The Man with the Kaffiyeh
It was thanks to
the Madrid conference that Saeb Erekat established his position with Yasser
Arafat. Erekat showed up at the Victoria Hotel conference room wearing a
kaffiyeh, an Arab headdress. His fellow delegation members tried to dissuade
him from wearing it, fearing that his appearance would upset the Israelis and
the Americans. Their efforts were futile, as were American attempts to
intervene. "I am not taking the kaffiyeh off," Erekat surprised his
friends by yelling. "Look, all of the delegates from the Gulf states are
wearing the same. Why don't you ask them to take it off?"
At the end of the
conference, the Palestinian delegates met with Arafat to brief him. "What
happened with the kaffiyeh?" he asked Erekat in a fatherly tone of voice.
After some of the delegates bluntly attacked the embarrassed Erekat, accusing
him of "dressing up" in order to disrupt the conference, Arafat
declared: "Every people has its naïve members. Saeb and I are the naïve
Palestinians." Erekat was moved almost to tears: "Mr. President, I
wore the kaffiyeh to represent you. I felt that I bore all of your weight on my
head as I put it on." Arafat embraced him warmly. From that point on, he
took Erekat under his wing, appointing him minister of municipal affairs as
well as chief representative to the talks with Israel.
Over the past
years, Erekat has spent thousands of hours with the members of the Israeli
negotiating team. "What a difference between the Rabin era and that of
Netanyahu," he said with a sad sigh. "When I sat before Rabin's
delegates, I saw Israelis whom I wished to resemble. They were sure of
themselves, could see where Israel's interests lay and envisioned what their
country would look like three centuries from now. When I met with people such
as Danny Naveh, Dore Gold and their friends, I saw only shortness of vision.
People with no historical consciousness, who possess an imaginary sense of
power and dangerous political blindness. I am sorry to say that Israel's great
men have disappeared. Where are the heirs of Ben Gurion, Rabin, Peres? All
that's left are amateurs on a par with student union representatives worried
about the cost of tuition."
Like Asfour, Erekat
expressed wonder at the Israelis' failure to discern Netanyahu's true nature.
"What, they can't see what he's done since he came to power?" he
asked, raising his voice. "He has shattered trust with the Palestinians,
then we had to bring in the Americans as a third party, then he damaged
Israel's relations with the Arab nations, then he marred Israel's international
image, then he provocatively added settlements. I don't understand him. Is this
how he thinks to change the demographic reality in the territories? He must
know that all of the population in the settlements is worthless compared to the
number of children born in Gaza in the course of one year. So where is he
leading the two peoples? Bosnia? Civil war? If Netanyahu was only your problem,
we might have lived with it. Unfortunately, he has also become an acute problem
for the Palestinian people."
Fri, 26 Jun 1998
© copyright 1998
Ha'aretz.