Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker?

By Alan Hart. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985. 512 pp. $19.95.

Reviewed by Richard Curtiss

People who follow the Palestine story know there are two standard versions. One is the "mythology" in which hard-working, idealistic Jewish settlers make the desert bloom despite constant harassment by marauding Arabs who plunder, kill and vanish back into the trackless desert. This version is propagated in Hollywood film and New York fiction and accepted by most Americans until they visit the Middle East. When they do, the observant note that in fact it is Arab orange groves that have died so that Israelis can have swimming pools, and that where the office buildings and farms are Israeli owned, it is often Arabs who build and tend them. Then visitors are ready to listen to the second version of the story, told by American "old Middle East hands" who were there before Israel. They describe a peaceful Arab community of mixed Palestinian Christian and Muslim villagers who at first welcomed Jewish settlers from Europe.

When the Palestinians complained, however, that these Jews were using seemingly unlimited funds to buy up Arab lands under covenants that prevented Arabs from remaining on them, the Jewish newcomers used the United Nations partition plan to "legalize" what became their Jewish state of Israel and its actions. In short, the Palestinians suffered the fate of weak peoples whose lands are coveted by the strong.

This book, published in England in late 1984, and being released in the U.S. next month with a new chapter covering 1985 events, might be called a third version of the Palestine story. It is an informal but highly-informative and obviously sympathetic portrait not only of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yassir Arafat, but of all of the top leaders of his Al Fatah guerrilla organization, now the major component of the PLO. It takes up where the "old Middle East hand" version of the Palestine story leaves off.

In it we meet a much younger Arafat—taking a university degree in Cairo and setting up as a successful engineer in Kuwait to earn enough money to finance an organization of Palestinians who would not accept the theft of their nation.

We learn that Arafat was born in 1929 in Egypt of Palestinian parents; is unable to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time; sleeps only five hours a day in two short shifts; has a nose for danger that has saved him from countless assassination attempts by Israel, Syria, and leftwing Palestinian rivals; works from 18 to 19 hours a day seven days a week; and seems to relax only in the company of children.

We read a series of fascinating anecdotes illustrating how Al Fatah, a right-wing resistance organization, grew under the leadership of Arafat and a band of loyal followers from unimaginably humble beginnings and eventually took over the previously-ineffective PLO. The book attributes much of Arafat's political maneuvering and seeming inconsistency to an endless battle to thwart attempts by Syrian President Hafiz Al-Assad to control the Palestinian resistance.

The book makes it clear that, since the time of the late King Feisal, Saudi Arabia has helped Al Fatah, and after years of opposition, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser also became Arafat's supporter. There are kind words for Arafat's original patrons in Kuwait and, surprisingly, for King Hussein of Jordan.

The book, by noted British television correspondent Alan Hart, had an unlikely inception. A prominent Jewish businessman in London agreed to finance an unofficial shuttle in which Hart was to convey to the Palestinians some of the ideas developing among Israeli Labor Coalition leaders during their sojourn in the political wilderness after Begin's Likud coalition took over the Israeli government in 1977.

The idea was that when it was back in power the Labor Coalition might offer a settlement based upon UN Security Council Resolution 242's land-for-peace formula. The Palestinian shuttle went well, Hart reports, but the 1981 Israeli election did not. Likud received a second term, continued its colonization of the West Bank, and invaded Lebanon, making a mockery of Hart's peace mission.

By this time, however, Hart knew Arafat and the other top Al Fatah leaders well. He mortgaged his home to continue his Middle East visits, and spent hours recording the reminiscences, beliefs, and dreams of these hardened veterans who had made almost unbelievable sacrifices for Palestine.

The result is a third version of history, that of the Palestinians themselves. Hart believes that until we understand it and their leader we won't understand the only possible route to peace in the Middle East.

It will take an extraordinary Palestinian to lead his battered, alienated people to permanent peace with those they blame for their misery. This book presents a convincing case that Arafat is that Palestinian leader, and that if America allows Israel to reject the overtures he presently is making in conjunction with King Hussein, there may be no other Palestinian overtures, and no Middle East peace.