Annual Nakba Commemoration Dinner Speech
When I started to write Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, I thought that the significance of Golda’s message to me from the grave was almost impossible to exaggerate. On a personal level I took it to mean that Golda wanted me to know that she was not actually as deluded as I might have imagined her to be on account of her denial, while she lived, of the existence of the Palestinians as a people with rights and an irrefutable claim for justice.
Put another way, she was acknowledging the difference between, on the one hand, Israel’s propaganda – the myth Zionism created to fool the world and comfort itself and, on the other hand, what she knew to be true. In effect and posthumously Mother Israel was admitting that the creation of the Zionist state had required the doing of an injustice to the Palestinians, and that Israel was living a lie.
The problem for Golda’s generation with the truth – the actual existence of the Palestinians – was that it raised fundamental questions about the legality and morality of the Zionist enterprise (her life’s work) and the legitimacy of Israel’s existence. On reflection, and because of her last message to me, I am inclined to the view that Mother Israel went to her grave troubled by the injustice done to the Palestinians in the name of Zionism. She would not have been able to escape the logic of reality and the question it begged. If the Palestinians did not exist – no problem. But if really they did exist – “What have we done?”
The Golda Meir I knew would have asked herself that question when it was obvious – as it was before her death – that the regeneration of Palestinian nationalism was as much a fait accompli as the existence of her state.
As it happened the truth was too uncomfortable for Mother Israel to confront while she lived. That was to be a task for her children. One possible implication of her last message to me was that she wanted them to confront it, by asking themselves what they must do to right the wrong done in Zionism’s name to the Palestinians. Some of my anti-Zionist Jewish friends have said that I have been much too kind to Golda. She was, they insisted, “an unchangeable, Zionist zealot.” They could be right and I could be wrong; but I think I knew Golda better than they did, and I’ll stick with my own interpretation.
Now to my own favourite Arafat story. It’s a good story in its own right but it has a point which I want to develop this evening.
In 1984, shortly after the publication of the first edition of my book Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker? I had a call from Tunis.
For those not aware of that book, it was the first ever to tell the true story of the Palestinian struggle from the leadership’s perspective. In addition to Arafat himself, my prime sources were Abu and Um Jihad, Abu Iyad and the Hassan brothers, Khalad and Hani. I spent more than a year virtually living with them and others in the leadership to talk the story out of them.
In that book I came to two main conclusions. The first was that by the end of 1979 (more than three decades ago), Arafat had performed a miracle of leadership by preparing the ground on his side for unthinkable compromise and peace, peace on terms which any rational government and people in Israel would have accepted with relief. The second was that what Arafat needed to emerge as the peacemaker he so much wanted to be was a good faith Israeli negotiating partner.
Back to the call from Tunis. It was from Khalad Hassan. He was Fatah’s intellectual giant on the right. When he thought it necessary, he was fiercely critical of Arafat to his face in private, but nobody did more than Khalad to assist the Chairman to sell the idea of unthinkable compromise with Israel to the PNC.
Khalad said: “Habibi, the Chairman is very, very angry with you.”
I asked why. Khalad replied: “You must come here and find out for yourself.”
So I went to Tunis. I was very aware that Arafat had a terrible tempter and I wasn’t looking forward to be on the receiving end of it. I wondered if our friendship was about to end.
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