Tested by Zion (6 page)

The speech did not evoke a strong reaction, and most responses were negative. Like Bush's mention of a Palestinian state in his UN address, the words Powell spoke were not viewed as earth-shaking.
Syria Times
said Powell “did not break much new ground”; the Jordanian government called the speech “serious” but added, “we are awaiting the practical procedural steps”
¹³
; a commentator in the Israeli paper
Maariv
claimed Powell “said nothing new or
exciting” and that Powell's “vision” was “like reheated pasta.”
¹⁴
The
Jerusalem Post
summarized that “Arabs and Europeans reacted coolly.”
¹⁵
The coolness reflected a sense that the United States may have had an objective of Palestinian statehood, but it had no way forward to achieve it – for better or worse. These were just words, speeches, and “work plans,” and there would be more visitors to the area: To Middle Easterners, it all sounded like more of the same.

Sharon reacted quietly because he had been told what was coming. As Shalom Tourgeman explained, after the 9/11 attacks, American attention was turned away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and then came back to it:

You were too busy with analyzing how it will be, and what are the implications of 9/11 on America. And Iraq – the focus was Iraq.…We entered a period where every week we had here a terror attack, and we had to deal with it. Then we started the thinking process of a Palestinian state, which was an idea that was agreed quietly with Sharon, but he wanted to see what are the reactions when you are spelling it out, and it was the first time that you mentioned it. The issue of a Palestinian state was first raised in the speech of Powell in Kentucky. And the administration called us before to prepare Sharon that this is something that Powell is going to do. And this was the first time and it was a big, big issue in Israel, that the Americans are supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state. He didn't get excited because he knew.
¹⁶

Nor could Sharon complain when visiting American officials, from Powell to Tenet and Zinni and Mitchell, met with Arafat because in his months as prime minister, he had been in frequent if indirect contact with Arafat. Shimon Peres, then Israel's foreign minister, had been sent to meet with the PLO leader, as had Sharon's older son Omri; Sharon and
Arafat had even spoken on the telephone. But the terror did not stop. On November 27, 2 were killed and 50 injured in a shooting attack at a bus station. On November 29, a suicide bombing on a bus killed three and injured nine. On December 1, two suicide bombings at the largest pedestrian shopping street in Jerusalem, the Ben Yehuda mall, killed 11 and injured 180 people. The following day, 15 were killed and 40 injured by another suicide bombing in a bus, this time in Haifa. That was 26 dead in 24 hours. A week later on December 9, another bus bombing in Haifa injured 30 more Israelis. On December 12, 11 more people were killed and 30 injured in another bus bombing. The year was ending in a burst of Palestinian terrorist violence that Sharon could not seem to stop.

While the Israelis were maintaining contact with Arafat, they were also punishing him for these attacks: On December 4, for example, after the Ben Yehuda mall bombings, they had attacked his offices in both the West Bank and Gaza. They viewed him as a terrorist but were unable to break contact with him – in part because the United States and Europe seemed to view him as a statesman. In 1994, he had (with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin) received the Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords; during the Clinton years, he was invited to the White House a remarkable 13 times, more often than any other
foreign leader. Israeli efforts to get the United States to see Arafat as a terrorist leader had failed before and, after 9/11, Arafat was eloquent in denying any connection to terror.

Yet on January 3, 2002, Israel seized a ship called the
Karine A
, and Arafat's world began to change. The freighter had been purchased in August 2001 by Adel Mughrabi, a Palestinian associated with Fatah and with Arafat, and had sailed to Sudan. There it picked up its regular cargo – and a new Palestinian crew. In November, in Yemen, some weapons were loaded on board. In December, it sailed near Iran, and a smaller vessel approached it and transferred 80 large wooden crates carrying 50 tons of Iranian arms for the PLO's use against Israel. Commanding the Iranian vessel ferrying the arms to the
Karine A
was Haji Bassem, the deputy of Hizballah's operations chief, the arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyah. Israeli naval commandos seized the ship in international waters in the Red Sea, on its way to the Suez Canal and thence to Gaza. In those crates on board, the Israelis found 345 Katyusha rockets, 735 hand grenades, 1,545 mortar shells, antitank missiles and mines, sniper rifles, Kalashnikov rifles, 700,000 rounds of small arms ammunition, and 2,000 kilograms of explosives. It was discovered that the chief procurement and finance officer of Arafat's Palestinian Authority, Fouad Shubaki, had handled payment for the weapons, inextricably tying Arafat to the episode.

The eventual result was a new American view of Arafat, who was now placed in the post-9/11 context: He was a terrorist, working with Iran and
Hizballah, at the moment when America was in a global war against terror. After Israel's discovery of the ship's cargo, Sharon had summoned his aide Danny Ayalon and told him, “Call Rice.” There were documents she needed to see, revealing who was behind the
Karine A
, who had paid for it, and what was on it. The intelligence attaché at the Israeli Embassy in Washington was Shlomo Mofaz, brother of IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, and he brought the papers to the NSC offices personally. Steve Hadley, at the time deputy national security advisor to Rice, summed it up: “
Karine A
is a terribly important incident in our Middle East policy, because it confirms a view that the Israelis were pushing on us very hard, which was, ‘You don't understand Arafat. Arafat is in fact a purveyor of terror.’”
¹⁷
General Zinni was in the Middle East that day and “actually watched news of the
Karine A
's capture on television while Arafat was sitting beside him.”
¹⁸
Arafat denied everything to Zinni's face. The whole affair had been fabricated to undermine Zinni's mission, Arafat said; he knew nothing about it. Initially, Zinni believed the denials, which made his anger at Arafat's lies even greater later on.

In retrospect, it is clear that the
Karine A
affair
was a turning point in perceptions of Arafat, but the realization that he was permanently wedded to terror came slowly, at least for some: “One week after the seizure, Secretary of State Colin Powell could still be heard insisting that he had ‘not seen any information that yet links [the
Karine A
] directly to Chairman Arafat.’”
¹⁹
In many ways, it is astonishing that as late as January 2002, the United States was dealing with Arafat as a possible peacemaker and desirable ruler of a
new Palestinian state. After returning from Tunis as part of the Oslo Accords
, Arafat had established a corrupt satrapy ruled by a web of “security forces” reporting only to him. He crushed the civil society that had come to life in the form of several hundred NGOs after 1967, when Israeli rule replaced that of Jordan.
²⁰
Arafat led a one-man band, playing rivals and underlings off against each other and absolutely forbidding the establishment of political institutions that might have limited his personal power. There was no reason to believe that an independent state ruled by Arafat would be organized any differently. What is more, Arafat had been involved in terrorism for decades, from organizing the murder of the U.S. ambassador to Sudan in 1973 to leading the first intifada after 1987. Yet even after this latest episode, Arafat was viewed in some quarters as a man with whom business had to be done.

The State Department drafted a secret letter to Arafat, in essence telling him he needed to cut it out; henceforth, no more terrorism. Yet by focusing solely on the future, this draft would tacitly inform Arafat that he was to pay no penalty for the
Karine A
, a conclusion Arafat would reach instantaneously. Despite the war on terror, then, the draft of the letter would signal to him that he could engage in business as usual: terror, denials, more terror.

Rice kept the draft from the vice president's office, but a member of his staff overheard a reference to it and demanded to see the text. The result was a 45-minute confrontation between Rice and Powell on one side and the VP's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, on the other. Rice and Powell told Libby “we have a policy” and it includes dealing with Arafat; Libby's succinct reply was that the VP does not agree with the letter. Cheney took the issue to President Bush, and the letter was never sent.

So in the immediate aftermath of the
Karine A
, the administration neither reached out to Arafat nor did it publicly break with him. In a letter to Powell, Arafat denied any knowledge of or involvement in the arms shipment, a lie that again helped persuade Cheney and many others that Arafat was simply incorrigible. Bush states in his memoir that “Arafat had lied to me. I never trusted him again.”
²¹
Yet at the State Department, there was equivocation: In the department's January 11 press briefing, its spokesman said Arafat must “provide himself a full explanation of what went on, and take action to ensure that it doesn't reoccur.” There was a compelling case of PA involvement, so “Chairman Arafat has a responsibility as the leader of the Palestinian Authority to provide a full explanation, and a responsibility to take immediate action against those responsible.”
²²
It seemed that, for the State Department, Arafat could engage in such activity, lie about it, blame others, make believe he was punishing them, promise not to do it again, and all would be forgiven.

Yet for Sharon and for Bush, the Arafat who would – even after 9/11, even after the administration had endorsed Palestinian statehood, even while American envoys were visiting him regularly, even while Sharon sent secret emissaries to maintain contact – buy tens of millions of dollars worth of arms from Iran for use against Israel was a different figure after the
Karine A
incident. By late January, the president was blaming Arafat directly for promoting
terror: “I am disappointed in Chairman Arafat. He must make a full effort to rout out terror…and ordering up weapons that were intercepted on a boat headed…for that part of the world is not part of fighting terror, that's enhancing terror.”
²³
Cheney added in a television interview days later that “[w]hat's most disturbing isn't just the shipment of arms, it's the fact that it came from Iran.…So what we have here is Yasser Arafat…doing business with Hizballah and Iran.…And it's difficult to take him seriously as an interlocutor in that peace process if he's going to conduct himself in that fashion.”
²⁴

As shown by that CNN interview and his intervention to stop the Powell/Rice letter to Arafat, Cheney was concluding that Arafat was the problem, not part of the solution. To work with him was to turn a blind eye to Palestinian, Iranian, and Hizballah terror. Cheney's aide John Hannah explained that

Karine A
is certainly critical in our universe because it does move the Vice President to finally say…you've got to get rid of Arafat, Arafat is a fundamental problem in terms of his support for violence, his role in terror, the kind of entity he's building in the West Bank.…
Karine A
I think really seals the deal for him that there is just no working with this guy; that he's incorrigible and cannot be redeemed and should not be redeemed – and in fact that he should be seen in the region as suffering a real price for promoting this kind of instability and violence, and being in bed with the Iranians and Mughniyah on
Karine A
. So I think the Vice President reaches a firm conclusion at that point.
²⁵

Cheney's intervention was a sign of another development that the
Karine A
affair
had spurred: “Officials at the Pentagon and the White House…began wresting control of Israel policy from the State Department in mid-January.”
²⁶

While officials in Washington mulled over Arafat's role and its implications for any future efforts at Middle East diplomacy, Palestinian terrorism escalated. On January 17, a shooting attack at a bar mitzvah reception killed 6 and injured 35. On January 22, a shooting attack at a Jerusalem bus stop on the busy Jaffa Road killed 2 and injured 40. On January 25, a suicide bombing injured 25 people near a café on a pedestrian mall in Tel Aviv. On January 27, a suicide bombing at almost the same spot as the January 22 attack killed one man and injured 150. In February, attacks came roughly every other day.

March was even worse, with almost daily attacks killing one or two Israelis. On March 2, 10 people were killed (including 6 children) and more than 50 injured when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives next to a group of women gathered around baby carriages outside a synagogue. Ten people, including seven soldiers, were killed in an attack at a roadblock on March 3. Fifteen people were injured by a suicide bombing on March 7.

The bloodshed was so great that Sharon lifted his year-old “seven days of quiet” demand, deciding on March 8 that negotiations with the Palestinians
could recommence. He was responding to an American proposal that, in view of the extent of violence, the Tenet security plan should be implemented immediately. Yet on March 9, a bombing at the Café Moment in downtown Jerusalem, just blocks from the prime minister's residence, killed 11 and injured 54, while on the same day in Netanya, 2 were killed and 50 injured by two Palestinians using guns and grenades.