Essence of the suppressed truth
Very soon after he came to power in a coup in Egypt in 1951, Nasser secretly signalled that he wanted an accommodation with Israel. The signalling was done in secret exchanges he had with Moshe Sharret, Israel’s first foreign minister and in my view the only completely rational Israeli leader of his time. He was also briefly prime minister when Ben-Gurion stood down for a while because some of his colleagues, and perhaps even the man himself, were beginning to doubt his mental state. When Ben-Gurion returned as prime minister, he destroyed Sharret politically because, inspired by his exchanges with Nasser, he wanted to make peace with the Arabs on terms which would have seen Israel confined to the Armistice borders of 1948.
But the man who did more than any other to prepare the ground for peace was the one who also led the struggle to re-open the Palestine file – the pragmatic Yasser Arafat. In my book Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker? first published in 1984, I revealed that he personally was reluctantly reconciled to compromise with Israel as far back as 1968. Repeat 1968. By that time he regarded Nasser as a trusted father figure, and he believed the Egyptian president was right when he told him that if the PLO wanted to be taken seriously by the major powers, those of both the West and the East, it had to be realistic and come to terms with an Israel inside its pre 1967 borders.
Thereafter it took Arafat five long years to sell the idea of unthinkable compromise with Israel to his Fatah leadership colleagues. Initially the idea of compromise was unthinkable to virtually all Palestinians not only because it required them to make peace with Israel in exchange for only 22% of their land, but also because it required them, effectively, to renounce their claim to the other 78% of it and to legitimize Israel’s presence on it.
After that it took Arafat another five long years to sell his Fatah-approved policy of politics and compromise with Israel to the PNC (the Palestine National Council), a sort of Palestinian parliament-in-exile and the highest Palestinian decision making body. At the time there were about 300 PNC representatives in the global Palestinian diaspora. There were others in the Israeli-occupied territories and Israel itself, but the Israeli authorities did not allow them to travel to attend PNC meetings.
In those five years Arafat had to turn the PNC around – from rejection of compromise with Israel to support for it. And he had to do it by democratic means, by discussion and debate. He could not behave like his autocratic Arab brothers at leadership level and impose his will. He did it by summoning all 300 PNC members from all over the world, one by one, to talk with him in Beirut. In his first conversations with them, many said they would not vote for compromise with Israel; that Arafat was a traitor for advocating it; and that if he continued along that line he might well be assassinated. Arafat was indeed putting his credibility with his own people and his life on the line. At the end of each of his one-on-one conversations with rejectionist PNC delegates, Arafat asked them to return to their places in the diaspora and to think very carefully about the case he had made for compromise with Israel. If after time for reflection and debate with their own communities they were still opposed to his policy, he would summon them back to Beirut for another conversation.
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