The Levanter (3 page)

The guerrilla movement was in its infancy then, but he seems to have been a natural leader and was soon heading his own band of “infiltrators”, as they were called by the Israelis, in raids across the Jordanian border into Israel. As he was still on the UNWRA payroll as a medical aide, it was necessary for him to use a cover name. The one he chose was El-Matwa - Jackknife - and before long it had achieved some notoriety. One of Jackknife’s exploits, the shooting-up of an Israeli bus, was believed to have provoked a shattering Israeli reprisal raid. Among the Palestinian militants, success was measured by the violence of the enemy’s reaction. Jackknife’s reputation as a local leader was now established. When Egyptian intelligence officers came looking for Palestinians who knew the border country and would be willing to serve with the
fedayeen,
Ghaled was among the select few who were approached.

The Egyptian
fedayeen
were heavily armed commando forces. Operating from Egyptian and Jordanian bases, they penetrated deep into Israeli territory, murdering civilians, mining roads, and blowing up installations. The Sinai campaign of 1958 put an end to their activities, but among the Palestinians the
fedayeen
idea persisted. The guerrilla groups which now began to be formed were trained and organized by men like Ghaled who had soldiered with the Egyptian
fedayeen.
One of the larger groups became known as Al Fatah, and Ghaled was one of its early leaders.

In 1963 he was wounded in the left leg during an Israeli reprisal raid. The wound was serious and the early treatment of it inadequate. Toward the end of the year his father advised him to go to Cairo for corrective surgery.

His presence in Cairo at that time had decisive effects on his future. The Palestine Liberation Organization was in the process of being formed there, and Ghaled, convalescing after the operation on his leg, was drawn into the discussions. As an Al Fatah leader of note he was consulted about the PLO’s new official field force, the Palestine Liberation Army, which was to be armed with Soviet weapons. Though he refused the battalion command which was offered to him, he was appointed a member of the PLO’s new “Awakening Committee”.

Under the PLO charter this committee was to devote itself to “the upbringing of the new generations both ideologically and spiritually so that they may serve their country and work for the liberation of their homeland”. During his convalescence Ghaled was given the job of lecturing to groups of Arab students attending, or about to attend, Western universities, and of leading discussions. It was at one of these student meetings that he met Melanie Hammad.

There were two articles by her in the Ghaled file. The first had been published by a French left-wing quarterly and was a dull restatement of the Palestinian case enlivened by direct quotes from Ghaled. One of them, a comment on the Balfour Declaration, gave me a foretaste of the sort of thing I might have to listen to.

“The British are unbelievable,” Ghaled had said. “They promised to provide the Zionists with a national home in Palestine and in the same breath promised that they would do so without infringing on the rights of the existing inhabitants. How could they? Did they think that, because they were dealing with the Holy Land, they could count on another of those Christian miracles of loaves and fishes?”

The other Hammad piece, also in French, had been written in 1933 for a big-circulation newspaper noted for its sensationalism. In this Melanie Hammad had let herself go. Ghaled, then commanding an Al Fatah training camp in the Gaza Strip, was eulogized as the white knight
sans peur et sans reproche
of the Palestinian cause, a resolute yet honourable fighter for freedom, a Nasser-like politico-military leader of the kind needed if there were ever to be true unity of purpose in Palestine.

Edwards had written a note in red ink across the clippings:
PLO Cairo spokesman went out of his way to dismiss this estimate of G. as “grossly distorted” and said that it “impugned his loyalty to the Palestinian cause”. Hammad dubbed “irresponsibly inaccurate and naive”. Picture declared phony.

The picture referred to, which appeared with the article, showed a tall man in desert uniform studying a map spread out on the tailgate of a truck. He was wearing a head cloth which shaded most of his features. All you could see was a prominent, somewhat aquiline nose and a thin moustache. Since there was no authenticated photograph of Ghaled in the file with which to compare it, I had no way of judging its possible phoniness. What interested me more was the suggestion, implicit in the spokesman’s strictures, that in 1966 Ghaled’s loyalty to the PLO was already suspect; I looked for evidence of disciplinary action of some sort.

All I found was an announcement put out by the PLO radio some weeks later (November ‘66) that Ghaled had been relieved of his duties as a member of the Awakening Committee in order to “concentrate upon his operational duties with Al Fatah in the field”. In other words he had been told to stay clear of politics, stop playing personality games, and get back to killing Israelis.

Presumably they believed that this public admonishment had brought Ghaled to heel; and, presumably, his general demeanour encouraged them in that belief. Subsequent references to him in PLO communiqués were laudatory in tone. His sudden turnaround, when the crunch came in Jordan, had obviously taken them by surprise.

Following the Six-Day War with Israel and the fresh influx of West Bank refugees which it produced, tension in Jordan between the government of the Hashemite King Hussein and the Palestinians had grown steadily. Half the population of that small country were now Palestinian refugees. The Al Fatah and other refugee guerrilla organizations began to present the king and his government with a serious challenge to their authority. In 1970 the Palestinians were warned by Ghaled that the Jordanian government was planning to make a unilateral peace settlement with Israel. It was time, he declared, to take over the government in Amman and make it their own. Quite suddenly he became the most militant and vociferous of the anti-Hashemite Palestinians. In a speech to his
fedayeen,
reported by the Damascus guerrilla radio, he had thrown down the gauntlet. “By Allah,” he had shouted, “we will wade through a sea of blood if need be. I tell you, comrades, we must risk everything now for our honour.”

From the self-styled Marxist, Salah Ghaled, this sort of hysteria was new. Frank Edwards thought that the fact that Ghaled’s parents had once again become refugees when the West Bank was occupied, and that Ghaled senior had subsequently died in an UNWRA camp, had precipitated the change. I wasn’t so sure. It seemed to me more likely that Ghaled had decided that the moment had come for him to make his bid for power, and that the hysteria had been calculated.

Anyway, he got the sea of blood he had called for. When he and the other Al Fatah guerrilla leaders attempted to take control of the capital, Amman, King Hussein ordered the Jordanian army to stop them, and the army obeyed.

At this point, the series of events which Ghaled was later to denounce collectively as “the Great Betrayal” took place. Alarmed by the spectacle of what was, in effect, an Arab civil war, the PLO Central Committee hastened to intervene. Negotiating with the king and his government, they secured a cease-fire, then an extension of it, and finally signed an agreement under which all Palestinian guerrilla forces would be withdrawn; to begin with from Amman, and later from all other urban areas in Jordan. This tragic conflict, it was said, had been the result of Israeli provocations designed to incite brother to fight brother instead of the common Zionist enemy.

Ghaled was not the only guerrilla leader to defy the Central Committee by refusing to honour either the cease-fire or the withdrawal agreement, and sporadic fighting continued in and around Amman for many weeks; but, with the acceptance of the agreement by most of the Al Fatah forces, the Jordanian army was free to concentrate on and to isolate those that remained. One by one, as they saw their positions becoming untenable, Ghaled and the rest had slipped away, taking their men, their arms, and their equipment with them.

Ghaled and his
fedayeen
went north, first to a base at Ramtha near the Syrian border, and then, when the Jordanian army moved to clear that area too, into Syria itself. Most of the dissident leaders, having taken to the Jordanian hills to await developments, now set about composing their differences with the Central Committee. Not Ghaled, however; he remained loudly defiant.

From a subsidiary camp in Lebanon he proclaimed his independence of the PLO “running dogs” in the Al Fatah and his support for the Maoist-Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. At the same time he announced the formation of the super-militant Palestinian Action Force.

I found a copy of the original PAF manifesto in the file. It was subtitled,
Who Are Our Enemies?
Stripped of all the dialectical circumlocutions, his answer to that question could be summed up as,
“Those who now falsely profess to be our friends
”.

How were we to distinguish between false professions of faith and true ones? Simple.
All
would be regarded as suspect until tested in secret. How tested? The PAF had its own security service and its own sources of information. It would conduct its own secret courts-martial. Lists of convicted traitors would be published; PAF purification squads would carry out the court’s sentences. Only thus could the Palestinian movement be purged of the poison of the Great Betrayal and become purified.

What Ghaled meant by “purification” and “purified” had soon become clear. Only five or six well publicized “courts-martial” death sentences and “purification” squad executions had been necessary. After those demonstrations there were few men of sense and substance in the Fertile Crescent who did not see that it was better to contribute to the PAF’s fighting fund than to run the risk of being named on one of Ghaled’s purification lists.

The PLO denounced him as a criminal extortionist. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine dissociated itself from the PAF and its “revisionist” leader Ghaled’s “adventurism”. The Jordanian government outlawed him. In Lebanon he was wanted on various felony charges. As Frank Edwards had said, he was poison.

“As far as I can see,” I said, “this character is completely unrepresentative of the Palestine guerrilla movement. I’m not talking about what he used to be when he was with Al Fatah, Frank. I’m talking about what he has become lately.”

He nodded. “I Suppose it’s the extortion bit that you don’t like. Would you feel that he was more representative if he planted bombs on foreign airliners or in Israeli supermarkets?”

“Yes I would.”

“I can tell you one thing. This extortion thing wasn’t started to line his own pockets. The PLO cut off his supplies and subsidies. He had to turn somewhere. Maybe the Russkis are helping him, maybe the Chinese, but he still has to have some cash to operate.”

“But to operate what? Does he really believed that he is serving the Palestinian cause with this purification racket of his?”

“No, that’s a means to an end.”

“What end?”

“Why not ask him? You talk as it you already know what he’s become lately - a mere extortionist. That’s the PLO line and I don’t buy it I don’t know what he’s become. That’s why I’m interested in him, and curious. I’d like to know what he’s up to.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try and find out.”

I called Melanie Hammad then and told her to go ahead with the arrangements for the interview.

“At once,” she said. “I am pleased to be of service, Mr. Prescott. There will, of course, be certain conditions.”

I would have been surprised if there had not been. “What conditions, Miss Hammad?”

“The interview must not be published until two days after it has taken place. Security, you understand. And there can be no photographs taken.”

“Okay. Accepted. What else?”

“The interview must be tape-recorded.”

“I don’t use a tape recorder for interviews. I take notes.”

“Salah will wish it. He will not ask you to submit your copy to him before you file your story. Obviously that would be difficult but he will wish for an exact record of what is said.”

“Very well.”

“I will supply the two recorders.”

“Two?”

“You also must have an identical record.”

“I don’t need one.”

“That will be Salah’s wish.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“I will telephone you tomorrow with arrangements for the following day.”

We met in the early afternoon at the museum in Beirut - ”I am known to too many people at the St. Georges Hotel, Mr. Prescott” - and two tape recorders on the front seat of the car were committed to my care.

Miss Hammad drove as if we were being pursued. The mountain road we were soon climbing was narrow and poorly surfaced, the Buick softly sprung. Clutching the armrest as she flung the car through the hairpin bends, I began to wonder if, for the first time in my life, I was going to be carsick. I was about to protest that we had made good time from Beirut and that there was really no need to go so fast when she braked hard. I had to grab the two tape recorders on the seat beside me to stop them slithering to the floor.

We had just come through a very sharp bend onto a short, level stretch. I saw now that there was a roadblock ahead of us. It consisted of a striped barrier which could be raised and lowered, and, to prevent anyone crashing the barrier, a staggered arrangement of concrete posts on either side of it. A concrete guardhouse with weapon slits crouched beside the barrier, and three Lebanese army men with sub-machine guns stood outside. As the car rolled to a halt one of the soldiers lounged forward.

By the time he reached the car Miss Hammad had her window down and was talking fast. The soldier talked back while looking at me. I wasn’t unduly concerned. I didn’t speak or understand Arabic myself, but I
had heard enough of it spoken to know that, although Miss Hammad’s conversation with the soldier might sound like an exchange of threats or insults, it could very well be an exchange of pleasantries. This judgment was proved correct when she gaily laughed at something he had said, wound up the window, and was waved on past the barrier.