The Advocate

Arafat and I

Nirit Ben-Ari

Tel Aviv, November 4, 1995.

This day I will never forget. Neither will most Israelis. I went to Kikar Malchey Israel (The Plaza of the Kings of Israel) in Tel Aviv that night to show support for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. A year earlier, Rabin had come back to Israel from the White House, after having done what until than was an illegal activity by Israeli law: on the White House lawn, he shook hands with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Shaking hands with Arafat was not only illegal, but was largely considered a moral crime. When Uri Avnery, former member of Knesset and life-long peace activist and advocate for Palestinian rights, crossed lines during the battle of Beirut and met Arafat in 1982, several Israeli cabinet ministers called for his indictment for high treason. Later in the 1980s, Abie Natan, an Israeli citizen and the man behind the ship-turned-pirate-radio-station “Voice of Peace,” received jail sentences for his regular meetings with the Palestinian leader.

But than came Yitzhak Rabin, the mythical general of the Six Days War, who changed everything by going to the White House and shaking Arafat’s hand. Israelis remained resistant, even in the face of the old general’s transformation into a peace-dove. For most Israelis, Arafat remained a symbol of the Palestinians’ armed struggle, and hence an enemy. A common Israeli phrase was that Arafat had “blood on his hands.” That, according to Israeli opinion, disqualified him from representing the Palestinian people, talking with Israelis, and generally being considered to be a human being.

Yet many other Israelis, including myself, saw things differently. Although Arafat was still Arafat, if Rabin was willing to do the unheard-of, something dramatically different might occur. Or, so we wanted to believe.

I was not yet radicalized back then, and like many others in my circles, I thought that exchanging the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for peace with Palestinians was generally a good idea. So I went to the streets to show it.

I lingered in the plaza with my friends after the rally, enjoying the Israeli music pumping out of the speakers and running into friends from high school and military service. The music stopped abruptly, and we soon left. No more than 20 minutes later, back at home, I was told that Rabin had been shot. A short hour passed, and the TV broadcasted the news: Rabin had been killed. The assassin was a religious Jew, a law student from Bar-Ilan University named Yigal Amir. Amir listened very carefully when his Rabbis preached that he who was giving away parts of the Land of Israel deserved death. Amir was a good Jew. That night he waited for Rabin to come off the stage, slipped past security with his innocent looks and shoot Rabin three times in the chest.
Rabin was dead. Arafat paid a visit to the mourning Leah Rabin, Rabin’s wife. And I, a year later, packed my bags, said my good-byes to friends and family, and came to New York City. I thought I was leaving behind my troubled country, the people who couldn’t stop killing each other, to start a life in a place where people drink their lattes without being worried about bombs going off.

In English they call it “wishful thinking.” Little did I know that I was about to embark on a journey that would change my values, my beliefs, my understanding of the world around me and myself. As I learned to speak English, I also learned the phrases Al Nakba, Intifada, and UN resolution. When I returned to the country I call home, I decided to go where most Israelis go uniformed and armed: the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Ramallah, August 2003
I arrived in the city with two American activists and a Palestinian schoolteacher from the West Bank village of Jayyous after three hours of driving on donkey roads and being stopped at one checkpoint for about 20 minutes. As soon as we arrived, Palestinian friends and journalists with the Palestinian Authority (PA) newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, appeared to show us around the city. Our first stop was the mukata’a compound, the PA headquarters where Arafat had been imprisoned by the Israeli government since April 2002. This is routine hosting-drill in Ramallah: all visitors are first taken to see what the Israelis have done to the Palestinian government offices. Our hosts attempted to organize an impromptu visit with the Ra’is, who loved to meet international activists, bestowing them with hugs and kisses. Too bad, we were told; the Ra’is was busy and couldn’t see us. So we stayed in the mukata’a for a while, observing the destroyed buildings from which the Palestinian government was supposed to operate.

Destroyed government buildings and an imprisoned president is more than a rubble of stones and an old man kissing visitors. It is, as the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling described it, a symbol of politicide: destroying the Palestinian public sphere, including its leaders, government buildings, schools, universities and hospitals. I is also the destruction of the private sphere, making everyday life unbearable for people in an effort to dissolve the Palestinian people as a legitimate society, polity and economy.

I was not sad that I missed my chance to meet Arafat. Almost none of the many Palestinians I met while visiting the West Bank were raving about the old leader. In fact, most Palestinian activists and community leaders, most of whom were busy organizing peaceful resistance to the West Bank Wall being built on their lands and farms, had only complaints and grievances against the PA’s corruption and lack of support for their struggle. In Budrus, I was told that no PA official showed up to support a well-planned protest against the Wall at which a member of the Swedish parliament was arrested. Jayyousians told us that when Israeli authorities designed draconian requirements blocking access to their land, which most of them failed to obtain, the PA had lent a hand in facilitating the permit regime. I also was told that a Palestinian cement company, owned by the family of Prime Minister Qurei, sold cement to Israeli contractors building the Wall and constructing settlements. Arafat knew about it but did nothing to stop it, they said. The incident also appeared in The Boston Globe, Electronic Intifada and Al-Jazeera.

Those reasons were enough to make me critical of Arafat and the PA. But on the other side of the Green Line, people had a totally different set of complaints: Arafat was orchestrating a bombing campaign against Israeli civilians; Arafat was not a “partner for peace”; Arafat rejected the most generous offer ever given by an Israeli government; Arafat proved that all he desired was the destruction of the Jewish state, and not co-existence.

Was this the truth?

Quoting Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, since the Oslo peace agreement was signed in September, 1993, Israel has committed the following acts:

*Dismembered the West Bank into "Areas A, B and C," giving the Palestinian Authority full control of only 18 percent of the land and retaining full Israeli control over 61 percent

*Divided tiny Gaza into "yellow, white, blue and green areas," giving 6,000 settlers control of 40 percent of the territory and confining a million Palestinians to the rest

*Imposed a permanent "closure" preventing masses of Palestinian workers from seeking employment in Israel and preventing Palestinians in general from entering Jerusalem. The Palestinian workforce has been transformed from one based on agricultural and an incipient industrial and commercial economy to impoverished casual laborers dependent upon an Israeli economy from which they are now largely excluded

*Expropriated thousands of dunums of farm and pasture land from its Palestinian owners for exclusive Israeli settlements and roads

*Uprooted more than 120,000 olive and fruit trees—for settlement or road construction, for "security" purposes, or for denying ownership rights to their Palestinian owners

*Established more than 40 new settlements, including whole cities like Kiryat Sefer, Tel Zion and Giva’ot, constructed some 90,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem and the settlements, and doubled its settler population

*Demolished more than 1,200 Palestinian homes, including some 500 during the last Intifada;

*Begun construction of a massive 480 km system of highways and "by-pass" roads serving the settlements while dissecting the West Bank and Gaza into dozens of tiny islands

*Exploited the natural resources of the Occupied Territories, illegally drawing, for example, 25 percent of its water from the West Bank and Gaza while leaving Palestinians with chronic water shortages

*Vandalized the West Bank, one of the world’s most sacred heritage sites, destroying its historical landscape and turning it into a disposal site for Israel’s industrial and urban wastes

*Virtually completed the incorporation of the West Bank into Israel proper, thereby eliminating any possibility of a viable and truly sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel, raising the danger of apartheid

*Implemented plans for a "unilateral separation"—another sign of apartheid—including the construction of a massive system of bunkers, walls, fences, minefields, "security crossings," checkpoints and other fortifications.

A generous offer? Partners for peace?

I never got to meet Arafat, but I did meet many, many Palestinians, who entrusted me with their stories and welcomed me into their homes as a guest of honor, even though they knew I was Israeli. For them, Arafat was a symbol of their national and personal struggle to survive as people and as individuals. When he was brought to Ramallah to be buried, they went by the thousands into the streets to pay him their last respects. It’s a shame that the American media covered Arafat’s death as it usually covers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: with utter contempt and an almost total lack of Palestinian voices.

Arafat’s death might not change much for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, but it is surely the end of an era. With his death, the only hope remaining is that the older generation of Israeli leaders will also leave the political stage, allowing new blood to come to the fore and reject the conventional wisdom of the elders that Israelis and Palestinians are mortal enemies. Only then there will be new hope that we can resist the fundamentalist forces interpreting the words of what they call God, and make way for the courageous voices of those who are no longer willing to sacrifice human life to achieve political goals and are ready to share the land.

Nirit Ben-Ali is a student in the PhD program in Political Science.