Arafat: Shameless in GazaArafat: Shameless in GazaMER - If you only have time for one article about the so-        called "Peace Process" and what has been done to the        Palestinian people since the Gulf War -- READ THIS ONE!        AND READ IT IN FULL!  David Hirst is one fo the most        seasoned veteran journalists in the Middle East today.        This article is from the GUARDIAN WEEKLY, 27 April.           (Opening Headline):  Yasser Arafat and his 'Tunisians' have turned the Palestinians' homeland into a ramshackle, nepotistic regime ofextortion.        S H A M E L E S S    I N    G A Z A                   By David HirstGAZA is the most conservative of Palestinian communities;its Islamist militants once set fire to a sea-front hotel,a restaurant and other such dens of iniquity. So imagine the pious horror at the opening of Gaza's firstand only nightclub. On a Thursday evening of the Muslimweekend, I found the Zahra al-Mada'in, the Flower of theCities, packed almost to capacity, not just with lonelyyoung men come to admire Gaza's first belly dancers andsongstresses -- locally recruited gypsies -- but withentire families, women, children and even a babe-in-arms. In other smart or risque places, you can add illicit liquorto your Coca-Cola, but here -- in another Gazan first --you can order your scotch or your Israeli Maccabee beer onthe very premises. However the oddest thing is not so muchthe place, but the clientele: they are mainly "Tunisians",not Gazans at all.Tunis was Yasser Arafat's last headquartersin exile, and "the Tunisians" is a nickname which Gazansgave to those, officially known as "returnees", who camewith him when, following the Oslo accord he establishedhimself here instead. There are about 10,000 of them,bureaucrats who run his Palestinian Authority, formerguerillas who dominate his enormous securityapparatus."The Tunisians" have " come home" to the soil ofPalestine itself. But the terrible irony is that they arenot merely strangers in their own land, they are for themost part disliked, despised, even hated. It is they whointroduced such abominations as Zahra al-Mada'in. But it is not just Hamas and Islamic Jihad, or bigots in general,who feel the shock. Liberals who welcome any challenge tothe dour local mores feel it too. For almost everyone, "theTunisians" are as alien, as unfit to rule, as those --Turks, British, Egyptians, Israelis -- who came beforethem. And because they are actually Palestinians,! and cameas "liberators", the shock is even worse.Arafat'sPalestine Revolution never made itself very popular, amonggovernments, elites or even ordinary people of theterritories it passed through .But at least in Jordan, in the sixties, its men trulyfought and died. So -- though with less purpose orconviction -- did they in Lebanon in the seventies andeighties. Obviously, during the eighties and nineties,they could not fight from Tunis, and other far-flung Arabcountries in which they fetched up, but at least, asmembers of the world's richest liberation movement, theycontinued to pump money into local economies.Here, in the homeland itself, far from fighting the formerZionist foe, they lead the collaboration with it. They mayattract money -- in the form of international aid -- tothis poorest of Palestinan communities, but they take atleast as much away from it. They are oppressive -- andimmeasurably corrupt. "We live in amazing, shameful times," said one of Gaza'smerchant princes, and a former Fatah fighter himself, "butyou should know that every revolution has its fighters,thinkers and profiteers. Our fighters have been killed, ourthinkers assassinated, and all we have left are theprofiteers. These don't think even primarily of the cause,they don't think about it at all. They know that they rejust transients here, as they were in Tunis, and, as withany regime whose end is near, they think only of profitingfrom it while they can." This is a damning indictment, but if any system can bemeasured by the conduct of its bureaucrats it is a fairone. In fact, the justice of it hits even a casual visitorin the eye. Just go to the district of Rimal. Rimal means"sand", and on this former wasteland there is now arising,at incredible speed, the most up-market neighbourhood of"liberated" Gaza. You might not think it at first sight; a sand-smothered,refuse-strewn mess of empty lots amid shacks that aredisappearing and half-finished concrete monsters that aretaking their place, it differs little in spirit from therest of this desolate, infinitely decrepit and unsightlycity.But it is mainly here that "the Tunisians" have taken root,with their amazing array of "ministries", "authorities" andspecial "agencies", police stations and senry posts,choice rooftop apartments, villas and places ofentertainment. Here is Arafat's own sea-front bureau --al-Muntada, The Club -- with all the "presidential"trappings he so adores, and here in the very nextbuilding, is the Zahra al-Mada'in cabaret. Here you will sooner or later run into Suha, his youngwife, out for lunch at Le Mirage, an exclusive sea-frontrestaurant, with her infant daughter and a posse ofForce-17 bodyguards. You will run into her, at least, whenshe is not in Paris, where she does her shopping and canfind a decent hairdresser, unlike the first, disastrousGazan one, who reportedly turned her blonde locks almostorange .        And you are bound to come across Susie, her ample Britishnanny who affects leopard-skin tights and often has toomuch to drink, a condition in which she is apt to dispenseindiscretions about the presidential household,threatening, some fear, another Middle Eastern nannyscandal of Netanyahu proportions. Among the fancy new villas, fanciest is thatof Abu Mazen, key negotiator of the ill-fated Oslo accord.It is not clear who paid for this $2 million-plus affair,all balconies and balustrades in gothic profusion, but thegraffiti which some irreverent scoundrel scrawled on itswall proclaimed that "this is your reward for sellingPalestine". Lifestyles match. Nabil Shaath, the highlyarticulate minister of planning much seen on Western TVscreens, recently took a wife young enough to be hisdaughter. He required four receptions to celebrate thisevent, in Cairo, Gaza -- and two in Jerusalem. Because hisIsraeli friends could not go to the one in East Jerusalem'sOrient House, that "illegal" outpost of the PalestinianAuthority, he had another in the Ambassador Hotel. For salutary contrast with Rimal, just stroll up the coastwhere, just beyond Le Mirage, you will come upon the awfulsqualor and open sewers of the Shati' refugee camp,conditions resembling those n which most Gazans live.There, in a windowless concrete block they call "the cafe", I asked some day labourers, idled by yet another Israeliborder closure, whether they thought that Gaza's per capitaincome, far from rising, had actually fallen by as much as39 per cent since the Oslo accord. For that is what arecent UN survey says. "More like 75 per cent," onereplied. "some no longer think it a shame to send theirchildren out to beg." That also seems to be borne out bythe UN report, which records an "alarming" increase in"child labour".More shocking, really, than the contrast itself is whatlies behind it. When he first came here, Arafat said hewould turn Gaza into a "new Singapore". Palestinianbusinessmen, who made their fortunes building the Arab oilstates, would help ! him build his. But, three years on, it is clear that none will seriously touch it.  Not just the Israelis deter them, with their repeated frontier closures that bedevil businessmen as well as workers In truth, Arafat does not want them either.  For they would undermine his control, achieved through a combination of police surveillance and money power. So insteadof any kind of independent, creative, wealth-producing capitalism, he and his coterie of unofficial economic "advisers" have thrown up a ramshackle, nepotistic edifice of monopoly,racketeering and naked extortion that enriches them as itfurther impoverishes society at large. Two years ago, the al-Bahr company barely existed. Al-Bahrmeans "sea". But Gazans now dub it "the ocean", because,they say, "it is swallowing Gaza whole". Legally speaking,not being officially registered, it should not be operatingat all. Yet it is so brazen about its powerful connectionsthat -- to the impotent indignation of the Palestinian"parliament" -- it even uses the Authority's letter heads.It belongs to Arafat, or, more precisely, to his wife Suhaand the other "shareholders" who handle his privatefinances. Al-Bahr -- who else? -- runs the Zahra al-Mada'innightclub. The premises were supposed to go by open tenderto the most qualified bidder. But Arafat just signed adecree placing it in his protege's hands. It is never byfair, and often by quite foul, means that Arafat Incorporated moves into real estate, entertainment,computers, advertising, medicine, insurance. Only the mostpowerful Gazan businessmen can resist its encroachments. Itgoes chiefly after small and medium fry. These arepressed into "partnership" with al-Bahr.Al-Bahr is the new, strictly domestic instrument ofArafat's takeover of the Gazan economy. It complementsalready existing monopolies, for the import of such basiccommodities as cement, petrol or flour, which he operatesin complicity with the Israelis. For example, out of the$74 for which a ton of cement is sold in Gaza, $17 goes tothe Authority, and $17 into his own account in a Tel Avivbank.It is no secret what Arafat uses this money for. "I shallgive you all you want if you obey and protect me -- andgive me all I want." That has always been his message tohis nomenklatura, and it has been amazingly successful. Forwhat resistance can be expected from an apparatus whoseminister of civil affairs, Jamil Tarifi, a big contractor,goes on building Israeli settlements even as thePalestinian people threaten a new intifada over Har Homa?Or whose high officials use their VIP cars to sail throughIsraeli checkpoints on their way to the fleshpots of TelAviv even as Israeli border closures rob day labourersof their menial wage?Rarely can a revolution have degenerated like Arafat's --and yet survived. It only survives because, in robbing hispeople to bribe his bureaucrats, he has proved so great acommitment to the peace process that the parties on whichhe now completely depends -- Israelis, Americans, theinternational community at large -- are willing to ignore,even encourage, his manifest corruptions. The Israelis maybe embarrassed by the latest, scandalous revelations oftheir leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, about the Arafat slushfund that the great peace-maker, Yitzhak Rabin, authorised.But so long as Arafat goes on bending to their conceptionof the peace, they will go on letting him draw onit.European governments would be far more embarrassed if itwere established that Arafat really does earn far more fromal-Bahr and his illicit monopolies than from all their aidcombined. But unless the scandal becomes too great, theywill go on paying too. But they delude themselves if theythink that they can go on propping him up for ever. And inthis regard, it seems, Arafat and his "Tunisians" are moreclear-headed than they are. They know that there is apoint beyond which even he cannot go without risking hispeople's wrath. Small wonder then that, according to Ha'aretz, a part ofArafat's secret fund is earmarked for "emergencysituations", such as a coup or a civil war, in which he,his family and immediate entourage could be forced to fleeinto exile once more, and re-establish the leadership fromthere. They know, better than anyone, that the peaceprocess, and all they get out of it, is built, like theZahra al-Mada'in, on nothing more solid than the finewhite powdery sands of Rimal.                The Guardian Weekly, 4/27/97
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