The public relations coup epitomised her deft manoeuvring since Arafat, a confirmed bachelor who for years had vowed he was ‘married to Palestine’, shocked the Palestinian community in July 1991 by wedding a pretty blonde less than half his age.
She recalls first hearing of her future husband when she was four years old and ‘hiding in fear’ in her family’s basement in Nablus as Israeli soldiers searched the West Bank city for a resistance leader named Arafat. In 1988, because of her fluent French and the long association of her mother Raymonda with the PLO (she founded the first Palestinian news agency in the occupied territories), Suha was asked to help out during an Arafat visit to Paris where she was living after finishing her education at the Sorbonne.
Within weeks Arafat asked her to come to Tunis as his personal assistant. Soon she was flying around the world with him and had supplanted his long-time secretary, Um Nasr. When he married Suha, there was a hair-pulling cat-fight between the two women at Arafat’s office. Um Nasr, a forty-something woman who had dedicated her life to the revolution, felt that she would make a much better wife.
Much of the resentment of Suha seems inspired not by anything she has done but rather by what she is. She is neither a traditional Arab wife in a culture that is still very conservative, nor is she the politicised revolutionary that many assumed Arafat would choose were he ever to wed. She likes French fashion and perfumes and visits Paris to stock up. Her upper-class trappings rankle among Palestinians more than the difference in age or religion (she is a Greek Orthodox Christian, he a Sunni Muslim).
For years Arafat’s nomadic existence and paucity of possessions had been a symbol of his refugee people; now Palestinians had a first lady who said: ‘It’s so difficult to take all of the luggage and go all over.’
But Suha is no bimbo. She comes from a prominent Palestinian family; her father is a wealthy banker and likes to talk of how her ancestors lived in a crusader castle. She is trying to carve out a middle role, somewhere between being a traditional wife and a public figure in her own right.
She recently took along a film crew with her to visit a Palestinian orphanage in Tunis to publicise their plight. Arafat has symbolically adopted all the children, most of whose parents are considered martyrs of the Palestinian cause. And she has founded a society to care for Palestinian children.
But unlike Hillary Clinton, who seems to tolerate Bill’s presence only because it gives her the power to implement her own programmes, Suha genuinely seems to adore Arafat. She pours him tea in the morning and nags him to rest. His schedule is less erratic these days, although he still maintains his nocturnal habits, often meeting with other PLO officials until three or four in the morning.
‘She is suffering with me,’ Arafat said last week during his Washington visit. ‘I am working 18-hour days.’
But she has given the PLO leader the chance to think of a home as well as a homeland.
Arafat thrives amid cut and thrust of peace
MIDDLE EAST
9 January 1994
For a man who was supposed to be going mad under the gruelling pressure of negotiations with Israel, Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organisation leader, was in an extraordinarily good mood last week.
He opened a meeting of Palestinian engineers in Tunis, joking that if his political career did not work out he could always join their ranks and resume his former profession. He met for three days with a delegation of disgruntled Palestinians from the occupied territories.
He dispatched Farouq Qadoomi, the PLO foreign minister, to try to patch things up with King Hussein of Jordan. He met an all-party group of British MPs and a Gaza businessman with plans to build a floating port.
He also delivered a New Year’s Day address from his Tunis headquarters to a carphone in Yarmouk Square in Gaza; and he persuaded the executive committee, his cabinet, to stand firm in the latest contretemps with Israel over talks on the implementation of their peace accord. All the while, faxes and telephone calls flew back and forth between Arafat, his representative in Cairo, and Israel to resolve the deadlock in negotiations.
It was all in a week’s work. Arafat has changed very little in his last three decades as a Palestinian leader, much less in the three months since the peace agreement was signed in Washington. But at 64, he has been rejuvenated by Israel’s recognition of the PLO, working more hours than ever before, impatient with constraints. On New Year’s Eve he paused only for a piece of celebratory cake before signing his first working paper of the year at five minutes past midnight.
Arafat wants the peace accord to go ahead and he is twisting arms, using financial pressure, threatening those who do not agree with him and playing off internal rivalries for all that he is worth. He even bangs the table in meetings of the executive committee, and, heaven forbid, has been known to shout.
He is acting like a leader; yet this behaviour has led to charges that his style of governing is undermining the peace process and even to absurd reports that he is mentally unstable.
Perhaps this is because he has actually done something he has been criticised for not doing during his entire leadership of the Palestinian movement. It has long been the conventional wisdom that Arafat is incapable of taking the bold steps required of a leader, insisting instead on securing the consensus of even the most radical PLO faction.
When he signed the peace accord with Israel last September, Arafat took a bold and dangerous step for the first time, leaving behind anyone whom he could not convince to join him. He felt Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, was offering the best deal possible and that if he waited to bring along every fractious member of the PLO, that handshake on the White House lawn would still be merely a dream. In his view, those who are now accusing him of being autocratic are the same people who previously lambasted him for failing to take the initiative.
The second criticism that has lately been floated is that Arafat’s style of leadership has opened serious divisions in the PLO and that this threatens the peace process. Israel has tried to play on these divisions, making it clear for example that it would prefer to deal with Abu Mazen, the senior PLO official who signed the peace accord in Washington.
This is a serious misinterpretation of what is going on inside the PLO. In its decades of scrutiny of its enemy, Israel may have missed the forest for the trees. Although the Israeli intelligence services can identify which individual Palestinian mounted such-and-such an operation, they do not appear able to explain to their government how the PLO works.
In fact, titles mean little. Power is based on shifting internal alliances, party membership, past history, and money. Arafat is the unquestioned leader because he works the system best and because he rises above all of them as the lasting symbol of Palestinian nationalism.
Even Arafat’s most vocal opponents have not called for his replacement; they know there is nobody else who can keep the organisation united behind this peace accord. There is criticism in the PLO ranks, but this reflects the changes in Palestinian politics rather than any change in Arafat.
For years, there have been divisions along ideological lines, from the Marxist left to the Islamicists on the right. That is all irrelevant today. The divisions are now social and economic, and Arafat is having to juggle them, conducting the peace talks while he tries to put together a reliable and competent team for his new government.
He has to balance the demands of returning guerrillas and wealthy Palestinian businessmen who have made their money in the diaspora and who now want to run the economy of the new Palestinian entity; between Palestinian technicians who have worked in the West and loyal political appointees who are afraid there will be no place for them; between Palestinians inside the occupied territories, who feel they have borne the brunt of the occupation, and those returning, who feel they have sacrificed normal lives for