On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin

Peres, the acting prime minister, will try to move on. He plans to push forward the peace process, which he helped broker and which cost Rabin his life. It will be a difficult task. Rabin, a gruff old soldier, was trusted by Israelis to look out for their security. Peres’s language is visionary, but he lacks his predecessor’s credibility.

The process is too far advanced, however, to be easily derailed. Arafat has ruled Gaza for more than a year and, starting this week with the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank town of Jenin, will take over the West Bank in a phased process that will culminate in elections in January. The hard decisions have been pushed through. Rabin’s death may help move along the peace process that he came to reluctantly but once converted pursued like one of his military campaigns. A poll released on Friday showed the proportion of Israelis supporting the peace process had risen by 31%.

And the outrage Israelis feel at the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish fundamentalist may win Peres support from those who now see the right as tainted because it provided fertile soil for such an extremist as Amir. With the death of Yitzhak Rabin, Israelis may no longer see a peacemaker as a defeatist, but as a hero.

Israel’s peace hopes wither: Netanyahu victory gives voice to the hardliners

2 June 1996

Marie Colvin, Gaza; Andy Goldberg, Tel Aviv

It was a mournful gathering. Meeting for lunch in Gaza yesterday, Palestinian politicians mulled over the results of Israel’s election with an air of grieving relatives at a wake. The surprise election of Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister, they grimly concurred, could prove a mortal blow to peace. Even the menu seemed to symbolise their worst fears. They were eating roast dove.

The Likud leader, they recalled, had vowed his first act would be to close Orient House, the Palestinians’ diplomatic outpost in Jerusalem.

What is more, he plans to ignore Shimon Peres’s promise to withdraw Israeli troops from the West Bank city of Hebron, which was to be the next step on the road to a permanent peace. ‘We feel the Israelis have voted against peace,’ sighed Um Jihad, a Palestinian minister. ‘There are difficult days for us ahead.’

The shock at the rise of Netanyahu was not limited to the Palestinian camp. President Bill Clinton congratulated him, as did Peres, his defeated rival and Labour leader. Yet they were stunned. Clinton had urged Israelis to vote for peace, in a thinly disguised endorsement of Peres.

Another worried man was Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader. He had stayed awake until 7am on Thursday after the previous day’s voting. He watched the returns on television in anxious disbelief. Netanyahu won the vote by just one percentage point. Yesterday an adviser said the Palestinian leader was ‘in a state of shock’. Israel’s political status quo had been turned on its head.

The man responsible relaxed yesterday with his wife and children at their home in Jerusalem. Within hours of his victory he had begun to look as if he had been a prime minister all his life. He waved regally to a crowd before stepping into a chauffeur-driven Cadillac for a trip to the Wailing Wall, where he slipped a thank you note to God into a crack. To the delight of cameramen, he ruffled the blond locks of his two young sons as they arrived home.

He has never even held a cabinet post and at 46 is a beginner by contrast with Peres, who had counted on five decades of experience and a Nobel prize for peace to secure him victory. Yet Netanyahu espouses an old idea: Israel’s paramount need, he believes, is for strong government that can provide security for Jews. He has consequently ruled out an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, effectively scuttling any chance of a peace deal with Syria. He has promised to resume Jewish settlement in the West Bank and said he would send the army and Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service, back into what is now autonomous territory patrolled by Palestinian soldiers.

By contrast, Peres seems to have believed he was leading a nation converted to peace, satisfied with a booming industry and improved economy. It was a fatal miscalculation. A wave of suicide bombings by Hamas extremists in which dozens of people were killed left the country feeling pessimistic about Peres’s vision of a new and peaceful Middle East.

Supporters of Peres made pilgrimages to the grave of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who was assassinated in November by Yigal Amir, a right-wing student. One left a note saying ‘Sorry, friend’, a melancholy echo of Clinton’s ‘Goodbye, friend’ uttered at Rabin’s funeral.

Netanyahu had been unrelenting in his opposition to Rabin, who led his country into the historic peace agreement with the Palestinians in 1993. Netanyahu would stand among the corpses left by an Islamic fundamentalist attack aimed at stopping the peace process, blame the government for the deaths and call for the revocation of the Oslo accord. He turned a blind eye to posters at Likud rallies depicting Rabin in Nazi uniform. Rabin’s widow, Leah, refused to shake Netanyahu’s hand at his funeral and was said to be in despair at Likud’s victory.

Rabin’s death had left Peres with a seemingly unassailable 26-point lead. But ironically, it was Peres’s attempt to ‘get tough’ that led to his downfall. With his approval, Israel’s security services used a booby-trapped mobile phone to assassinate Yehia Ayyash, a Hamas bomber revered by the Islamic fundamentalist group. Israel hailed the death as a glorious blow against terrorism: but then Hamas struck, killing 63 people in revenge suicide bombings. Peres’s lead was wiped out overnight.

Sensing the newly subdued mood in Israel, Netanyahu restrained his accusations and let the bloody scenes on television do the talking. He moved to capture the political centre, refining his position on the Oslo accord from outright rejection to acceptance of the agreement as a fait accompli that needed revision.

And, in what would be the deciding factor in the campaign, the worldly Netanyahu wooed the ultra-orthodox vote, 10% of the electorate. Netanyahu took to wearing a skullcap and adopted the phrase ‘with God’s help’. He persuaded the rabbis that Likud’s belief in Eretz Israel or the greater Israel that includes the biblical land of the Jews was preferable to Labour’s commitment to territorial compromise.

One of the most dramatic moments of Netanyahu’s campaign came with his endorsement by Rabbi Yitzhak Kadurie, a 106-year-old mystic, 36 hours before polling. Every Israeli newspaper and television station showed pictures of the frail rabbi, his hands resting on the head of a reverential Netanyahu, saying: ‘Bibi, Bibi, Bibi, may God grant that next week you will be premier.’ More than 90% of the ultra-orthodox community voted for Netanyahu. This tipped the election.

Netanyahu was also helped by the disastrous Labour campaign. While Likud was stealing Labour’s message of peace, Labour tried to dress up as Likud. Peres bombed southern Lebanon to hit Hezbollah, the Islamic fundamentalist group, but everyone saw it as an election ploy. The operation backfired when Israeli artillery fire killed 100 Lebanese civilians in a United Nations camp at Qana, losing Peres some of the Israeli Arab support.

In a final blow, Likud mounted a scare campaign that touched on racist themes. Posters proclaimed ‘Netanyahu is good for the Jews’ and warned them that Peres was the candidate of the Arabs.

But Netanyahu still might not have won had Peres not practically given the election away. While a brash and confident Netanyahu pressed ahead, Peres was advised to ignore him and act like a statesman. It is a role that has never worked for him. He has lost every election campaign he has waged, including two earlier runs for prime minister. He could not shake off his image of a loser. The contrast between the two could not have been more noticeable when the results were announced on Friday night. A jubilant Netanyahu greeted crowds as he entered his home in what was an old Arab neighbourhood before 1967, shouting they should welcome ‘a new Israel of peace and security’.

Peres spent the day in seclusion in his 12th-floor apartment in a luxurious suburb of Tel Aviv. He emerged briefly, looking exhausted and speaking in a flat voice. ‘This was not a choice between two parties,’ he told waiting reporters. ‘It was a choice between two different ways. We shall remain loyal to our way.’ But at 72, he can do little to implement his vision. There will be no more elections.

This week will see the first steps towards Netanyahu’s ‘new Israel’. The West and Israel’s Arab neighbours are hoping Netanyahu will be more pragmatic than his campaign rhetoric suggested.

But there are few early signs of moderation. He owes enormous debts to right-wing nationalist and ultra-orthodox religious parties, which themselves won unprecedented numbers of seats in the Knesset. To put together a governing coalition Netanyahu will have to give the right-wing and religious parties ministries and a say in policy.

The lineup for his cabinet includes retired generals Ariel Sharon, the former defence minister who launched the 1982 Lebanon war, tipped for the finance portfolio, and Rafael Eitan, candidate for the Ministry of Domestic Security (police), who as Sharon’s chief of staff enforcing the siege of Beirut announced the Arabs were ‘trapped like drugged bugs in a bottle’. Netanyahu’s new Israel is likely to bear little resemblance to the vision many have had in their sights in the past three years.

Israeli bulldozers rev up for showdown in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM

16 March 1997

Sasson Shem-Tov drives a black Jaguar and wears sunglasses whatever the weather. He does not usually take much interest in politics. But this week he finds himself in the middle of a dispute between Israel and the Arabs that risks bathing his country in blood.

Shem-Tov is about to order his bulldozers into Arab east Jerusalem to help build a Jewish settlement that the Palestinians have vowed to stop by any means. Even America, which is usually supportive of Israel, has denounced its plan to build 6,500 homes for Jews on a hill within sight of the church spires of Bethlehem. On Thursday the United Nations general assembly called for construction to stop.

Yasser Arafat was so angry that he twice refused to take calls from Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. It is not only the settlement plans that have provoked Arab ire: Netanyahu recently announced that the first step of a three-phase withdrawal from rural areas of the West Bank, mandated under the Oslo accords, would include only a fraction of the territory Palestinians expected. The prime minister then ordered the closure of four Palestinian offices in Jerusalem, a move whose legality is being debated.

King Hussein of Jordan sent a bitter letter charging that the Israeli prime minister was ‘dragging the peace process to the edge of the abyss’. When a Jordanian gunman opened fire on Israeli schoolgirls on Thursday, killing seven of them, commentators in both countries suggested he had been angered by Netanyahu’s intransigence and insinuations.

Shem-Tov, a wealthy Israeli construction magnate, is unperturbed. ‘We are going in next week,’ he said over his car telephone. His yellow bulldozers were already in place near Har Homa, the pine-covered hill Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 war, which he has been contracted to clear for the new homes. To him, it is just business. But for the right-wing Israeli government, the settlement means much more.

If built, Har Homa will close the last gap in a half-moon of Jewish settlements constructed on hilltops around the outer edges of Arab east Jerusalem. By encircling the Arab area with these self-contained Jewish townships, right-wing Israelis want to create ‘facts on the ground’ to ensure they will never have to cede an inch of Jerusalem to the Palestinians, who claim east Jerusalem as their capital.

Under the Oslo accord, the final status of Jerusalem is supposed to be decided in talks scheduled to conclude in 1999, but Palestinians argue that there will not be much to talk about if Israel keeps building. Netanyahu showed no sign of backing down. ‘I am building Har Homa this week and nothing is going to stop me,’ he said in an interview. The Israeli cabinet on Friday reaffirmed his decision, and government sources said the bulldozers are likely to move in tomorrow.

The army will no doubt be called in to keep back protesters, who have vowed to lie down in front of Shem-Tov’s machines. Palestinian leaders have pledged that the demonstrations will be peaceful, but emotions are running so high among Palestinians that they are widely expected to explode into violence. ‘The minute the bulldozers go in I think only God knows the consequences of what will happen,’ said Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian minister involved in the Israeli–Palestinian negotiations.

Yesterday Arafat made a last-ditch effort to thwart Netanyahu diplomatically. Amid Israeli condemnations, he gathered American, European and Arab sponsors of the peace process to an emergency conference at his seaside headquarters in Gaza to seek their help in stopping the Har Homa settlement and putting the peace process back on track.

Although the Americans used their veto in the United Nations vote, they showed their opposition to the settlement plans by sending Edward Abington, the American consul in Jerusalem, to the talks, despite a direct Israeli request that Washington should boycott the meeting. The Palestinian president is making no secret of his anger. ‘The situation is really serious,’ Arafat told envoys to yesterday’s meeting. ‘We are facing a plan to destroy the peace process.’

The conference in Gaza is not expected to make any difference on the ground. Arafat called the meeting to send a signal to Netanyahu that he is not alone; the governments who sent envoys wanted to reassure Arafat of support, which they hoped would head off an explosion of Palestinian violence.

The threat of bloodshed is no secret. Under the codename Thornbush, Israeli army units with tanks have been practising manoeuvres to re-enter cities on the West Bank controlled by Arafat’s Palestinian authority, in case Palestinians fight to stop the building at Har Homa. Israeli intelligence sources said yesterday that the army wanted to be better prepared than it was in September, when 60 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers were killed in clashes after Netanyahu’s decision to open a tunnel in Jerusalem.

Given the reluctance on both sides to fight, there is still a good chance violence can be avoided. Crises have come and gone since Netanyahu’s government took over from Labour in May, and generally he has compromised.

Nor is Arafat in a strong position. His army is no match for the Israeli forces. If he had to fight, the peace process that would finally win a homeland for Palestinians would be shown up as a failure. He would then be vulnerable to Islamic extremists.

Netanyahu needs the support of the ultra-right-wing parties in his coalition government. But he may well have miscalculated the strength of anger his moves have inspired among Palestinians. The test of that will come when the bulldozers close in on Har Homa.

Arafat encircled in battle for Jerusalem

6 April 1997

In his first interview with a foreign journalist since the latest Middle East crisis erupted, the Palestinian leader tells Marie Colvin in Gaza why the new Israeli township must be stopped.

It was an odd spectacle: Yasser Arafat marched briskly around his modest office, arms swinging, eyes fixed on the carpet. He might have been deep in thought. But the diminutive Palestinian leader calls his compulsive pacing ‘speed walking’, a form of daily exercise that seems a perfect metaphor for his political predicament: he has little room for manoeuvre.

Sweating in the heavy military jacket he wears in all seasons, he marched round and round on Friday, skirting the conference table and ignoring the breathtaking view from his windows of the sparkling Mediterranean sea. After half an hour’s wear of the dull, grey carpet, he sat down, mopped his forehead with a yellow Kleenex and turned his attention to a visiting reporter.

On his desk were reports of yet another day of violent Palestinian protests in the West Bank against the decision by Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to build a new Jewish settlement in Arab east Jerusalem.

‘I am asking Netanyahu to understand exactly the sensitivity of the question of Jerusalem,’ Arafat said, swivelling his chair to face the sea, then turning it abruptly back again. ‘I am astonished at how he does not understand it. Or perhaps he understands it but insists on challenging the Palestinians, Arabs, Christians and Muslims.’

On the eve of Netanyahu’s summit with President Bill Clinton tomorrow, Arafat knows he has no alternative but to continue the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. Yet if he accepts the new Jewish township he will lose any credibility among his own people.

From the Israeli side, Arafat is faced with overwhelming force and an intransigent prime minister. The Americans, meanwhile, are pressuring him to halt street protests. They also want him to arrest extremists who have dispatched three suicide bombers to attack Israel since the bulldozers began clearing the way for homes to be built for 30,000 Jews on a pine-covered hill known as Har Homa to the Israelis and Jebel Abu Ghneim to the Palestinians.

An Arab League decision last week to sever Arab ties with Israel gave Arafat some support for what he calls ‘the battle for Jerusalem’. But the backing of other Arab countries has been largely rhetorical. Thus Arafat feels very much alone as he marches in his headquarters by the sea.

For his part Netanyahu, say those who know him, believes that if he can force Arafat to accept the new settlement, the Palestinians will ‘lower their expectations’ in future peace talks. Yet Arafat, already under attack for conceding too much to the Israelis in the Oslo agreements, cannot give up any more if he is to survive as leader.

‘Netanyahu must stop this settlement on Jebel Abu Ghneim,’ he insisted, adding that this was a condition for Palestinians returning to the peace talks. ‘Netanyahu must return to the honest and accurate implementation of the peace process. Nothing less.’

Arafat says he has ‘no contact’ with Netanyahu these days. He has ordered his security chiefs to stop sharing intelligence information with their Israeli counterparts. Netanyahu’s generals have warned that this is dangerous. Since Arafat took over Gaza and the West Bank cities, shared information from Palestinian security forces has prevented several planned attacks against Israeli targets.

But the Palestinian leader has lost faith in any idea that Netanyahu can be a partner in the peace process. Instead, he sees him as dangerously dependent for his political survival on the support of religious and ultra-right-wing parties who believe in Eretz Israel, or greater Israel.

‘I am sorry to say Netanyahu is following the ideology of the (Jewish) fanatic groups,’ said Arafat. ‘He must remember he is committed to Oslo, which was signed by the previous Israeli governments, or we will be at a real impasse.’

For a few moments, Arafat stared through his heavy black-framed glasses into the middle distance, as if trying to see the way ahead. There was none. ‘We are at a real impasse now,’ he sighed.

One possible hope is American mediation. ‘The peace process now needs the attention of the American administration – especially President Clinton,’ the Palestinian leader said. ‘The agreement was signed under his supervision. This is not a bilateral agreement. It is an international agreement.’

Arafat has not yet received an invitation from Washington to take part in a meeting with the Israelis. But some analysts believe the Americans are trying to work out a deal. Sources in Washington say the Clinton administration is trying to piece together a compromise that would include delaying the settlement, rather than definitively stopping it, while simultaneously speeding up the schedule for final negotiations.

At the moment, however, the Americans, who have generally supported Netanyahu’s position that the Palestinians must stop their protests before peace talks can resume, seem intent on winning concessions from Arafat.

Last week Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state, telephoned Arafat twice to seek his approval for three-way talks. She urged him to try to calm the violence in the West Bank, arrest Islamic extremists and resume security co-operation with the Israelis.

In one lengthy telephone call, Arafat explained that as Netanyahu had ignited the crisis with his ‘violent’ action of sending in bulldozers, she should be asking the Israelis, not him, for concessions. He could not return to security co-operation before the political negotiations resumed.

‘Let’s not get into a discussion of which came first, the chicken or the egg,’ Albright responded. To which Arafat replied, cryptically: ‘But we have to remember that in the end there is the hen and there is the egg.’ The response of the new secretary of state is not recorded.

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