Arafat’s Trials at Tunis: Enemies Inside and Out

More than 40 years ago, Jerusalem-born Yasser Arafat was an 18-year-old university student in Cairo fighting alongside Egyptian nationalists for independence from Britain. Next door, in his native Palestine, Jews were battling the British for the right to their sovereign homeland.

Now the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization talks about the urgency of a peaceful settlement between Israelis and Palestinians over disputed territories on the West Bank and in Gaza. After settlement, he says, Israeli-Palestinian hatreds and bitterness will quickly vanish “and we shall live in peace.” Arafat envisions the state of Israel and a state of Palestine living side by side in coexistence, neither nation “being superior to the other.”

Arafat was reminiscing about his youth at an informal dinner during three days of wide-ranging conversations a few weeks ago. He used the example of two simultaneous struggles for independence in the Middle East to underline the common history of Jews, Arabs and their heritage.

While peace is still little more than a hope--as unpredictable as all else in the embattled Middle East--Arafat’s own future hinges on current developments. A failure for the 59-year-old chairman’s peace offensive or a breakdown in newly established dialogues with the United States could quite conceivably cost Arafat his leadership position--if not his life.

Conversations in Tunis with Arafat and other PLO figures illuminated the fragile control he maintains of the Palestinian movement. While Arafat has held PLO chairmanship for nearly 20 years (the organization was created in 1964), his leadership is constantly open to challenge, even life-threatening challenge, from the many factions of this fractious movement.

In recent years, five members of the 10-man Fatah Central Committee have been assassinated, most probably by fellow Arabs, and Arafat recognizes his personal vulnerability. Fatah was a group he founded in 1959. Along with the factions inside the PLO, he also has to contend with outside Palestinian terrorists who are his sworn enemies.

Even as Arafat promotes diplomacy, he lives under intense security. His constant travels--flying aboard private jets to world capitals--are kept secret until the moment of departure from all but a handful of most-trusted aides. The chairman’s local whereabouts and movements are hidden from public sight, under armed guard. The PLO moved to Tunis in 1982 after expulsion from Beirut and now is virtually a state within a state. After the Israeli air strike at PLO headquarters in Tunis four years ago, installations have been changed and dispersed.

While most PLO offices are located at dozens of villas in the suburban, middle-class district of El Menzah, the houses are unmarked and only key aides know the exact address of such operations as the Foreign Affairs Department, the Political Department or the Office of the Chairman. Inside, men in civilian clothes carry automatic weapons to protect the properties and their occupants.

PLO activists in Tunis avoid the ostentatious presence they once displayed in Beirut. A casual tourist would not be aware that the PLO represents a major contribution to the shaky Tunisian economy--the Palestinians have made themselves nearly invisible. A modern inn in downtown Tunis is commonly known as the “PLO hotel” because it serves the rapidly growing stream of foreign visitors calling on Arafat. PLO delegates and operatives are stationed in 109 countries; they commute frequently between their posts and Tunis headquarters.

Arafat himself lives on the outskirts of the capital where the PLO maintains what he calls “guest residences”; the chairman is said to sleep in a different house every night. As a rule, he receives distinguished foreign guests at the luxurious seaside residence of the PLO ambassador to Tunisia, hidden from the roadside. The driveway behind the trees is filled with cars and armed bodyguards in civilian clothes. These are men fanatically loyal to Arafat; they call him by his guerrilla code name, Abu Ammar. Abu means brother and Arafat, in English, refers to all his companions as “brothers.”

The Israelis, in his words, are also relatives. When asked whether Palestinians and Israelis could finally overcome the memory of wars and recriminations in the last four decades, Arafat said, “Don’t forget that they are our cousins, and that this is all a part of our history . . . . You see, this is the Holy Land. We are encouraging the Israelis to talk with us and it is we who are running after them to have open talks.”

Arafat remembered when he had hidden from them. His associates said he rarely talked about his early years but this time Arafat was the one who brought up the subject. He launched into the story of his clandestine operations in Israel after the 1967 War. As the head of Fatah, he decided to organize underground resistance. He spent three months inside Israel in 1967 and one month in 1968, the first times he had been back since Israel won independence in 1948.

Arafat said he wore a variety of disguises, sometimes dressing as a Bedouin tribesman, sometimes as a woman. He communicated in Arabic and in English, knowing enough Hebrew to move with considerable ease, not arousing suspicion.

In those days, Arafat believed international terrorism and guerrilla warfare were the only viable weapons in the Palestinian struggle. Subsequently, he said, he decided that terror was the wrong policy. His new strategy is a combination of the intifada, the uprising in the territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 War, and a diplomatic peace offensive.

The intifada , now 14 months old, is turning into a full-fledged thawra --Arab for revolution. Arafat sees nothing but catastrophic bloodshed if events are allowed to escalate. That is why he turned to the outside world for support in his diplomatic initiatives.

To enlist outside support, Arafat has worked to make the PLO look like a unified, responsible quasi-government, whatever its internal disputes. Fatah is probably the most important group under the PLO umbrella and the most loyal to him personally. But there are only three Fatah members on the 15-man PLO Executive Committee, in effect the ruling body. And a visitor cannot measure Arafat’s control over the 450-member Palestine National Council that functions as a parliament.

Both the executive committee and the national council supported Arafat’s decision last December to recognize Israel and to renounce terrorism--the conditions for opening diplomatic contacts with the United States. But it is no secret in Tunis that many PLO chieftains were privately opposed.

Arafat’s most notable opponent is Dr. George Habash, the 63-year-old founder of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He has abstained from public criticism since December, but Arafat’s faction expects Habash to try sabotaging the new PLO policy. Habash believes armed struggle is the only way to deal with Israel; Arafat people assume that PFLP commandos were responsible for recent attempts to penetrate Israeli borders.

The Arafat group thinks radical opponents are determined to make the chairman appear responsible for such attacks. That could force the U.S. Administration to break off dialogue on grounds that the PLO had not truly renounced terrorism. Rupture of the tie to Washington could strip Arafat of his new-found status and, inevitably, lead to his political collapse. The conversations in Tunis made clear that PLO politics are a perpetual-motion machine of intrigue and conspiracy.

Most current PLO leaders are middle-aged professionals. Arafat himself graduated in engineering from Cairo University in 1956. His younger brother Fathy is a physician and head of the PLO’s Red Crescent Society. The PLO delegate to Sweden is an oral surgeon. Many other leaders are graduates of the American University in Beirut; they go out of their way to tell U.S. visitors about their backgrounds and their interests in America. Many also have close relatives in the United States.

Arafat acts these days as a chief of state, paying visits to world figures ranging from Pope John Paul II to European prime ministers and receiving foreign ministers from everywhere. He has access to telecommunications technology and keeps contact with PLO outposts by fax machines.

He also keeps tabs on the men considered dangerous enemies, leading terrorists such as Abu Nidal who broke away from the mainstream PLO and is now believed linked with Libya.

When the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked in 1985 by a group led by Abul Abbas, an American passenger was murdered; Arafat exploded. “He was tearing hair from his bald head, shouting that Abbas was destroying the Palestinian reputation with such acts,” one associate said.

Having embraced new strategy, Arafat knows he may be the target of the terror he once helped to spawn. “But I have no choice,” he said, spreading his hands, a gesture of determined resignation: “This is the only way for us to go.”