for mine. In receiving love from others, it will always be hers I crave most.

Acknowledgment + Approval – Mother’s Unconditional Love = Attraction. Good

What role does the Lord have for us in strengthening our brothers and sisters who come to Christ from a Muslim background, and how can we actively love our neighbors and our enemies when humanly speaking this is impossible?

I visualized the action of God kneeling down in the dirt and forming a man’s body.

The notion that everyone will eventually cease to exist brings me great comfort and temporary courage.

it’s the idiosyncrasies of culture that keep me an outsider, and leave me with a persistent and pervasive sense of otherness, of non-belonging.

Eventually I would come to recognize her refrains of abstinence, of swearing off men, of committing to her vibrator, as wounded declarations of a boy-crazy woman with no plans to give up on her boyfriend, who chose to value herself in proportion to his estimation of her. I would always envy that: her unambiguous craving for men.

Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart.” - Yasser Arafat

Islamists’ criticism [of the PLO leadership for signing the Oslo Accords] was completely in line with other non-Islamist critics (except for the reproach of having been paid to sign). Edward Said suggested that according to sources from the PLO Executive Committee, Arafat only took an interest in the sections of the agreement being negotiated in Oslo which concerned him and his future role. All Arafat wanted, according to Said, was "acceptance" by the Israeli and American side: "They weren’t interested in fighting, or being equal, they just wanted the white man to say they were okay." All Arafat got in Said’s eyes from the Israelis was a mandate "to enforce what they call their security". His resumé was that the PLO succeeded in "being the first national liberation movement in history to sign an agreement to keep an occupying power in place." He called for a boycott of and non-cooperation with the Palestine National Authority (PNA). "So I think the preeminent responsibility of every Palestinian is not to cooperate with the authority that is a surrogate to the Israeli occupation and an incompetent one at that." Said and Ḥamās called for the return to the Intifāḍa: Said in the sense that local needs be taken care of by the community in parallel institutions as during the Intifāḍa, Ḥamās furthermore in terms of military struggle.

An entire era ended when Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin presided over the signing of the Declaration of Principles on 13 September 1993. Their exchange of letters of recognition ended decades of mutual denial between the national communities they represented, even if the accord did not fundamentally resolve all aspects of the conflict. Many thousands had died, both combatants and civilians, since the war that led to the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine and to the mass exodus of its Arab population in 1947–9. The Palestinian national movement was to raise the twin banners of 'total liberation' and 'armed struggle' in following years, but ultimately proved unable to liberate any part of its claimed homeland by force. The civilian uprising that erupted in 1987 initially appeared more effective in shaking Israeli control, but still the PLO finally accepted a negotiated compromise, the terms of which ran counter to virtually all the principles and aims it had espoused for so long.

By the end of the year 2000, Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza numbered 225,000. The best offer to the Palestinians—by Clinton, not Barak—had been to withdraw 20 percent of the settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 10 percent of the occupied land, including land to be “leased” and portions of the Jordan River valley and East Jerusalem. The percentage figure is misleading, since it usually includes only the actual footprints of the settlements. There is a zone with a radius of about four hundred meters around each settlement within which Palestinians cannot enter. In addition, there are other large areas that would have been taken or earmarked to be used exclusively by Israel, roadways that connect the settlements to one another and to Jerusalem, and “life arteries” that provide the settlers with water, sewage, electricity, and communications. These range in width from five hundred to four thousand meters, and Palestinians cannot use or cross many of these connecting links. This honeycomb of settlements and their interconnecting conduits effectively divide the West Bank into at least two noncontiguous areas and multiple fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable, and control of the Jordan River valley denies Palestinians any direct access eastward into Jordan. About one hundred military checkpoints completely surround Palestine and block routes going into or between Palestinian communities, combined with an uncountable number of other roads that are permanently closed with large concrete cubes or mounds of earth and rocks. There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued.

I saw Clinton again during the signing of the peace treaty with Jordan in Israel’s Arava Valley in 1995. That year, I also sent him my third book on terrorism, Fighting Terrorism, and he sent me back a cordial letter. Notwithstanding his civility, I knew his administration would do anything to defeat me. In fact they did. Totally committed to the idea of a fully independent Palestine, they were not aware that Rabin himself had been opposed to such a state. Clinton sent his number one campaign strategist, James Carville, his pollster Stan Greenberg and his top team of experts to Israel to help tip the scales in Peres’s favor. Special envoy Dennis Ross would later say, “We did everything we could to help Peres,” and Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, would also later admit, “If there was ever a time that we tried to influence an Israeli election, it was Peres vs. Netanyahu.”23 Normally such an outrageous and systemic interference in another democracy’s elections would elicit outcries of protest from the press in America and Israel alike. No such protests were heard. Totally supportive of Peres, the press in both Israel and the United States was silent. Though the odds were stacked against us, we weren’t fazed. “About Carville,” Arthur said, “we can beat him.” Clinton and Peres organized an international peace conference in Sharm el-Sheikh a few weeks before the elections. Peres, Clinton, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, and Arafat all showed up and danced the dance. Yet a few months earlier, soon after Peres was installed without an election as replacement prime minister following Rabin’s assassination, King Hussein had sent me a message through his brother Crown Prince Hassan, asking: Would I meet Hassan secretly in London? In a London flat the crown prince and I hit it off immediately. I liked Hassan. Straightforward, with a humorous streak, he didn’t even attempt to hide his concern about a Peres victory. Though they wouldn’t admit it publicly, he and many Jordanian officials I met over the years were concerned that an armed Palestinian state could destroy the Hashemite regime and take over Jordan.

After the Hebron Agreement there was the briefest of honeymoons with the Clinton administration. Clinton sent me a letter commending me for my “courage” for making a tough decision. He sent Arafat a similar letter. I thought that was peculiar since the only courage Arafat displayed was the courage to receive the Palestinian neighborhoods we had transferred to his control. But this was clearly as good as it was going to get. “Netanyahu and Arafat are both allies of the United States,” the White House briefed Israeli reporters.3 This was incredible. The democratically elected leader of the staunchest ally of the US and the leader of a terrorist organization that had murdered hundreds of Americans were put on equal footing. But such was the diplomatic mind-set of Washington in those days. The administration suffered from double-barreled myopia. First, it refused to see that the core of our conflict with the Palestinians was the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any boundary. Second, it refused to really internalize that Israel’s government was dependent on a parliamentary system in which the prime minister could be toppled at any moment by the slimmest of majorities.

Har Homa was in the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem drawn right after the Six-Day War. Israel never accepted any formal limitation on building neighborhoods within these boundaries, including under the Oslo Accords. Nonetheless, the decision to build Har Homa was met with severe Palestinian and international censure. Arafat demanded that I rescind the authorization. I did not. As usual, loud protests ensued. The British foreign minister, Jack Straw, visiting Israel, literally joined hands with the Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini in a Palestinian march condemning the Har Homa project. He was supposed to have dinner with me that evening. I promptly canceled it. For me, I said, that was the last straw. The protests eventually died down; the Palestinian southern thrust into Jerusalem was blunted. Today Har Homa has forty thousand residents, a small city within a city.

Two targets in particular seemed to interest [Ariel] Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab life in Palestine and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, this is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: [/block]Palestinians? What’s that?[block] And [/block]Palestinians, fuck you[block], and [/block]Arafat, I will hump your mother[block]. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)