----- Original Message ----- From: Sid Shniad <shniad at SFU.CA> To: <SOCIALIST-REGISTER at YORKU.CA> Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2000 11:16 AM Subject: How The CIA Tried To Bully Arafat - The Independent / UK
> The Independent / UK November 4, 2000
>
> How The CIA Tried To Bully Arafat
>
> by Robert Fisk
>
> Gaza is physically so tiny that it has to be a place of contrasts.
At
> midday, I was sitting amid long grass, amid lemon and fig trees, and
> bushes of pomegranates and gardenia, listening to one of Yasser Arafat's
> most trusted lieutenants telling me of George Tenet's threats. Indeed, the
> head of the CIA, so frequent a visitor to Gaza, seemed strangely present
> because my host knows the CIA boys well.
> A couple of hours later, I watched an Israeli soldier run from the
> border fence and squat in the muddy dunes of Karni to take aim at a boy
> holding a sling-shot. There was a high-pitched crack, the thwack of a
> bullet hitting something and the youth was on the ground, two men
> running towards him with a stretcher.
> The rifle cracked again and, just once, I heard the bulletwhizz
through
> the air to my right. Yes, Mr Arafat's man had told me in his orchard, the
> CIA knew the Israelis were deliberately trying to kill stone-throwers. "We
> have shown them the statistics and taken them to watch these unequal
> battles," he said. "Personally, they agree with us that the Israelis are
> shooting at the upper part of the body."
> From the orchard, with its fruit flies and sparrows, to the mud of
Karni
> was perhaps only a mile. And it was odd how the threats and anger of the
> talks at Camp David fitted in so naturally with the blood and
tyre-shrieking
> ambulances down the road. Mr Arafat's officer did not mince his words.
> The story had come to him from Mr Arafat, at the very end of the Camp
> David talks which had brought us all, within weeks, to the catastrophe
that
> now embraces "Palestine" and, some would say, Israel as well. "Tenet
> had gone to Arafat warning: 'We can make new borders, we can make
> peoples, we can make new regimes'," he said.
> This is what the CIA boss told Mr Arafat at Camp David. And when
> the Palestinian leader would not make the capitulation that Bill Clinton
> and the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, wanted, Mr Tenet threatened
> Mr Arafat. He said: "So you will go back to the Middle East alone." He
> meant that he would not have the support of the CIA. And Mr Arafat
> replied: "If this is the case, you are most welcome to come to my
funeral -
> but I won't accept your offers."
> Around us, the flies and birds moved through the hot trees. Mr
> Arafat's grey-headed factotum chewed through a mandarin, the juice
> dribbling down his chin, occasionally taking calls on his mobile phone as
> his two sons picked olives off a tree behind us.
> "You have to understand that what has happened between Shimon
> Peres [former Israeli prime minister] and Arafat is just an armistice," he
> said. "The worst is yet to come. We may have a few days of less trouble.
> But that is all. We know how to start things and we don't know where it
> will end. But we believe that if it lasts longer, the results will be
better.
> Nobody knows how the mechanism of war develops."
> At Karni, Arafat's officer had ordered restraint. A clutch of
police
> captains swept their arms in front of the crowd of youths halfway down
> the road. "Go back up there," they shouted. There was a momentary
> movement in the crowd; then the policemen were ignored. Perhaps 400
> youths stood on the narrow road and advanced in a mass, almost falling
> off the edge of the road, offering the Israelis a target they could not
miss,
> seeking the "martyrdom" that the Israelis - and most of us cannot
> understand. It was an extraordinary scene. A group had unified without a
> word of command for an understood goal. They wanted to be targets. The
> Israelis obliged.
> A cluster of tear-gas canisters failed to shift the crowd; a
single live
> round did the trick. There were shouts and a stretcher bobbing through
> the screaming youths and an ambulance driving through the dust for the
> Shifa Hospital.
> Before dusk, an armoured Israeli convoy thundered down the road
> from the Jewish settlement of Nitzarim, ordering motorists at gunpoint to
> turn round. The road runs through Palestinian Gaza and the Israelis -
> note, they must not be called "occupiers" - were trying to force a passage
> down to the border through Karni. Under the terms of the Oslo
> Agreement, the Israelis can use this route with a Palestinian escort. But
> there was no Oslo, and no escort.
> But then they stopped and I realised that they were waiting for
> Palestinian Authority guarantees of safety before daring to move down
> the road to the Israeli border. And I knew that Mr Arafat's man in the
> orchard would be on his mobile phone, deciding whether or not it was
> safe for the occupiers to go home. George Tenet should have been with
> us at that hour.