{"id":6669,"date":"2026-08-19T21:04:35","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T04:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tehranbureau.com\/?p=6669"},"modified":"2026-08-19T21:04:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T04:04:35","slug":"dancing-with-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/resanegar.com\/en\/dancing-with-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Dancing with Death"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How three days in Beirut locked Israelis and Palestinians in a fatal embrace<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gareth Smyth talks to Yossi Alpher about his latest book, Death Tango, focused on the 2002 Arab Summit<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Death Tango: Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat and Three Fateful Days in March<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yossi Alpher<\/em><\/strong> (www.yossialpher.com)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rowman & Littlefield, February 2022<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Blood cannot wash out blood, as the Farsi proverb says. Can we recall a time before the deluge when it all might have been different? At the turn of the century, Mohammad Khatami talked of a dialogue between civilizations. There was an Israeli-Palestinian \u201cpeace process.\u201d Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 under fire but with few lives lost and little subsequent retribution. Under new president Bashar al-Assad, Syria was entering the \u201cDamascus spring.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did it all go wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a well-worn question, but the answers from former intelligence operative and analyst Yossi Alpher are among the better ones. Alpher has walked a long path since early 1979 when, on one of his first days in the Mossad, he was asked for advice on whether Israel should kill Ruhollah Khomeini as the ayatollah readied his return to Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Death Tango<\/em> is Alpher\u2019s latest in a string of penetrating books on the region. If you have any interest in the Middle East and you\u2019re not reading it, then you\u2019re simply not paying attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not for the first time, Alpher frames the present by looking back. Death Tango<\/em> focuses on the March 27\u201329, 2002, Beirut summit of the Arab League, three days that helped carve a \u201cslippery slope,\u201d in Alpher\u2019s phrase, that has become ever steeper and more slippery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes time speeds up. Recall John Reed\u2019s Ten Days That Shook the World<\/em> on the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Sometimes events reverberate for a long, long time. That\u2019s what happened, writes Alpher, with those three fateful days in Beirut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2002 Arab Summit followed the Oslo agreements of 1993\u201395 between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, and George Bush\u2019s January 2002 \u201cAxis of Evil\u201d speech. Afterward came the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq; and in 2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad succeeded Khatami as Iran\u2019s president. The Arab Summit took place 18 months after the second Palestinian intifada began in late September 2000, a campaign that by July 2005 saw 509 Israelis killed in suicide attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The significant upshot of the summit was the endorsement of the Arab Peace Initiative. For the first time, the Arab states as a whole offered to \u201cnormalize\u201d relations with Israel in return for a viable, neighboring Palestinian state in the territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. Two states, side by side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alpher cogently defended a \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d in his 2016 No End of Conflict: Rethinking Israel-Palestine<\/em>, arguing that Israel, given Jewish\/non-Jewish demographics across 1947 Israel and the occupied territories, could not otherwise remain both a democracy and a Jewish state. A single Israeli-ruled entity, Alpher wrote, would lapse into a form of apartheid, a state encompassing Israeli-Palestine, or \u201cmandate Palestine,\u201d where some people had rights and some didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As 2022 proceeds, this looks even more likely. So what happened to the alternative of two states, side by side?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alpher took himself back to 2002 via a series of discussions with Arabs, Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, diplomats, soldiers, scholars\u2014some who were at the Beirut summit and some who weren\u2019t. Alpher tells me in an interview that he revised the book after he thought he\u2019d finished it, adding a chapter on Israel\u2019s \u201cnormalization\u201d agreements in 2021 with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Whereas the Arab Peace Initiative was premised on a Palestinian state, the two Gulf Arab countries have dropped the Palestinians\u2014and Alpher thinks Saudi Arabia will follow suit when 85-year-old King Salman passes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This outcome might look good for the Israelis, he notes, but beyond the short term it\u2019s not so simple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Arabs\u2019 condition for peace [in the API] was that we and the Palestinians first reach an agreement . . . [on] a two-state solution, and only then would they give us normalization,\u201d Alpher says. \u201cSo, they [the Gulf states] reversed it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this, whatever the Gulf Arabs\u2019 intentions, will encourage the slippery slide toward apartheid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are normalizing with the surrounding Arab world because the Arabs, in places like the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan, are fed up with the Palestinians and with extremist demands like the right of return [for descendants of those who left in 1947\u201348, as Israel was created]. We\u2019re not heading in the direction of renewing talks about a two-state solution, we\u2019re heading toward a single entity led by the extremists on both sides who are happy to be oblivious of the mess they\u2019re making. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019d like to sit down with a UAE leader and ask . . . \u2018Are you aware of what Israel-Palestine will look like 30\u201340 years from now, and is that OK with you?\u2019 . . . They\u2019re not democracies, so it seems they can coexist with an Israel like this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how did all this come about? Was the 2002 Beirut summit a missed chance for a just peace, or did it rather confirm a slide that was already unstoppable?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back, Alpher believes the latter, but like any real intelligence analyst he isn\u2019t 100 percent sure. \u201cI think the book is saying there was no opportunity,\u201d he muses. \u201cBut those three days were a symbolic major turning point.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fast rewind. Beirut, March 27\u201329, 2002. A summit held in the rebuilt Phoenicia Hotel in view of the still blown-out Holiday Inn and infamous Murr Tower. The setting was dramatic if nothing else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Muammar Qaddafi, \u201cBrotherly Leader\u201d of Libya, didn\u2019t go because the Lebanese wanted him to explain the disappearance in Libya in 1978 of Musa al-Sadr, the Shia political-religious leader. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak also stayed away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five months into the second intifada, Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Authority, was besieged by Israeli tanks in his Ramallah compound. Arafat\u2019s scheduled appearance in Beirut by video fell through when the link mysteriously dropped, a \u201ctechnical fault\u201d widely attributed to Lebanese allies of Syria\u2019s president, Bashar al-Assad, who was in Beirut as a conditional backer of the peace initiative drafted by Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arab attendees had differing priorities. Alpher devotes a chapter in Death Tango <\/em>to interviewing New York Times<\/em> columnist Thomas Friedman over his role in helping the Saudis draft the API. For the Saudi monarchy, the initiative was in part a way to redeem itself for any real or perceived role in the 9\/11 attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Lebanese, keen to demonstrate their country had recovered from the 1975\u201390 war and was open for investment, were to varying degrees allied with Syria, whose president wanted to show Damascus\u2019s leadership in the Arab world and highlight the Israeli occupation of the Golan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alpher begins the book not in Beirut but 180 kilometers to the south in Israel, with a detailed account of the suicide bombing on March 27 of the Park Hotel in Netanya, where a group of Israelis had gathered for a meal marking Passover eve, the day the Arab Summit opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The explosion was deafening. Ball bearings and metal shrapnel flew in all directions. Human beings and furniture were transported by the blast across the banquet hall. People were shredded. Body parts were severed. Blood flowed. Ears were ringing. Smoke and dust enveloped the dining hall and the lobby. . . . After a second or two, the screaming and moaning started.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This was, Alpher writes, the \u201cmost devastating suicide bombing\u201d in Israel\u2019s history, killing 30, maiming far more. Its effect on Israeli public sentiment, given its occurrence on Passover eve, was \u201ctraumatic.\u201d And it came, Alpher stresses, just as the Arabs were offering peace from Beirut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m struck by the fact that the summit participants in Beirut\u2014and I was able to speak to more than one of them\u2014are somehow aware of this terrible suicide bombing and it just flies right by them,\u201d Alpher observes. \u201cThey have nothing to say about it. These are the different perceptions, the different worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asked about suicide bombings at a summit press briefing, Assad said \u201cwe should deal with the action before the reaction and we must denounce the Israeli violence.\u201d The Syrian leader and other Arabs felt Palestinian suicide bombings showed the desperation of oppressed people. Lebanese memories were still fresh of the Israeli shelling of the Qana United Nations post in 1996 that killed 106 sheltering civilians; burly Fijian UN troops delicately carried out charred, disfigured children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A wider gap in perception, Alpher notes in Death Tango<\/em>, lies in a Palestinian Arab view of Israel as \u201ca foreign implant\u201d rather than a \u201clegitimate Jewish national movement.\u201d But\u2014once one puts aside some Palestinian claims that there was never a Jewish temple in Haram al-Sharif, or Jewish claims that Palestine never existed\u2014not everyone sees the two as incompatible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leading Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi argued in The Hundred Years War on Palestine<\/em>, published in 2020, that seeing a \u201ccolonial-national movement\u201d in the Israel created in 1947\u201348\u2014when Jews were around 30 percent of the population, up from 10 percent at the beginning of British rule in 1920\u2014does not require denying that Israelis have established a \u201cthriving national entity\u201d (Khalidi\u2019s phrases).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And neither does it preclude recognition of Israel along the lines of the Arab Peace Initiative (API) launched in March 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remind Alpher of a short video released in the run-up to the summit by Mustaqbal Television in Beirut, owned by then prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The video set images of smoke and death in Palestinian refugee camps and Israeli shopping malls against Bruce Springsteen\u2019s version of the 1969 Temptations song \u201cWar\u201d (\u201cWhat is it good for?\u201d) and then splashed the message \u201cArabs Want Peace.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alpher has seen the clip. \u201cYou see the two sides murdering one another, and then there\u2019s a call for peace\u2014but based on what?\u201d he asks. \u201cThe Arab Peace Initiative is a call for peace, but it wasn\u2019t tailored to Israel\u2019s mentality or perceptions, and that didn\u2019t seem to bother the people who put it together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So were there genuine peacemakers in 2002, and who were they?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of many narratives running through Death Tango<\/em> is the role of Ariel Sharon, who was Israeli prime minister at the time of the summit, having taken office in March 2001. While Sharon was forever linked in Arab minds with the 1982 massacre of thousands of Palestinians by Israel-allied militia in the Sabra-Shatilla camps in Beirut, Alpher sees Sharon\u2019s pullout from Gaza in summer 2005 as part of his \u201crapid metamorphosis\u201d from \u201csettlement-building hero\u201d to \u201cunilateral dismantler of settlements.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hence, Alpher recalls, Sharon seriously expected he might attend the Beirut summit. \u201cSharon\u2019s Gaza withdrawal,\u201d Alpher writes, \u201ccan be understood only against the backdrop of the events of March 27, 28, 29, 2002.\u201d As the United States\u2014still then the linchpin of the region\u2014dithered, Sharon \u201cneeded to act.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And is that yet another \u201cif only\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However well Alpher unfolds the ins and outs of those three days in Beirut, the unsettling power of Death Tango<\/em> rests largely in the way he shows the dance still going on. If the two-state option has retreated almost entirely from view, what stands in its place?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor the last ten years I have felt very strongly that we and the Palestinians are on a very dangerous slippery slope towards a binational entity, a very violent and conflicted one,\u201d Alpher says. \u201cThere may be a spectrum, at one end of which is a binational democratic state, where everybody is truly equal, and at the other end is an apartheid state. Where we end up, I truly don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you want to see a major recent expression of this, it was in May [2021], what we call \u2018Operation Guardian of the Walls,\u2019 the latest war with Gaza, which unlike the previous rounds with Hamas in Gaza, involved Palestinians everywhere\u2014the mixed cities in Israel . . . the Temple Mount, incidents among Palestinians in Jordan, in Lebanon, and on the streets on London and San Francisco. This is the way the slippery slope is beginning to look.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The task facing \u201cextremists on both sides\u201d\u2014Alpher\u2019s words\u2014has become easier since those three days in March 2002 when Sheikh Yassin, the Hamas spiritual leader, saluted the Park Hotel bombing as the instant death knell of the Arab Peace Initiative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As illustrated by Khalidi in The Hundred Years War on Palestine<\/em>, the whole US-supervised Oslo process, beginning 1993 and barely alive even by 2002, sidelined Palestinian civil society in favor of security cooperation between Israel and the Arafat leadership. And since 2002, American interest groups have pumped more and more energy into Jewish settlements and into labeling any critics as \u201canti-Semitic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yossi Alpher concedes that those Israelis holding his or similar views are in the minority. Most prefer not to think they are on a slippery slope. While he\u2019s hardly optimistic, Alpher has an eye to the future, devoting time to writing partly because he wants to fashion a legacy for the young, including his five grandchildren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m trying to paint a picture of where we are today, where we\u2019re going, and how we got there. If you are devoted to a two-state solution because it\u2019s the right thing to do, you\u2019re going to be upset by this book. Sorry if it spoils your appetite.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gareth Smyth was based in Beirut 1996-2003, and covered the 2002 summit as the Lebanon correspondent of the Financial Times<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Extract from Gareth Smyth\u2019s diary at the 2002 Arab summit: other material available at\u00a0ft.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n


Gareth Smyth\u2019s diary at the 2002 Arab summit: other material available at ft.com<\/strong>

Thursday 29 March, 2002<\/em>

It was clear that something was wrong on Tuesday evening when Egyptian television announced that president Hosni Mubarak would not be coming. And when on Wednesday morning, Jordan said that King Abdullah would not attend, the rumour mill went into overdrive.

This, remember, was supposed to be the summit where the Arab League presented a unified plan for peace with Israel. Could this happen with key figures missing? \u201cYou are watching another Arab disaster,\u201d a member of Hizbollah told me on Wednesday morning.

But it got worse. Days earlier, conference organisers said that if Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, were prevented from attending the summit, there would be a video hook-up so he could address delegates from Rumallah.

What better propaganda for the Arab cause could be imagined? An Arab leader, blockaded in his office by Israel tanks, speaking to his brother Arabs and the world by satellite link.

\u2018Twas not to be. Arafat did address the world, courtesy of al Jazeera and CNN, but the Lebanese authorities blocked his transmission to the conference on \u201ctechnical\u201d grounds \u2013 leaving Ghassan Salameh, the minister of culture and conference spokesman, to tell an incredulous press that Arafat had gone live on Jazeera rather than wait his turn scheduled by conference organisers.

Last night, Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, was trying to repair matters after the Palestinian delegation walked out in disgust. But it was too late. This was already the conference of disunity.

Earlier in the day, Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had presented an emotional appeal for peace to Israeli and world public opinion. Arafat had backed the initiative, calling on the Israelis to support the \u201cpeace of the brave\u201d.

But the first serious clue to an explanation of the tensions behind the surface was the summit\u2019s opening speech from the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, which at one point directly stated the fear of Arab hardliners that the Saudi peace plan had been devised as a way to end the intifada.

\u201cThe big threat lies in our acceptance of international pressure to replace the intifada simply with the end of violence, and not with stopping occupation and recovering rights,\u201d he said.

And then came Bashar al Assad, Syrian president and a close ally of Mr Lahoud, told the summit that \u201cthe more we want peace the more we support the intifada\u201d, and called Israel\u2019s treatment of the Palestinians \u201cthe new holocaust\u201d.

In retrospect, perhaps the Saudis could have handled their plan better. Announcing it to the New York Times (on February 22), seen as a pro-Israeli paper, hardly impressed those like Syria who believe Israel is more likely to respond to pressure than a peace plan.

It took a week before the Syrian (government-run) media even commented on the plan, and when it did it, it was negative. When president Assad went to Saudi Arabia earlier this month, many reported the surface appearance that Syria now \u201csupported\u201d the Saudi plan, but the Syrian media\u2019s description of what they thought the plan contained made it clear they did not really see it as a message of peace to Israel and the world.

At the weekend, and during the foreign ministers sessions in Beirut on Monday, it was clear that disagreements remained over the final communique \u2013 not huge disagreement perhaps, but significant indications of tensions underneath the surface.

Hosni Mubarak is far too seasoned an operator not to realise that something was wrong, and opted not to be part of the disaster. King Abdullah would not be the only leader present who had ties with his neighbour, Israel.

And Lebanon? Well, this was supposed to be the summit where is showed the world it had recovered from war and was ready to attract new investment.

Instead, it blocked Yassir Arafat, an Arab leader who has never lived the life of luxury, a man whose critics would concede has shared suffering with his people. As he sat in the opulent ballroom of Beirut\u2019s Phoenicia Hotel, Emile Lahoud peppered his speech with reference to \u201cresistance\u201d. Two miles to the south, in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatilla, it must have sounded very, very hollow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gareth Smyth talks to Yossi Alpher about his latest book, Death Tango, focused on the 2002 Arab Summit<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":6679,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[129],"tags":[],"issue":[],"article-type":[117],"tb_section":[],"class_list":["post-6669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","article-type-review-of-books"],"yoast_head":"\nDancing with Death - \u0631\u0633\u0627\u0646\u0647\u200c\u06af\u0631<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/resanegar.com\/en\/dancing-with-death\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" 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