Essence of the suppressed truth
The PNC vote in 1979 was an overwhelming victory for Arafat. There were 296 votes for his policy of politics and compromise with Israel and only 4 against. It was shortly after that historic PNC decision that I had the first of very many conversations with Arafat. When we were alone, he extracted a notebook from his hip pocket. He waved it triumphantly in the air and said, “It’s all here.” The it was his own record of his conversations with PNC delegates over the five years. Then, with a big smile on his face and in a voice that suggested he could hardly believe what had happened, he said this: “How far we have travelled. No more this silly talk of driving the Jews into the sea. Now we are prepared to live alongside them in a little mini state of our own. It is a miracle.”
It was, and Arafat was the miracle worker. He had prepared the ground on his side for peace on terms which any rational government and people in Israel would have accepted with relief. No other Palestinian leader could have done it.
The problem then was not that Israel didn’t have a Palestinian partner for peace but that the Palestinians did not have an Israeli partner. Menachem Begin, arguably the most successful terrorist of modern times and perhaps of all time, was Israel’s prime minister. Arafat the terrorist Begin and his Likud leadership colleagues could handle. Arafat the peacemaker they could not. And that’s why in 1982 Begin allowed General Sharon, then Israel’s Defense Minister, to take the IDF all the way to Beirut for the purpose of liquidating the entire PLO leadership and destroying its infrastructure.
But that was only phase one of Sharon’s game plan. If he had succeeded in Beirut, he was going to de-stabilise Jordan and bring about the downfall and departure of the Hashemite monarchy. That done he was intending to say to the Palestinians something like: “Of course you must have a state of your own. There it is. Jordan. Go take it.” To assist that process Sharon had established on the West Bank something close to a Palestinian puppet government-in-waiting consisting of 70 Palestinian collaborators. When he had overthrown King Hussein he was going to helicopter them into Amman.
Subsequently King Hussein, whom I knew very well, told me that he and all Arab leaders were fully aware in advance of what Sharon’s intentions were. Hussein also confirmed to me something Arafat told me. Shortly before Sharon launched his invasion of Lebanon to liquidate the PLO, the Gulf Arab leaders met in secret, without any advisers present, to agree a message to President Reagan. The message was that when Sharon invaded Lebanon to liquidate the PLO, the Arab leaders would not make any problems for the U.S. or Israel. Arafat’s source for that information was one of the Gulf Arab leaders who was present at the secret meeting – Oman’s Sultan Qaboos. His message to Arafat was this: “When Sharon comes for you in Beirut, you will ask for our help and you will not get it. Be careful.”
All of that and much, much more is in my book, in fully documented detail.
In due course Arafat did get a possible even probable Israeli partner for peace in the shape of Prime Minister Rabin; but as I knew from my own sources, Rabin went into the Arafat-initiated Oslo peace process only with great reluctance because he feared he would be assassinated by one of his own. As we know, his fears on that account were justified. The Zionist fanatic who assassinated Rabin, possibly with the complicity of some in one of Israel’s security services, was not mentally de-ranged, he knew exactly what he was doing – killing Rabin to kill the Arafat-initiated peace process.
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