The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East. Charles Glass
‘The Israeli grand design to have and to expand settlements and contract out security to the Palestinian Authority could not work,’ he said, one year into the new intifadah. ‘In fact, if this intifadah had not been against Israel, it would have been against the PA.’
The question that confronted Palestinians about Yasser Arafat was: is he governing for us or for the Israelis? If for the Palestinians, he should have been moving politically to dismantle the Israeli settlements and give the land back to their owners. If for the Palestinians, he should have made his executive accountable and open to them. If for the Palestinians, he would have made it impossible for his ministers to steal and to help the Israelis construct settlements. But, if he governed for Israel, he would arrest Palestinians who attacked settlements, allow his advisers to grow rich selling cement to the settlements, cooperate with the intelligence agencies of Israel and America to suppress resistance to occupation and demonstrate his contempt for those who criticized him in the Palestinian legislature, media and civil society.
‘Arafat,’ Jonathan said, ‘I think, sensed it wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t so much Jerusalem or the refugees, but Barak’s insistence at Camp David that this was it, the end of the road. There was no possibility you could improve the terms. He couldn’t do it. His people would not have gone along with it. From that day to this, Tenet, Mitchell’ – meaning the missions of the two Georges, the CIA director and the former senator – ‘everything has been an attempt to revive security cooperation. If Arafat hits Hamas, the Israelis will stop hitting him. Nothing else. It’s simply not going to work.’
What will work?
‘A two-state solution.’
To many Israelis that was an unacceptable, maximalist demand. It was, however, the result of an evolution in Palestinian thought born of eighty years of defeat and a compromise of their previous ideal of a ‘secular, democratic state’ in all of Palestine. It had taken generations for them to realize they did not have the strength to win back the part of Palestine – 78 per cent – they lost to Israel in 1948. By the first intifadah in 1987, they were ready for independence in Gaza and the West Bank. The settlers and Israel’s then prime minister Ehud Barak told Palestinians they were unreasonable to demand all of the West Bank and Gaza, all of Israel’s 1967 conquest, all of the 22 per cent. At Camp David, where Bill Clinton caused a conflagration with his quixotic pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize to redeem his tarnished presidency, Barak had excluded the largest settlement blocs from discussion and was prepared to consider adjustments only to the rest of the occupied territories. Under Barak’s vague proposals, Israel would have kept about 30 per cent or more of the land, 80 per cent of the water and all of the sky above for its right to fly and use the airwaves. Even a leader as craven as Arafat could not say yes to a mere 15 per cent of all Palestine on which to build his Arab Bantu-stine.
‘Israel holds all the cards,’ Jonathan said, ‘and they know it. They are furious with the Palestinians for failing to recognize that. This is more on the left than on the right.’ Jonathan had discussed this with the foreign minister, Shimon Peres. ‘Peres told me, we are not negotiating with the Palestinians. We are negotiating with ourselves.’ The Israeli leadership regarded its decision on what to ‘give’ the Palestinians as an internal matter rather than as a subject for negotiation with the occupied people.
‘When subcontracting control to the PA failed,’ Jonathan concluded, ‘the left had nothing else.’ Israel turned to Sharon ‘with his policy of hit them and hit them harder’. Sharon had his critics, but Jonathan said they were even further to the right, demanding that the old Arab killer ‘get tougher, expel’. The Palestinians were making the settlers feel insecure on their roads in the West Bank and Gaza. ‘Palestinians now have guns and are willing to use them,’ Jonathan said. ‘The Gaza settlers are no longer safe. Period. Palestinians can exact a daily price, which means Israelis don’t hold all the cards.’
In response, he admitted, ‘The Israelis made life absolutely miserable.’ Sharon was, he said ‘absolutely furious. And he’s trying to keep it going. More incursions, more killings.’
In his pink Ralph Lauren shirt with preppy button-down collar, Jonathan Kuttab was as much American as Palestinian. But he misjudged the United States, as parts of the world did when the attack on Afghanistan was beginning. ‘America needs the Arab world,’ he said. ‘It cannot invade Afghanistan without neutralizing this place. Pakistan, Egypt, Iran and the rest will not go along with this crusade unless the Americans do something about the Palestinians.’ He was wrong. The United States let Sharon deal with the Palestinian problem as if its only dimension were security, as if Israel provided the model for the US to deal with Osama bin Laden and the tribes of Afghanistan. It did not seek or obtain Arab support. ‘The only basis for optimists,’ Jonathan said, ‘is that you cannot ignore one billion Muslims for ever.’ Jonathan, a Christian, may have been wrong about that as well.
We went back to the local conflict that was emblematic of the larger dispute between an all-powerful America and a helpless, supine Arab world. And we were back where we began more than a year before: that total weakness of the man in the torture chamber. ‘It’s not pure sadism,’ Jonathan said. ‘In the first intifadah, the problem was that ordinary soldiers were doing the interrogation. That’s sadism. They beat them up. But it was not effective. They have to force them to give information and to sign confessions. And they need professionals to do that. When you physically weaken someone, humiliate him, you can force him to do what you want. They use sleep deprivation and violent shaking. They are more effective. They study this. They are scientific and methodical. There are time limits, when people are vulnerable. If they have not broken down by the fiftieth day, they let them go.’ Did he know anyone who had taken it longer than fifty days? ‘I had a client who did. They released him on the fifty-fifth day. He had a few teeth broken. He was tired, weak, but in very good shape.’
The ones who survived the best were those who neither confessed nor implicated their comrades. Franz Fanon, the psychiatrist who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, based on his experience of French repression in Algeria, had observed the same phenomenon. Those who cracked, who named names, left prison ashamed and broken. Those who held out – despite being tortured longer – recovered. One of Fanon’s other observations was that those most in need of psychiatric treatment were the torturers. He told of a French policeman who came to Fanon begging for help. He wanted to stop beating his wife and children but to continue torturing Arabs. A journalist at Ha’aretz told me of an Israeli psychiatrist who specialized in torturers, some of whom found their only remedy was to quit.
What had the Palestinians achieved with their suffering? In my lifetime, the Vietnamese had driven out the French and the Americans. The Algerians had expelled the French. The Belgians, the British, the French and the Portuguese had left Africa, the Dutch abandoned the East Indies. The whites of South Africa had surrendered power to the majority. Yet the Palestinians were left behind, ignored by the great powers, betrayed and used by the Arab states, beaten down by the Israelis. Young Palestinians emerged from the Russian Compound to repair their damaged spirit and flesh, then grew old to watch their sons relive the experience.
‘Let me tell you something,’ Jonathan said. His elbows were on the table. His black hair and moustache made him look like a sombre Charlie Chaplin. I leaned forward to listen. ‘I never defended anyone accused of possessing, manufacturing or buying communications equipment. Give me a break. I’ve defended thousands of security defendants. How come no one is trying to listen to the Israelis? This is so embarrassing. In terms of armed struggle, we Palestinians are not serious.’ It wasn’t the coffee or Valentine Vester’s young blossoms that filled the morning air of the courtyard just then. It was despair. Jonathan, who for most of his professional life had attempted to defend Palestinians in the military courts, said that he had switched to business law.
Hidden Treasure
Papa Andrea’s restaurant was empty. I liked the place, not for the food, but for its open roof in the Christian Quarter. Most of the old city’s landmarks were nearby, all Jerusalem’s domes and spires and rain troughs