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ABU NIDAL: A GUN FOR HIRE -- THE SECRET LIFE OF THE WORLD'S MOST NOTORIOUS ARAB TERRORIST |
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Chapter 3: Childhood Traumas Eager to check out Abu Iyad's theory, I set out on the trail of Abu Nidal, digging into his past, questioning everyone I met who knew him, and trying to understand his evidently complex personality. Abu Nidal is, I discovered, a man of nondescript appearance (although several sources mentioned his bald head, bright eyes, and good teeth), simple education, and poor health who suffers from stomach ulcers and angina. He dresses shabbily, most often in a zip-up jacket and old trousers. He has few of the obvious vices: He does not gamble, run after women, hanker after luxuries or even after comfort. He has hardly a family life to speak of. Whiskey, which he drinks nightly in large quantities, appears to be his only solace. His long sojourn underground for nearly twenty years, something of a record in the world of clandestine operations, has made him shy of human contact. A fantasist with little regard for truth, he lives in a world of violence, delusion, and fear and, like other practitioners in the murky world of intelligence, is addicted to secret knowledge and secret power. A master of disguises and of subterfuge, trusting no one, lonely and self-protective, he lives like a mole, hidden away from public view. He seems to be a mine of contradictions: both quick and very cautious, both daring and cowardly. Yet even his enemies concede that it has taken great abilities to create his disciplined and widely feared instrument of terror. A canny administrator with a sound financial brain, he has amassed a fortune, reportedly running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Ex-colleagues say that he is capable of hard work and clear thinking over long periods and that he is an undoubted leader who, though inspiring loyalty and dedication, rules his far-flung organization through fear. Once upon a time, at the beginning of his career, Abu Nidal was famous for his fiery and unbending nationalism. Now he is notorious for his murders. Some say that in his middle fifties, he has come to savor his reputation as an outlaw and a killer, that it is a case of patriot turned psychopath. To kill repeatedly and on a large scale, to be awash in blood, is not a normal human condition. Such an aberration is usually found only in situations of great stress, when a community blinded by hate and fear attacks another, in times of war, or when an individual personality is profoundly disturbed. THE LOSS OF A MOTHER If Abu Nidal seems like a classic case of a split personality, his unhappy and insecure childhood, which several of his acquaintances mentioned, may go some way toward explaining it. He was born in May 1937 in Jaffa, an ancient Arab port on the Mediterranean coast of what was then Palestine. His father, Khalil al-Banna, was a solid citizen whose fortune lay in orange groves that stretched south of the town in luxuriant and sweet-smelling plantations. Each year he supervised as his citrus crop was packed in wooden crates and shipped to Europe, on a shipping line from Jaffa to Liverpool that had been opened in the 1890s. Hajj Khalil was a patriarch. By his first wife, he had had eleven children, seven boys and four girls, who lived in a spacious, three-story house built of dressed stone, which was situated close enough to the shore for the children to skip down for a dip in the sea after school. To escape the humid summer heat of the coast, Khalil al-Banna bought another house in a mountain village further up the Mediterranean. It lay in the north of Syria, in the striking hill country above the port of Alexandretta (which was ceded to Turkey, against Syria's will, by the French on the eve of the Second World War). Many of the inhabitants of these coastal mountain villages were and remain members of the Alawite sect, a heterodox offshoot of Shi'ite Islam. To bring in much-needed cash, these dirt-poor villagers were often forced to hire out their daughters as domestic servants to middle-class families in the region. One summer the Banna family brought home to Jaffa a handsome young Alawite girl of sixteen. Khalil al-Banna became infatuated with her and, in his old age, married her, to the outrage of the rest of his family. His twelfth child, the future Abu Nidal, was the son of the family maid. He was named Sabri. From the beginning, Sabri's position in the household was uncomfortable. He was scorned by his older half-brothers and sisters. Worse still, when his father died in 1945, his mother was eventually turned out of the house and so he lost her too. Aged eight, Sabri remained in the parental home, but there was no one to care for him, and such neglect meant that he received virtually no education. He dropped out of school after the third grade and to this day, to his embarrassment, continues to write with the untrained hand of a child, a source of much anguish. Arabs have their own particular snobberies, often to do with pride of family, which is one reason that cousin so often marries cousin. But there was little to be proud of in being the son of a poor maid from a downtrodden sect -- until, that is, Hafez al-Assad, himself an Alawite of peasant stock, came to power in Syria in 1970. Abu Nidal then tried, as we shall see in due course, to ingratiate himself with the Syrian leader by invoking this maternal ancestry. Abu Nidal has since made it up with the members of his father's family, some of whom live under Israeli rule in the occupied territories. A half-sister lives in Nablus, on the West Bank; he sends her money from time to time in various roundabout ways. A half-brother, Muhammad al-Banna, was a prominent fruit-and-vegetable merchant who, until his death five years ago, was on good terms with the Israeli occupation authorities. Several of his nieces, of whom he has at least a score dispersed around the Arab world, are married to members of his organization. But who can tell how the loss of a mother and his early humiliation and rejection affected him? However, his cruelty and the need to dominate those around him point to a grievance against the world that may be connected with the pain he suffered as a child. Those who know him well say that he despises women, and there is little room for them in his all-male organization. His members' wives are kept in isolation and in ignorance of their husbands' activities. They are not even allowed to befriend and visit one another, as is customary among the other Palestinian groups. His own wife, as we shall see, a patient, longsuffering woman, has for years been kept away from society, without friends. THE SHOCK OF EXILE Abu Nidal's bitter and vengeful personality was very probably shaped by the slights he suffered as a child but also by the impact on him of the disaster that overtook his family, and the whole of the Palestinian community, as a result of massive Jewish immigration into Palestine, culminating in 1948 with the establishment of the state of Israel. What happened in Palestine in 1947-48 is one of the most contentious subjects in modern history. This book is hardly the place to rehearse the old polemics or to set out the rival versions of history as seen by Arab and Jew. Monstrously persecuted by Hitler, the Jews needed a homeland and the British promised them one. In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, partitioning Arab Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, a resolution that the Zionists considered international sanction for a country of their own and which the Arabs rejected. Jews claim, moreover, an emotional attachment to the land of their historic ancestors. But the way the state of Israel was created, with the violent expulsion or stampeding of its Arab inhabitants, left much to be desired and has been a source of furious controversy ever since. Dispossessed Palestinians, who had enjoyed almost uninterrupted tenure of their land for thirteen hundred years, suffered a great shock from which they have been unable or unwilling to recover. In the 1930s many a Palestinian child, like the young Sabri al-Banna, was brought up on tales of heroic deeds by Arab fighters who tried to stem the remorseless tide of foreign immigrants who were buying Palestinian land from Arab landowners, dispersing the Arab tenants and laborers. Jaffa, where he grew up, had a tradition of militancy. A Jewish attempt in 1935 to smuggle weapons through Jaffa port was one of the first incidents that roused the Arabs to take up arms against the Jews and their British protectors. Arab irregulars clashed with British troops. Their leader, Sheikh Izz al-Din Qassam, a devout cleric turned guerrilla fighter, was killed. Palestinians consider him the father of their armed resistance. His death was one of the sparks that ignited the great Arab revolt of 1936-39, which the British put down with terrible ruthlessness, killing thousands of Palestinians and interning tens of thousands. Palestinian protest at the influx of Jews was crushed for a generation. Living cheek-by-jowl with Tel Aviv, its brash, rapidly growing neighbor, Jaffa was caught in the grip of these violent events. Thousands of Arab peasants, evicted from the land as it passed to Jewish owners, set up miserable shantytowns around the port. Hostility between Arab and Jew, in Abu Nidal's youth, was an inescapable fact of daily life. When the Arabs rejected the 1947 UN partition plan and civil war broke out between the Arabs and Jews, Jaffa found itself under siege. Surrounded by Jewish territory, it was an Arab enclave that the Jewish high command was determined to capture. Sniping escalated into running battles and then into mutual atrocities. In a notorious incident early in 1948, two Stern Gang terrorists disguised as Arabs drove a truck full of dynamite hidden under a pile of oranges into the town and blew it up, causing over a hundred casualties. Such terror tactics were repeated in many parts of Palestine as the Zionists raced to seize as much territory as possible before Britain's withdrawal on May 15, 1948, which, they feared, would herald the entry into Palestine of regular Arab armies. In Jaffa, the fighting shut down schools, factories, the bus service, and the citrus industry, the Banna orange groves and packing plant included. The hugely successful Zionist strategy was to mount surprise attacks on Arab cities with mortar and rocket bombardments; to harry the Arab population with psychological warfare from loudspeakers and clandestine radio stations operated by the Hagana, the underground Jewish militia; and, in the countryside, to stage massacres in isolated villages such as Deir Yassin and Kolonia, calculated to stampede the rural population off the land. Several thousand Arab civilians were slaughtered in different parts of the country, leading to the panicked flight across the borders of some 750,000 others. It was then that the intractable Palestinian refugee problem was born. For years, much of the information about these killings was deliberately suppressed, but word has lately been filtering out, thanks mainly to Israeli researchers and historians, who have been probing into the events of the period. * In Haifa, Acre, and Jaffa, scores of Palestinian families, under fire from Jewish snipers, were drowned in the rush to escape by sea to Gaza or Beirut. As soon as the Hagana seized Jaffa on May 14, 1948, it was cleaned out by looters from Tel Aviv and then quickly settled by thousands of Jews. Of an Arab population of 75,000, only 3,000 remained. The Banna plantations were confiscated by the Israeli government. The wild scramble of the Palestinians to get out was matched only by a Jewish scramble to seize their property. As late as 1953, a third of Israel's Jewish population was living on land taken from Palestinians. A few weeks before the fall of Jaffa, the once proud and prosperous Banna family fled south to the small town of Majdal, where they hoped they would be safe, but they were soon driven out again by the advancing Israelis. Fleeing still further south to Gaza, then under Egyptian military occupation, they found shelter at last in the al-Burj refugee camp, where, packed together in tents, they spent a wretched year, including the very cold winter of 1948-49. They then moved on again to the city of Nablus, in the West Bank, then under Jordanian rule and temporarily out of reach of Israeli guns. In time, some of Khalil al-Banna's sons and daughters were able to scratch out a modest living. They were the lucky ones. Years after the 1948 catastrophe, most Palestinian refugees were still living in tents, still awaiting the miracle that would return them to their homes. Today in the camps, breeze blocks have replaced the canvas tenting, but the refugees are still there, their numbers swollen by natural increase and new wars. Attachment to their lost land and hatred for those who displaced them remain their dominant emotions and have intensified with the passing years. Israelis are rightly proud of their state building and of their military prowess, but as many would now acknowledge, their "war of independence" was, like most wars, a brutal and often criminal affair. They won it because the military balance was crushingly in their favor. The propaganda version in which a helpless Jewish community miraculously defeated overwhelming Arab forces is a myth and has been exploded by such Jewish historians as Simha Flapam, in his The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (1987), and Benny Morris, in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949 (1987). Furthermore, in a lecture delivered in 1990 in Jerusalem, Benny Morris, of the Hebrew University, reported that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Israeli soldiers and civilians killed thousands of unarmed Palestinians who tried to reenter the country to pick their crops or recover their lost property. Soldiers "used to shoot them on sight," and settlers on kibbutzim would booby-trap water pumps to prevent Palestinians from removing them. The bodies of Palestinians killed in this way would then be booby-trapped in turn to kill anyone who tried to take them away for burial. Such incidents are a reminder of the brutalities the Palestinians suffered and, in the West Bank and Gaza, continue to suffer. The Israeli state was built on the utter ruin of Arab Palestine and the uprooting of its population -- a people that had had no hand in the frightful persecution of the Jews in Europe. Many in the West still see the Jews as victims of a thousand years of persecution, culminating in the obscenity of the Holocaust. But there can be no understanding of Abu Nidal and other angry Palestinians like him unless the impact on them of Israel's victory in 1948 is recognized. These men and women were made homeless, robbed of everything they possessed, forgotten by the world, and constantly taunted by the triumphalism of the victors. The mass exodus of Palestinians from their homeland gave the Israelis their real start in life, but for the losers it remains the supreme tragedy of their history, blotting out the horizon like an impenetrable cloud. To many Palestinians, the Israeli is a murderer and a thief, a brutal conqueror with neither conscience nor humanity. What happened in 1948 was not the end of a process but the beginning. The repression of Palestinians, the expropriation of land, the building of settlements, the appropriation of scarce resources such as water -- all these continue to this day, breeding in the victims of these policies an explosive mixture of rage and despair. However reluctant Israelis and Jews may be to acknowledge it, the terrorism of Abu Nidal and those like him is a reaction to the Jewish victory, which has condemned the Palestinians to a half-life of helplessness, insecurity, and uncertain identity. Perhaps none of this would have happened had the Arabs accepted the UN proposal in 1947 to partition Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish sector, but they didn't and the result has been more or less unending misery and violence. From a profound sense of grievance, an obsession with revenge has flowed ineluctably: What was taken by force can only be regained by force. This is the gut feeling of many Palestinians. No middle ground, compromise, or peaceful solution can be entertained. When I first started examining Abu Nidal's career, I felt that this maxim had blinded him to political realities and led him into a life of purposeless terrorism and crime. YOUTHFUL AGITATOR Abu Nidal's early teens in the West Bank city of Nablus were difficult. He scraped by on charity from his half-brothers, themselves struggling to survive. He took odd jobs as errand boy and electrician's assistant but deeply resented, as he made plain to friends later in life, his ragged clothes, empty stomach, and lack of education. He tried to attend a government school for a few months, but with no money to support him and having missed so many years already, he simply could not catch up. He faced ridicule, which added to his resentments. However, he was clever and ambitious, and attempting to read on his own, he came upon a semi-clandestine news sheet, al-Yaqzah (The Awakening), which the local Jordanian branch of the Ba'ath party published occasionally on the West Bank. The Ba'ath in Jordan was an offshoot, in fact the first such offshoot in the Arab world, of the mother party that two Syrian schoolmasters had founded in Damascus in the late 1940s. When Arab feebleness and disarray were exposed by the disaster in Palestine, young people looking for a way forward flocked to join the Ba'ath, with its exciting, if somewhat incoherent, program of Arab "rebirth." It was to become the great nationalist party of the period. The West Bank, and the city of Nablus in particular, packed as it was with embittered refugees, was fertile ground for Ba'athist ideas, especially in the turbulent years that followed the assassination of King Abdallah of Jordan in 1951 -- killed by a Palestinian for his collusion with Israel during the 1948 war and his proposal to accept its existence after the war. His mentally ill son Talal succeeded him but was soon deposed as unfit to rule. His grandson, the young Hussein, then seventeen, was still untried. The Ba'ath in Jordan had not yet been given a license to function legally as a political party and was still more or less underground, playing cat-and-mouse with the authorities. But in violent demonstrations, it demanded a greater say for Palestinians in the kingdom's affairs. It also demanded that Jordan end its relationship to Britain, which the Palestinians felt had betrayed them to the Zionists. In 1955, the Ba'ath campaigned to keep Jordan out of the British-inspired Baghdad Pact, and in 1956, during the Suez war, it wanted King Hussein to side with Egypt's Nasser, the nationalists' hero then fighting for his life -- and for Arab independence -- against Britain, France, and Israel. This Ba'ath was the party that the young Abu Nidal joined when he was eighteen. It was his first taste of radical politics. But this political experience was short-lived. In April 1957, a group of nationalist officers tried to seize power in Amman but were faced down by Hussein and his loyalist Bedouin troops. The would-be putschists were locked up or sent into exile. The Ba'ath and other radical parties called a congress in Nablus to demand that the officers be reinstated, that the king's advisers be sacked, and that Jordan realign itself away from Britain and the United States and toward Egypt. Agitating, demonstrating, and facing police gunfire, the young Abu Nidal lived every moment of these dramatic events. But the nationalist dream soon faded. Stiffened by Western help, Hussein reasserted his authority, smashing the Ba'ath by mass arrests. Its offices were closed and its paper suspended. Its top men, including the party leader, Abdallah Rimawi, fled to Syria, while young militants like Abu Nidal chose to lie low. A year later, as Hussein's grip tightened and the Ba'ath party's prospects dimmed, a thoroughly disgruntled Abu Nidal, nursing a hatred for the Hashemites second only to his combined hatred of Israel, Britain, and the United States, went to seek his fortune in Saudi Arabia -- one among tens of thousands of young Palestinians who, to escape the stinking, overcrowded refugee camps, headed for the oil-rich kingdom. He made his way to Riyadh and, with a friend, Abu Fadi, set himself up as a housepainter and electrician, trades in which he had dabbled in Nablus. By 1959 the two partners had managed to open a shop on al-Wazir Street, in the Saudi capital. But distance from Palestine did not blunt Abu Nidal's feelings. On the contrary, the further away he was from the lost homeland, the more he dreamed of "the return," the obsessive idea that filled the minds of countless Palestinians. He still considered himself a Ba'athist -- the party had been his school during the Nablus years. But in Saudi Arabia it presented few attractions: It was a puny underground movement, a dozen young men who held meetings in a cellar. In any event, Nasser, who was suspicious of the Ba'ath, had forced the Syrian mother party to dissolve itself at the time of the Syrian- Egyptian Union of 1958, plunging the movement into confusion, which spread to its branches throughout the Arab world. Abdallah Rimawi, head of the Jordanian Ba'ath and the man Abu Nidal had looked up to in his young manhood, left the movement and took refuge in Cairo. Abu Nidal, in turn, left the Ba'ath, to find another outlet for his restless energies. In his early twenties, already conscious of his latent abilities, he saw himself as something of a leader, seeking to impress others by spinning yarns about his own achievements. He was a fabulist, playing games with the truth, a trait that would grow more pronounced. In Riyadh, gathering around him a group of young men, he founded his own little faction and, in the spirit of the times, gave it the grandiose name of the Palestine Secret Organization. He dreamed of dispatching emissaries throughout the region, of sprouting offshoots, of carrying the fight into "usurped Palestine" itself. Beirut was his first target. It was then considered the political and publishing mecca of the Middle East, the one Arab capital where speech was free enough and the secret police comparatively benign. So in the early 1960s, Abu Nidal staked his savings on sending two young men to Beirut to set up a branch of his secret faction. But his envoys gave up -- one became a student, the other went into business -- and the venture collapsed. In striving to get started in the resistance business, Abu Nidal was not unique. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, many Palestinians working in Arab countries, as well as Palestinian students in Europe, attempted in a more or less clandestine fashion to set up their own political organizations. Dozens of groups emerged, although few survived for long. The prime inspiration was the trauma of exile, the suffering of their families, the need to break free from the shackles of Arab host countries -- and the burning desire to hit back at Israel. Of all these organizations, by far the most important was Yasser Arafat's Fatah, which emerged in Kuwait in 1958-59 and was soon to grow into the parent of all Palestinian fighting movements. Fatah had recruits wherever Palestinians were to be found -- including Saudi Arabia, where Abu Nidal, a proven activist, was inevitably drawn into the net. Abu Nidal did not join Fatah as a humble foot soldier. Having run his own "group" and passionately committed to the cause of the resistance, he entered a rung or two higher up on the organizational ladder. He had a head for figures, and his business was doing well. He was lively and entertaining company. He seemed well launched into life. On a visit to Nablus, he met and married a girl, Hiyam al-Bitar, from a good Jaffa family exiled like his own. She was better educated than he was, had been to school and had learned French. But, to his taste, she was agreeably docile, halfway between a traditional Arab wife and a modern woman. She was to bear him a boy and two girls. In Saudi Arabia, Abu Nidal had been no more than an armchair guerrilla -- plotting, talking, dreaming of great deeds, but not actually doing very much. The 1967 war -- after 1948, the second traumatic date in the Arab calendar -- changed all that. In a lightning preemptive campaign, Israel shattered the armies of its Arab neighbors, seized East Jerusalem and all that was left of Arab Palestine, as well as Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Syria's Golan Heights, and emerged as the region's superpower, evidently stronger than any combination of Arab states. The West Bank and Gaza, with their teeming Palestinian populations, became the occupied territories, as they remain today. The blow to the Arab psyche, to Arab self-confidence, was colossal. The gangrene of hate ate deeper, as did the thirst for revenge. Demonstrating against the war and its disastrous outcome, Abu Nidal and his friends were rounded up by the Saudis and expelled as dangerous subversives. But Abu Nidal could not return to the West Bank. His Nablus home had been overrun by the Israelis. The only possible destination was Amman, where Palestinian guerrillas were preparing to fight an enemy whose forward positions had now reached the Jordan River. A Palestinian acquaintance, Abu Ali Shahin (who was later to spend many years in Israeli jails), remembers Abu Nidal at that time. "He was very fanatical," he told me. "He wanted to go and fight. He didn't believe in religion or Ba'athism or Marxism or anything else. There was no way to recover Palestine except by shedding blood. The gun was his ideology and his ideology was the gun. The gun, only the gun!" _______________ Notes: * To cite a single example, on August 24, 1984, the Israeli daily Hadashot published an account of a previously unreported massacre at the village of Dweima on October 28, 1948, in which an estimated 500 men, women, and children were killed by a regular Israeli army unit.
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