Days of Tea and Terrorism

In April 1996, I attended an unusual gathering in Gaza City. It took place in a small room not far from the sea. Yasser Arafat’s security men were posted at all the doors, guns visible. Some pastries were on offer, and some tea. The guests of honor -- heroes, in many cases, to their hosts -- were a group of paunchy, graying, middle-aged men and women, including some of the world’s most famous and dangerous terrorists.

In one corner was Leila Khaled -- a daring, revolutionary Palestinian commando during the 1970s, who had hijacked two airplanes and spent several years in prison. At 52, she looked surprisingly conservative in a blue pleated skirt and dark sweater. It was the first time she had returned to the Palestinian territories since fleeing in 1948 when Israel was established.

In another corner was Mamdouh Nafel, formerly of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Nafel headed military operations for the group in 1974, when three terrorists took over a school in Maalot, Israel. Twenty-four people died, including 20 children. “We can talk about that in more detail another time,” he said politely.

In the center of the room, holding court, was Abul Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, mastermind of the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, during which a 69-year-old, wheelchair-bound Jew named Leon Klinghoffer was shot and then dumped over the side of the boat. Abbas, a fugitive from Italian justice, where he had been convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison, was in a particularly reflective mood. He had not set foot in the Palestinian Territories since leaving his small village near Haifa in 1948, just a few days after he was born.

Now, potbellied and sporting a blazer, he talked about his emotion at returning to the homeland he had long fought to liberate. “Yes, it’s true -- I cried when I crossed over the border,” he said. “The only dream that was left to us was the return to Palestine.”

Abbas had not appeared in public for many years. I asked him about the Achille Lauro. He tried to explain. He said he was sorry Klinghoffer was killed. No one was supposed to die during the operation, he said, and he regretted it.

“He was not killed because he was American or a Jew, but because he made a lot of fuss,” explained Abbas.

Abbas, Khaled and Nafel were among 400 exiled Palestinians whom the Israelis allowed to return to their native land that week for a historic meeting of the Palestine National Council, at which there was to be a vote amending the Palestinian national charter after more than 30 years. Written in 1964, the charter called for “armed struggle” to destroy the state of Israel, but Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres had agreed that the portion of the charter condoning violence should be changed.

These were the heady days of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and, for the most part, optimism reigned. Even the men and women sipping tea that night in Gaza -- responsible among them for the deaths of dozens of innocent civilians -- seemed harmless in their blazers and cardigans, laughing and swapping stories. Peace, after all, was at hand.

There was still terrorism, of course. A recent series of suicide bombings by Islamic militants had killed nearly 60 people -- including one along the route my children took to school in Jerusalem most mornings. But many still believed that a resolution of the hundred-year-old conflict was inevitable, as Peres kept saying. It seemed obvious at that moment that reasonable people could reconcile the Palestinian demand for independence and self-determination -- and for the end of the Israeli occupation that began in 1967 -- with Israel’s need for security. Even Abbas, symbol of rejectionist Palestinian hard-liners, had agreed to return to Gaza to vote against violence at Arafat’s request.

But our optimism was misplaced. Although the Palestinians rejected violence the next day at their meeting, Israel never really accepted the vote, choosing to complain instead about the voting process.

The suicide bombings and a rising fear of terrorism led to the defeat of Peres in the Israeli elections. He was replaced by the hard-line Likudnik Benjamin Netanyahu, who slowed the peace process to a crawl; the return of the city of Hebron to the Palestinians was delayed. Further efforts at peace talks under Netanyahu and his successor, Ehud Barak, failed. In September 2000, Ariel Sharon took 1,000 soldiers to the holiest Islamic site in Jerusalem, prompting protests. A 12-year-old Palestinian boy was shot to death in his father’s arms, a new intifada broke out and Sharon was elected prime minister.

Nearly three years into the intifada, with peace talks on hold indefinitely -- and in the aftermath of the events of Sept. 11 -- it’s easy to see that we had been lulled into a false sense that peace was inevitable. We thought the party by the sea -- with its potbellied freedom fighters and graying terrorists -- was quaint, almost funny. We knew that violence used against civilians in the name of justice was a terrible perversion (whether by Palestinians or Israelis or anyone else), but we thought for some reason that it was behind us. Today, it is clear how wrong we were.

Abbas is now in custody, captured Monday by American forces in Baghdad, where he had been given sanctuary by Saddam Hussein’s regime, and he may yet serve time for the deaths he caused. No matter how just his cause may be, his punishment will serve as vindication. Not for Americans, not for Jews -- but for all those who “make a fuss.”