THE SURVIVAL OF ARAFAT
Rowlinson Carter discovers
the Tunisians' outrage, and an Englishman's bed
Tunis INTENSE pressure by the United States, including the hurried personal intervention of Vice President George Bush, eventually squeezed Tunisia into providing refuge for Yasser Arafat and 1,000 Palestinian fight- ers at the time of their eviction from Lebanon in November 1982. Nobody else would have them. Tunisia's reluctant hos- pitality was unpopular at home because the Palestinians' track record as guests on foreign soil suggested that it was only a matter of time before something went wrong. Whatever that might prove to be, it would inevitably upset Tunisia's political and cultural balancing act between the West and the Arab world, and between factions within the Arab world itself.
What went wrong three years later, of course, was the Israeli bombing of the PLO complex on a dreary stretch of the Tunisian coast, a narrow escape for the tourist industry which increasingly sustains the Tunisian economy. The dreariness of the setting was quite as deliberate, in its way, as the manner in which four Israeli F15s came straight off the sea and without any preliminaries steered their ordnance right onto target. It was a demonstration, it appears, of American hi-tech, the optically guided 'wall-eye' bomb. One of two more F15s circling protectively overhead then surveyed the damage, fired a short burst of tracer into the air as a signal of satisfaction, and the operation was over in a matter of minutes. Not so the repercussions or ques- tions which remain, as yet, unanswered.
For a start, were the Israelis seriously intent on killing Arafat or even, indeed, his senior aides? Arafat claims, not for the first time, a miraculous escape, but he and his colleagues are among nature's noto- rious late-risers who would not but for the most exceptional circumstances be any- where near their offices by 10.09 a.m., which is when the Israelis struck (an unusual time for an air raid even allowing for the distance involved). Arafat had 'Can I press you to a meal?' returned from Morocco only the night before and, following his cautious habit of never spending two consecutive nights in the same bed if he can help it, went off to a house on the opposite side of the Gulf of Tunis, in Gammarth, at least an hour's drive from the PLO headquarters. Arafat's own explanation is that he went to his headquarters early, having brought forward by two hours a staff meeting. originally planned for 9 a.m. With business thus concluded at an unprecedented hour, he went jogging. This explanation, tested on journalists and diplomats who have had cause to get hold of any of the PLO hierarchy much before lunchtime, is greeted with incredulous guffaws.
A more acceptable explanation, among diplomatic circles, is that for the moment Israel would prefer to spare Arafat his life. He is the sine qua non of King Hussein's current peace initiative, and while that is far from perfect in Israeli eyes it is a good deal better to be going along with than some of the alternatives they can think of. The air raid is interpreted as a gesture aimed at Jerusalem's domestic grandstand: an attempt to arrest neo-Fascist tendencies spurred by Israel's humiliation over Leba- non. When Israel's leadership feels the need to demonstrate its ability still to pull off remarkable military tricks, the PLO are always an inviting target.
The bombing, which may have caused as many deaths among Tunisian security per- sonnel as Palestinians, about 60 in all, caused an outrage in Tunisia. The anger was directed naturally against the Israelis, but perhaps even more so against the Americans, because in their case there was seen to be betrayal heaped on to ingrati- tude for Tunisia's favour in taking in the Palestinians in the first place. Tunisians will not accept that the US was not deeply implicated in the raid, even if they have trouble proving it. It is not widely known, for instance, that some days before the raid families with children at the American school in Tunis were advised with 00 reason given not to allow their children to wander too far afield unaccompanied. When the raid did take place, the school was immediately closed as a precaution against possible hostile demonstrations or worse. The coastline on either side of the modern capital of Tunis has been, on and off, at the receiving end of unrest in the Levant since Dido fled from her persecu- tors in ancient Tyre and arrived here to set about the founding of Carthage. Arafat arrived by ship from the same quarter 3,000 years later and was received by Wassila Bourguiba, wife of the Tunisian president, playing Dido to her portly, unshaven Aeneas. The first dozen or so Palestinian fighters down the gangplank were permitted to wave their Kalashnikovs and otherwise give the appearance for the benefit of television of having achieved a great victory in being thrown out of Leba- non. When the show business ceased, the fighters still on board were disarmed and packed into lorries to two destinations — Qued Zarga, in north-central Tunisia, and the Hotel Salwa, an ambitious tourist project hopelessly mislocated on a stretch of coast rapidly being engulfed by cheap housing and light industry. The troubled owner of the Hotel Salwa was one of the few people in the country whose welcome to the affluent PLO was genuinely warm.
The Palestinians were never happy in Tunisia. They were under constant sur- veillance by Tunisian security and, socially, they were ill at ease in a society which, though nominally Arab, is cosmopolitan in a continental sort of way. The lorries which followed them from their port of dis- embarkation, the earlier French naval base of Bizerte, and were carrying their person- al possessions, including bedding and cher- ished weapons, got lost. They turned up in due course with the bedding but without the weapons. Before long the Tunisians were conspiring with the Palestinians to help those who wanted to leave. The necessary travel documents were produced in a trice.
The Israelis insist that the attack was direct retaliation against those responsible for the murder of three Israeli civilians in Larnaca harbour, i.e. the PLO high com- mand, which at the beginning of this year moved into new premises along the beach from the Hotel Salwa. The PLO claim that the Larnaca operation had nothing to do with them, although they do say privately in Tunis that not only were the Larnaca victims members of Israeli intelligence, but efficient ones who were playing havoc with PLO operations in and out of Cyprus.
The intriguing figure allegedly involved in the Larnaca killings is a fair-haired Englishman from South Shields who joined the PLO for ideological reasons. He is remembered and talked about by Palesti- nians who are still in Tunisia. A middle- aged French schoolteacher who had be- friended one of the Palestinians while on holiday in Tunisia rushed back on hearing of the Israeli bombing to discover whether he was still alive. At a lunch to celebrate their reunion, I asked him whether he knew of a fair-haired Englishman. 'You mean Ian Davison,' he replied. 'Of course I know him. The bed he slept in here was next to mine.'
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