The Inevitability of the Oslo Accord

The Palestinian struggles, proceeding at the pace described in the preceding pages, ended in the signing of the Oslo Accord. This is a logical outcome, entirely consistent with the course of the Palestinian “revolution” and the record of its leaderships. A course such as the one set out above, and conduct such as has been described, could only produce a result like the Oslo Accord. This bears out the prophecy of a young girl from the Ain al-Hilweh camp. In 1972 I was in the camp, and I was interested in learning what people said about the revolution and the revolutionaries, and in gauging the extent of their optimism. Impressions varied and multiplied, but I remember that the answer of a girl I judged to be no older than fourteen at the time was sharp and full of bitterness. She said she did not expect those who chased after people’s honor to liberate Palestine, but rather expected them to concede Palestine. I was struck by this and followed the matter, and arrived at a conclusion I spoke of publicly in 1979. I said at the time that the Palestine Liberation Organization would recognize Israel, because its leadership was not qualified to achieve any kind of victory. And in 1982 I spoke before a gathering of students at An-Najah National University, saying that the Liberation Organization would recognize Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. Of course, I was subjected to defamation and various kinds of insults and distortion. And I knew that instructions were being issued from abroad to local leaderships in the West Bank to intensify the frenzied campaigns against me. My answer was always that it was only a matter of time before the revolution of the Palestinian people revealed itself for what it truly was.

Before I go on, I would note that the Oslo Accord placed the Arab region, and the Palestinian cause in particular, in a historically rare phase, and perhaps a unique one. History has not, to my knowledge, seen a people, or those holding decision-making power within it, agree to concede their homeland or sign a peace treaty with an enemy still occupying their land and scattering them across the earth. It is a strange and unique event, and one that will be of interest to historians and to students of the history of peoples and their attachment to their homelands and their lands. The leadership of the Palestinian people, with the backing of a large portion of it, signed a document in which it relinquished the land that had been described, across centuries and particularly in recent centuries, as its homeland — a homeland for whose rescue and liberation it had continually pledged to give everything precious and dear. I have leafed through history books and asked historians about a similar case, but I found none, nor did they produce one. Peoples throughout history have been defeated, expelled from their lands, and subjected to slaughter, killing, persecution, torture, and displacement, but they did not take up a pen to sign, for their executioners, an official document acknowledging the aggressors’ right to the land they had seized. Only the Palestinian leadership, together with a broad public of supporters, stands alone in such an event.

The Palestinian leadership enjoyed broad support, despite its fluctuations from time to time. Mass marches were held and celebrations and festivals staged in support of the leadership, and opinion polls showed that more than half the people supported the leadership. It is true that opposing, rejecting marches also took place, and celebrations and festivals were held opposing the leadership’s policy, and it is true that the various media played a large role in mobilizing the Palestinian people in favor of the agreement, but the opposition remained largely hesitant and unwilling to seize the initiative and obstruct the wheel of the agreement’s implementation. Indeed, the enthusiasm of most of the opposition cooled over time, and the opposition turned into mere verbal opposition, and some of its actions came, implicitly, to serve the agreement with Israel. One might even say that the breadth of the public’s support for the agreement is owed, in part, to the ineffectiveness of the opposition in bringing about radical change. I will come to this in some detail.

What calls for study and inquiry is the great shift in the Palestinian position at the mass level — namely, the abandonment of all the poems, slogans, hopes, aspirations, and positions, and of the very meaning of singing the praises of the ancestors’ land and insisting on its liberation, in favor of accepting Israel as a state with which one may cooperate and deal, not only economically but at the security level as well. A large part of the Palestinian people abandoned that literature and those surging emotions and flowing feelings toward Palestine, to the point that, in 1991, Palestinian youths placed olive branches on the rifles and military vehicles of the occupation as an expression of their love of peace. The values that had governed people’s feelings, and perhaps their actions, over the years collapsed, and with them collapsed the proposals, principles, goals, and symbols. Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud and Abu Salma turned into mere men who composed poetry; Jaffa into a mere city that once was but has now fallen under the shadow of Tel Aviv; the slopes of Mount Carmel into the foothills of a Haifa that has become Jewish; the coastal plain into a mere civilized vista onto which Jewish technology has cast lights twinkling in the darkness of night. And the blood of the martyrs turned into a mere chant repeated at every funeral, without people being serious about fulfilling the oath they swore to honor it. And yesterday’s prisoner under the occupation turned into a jailer holding Palestinians to account for their actions against Israel.

It is a unique historical phenomenon deserving the attention of researchers and scholars, who must surely examine it, particularly from the angle of the educational method that produces a person whose position on decisive, historic questions changes from one moment to the next. They must focus on the Palestine Liberation Organization in its attempt to create an explicit or implicit Palestinian educational system to help it achieve its declared goals — liberation, return, and the establishment of the independent Palestinian state. The Palestinian people were influenced, over tens of years, by the Palestine Liberation Organization and its various policies, and its educational and moral policy certainly left its mark on the Palestinian people, even if with varying intensity across its different segments. It is important that they examine those factors that lead to reversals in positions and place people on the edge of their own convictions, such that they accept what they reject and reject what they accept from one moment to the next, on matters touching the very core of their lives and their future.

If the matter is bound to provoke study and investigation with respect to the Palestinian people and the Arab people in general, it may not appear so with respect to the Palestinian leadership, embodied chiefly in Yasser Arafat. Was the leadership, over the years, heading toward a peace with Israel, with the sum of its policies flowing into this course? If the answer is yes, then this orientation would have governed how it arranged educational, instructional, economic, and military conditions so as to arrive at the planned results. And regardless of the goals, there remains a dialectical link between the leadership’s goals and policies and the people’s reaction. That is, the leadership works to adopt those policies that produce certain reactions among the people, and the reactions in turn form a strong support for the continuation of the policies. It is a mutual feeding, but one that is programmed and purposeful on the part of the actor, and unconscious on the part of its object. If the people are marked by rapid movement between contradictory positions, this is something that characterizes its educational system. And although the educational system is shaped by several factors, it is greatly influenced by the system the leadership sets and is keen to apply, owing to its capacity for planning and implementation. That is, the leadership leaves its clear and influential fingerprints on the educational system, so that the people’s moral movement corresponds, to a clear degree, with the educational system the leadership determines or works to entrench.

Was the Oslo Accord, and the agreements that followed it, inevitable, or did they result from emergency circumstances? This is what this paper attempts to answer in the pages that follow, in light of the discussion in the preceding pages.

The Basic Outlines of the Liberation Organization’s Policy

In the course of its justification for the agreements with Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization says there were objective factors beyond its will that led it to accept peaceful solutions and to sign the Oslo Accord. It says that it tried, over long years, to achieve its goals set out in the Palestinian National Charter through the following steps:

First: the organization waged a popular war of liberation against Israel inside and outside Palestine. It established military bases, trained fighters, provided them with fighting means, and fought many battles against the enemy, foremost among them the Battle of Karameh, and notable military operations such as the coastal operation and the Savoy Hotel operation. The organization sustained many losses over the years in lives and equipment, in addition to the suffering of people in the various Palestinian communities.

Second: the Palestinian people suffered a great many calamities over the years and no longer have the energy, at least at present, and need a measure of rest, or a resting station, so that they may be able to regroup, plan, and gather their strength once more. The people have paid a very heavy price in blood since 1917 until now, and people were displaced and scattered across the earth until fathers no longer knew where their sons were, nor uncles their nephews, nor girls their maternal uncles. Sorrow entered every Palestinian house and home. Children were orphaned, wives lost their husbands, and mothers their sons. Hundreds of thousands were thrown into prisons and endured every form of torture and brutality. This is in addition to deportations, starvation, and nighttime military raids on homes, and so on. The people have grown weary and tired, so says the organization, and a large part of them have come to yearn for the rest of the fighter exhausted by battle.

Third: the Palestinian people offered enormous sacrifices, and their hope was great for serious assistance from the Arabs, peoples and governments alike, but they found from the Arab governments nothing but a lack of seriousness, if not hostility, toward the Palestinian organizations and the Palestinian dreams of liberating the homeland. The Arab states, according to the Liberation Organization’s defense of its policies, stood against the military action the organization had adopted, and schemed with states that strongly support Israel such as the United States, and were never enthusiastic about the establishment of a Palestinian state. Indeed, large numbers of Palestinian youths fell in confrontations with Arab armies. The Arab states even became unwilling to receive Palestinians residing on their soil in a non-struggle capacity.

Fourth: the great powers ultimately stood with Israel and gave Palestinian rights nothing but verbal attention, below the required level. Israel received every kind of support from many states and its standing and trade were reinforced, while the displaced people did not even receive the humane concern they were entitled to. And the Arab states did not press for an acceptable solution for the Palestinian people, nor did they seriously try to influence the policies of the great powers.

Fifth: matters deteriorated very seriously for the Palestinian people after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Iraq. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, says the organization, the Palestinians lost the power they had relied upon in international forums, which had constituted the other side of the international balance, whether on the diplomatic or military stage. The United States became the sole superpower in the world, and the strong backer of Israel. And with Iraq’s defeat, the fence closed in around the organization, because it had lost a strong Arab backer who had continually provided material and moral support to the Palestinian people.

And the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization says that it led the Palestinian struggle for tens of years, and that the time has come to reap the fruits, which might be poor fruits. Under the current circumstances described above, the Palestinians have no opportunity to reclaim their rights, and it is better for them to accept what is granted to them and continue to demand more. Continuing the struggle has become useless and without any Arab or international political cover, and accepting the fait accompli is better than continuing actions that lead to a political suicide whose price is paid by the Palestinian people as a whole.

The Gap Between Word and Deed

The Palestine Liberation Organization has indeed led the Palestinian people since the mid-1960s, and it set for itself goals, of which I mention, by way of example and not limitation, what appeared in the declaration of the First Palestinian Arab Conference held in 1964. The declaration stated that “the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization is a mobilized leadership of the forces of the Palestinian Arab people to wage the battle of liberation, a shield for the rights and aspirations of the people of Palestine, and a path to victory.” As for the Palestinian National Charter, considered the amended version of the Palestinian National, pan-Arab Charter, it stated that “the Palestinian Arab people is the rightful owner of its homeland, and determines its fate after the liberation of its homeland, in accordance with its own will and by its own free choice.” It also stated that “armed struggle is the only path to the liberation of Palestine, and is thus a strategy and not a tactic…” (Article 9). As for the phased program, the Palestinian National Council affirmed the recovery of the full national Palestinian rights, foremost among them the right of return and self-determination over the whole of its national soil (preamble of the program), and affirmed the rejection of Security Council Resolution 242 (clause 1), and the Liberation Organization’s right to use various means, foremost among them armed struggle, in order to liberate Palestine and establish “the fighting, independent national authority of the people over the part of Palestinian land that is liberated” (clause 2). The program added that the Liberation Organization would not accept any scheme for a Palestinian entity whose “price is recognition, reconciliation, and secure borders” (clause 3).

Apart from the written provisions, the Palestine Liberation Organization spared no effort in repeating its liberationist insistence in the Palestinian people’s hearing. Despite everything declared by the Liberation Organization, and despite all the justifications it musters to support its current policy toward Palestine, the organization’s practical policy indicates that there is a very wide gulf between what is declared and what is actually practiced on the ground. The political discourse the Liberation Organization adopted over the years does not match or resemble the practical steps it followed; indeed, the political discourse contradicts the action. General Palestinian policies never, in fact, moved toward liberation, nor toward mobilizing Palestinian and Arab energies toward the goal of liberation. Rather, these policies appeared, on the whole, contrary to the declared intentions.

What follows is a discussion of important, fundamental issues directly related to the nature of the policy pursued and the goals expected of it. Every government, every party, and every organization sets specific goals for itself and lays plans suited to achieving that goal. Plans touch on the essential axes of movement and activity, without which the goals cannot be achieved, however much care is given to secondary axes, and however eloquent and emotionally stirring the speeches may be. The Liberation Organization set goals and did not adopt plans commensurate with them — if it had not, in fact, adopted contrary plans. In clarifying this, I try in this chapter to merge what appeared in the two previous chapters within an integrated vision, one whose fabric does not indicate the mere existence of errors within the organization, but rather a comprehensive program with functional and institutional foundations and structures. That is, the matter was not one of whims or mistaken judgments, but rather whims and mistakes subject to a programming that made their occurrence inevitable.

This becomes clear in what follows:

First: Education

Whoever wants liberation must work to adopt an educational program suited to the goal. Liberation requires sacrifice, self-giving, collective work, and mutual cooperation among people. It requires an ethic that draws people close to one another and preserves their rights and their secrets, that has regard for the rich and the poor alike, that respects the young as it does the old, that raises the level of their education and their awareness of the realities of the conflict and the methods of confronting the challenge, and that cultivates in them a spirit of construction and orientation toward the common good. Liberation is an extraordinary task and requires an extraordinary moral mobilization, such that a person devotes himself, prefers his brother to himself, and fully realizes that his personal interest can only be achieved through the general goal, which is liberation. This in turn requires enormous educational effort within a clearly defined educational system that forms an integrated fabric touching the various activities of life and awareness of them and their goals. The educational system forms the foundational base on which the rest of things are built; if it is shaky, the structure stands on the verge of collapse, and if it is solid and cohesive, the structure stands and is driven upward. Can a people liberate a homeland within values of individual selfishness? Can it do so while its sons hope to achieve their own private interests during the course of liberation and work toward that? Can it do so without good relations with those from whom it hopes for support and help? Can it do so without self-reliance, or while relying for its daily bread on the very enemy it says is stealing its land? The system of values, including the values of consumption, cohabitation, and dealing with one another, is decisive in the matter of liberation, and it must be crystallized and practically entrenched so that it bears fruit.

Did the Palestine Liberation Organization adopt an educational system commensurate with the declared goal, one that would enable the Palestinian people to reclaim their rights? A close observer of the course of the Palestine Liberation Organization can hardly detect any concern with an educational system other than one that entrenches the individual’s dependency and strips him of his sense of self and his capacity to take the initiative. The Liberation Organization never developed, either in its policy inside Palestine or outside it, a moral system consistent with the requirements of revolution — respect for others, devotion to public service, and setting a virtuous example that draws in others’ support. Indeed, the organization even failed to establish a moral system governing the bearing of arms, which constitutes the very first point of departure toward the liberation of Palestine. The Palestinian weapon was used, both personally and collectively, against Palestinians. Palestinians killed other Palestinians or wounded them in personal feuds or through careless play with weapons, and battles occurred between Palestinian factions that claimed the lives of a considerable number of Palestinians. And this still happens within Palestinian ranks today, in the territories occupied in 1967 or in Lebanon.

I do not have statistics, but I believe that the Palestinian weapon carried by the factions of the Liberation Organization has killed more Palestinians than it has killed Israelis. And I call on the various factions to publish whatever statistics they have so that the truth may be shown before the Palestinian people.

Instead of being exposed to a creative educational system that would produce in him a revolutionary others could emulate, the Palestinian was exposed to a feeble, hollow upbringing resting on resounding slogans, speeches, festivals, and applause for the chairman of the Liberation Organization and the leaders of the factions, each according to his faction. The Palestinian was left out in the open, educationally speaking, and became raw material for factional recruitment and dependency, serving as a basic asset in internal Palestinian conflicts. The Palestinian was raised on the two-fingered V sign of victory, and on slogans such as “Mountain, no wind can shake you,” “The covenant is the covenant and the oath is the oath,” “Revolution until victory, until victory, until victory,” and “We shall surely return.” Meaningless slogans that betray nothing but demagoguery, and that differ in no essential way from the slogan “London is where we tether our horses” — loose slogans carrying no practical content and requiring no actual practice beyond chanting during speeches and whistling, especially when the image of the inspiring leader appears or when the speaker mentions his name.

For decades, the Liberation Organization proceeded without acquainting the Palestinian with his homeland or the history of its towns and cities, nor even with Palestinian history itself. I found no genuine teaching of geography or history among the ranks of the organizations, even inside the detention centers, to the point that senior leaders turned out to know no more about their homeland than the general, imprecise information any ordinary person on the street might know. As for the slogans on which the Palestinian was raised, they did not remain the same slogans. The organization took to changing its sayings and slogans over time, and the Palestinian had to change along with them without knowing how, why, or on what justification. He would go to sleep on one slogan and wake to another, and he never hesitated to repeat it and raise it. What had been betrayal under one slogan became patriotism under another; what had been cowardice became courage; what had been rejected became accepted. And the Palestinian went about, stumbling, hoping the new slogan would bring him good or future hope — perhaps the new would achieve what the old had failed to achieve. And in the absence of a program that helps a person develop his personality, strengthens his self-confidence, and spurs him to initiative, the Palestinian became a conformist and dependent, frequently resorting to forces outside himself to achieve his goals.

The Liberation Organization was warned, through various means, of the necessity of working hard to help the Palestinian possess himself, so that his capacity for liberation might be strengthened. But instead of enlisting educational experts and thinkers to lay down a general educational policy, its symbols focused on the task of mass recruitment and on entrenching the idea of loyalty to the organization and to the individual who led it, rather than to Palestine or to the principles that might lead to its liberation. Money was used to recruit individuals, and it created traditions of buying and selling individuals that persist to this day. Instead of money being used to liberate Palestine, it was used to reinforce one political position against another, or to reinforce an individual’s authority over the organization. The individual turned into a chanter, shouting the slogans he was asked to shout, and grew accustomed to being the lower hand, receiving a reward whenever he did something that pleased the leadership.

The Palestine Liberation Organization created two prominent educational values: parroting and begging. The first leads to the second, and the second is a basic condition for obtaining the first. People grew accustomed to holding out their hand and receiving aid from the revolution they were supposed to be supporting, and in exchange for obtaining something, they had to continually say yes and repeat what the giver of the money wanted from them. Such is the lower hand: a hand devoid of dignity and pride, and base in that it continually echoes what its master wants. And the matter appears very sad when one looks at a Palestinian celebration and sees the young stirring and swaying, chanting as though drunk on speech-making empty of any content, yet which stirs certain emotions in them through its ornate phrases.

Second: Secrecy

It is well known that the Arab homeland lives in a state of instability, and that the influence of colonialism remains strong within it and all but dominates most Arab regimes. From this angle, it was not to be expected that the Arab regimes would coexist with any Arab revolution, including the Palestinian revolution. The regimes, or some of them, coexisted with the Algerian revolution in the 1950s, but the conditions of that period have passed, and the reality of Arab fragmentation has become sharper and more deeply rooted in the Arab psyche, and dependency has become an attribute inseparable from Arab policy generally. The existence of an Arab revolution working to change the equations and conditions created by colonialism in the Arab homeland constitutes a threat to colonial interests, including Israel and most Arab regimes, which would not have remained in power were it not for colonial support. And if an Arab regime allows freedom of action for a given revolution, it soon finds itself subject to various sanctions and threats from Western states, particularly the United States, and from Israel. Arab regimes that have tried to break out of the encirclement and oppose colonial policy in the region have been subjected to military and economic sanctions.

For this reason, it is not wise for any element or organization to operate openly in the Arab homeland, even if its goal is the liberation of Palestinian land. Arab rulers may love to see Palestine free, Arab, and Islamic, but love is not like reality. Openness exposes its practitioner to great and serious dangers, and if he is not struck immediately by the regimes, pressure is exerted on them to direct a blow at him. A given regime may delay in striking, and may stall and maneuver, but it cannot help but implement, even partially, measures to prevent acts of violence. Arming oneself with secrecy was more important for the Liberation Organization than for any other organization in the Arab homeland, because of Israel’s mobilization of its intelligence and military capacities in pursuing the Palestinians. Israel defends its own existence; it is, in effect, an intelligence and military garrison in a state of continuous alert to any Arab or Palestinian military development that might pose a threat to it. It therefore cannot tolerate the existence of military organizations operating along its neighboring borders, whether their work is secret or open, and it finds it easier to strike open targets. In these efforts, Israel receives continuous Western support.

Within this atmosphere, the Liberation Organization should have focused on secrecy, and the political and military leaderships should have been separated, so as to give the political leadership the freedom of open action that might be necessary. Military action should have remained secret in order to have an effect and impact serving the organization’s declared goals — its secrecy is the secret of its strength, regardless of its size, and it constitutes a deterrent force greater than that of a regular army composed of tens of thousands of soldiers. The presence of tens of thousands of Palestinian fighters in Lebanon did not deter Israel from entering Lebanese territory in 1982, while a few thousand Hezbollah fighters deterred the Israeli army, which recognized the dangers of entering Lebanon during the military operation called the Grapes of Wrath in 1996. This is because Hezbollah waged a concealed guerrilla war, while the Palestinians in 1982 appeared as a regular army posing no real danger before the Israeli military machine. Through secrecy, an organization can preserve its political existence indirectly, in a way the political forces in the region cannot bypass.

The Palestine Liberation Organization did not heed this analysis, which springs not from imagination or illusion but from a reality that anyone from the region touches every day. The organization cast secrecy aside entirely, and the Palestinian factions opened their doors to anyone who wished to join. The result was that the intelligence services concerned infiltrated all the Palestinian factions, the offices affiliated with the Liberation Organization, and its various bodies and departments. Military bases, trainers, planners, councils, and committees were infiltrated, to the point that the activities of the organization and the factions became like an open palm before many states and regimes. The infiltration reached such an extent that an ordinary citizen could know the organization’s secrets. For example, I, the author of this article, learned of a plot by Arafat’s men to shoot me, and I was able to find out, shortly after they carried out the act, who had opened fire on me and struck me with four bullets. I learned who fired, who had sent him, and who had asked them to send him. If I, as an ordinary citizen, could penetrate the ranks of the Liberation Organization, how much more so the intelligence services of Israel, the United States, and Jordan?

The ranks of the organization and the factions were infiltrated to such a degree that the vast majority of military attempts against Israel failed, and Palestine’s sons were killed on land and at sea before reaching their targets. Palestinian statements would be issued about the success of operations, the killing of Israeli soldiers, and the martyrdom of some fighters, but these were not serious and served Palestinian consumption purposes. Occupation patrols would be waiting for Palestinian fighters on land and at sea, attacking them before they reached their target — to the point that they would sometimes call out to some fighters by name over loudspeakers, demanding their surrender. Very rare operations succeeded over the years, and the Palestinian factions still sing their praises and consider them great achievements, and there must surely be a secret behind the success of this small number. This situation was repeated time and time again, and the factional leaderships and the leadership of the Liberation Organization knew what was happening, and knew full well that those recruited to carry out military operations were, in effect, going to the guillotine, but it took no serious action to correct the situation, and the same mistake — or crime — continued to repeat itself. The repetition of the tragedy points clearly to terrible infiltrations within the ranks of the organization and its various factions, and the leadership’s failure to correct the situation means one thing: that the infiltration exists, fundamentally, at the very top.

Add to that the fact that the Palestinian fighters, particularly at the leadership level, were distracted by ranks and salaries. The organization’s leadership introduced military ranks into the military apparatus and set a salary and privileges for each rank, which meant introducing a kind of competition that distracted fighters from their basic tasks in achieving liberation. The senior figures sat enthroned atop ranks and salaries, while the sons of the poor and destitute, whose enthusiasm had poured out for Palestine, were lost in illusory fighting. And fighters who lived in Lebanon know that fortune always favored those who sought pleasure, soft beds, and enjoyments, who were then placed in charge of the various apparatuses and corrupted whatever remained of righteousness or trace of secrecy.

As for the territories occupied in 1967, it was clear that the number of Palestinian detainees never corresponded to the scale of action they had actually carried out against Israel. Over the years, the number of detainees reached hundreds of thousands, while, by contrast, actual operations were very few. The reason lies in the fact that most Palestinian cells fell into the occupation’s hands before they could act. It was as though the occupation’s security apparatus knew in advance about the cells and their organization, and waited until the last moment to strike them. From my own experience in Palestinian detention, a great many detainees reported that they had been arrested shortly before they were to carry out an operation.

Third: The Regionalization of the Palestinian Cause

No one with even the slightest knowledge of strategic military affairs could expect the Palestinians to be capable of defeating Israel and the Western states allied with it, given the existing military balance. Israel is a militarily powerful state, backed by great military powers, and confronting it requires mobilizing energies and efforts not only at the level of the Arab homeland but at the Islamic level as well, in addition to the necessity of mobilizing the states of the world politically and seeking mutual technical and military reliance among them. The hostile power is neither easy nor simple, and it continues to build up its technical and military capacity. If there is anyone among the Palestinians who thinks he will defeat Israel alone, or achieve Palestinian goals without support, backing, and help from Arabs and Muslims, he is without doubt deluded and knows nothing of the imbalance that exists in the region.

The current Liberation Organization did not take this into account, even though its predecessor, led by Ahmad al-Shuqayri, had adopted a nationalist line clearly reflected in the Palestinian National, pan-Arab Charter, and had seen the necessity of mobilizing the Arab states to support the Palestinians. The Palestinian National Council took a decision in 1968 to convert the pan-Arab National Charter into the Palestinian National Charter, under which Palestine became the homeland of the Palestinian Arab people rather than an Arab homeland. As I noted earlier, the council was here in keeping with the thinking of Fatah, which considered itself a national, country-specific movement working to achieve Palestinian goals by Palestinian hands. The Liberation Organization began feeding Palestinians the values of country-specificity, or regionalism, and separation from the Arabs and Muslims, following the example of several Arab regimes. Distinct regionalist slogans and clear separatist orientations emerged, touching even the simplest matters, such as the white and black keffiyeh. The organization, like some Arab regimes, turned the Arab keffiyeh into symbols entrenching division and rivalry. This served to free the Arab and Islamic regimes of their responsibilities toward Palestine, and lifted from their shoulders a burdensome matter they could not, of their own free will, have escaped or abandoned. This culminated in the burden of Palestine being placed on the Liberation Organization at the Rabat Conference in 1974, even though Arab leaders had promised assistance. The organization then began acting as though it were an Arab state, entering into internal Arab conflicts and becoming a party to alliances and counter-alliances. At times the organization was a friend of Syria and hostile to Syria’s Arab rivals; at times it played the friend of Iraq depending on its friendship with Iran; at times it was hostile to the parties to the Camp David treaty, and at other times reconciled with them, and so on. Whereas the organization had once been the owner of a cause, it came to be viewed as a new Arab party with its own particular interests and attachments that fell outside the logic of achieving the declared Palestinian goals. This view was reinforced as the organization entered the arena of diplomacy and engaged with international efforts to achieve a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian cause. Indeed, the organization even damaged its own standing with the Arab regimes supportive of the Palestinian cause, in that it was exerting efforts toward a settlement at the very time the Palestinian people spoke of steadfastness, liberation, and insistence on the traditional positions aimed at achieving Palestinian hopes.

The Liberation Organization stripped itself of the freedom to address the Arab and Islamic peoples and to mobilize their energies for the sake of the sacred cause, because it had become a party responsible for a private cause rather than a general one, and any attempt to address the peoples came to be viewed as interference in the internal affairs of states and an encroachment on government prerogatives. Since it had accepted operating within a country-specific logic, it had to bear the consequences.

Fourth: Separation from the Masses

The Palestine Liberation Organization was not content with moving toward regionalization and trying to isolate the Arab and Muslim regimes from the Palestinian cause; it worked to isolate the Arab and Muslim peoples as well. The Arab and Muslim peoples were an immense asset for the Palestinian cause, and they had the readiness to make the sacrifices required for Palestine’s sake. The Liberation Organization itself is witness to how eagerly people throughout the Arab homeland gave material donations to Palestinian fighters and joined the ranks of the Palestinian revolution after the 1967 war. Arabs came forward to help directly because they considered Palestine their own cause, and because they considered the revolution, after the June defeat, the effective means of confronting and repelling the aggression — this in addition to the fact that the image of the revolution was radiant in that period, capturing people’s attention and trust. The Arab and Muslim masses have proven their firm desire to support Arab and Muslim causes, and Bosnia and Chechnya were two prominent examples of this, where the masses mobilized to defend the two Muslim peoples and tens of thousands of fighters set out for jihad to save Islamic lands. The Liberation Organization could have obtained enormous popular support had it proven itself serious in its pursuit and in its management of the various activities and dimensions of the struggle.

The Arab and Muslim masses constitute a true support for any effort aimed at liberating Palestine or resolving the Palestinian cause in a manner that restores Palestinians’ rights. And if the Arab governments have been remiss toward the fundamental Arab causes and unwilling to free their peoples from injustice and enslavement, then the Liberation Organization held out hope that it might stand with the peoples to bring about change at the level of the Arab homeland, through its leadership of a serious struggle in confronting Israel. Its serious work toward liberating Palestine could have mobilized people and achieved accomplishments that would have won the organization the masses’ respect and the support that would form a shield for it and grant it the boldness to support the masses in confronting tyranny. The organization had before it a historic opportunity to bring about radical change at the level of the Arab homeland.

But the organization took steps that damaged its image among the masses, particularly in Jordan and Lebanon, and to some extent in Tunisia. In both Jordan and Lebanon, as I noted earlier, the organization moved to marginalize the Jordanian and Lebanese peoples and subordinate them to the Palestinian revolution, which considered itself the legitimate leadership that the two peoples must obey. The organization tried to impose its leadership and to relegate the leaderships of the two peoples to supporting, second-tier figures behind the organization’s leaders. That is, the organization tried to play the role of master rather than dealing with the two peoples with brotherhood and friendship. This delighted the enemies of the revolution, who rejected the very idea of armed resistance in the first place, and it worked to repel people’s support and turn them into enemies hoping for the day they would be rid of the Liberation Organization. The organization committed acts of great gravity in Jordan and repeated them in Lebanon, causing the two peoples to hate the Palestinian people, not just the organization. This does not mean I absolve the regimes in Jordan and Lebanon, but I am only pointing to the organization’s role, which contributed, alongside the Arab regimes, to creating hatred among Arab peoples. As for Tunisia, the Tunisian people began retreating from their positions on the Palestinian cause after becoming acquainted with the conduct and daily behavior of the Palestinian leaderships.

The Liberation Organization now says that the Arab peoples let it down, and that this letdown was a fundamental reason for its move toward a peaceful solution with Israel. This claim is untrue, because the organization preferred to work with governments and turned its back on the peoples; indeed, it worked to tarnish the initial image the peoples had built of the organization. The organization gave the Arab masses such a bad impression of itself that there is no longer trust or willingness to offer support and backing. In 1967, a young Palestinian could walk through an Arab capital with a donation box and fill it from a single street, but he would not be able to fill it now even if he toured every Arab capital.

Fifth: The Spending of Money

It is said that the Palestine Liberation Organization stood out among the various organizations and revolutions as the wealthiest, and as the only revolutionary organization that provided financial support to the people rather than relying on the people. The Liberation Organization mastered the art of holding out its hand and seeking funds, and it likewise mastered the art of squandering and spending them in ways that did not serve the task of liberation.

Holding out its hand earned the Palestinian people the habit of begging and placed them in the position of the lower hand, which negatively affects morale and the desire to work, strive, and be active. External support breeds laziness and idleness, and dependence on others — particularly when aimed at meeting people’s daily needs rather than confronting strategic dangers — leads to tying people’s fate to whoever provides the support. Some support may have been necessary for buying weapons, supporting fighters’ families, and developing new weapons, but it was not necessary for purposes of consumption.

In any case, the hope was that the funds obtained through begging would be invested in building a Palestinian economy suited to the requirements of liberation. The domestic economy should have been supported, so that people would grow accustomed to supporting themselves through ever-expanding production that would generate skilled and professional workers. Economic enterprises should have been established, to the extent possible under occupation, to draw workers away from Israeli factories and farms, and to employ Palestinian labor for the sake of a rising Palestinian output. It was, and remains, a disgrace that tens of thousands of Palestinians work in Israeli sites of production, because such labor is a source of economic strength for the very enemy occupying the land and displacing the people, and because whoever depends on his enemy for his daily bread cannot be capable of achieving liberation. It would have been wise to invest the money in washing away such a disgrace.

But the organization paid no attention to any strategic planning that would constitute an economic asset for the Palestinian people. Even as the flow of support funds — called the funds of steadfastness — poured in, the number of Palestinian workers in Israeli work centers increased, and the organization did not even work to provide job opportunities commensurate with the natural growth of the workforce. The organization was concerned only with establishing fragile, non-productive institutions in order to tell people and states that it possessed institutions upholding the slogan that the Liberation Organization was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. It established non-productive institutions to tell the international forums that the infrastructure for establishing a state existed, at a time when the world saw that this infrastructure did not, in truth, exist. The worker received no support, the farmer received no care, the struggler received only scant attention, and the money was squandered into the pockets of many who had, to begin with, no need of it.

There is no doubt that some of the funds were spent well, but this was not enough, nor was it the customary, well-known method among the people. Much of the money was used to buy loyalties and political positions, which spurred people to adopt a policy of hypocrisy and fraud in order to obtain material gains. Financial corruption was widespread and rampant, and remains so to this day under the Palestinian Authority.

I will return to this subject again.

Sixth: The Traditional Power Holders

Palestine, like every part of the Arab homeland, suffered from traditional family influence, or from the tribal mentality that does not believe in the public interest and always prefers to guard private interests. The tribal mentality, by definition, is an insular, closed, and racist mentality, sacrificing the public interest for the sake of private interest. This mentality prevailed in Palestine for centuries, and it was the prevailing one during Ottoman rule, the British Mandate, and the Jordanian era. It has proven itself always inclined to cooperate with whoever holds power, regardless of who that is, because its economic and social interests require it. The influential tribes cooperated with Turkish rule, burdened people with taxes, and amassed great monetary and landed wealth, to the point that some tribes became, by the standards of available land area in Palestine, feudal in scale. They cooperated with the British Mandate to such an extent that most of them sold land to the Jews at the very time they were leading the country and continually promising the people that independence would be achieved. These influential families did not shy away from cooperating with the Israeli occupation in implementing general policies for the sake of their own interests.

These families did not vanish or hand their affairs over to others; rather, they remained in some form of relationship with the Jordanian regime, the Israeli occupation, and some Western circles and governments, in order to take up power at the moment the revolutionary phase collapsed. They found friends who protected and supported them because of their inclination toward appeasement and their engagement with the Israeli and American proposals for resolving the Palestinian cause. Of course, I do not mean to include here every member of these traditional families; I am speaking of the general trend of the tribal mentality and the prevailing tribal behavior. As for individuals, there are differences, and among the traditional families there have emerged Palestinian fighters who made sacrifices.

It was thought that the Liberation Organization constituted a new leadership oriented toward modernizing Palestinian society so that it could be capable of confronting the great challenges awaiting it. But the days revealed that the organization’s leadership dealt seriously only with those who represented the traditional families. It did deal with fighters, but this dealing remained superficial and subject to interruption or change. Its dealings with the families, however, remained constant, and the bonds grew tighter over time, to the point that the symbols of these families became the most influential figures within the circles of the Liberation Organization — even though some of them were known at the popular level to be agents of Israel. The standing of these figures within the ranks of the Liberation Organization continued to rise until they became its symbols, occupying the front seats behind Yasser Arafat, while those fighters who remained, over the years, retreated to the back seats. If one traces the backgrounds of the Liberation Organization’s delegates to the Madrid conference, and through the various stages of the negotiations with Israel, and in the key positions within the Palestinian Authority, one finds that most of them come from family roots with long-standing traditions of bargaining away the homeland. The names are many and well known, and are mentioned continually in Palestinian popular circles, but I refrain from naming them here so that this book does not turn into a cause for personal score-settling. There is confidence that history will not fail to record the facts and detail them. But the tragedy remains present, even if there is some consolation in the writing of history. We have had leaderships before who sold land to the Jews, and history was not written until after a time when those leaderships had already died.

Seventh: The Intifada

The Intifada constituted the second great historical event in which the Palestinian people took its cause into its own hands, after the 1936 strike and the revolution that followed it, lasting three years. The worries and pains of the Palestinian people had accumulated because of the Israeli occupation and its bloody, repressive policies. The Palestinian people had, over years of revolution, political effort, and diplomacy, hoped for a way out that would relieve it of the burden and oppression of the occupation, entirely without success. The Zionist occupation of the land and the people constituted an antithesis of the Palestinian self in the territory occupied in ‘67, and a fiercely brutal instrument of terror. The occupation formed a barrier between the Palestinian, as an individual and as a member of a community, and his human and national aspirations and hopes, and his will to be free, capable of movement, expression, and participation.

The occupation was working to create a fait accompli in which the Palestinian would accept what was given to him and settle into calm and stillness, but this ran contrary to both historical and human logic. From the human standpoint, it appears that a person has a limited capacity to endure repression and humiliation, and however much he submits, his submission remains temporary, and one cannot be assured of its continuing. From the historical standpoint, countries and regions that have experienced occupation have seen revolutions and struggles that ultimately led to the end of the occupation and the achievement of the right of self-determination for those who suffered under it. The Palestinian people is no different from other peoples, and it was not possible for it to surrender either to the circumstances or to the pressures of the occupation.

Although the occupation is the direct and first cause of the outbreak of the Intifada, the question that remains is why the people were forced to carry their own cause, as angry masses expressing their rejection of the fait accompli. Returning to the period of 1936, we find that the Palestinian people found itself, at that time, alone, with no one to help it. The Palestinian leadership at the time was mired in tribal conflicts, competing for wealth and prestige, trying hard not to anger the British Mandate, and trying to distract people with speeches, festivals, and promises. The land was being lost, and no hope of rescuing the situation appeared on the horizon. Even the Arab and Islamic countries offered no ideas or hopes of extending a helping hand. It was therefore not surprising that the people came out in protest, bearing arms against their enemies.

The situation in 1987 was not radically different from that of 1936. Years of fighting and continual promises to liberate the country, or to reach a solution achieving part of the Palestinians’ hopes, produced nothing positive — indeed, produced more suffering and pain. People paid a very heavy price for freedom without any hope of reaching an open door appearing. The Liberation Organization, on which they had built their hopes, departed from Jordan and from Beirut; many martyrs fell, homes were demolished, detainees were led to prisons by the thousands, and the people were subjected to massacres, starvation, and every kind of persecution.

The Palestinian leadership did not appear capable of playing a decisive role in achieving freedom for the people, nor did the Arab states appear concerned with the Palestinian cause — to the point that the Arab Summit held in Amman in 1987 did not even discuss the Palestinian cause, as though it were a matter belonging to another world. The same was true on the international stage, where the cause was not discussed at an American-Soviet summit meeting. This situation led to a feeling of abandonment and to the sense that weeping and sorrow were futile, and so the people came out, carrying their burdens, in a broad mass movement.

This explains the people’s outpouring in a spontaneous mass uprising. No one planned this uprising, and no one expected it within any specific time frame. Had someone planned it, matters would have been different, in that it would have been programmed, with sequential steps based on prior awareness of each step, its goals, and what it might achieve. It would then have been a conscious intifada, with calculations and policies capable of maneuvering and moving the people forward in a serious step toward revolution. It is historically known that mass uprisings are spontaneous eruptions arising from a feeling of despair, not from awareness, and are protest movements that may involve some violence but are not a revolution. Intifadas are protests lacking organization and awareness, while revolutions are conscious confrontations that adopt methods of resistance.

If anyone had planned the Palestinian Intifada, he would certainly have planned to stockpile food supplies to meet emergencies, and if he had not done so, then he was a failed planner. Given my direct participation in the mass activities from the very first days of the Intifada, I know full well that neither the Liberation Organization nor the Palestinian factions possessed a single storehouse hiding even one kilogram of sugar, oil, or any other food item. And I know full well that the Palestinians of the territory occupied in ‘48 rushed to our aid and supplied us, with remarkable speed, with various kinds of food. And for the historical record, I must note that the Druze Palestinians did not hesitate to extend a helping hand, and their trucks reached the storehouses we had set up and the various Palestinian camps and communities. Indeed, the military governor of Nablus at the time, himself of Druze identity, went so far as to arrest members of the Druze Initiative Committee.

The Intifada was a historic mass development, and it could have been seized upon, developed, and escalated so as to constitute a great challenge to the occupation. There was great hope in exploiting the situation that had arisen in order to move the masses from a state of mounting pressures to a state of awareness that would give birth to a revolution; there was, at the same time, great hope in beginning an effective economic boycott, then moving to partial and then comprehensive civil disobedience, and then revolution.

The methods by which such a goal could be achieved were put forward, and this was made clear to the Liberation Organization through many channels, with focus on several points, among them:

A. Preserving the mass character of the Intifada: The masses made the Intifada, and the specter of factionalism should have been kept away from it, so that it would remain a mass movement. Factionalism is dangerous, and it had already fragmented the Palestinian people before the Intifada, and it could kill the Intifada if it crept into it. The Liberation Organization’s leadership did not heed these words, and from the very first days rushed to say that it was the one who had carried out the Intifada and that it was directing it “by remote control,” as one of the organization’s leaders put it, and Yasser Arafat appeared saying that Communiqué No. 75 was in his pocket and that the Intifada consisted of seven phases.

The organization’s leadership created an atmosphere of competition among the factions, and each side tried to prove it was the leader of the Intifada, or at least one of its leaders. This served to fragment the masses into frameworks and factions, and thereby to shrink the mass tide in favor of factional actions, and to reduce the role of the masses to an extremely low degree — the point at which the masses came to see the Intifada, which had turned into an intifada of shuttered shops, as a burden upon them rather than an asset in their favor.

B. Money: The Liberation Organization’s leadership was informed that its money, before the Intifada, had played a negative role on the Palestinian scene, and had been, for the most part, money of destruction rather than money of construction. As long as the conditions of those in charge of this money had not changed during the Intifada, it would be better for them to keep their money with them, and if they sent it, its effect would be nothing but to sabotage the Intifada.

Of course, the Liberation Organization’s leadership did not listen. It allocated some funds to be spent in proper ways, such as helping detainees and the families of martyrs, but much money was spent on buying loyalties and staging media demonstrations to highlight the Liberation Organization’s leadership. And since buying loyalties was a fundamental rule of the organization’s leadership’s mode of operation, the share of Israel’s and America’s friends, and of those not nationally active, was the largest and most generous portion of this money, and so these became leaders of the strugglers in the street. These strugglers, whom the media continued to deceive and mislead, gradually withdrew as the picture became clear over the days, until their numbers shrank considerably.

I recall here a meeting held on December 11, 1987, to assess conditions and take a practical decision to contribute to the situation. The assessment at the time was that the popular unrest would be long-lasting, and that a plan had to be laid for effective participation, as far as possible, in the popular trends. What matters is that those gathered, after laying out their plan, moved on to discuss when and how the Liberation Organization’s leadership would begin sabotaging the popular situation that had arisen. The conclusion was that the leadership would destroy the people’s unity through factionalism and a focus on Arafat’s leadership and his images, and through the funds that would be used for political co-optation and to shift the situation from a national character to a political one.

C. The economy: The organization’s leadership was also told that the money, if it had to be sent, ought to be invested in building a new economy along the lines proposed before the Intifada, in order to support the mass movement, and in order to absorb those who left jobs in departments overseen by the occupation. For it is not wise to demand that people carry out civil disobedience without providing an alternative that guarantees them their daily bread. But what happened was that statements were issued demanding civil disobedience without providing a sound economic foundation. There was a great deal of media fanfare about resignations by police officers and about some people’s refusal to pay taxes, but we were certain that people would end up paying their taxes, and that popular alternative education would fail, and so on, because the foundation for the success of these things was not available, and what was actually done in this regard went no further than media purposes.

D. Escalation: The Liberation Organization’s leadership was told that exploiting the situation created by the masses required maintaining the momentum, and that this was to be done through escalatory steps that would preserve the mass mobilization and reinforce the masses’ pressure on the occupation. Monotony in mass action was to be rejected, because it leads to boredom and slackening, and renewal was necessary.

But the organization’s leadership pursued the path of concessions instead of escalation and renewal. The leadership seized the opportunity of the mass tide to tell the Palestinian people that it was declaring independence, under the cloak of announcing recognition of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 — and these were release-valve steps that had a negative effect on the situation.

E. Strikes: From the very beginning of the Intifada, voices rose against strikes, because they burdened the masses and had a destructive effect on the facilities of life, particularly the economy and education, but no one listened and no one heeded advice. The organization’s leadership tried to cover over the educational catastrophe we were living through by encouraging students to cheat, which caused further destruction, while it exploited the poor economic conditions as an element instilling despair among the masses — the greater the frustration and despair, the greater the masses’ acceptance of the policy the organization pursued. That is, the organization used the weapon of the strike as a tool harmful to the people, driving them toward despondency.

Strikes harmed us without affecting Israel in the least — indeed, army patrols would relax on strike days because they knew calm would prevail. And from a media standpoint, strikes served no purpose except perhaps in the first days or months of the Intifada; perhaps Radio Monte Carlo was the station most interested in the subject, because it reflected the viewpoint of the organization’s leadership.

F. The international arena: The organization was told that the international arena was important and that it should be focused on in order to win international support and sympathy. The organization’s leadership heard these words, but it heard them so much that it went deaf to all other subjects. Its focus on this matter, to the neglect of other matters, led the Palestinians to appear as beggars soliciting sympathy and pity, as though international relations were built on good intentions and eliciting compassion.

The international arena, without underlying strengths, is of no use. Those strengths are represented by elements of power such as a strong economy, secret cells, lethal weapons, or an uprising. We had an uprising, but the organization’s leadership turned to the international arena with great efforts of its own that did not, in practice, contribute to strengthening the Intifada, but rather to weakening it.

G. Education: The sabotage of the educational process in the schools was among the worst things that befell the Palestinian people during the Intifada. Strikes ate into school days, to the point that the number of school days in one academic year shrank to about forty days. It was a sad matter, and every appeal to exempt schools, workshops, and factories from strikes failed — no ear would listen. How could a people that shuts down its schools and its factories hope to win, while its leaderships excel at delivering speeches about the importance of education and national production in confronting the enemy?

The general secondary school exams (the Tawjihi) turned into festivals of cheating over a number of years of the Intifada. National centers were established to prepare answers to exam questions, photocopy them, and distribute them to students in the exam halls. The cheating process began first through the use of loudspeakers broadcasting the answers from outside the exam halls, but the national movement developed its methods and made the operation more organized and efficient. National cheating committees were established, modeled on the national cheating committees that had operated in Israeli prisons.

I first became acquainted with the national cheating committees in Junayd Prison, located in the city of Nablus. I was astonished when the doors of the prison sections were opened on the day the general secondary exam began, since Israel allows the exam to be administered under the supervision of the departments of education. But the veteran detainees explained to me that the prison administration opened the doors to facilitate the movement of the national cheating committee, which answered the questions and recited the answers before the examinees. As I looked into the matter further, I found that the cheating committees were made up of representatives of the Palestinian factions participating in the Palestine Liberation Organization. I also found that the committee would appoint someone to sit the exam on behalf of a person who might be sick, unable to read or write, or outside the prison walls.

The free world borrowed this revolutionary experiment and applied it to the general secondary exam. Elements of the national movement led the cheating operation as a way of helping students whom the Intifada had distracted from their studies. And it was rumored — though I am not certain of this point — that a fatwa permitting the cheating operation had been issued from Tunis, where the Liberation Organization’s leadership was based.

Did the Liberation Organization’s leadership know that an ignorant person cannot achieve liberation? Did it grasp the danger of the deterioration of education for the Palestinian people and its cause? Perhaps no orders were issued to carry out the cheating (though I lean toward believing they were, given that winning political support on the scene over the years was achieved through laxity, clientelism, and feeding hypocrites with money) — but what prevented the leadership from issuing orders to stop this disgraceful practice? The Liberation Organization could easily have corrected the situation by declaring that anyone who cheated was a traitor to the homeland, but it did not do so.

Indeed, the cheating operation, or the pressures to cheat, even extended to the universities. A number of university instructors, bowing to feelings of loyalty or to methods of intimidation, gave some student leaders grades they did not deserve. And I know of many students at various universities who obtained high grades despite being failing students who did not bother to attend, simply because they were members of student councils loyal to the Liberation Organization’s leadership, or loyal student leaders. To be fair, this cheating was not confined to this case alone; it is observed that cheating extended to other factions favored by instructors sympathetic to them.

After all this, the organization comes to say: what is the alternative? Then, in its justifications for the negotiations and the agreement, it enumerates all the flaws that had been warned of over the years. The organization was told that its policies were leading toward the abyss, but it did not heed the advice; indeed, it is clear that, over the years, it was proceeding according to a specific, clear program leading to this very result — that is, the tactical policy the organization’s leadership had continually spoken of throughout the past years was, in truth, nothing but the organization’s strategy, which it had concealed from the people behind a veil of slogans and justifications.

It is entirely clear that the organization was not erring in its policies, but that these were deliberate policies meant to lead to a result the leadership wanted — the very result we see before us now. Otherwise, how are we to understand the insistence on these policies and the insistence on suppressing anyone who opposed them? It is understandable that a person might err once, twice, or three times — that is the nature of one who acts — but to err and continue erring despite advice, clarifications, and warnings, is a matter beyond the margin of error. The organization’s leadership was not under any illusion about what it was doing, because it wanted to lead the Palestinian people to this very stage, in which it would ratify the surrender of its rights.

The organization wanted to create an atmosphere of despair such that the people would accept whatever solutions it proposed with the enemy, and, given the existing balance of power, accept what the enemy wanted. That is, the matter is not one of poor judgment, but of deliberately poor judgment. Was there, then, a prior program that was meant to be carried out?

Whoever listens to the Liberation Organization’s leadership would think it spared no effort in the cause of liberation. It speaks of heroics, sacrifices, conspiracies, plots, planes, bombardment, shouting, dust, and so on. But the true measure remains in the general policy. What can a heroic fedayee achieve if his heroics are to be invested in political bidding wars? And what can an extraordinary person achieve in trying to entrench sound values in the face of a current of cheating and deception? Slogans have no value in the face of general policies, and do not withstand time, which is bound to strip away the truth.

The Cover for the Liberation Organization’s Policy

Anyone who follows the Liberation Organization’s policy through the main points noted in the preceding pages arrives at the conclusion that there is a great flaw in this policy, and that something remains unclear. Why was there no moral education to help carry out a revolution? Why was the Palestinian people left prey to hollow, demagogic slogans that amounted to nothing but noise? And why were agents left to roam freely within the ranks of the organization and the factions, with the Palestinian people paying the heavy price for it over the years? Why were the doors of investigation, scrutiny, and evaluation never opened? Why did spies gnaw away at the Palestinian people while the leaders knew full well that the infiltrations were large, widespread, and reached the highest levels of responsibility? And what was the sin of a people who wanted to liberate their homeland, that their sons should die and meet calamities and misfortunes without achieving any results? It is a terrible matter, and it drives a person to confusion, distraction, and thoughts some might consider forbidden. Did the leaderships not know that our sons who wished to fight from southern Lebanon or by sea were dying before they arrived, because Israeli forces were always waiting for them? They knew.

And why the financial corruption, and the failure to attend to construction and to providing job opportunities for Palestinians? Why is public money squandered while Palestinians are driven to work in Israel? And why does the money reach the whales while the worker, the farmer, and the craftsman — the very backbone of what remains of Palestinian production — are denied support? And why the damage to the Palestinian image through ugly, foolish conduct? Why the quarrel with our Jordanian and Lebanese brothers? In whose interest is hatred of Arabs planted in people’s hearts? Many questions, without end, surround the Liberation Organization’s policy.

But the bigger question concerns the Palestinian people itself: is it a people so foolish? No. The Palestinian people, like other peoples of the region suffering from backwardness and ignorance, has a capacity to analyze and understand matters no different, fundamentally, from the capacity of the region’s other peoples. It suffers from a general problem constituting an objective circumstance that could be overcome with time. But this objective circumstance was reinforced by several policies that formed a cover for the organization’s policy, foremost among them the following:

First: keeping the Liberation Organization’s leadership financially capable, so that it might remain able to attract support. The organization would periodically pass through contrived financial crises, but matters would soon be resolved. The organization would receive funds from Arab states loyal to the United States, at the very time the United States was denouncing the organization as terrorist and waging a powerful media war against its leadership. If the position of the United States and its Western allies was serious, why did they allow the organization to be funded?

The United States denied funds to a number of revolutionary organizations around the world wherever it was able to do so, and it was always capable of controlling the policy of the Arab states loyal to it in this regard. The United States imposed a financial siege on the Hamas movement and compelled Arab governments to take part in the effort, and it besieged Libya, Sudan, and Iraq and compelled Arab states to comply — so why did it allow the funding of the Liberation Organization’s leadership, despite having described it as terrorist for a long stretch of time? Our people in Palestine know that the organization never once declared bankruptcy, and that it remained capable of spending money in the country. Its budget fluctuated from time to time, but it remained able to meet a large part of its needs. It also remained able to meet the requirements of the leadership, which, as we shall see later, was not capable of continuing to lead without money.

Second: the Liberation Organization’s leadership enjoyed broad media coverage over the years, even amid the great onslaught by Israel and the West generally against it and against the organization. Indeed, France even employed Radio Monte Carlo to serve as a spokesman for the organization on the Palestinian cause. The radio station was more Palestinian than the Palestinians themselves, and continually defended the organization’s leadership, directly and indirectly, working to obscure a great many facts and marginalize other Palestinian forces competing with the leadership. The media apparatus helped the leadership in its extraordinary capacity for maneuver, deception, and the fabrication of events from which it would ultimately emerge as the party of heroism and courage. The most recent of these events was what was called the Al-Aqsa Intifada of 1996, which claimed the lives of about eighty Palestinians and left about a thousand wounded, for no purpose other than to improve the image of a leadership that had deteriorated after the implementation of the Oslo Accord.

Third: the Liberation Organization’s leadership followed a policy of so-called tactics. The organization’s leadership mastered the process of maneuver and deception to a very great degree, calling this art “tactics” — meaning taking immediate, day-to-day, short-term steps enabling it to get past difficulties, obstacles, and hostile policies. This art became such a behavioral feature of the Palestinian leadership that Arafat was nicknamed “the tactician.”

In practice, “tactics” amounted to crossing red lines on the Palestinian scene. The leadership would exploit crises and difficulties to announce new positions that were not acceptable on the Palestinian scene, and would explain them away as tactics aimed at getting through the current phase. The leadership would accept the new position while spreading among the strugglers the notion that it remained committed to the Palestinian constants, and that it was merely bowing its head a little until the storm passed. “Tactics” remained a continuous policy until the Palestinian ceiling fell to its lowest level, and the constants were lost.

What makes one suspicious of this “tactics” is that it was never backed by any strategic action. Whoever wants to maneuver or deceive in order to get past crises must find a foundation to lean his back against, so as not to lose himself and his goals in the midst of the tactics. For example, there might be a relationship with a number of Arab states one could lean on, or one’s people might be economically self-reliant, or there might be secret cells striking fear into the enemy, or a strong army, and so on. What did the Palestinian leadership do to support its tactics and to place the Palestinian people on solid ground? Nothing, of course. On the contrary, it destroyed what might have served as the nucleus of a foundation for the Palestinian people to stand on. As I explained earlier, Palestinian policy rested on strange premises that cannot enter into any logical analysis for defending the interest of the nation and the people.

The trinity of money, media, and tactics worked to provide cover for the aforementioned policies, allowing them to succeed, so that the Palestinian people ultimately found itself empty-handed, calling for the necessity of accepting the fait accompli and asking what the alternative was. The people were struck by many defeats and setbacks (which the leadership had always described as victories), which made it prey to despair, and it ultimately found itself alone, cornered, unable to do anything but accept what was granted to it. Despite this, the leadership portrayed it to the people as a great achievement deserving celebrations and festivals. And there remain, among the Palestinian people, no small number who still dance for an independence that never happened and a state that was never established.

The Palestinian leadership’s tactics began in the late 1960s, when Palestinian officials spoke of the impossibility of a successful military solution against Israel (see Abu Iyad’s book, A Palestinian Without Identity). It then progressed toward putting forward the principle of the secular state in the early 1970s, encompassing the adherents of every religion in Palestine. After that came the proposal of the Palestinian authority, which spoke of liberation in phases and of the Liberation Organization’s readiness to establish a Palestinian state on any part of Palestine that was liberated. In 1974, the Liberation Organization entered the world diplomatic arena in force, and indirectly proposed to the United States its readiness to accept Israel in exchange for recognition of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. In 1977, the organization’s leadership decided to move forward in search of a peaceful solution to the Palestinian cause, with its eye on meeting the American conditions Kissinger had announced in 1975: recognition of Israel, recognition of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the annulment of the Palestinian National Charter, and the renunciation of terrorism.

The organization’s leadership found a historic opportunity to reach a peaceful solution in 1977 and 1978, following Sadat’s visit to Israel and the signing of the Camp David accords, but the Palestinian people were not, at that time, ready to accept this solution, and the people of the West Bank and Gaza Strip hastened to hold a mass conference on the campus of An-Najah National University in 1978, in which they declared their rejection of the Camp David accords. The leadership was not comfortable with what happened, and a dispute arose between Arafat and some leaderships in the occupied land over the matter, such as Bassam al-Shak’a, but it was forced to accept the situation as a result of popular rejection.

The Palestinian leadership took another step away from the Palestinian National Charter upon its departure from Beirut in 1982, when it agreed to the American proposal, which at the time called for establishing Palestinian self-rule, led by the organization, in some of the territories Israel had occupied in 1967. This step was reinforced in 1983 when it broke the boycott of the Egyptian regime, which had been shunned by the Arab states because of its peace treaty with Israel. In 1985, Palestinian tactics moved to renouncing terrorism, when Yasser Arafat announced in Cairo his renunciation of terrorism. Matters developed further in 1988 when the leadership took a decision at the Palestinian National Council recognizing Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the right of the states of the region to live in peace. And a month after taking the decision, Arafat stood before the world’s media, announcing his acceptance of the three American conditions.

The tactics did not stop there — the declared Palestinian ceiling kept falling until it arrived at a self-rule that the Palestinian leadership now calls a state, calling its head the president of the State of Palestine.

Palestinian tactics progressed in step with the progression of Palestinian frustration and the defeats suffered over time under the Liberation Organization’s leadership. With every setback, an opening would appear before the leadership to make a new concession, and the Palestinian people, through the ranks of those who benefited from the organization’s money, would find the justification for this concession. Because of this, a justificatory mentality spread across the Palestinian scene, to the point that there was no longer room for scientific inquiry into phenomena or developments, and explanations came to rest on the leadership’s genius, the excellence of its leadership, and its absolute devotion to the people’s cause. The concession was proportionate to the degree of frustration, and whenever a need arose to make a concession, it had first to be preceded by an act that brought frustration upon the people. This appeared clearly and plainly during the Intifada, which turned into a heavy burden upon the people. And as matters developed, the question was no longer about the ceiling of Palestinian demands, but revolved instead around the final ground on which the concessions would come to rest.

The Israeli Ceiling

To understand the policy of one party to a conflict equation, it is important to become acquainted with the policy of the other party. What did the Israeli side propose over time, and what was the position it insisted upon?

Following the 1967 war, Israel announced a position it held to over the years. It said that any solution to the problem existing in the region could only come through direct, bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Arab states. Despite international resolutions, mediations, and the many attempts to reach a solution between the Arabs and Israel, and despite the ambiguous Security Council Resolution 242, Israel held firm to its declared position, insisting that if the Arabs wanted to obtain any of the gains Israel had achieved through the war, they had to sit at the table of direct, bilateral negotiations. It told the Arabs that the negotiating table alone would determine the solutions acceptable to both parties. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States nor any other state could impose a solution on the region, and it was for the states of the region to decide what suited them.

Israel had been concerned, since the early 1950s, with a war between itself and the Arabs, in order to teach them a harsh lesson and to impose a solution ending in peace agreements between itself and each Arab state separately. The Arabs filled the world with fiery speeches about liberating Palestine, and threatened and menaced the Zionist entity until military victory became the dream of the Arab street. According to Israel, Arab leaders filled their peoples with illusions and lies until those peoples became poised to pounce on Israel with a crushing, annihilating blow. This in itself constituted a problem for Israel, because popular mobilization, even if built on illusions and flimsy foundations, was bound to build popular positions whose effects could persist for a long time, reflecting negatively on Israeli interests. That is, the policy of lying adopted by Arab leaders produces an effect that enables generations to carry hatred toward Israel and to continually think of ways to inflict defeat upon it. For this reason, Ben-Gurion, along with a number of leaders of the Zionist entity, believed it would be better for Israel to enter a war against the Arabs so that the Arab people would face the truth and Arabs would know that their leaders were trying to create false images. Indeed, Ben-Gurion was even prepared to pay a huge sum of money to any Arab leader who would enter the war against Israel — that is, he was prepared to hire a make-believe warrior.

Israel hoped that the Arab people would understand the equation, and that this would make it easier for Arab leaders to enter negotiations with Israel and reach peace treaties preparing the ground for Israel’s integration into the region on various levels. Defeat might make it easier for Arab leaders to stop the resounding speeches and the lying, and to submit to the bitter truth — that Israel is the stronger and more capable party.

There was an opportunity before Israel in 1956, but the circumstances of the war were not favorable. The war was not an Israeli one but a tripartite one, and Israel could not achieve its goals because of the prevailing international circumstances.

The 1967 war was the historic opportunity for Israel to bring the Arabs to their knees. The Arab leaders grasped the reality of the matter, but the gap between them and the peoples’ willingness to accept defeat remained wide and deep. Israel, however, was not disposed to understand the sentiment of the Arab street, and insisted on its declared position of direct negotiations. But it was necessary for Arab defeats to follow one after another before the Arab people and the Palestinian people would understand that Israel was a glaring reality that could not be defeated, and that the security, peace, and economic prosperity of the region could not be achieved with its absence and its continued exclusion from the region’s activities.

That is, there is a clear Israeli ceiling, which can be summed up in the insistence on direct, bilateral negotiations leading to bilateral peace agreements. The most important element of this ceiling is that every Arab party must know in advance that Israel has security requirements it must meet. That is, the peace treaties mean that Arab leaders must become guardians of Israel’s security, placing their armies and military capacities at the service of this purpose. And Israel welcomes any Arab party willing to deal positively with its requirements — that is, willing to lower its own ceiling until it reaches Israeli ground.

Regarding the Palestinian territories specifically, Israel wished, immediately after the war, to reach a solution with Jordan, and proposed, through its foreign minister Allon and through the Labor Party’s program, a solution under which it would retain the Jordan Valley and Latrun as two security zones, and Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel. The Palestinians rejected this solution, which made King Hussein hesitant to accept it — this, even though the territory occupied in 1967 was, at that time, almost entirely free of settlements. In 1973, Golda Meir, then Israeli prime minister, put forward the idea of self-rule, but it found no response, particularly since the Palestinian people were, at that time, caught up in the revolution and hopeful that the whole of Palestine would be liberated. In 1977, Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, put forward a serious plan for self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza, proposing the establishment of an elected Palestinian council and the formation of a large police force armed with personal weapons, and chose Bethlehem to be the capital of this self-rule. But the plan was rejected by the organization’s leadership, and the people were not ready to accept it.

Menachem Milson, head of the Civil Administration in the West Bank, tried to establish a unilateral self-rule in 1981. He worked hard to form a Palestinian council to handle civil affairs, but he failed, and the organization stood firmly against his orientations, which relied fundamentally on forming a Palestinian council drawn from West Bank residents. Milson established the Village Leagues, collaborators with Israel, to serve as an institution implementing Israeli policies. Israel worked hard to make the idea succeed, hoping to establish through it a Palestinian self-rule under Israeli sovereignty. Israel was not comfortable with the continuation of direct occupation over the population, given the security and administrative burden this placed on its shoulders, and the bad reputation it earned on the international stage, in that occupation contradicted the democratic values and the freedom of peoples to determine their own fate that Israel prided itself on. For this reason, it saw fit to exercise the occupation through the Palestinian people itself. The idea of self-rule would allow it to rid itself of managing Palestinians’ civil affairs, to shed a stigma that dogged it on the international stage, and to grant it the right to continue controlling Palestinian land while giving Palestinians the geographic space suited to Israeli goals and meeting their future need for residential expansion.

But the Palestinian people in the West Bank did not respond to the Village Leagues, despite the various pressures Israel exerted. The Liberation Organization rejected the idea and warned everyone who responded to it. Yusuf al-Khatib, from the Ramallah area, met his death for being accused of cooperating with the Leagues.

But the proposal of self-rule was accepted, as I noted earlier, unannounced, in 1982, during the efforts of Philip Habib, the American envoy, to secure a safe departure for the Palestinian forces from Beirut. This acceptance was never announced, and the Palestinian people remain, to this day, unaware of what took place in Beirut. In any case, the people would not have accepted this proposal at the time, particularly since they believed, and still believe, that they had won in Beirut, to the point that the Palestinian fighters left Beirut raising their fingers in victory signs.

As for the Palestine Liberation Organization, it continually declared that Israel would not negotiate with it and would not recognize it. But at the same time, it opened secret channels of communication with Israel, channels that included both major parties, Labor and Likud. Contacts began long ago, though they became known to informed circles only in the early 1980s. Some go so far as to say that leadership-level contacts took place in the late 1960s. I myself was among those asked to meet Shimon Peres in 1982 on behalf of the Liberation Organization, but I refused. In any case, Israel’s declared rejection of the Liberation Organization points to a lack of seriousness, and suggests that it was not, in reality, a matter of principle so much as part of tactical political goals. Israel’s denunciation of the organization was heated, and the media campaign against it was fierce, but contacts between them existed both inside and outside the occupied land. Why? Was the goal of the propaganda campaign to preserve the Liberation Organization’s popularity among the Palestinian people? And was the Liberation Organization heading toward the Israeli ceiling, requiring diplomatic efforts to speed the organization’s steps toward this goal?

In this regard, I recall a discussion that took place among detainees one night in the Negev detention camp in southern Palestine. A number of detainees gathered, myself among them, and discussed the future of the relationship between Israel and the Liberation Organization. Some of us said, at the time, that the Liberation Organization’s leadership would reach a solution with Israel and would arrest Palestinians, and some of us exaggerated a little and said that Israel would rent out the Negev detention camp to the Liberation Organization once it handed over Palestinian affairs to it. This was in the first months of the Intifada in 1988, before any change occurred in the global balance of power and before the Gulf War erupted. Young men from Fatah objected to this discussion and considered it malicious and hostile, expressing an unjustified hatred of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s leadership. But the discussion did not proceed in this spirit; rather, it was based on a forward-looking view of existing policies taking their course quietly and continuously. The Palestinian National Council itself bore out the discussion when it announced its resolutions, referred to above, in 1988. That discussion expressed a feeling, and an analysis based on inference, that the organization was moving forward toward accepting the Israeli ceiling, and that it was gradually working to abandon the Palestinian demands, or ceiling.

History will, I believe, uncover astonishing facts about the secret meetings that took place between the Israeli and Palestinian sides, and what I fear most is that some of those meetings were aimed at coordination rather than negotiation. The result, in any case, has become plain to see: the Oslo Accord.