Michael Chabon: Israeli Occupation 'The Most Grievous Injustice I've Ever Seen in My Life'
Renowned author along with other writers recently toured West Bank led by Breaking the Silence to research book of essays marking 50 years of occupation.



Israeli soldiers and border police stand guard as Israeli settlers take over several houses, which are disputed between Palestinians and Israelis, in the West Bank old city of Hebron January 21, 2016.s

The author Michael Chabon was on a tour of Hebron in the West Bank when he met an unexpected fan in a nearby group of Israeli soldiers on duty in the divided city.
“I’ve actually read your books,” said one young soldier, recognizing the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.”

Other than that, fans were in short supply that day. Jewish settlers were dogging Chabon’s group, telling the participants that their guide was feeding them lies as he explained the restrictions on Palestinian life in the West Bank city. Indeed, the soldier who had read his novels was one of a group who had been following Chabon’s tour, presumably trying to keep the settlers’ confrontation from escalating. Chabon thanked the soldiers when one recognized him.

Chabon’s tour to the West Bank was led by Breaking the Silence, the controversial Israeli group that collects and distributes Israeli soldiers’ testimony about their service in the occupied territory. Chabon, along with his wife Ayelet Waldman, are two of the 24 leading novelists who will visit East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza over the next few months to research a book of essays marking 50 years of Israeli occupation. The couple will edit the book, which aims to illuminate what it’s like to live under Israeli military rule. Chabon’s essay will focus on Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American businessman who moved to Ramallah to build the Palestinian economy in the wake of the Oslo peace accords, only to watch the Israeli occupation deepen around him.

Chabon, who deals with Jewish themes in his work, addressed Israel obliquely in “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” The novel takes place in Sitka, Alaska, the central city of a settlement of Jewish refugees from World War II. The state of Israel lasted just three months before it toppled in an alternate telling of the Arab-Israeli war. “Jerusalem is a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles,” Chabon wrote. In Sitka, there is tension - but also positive relations - between the Jews and the indigenous population, a possible reference to real life Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians.

Now, Chabon will address Israel’s darkest issues head on. His attention to the occupation, sparked by Waldman’s 2014 trip to Hebron, comes out of a place of deep concern for Israel. “I do love Israel. I do care about Israel,” he said. “To dehumanize others dehumanizes you. It is bad for Israel and if it ended it would be good for Israel.”

The Israel Boook Review, Managing Editor, Stephen Darori wh0 accompanied the authors’ Breaking the Silence tour for two days, sat down  for an interview with Chabon at the group’s hotel in the stately Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Chabon was visibly jarred by what he had seen the day before in Hebron, calling the occupation “the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life.” He talked about the role of authors in addressing human rights issues, his childhood relationship to Israel and whether he is worried about alienating Jewish readers with his anti-occupation stance. (He’s not.)

Yesterday you went to Hebron, one of the most challenging places in the territories. What was that like?
As a Jew and someone who has felt connected both to Israel and also to the Old Testament narratives, it actually does mean something to me to be in Hebron, to be where supposedly Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca and Leah are all buried. From my point of view, to see that place being dishonored and made less sacred and less holy by the presence of this incredibly cruel and unjust machinery, some literal machinery and figurative machinery of oppression, it offends me. I wish I could simply have gone and had a chance to experience the history and the past and the narratives that shape me without this vituperative hateful layer of supposed holiness spoiling it, not just for me but I think in some ways for the world.

What was your relationship to Israel and Zionism growing up?
I felt deeply connected to legends and folklore and Jews generally. They are the central metaphors of my way of thinking about things, like the Tower of Babel or the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. In terms of Israel, I was four years old when the Six Day War happened. That is my first memory of Israel. First it was, “Oh my god, oh no” and it was terrible things happening and then it turned to incredible giddy jubilation and relief, but beyond relief, in hindsight it was almost gloating. Then in ’73, the Yom Kippur War brought a kind of dread, a prolonged version of the same thing. It was initial dread and anxiety followed by eventual relief, much less jubilation. There was a sense of “That was close.”

You went to Israel in 1992 as an adult when you had just started dating Ayelet Waldman. Did you travel there as a child too?
No. But my grandparents had come here and I remember them coming back and bringing me a hat from a kibbutz called Ayelet HaShahar. That was the first time I saw the word “Ayelet” in my life. When I met my Ayelet, I was like, “Oh the hat my grandparents brought me. The kibbutznik hat.”
The idea of the kibbutzim was important to my grandfather and my father. [The kibbutz project] was the only viable socialist thing that didn’t result in totalitarian excess and repression and so on. There was a political pride, too. It wasn’t just the quasi-militaristic or jingoistic, “Yeah, we showed them!” kind of thing. It was, “This is amazing what they are doing over there in many ways, making the desert bloom.” We were able to take pride in all of that.

There was no regard whatsoever for Palestine or Palestinians and they only came into my consciousness initially through terrorist incidents. It wasn’t until the invasion of Lebanon that some cracks started to appear for me and I started to have questions reading about the massacres in the refugee camps. I was like, wait, Israel? Is that what they are doing? And then there was a long, slow, heartbreaking process of continuing disillusion and dismay. But I was always [grasping] to this ultimately irrational idea that [Israel’s actions toward Palestinians] were justified or couldn’t be helped or were no worse than anything anyone else would have done under the same circumstances.
You said you had not dealt with the topic of occupation in your writing until now. You have a large Jewish readership. Are you concerned about alienating them?

I’m not so worried about that. All I’m really doing is going to try to see for myself. Once you see for yourself it is pretty obvious I think to any human being with a heart and a mind, it is pretty clear what to feel about it. It is the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life. I have seen bad things in my own country in America. There is plenty of horrifying injustice in the U.S. prison system, the “second Jim Crow” it is often called. Our drug laws in the United States are grotesquely unjust. I know to some degree what I am talking about. This is the worst thing I have ever seen, just purely in terms of injustice. If saying that is going to lose me readers, I don’t want those readers. They can go away and never come back.

What role do novelists have to play in changing the status quo in Israel and the Palestinian Territories?
What a creative writer, a fiction writer or a writer of creative non-fiction can bring is an overt point of view that doesn’t try to hide itself the way journalists are trained to be objective and conceal their biases and just “present the facts.” It is a strength to have a point of view, to implicitly or explicitly say to the reader: Here is where I am coming from and this is what I saw and this is what I thought of it and what I made of it and how it made me feel. It is all there on the page for the reader to accept or reject or connect to or not connect to, and it can be extremely powerful.
Without Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” there might not have been a Civil War fought to end slavery in the United States. It was a novel, more than anything else, more than preaching from the pulpits or the reports of travelers or whatever the equivalent of journalism would have been in that day, or first person slave narratives. Fiction invites the reader into the world of a novel in a way that no other kind of writing does. So you have got these people who are professional noticers, professional observers, professional connection-drawers, professional metaphor-crafters bringing all of those skills to bear to report on any aspect that they wish of their weeklong experience here.
As a Jewish writer who deals with Jewish topics, have you experienced this trip differently from some of the other writers on the tour?
The first day we were here they took us to Silwan, in the shadow of City of David [a national archaeological park managed by the Elad organization, which helps settlers move into Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem]. I’m hearing and seeing [Jewish settlers] illegally taking over houses and these [Palestinian] people are fighting for their neighborhood. Who does it turn out is one of the major sources of [support] for this whole City of David enterprise? The little blue boxes I put my pocket change in at Hebrew school every week growing up, the Jewish National Fund. That was in 1973 and the pennies I was putting in the boxes weren’t literally going to support the takeover of Silwan. It’s just I have that in my own personal history, not the history of my people, but in my own life I have a connection to something that does make me culpable. Not just through omission, not just through a lack of having taken any action or spoken up or said anything but actually through support of things that I didn’t know were being used in that way. It has given me a whole different viewpoint on the entire enterprise going all the way back to 1967 at least.
You are putting the finishing touches on your new book. Can you give us a peek into the subject matter?
It’s coming out in November. It has a lot of Jewish content. It is about an American Jewish family. In some ways there are definite echoes of “Kavalier & Clay” and the “Yiddish Policemen’s Union” and other books. It’s a novel disguised as a memoir of my grandfather, but it is not my grandfather. It is written as if it were a memoir by me. It is an attempt to explain an enigmatic advertisement I found in a copy of an issue of Esquire Magazine in 1958 for Chabon Scientific Company that sold a model rocket. This memoir is the fictional history behind that advertisement to explain it.

A,B.C of the Rabin-Arafat-Peres Oslo II Accords Fantasy....Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, by David K. Shipler Paperback,Broadway Books The Modern Middle East: A History 4th Edition by James L. Gelvin, Oxford University Press Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel,by Dan Ephron Hardcover,W. W. Norton & Company On Palestine Paperback – April 7, 2015 by Noam Chomsky , Ilan Pappé ,Haymarket Books Lonely Planet Israel & the Palestinian Territories (Travel Guide),by Lonely Planet and Daniel Robinson Paperback,Lonely Planet Routledge Library Editions: Israel and Palestine: Palestinian Leadership on the West Bank (RLE Israel and Palestine): The Changing Role of the Arab Mayors under Jordan and Israel by Moshe Maoz,Routledge Occupied Lives: Maintaining Integrity in a Palestinian Refugee Camp in the West Bank,by Nina Gren,Hardcover.The American University in Cairo Press My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit, Paperback, Spiegel & GrauOn PalestineApr 7, 2015 by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé Paperback (Haymarket Books),The Struggle for PalestineJun 1, 2002 by Lance Selfa Paperback (Haymarket Books), The False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for PalestineNov 15, 2011 by Tikva Honig-Parnass Paperback (Haymarket Books),Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and ResolutionMay 1, 2012 by Moshé Machover Paperback (Haymarket Books), Stateless Citizenship: The Palestinian-Arab Citizens of Israel (Studies in Critical Social Sciences)Nov 11, 2014 by Shourideh C. Molavi Paperback (Haymarket Books)

The three types of area jurisdiction in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) – A, B and C – were meant as a short-term fix until a real Israeli-Palestinian peace accord could be crafted. More than 20 years later, both sides have broadly infringed on these parameters. Israel regularly penetrates Area A for security reasons, while the PA (with EU support) is building illegally and dangerously in key parts of Area C that are critical to Israel. Israel should halt this encroachment with determination.

Most would agree that the ABCs are indispensable to literacy and a gateway to Western literature and culture. Similarly, knowing the difference between areas A, B and C in Judea and Samaria and the ramifications thereof is indispensable to understanding the politics and violence that affect many of us on an almost daily basis.

Take any social or political activity of consequence for either Israelis or Palestinians, from agriculture to construction to employment, settlement and of course security and taxation, and the importance of these designations is bound to arise.

It has been more than twenty years since the terms "Areas A, B and C" came into existence, but even avid followers of Israel’s political scene might be confused over what they mean. They were first used in legal documents during the Oslo negotiations, most notably the interim agreement between Israel and the PLO signed in September 1995 known as the Oslo II Accord. That agreement extended the jurisdiction of the newly formed Palestinian Authority (PA) to the major towns in Judea and Samaria. The PA had secured jurisdiction over most of Gaza and Jericho a year and a half earlier.

These three types of jurisdiction—which have important differences—were only intended to have meaning for five or six years, at which point a final settlement to the Palestinian issue was supposed to be achieved. The date for that auspicious occasion, as agreed upon by then-US president Bill Clinton, then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat, was to be no later than five years from the establishment of the PA in May 1994; that is to say, in 1999.

Seventeen years later, a final agreement seems as distant as ever. The differences between the legal definitions of areas A, B and C and the realities on the ground have grown. Yet despite those differences, Israel, the PA, the US and most if not all of the international community still regard these legal distinctions and the documents in which they were inscribed as binding, only to be supplanted by the signing of a final agreement.

This primer tries to make sense of these differences and their ramifications for issues such as settlements, security and the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian issue.

Area A is the space in which the PA has political and military jurisdiction over its residents, all of whom are Arab. This includes all the major towns and their immediate environs, with the partial exception of Jewish Hebron, which came under exclusive Israeli control in the 1997 Hebron protocol between Israel and the PLO. This area comprises approximately 18 percent of Judea and Samaria’s land mass.

According to the Oslo Accords, the PA was never given jurisdiction over Israeli citizens and foreign nationals. Israeli citizens have the right to enter and pass through Area A unmolested, provided they are not involved in illicit activity, in which case the PA can only temporarily apprehend them until they are transferred to the Israeli authorities. Joint Israeli-PA patrols were intended to handle such cases.

Area B signified less built-up areas, many of which shared space with settlements created in the massive settlement drive in the 1980s launched by the Likud government. In Area B, which comprises approximately 22% of Judea and Samaria, Israel and the PA share jurisdiction. Israel enjoys exclusive jurisdiction over the Jewish inhabitants and exclusive authority over security for both its Arab and Jewish inhabitants.

The PA has political, administrative and police jurisdiction over the Arab inhabitants. They are subject to its laws, pay the necessary taxes and benefit from the same public services the PA provides in Area A. Strictly speaking, only the IDF and the Israel Police can make arrests in these areas.

Most of Judea and Samaria (60% of the area) is designated Area C, over which Israel has exclusive jurisdiction both administratively and in security matters. Area C’s distinguishing characteristic is that it is sparsely populated by Arab inhabitants and in which much Jewish settlement has taken place. Most of this area lies east of the populated mountain spine from Jenin in the north to Hebron in the south. The eastern slopes descending into and including the Jordan Valley are characterized by harsh climate and low to no rainfall.

The Jordan Valley, the South Hebron Hills and the area in the vicinity of Ma’aleh Adumim—from east of Mount Scopus to Jericho—are by far the most politically contested spaces in Area C, due to both Jewish settlement and Israeli security concerns.

It is important to note that a fourth letter of the alphabet was left out of these legal designations: “J” for Jerusalem. The issue of Jerusalem in the relevant legal documents was mentioned only as one of five crucial issues that were to be resolved in the final talks. This meant that Jerusalem remained formally under exclusive Israeli jurisdiction.

The alphabetic division of the area clearly reflected Israeli geostrategic logic more than Palestinian interests, suggesting that Israel had the upper hand in the negotiation process. The division was supposed to facilitate Israeli security control while relieving Israel of the burden of caring for the area’s Arab inhabitants.

But Israel's upper hand in the negotiations was undermined by its policy on the ground over the six years between the emergence of the PA and the outbreak of the second intifada. The Israeli Defense Ministry, the IDF and the government attempted to buy quiet by turning a blind eye to PA encroachment with the encouragement of many Western governments.





The activities of Orient House, the shadow east Jerusalem municipality headed by Faisal Husseini, were probably the most striking deviation from the strategic logic of the Oslo agreements. Husseini, although dubbed a “peace advocate,” was in fact one of the more extreme and influential Fatah leaders until his death in 2000. Palestinian security agents soon penetrated East Jerusalem and often kidnapped Arabs who were suspected of being informers, or for expressing opposition to Arafat, or even for penal matters.

Just as these infringements occurred in Jerusalem, they also occurred in Areas B and C. The fear they created must have made it difficult to gather intelligence, a constraint for which the Israeli public paid dearly. In the first two years of the second intifada, highly sophisticated squads of up to 12 terrorists belonging to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah expertly planned—undetected—large suicide bombings over an extended period of time.

Meanwhile, the PA achieved effective sovereignty over Area A, over which the Israeli authorities had the right to “hot pursuit” and in which Israeli citizens had the right to move and do business. Soon after the signing of the 1993 accord, settlers and most Israelis were barred from entering Area A after a few Beit El and Ofra inhabitants endangered their lives attempting to exercise their right of movement. Area A also became off limits to the IDF. As a result, sanctuaries of terrorism appeared in Arab towns such as Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm and Bethlehem.

So ingrained did the idea of PA sovereignty become that when the IDF entered Gaza in April 2001, for the first time since the signing of Oslo II, the US Secretary of State assailed the operation as “excessive and disproportionate” and demanded that Israel withdraw its forces—a demand with which Israel quickly complied. Tragically for the 1,050 victims of Palestinian terrorism and their families, while Israeli sovereignty was being violated in Jerusalem, Israel effectively lost its right to prevent terrorism in Area A between 1996 and 2002.

It was only after 9/11 and Iranian complicity in the massive shipment of arms to the PA, exposed through the interception and takeover of the boat Karin-A in February 2002, that the US gave the green light for Israeli penetration of Area A. The suicide attack at a 2002 Passover Seder held in the Park Hotel that killed 33 Israelis—including many Holocaust survivors—provided the resolve to switch gears from a policy of essentially absorbing casualties to a major frontal assault.

At the end of March 2002, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, re-conquering all the major Arab towns in Judea and Samaria, and essentially changing areas designated A to the status of B, where the IDF became responsible for security. Nothing characterized that change more than the preventive arrests carried out by the IDF on an almost daily basis ever since.

The numbers of those arrested is mind-boggling by Western standards. In 2007, IDF forces, working mostly at night, arrested 7,000 Arabs. The arrests declined to half that number in 2012, but have increased since then with the reemergence of terrorism on a large scale. In 2015, the number of people arrested rose to 6,000, with sharp increases during the months that coincided with the ongoing wave of violence. To get a sense of the proportion of these arrests, consider that a senior security official in the British Home Office announced with alarm that the authorities had arrested 281 terrorist suspects in Great Britain in 2014.

IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) forays into PA territory to make preventive arrests have been the most effective means by far in reducing terrorism (at least until the present wave of “own-initiative” terrorism). Thus, terrorism declined by a greater percentage before the erection of the security barrier than after it.

Israel has not been alone in changing the status quo in the alphabetic division of Judea and Samaria. Whereas Israel reduced PA control in Area A in its fight against terrorism, the PA and the EU, with financial support from Arab states such as Qatar and Kuwait, have over the past decade sought to actively encroach on Israeli rule in Area C, where according to the accords, Israel has exclusive administrative and security control.

The major arena in this intense yet quiet war extends from Anata (bordering the light rail depot on the northern side of the Jerusalem-Jericho highway) to Abu Dis and Eizariya, three kilometers to the south, landing on both sides of the highway parallel to Ma’aleh Adumim all the way down to Jericho. The PA and EU’s major objective is also their weapon: to create continuous Arab settlement from the south to the north of the West Bank.

Israel would like to prevent that contiguity by building on E-1, the area that would create continuous settlement from Ma’aleh Adumim to Jerusalem. But as Israeli building dwindles into insignificance under the stern gaze of Uncle Sam and a frightened Israeli Prime Minister, the PA, with the help of the EU, has succeeded in housing 120,000 Palestinians in a space no larger than nine square kilometers. This number is more than double the number of inhabitants of Ma’aleh Adumim and the other Israeli localities in the area extending to Jericho.

One hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants? Where do they all live? The answer can be found in Waze, but you probably don’t need it. Go to the French Hill junction and continue on Route 1 to Jericho. When you are one kilometer from the junction—literally meters from the security barrier—look north. You’ll find an urban jungle so dense it makes Bat Yam look like New York’s Central Park.

Welcome to Ras Khamis and Ras Shahada, which block from view the village of Anata, home to the prophet Jeremiah from Anatot. According to Palestinian media, Nasrin Alian, an attorney with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 120,000 inhabitants live in this urban monstrosity alone, all of which was erected since 2007. Umm Ishak al-Kaluti, of the same media site, confirms that ten years ago she owned one of the few homes on this once barren hill.

Most of this area is within the official municipal line and is thus formally under Israeli sovereignty. The remainder is Area C, which Israel presumably controls. Yet hundreds of six-to-ten-storey apartment buildings were built there, all of which are illegal, as a senior officer in the Border Police in charge of security in the area confirmed. This officer and Jamil Sanduqa, head of the makeshift local council of Ras Khamis, supported by the PA and the EU, would both agree—despite their quiet war—that these neighborhoods are a human disaster. Sanduqa characterizes living there as “life imprisonment.”

The only road that traverses this urban nightmare is two lanes wide. It is continuously clogged all the way to the 24-hour outpost, manned by the Border Police, which allows passage into Jerusalem. Fire trucks find it impossible to reach the scene in the event of emergencies like fires from electrical short circuits or explosions of gas balloons (most of which are illegally placed). They would be hard pressed to reach victims in the event of a major disaster like an earthquake.

Garbage burns in the open with devastating health effects on the inhabitants, and probably on the inhabitants of French Hill as well. This is also true of A-Zaim, a smaller version of Ras al-Khamis just two kilometers south, which is designated as Area B. In A-Zaim, illegal building is taking place toward the highway in violation of international conventions that stipulate mandatory distances between the building line and major arteries of traffic.

One must assume that the Israeli officials in Beit El responsible for seeing that the PA operates within legal confines have very rosy glasses. Otherwise, how can one explain that these illegal buildings, which can easily become ideal shooting sites for terrorist snipers, have not been dismantled?





From Ma'aleh Adumim onward, the EU has identified Bedouin makeshift encampments as the chief weapon for transforming Area C into the would-be Palestinian state. Were EU officials to allow such encampments in their home states, they would find themselves behind bars for abetting housing that is in contravention of civic ordinances in third-world states, let alone states that comprise the EU.

These fast-growing encampments are too close to a major highway, and bereft of sewage systems and organized garbage disposal. The Israeli authorities have leveled an area just south of Abu Dis that would provide all these amenities, but the EU continues to abet this inhuman settlement. Obviously, the EU believes that any illegal means justify the end of creating a Palestinian state. The story is being repeated in the Southern Hebron Hills.

The document written and signed in 1995 that created areas A, B and C, though hardly dramatic in its own right, set the stage for dramatic, often painful events. It directly relates to current affairs such as the recent proposal made by IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot to return to the PA sole security control over some cities in Area A, beginning with Ramallah and Jericho.


Will Israel repeat the mistake of providing Hamas and Islamic Jihad with sanctuaries from which to launch not only attacks with makeshift weapons, as in the current wave of violence, but also massive suicide bombings, as in the second intifada?


The same can be said of the lenience Israel is showing in the face of massive illegal building abetted by the EU and some other Arab states. Israel might be making the same error it made between 1996 and 2002 when it allowed the PA to encroach on areas B and C, for which it paid a very high price during the second intifada.

Yasser Arafat and the PLO : Swiss Bank Accounts, Booze, Liquor and Boys in Bed

• Public Opinion and Political Response in Palestine: Leadership, Campaigns and Elections since Arafat by Erika Schwarze,Hardcover. I.B.Tauris
• Arafat: The Biography Paperback – International Edition, by Tony Walker, Andrew Gowers ,Virgin Books
• Arafat and the Dream of Palestine: An Insider's Account by Bassam Abu Sharif, Hardcover
• Once an Arafat Man: The True Story of How a PLO Sniper Found a New Life,by Tass Saada and Dean Merrill State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Unmaking of the Palestinian Statb by Jonathan Schanzer,Hardcover, St. Martin's Press
• The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process (Nation Books) Paperback ,by Clayton E. Swisher ,Nation Books
• Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution,by Andrew Gowers and Tony Walker,Hardcover, Interlink Pub Group Inc

Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are known internationally for the violence between Israelis and Palestinians. As ruinous as that violence has been, another cancer permeates Arafat's administration; its name is corruption. From firsthand experience, I understand just how deep it is. Here is what we know.

From Optimism to Dismay

On July 1, 1994, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman, Yasir Arafat, arrived triumphant in the Gaza Strip, watched by millions on television across the world. his PLO henchmen wer already in Ramallah, having traveled there from their exile throughout the Middle East in the weeks after Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and President Bill Clinton had signed the Oslo accords in September 1993. Between 1994 and 1996, PLO Terrorists and  Palestinian businessmen and intellectuals spent many days brainstorming to see what contributions we could make to a Palestinian state. Many were originally from all parts of Israel,HaifaJerusalem, Ld, Ramla and smaller villages, and had witnessed an Israeli withdrawal of forces and the birth of a democratic Palestinian state. It was a time of optimism among Palestiniansand they gathered with friends and business partners around the television in Ramallah and watched Arafat's arrival in the Gaza Strip.

In 1996the Palestine International Bank (PIB) was founded. Thousands of Palestinians in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the diaspora supported me financially or morally. Their investors had hoped to build a thriving economy in the newly autonomous PA areas. The PIB was truly Palestinian. Headquartered in Ramallah, it used mostly Palestinian capital, although it did receive support from other Arabs. All its reserves were kept inside Palestinian areas, and our shares traded actively on the Palestinian stock exchange. From nothing, it expanded their customer base to more than 15,500. Among those licensed by the newly established Palestine Monetary Authority (PMA), they were the largest bank in the Palestinian territories.

Executives from PIB first met Arafat in April 1995 while trying to secure a banking license for the PIB. This meeting at his Gaza office, though brief, was cordial and encouraging.Things should have  gone  smoothly,but, as the PIB grew more popular, Arafat's inner circle and, specifically, Muhammad Rashid, a PA official, also known as Khalid Salam and often described as an economic advisor to Arafat and manager of a small percentage of PIB stocks, made it difficult for the PIB to branch out and move forward. The PA, which strictly controls Palestinian media, launched a negative media blitz against us in a bid to suppress our growth. The systematic effort to undermine PIB came especially after key PIB Executives refused to cede power to Muhammad Rashid.

Over the course of fifteen meetings, the PIB ExecutivesI became better acquainted with Arafat and grew increasingly concerned with his leadership style. Arafat and top PA officials did not respect the rule of law; many were corrupt. Arafat believed neither in separation of powers nor in checks and balances. His animosity toward accountability thwarted efforts to establish a responsible leadership. By 1996, Palestinians in the PA were saying they had traded one occupation for two, the one by Israel and the one by Arafat and his cronies.

Rather than use donor funds for their intended purposes, Arafat regularly diverted money to his own accounts. It is amazing that some U.S. officials still see the Palestinian Authority as a partner even after U.S. congressional records revealed authenticated PLO papers signed by Arafat in which he instructed his staff to divert donors' money to projects benefiting himself, his family, and his associates

How did Arafat's inner circle benefit? In 1994, he instructed the Palestinian Authority official in charge of finances, Muhammad Nashashibi, to fund secretly—to the tune of $50,000 per month—a Jerusalem publicity center for Raymonda Tawil, Arafat's mother-in-law, and Ibrahim Qar'in, an associate of Arafat's family. He also ordered the investment in the computer companies of 'Ali and Mazzan Sha'ath, sons of Nabil Sha'ath, the PA's key negotiator in talks with Israel. Amin Haddad, Arafat's designated governor of the Palestine Monetary Authority, established several import-export companies acting as the front man for Arafat. The Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction financed these activities. Thus, an organization meant to channel funds from donor countries like France and Germany became a mechanism by which to enrich Arafat.

Arafat's men flagrantly displayed corruption. Arriving penniless in Gaza and the West Bank from exile in Tunisia, many PLO members amassed wealth, built villas in Gaza, Ramallah, Amman, and other places, and sent their children to the best schools in the United Kingdom and the United States. Hisham Makki, former head of the Palestine Broadcasting Services, assassinated in January 2001, earned a monthly salary of $1,500 but became a millionaire within a few years. Immediately after his assassination, Arafat froze Makki's personal bank accounts, estimated at $17 million. Makki was alleged to have taken bribes and sold government-owned equipment. However, it was rumored that he had a dispute with another PA official over the sharing of profits gained on illegal business transactions. His assailants, believed to be members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a shady group affiliated with Fatah, have never been caught.

Palestinians complained. The corruption of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority were blatant, but it appeared as if their status quo policies caused Israel and the United States to turn a blind eye. Diplomats downplayed flagrant corruption. In August 2001, Israel seized close to a half million documents from Palestinian offices in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Subsequent State Department reports on Palestinian governance and terrorism made little use or even mention of these documents. European and U.S. policymakers assumed Arafat's critics to be against the Oslo accord. That may have been the case with members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but it was not the case among more liberal-minded Palestinians and investors.

Arafat's corruption reached its peak in 1999 via the monster of "twelve security forces that nobody could control," in addition to the disorganized Tanzim (Fatah's militia). He played these services off each other, never allowing a subordinate to gain power. Between 1995 and 2000, Arafat's thugs beat up at least eleven elected members of the 88-member Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) because they voiced views in private and in public that were opposed to Arafat's on how the PA is run. The victims included PLC Human Rights Committee head Qaddoura Fares, Azmi ash-Shoaibi, Abdul Jawad Saleh, Hatem Abdul Kader, among others. Arafat wanted to terrorize and silence his critics. Indeed, one of his favorite slogans was Dimuqratiyat al-Banadiq (Democracy of the Guns). Arafat believes true power lies in force, whether directed against Israelis or against his own people.

How popular is Arafat among Palestinians? At times of crisis, television crews show cheering Palestinians demonstrating and greeting their leader outside his Ramallah headquarters. In better days, Palestinian television regularly broadcasts pro-Arafat rallies across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But rallies aren't always what they seem. PA funds are used to buy loyalty and drum up support.The PA hired crowds, stages promotional media campaigns, and distributes Arafat's pictures in the streets and alleys of the Palestinian territories. Rather than build a viable state, Arafat sought only to amass wealth and power.Arafat and his entourage and close associates used to  refer to him asal-Arrab, meaning "the Godfather."

At the end of 1997, when the PA Auditor's Office released its end of the year financial report, $326 million—43 percent of the annual budget—was "missing." Only 57 percent of the budget was accounted for, spent on security forces (35 percent), office of the president (12.5 percent), and public allocation (9.5 percent). A special committee appointed by the PLC conducted an investigation and released a report accusing the PA of financial mismanagement. The findings of this panel exposed many official misgivings and abuses such as the use of government money for personal purposes by ministers Nabil Sha'ath, Talal Sidr, and Yasir Abd Rabboh; excessive expenditure on rent, salaries, and cost of travel in various ministries; receipt of bribes by ministry officials in the Ministry of Civil Affairs; illegal and unreported collection of taxes by the Ministry of Postal Services; granting illegal customs exemptions on cars, furniture, and material donations entering the PA, etc. It concluded that anyone involved in corruption should be taken to court, regardless of his position as minister, undersecretary, or director-general. The report demanded the ouster of at least two ministers: civil affairs minister Jamil at-Tarifi, and planning and international cooperation minister Nabil Sha'ath.
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The PLC voted 51-1 in favor of dissolving Arafat's appointed 18-member limited self-rule cabinet. Sixteen ministers gave letters to Arafat signaling readiness to resign if asked. But Arafat confirmed the corrupt ministers in their positions rather than firing them. Additionally, PLC member Haider Abdel Shafi resigned due to "frustration with the performance of the PLC and with the executive's total lack of concern for its recommendations," and added, "The PLC is a marginal body and not a true parliament."
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Even as the PLC committee was conducting its investigation, Arafat appointed Tayeb Abd al-Rahim, general secretary of the Presidential Office, to make a detailed inquiry into acts of corruption. His report remains secret.

In practice the reports were meaningless. Since Arafat did not honor rule of law, decisions by auditors or the Palestinian Legislative Council fall by the wayside. Corruption continues. More than

,; six years after the report's issuance, Tarifi remains in the cabinet. Rather than face charges, Sha'ath has won promotion.

In another case, Salam Fayyad, the official in charge of finance, again said in August 2003 that there were many "irregularities" in the work of the Petroleum Authority, which has been siphoning money to secret bank accounts for years. When Nablus legislator Mu'awyah al-Masri asked for details and figures about the revenues from oil products, Fayyad shocked the lawmakers by declaring, "Unfortunately, the documents related to the revenues from oil products—or how the money was used—can't be found. They have disappeared from the ministry."

The bank accounts of Harbi Sarsour, head of the Petroleum Authority, were frozen by the PA pending investigation into the scandal. But an initial investigation by Fayyad's office and the PLC showed that much of the oil profits had been deposited into a bank account under Arafat's name.

For sheer scale, few allegations match up to a deal allegedly struck between Muhammad Rashid, one of Arafat's economic advisors, and the late Yossi Ginosar, a former Israeli security officer. Ginosar's company, ARC, helped open Swiss bank accounts and deposit funds into them derived from both PA-financed companies and Israeli tax rebates to the Palestinian Authority. Over a period of five years, approximately US$900 million was diverted to these accounts.

In early 2002, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted a poll in which they surveyed 1,320 Palestinians. Eighty-five percent believed that there was corruption in PA institutions; only 16 percent gave a positive evaluation to democracy under the Palestinian Authority. Eighty-four percent expressed support for fundamental reforms in the PA.

Arafat Robs the Palestine International Bank

On November 28, 1999, the PIB became a victim of Arafat's abuse of power and flagrant disregard for the law. That's when, in direct breach of the law, Arafat issued a decree dissolving the Palestine International Bank's Board of Directors. The state-controlled Palestine Monetary Authority took over the Bank, and with Arafat's blessing and written approval, formed a new supervisory Board of Directors, including at least one convicted and Interpol-wanted felon. The unlawful takeover was a confiscation of all the Directors m Shareholders', its clients' private assets for Arafat's personal use. At the date of seizure, PIB total assets amounted to $105 million. Since the takeover, they e neither called for a shareholders' meeting nor disclosed the bank's balance sheet.

The PLC investigated the seizure of the bank after I lodged a complaint in 2000 about the PIB's unlawful takeover. The PMA governor then threatened the bank's auditing firm, Talal Abu Ghazaleh International (TAGI), for revealing facts and figures that implicated the Palestinian leadership. The PMA governor took punitive measures against them but was unanimously condemned by the PLC. Meanwhile, the PMA altered, hid, or destroyed bank records in their campaign to demonstrate malfeasance on the  part of the previous Chairman and key executives  retroactively. They supplied false information to the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) group leading to a faulty audit. PWC seems to have taken for granted the accuracy of material that PMA governor Amin Haddad supplied, but he both provided some fraudulent documents and omitted others. The Qatari government rejected the PWC Report

As they seized the bank, Arafat's security services harassed the previous Chairman and Executiveswho fled to the Qatari mission in Gaza. Arafat's staff confiscated then  private belongings  of the Chairman, including my car, which Arafat took for himself.  Only after the State of Qatar threatened Arafat with financial sanctions and severing of diplomatic ties did the PA give us free passage for the chairman of PIB and its Executives  to leave Gaza for Qatar.

 After months of investigation and deliberation, the Palestinian Legislative Council ruled all decisions taken by the PMA on the matter of PIB to be illegal, and hence subsequent actions to be illegitimate. Chiefly because of his mismanagement of the PIB case and citing corruption, in May 2004, the PLC fired Amin Haddad from his position in the Palestinian Monetary Authority. Hassan Khreisheh, Palestinian deputy parliament speaker, said, "This is part of the parliament's war against corruption in the PA."He pointed out that Haddad had been pocketing unauthorized bonuses and profiting illegally from his management of the PIB. In spite of this, Arafat continues to back Haddad. As Khreisheh says, "Arafat resists any change, but pressure is building against him."[26] Arafat's support for Haddad is magnified in his August 5, 2004 letter to the PLC Reform Committee. He stated, "Firing the governor of the PMA would serve our enemies."[27] By "enemies," he was referring to, among others, the previous Chairman of PIB and the deputy prime minister of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor ath-Thani, whom he mentioned more than three times before several PLC members.The PLC also indicted Arafat's relative, Jarrar al-Kudwa, who headed the General Monitoring Board that functions as the PA's Controller's Office, for corruption and misleading the investigation into the seizure of the PIB.

On June 18, 2004, the evening after the Jordanian daily Ad-Dustur published the Khreisheh interview cited above, Arafat ordered his Special Security Apparatus to arrest one of my sympathizers in Ramallah. Thus does Arafat continue to use the Palestinian security forces to harass and intimidate anyone who questions his pocketbook. It is no surprise then that he issued clear instructions to PA officials not to discuss openly the PIB issue. To him, the matter is an extremely important issue. The PA disregards many court decisions unless they serve Arafat's purposes. Chief Justice Zuhair as-Sourani usually acts on Arafat's orders.Arafat and Sourani handpicked Judge Talaat Taweel in order to pass the civil judgment  . Taweel has been implicated in criminal cases. Likewise, the PLC's Human Rights Committee condemned Sourani's illegal actions. Arafat subsequently promoted him to chief justice.

The continuing decay of the judicial system prompted the Union of Palestinian Lawyers to launch a short boycott of the Palestinian court system on June 28, 2004. Union leader Hatem Abbas remains a vocal critical of judicial corruption. On September 26, 2004, he sent a strongly worded letter regarding Sourani's malpractice.The PLC decided to suspend all sessions from September 7 to October 7, 2004, in an attempt to pressure Arafat to accelerate the approval of a reform package that he publicly adopted on August 18, 2004, and in protest against the Palestinian cabinet for not implementing the decisions and bills approved by the PLC. The PLC wants to stress that the council's decisions have to be taken seriously.

The Cement Scandal

Abuse of power among Arafat's associates and Palestinian ministers is not the exception but rather the rule, as shown by the cement scandal: PA officials were accused of selling cement to Israel for use in constructing the West Bank wall and for Israeli construction in the disputed territories, then pocketing the money.

On February 11, 2004, Israel's Channel 10 television reported that the Al-Quds Cement Factory supplied the cement for these purposes. Television footage showed cement mixers leaving company headquarters and driving to Maale Adumim, an Israeli settlement a few kilometers away. The family of Prime Minister Ahmad Qureia co-owns the Al-Quds company. When confronted by the allegations at a June 2004 press conference in Rome, Qureia denied personal involvement.

On June 9, 2004, the PLC held a debate in which some legislators accused Maher Masri, who held the Palestinian Authority's economy portfolio, of negligence and fraud. Council members called for an investigation on "corruption and tax evasion" charges. Despite the charges, the debate itself was stilted. Palestinian security ejected PLC deputy and anti-corruption campaigner Jawad Saleh from the debate after the PLC speaker prevented nine deputies who had conducted the investigation from participating in the debate.

The scandal reportedly started with an Israeli-German businessman named Zeev Blenski. Blenski sought to import 120,000 tons of Egyptian concrete but, the Egyptian firms, under pressure from Egypt's anti-Israel lobby, refused to provide it. Blenski then turned to the Tarifi Ready Mix Cement Company, owned by Civil Affairs Minister Jamil Tarifi and his brother Jamal and two other Palestinian cement companies, Intisar Barakeh Company for General Trade and the Yusef Barakeh Company for General Trade.

Tarifi got Masri to sign an import permit. In fact, "senior PA officials had received bribes to issue import licenses to several importers and businessmen working on behalf of Israelis." The permits directed the cement to be used to rebuild homes in the Rafah refugee camp, which had been razed by Israeli troops. Instead, Blenski sold the cement to build parts of the separation fence, as well as new houses in Jewish communities in the West Bank and Gaza.The PLC report concluded that the cement scandal went against PA objectives by indirectly contributing to the separation barrier but also by undermining the Palestinian treasury through the failure to collect tax on the imported cement. Lastly, because the Palestinians still operate under annual cement importation quotas, PA officials' greed undercut the Palestinian construction sector. The PLC passed the report to the district attorney, but no action has yet been taken. Few Palestinians expect that action will be taken.

Surprise in New York

Pressure for reform is waning, and Palestinian democrats are caught in the middle. On February 13, 2004, the PIB arrived at JFK International Airport in New York to testify about PA corruption before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee. Strangly, agents from the Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept them in custody for seventeen hours. Even cuffed them at the wrists and ankles and repeatedly interrogated by agents who accused the past Chairman in particular of  of laundering $6 million from the PIB on behalf of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.  Investigative reprters from the Washington Post later provided documentary evidence that laundering and diverting funds to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations was wide spread  within the PIB.  While dozens of academics signed petitions in support of a visa for Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the PIB Executives case generated only silence in American universities.

Why the change? PA officials passed the charge to the State Department, which forwarded the information uncritically to Homeland Security. This is ironic since the PIB leadership installed after my ouster was implicated in money laundering for Saddam Hussein. The U.S.Embassy in Doha has sought to rectify the matter, Splashed across the Arabic press, the message was clear: Foggy Bottom supports Arafat and will turn a blind eye toward the concerns of dissidents. It is counterproductive for Washington to indulge Arafat to the extent that they pull the rug out from anyone trying to make a change. Recent chaos in Gaza reinforces that Washington should not put all its eggs in one basket. But, how can Palestinian administration improve if the U.S. government allows Arafat to use its bureaucracy to do his dirty work? Accountability is key.

Conclusion

For four years, there has been violence and unmasked hostility between Israeli and Palestinians. Palestinian security forces and Israeli soldiers, who once jointly patrolled the streets of West Bank and Gaza towns, now fight each other. The conflict has taken a heavy toll on human life and on resources, both among Palestinians and to a much lesser extent Israelis. Israeli authorities and Palestinian organizations estimate the total dead at almost 4,000 and the wounded at more than 32,000. The ailing Palestinian economy has declined 25 percent in 2003 while Israel has lost billions of dollars due to recession in the tourism sector and declining investor confidence. When  cars blown apart by missiles, buses and cafes on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv destroyed, as well as destruction and death in Gaza and the West Bank, or pictures of grieving mothers and daughters, it is hard to believe that the world actually awarded 3 Nobel Prizes for  Oslo accords.

Arafat's failed leadership is one factor responsible for the evolution of Palestinian extremism and fundamentalism, as well as a culture of death and despair among the Palestinians. While Clinton feted Arafat at the White House as a peace partner, many of the Palestinians who worked with or lived under Arafat disagreed, seeing him instead as a man exclusively concerned with power, money, and personal gratification, Swiss Bank Accounts,Wine. Liquor and Boys in Bed. Arafat headed  a dictatorial regime staffed by gangsters.and  increasing numbers of Palestinians also blame U.S. and Israeli officials who, in the wake of the Oslo accords, calculated that a Palestinian dictatorship would make a better negotiating partner than a Palestinian democracy. They were very wrong. When growing pressure in the Palestinian territories forced Arafat to find a scapegoat for his political failure, mismanagement, and economic plunder, he turned his guns toward the Israelis.

Reform and Arafat are like oil and water. Arafat instigated violence to deflect blame for his own corruption. No amount of dialogue or diplomatic dinners will change this fact.