Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Mossad had used a drug to try and assassinate the Hamas leader on the streets of Amman, Jordan (see the chapter 6, “Avengers”). Since the start of the new millennium, Mossad agents have been credited with poisoning over a dozen terrorists by using a variety of lethal drugs that can never be traced. Some were designed to act slowly. Others were fast acting so that by the time medical intervention came, it was too late—and the drug was no longer detectable in the victim’s body. All these weapons had been created at Israel’s Institute for Biological Research (see chapter 17, “Bunglegate” pages 341–42).

As Arafat’s condition further deteriorated, his aides said he had suffered a brain haemorrhage, a stroke caused by bleeding into the brain. Could that be true? The hospital spokesman would not say.

On Thursday, November 12, Yasser Arafat died in the early hours of the morning. The hospital spokesman told waiting reporters there would be no details released on tests of the cause of death. There would be no autopsy. And so Mossad’s bête noire died mysteriously, surrounded by secrecy. He was brought back to his compound and buried in Ramallah the next day in a concrete coffin, which had been hastily constructed some days before. There were two reasons for this unusual casket, Dr. al-Kurdi said. Arafat’s body would be preserved for an autopsy to be conducted and then he could be replaced in his concrete casket and one day be buried in the holiest of all mosques in the Muslim world—the one in Jerusalem.

When Meir Dagan heard this, he is said to have smiled. There was also a more important matter on his mind. The day before, hours after Arafat died, Mordechai Vanunu had been arrested in his rooms in St. George’s Church in Jerusalem. He was charged with once more revealing classified information about Israel. Three months previously, Vanunu had said he would like to give up his Israeli citizenship and become a Palestinian. Vanunu said his one great wish was to be received by Yasser Arafat. The whistleblower’s naïveté had not been tempered by his long sojourn in prison or his short months of freedom since his release. There can be little doubt that if the two men had ever been allowed to meet, Arafat would have exploited the occasion. He was a master of manipulation. In the end he had died as he had lived: amid confusion, intrigue, and farce. If he had been poisoned, no one now would ever know. If he had not, Arafat had left a legacy that would continue to promote the idea.

For years Arafat had operated according to the chaos theory of politics: as long as the Palestinians remained a festering problem for Israel, he would stoke the fires of not only his followers but the entire Muslim world. In his famous speech to the United Nations General Assembly that had marked his entry as a revolutionary icon, taking his place alongside Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Arafat had declared, “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat, do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

On the day of Arafat’s death, at a briefing later to his senior aides on what Arafat’s death could foretell, Meir Dagan said that the only tragedy about Arafat’s death was that it had not come sooner because Arafat had failed to ever let go of the gun.

The sixth floor of Mossad headquarters, with its olive-painted corridors and office doors that each bore a number in Hebrew but no name, housed the analysts, psychologists, behaviorists, and forward planners. Collectively known as “the specialists,” following Yasser Arafat’s death they had combined their skills to evaluate and exploit how it was being perceived in the Arab world and beyond.

Their conclusions would guide Israel’s future military and political moves in such key areas as prime minister Ariel Sharon’s controversial plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the relationship Israel should now have with the Palestinian Liberation Organistation, the PLO.

The withdrawal was to take place in the high summer of 2005. It would be the first time that Israel had handed back settlements since its pullout from the Sinai in 1978 after the Camp David agreement had brought peace with Egypt. But already in the wake of Arafat’s death, the withdrawal was being promoted by the PLO as the first step in finally creating a meaningful Palestine state that had been Arafat’s abiding dream. But the Gaza Strip settlers saw their eviction as a betrayal of Israel’s right to reclaim the land it had once occupied in biblical times. Their feelings of treachery were all the greater since the evacuation had been the work of Ariel Sharon, long regarded as the most powerful supporter of the settler movement.

The Mossad analysts shared the view of deputy prime minister Shimon Peres: “Zionism was built on geography but it lives on demography.” They saw the realpolitik motives that had made Sharon order the razing of twenty-one Jewish settlements that lay along a stretch of the Mediterranean. To protect their eight thousand inhabitants from the surrounding 1.3 million Palestinians was a huge drain on Israel’s resources.

To defend the settlements on the West Bank, Sharon had ordered the erection of a towering security barrier of reinforced concrete and razor wire that snaked down the length of the country; it meant Israel’s effective border would be extended.

Like the majority of Israelis, the analysts were preoccupied by how soon Peres’s prescient remark would become a reality. The forward planners on the sixth floor had calculated that by 2010 the number of Arabs living between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean would surpass the projected 5.2 million Jews living in Israel at the end of the decade.

In the months before his death, Arafat had predicted that not only would Gaza be “cleansed” of its Jewish settlers, but that the West Bank would also see the departure of its settlers from the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria.

The analysts had advised Meir Dagan that Arafat had left a legacy fraught with risk. They predicted that while the PLO would use the withdrawal from Gaza as a huge propaganda victory, Palestinian extremists like Hamas would defy calls by the PLO leadership to stop attacks on the settlements. It had turned out to be true.

The evacuation was conducted with overwhelming force by the Israeli army. Afterward synagogues left by the settlers were burned to the ground by Hamas militants. Following a short interval, the suicide bomb attacks on Israel resumed. Hamas justified them by presenting the Gaza withdrawal as no more than a maneuvre by Israel to create more misery and frustration for the Palestinians. “Until the last Jew is removed from our land there can be no peace,” Hamas said.

Throughout Arafat’s life the PLO and Hamas had competed for control of the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000; each had aimed to persuade the shebab, the Arab youth, whose support was crucial in the direction the fight against Israel would take. By the second Intifada, when suicide bombings became the main symbol as Islamists and Fatah activists blew themselves up while killing as many as they could in Israeli pizzerias and restaurants, at bus stations and marketplaces—and Islamic religious leaders called for all-out jihad on the grounds that all Israelis, including women and children, were legitimate targets because Israel was a military society—Arafat was pressured into taking action against the terrorists, not only by Ariel Sharon, but also by moderate elements in the Arab world. Arafat still possessed a political legitimacy among them. But Hamas had the advantage of its Islamic extremism, a powerful drug to the dispossessed youth, epitomised further by the hero worship they bestowed on Osama bin Laden, who had repeatedly proclaimed, “There will be no solution to the Palestinian problem except through jihad.” As the second Intifada continued to explode in a succession of fiery pyres, Arafat had seen his own infrastructure destroyed by Israel’s sophisticated weapons, guided to their targets by the superb intelligence of Mossad and Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service. In what Mossad analysts saw as a last desperate attempt to bolster his ailing leadership, Yasser Arafat had begun to claim that his way of carefully controlled political tension was the only means to pressure Israel into accepting his demand for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. By the time of his death, Arafat had attracted a considerable body of support among influential Palestinians. For Ariel Sharon the risk of Arafat being granted the martyrdom he was rapidly attracting among moderate Palestinians, while at the same time Hamas continued its violence, was totally unacceptable.