22/7/94

The Arafunnel

When Rabin, Peres and Arafat met in Paris, all they had to do was get past the animosity to get down to in-depth peacemaking.

It was a great day in the history of peacemaking.
Yitzhak Rabin. Shimon Peres. And Yasser Arafat. Fraternite in Paris, a summit of conciliation between implacable foes.
The Palestinian leader couldn't wait to get past the diplomatic protocol: he had a wonderful idea to share with his new friends.
The prime minister of Israel got up. With aplomb he turned to the man who had dogged him for decades. "I --"
The foreign minister of Israel leaped to his feet. "What do you mean, 'I'? Or perhaps you're scheming to take all the credit for the peace process."
The prime minister turned to the other man who had dogged him for decades. "I am the elected leader of our country, which you sometimes seem to forget."
"Thanks to an ugly campaign full of insinuations, innuendos, character assassinations and various fast ones you pulled to rob me of the party leadership."
"Huh! You remember the last time you were in charge? You plunged this party to depths it has never seen. You have never won an election. In fact, you're the only leader of our party who has ever lost an election."
"Oh yeah? You blew the Histadrut election."
"Your lackey Haberfeld lost it."
"Your traitor Ramon lost it."
"Your lapdog Beilin is making fools of all of us."
"Your wife caused you to resign in shame."
"Like you tried to do to me by lying about that Arafat letter."
"You sold this country to the haredim!"
"You made a deal with the Likud!"
"You made a deal with the PLO!"
"Gentlemen!" Arafat glared at his esteemed colleagues. "While it is true that I came here to make peace with enemies, it was not in the role of peacemaker. May I remind you that  I am the enemy."
Rabin and Peres fell all over themselves agreeing with Arafat. At his urging, they shook hands. "Like on the White House lawn," the Palestinian leader reminded the Israeli leader.
"That was easier," Rabin grumbled.

THE THREE men found they had a lot to talk about.
"Pity about O.J. Simpson," Peres said.
"He was the best," Arafat said sadly.
"Hey, did you see those Brazilians in the World Cup?"
"Gimme a break. Their defense stinks."
"Barley futures look bullish."
"With the dollar slumping? Nah."
"Been through the Chunnel yet?" Arafat slipped it in nonchalantly. The Israelis  said they hadn't. "I mean, here we are in Paris, and for the first time ever, we can just bop over to London." He cleared his throat. "Funny, isn't it? Now it's possible to go overland from France to England, but impossible from Gaza to Jericho...."
"What do you mean?" Rabin asked warily.
"Well," Arafat said, slowly but pointedly, "there's this problem of a Jewish state in between. You didn't think about that when you so generously gave me two broken bits of Palestine to rule. What am I supposed to do, fly back and forth? Sit in Zionist traffic? I mean, what if there's a putsch in Khan Yunis while I'm on vacation in Uja?"
"Good point," Peres said.
"Out with it," Rabin scowled. "What are you going to demand now, two Palestinian states?"
Arafat looked stung. "Yitzhak! It's me, Yasser! After all we've been through together, you're going to sit there and call me greedy?! By Allah, we're practically cousins, you and I."
"Alright, what itch are you scratching?"
"Well, I had an idea. A wonderful idea. I mentioned it to my wife Suha, and she agrees with me, it's brilliant. We dig a tunnel."
What?!"
"Like the Chunnel. A great, long link between my two isolated entities, wide enough for my limousine, deep enough so you can still grow your Jewish orange trees above this sovereign Palestinian underterritory. Yitzhak, it's the perfect solution!"
"I love it!" Peres exclaimed.
"It's dumb," Rabin snapped.
"To tell you the truth, I got the idea from you fellows." Arafat was becoming animated. "Tell me, what is the loftiest Zionist dream that never got off the ground?"
Rabin gasped. In a hoarse whisper, he answered: "The Med-Dead Canal."
"Egg--zactly!"
"A tunnel..." Rabin said wondrously.
"The Chunnel..." Peres said dreamily.
"The Arafunnel!" Arafat said hopefully.
"The what?" Rabin roared.
"Well," the PLOnik sniffed, "it sounds a lot better than the 'Rabinnel.'"
Peres was beginning to see the light at the end of it all. His glee ran amok. "An epic endeavor! An enterprise of enemies! East meets West! The Ninth Wonder --"
"Shimon!" the prime minister barked. "Save that crap for the reporters, you're making me nauseous."

THE THREE wise men mulled over the particulars of building the Arafunnel. But Peres was troubled. "They're gonna hate it," he said, suddenly gripped with defeatist doom. "The right, the left, the settlers, the environmentalists, Israelis and Palestinians, the Americans, Syrians and Jordanians, archeologists, haredim, feminists, Oleg. Then Shas will demand a compromise or else, Rabin will appease them, the thing won't get past Beit Guvrin and ... and I'll get blamed."
But Arafat was very experienced in such situations. "I will announce in Arabic that it's a Palestinian tunnel, you will announce in Hebrew that it's an Israeli canal. That'll please everyone and confuse the Americans."
"Come to think of it," Rabin said, "there's no reason why it can't be both."
Peres was crestrisen. "Both! Of course! Who would complain about a new water source, hydroelectric power, mass employment? We won't even have to expropriate any land. They're gonna love it!"
"As long as we don't cut into some wretched archeological site."
"Or bones."
"Pishposh," Arafat said. "I can't imagine anyone would go deep down into a horrible black hole to stage a silly demonstration."
"Huh," said Rabin, "you don't know our people."
Arafat was getting irritated. "How you Jews ever managed to rule the world I'll never know. You want to build the Arafunnel? Build it. Somebody squawks? I'll take care of 'em."
Rabin smiled diplomatically. "Thanks, but I prefer to take care of them in our own way."
"You're going to put 'em all in jail?"
"No, I'm going to put 'em all in charge. Anybody who opens a mouth gets a fancy title with a big salary."
Peres wore his worried look again. "Who's going to put up all the money for this?"
Arafat snapped his fingers. "I got it! The American Jews! DO you have any idea how much space there'll be down there for name plaques?"
There arose the inevitable question of where precisely the Arafunnel would run. Peres opened his briefcase and pulled out a document marked "Masterplans -- Secret." It was a map of the country, an unusual map, one that Arafat had never espied.
"We've had extravagant ideas before," Peres explained, "like the Med-Dead Canal, right here." He ran a finger along its proposed route. He showed Arafat the other markings: the Amman-Ashdod road, the pipeline from Saudi Arabia to Rafiah via Mitzpe Ramon, the Route 6 Superhighway, the Eilat railway, the Tel Aviv subway. Grandiose plans for a fairytale future. Arafat asked about a curious blue line along the border.
"Oh, that," Peres chuckled. "It was Golda's idea, the real reason we've been taking all that land since '67. You see, the Litani River, which flows in from the Mediterranean near our security zone, links by river with the Kinneret, which connects to the Dead Sea via the Jordan River, and all we have to do is flood the wadis from the Dead to the Gulf of Aqaba, which, with the Sinai in our hands, gets us right back to the Mediterranean at the Suez Canal, and bingo, the State of Israel becomes Israel Island."
"Wow," Arafat said. "Compared to that, the Arafunnel is small potatoes."
"Piece of cake," Peres said. He took out a pencil and drew a rough line from the northern shore of the Dead Sea, southwest to Hebron and then due west to Gaza. With a flair, he inscribed it: "Route -1, the Arafunnel."
"That's where we burrow?" Arafat asked.
Peres smiled benignly. "I figured you'd like a stopover under Hebron. There's a gas station there, a felafel stand, clean bathrooms."
Shaking his head, Arafat pointed at a dot on the map, that infamous suburb of Hebron, Kiryat Arba. "Too close to the Jewish underground."
Rabin didn't see that as a problem. "This is a territorial compromise I think they'll ccept."
Arafat gasped. "You don't mean..."
"Why not? You can have autonomy over the bottom half of Hebron. And we keep the top half. Genius, no?"
"No!"
Peres interceded on behalf of Arafat. "It's a dumb idea, Yitzhak."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah!"
"Sez who?"
"Sez me!"
Gentlemen!!"