Israelis and Americans are not the only ones to suffer from Arafat's callous disregard for human life. In the summer of 1976, when the Palestinian refugee camp of Tel Zaatar in Beirut was being besieged by Christian militias, backed by the Syrian army, Arafat ordered the camp's inhabitants not to surrender, knowing full well that they would be defeated and many of them slaughtered. The survivors themselves later accused Arafat of sacrificing them because he needed martyrs to attract world attention to their plight, and there were plenty of them. During the fifty-five-day siege and the massacres that came in its immediate wake, some thirty-five hundred Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed.
When Arafat came to visit the camp's refugees, temporarily accommodated in the nearby town of Damour, destroyed by the PLO a few months earlier and its Christian population slaughtered and expelled, several women stood by their hovels and shouted "traitor" at him, while others threw rotten vegetables at him.
This unscrupulous sacrifice of his own people pales in comparison with Arafat's wider predilection to wreak havoc on some of the Arab states and societies that have hosted the Palestinians since 1948 and have facilitated their anti-Israel activities. Whenever the PLO has managed to gain a firm foothold in an Arab state, it's only a matter of time before Arafat's calling cards of violence, destruction, and death follow.
Jordan was the first to learn this lesson, when after the Six-Day War of 1967 it allowed the Palestinian organizations to use its territory as their foremost springboard for anti-Israel attacks. For King Hussein this was a means to pressure the Israelis to return the West Bank of his kingdom, which they occupied during the war. Arafat, however, had no intention of confining himself to the limited role ascribed to him by the Jordanian monarch. Instead, he sought to transform Jordan, with its large Palestinian population and its long border with Israel, into an Arab North Vietnam, the platform from which the Palestinian resistance would pursue its struggle against Israel until the eventual destruction of the Jewish state. Before long these two mutually exclusive visions put Arafat and Hussein on a collision course, as the king realized that, far from rewarding his hospitality, his Palestinian guests were progressively undermining the stability and well-being of his kingdom.
Palestinian defiance of Jordanian authority began from the moment of their arrival in Jordan, becoming increasingly brazen after the Karameh battle of March 1968, in which Palestinian guerrillas, with Jordanian army reinforcements, managed to hold out for some time against an Israeli raiding force. Though Palestinian casualties were far higher than on the Israeli side, and their qualified battlefield success owed as much to Jordanian help as to their own fighting ability, and while Arafat himself fled the battle at an early stage, he quickly turned Karameh into an historic watershed in Palestinian military annals and a major sales pitch for mass recruitment. Prior to the battle, Fatah had some two thousand men under arms. By August 1970 it had swelled to ten thousand fighters.
As their power grew, the guerrillas established their own "state within a state" in Jordan, setting up autonomous governmental institutions in all spheres—military, political, and social. They ran their own police forces and courts, arresting and punishing people in total disregard of the law of the land. They set up roadblocks, where they levied illegal taxes, and roamed the streets of Amman at will, often attacking soldiers and policemen. Entire areas became inaccessible to Jordanian authorities. The Wahadat refugee camp near Amman was dubbed the Republic of Palestine, with the Palestinian flag flying at its entrance.
Between mid-1968 and the end of 1969 there were no fewer than five hundred violent clashes between the Palestinian guerrillas and the Jordanian army and security forces. The Palestinians kidnapped Arab diplomats and unfriendly Jordanian journalists, attacked government buildings, and publicly insulted the Jordanian flag in front of Jordanian subjects. Incidents of thuggery and crime abounded, including sexual molestation and rape and acts of vandalism against bakeries that left some of the population without bread. Recalling a particularly chilling incident, Zeid Rifai, chief of the Jordanian royal court, graphically described how "the fedayeen killed a soldier, beheaded him, and played soccer with his head in the area where he used to live."
Arafat relished his newly gained prowess. Behaving like a feudal warlord, he spent his time touring guerrilla bases throughout Jordan, loosely overseeing the anarchy spread by his forces without making the slightest attempt to rein anyone in. Hussein's desperate attempts to pacify the situation were fruitless, as Arafat unflinchingly violated the numerous agreements he had signed with the king. Repeated clashes between February and June 1970, which claimed nearly a thousand lives, failed to convince Arafat to clamp down on the guerrillas. In the following months, Hussein narrowly escaped a number of attempts on his life, with Arafat himself implicated in at least one coup d'etat, which he had plotted together with Jordanian officers. In August he even convened the Palestine National Council for a special meeting in Amman, which openly debated the issue of replacing the king. Infuriated by this gratuitous act of thanklessness and fearing for the survival of his kingdom in the face of growing anarchy, Hussein in September 1970 exploited the hijacking and subsequent blowing up of four Western airliners by PLO terrorists to move against the Palestinian organizations and, in a bloody war that resulted in horrendous atrocities on both sides and claimed thousands of lives, drove them out of Jordan. "The blame for the Jordanian mess which led to the Black September rests with Yasser Arafat, the one person who was capable of defusing the situation," a Palestinian biographer of Arafat commented.
With his Jordanian base in ruins, Arafat quickly reestablished himself in Lebanon, which he occasionally had been using since the mid-1960s for terrorist attacks against Israeli civilian targets. As with Jordan, it did not take long before he helped turn his host country into an inferno, this time by playing a key role in triggering one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern Middle Eastern history, which raged for more than a decade and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
Lebanese-Palestinian relations had been strained from the moment Palestinian refugees began pouring into the country during the 1948 Palestine War. Viewing the new arrivals as cowards who had shamefully deserted their homeland expecting others to fight on their behalf, many Lebanese demanded the return of the refugees to Palestine, or at the very least the expulsion of young men of fighting age, many of whom had arrived under the pretext of volunteering for the pan-Arab forces that were being organized for intervention in Palestine. Camille Chamoun, then minister of the interior and the future president of Lebanon, publicly asserted in May 1948 that "at this decisive stage of the fighting the [Palestinians] have not remained so dignified in their stand; they lack organization and omitted to arm themselves as well as their enemy did. Many of them did not assist their brothers from nearby Arab countries who hastened to help them."
In the following decades a fragile modus vivendi evolved between the Lebanese population and its Palestinian guests, whose stay turned out to be far more permanent than initially envisaged. While most Palestinians were denied Lebanese citizenship, thus being condemned to an inferior existence in squalid refugee camps with little hope of social mobility, Beirut was perhaps the one city where the Palestinians were most successfully integrated. Many of them, mainly Christians who managed to acquire Lebanese nationality, became bankers, businessmen, doctors, and academics.
The mass arrival of the guerrillas in the early 1970s undermined this elicate coexistence as many Palestinians, especially in the refugee camps, turned on their Lebanese hosts. "Until the early 1970s, all Palestinian residents in our country feverishly professed to their being Lebanese," lamented a Lebanese Muslim intellectual. "Once the PLO established itself in the country, they suddenly reclaimed a Palestinian 'dentity and began to look down on us."
In a repeat of their Jordanian lawlessness, Palestinian guerrillas quickly turned the vibrant and thriving Lebanese state, whose capital Beirut was internationally acclaimed as the "Paris of the Middle East," into a hotbed of violence and anarchy. Several districts of Beirut and the refugee camps came under exclusive Palestinian control, so much so that they became generally known as the Fakhani Republic, after the Beirut district in which Arafat had set up his headquarters. So did substantial parts of southern Lebanon, or "Fatahland." In a flagrant violation of Lebanese sovereignty, the guerrillas set up roadblocks, took over buildings and drove out local residents, operated extortion rackets, protected criminals fleeing from Lebanese justice, requisitioned cars, opened unlicensed shops, bars, and nightclubs, and issued their own passes and permits. In short, "they behaved like urban gangsters or armed Mexican banditos."
To make things worse, Arafat not only failed to restrain his forces but also became actively involved in internal Lebanese politics, which for more than a century had been plagued by a bitter feud between the country's Christian and Muslim communities. When on April 13, 1975, Christian militiamen ambushed a Palestinian bus and killed its twenty-eight passengers, in revenge for the killing of four Christians earlier that day, mortar and machine-gun battles between Palestinian guerrillas and Christian forces erupted all over Beirut, accompanied by wholesale acts of violence against hapless civilians. It was a familiar pattern, which would dominate Lebanon over the following eighteen months. Adding to the conflagration, Arafat supported a demand by the Lebanese leftist alliance to remove the Phalanges Christian party from government for its apparent involvement in the April 13 massacre, a decision that put the Palestinians squarely on one side of the historic Lebanese divide. "I remember literally screaming at him in my own house," the Palestinian academic Walid Khalidi, then based in Beirut, recalled, along with his desperate attempts to dissuade Arafat from taking sides. "I was really very angry because it just didn't make sense for him to say that. I told him that we as Palestinians had no business calling for the ostracism of the Phalangists, and that it would drive them all the way into the hands of the Israelis."
By June 1976, the Lebanese government had exhausted its ability to contain the conflict and asked for Syrian intervention. In the following years, Lebanon would gradually come under Syrian sway without the
abating of the civil war. Syria prevented a clear-cut military outcome by supporting the weaker force then turning against it once it had gained the upper hand, all in an effort to strengthen its say in Lebanese affairs. The Christians sought to counterbalance Syria's heavy-handed presence by seeking Israeli help, and in June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon in force, further escalating the conflict. Within three months Israel had destroyed the PLO's military infrastructure up to Beirut and expelled Arafat and many of his terrorists from Lebanon. A year later, Arafat attempted to return but was yet again driven out, this time by the Syrians, who had also engineered a revolt against him within his own organization, the Fatah.
Yet this long and painful record of mayhem and destruction seems to have left little impact on Arafat. He has never publicly acknowledged any responsibility for the Black September tragedy, let alone the Lebanese civil war, and in fact looks back on his Lebanese days with fondness. "You see what happened after we departed from Lebanon, these dirty groups..." he told a pair of biographers in 1989 in a diatribe against the Shi'ite militant organization Hizbullah. "While I was there, I could keep these dirty groups under control!" He bragged similarly four years later in an attempt to reassure Israelis of his ability to enforce law and order in the territories that were to be placed under his control as part of the Oslo accords. "I controlled the whole of Lebanon," he said. "Do you think I cannot control Palestine?"
For the many Israelis and Arabs who remembered the PLO's excesses in Lebanon, these words offered anything but comfort. "Arafat wronged Jordan and King Hussein expelled him," Mustafa Tlas, the Syrian minister of defense, observed. "He wronged Syria and Hafez al-Assad kicked him out... And in Tunis, the Tunisians will expel him as well. He causes destruction wherever he goes."
Tlas was wrong in one important respect. Rather than being expelled by the Tunisians, Arafat was saved by the Israeli government headed by Yitzhak Rabin, which offered him the Oslo peace deal. As a man who had made a political career out of war, the promise of peace came to Arafat when he needed it most.
