Arafat, and other encounters in Palestine/Israel

I got back home to Charlottesville, Virginia, Monday evening, and have been working my rear end off since then writing a long article to a tight deadline. Got up at 4 .a.m. this morning to work on it, no less. That wasn’t as bad as it seems, since the time-difference between here and Israel/Palestine allowed me to think of myself as basking lazily in bed till noon.
But now, having met the deadline I was working to, and having taken the faithful pooch Honey for a good long walk, I’m ready to blog here again. Where was I?
I confess I haven’t posted anything meaningful here yet about some of the most politically “significant” encounters I had while I was in Palestine/Israel. Like my lunch-party with Yasser Arafat last Friday. Or the content of the good discussions I had on Thursday with former Palestinian Minister of Culture Ziad Abu Amr and PLO Executive Committee Qays Samarrai (Abu Leila). I really didn’t see the need to advertise encounters like these to the whole world at a time when I still (on Sunday morning) had to face the prospect of a lengthy interrogation and inspection of all my baggage and notes at the time I would be leaving Ben-Gurion airport.
Are you like the many other people I have talked to since my lunch with Arafat whose first question has been, as always, “How did you find him?”


My previous encounter with the Palestinians’ “historic leader” was in May 2002. In this article, which I published soon after that, I described him as “fragile and tired”. I also wrote that at times during our 30-minute meeting,

    the Palestinian leader’s once-renowned memory seemed to flag and his attention wandered. Three of his currently favored advisers were sitting around him. One of them, spokesman Saeb Eraqat, jumped into the conversation frequently, often talking “on behalf of,” or over, or even in direct contradiction to “the President.” It was an extraordinary performance, a display of l

21 thoughts on “Arafat, and other encounters in Palestine/Israel”

  1. Oh what a sweet, sad tale. I remember well meeting the luminous Ruth First in Khartoum in the late 60s with some Sudanese communists.
    And I remember a senior member of the Palestinian community in Kuwait (where I was teaching) asking me (who had just come from sixteen years living in N Ireland) how long the Irish resistance to the British had taken (in relation to the intifada just begin) and I said ‘Well it goes back at least to Cromwell ;o(
    I am so glad to have found your blog
    keep us up to speed with everything in your head!

  2. Robin, hi, welcome to the Comments boards here!
    That is rather a sobering comparison, the one with the N. I. situation, isn’t it… And of course, a number of other embedded-colonial situations have been equally long-lasting… Not least the one I am, to my intermittent perplexity (?word: well it should be), a part of here in the US of A.
    I have heard Arafat say on a number of occaions, Nahnu la al-hunud al-humr (“we are not the Red Indians!”) Actually, from the present perspective, the situation of the Native Americans in the US seems quite a lot better in many ways than that of the Palestinians…. They all have stable citizenship rights here in the US, plus they have some territories (massively reduced) over which their treaty rights are generally recognized. In addition, there is some broad recognition/acknowledgment in the popular culture here that harm “was done” to the Indians by the whole US colonial venture…. This fall, the National Museum of the American Indian will open on the National Mall, near the Capitol Building, which I think is (however many centuries overdue) a great step forward.
    So no, Mr. Arafat, the Palestinians are not Red Indians. Bt you might be quite a bit better off if today if you were…
    Yes, tragic. (Keep the comments coming!)

  4. Not quite, Jonathan, but close. If the ethnic cleansing here had indeed been “thorough” there wd have been “None left to tell the tale” (title of Allison Des Forges’ great book of testimonies of survivors of the Rwandan genocide.)
    And as I understand it, that was the case for many of the Native American nations here– but fortunately, not quite for all of them. So the costs that Manifest Destiny imposed on the indigenous peoples of this continent can now be expressed, represented, and perhaps understood that much better than they would have been if the ethnic cleansing had been “thorough”?

  5. True. The main point, though, is that we began treating the Indians well only after we had killed them, penned them up and settled their land to the point where they no longer posed a threat. We can say “the Indians got a raw deal” today because it costs us nothing. I have no illusions as to how we would probably act if they were still strong and putting up a fight.
    So when you say that the Indians are treated better than the Palestinians now, you’re leaving out a long period during which they were treated considerably worse. No doubt, if Israel had taken the WB in 1948 and chased most of the Arabs out, those who remained would be Israeli citizens today. Unlike Benny Morris, though, I wouldn’t consider this a preferable outcome; I believe (although I can of course never prove) that it would have resulted in a net increase in suffering. I don’t think you would approve if Israel emulated the United States’ history w/r/t the Indians, even if this resulted 100 years from now in Israelis sipping coffee and remarking on what a raw deal the Palestinians got.
    There is, as far as I know, only two settler states that have made any real progress at integrating indigenous minorities that haven’t been mostly wiped out. One of them is New Zealand, and the other is… Israel (with respect to the Arabs in Israel proper). New Zealand has been much better at it than Israel, which is why I’d like to see Israel adopt something resembling the post-1975 Waitangi framework w/r/t its Arab citizens.

  6. I doubt comparisons with the American or Pacific colonial experiences are very enlightening, and Ireland is scarcely better. For one thing, the time scales are so huge. Ireland’s conflict, for example, goes back to Henry II (1171) during which it metastasized several times into different struggles.
    Similarly, the European conquest of the Americas usually is discussed as if the USA were the only nation involved–in fact, the project of conquest was well advanced by the time the US became an autonomous participant. The US, however, receives the lion’s share of the blame because, ex post facto, a unifying ideology was applied to the conquest (including that carried out by prior generations of Europeans). That ideology had almost nothing to do with the actual motives of the people dispossessing the American Indians, nearly all of whom acted with very limited and personal interests. “Manifest Destiny,” for example, comes not from a speech by a US statesman, but an editorial by John L. O’Sullivan in 1839, “The Great Nation of Futurity.”
    Perhaps your humble fan is an imbecile, but he’s never understood why a diffuse mob, beyond any legal authority and often any legal sanction, would be imagined to be influenced by anything besides universal human greed; but there you have it.
    The case of Israel is entirely different. The Jewish state represents a refugee population put in a death stand* by the several powers of the era. This simple fact, usually ignored by all commentators, has left Israel at the mercy of foreign projects.**
    ————————————-
    * In The Art of War (Sun Tzu, 5th cent. BCE), he describes the strategy known as a “death stand” under which a battalion of troops is positioned such that they either fight victoriously or they die.
    ** “project” in the 18th century sense of “scheme,” “con,” “grift,” fantastical adventure; see concluding paragraph of Wealth of Nations.

  7. James– I love yr historical depth, and yr erudition… Too tired now to respond to everything you write.
    Jonathan, I know you’ve written about NZ’s Waitangi framework elsewhere (yr great Headheeb blog, mainly), and I think it’s a great addition to the conversation. But as far as I understand it, the Queen of England plays an important symbolic role in that Framework as being a sort of “neutral party” of undefined but powers but recognized general “legitimacy” who can importantly stand above the direct or potential contest for resources etc between the NZ “whites” and the Maoris.
    So here’s my question: between the Israelis and the Palestnians, who gets to play Queen? (Are they taking volunteers? I could polish up my Sloane Ranger accent and start walking around with two silly little dogs… )
    New Zealand has been much better at it than Israel, which is why I’d like to see Israel adopt something resembling the post-1975 Waitangi framework w/r/t its Arab citizens.

  8. I think the role of the Queen in a Waitangi-based Israel would have to be filled by a constitution agreed upon through mutual consultation. A document as well as a person can stand at the center of the state, as long as it’s a document that everyone holds dear.

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