Re: Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire -- The Secret Life of the Worl
Posted: Tue Jun 09, 2015 3:25 am
Epilogue
After Abu Iyad's murder in January 1991, I tried to trace Jorde to the Mediterranean haunts where we had first met the previous summer. He had disappeared. Some of his mates said he was afraid Abu Nidal would kill him and he had gone into hiding. Others believed he had made his way back to Spain, to the tourist bars and discos of Barcelona. He was resourceful, and I had no doubt that he would survive somehow, perhaps even cross my path again one day.
But Jorde was not the only one to hide. The murder of Abu Iyad robbed many people of their protector. In Tunis, where the PLO had gone after being thrown out of Beirut in 1982, it was as if someone had overturned an ant heap, sending its inhabitants in all directions. The PLO had not recovered its nerve since the Israelis had killed its military supremo, Abu Jihad, in Tunis in 1988. The murder of Abu Iyad made matters even worse. By killing Abu Iyad, Abu Nidal had shown that he could hit the very top of the PLO's intelligence and security apparatus. No one was safe. Arafat's organization was shown up yet again as lax, chaotic, and infiltrated. No one trusted anyone else and PLO morale was terrible.
Atif Abu Bakr and his colleagues in the Emergency Leadership were also in trouble. They had vowed to wrest Abu Nidal's organization from him. But having lost Abu Iyad, they too dispersed, terrified of being killed. Some went underground. Others, like Abu Bakr, who was now penniless, scraped up what they could and left Tunis in search of safer haven abroad. These men could scarcely count how many times they had been forced to pack their bags.
The disaster suffered by the PLO and by the Emergency Leadership was soon made vastly worse by the ignominious defeat of Saddam Hussein, whom Arafat had supported. Arafat, who had wanted to be recognized by the West, now found himself condemned by much of it, and by most Arabs too -- by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, and their allies in the wartime coalition, who had now stopped sending money to the PLO. Many Palestinians were now sick of Arafat, although most could not say so out loud. The structure of Palestinian resistance outside the occupied territories was collapsing. Years of diplomatic effort had been thrown away. By the summer of 1991, the PLO seemed weak and more isolated than ever.
Arafat's misfortune was Abu Nidal's good fortune, although this was not always understood by outsiders at the time. During the 1990-1991 Gulf conflict, the Western press had speculated that Abu Nidal would place his terrorist network at the disposal of Saddam Hussein, his first sponsor. But this was to misread Abu Nidal, who was too shrewd to back a loser; nor would he choose the same side the PLO chose. Far from supporting Iraq, he had immediately exploited the conflict to ingratiate himself with members of the anti-Saddam coalition.
In the early summer of 1991, as if suddenly oblivious of his terrorist record, Egypt, incredibly, let Abu Nidal open offices in Cairo -- apparently, to punish Arafat for choosing the wrong side. With this move, Abu Nidal had been given a second chance in an Arab world more deeply divided than ever by the Gulf war.
Abu Nidal is a professional killer who has sold his deadly services certainly to the Arabs and perhaps to the Israelis as well. His genius has been to understand that states will commit any crime in the name of national interest. A criminal like Abu Nidal can flourish doing their dirty work. He could not have survived if his "clients" had not found him useful. They are responsible for his actions. Iraq set him up; Syria took him over; Libya inherited him; whether or not Israel manipulated and exploited him -- and at the very least the evidence suggests there is a case to answer -- it has certainly benefited from his attacks on the moderate PLO and has done nothing to stop him despite his attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets. And now Egypt has resuscitated him in opposition to Arafat, whom it despises for supporting Saddam.
Abu Nidal has served many masters with many interests. His shrewd grasp of regional politics, his lack of moral restraint, and his talent for survival have made him the king of the Middle East underworld, a world-class gangster.
Throughout Abu Nidal's career, the thread has been his hostility to Yasser Arafat and the PLO, a hostility shared by each of his sponsors, including most recently Egypt. This provides the clue to his success. Israel has for years wanted to destroy the PLO. Abu Nidal's Arab sponsors have also found the PLO threatening, and though they have been willing to buy it off, they have also felt it necessary to contain and enfeeble it, so as to frustrate Arafat's ambition of independent policy making. For years Abu Nidal has kept the Palestinian national movement down and both Arabs and Israelis have benefited.
Arab leaders have publicly supported the Palestinian cause, but they have, almost without exception, distrusted the PLO, which has often challenged their authority in their own countries, attracted Israeli reprisals, and even threatened to drag them into war. The PLO must share part of the blame for this Arab hostility. Under Arafat's leadership, it allowed itself to get involved in Arab squabbles; it clashed at various times with the state interests of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia and, most recently, Kuwait; its bureaucracy is incompetent and often corrupt; it clung too long to hollow warlike slogans and was fatally slow in defining realistic political objectives; it was hopeless at presenting its case to the West; it has been a babel of conflicting and self-serving voices rather than a disciplined liberation movement.
Yet Arafat is still owed the credit for renouncing terrorism and attempting to seek a negotiated settlement with Israel since 1974 -- a position that so alarmed both Israeli and Arab rejectionists that the most committed PLO doves were murdered by Israeli and Arab killers, the latter, Abu Iyad believed, acting on Israel's behalf. The truth is that the PLO has for years been the main victim of terrorism rather than its perpetrator, the antithesis of the popular perception encouraged by Israeli propaganda.
Today, although battered and stumbling from Israeli and Arab assaults, the PLO remains, for lack of an alternative, the champion of Palestinian aspirations for a homeland. Arafat will sooner or later pass from the scene, the intifada may be crushed or die from exhaustion, but Palestinian nationalism will not go away -- and will perhaps become more violent -- so long as there are five million people alive who call themselves Palestinian. The next Abu Nidal who emerges may not so easily be turned against his own people.
Until the Palestinians' legitimate grievances are met, Palestinians, and perhaps all Arabs, will never live in peace with Israel. The Arab leaders' betrayal of the Palestinians makes a joke of Arab nationalism, while Palestinian suffering at Israel's hands is the blackest stain on Israel's national record.
The Arab states have dealt harshly with the Palestinians out of weakness, probably because they could not defend them against a far more powerful Israel. One reason Arab leaders hate the PLO is that it is an unwelcome reminder of Arab impotence. Israel, meanwhile, has dealt harshly with the Palestinians from strength, because there was no one around to restrain it. No countervailing Arab power, no force in the region, and, apparently, no international pressure has sought to make Israel desist from the brutalities, listed by Amnesty International and others, that it inflicts on its captive Palestinian population.
Many of these problems -- Israeli occupation, guerrilla resistance, civilian suffering, terror -- stem from Israel's victory in 1967 over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, when it seized great tracts of territory and emerged as an imperial power immeasurably stronger than all its neighbors put together. Isaac Deutscher, a historian of the Russian revolution, was one of the first to observe that colonizing a million or more Arabs would hurt Israel. He quoted the bitter German phrase Man kann sich totsiegen: "You can drive yourself victoriously into your grave."
Just a few days after the Six-Day War, Deutscher, a Jew and a distinguished anti-Stalinist, told an interviewer (New Left Review, June 23, 1967): "It was only with disgust that I could watch on television the scenes from Israel in those days; the displays of the conquerors' pride and brutality; the outbursts of chauvinism; and the wild celebrations of the inglorious triumph, all contrasting sharply with the pictures of Arab suffering and desolation, the treks of Jordanian refugees and the bodies of Egyptian soldiers killed by thirst in the desert. I looked at the medieval figures of the rabbis and hassidim jumping with joy at the Wailing Wall; and I felt how the ghosts of Talmudic obscurantism -- and I know these only too well -- crowded in on the country, and how the reactionary atmosphere in Israel had grown dense and stifling. Then came the many interviews with General Dayan, the hero and saviour, with the political mind of a regimental sergeant-major, ranting about annexations and venting a raucous callousness about the fate of the Arabs in the conquered areas. ('What do they matter to me?' 'As far as I am concerned, they may stay or they may go.')"
What would Deutscher have thought, I wonder, of Shamir and Rabin, of Arens, Sharon, Geula Cohen, and the rest of them, of the bone-breaking beatings and the tortures, of the grisly detention camps and the pitiless curfews, of the death squads, of the children murdered by the score, of the Palestinian girl of nineteen I read about the other day who was forced to give birth while handcuffed to the bars of her Israeli hospital bed?
How can Jews, who have known far greater suffering themselves, do such things? For the miserable career of Abu Nidal might never have happened had Israel been willing to talk with the PLO in 1974, when Arafat sent his four messages to Henry Kissinger saying that he was ready to sit down.
The Israeli writer Amos Oz says that Israelis and Palestinians have gone mad and, for their own protection, need to be separated until they can recover their sanity. This book describes a case of dementia. I have written it to show what bloodstained lunacy goes on behind the scenes. Palestinians and Israelis have been killing one another over a pocket handkerchief of territory -- the West Bank -- captured by Israel in 1967. Palestinian hopes of identity and self-respect rest on this sliver of land: For them, anything less than self-government there means a continued diaspora or bitter servitude. They kill and die to get it back. But many Israelis, claiming that the West Bank is an integral part of the "land of Israel," will kill and die rather than give it up. Without peace, the prospect ahead is of more terror and counterterror of the cruel, remorseless sort I have described in this book.
Over the years, I have come to believe that Israel's long-term security lies not in crushing Palestinian nationalism and the PLO but in coming to terms with them. Far from threatening Israel, a Palestinian statelet on its borders would strengthen Israel, by gaining it full acceptance into the Middle Eastern family.
Israelis tend to express their situation in existential terms as if under constant threat of extinction. But Israel faces no existential threat. The last time it faced such a threat was in the brief truce during the 1948 war, as Ezer Weizman, an Israeli war hero and former air force chief, has publicly acknowledged. The debate today is not about Israel's existence -- that question was settled over forty years ago -- but about the terms and nature of the peace that it must make with its Arab hinterland. It is a peace that I, for one, involved in studying the area for the past three decades, ardently hope for.
Although the Arabs want peace, there are in my estimation two things that they will not accept and that, if Israel insists on them, are bound to breed further terrorist violence such as Abu Nidal's, and in due course further wars. The first is the permanent oppression and dispersal of the Palestinian people. If Israel wants real peace, it must make room for a Palestinian homeland, as a partner not an adversary, within the boundaries of historic Palestine.
The second thing the region will not tolerate is permanent Israeli domination. Accepting Israel as a major player in the Middle East system, competing and interacting with Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the others, is something the Arab players are reconciled to, indeed expect and look to. But they are not ready to live indefinitely in the shadow of Israeli power, in fear of attack by its far superior military force. Vulnerability and humiliation inevitably drive them to acquire the means to hold Israel in check. Such deterrent means may not yet be available to Israel's weak and divided neighbors, but the quest for them will go on -- and, most likely, cause Israel to preempt, setting off a new cycle of violence.
Yet a stable and long-lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors can only rest on mutual deterrence, on an Arab-Israeli balance of power, and eventually on good neighborliness. Israel's security cannot forever be maintained at the cost of the insecurity of its neighbors -- the formula of successive Israeli and American governments over the decades.
Readers must reach their own conclusions about Abu Nidal, bearing in mind that Abu Iyad and his Fatah allies had every reason to make a case against Abu Nidal and Israel, their two greatest enemies. If, despite his crimes, he is judged to be a Palestinian "patriot," then he proves how the conflict has reduced to gangsterism the Palestinians' yearning for a homeland. If Abu Iyad and others are right that he is an Israeli instrument, then he is proof of the political and moral depravity to which Israel and its Arab collaborators have sunk.
The cost of Israel's possession of the West Bank is incalculable. It has been paid by Palestinians in deaths and in shattered lives, but also by Israel, in the brutalizing of its society and its army; in the glaring absence, as it shapes its policies, of anything worthy of Jewish ethics; in the loss of its good name and the corruption of its diplomacy as it manipulates international opinion and ducks and weaves to avoid negotiations that might entail the return of the territories to their owners.
When Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev's foreign minister, was accused by hard-line Soviet critics of having "lost" Eastern Europe and "allowed" Germany to unite, he thoughtfully replied, "It was the price we had to pay in order to become a civilized country." It is an answer that Israel might ponder as it considers the fate of the occupied territories, suffering and seething under its rule.
After Abu Iyad's murder in January 1991, I tried to trace Jorde to the Mediterranean haunts where we had first met the previous summer. He had disappeared. Some of his mates said he was afraid Abu Nidal would kill him and he had gone into hiding. Others believed he had made his way back to Spain, to the tourist bars and discos of Barcelona. He was resourceful, and I had no doubt that he would survive somehow, perhaps even cross my path again one day.
But Jorde was not the only one to hide. The murder of Abu Iyad robbed many people of their protector. In Tunis, where the PLO had gone after being thrown out of Beirut in 1982, it was as if someone had overturned an ant heap, sending its inhabitants in all directions. The PLO had not recovered its nerve since the Israelis had killed its military supremo, Abu Jihad, in Tunis in 1988. The murder of Abu Iyad made matters even worse. By killing Abu Iyad, Abu Nidal had shown that he could hit the very top of the PLO's intelligence and security apparatus. No one was safe. Arafat's organization was shown up yet again as lax, chaotic, and infiltrated. No one trusted anyone else and PLO morale was terrible.
Atif Abu Bakr and his colleagues in the Emergency Leadership were also in trouble. They had vowed to wrest Abu Nidal's organization from him. But having lost Abu Iyad, they too dispersed, terrified of being killed. Some went underground. Others, like Abu Bakr, who was now penniless, scraped up what they could and left Tunis in search of safer haven abroad. These men could scarcely count how many times they had been forced to pack their bags.
The disaster suffered by the PLO and by the Emergency Leadership was soon made vastly worse by the ignominious defeat of Saddam Hussein, whom Arafat had supported. Arafat, who had wanted to be recognized by the West, now found himself condemned by much of it, and by most Arabs too -- by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, and their allies in the wartime coalition, who had now stopped sending money to the PLO. Many Palestinians were now sick of Arafat, although most could not say so out loud. The structure of Palestinian resistance outside the occupied territories was collapsing. Years of diplomatic effort had been thrown away. By the summer of 1991, the PLO seemed weak and more isolated than ever.
Arafat's misfortune was Abu Nidal's good fortune, although this was not always understood by outsiders at the time. During the 1990-1991 Gulf conflict, the Western press had speculated that Abu Nidal would place his terrorist network at the disposal of Saddam Hussein, his first sponsor. But this was to misread Abu Nidal, who was too shrewd to back a loser; nor would he choose the same side the PLO chose. Far from supporting Iraq, he had immediately exploited the conflict to ingratiate himself with members of the anti-Saddam coalition.
In the early summer of 1991, as if suddenly oblivious of his terrorist record, Egypt, incredibly, let Abu Nidal open offices in Cairo -- apparently, to punish Arafat for choosing the wrong side. With this move, Abu Nidal had been given a second chance in an Arab world more deeply divided than ever by the Gulf war.
Abu Nidal is a professional killer who has sold his deadly services certainly to the Arabs and perhaps to the Israelis as well. His genius has been to understand that states will commit any crime in the name of national interest. A criminal like Abu Nidal can flourish doing their dirty work. He could not have survived if his "clients" had not found him useful. They are responsible for his actions. Iraq set him up; Syria took him over; Libya inherited him; whether or not Israel manipulated and exploited him -- and at the very least the evidence suggests there is a case to answer -- it has certainly benefited from his attacks on the moderate PLO and has done nothing to stop him despite his attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets. And now Egypt has resuscitated him in opposition to Arafat, whom it despises for supporting Saddam.
Abu Nidal has served many masters with many interests. His shrewd grasp of regional politics, his lack of moral restraint, and his talent for survival have made him the king of the Middle East underworld, a world-class gangster.
Throughout Abu Nidal's career, the thread has been his hostility to Yasser Arafat and the PLO, a hostility shared by each of his sponsors, including most recently Egypt. This provides the clue to his success. Israel has for years wanted to destroy the PLO. Abu Nidal's Arab sponsors have also found the PLO threatening, and though they have been willing to buy it off, they have also felt it necessary to contain and enfeeble it, so as to frustrate Arafat's ambition of independent policy making. For years Abu Nidal has kept the Palestinian national movement down and both Arabs and Israelis have benefited.
Arab leaders have publicly supported the Palestinian cause, but they have, almost without exception, distrusted the PLO, which has often challenged their authority in their own countries, attracted Israeli reprisals, and even threatened to drag them into war. The PLO must share part of the blame for this Arab hostility. Under Arafat's leadership, it allowed itself to get involved in Arab squabbles; it clashed at various times with the state interests of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia and, most recently, Kuwait; its bureaucracy is incompetent and often corrupt; it clung too long to hollow warlike slogans and was fatally slow in defining realistic political objectives; it was hopeless at presenting its case to the West; it has been a babel of conflicting and self-serving voices rather than a disciplined liberation movement.
Yet Arafat is still owed the credit for renouncing terrorism and attempting to seek a negotiated settlement with Israel since 1974 -- a position that so alarmed both Israeli and Arab rejectionists that the most committed PLO doves were murdered by Israeli and Arab killers, the latter, Abu Iyad believed, acting on Israel's behalf. The truth is that the PLO has for years been the main victim of terrorism rather than its perpetrator, the antithesis of the popular perception encouraged by Israeli propaganda.
Today, although battered and stumbling from Israeli and Arab assaults, the PLO remains, for lack of an alternative, the champion of Palestinian aspirations for a homeland. Arafat will sooner or later pass from the scene, the intifada may be crushed or die from exhaustion, but Palestinian nationalism will not go away -- and will perhaps become more violent -- so long as there are five million people alive who call themselves Palestinian. The next Abu Nidal who emerges may not so easily be turned against his own people.
Until the Palestinians' legitimate grievances are met, Palestinians, and perhaps all Arabs, will never live in peace with Israel. The Arab leaders' betrayal of the Palestinians makes a joke of Arab nationalism, while Palestinian suffering at Israel's hands is the blackest stain on Israel's national record.
The Arab states have dealt harshly with the Palestinians out of weakness, probably because they could not defend them against a far more powerful Israel. One reason Arab leaders hate the PLO is that it is an unwelcome reminder of Arab impotence. Israel, meanwhile, has dealt harshly with the Palestinians from strength, because there was no one around to restrain it. No countervailing Arab power, no force in the region, and, apparently, no international pressure has sought to make Israel desist from the brutalities, listed by Amnesty International and others, that it inflicts on its captive Palestinian population.
Many of these problems -- Israeli occupation, guerrilla resistance, civilian suffering, terror -- stem from Israel's victory in 1967 over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, when it seized great tracts of territory and emerged as an imperial power immeasurably stronger than all its neighbors put together. Isaac Deutscher, a historian of the Russian revolution, was one of the first to observe that colonizing a million or more Arabs would hurt Israel. He quoted the bitter German phrase Man kann sich totsiegen: "You can drive yourself victoriously into your grave."
Just a few days after the Six-Day War, Deutscher, a Jew and a distinguished anti-Stalinist, told an interviewer (New Left Review, June 23, 1967): "It was only with disgust that I could watch on television the scenes from Israel in those days; the displays of the conquerors' pride and brutality; the outbursts of chauvinism; and the wild celebrations of the inglorious triumph, all contrasting sharply with the pictures of Arab suffering and desolation, the treks of Jordanian refugees and the bodies of Egyptian soldiers killed by thirst in the desert. I looked at the medieval figures of the rabbis and hassidim jumping with joy at the Wailing Wall; and I felt how the ghosts of Talmudic obscurantism -- and I know these only too well -- crowded in on the country, and how the reactionary atmosphere in Israel had grown dense and stifling. Then came the many interviews with General Dayan, the hero and saviour, with the political mind of a regimental sergeant-major, ranting about annexations and venting a raucous callousness about the fate of the Arabs in the conquered areas. ('What do they matter to me?' 'As far as I am concerned, they may stay or they may go.')"
What would Deutscher have thought, I wonder, of Shamir and Rabin, of Arens, Sharon, Geula Cohen, and the rest of them, of the bone-breaking beatings and the tortures, of the grisly detention camps and the pitiless curfews, of the death squads, of the children murdered by the score, of the Palestinian girl of nineteen I read about the other day who was forced to give birth while handcuffed to the bars of her Israeli hospital bed?
How can Jews, who have known far greater suffering themselves, do such things? For the miserable career of Abu Nidal might never have happened had Israel been willing to talk with the PLO in 1974, when Arafat sent his four messages to Henry Kissinger saying that he was ready to sit down.
The Israeli writer Amos Oz says that Israelis and Palestinians have gone mad and, for their own protection, need to be separated until they can recover their sanity. This book describes a case of dementia. I have written it to show what bloodstained lunacy goes on behind the scenes. Palestinians and Israelis have been killing one another over a pocket handkerchief of territory -- the West Bank -- captured by Israel in 1967. Palestinian hopes of identity and self-respect rest on this sliver of land: For them, anything less than self-government there means a continued diaspora or bitter servitude. They kill and die to get it back. But many Israelis, claiming that the West Bank is an integral part of the "land of Israel," will kill and die rather than give it up. Without peace, the prospect ahead is of more terror and counterterror of the cruel, remorseless sort I have described in this book.
Over the years, I have come to believe that Israel's long-term security lies not in crushing Palestinian nationalism and the PLO but in coming to terms with them. Far from threatening Israel, a Palestinian statelet on its borders would strengthen Israel, by gaining it full acceptance into the Middle Eastern family.
Israelis tend to express their situation in existential terms as if under constant threat of extinction. But Israel faces no existential threat. The last time it faced such a threat was in the brief truce during the 1948 war, as Ezer Weizman, an Israeli war hero and former air force chief, has publicly acknowledged. The debate today is not about Israel's existence -- that question was settled over forty years ago -- but about the terms and nature of the peace that it must make with its Arab hinterland. It is a peace that I, for one, involved in studying the area for the past three decades, ardently hope for.
Although the Arabs want peace, there are in my estimation two things that they will not accept and that, if Israel insists on them, are bound to breed further terrorist violence such as Abu Nidal's, and in due course further wars. The first is the permanent oppression and dispersal of the Palestinian people. If Israel wants real peace, it must make room for a Palestinian homeland, as a partner not an adversary, within the boundaries of historic Palestine.
The second thing the region will not tolerate is permanent Israeli domination. Accepting Israel as a major player in the Middle East system, competing and interacting with Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the others, is something the Arab players are reconciled to, indeed expect and look to. But they are not ready to live indefinitely in the shadow of Israeli power, in fear of attack by its far superior military force. Vulnerability and humiliation inevitably drive them to acquire the means to hold Israel in check. Such deterrent means may not yet be available to Israel's weak and divided neighbors, but the quest for them will go on -- and, most likely, cause Israel to preempt, setting off a new cycle of violence.
Yet a stable and long-lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors can only rest on mutual deterrence, on an Arab-Israeli balance of power, and eventually on good neighborliness. Israel's security cannot forever be maintained at the cost of the insecurity of its neighbors -- the formula of successive Israeli and American governments over the decades.
Readers must reach their own conclusions about Abu Nidal, bearing in mind that Abu Iyad and his Fatah allies had every reason to make a case against Abu Nidal and Israel, their two greatest enemies. If, despite his crimes, he is judged to be a Palestinian "patriot," then he proves how the conflict has reduced to gangsterism the Palestinians' yearning for a homeland. If Abu Iyad and others are right that he is an Israeli instrument, then he is proof of the political and moral depravity to which Israel and its Arab collaborators have sunk.
The cost of Israel's possession of the West Bank is incalculable. It has been paid by Palestinians in deaths and in shattered lives, but also by Israel, in the brutalizing of its society and its army; in the glaring absence, as it shapes its policies, of anything worthy of Jewish ethics; in the loss of its good name and the corruption of its diplomacy as it manipulates international opinion and ducks and weaves to avoid negotiations that might entail the return of the territories to their owners.
When Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev's foreign minister, was accused by hard-line Soviet critics of having "lost" Eastern Europe and "allowed" Germany to unite, he thoughtfully replied, "It was the price we had to pay in order to become a civilized country." It is an answer that Israel might ponder as it considers the fate of the occupied territories, suffering and seething under its rule.