Haidar Abdel Shafi

IN THE spring of 1948, around March as he remembered it, Haidar Abdel Shafi found himself at nightfall, waiting, in a small mud hut by the side of the main road in Deir al-Balah. Around him stretched groves of olive and orange trees. Palestine, in those days, was a community of peasants and landowners; a man was judged by how many trees he had. Haidar's father had had none, preferring—as he told the astonished neighbours—to save money for schooling his six children rather than buy plantations. The lanky boy, with his dark brows, had shaken the dust from his feet and gone away to study. But he was back now, defending the land.

Beside him lay a bag of first-aid equipment. He was a doctor, trained in Beirut and Jerusalem, now based in Gaza, and one of only about a dozen practising in the whole southern sector of Palestine. With his few colleagues he had founded, in 1945, a southern branch of the Palestine Medical Society, and together they had attended the first Palestine Medical Congress. Since his student days, when he had first been inspired by Arab pan-nationalism, he had looked on doctoring as a form of resistance: to illness, to poverty and, by strengthening the common people, to political troubles and oppressions. When it came to organising Palestinians, a community not easily made coherent, a network of doctors, clinics and waiting rooms might serve as well as any political party. But crouching in a hut by the main road was not his normal mode of operation.

Somewhere ahead of him were a group of fedayeen, Arab guerrilla fighters, who had come to attack the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom. The settlement, one of many built on purchased land in Palestine in the years before the establishment of Israel, was well-defended, surrounded by circle after circle of barbed wire. Within the circles the ground was mined, and the whole scene was overlooked by Jewish observation towers.

The battle, though it raged all night, was a bloody defeat for the fedayeen: 12 killed, with Dr Abdel Shafi's first-aid bag no match for the mines and the snipers. The Zionists seemed superbly organised. Indeed, it was usually so. All through his long career, in which he was a founder-member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and represented Gaza on the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the doctor's chief lament about his own people was their disarray. They had little notion of democracy, being loyal instead to Yasser Arafat, a strongman who monopolised all decision-making and surrounded himself with thieves. And they turned out in the end to have no capacity for national unity, splintering into factions—Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the rest—who then fought one another. The Israelis, as he often pointed out, needed only to watch the Palestinians destroy themselves, as they had watched that March night from their high, dark towers.

Requiem for the olive trees

Dr Abdel Shafi was that rarest of figures, a secular and non-sectarian Palestinian leader whose integrity and outspokenness made him a model for all the rest. He was of the left, in an old socialist way, but was never a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; a doctor's role, he seemed to believe, was to stay detached from such affiliations. Far more useful was his decision to found and direct the Gaza branch of the Red Crescent, his own rallying organisation for Palestinian improvement. The Islamists attacked him, and in 1981 burned his clinic down; he noted then, stoically, that the Israelis who then ruled Gaza did not trouble to intervene.

On both the PLO and the PLC he was a gadfly, denouncing corruption and resigning with much publicity from the PLC, in 1997, because it was doing nothing to counter Israeli ambitions. The Palestinian Authority infuriated him because it would not control the intifada and was allowing Palestinians (though, he stressed, they had every reason to rebel) to commit random violence against Jewish civilians. He never ran for president in the 1996 elections, but might have done well if he had.

Though the Israelis twice deported him and then confined him to Gaza for his long-term refusal to co-operate, he did not oppose the existence of Israel. The Jewish presence was a reality, and the Jewish state had to be accepted. Nor did he dislike Jews: at Sabbath dusks, as a boy, he had been in demand to light the lamps of his Jewish neighbours. But there had to be a spirit of “mutuality and reciprocity”: two viable states, side by side, within the 1967 borders, and no Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. Until the settlements stopped entirely, he insisted, there was no point in any peace plan for the Middle East.

This was his message at the Madrid Conference in 1991 and at the Washington talks that followed—talks which he led and which were undermined, to his disgust, by secret accords made later at Oslo between Arafat and the Israelis. His speech at Madrid was perhaps the most eloquent the West had ever heard from a Palestinian: a plea for understanding, for sympathy and for territory. “What requiem can be sung”, he asked, “for trees uprooted by army bulldozers? And...who can explain to those whose lands are confiscated and clear waters stolen, a message of peace? Remove the barbed wire. Restore the land.”