 In a Ruined Country 1-4 (David Samuels - The Atlantic)
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David Samuels has written for Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, and The American Scholar. This is his first article for The Atlantic Monthly.
Copyright © 2005 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; September 2005; In a Ruined Country; Volume 296, No. 2; 60-91
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200509/samuels
The Atlantic Monthly | September 2005
In a Ruined Country How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine .....  he war for Jerusalem that began after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's failed peace offer at Camp David in the summer of 2000 has become the subject of legends and fables, each one of which is colored in the distinctive shades of the political spectrum from which it emerged: Yasir Arafat tried to control the violence. Arafat was behind the violence. Arafat was the target of the violence, which he deflected onto the Israelis. Depending on which day of the week it was, any combination of these statements might have been true.
In his patchwork uniform, which combined a military tunic with a traditional kaffiya, the Old Man, as those who had known Yasir Arafat the longest called him, was a strange and defiantly contradictory person. He was the father of the Palestinian nation, and the successor to the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem, Omar Ibn al-Khattab and Saladin. His official title was rais of the Palestinian Authority, a title that is ambiguously translated as "chairman" or "president." Arafat was also the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the head of Fatah, the PLO's central faction, which he founded in Kuwait in the late 1950s. The title that came first on his personal stationery was head of Fatah, which means "conquest"—a backward acronym for Harakat al-Tahrir al-Falistiniya, the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Spelled forward the acronym yields "Hataf," which means "death."
Arafat's failure to conquer Jerusalem did not shatter his conviction that history was moving in his favor: under pressure from within and without, isolated in the world, the State of Israel would eventually crack apart and dissolve, to be replaced by Arab Palestine. "We will continue our struggle until a Palestinian boy or a Palestinian girl waves our flag on the walls, mosques, and churches of Jerusalem, the capital of our independent state, whether some people are happy about it or not," he promised. "He who doesn't like it may drink the water of the Dead Sea." Arafat understood his actions as part of an unfolding within the long duration of historical time rather than as disembodied headlines on CNN. The inability of his diplomatic interlocutors to understand what he was driving at exposed the fatal limits of the Western conception of politics as a way to find a happy medium between competing interests.
Arafat's given name, Muhammad Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Raouf Arafat al-Kidwa al-Husseini, provides close readers with a biography in brief of the man who created a nation out of the Arab refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The boy Muhammad Abd al-Rahman was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929, and grew up in the city's Sakakini district. Both his parents were Palestinians. His father, Abd al-Raouf, was a merchant from Gaza. In the late 1920s Abd al-Raouf left Gaza to prosecute a claim to a large chunk of Cairo that he believed was the rightful property of his family. The claim was futile, and preoccupied him until the day he died. Arafat seldom mentioned his father and didn't attend his funeral. His mother, Zahwa, for whom he named his only child, was a daughter of the al-Saud family, whose home in the Old City of Jerusalem was part of the neighborhood that was bulldozed by the Israelis after the 1967 war to create a plaza in front of the Western Wall. Although not born in Jerusalem, as he often claimed, Arafat did live in the al-Saud family house for several years with his brother Fathi after his mother died, in 1933. Arafat's grandfather was named Arafat, and his family name was al-Kidwa. His clan was the al-Husseinis of Gaza, not the famous Jerusalem family. "Arafat" was the only part of his given name that he would carry into adulthood; "Yasir" was a childhood nickname related to the word for "wealthy" or "easy." He didn't like school, and showed an early talent for organizing the neighborhood kids. "He formed them into groups and made them march and drill," his sister Inam told a biographer. "He carried a stick to beat those who did not obey his commands. He also liked making camps in the garden of our house."
It made sense that a people without a homeland, with only a recent shared history of expulsion, flight, catastrophe, shame, and defeat to bind them together, would fall under Arafat's spell. He was famous for his mastery of al-taqiya, the ability to dodge a threat, and of muamara, conspiracy. Those who met him, even his intimates, inevitably described themselves as rahba, awestruck. The man they met was mutawaadi and baseet—humble and modest. As much as any other man, Arafat was responsible for the making of the modern Middle East. The raids he launched on Israel from Gaza, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon in the 1960s helped to precipitate the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which stripped the Arab regimes of their credibility and set the stage for Arafat's emergence as the Arab Che Guevara. Arafat's creation of a Palestinian para-state inside Lebanon in the 1970s made him a wealthy man, and a linchpin of Soviet strategy in the region. Expelled from Beirut in 1982 by Ariel Sharon, he went into exile in Tunis, where he watched with surprise as a younger generation of Palestinians rose up against the Israeli occupation in 1987. His support for Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War left him broke and stripped of his political assets in the early nineties, and out of touch with the young revolutionaries in the West Bank and Gaza. In 1993 Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, which committed Israel and the United States to a process whose end point would be the establishment of a Palestinian state. He returned to Gaza through Egypt on July 1, 1994.
In a largely traditional society Arafat stood out because he was self-made, the symbolic incarnation of a people that owed its continued existence to him. Decades before he began to show his age in public, his lips trembling, his hands shaking, his belly distended—even then he was known as the Old Man. His speeches were laundry lists of slogans and exhortatory phrases such as "Ya jabal ma yahzak reeh" ("O mountain, the wind cannot shake you!") and "Li-l-Quds rayyihin, shuhada bi-l-malayyin" ("To Jerusalem we march, martyrs by the millions") interspersed with Koranic verses. The symbolic leader of the Palestinian nation spoke with a pronounced Egyptian accent. His lips flapped when he spoke. To some, the combination was irredeemably comic. He distinguished himself within the Palestinian national movement by his boundless energy for the cause, alqadhiya, which might also be translated as "the case," a term appropriate to a proceeding in a courtroom. One of the peculiarities of the nation that Arafat created was that it was founded on a festering grievance rather than any positive imagination of the future; the worse things were in the present, the stronger the Palestinian case became.
For the diplomats of the European Union, whose dream of creating a new kind of political organization that would rival the United States for global influence was burdened by the historical guilt of colonialism and the Holocaust, the image of the Jew as oppressor that Arafat offered the world was both novel and liberating; the State of Israel would become the Other of a utopian new world order that would be cleansed of destructive national, religious, and particularistic passions.
Perhaps it was the clownish aspect of Arafat's behavior that made it easy for the leaders of Israel, the United States, and Europe to believe that Arafat was a minor tribal chieftain whose true aim was to enjoy red-carpet treatment during his visits to the White House and to other seats of civilized government. The Palestinian leader was fond of time-saving measures, and could cite the exact number of hours that shaving once every five days, as he did, could add to a man's life. He spent his spare hours watching cartoons on television. His favorites were Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, and Tom and Jerry. It took Arafat more than an hour each morning to arrange the tail of his kaffiya in the shape of Palestine and pin it to the shoulder of one of his tunics, which his guards bought for him in military-surplus stores in the cities they visited. He completed his fanciful outfit with a pin in the shape of a phoenix, symbolizing the rise of the Palestinian people from the ash heap of history, along with a variety of military ribbons and decorations that testified to his self-appointed status as "the only undefeated general in the Middle East." In ranks behind the decorations were felt-tipped pens of different colors, to which court gossips liked to attribute decisive significance. Green ink was for his reports. Red ink meant that someone was to receive a certain sum of money; or else red ink meant that his signature was to be ignored. Inside the pockets of his jacket were the small black notebooks in which he wrote about money. When he was in doubt about a particular sum, he would withdraw a notebook with a flourish, cite a specific figure, and then put the notebook back in his pocket. Inside the notebooks were the codes that unlocked the secret bank accounts to which only he had access. When his private plane went down in the Libyan desert in 1992 and could not be located for thirteen hours, a great and memorable panic seized the leadership of the PLO at the thought that the remnants of the organization's vast financial empire had disappeared in the wreckage.
In a Ruined Country
(page 2 of 12)
 fter Arafat died, on November 11, 2004, there were some who believed that the chaos and violence that he had brought with him to the Palestinian territories might follow him to the grave, and that peace between Israelis and Palestinians might finally be at hand. There were others who noted the absence of any clear cause of death in the voluminous files provided by the military hospital south of Paris where he died. Some of his closest aides and advisers spoke openly of their belief that he had been poisoned. Suspects in the poisoning included the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, and the CIA, as well as a team of cyclists for peace who had visited Arafat the previous September. Only the idea that Arafat might have expired from natural causes was deemed too farfetched for serious consideration.
There were also those among his closest aides who found the discussion of the Old Man's death unseemly and distracting. The Old Man was a great figure in history, they believed. It was the Old Man who had created the Palestinian people out of a host of miserable refugees. It was the Old Man who had brought the Palestinians back to Palestine.
Several weeks after Arafat's death I visited the Muqata, his compound in Ramallah, the West Bank city that serves as the Palestinian capital. There I found groups of workmen carrying garbage out of the ruined buildings as if they were excavating the burrow of an animal. As I stood and watched, a group of a hundred soldiers in matching brown uniforms emerged from their barracks and stood more or less at attention as they were inspected by a senior officer. These are the faces of Palestine, I thought, the faces of the conquerors and the conquered of the past thousand years—sharp-featured Arabs, fierce-looking Turks, light-skinned Europeans, dark-skinned Egyptian-looking soldiers from Jericho and Gaza. In response to their officer's command, they turned and faced a rubble-strewn field above which hung a poster of Arafat in a Soviet overcoat, waving good-bye. The Arabic motto on the poster read, "On Your Way to Fulfill the Palestinian Dream." Behind him was the golden dome of the Mosque of Omar.
The Bodyguard
 n the weeks that follow Arafat's burial in the parking lot of the Muqata, beneath an honor guard of transplanted olive trees, members of Arafat's inner circle decide, one by one, that it is important for his story to be told, and agree to talk to me.
Awaiting their pleasure, I arrange to stay in a private apartment in East Jerusalem that belongs to a friend, and that is otherwise empty during the winter. In the mornings, as I wait outside in the rain for a car to pick me up, I watch the children walk to school—the boys holding hands with boys, the girls in hijab walking to a nearby girls' school that Jewish would-be terrorists have tried to blow up with a bomb. The girls wear the hijab close to their skulls in a way that pulls back the skin on their foreheads and prevents stray hairs from escaping. They also wear blue jeans under their skirts. Across the street is the Don Derma family restaurant, which quaintly advertises "cocktails" and serves ice cream and coffee in the evenings.
I have different cars and drivers depending on what day it is and where I want to go. When I want to go to Gaza, or to the refugee camps, I travel in a white Land Rover with a sticker from an international aid organization where three of my friends have found work. Most of my official meetings are arranged for me by two local translators, without whom I am often as helpless as a child. The going rate for a translator with decent contacts is $150 to $200 a day. N., a hard-core supporter of Fatah, speaks seven languages, including German, Italian, Arabic, and Hebrew. She was born in Haifa and carries an Israeli passport. She was recommended to me by a Palestinian functionary in Ramallah who welcomed the opportunity to monitor my movements and contacts. N.'s loyalty to Fatah means that she has connections that more neutral translators lack; when she hands off unmarked packages to men who dart out of storefronts and alleyways near al-Manara Square, in Ramallah, I decide that it is best to play dumb. Her favorite game is to drive the wrong way through oncoming traffic at checkpoints as the soldiers draw their guns and order us to stop. "Sahafia—journalist!" she will shout, leaving me to plead our case.
One evening I go to see one of Arafat's bodyguards, Abu Helmi, at his well-secured apartment in Ramallah. To reach the Qalandia checkpoint visitors must pass the ugly concrete wall that divides the outer Arab villages from East Jerusalem, and then an open field of rubble. To the left of the rubble there is always a traffic jam at the checkpoint. After four years of war, crossing from one side to the other remains a haphazard affair. The road is cut by a snarl of concrete blocks and barbed wire whose makeshift appearance belies the fact that it is a permanent feature of the landscape. Getting through the checkpoint from Jerusalem to Ramallah takes about thirty to forty-five minutes. The return trip to Jerusalem can take up to four hours. After my days with N. are over, I sometimes go back out with Q., a translator who is close to members of Arafat's private guard. Q. grew up in Jerusalem and hates Fatah, and is an excellent source of rumors and gossip. At night the potholes are harder to spot, and the road stinks of burning garbage.
 n the night that Arafat was buried, Abu Helmi stayed up with the rest of the Old Man's guards to see who would come and pay their respects. He was amazed that so many of the inner circle didn't come.
Abu Helmi is a simple man, of unbreakable tribal loyalties. His eyes fill with tears at the mention of the Old Man as he shows us photographs from the old days. Thirty pounds heavier than in the earliest of the photos, but with the same dark hair and bushy moustache, Abu Helmi bears a marked physical resemblance to Saddam Hussein. It was Abu Helmi's job to travel ahead and make the arrangements when the Old Man visited foreign countries. When the Old Man's plane went down in the Libyan desert, Abu Helmi suffered an injury to his back. He walks stiffly over to a wide chest of drawers, which contains several thousand photographs of the Old Man taken on airstrips in Mali, Uganda, Comoros, and other faraway places where the Palestine Liberation Organization invested its money and the Old Man was welcomed as a head of state. There are photos of the Old Man with Muammar Qaddafi in Tripoli, and in a pilgrim's robes in Mecca.
"I don't want to speak about Abu Ammar as a president or a revolutionary leader; I want to speak about Abu Ammar the father," Abu Helmi begins, referring to the Palestinian leader by another of his familiar nicknames. ("Abu Ammar," meaning "father of Ammar," is a fossilized cognomen for "Yasir," which refers to a faithful companion of the prophet Muhammad.) As he speaks, Abu Helmi stirs his coffee with a sugar spoon that he squeezes gently between forefinger and thumb.
"For many years, at nights, we would suddenly wake up, with him coming over to see if we were covered, if we were sleeping or resting," Abu Helmi says. "During the meals, when there were no guests, we always ate together. He was always insisting, giving us food, spreading, cutting, saying 'Eat, eat.' If he was really happy with someone, he would insist that he feed him from the food on his plate into his mouth. He was always keeping us patient and telling us, 'Patience is not measured by the hour.'
"Always he would notice very small details—even if someone hadn't shaved for a day, he would always notice it and say, 'Why haven't you shaved?' He insisted that we wear ties and that we look good and that we appear to the world as we are, as civilized people."
"Did Abu Ammar enjoy that people around him had lavish things although his own life was so modest?" I ask.
"He was very pleased," Abu Helmi answers. "He never minded. He used to say, 'These people deserve to live—they should enjoy their life.'"
"Would he remember a mistake long after it had happened?" I ask.
"He doesn't forget. Not the right or the wrong. For us, he never refused anything. Once my niece, the daughter of our martyr, my brother, she was about to get married, and I went in to ask permission to attend that marriage in Jordan, and Abu Ammar immediately agreed, and he insisted that I carry a present of gold. Whenever there was a celebration or wedding, and we used to invite him by card, he would send the congratulations."
Abu Helmi's youngest son, who speaks fluent English, and is paralyzed from the neck down, is carried in through the living room and laid on a hospital bed, where he can hear the conversation. Abu Helmi's daughter brings more coffee from the kitchen.
"Abu Ammar started his day at nine a.m. until one-thirty in the afternoon," Abu Helmi says, wiping a bit of coffee from his thick black moustache. "One-thirty was his nap time, and lunch until four-thirty. Then it would stretch late into the night. Whenever he woke up to pray the dawn prayers, which was about three-thirty, he would always come out to check on us and to see what was going on, 'Do I need to make any phone calls?' He was always in constant surveillance of his work. Any issue or request that reaches the hands of Abu Ammar—it must be solved immediately."
After the Israelis attacked the Muqata in 2002, during Operation Defensive Shield, the Old Man sandbagged the windows for fear that he would be shot by Israeli snipers. Proclaiming himself to be under siege, he refused to leave the Muqata until his final illness, in October of 2004. On sunny afternoons he positioned a chair in the breezeway between the ruins of the compound's main building, a former British prison, and the modern office building next door. Here he talked on his cell phone and read telegrams from foreign ministers of Europe, African heads of state, and other notables expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause, the careful records of which were preserved on his presidential Web site. "Nahnu la al-hunud al-humr [We are not the red Indians]," he often proclaimed to the reporters who came to see him. On slow afternoons he liked to sit outside the Muqata with his guards.
"We would always be gathered around him," Abu Helmi remembers. "Sometimes we would bring fruit and peel it for him or make cookies here at home. He would ask, 'From where did you bring this?' And we would say, 'We made it at home, it's cheaper than buying it at the market.' He would say, 'Look at this guy, look how he's dressed.' He would always say, if he saw a chocolate, 'This is too much calories,' or 'Too much fat.'"
"How did Abu Ammar feel about Yitzhak Rabin?"
"He loved him," Abu Helmi says, with all apparent sincerity. "When I mention Rabin, I say, 'May God bless his soul.' That means great respect and great affection."
"Do you remember what Abu Ammar felt about the Israeli leaders who followed Rabin—about Peres and Netanyahu and Barak?"
At this question Abu Helmi laughs, and makes a sharp cutting motion with his hand.
In a Ruined Country
(page 3 of 12)
Two old friends who didn't Make it to Arafat's funeral
 ennis Ross was the chief Middle East negotiator for the United States from 1993 to 2000. I interviewed him in Washington, and I see him again one evening at the American Colony Hotel, in Jerusalem, beneath the starry ceiling of the Pasha Room.
"I walked into this villa in Tunis," Ross tells me, "nice but not extraordinary, and the first thing I noticed when I walk in is it had the feel of a revolutionary hangout, but not revolutionary in the sense of these guys who are out there blowing up people. It reminded me of when I was a student activist in Berkeley. You saw posters of Arafat as a young man. You saw posters of Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad, and you had the feeling 'Geez, these were the founders of Fatah,' and it was like a lair, a revolutionary lair, and I'm struck by this feeling, like I'm back in a kind of activist hangout where people are thinking, What can we do today? And I have that feeling until I get through the outer room, and then I see these guys through a mesh curtain laughing at The Golden Girls. I hear Bea Arthur's voice, and the incongruity of being in this revolutionary lair and Bea Arthur's voice—you know, I started to laugh. And I thought, What kind of revolutionary hangout is it where the people watch The Golden Girls?
"The first time I went to complain to him about the bombing—the first set of bombings were, I guess, in April '94, in Hadera and Afula—and I'm with him, and he leans over like this and he whispers, 'You know, it's Barak. He's got this group, the OSS, in the Israeli military, and they're doing this.' And I said to him, 'Don't be ridiculous.' I said, 'You know the Israelis are not killing themselves.' This was classic Arafat, never wanting to be responsible."
Q: "So you don't think that he was actually a hysteric?"
A: "No, I think it was all an act."
erje Roed-Larsen was the father of the Oslo Accords and is the most visible representative of the United Nations in the Middle East. A handsome man with a puckish sense of humor, he is also a bit of a dandy. On the afternoon that I meet him for a long conversation about Oslo, he is wearing a white pocket square in the breast of his dove-gray suit, which he has accented with a pair of silver cufflinks. He met weekly and often every other day with Arafat for more than a decade.
"Usually he would say, 'I agree in principle,'" Roed-Larsen told me, "which means 'No.' Or 'Why not?'—which also means 'No.' Or 'I have to think about it.' Or 'It's not me, it's Hamas.' Or 'I'm doing my best.'"
Q: "What was it like when he lied to you?"
A: "He lied all the time. And he knew it. I'd say, 'Abu Ammar, cut the crap. Let's talk serious.' And then he could either talk serious or not talk serious. He'd say nonsense."
Q: "The nonsense would consist of what?"
A: "'It's not me—it's al-Qaeda.' 'It's the Iranians.' 'It was a Lebanese ship.' 'It's the Syrians.' All that kind of stuff. Of course everybody around him knew he was behind it. He didn't tell any of his closest companions. Because he always operated with layers and layers and layers and layers. He was extremely compartmentalized. His dirty-tricks domain—he didn't inform any of his ministers. They didn't have a clue about it. He had a financial cupboard. He had a dirty-tricks cupboard. He had a white-business cupboard. He had a black-business cupboard. Everything was compartmentalized. He was a master manipulator, and in a way he was a master politician who made catastrophic mistakes in both moral and political terms. He thought he was immortal; he trusted that he had God's hand protecting him for everything. And he goes away in the middle of the biggest defeat of his life. That was one of the reasons he was so miserable before he died."
Q: "Do you remember the last time you talked to him?"
A: "I was at home in Herzlyia on a Sunday. I remember it vividly. I hadn't spoken to him in eighteen months. My cell phone rings."
Roed-Larsen's voice suddenly gets higher, and then he starts screeching like someone's crazy old aunt.
"'Terje! Terje! It is Abu Ammar! How are you? How are you? How was the holiday?' And then he says, 'Ah-dah-dah, always remember, Terje, eh, your wife is my sister! my sister! my sister! And I am the uncle of your children. Your children, the uncle!' And then he said, 'And you are always welcome to see me when you wish.' That was it. He got sick the week after, and then he died."
"We announce Tourism!"
he drive from Jerusalem to Nablus, the West Bank city that is known in the Hebrew Bible as Shchem, home to Jacob and his children, takes about two hours. Or it might take three hours. Or it could take five. My friend Nadir is driving me there to visit Munib al-Masri, one of Yasir Arafat's oldest friends and now the richest man in Palestine.
The line of vehicles at the Nablus checkpoint this afternoon is short. Cabdrivers wait on the other side of the barrier to take passengers to their destinations inside the city. In the separate lane for settlers three religious Jewish children, two boys and a young girl, try to hitch a ride back to their fortresslike dwellings on the rocky hillside.
Nablus is a city built between two biblical mountains, Har Grizim and Har Ebal. In the Bible, Har Grizim was blessed with a bountiful spring, and Har Ebal was cursed. Al-Masri's gorgeous neo-Palladian house sits on top of Har Grizim, overlooking the refugee camps and the old casbah of Nablus. Visitors are greeted by a statue of Hercules in the center of the hall. Sunlight shining in from a dome above traces the hour on the polished marble floor. Other rooms, which I wander through with the gentle encouragement of my host, contain such varied treasures as the floor of a 2,000-year-old Roman villa, a Rafaelo tapestry, seventeenth-century French dining-room furniture, and what al-Masri proclaims to be the oldest mirror in the world, which originally came from Venice, and which broke on its way here from Ramallah. One of al-Masri's sons designed the house. Five hundred men with donkeys carried out his plans at the height of the intifada, carting the stones and the precious antiques up the side of the mountain.
A hawkishly handsome man of seventy-one, al-Masri was born in Nablus and graduated from the University of Texas. He is the rare example of a wealthy Palestinian who made his money elsewhere and came back to Palestine out of nationalist motives.
"Yes, the Palestinians missed a lot of opportunities, but don't blame us," he tells me. "We were a million people in this land, and the Israelis were less than a hundred thousand people. But they came here very determined, and they worked very hard. Then they committed a few massacres that made people afraid, and then our stupid leaders told the people to leave. We always tend to say it's a Zionist plot with the British. What we call a plot, they call a plan."
As one of the leading financiers of the Palestinian national movement, al-Masri was close to Arafat for almost half a century. His first acquaintance with the movement came when he was the head of Phillips Petroleum operations in Algeria, where he met Khalil al-Wazir, otherwise known as Abu Jihad, the organizational genius of the Fatah movement, who was assassinated in Tunis in 1988. Al-Wazir had been sent to Algeria to open Fatah's first official bureau at the invitation of the Algerian revolutionary Ben Bella.
"One day I found somebody in front of me who said his name was Khalil al-Wazir," al-Masri recalls. "He made a favorable impression. I liked him. Maybe six months later another guy came. It was Arafat. It was late '63, and he starts coming back. I didn't like at the time the way Yasir Arafat spoke, because he spoke in Egyptian dialect. Arafat told me, 'What can I do? I went to school there. I did this and I did that.' And we became very good friends. I felt a great sympathy toward him, this little guy. He made believe that he was born in Jerusalem. He loved Jerusalem. He loved Jerusalem a lot. Oh, in that early period he was very dynamic. Piercing eyes, and always 'the cause.' Always a pamphlet or something to show me."
Al-Masri made a fortune in the oil-services business, and was invited to serve as a minister in the Jordanian cabinet by his friend the Jordanian prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal. By then Yasir Arafat was the head of the PLO and the hero of the battle of Karamah, in March of 1968, when he led a strong fight against an invading Israeli column and then displayed captured Israeli vehicles in the streets of Amman. The PLO forces in Jordan carried weapons in the street and began to take over the country, setting up roadblocks, collecting tribute, and meting out punishment. As the Hashemite Kingdom tottered, al-Masri became an important bridge between his friends Arafat and King Hussein. He remembers visiting Arafat, where he was holed up in a bunker on top of a mountain at the end of the failed Palestinian revolt that became known as Black September, surrounded by 6,000 or 7,000 Jordanian troops.
"It was a nice day, but he always wants to make it dramatic, Arafat," al-Masri says, with a forgiving wave of his hand. "He wants to take us down to the bunker. It stinks, it's smelly, dark. I said, 'Come on'—he made his point. He took us down anyway. He made us cry about how bad it was for the Palestinians. He said the Jordanian army went to Palestinian houses and they were killing the men and doing things to the women. Of course, when we went down the mountain, the first Jordanian soldier we saw said you did this and that to us, and now you Palestinians will have the gun."
In a Ruined Country
(page 4 of 12)
Arafat refused al-Masri's invitation to meet with the king at Amman. Instead he went to Lebanon. Wasfi al-Tal was assassinated shortly after by members of Black September, the Fatah terrorist group that was created to avenge the Palestinian defeat in Jordan. His assassins shot him in a hotel lobby in Cairo; one of them got down on his hands and knees and lapped at Tal's blood.
"No doubt Arafat was a great man," al-Masri says. "No doubt he had vision. Most of the people that you see now being very important, I see them wanting the grace of Yasir Arafat. They want to be in his grace. Ah, he thought money was power," al-Masri adds, with a wistful glance around his study. The money he spent to buy the loyalty of his court, al-Masri gently suggests, could easily have paid for a functioning Palestinian state instead.
"With three hundred, four hundred million dollars we could have built Palestine in ten years. Waste, waste, waste. I flew over the West Bank in a helicopter with Arafat at the beginning of Oslo, and I told him how easy we could make five, six, seven towns here; we could absorb a lot of people here; and have the right of return for the refugees. If you have good intentions and you say you want to reach a solution, we could do it. I said, if you have money and water, it could be comparable to Israel, this piece of land."
Al-Masri's eyes mist over. "Abu Ammar, yes. He's a simple man. He slept on a simple bed. He doesn't want any houses. He doesn't want anything. I remember one day I wanted to bring him some free suits, tailor-made suits, you know, and he said no, no, no. I can't. But he gave me a suit. He told me, 'This is my suit. You make it longer, you wear it and have it.' Be very interesting for you to see."
"Let's go eat," he says, beckoning me to join him. We eat at the table in his kitchen, which is adjacent to his grand house.
Halfway through lunch an aide brings down the suit, one of the famous military tunics that Arafat's guards bought at surplus stores. The brass buttons are decorated with the Fatah eagle. I check the inside of the jacket for a tailor's label, and find there is none. "Who would dare?" al-Masri explains.
"Put it on," he urges me. I put on the jacket, and find that Arafat was approximately my size, with slightly narrower shoulders. One of the inner pockets closes with a zipper.
"He kept money inside," al-Masri says. I suggest that it is strange to think that Arafat managed the affairs of his people from the inside pocket of this coat.
Al-Masri remembers sitting with Arafat one night in 1988 as the Palestinian leader negotiated a formula that would allow the United States to recognize the PLO. "They gave him the formula, and he said it in a speech in Geneva, but he put in extra words, so no one could figure out what he was saying," al-Masri remembers. "The Americans said, 'No way.' So I stayed up all night with him and Dick Murphy, the assistant secretary of state, to work out what he must say. The formula was 'We totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism.' So they called a press conference, and he said everything right, except instead of 'terrorism' he said, 'We announce tourism! We announce all forms of tourism!'"
Talk of Arafat's last illness makes al-Masri sad again. "Every morning I used to go see him and give him the medicine because he would not take it from anybody else," he remembers, looking moodily out over his lawn. "Yeah, and I never thought he would die."
"How long did you know that he was sick?" I ask.
"For the last year. Last year in September he told me he doesn't feel well. So, and he felt that something was not right, and it looks like he had the same symptoms again, but the last time he had enough immunity. Yeah, he knew."
I am struck by al-Masri's use of the word "immunity," which is a word characteristically associated with aids. Rumors that Arafat died of "a shameful illness" spread quickly through the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat, who married his wife, Suha, in 1990, was often surrounded by children and was openly affectionate with some of his bodyguards. The Palestinian leadership denounced reports that Arafat was a homosexual as lies spread by Mossad, the Israeli foreign-intelligence agency. Accounts also circulated that a secret agreement had been reached between the Israelis and Arafat's heirs, stipulating that the truth about Arafat's fatal illness would not be released, the Palestinian leader would be buried in Ramallah and not in Jerusalem, and the wanted men who had accompanied him in his captivity would not be pursued by Israeli forces.
"He knew that it was the same disease that he had a year ago?" I ask. Al-Masri nods his head.
"Same symptoms," he answers. "But look how strong he was. I mean, when Abu Mazen came," he says, referring to Arafat's longtime deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, "we brought him from one bed in his small room to a bigger room where we could sit. I sat on the bed. Abu Mazen sat in front of him and Abu Alaa sat in front of him. He said, 'Ah, Mazen.' His face was very red, and you know that he was very sick, but he wants to show that he was still in control of the details with Mazen, you know? He said, 'I have this flu, ah, ah. I have this flu. Came and went to my stomach.'"
The Old Man's Pockets
long the outer walls of the Muqata guards lounge beneath tattered posters of the white-bearded lunatic figure that Abu Ammar became in the last years of his life. His people accepted his foibles because he was their father. He named them. He paid for their weddings and their funerals. It was part of his paternal pose that no Palestinian who asked him for money went away empty-handed. When he visited cities, he was followed by an aide with a Samsonite briefcase stuffed with bundles of cash, which he distributed to the people who lined up to beg for money. Ordinary Palestinians placed classified advertisements in the newspaper asking Arafat for money. Others wrote him letters. "I sent him a letter on the occasion of the wedding of my second daughter," a qahwehgee, or "coffee guy," who works outside the Muqata tells me one afternoon, as he fills a small cup with hot black coffee from a large brass boiler. He indicates with a nod that the Old Man was generous.
Such generosity was a common feature of Arafat's rule. Documents taken by the Israeli army from the Muqata paint an astonishing portrait of the range of requests to which Arafat routinely responded with cash. The captured documents record requests for school fees for poor children in Gaza (Arafat gave them $250 each) and $34,000 in tuition and expenses for the daughters of a PLO official to study in Britain ("$10,000 is to be paid"). Though Arafat routinely cut his bequests to ordinary Palestinians to half or a third of what was asked, no such economies were inflicted on the petitions of his top officials. When one member of Arafat's circle requested money for the purchase of paintings of Mecca and Medina intended as gifts for a lady friend, Arafat was glad to oblige ("The two pictures should be paid—66 thousand dollars").
Members of the presidential guard got more money than they asked for. When Lieutenant Mahfoudh Aissa asked for plane tickets for his wife and four children to visit his sick mother-in-law in Tunis, Arafat approved the request, adding, "The tickets are to be paid for and an additional $1,000 for expenses." He then forwarded it as usual to the Ministry of Finance, which served through most of his reign as the Palestinian leader's personal cashbox.
For those at the top of the heap the rewards were much larger and more systematic. The amounts of money stolen from the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people through the corrupt practices of Arafat's inner circle are so staggeringly large that they may exceed one half of the total of $7 billion in foreign aid contributed to the Palestinian Authority. The biggest thief was Arafat himself. The International Monetary Fund has conservatively estimated that from 1995 to 2000 Arafat diverted $900 million from Palestinian Authority coffers, an amount that did not include the money that he and his family siphoned off through such secondary means as no-bid contracts, kickbacks, and rake-offs. A secret report prepared by an official Palestinian Authority committee headed by Arafat's cousin concluded that in 1996 alone, $326 million, or 43 percent of the state budget, had been embezzled, and that another $94 million, or 12.5 percent of the budget, went to the president's office, where it was spent at Arafat's personal discretion. An additional 35 percent of the budget went to pay for the security services, leaving a total of $73 million, or 9.5 percent of the budget, to be spent on the needs of the population of the West Bank and Gaza. The financial resources of the PLO, which may have amounted to somewhere between one and two billion dollars, were never included in the PA budget. Arafat hid his personal stash, estimated at $1 billion to $3 billion, in more than 200 separate bank accounts around the world, the majority of which have been uncovered since his death.
Contrary to the comic-book habits of some Third World leaders, such as President Mobutu Sese Seko, of Zaire, and Saddam Hussein, Arafat eschewed lurid displays of wealth. His corruption was of a more sober-minded type. He was a connoisseur of power, who used the money that he stole to buy influence, to provoke or defuse conspiracies, to pay gunmen, and to collect hangers-on the way other men collect stamps or butterflies. Arafat had several advisers who oversaw the system of patronage and theft, which was convincingly outlined in a series of investigative articles by Ronen Bergman that appeared during the late 1990s in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The PLO treasurer, Nizar Abu Ghazaleh, ran the company al-Bahr ("the Sea") for a small number of wealthy shareholders, including Arafat's wife, Suha. Al-Bahr set the price of a ton of cement in Gaza at $74, of which $17 went into Arafat's private bank account. One of Arafat's favorite bagmen, Harbi Sarsour, ran the General Petroleum Company, which established a monopoly over all the gasoline and fuel-oil products sold in the West Bank and Gaza. A company called al-Sakhra ("the Rock"), run by Fuad Shubaki on behalf of Fatah, profited hugely from an exclusive contract to provide all uniforms and other supplies to the Palestinian security forces. Official monopolies on basic goods and services had exclusive suppliers on the Israeli side. These profitable contracts were made available by Arafat to companies associated with former high-ranking members of the Israeli civil administration and the security services in the West Bank and Gaza.
The genius behind this system was Muhammad Rachid, who became Arafat's closest economic adviser. A onetime protégé of Abu Jihad, Rachid was a former magazine editor who became involved in the diamond business. He came to Arafat's attention because of his keen talent as a businessman, and because he was an ethnic Kurd—which meant that he was safely removed from the family- and clan-based politics that always threatened to disrupt the division of the spoils.
In their cities and villages Palestinians were subject to the extortion and violence of Arafat's overlapping security services, which competed among themselves for payoffs, arbitrarily arrested people and seized their land, and forced citizens to pay double or triple the price for everything from flour and gasoline to cigarettes, razor blades, and sheep feed. The fact that nearly everyone in Palestinian political life had taken something directly from Arafat's hand made it hard to criticize him; it was easier to go along. In 1991, at the low point of Fatah's finances, Ali Shahin, one of Arafat's earliest allies, wrote a secret report lambasting Fatah's "inconceivable moral degradation," for which he blamed the excesses of a leader whose true interests were "the red carpet, the private plane of the President, free rein to spend money." Shahin became the minister of supplies in Arafat's government and was notorious for selling spoiled flour and making truckloads of chocolates sit at the Erez checkpoint in the heat in order to help out a friend who owned the only candy factory in Gaza. The economy of the Palestinian territories, which had enjoyed startlingly high growth rates after 1967, when it passed from Jordanian and Egyptian control into the hands of the Israelis, stagnated and then went backward. In less than a decade Yasir Arafat and his clique managed to squander not only the economic well-being but also the considerable moral capital amassed by the Palestinian people during two and a half decades of Israeli military rule.
Continued: page 5-8 / page 9-12
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