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By Root 791 0

FLN, a Muslim crowd went berserk and cut the throats of any men, women and children they encountered in the almost deserted European quarter of the city. On Tuesday 3 July 1962 a plane carrying the Provisional Government landed in Algeria from Tunisia. The president, Ben Youssef Ben Khedda, drove into Algiers where hundreds of thousands of people waving white-and-green flags awaited him. There were chants and whistles of ‘Ya-ya, Dje-za-ir!’ or ‘Long live Algeria!’. Peace meant the onset of faction-fighting in the FLN which cost the lives of fifteen thousand former comrades. It also brought a bloody reckoning with those Muslim Algerians who had fought for France, as the FLN murdered an unknown number of former Harkis, the most conservative estimate being thirty thousand, the most sensational one hundred and fifty thousand. The much smaller number who escaped to the metropolis experienced the full ingratitude of the French and the neighbourly hostility of the Muslim Algerians who migrated in subsequent years as remittance men to France.

There was one further important aspect to the celebrations of Algeria’s liberation from France. Among the invited guests was Yasser Arafat, whose elder brother Gamal had befriended the exiled FLN leader Mohammed Khider in Cairo. Arafat was a former student militant with connections to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and with a family relationship to the chief adviser of the grand mufti. He was one of the five young Palestinian exiles, by 1958 all working in Kuwait, who founded a movement called Fatah for the liberation of Palestine. The name was based on the initials of the Palestine Liberation Movement - Harakat Tahrir Filastin - spelled backwards. Forwards they gave ‘Hataf’ or ‘Death’, backwards they spelled ‘Conquest’. Initially there were twenty members who swore an oath before being admitted to its cell-based structure:

I swear by God the Almighty,

I swear by my honour and my conviction,

I swear that I will be truly devoted to Palestine,

That I will work actively for the liberation of Palestine,

That I will do everything that lies within my capabilities,

That I will not give away Fatah’s secrets,

That this is a voluntary oath, and God is my witness.

Arafat had initially gone to Kuwait to work as an engineer building roads. From this starting point he developed business interests in the construction industry, which enabled him to travel and to recruit from among professionals in the wider Palestinian diaspora in the Gulf and western Europe. Arafat’s friend Khalil al-Wazir, also known as Abu Jihad, became full-time head of a Palestinian Bureau in Algeria, which along with Baathist Syria was the Palestinians’ most valuable patron. Cordial relations with the chilly Boumedienne enabled al-Wazir to open a guerrilla training camp at Blida while sending a select few to the Cherchel Military Academy. It must have been a heady atmosphere as Palestinians met such living legends as Ernesto Che Guevara or established contacts with foreign diplomats, which in early 1964 resulted in Arafat’s first visit to China.39

At this time Fatah was merely one of a host of organisations claiming to represent the Palestinians. In January 1964 an Arab summit in Cairo had created a Palestine Liberation Organisation under a diplomat and lawyer named Ahmad al-Shuqairi with the highly undiplomatic habit of calling for the Jews to be hurled into the sea. Worse, al-Shuqairi talked about establishing an armed wing of the PLO, thereby siphoning off Fatah’s potential pool of recruits. Using Wazir as an intermediary, Arafat proposed that the Palestinians should copy the Zionists’ example, with Fatah acting as the terrorist equivalent of Irgun or Lehi to the PLO’s version of the underground Haganah army of the Jewish Agency. Fatah’s extremely limited resources led to a series of strategic debates between the so-called ‘sane ones’ advocating caution and the ‘mad ones’, including Arafat, who argued that even apparently futile attacks on Israel would provoke a massive reaction that would bolster Fatah’s cause. A compromise