Yasser Arafat's speech at the UN, 1988 - 2 December 1988

A year or two ago – the memory is lively enough to make it seem like last month – I arrived at Kennedy Airport and was in a taxi coming into Manhattan. It was mid-afternoon, time when the small factories in the island which stagger their working hours would be letting loose their first load of homebound workers.

The plane arrivals at both Kennedy and LaGuardia begin to quicken around then, and all in all it's a time when the traffic pouring into Manhattan, is getting brisk and dense but on this day it was almost as if the bomb had dropped.

Or at least as if some company was filming the day the bomb dropped and had managed to secure the cooperation of the mayor, and the police department to the extent that San Francisco did so remarkably when they filmed, Nevil Shute's On The Beach. Not quite that dramatic – do you remember the American submarine inching the surface in San Francisco Bay and looking up to the hilly city, total devoid of humans?

But the comparative emptiness of the Grand Central Parkway was nothing short of spectacular and there had to be a reason. Pretty soon, I began to notice police cars parked at something like 100-yard intervals. And more and more and on and on. I didn't know that New York City had so many police cars.

"What is this all about?" I asked the cab driver, he was beaten too, and then, swinging across the Tribeca Bridge and on to the East River Drive he suddenly said, "I got it, it’s one of them Arabs. The guy with the three-day beard and the towel around his head." And so it was.

The city, the city that houses more Jews than Israel, was bracing itself for the arrival and the speech before the United Nations, of Yasser Arafat. Many people seem to have forgotten that he came here and presented the American government and New York City, with an excruciating problem of security.

He came, he bustled to the rostrum of the general assembly, he displayed a holster – empty, thank God – and spoke and was gone. He, or the authorities, had privately decided that the long motor trip from Kennedy into midtown and the UN headquarters was too risky, even with all the elaborate, and very visible, precautions.

He landed at Kennedy, switched to a helicopter, flew on to the lawn alongside the assembly building, was whisked inside, delivered his barrage, swept out, was whisked again into the chopper, flew to Kennedy, and was off again.

This time, the secretary of state Mr Shultz weaselled no words in denying Mr Arafat a visa to come and repeat his performance before the general assembly. Mr Arafat would not be allowed to enter the United States because he knows of, condones, and lends support to, acts of terrorism.

It was as simple as that, though the thinking of it preceding such a seemingly abrupt decision was long and careful. Mr Shultz anticipated an outcry from the Arab world and the opposition of most of America’s allies. Mr Shultz is at the end of his long and exhausting tenure as secretary of state.

He, as much as any of his predecessors, has held to the principle that this country, while of course privately feeling out the turns of Palestinian policy, publicly will not negotiate directly with the Palestine Liberation Organisation until it positively declares that the State of Israel has a right to exist.

Mr Shultz, I am sure, was given hope, as others were by Mr Arafat’s new recognition or endorsement, of United Nations resolution 242, which called on Israel to withdraw from occupied territory, in return for a guarantee of recognition and security. Though it's still unclear whether recognition means allowing the Israelis to depart in peace, or – the big stumbling block – recognition of the State of Israel as a sovereign nation.

And let’s not forget that the biggest stumbling block which resolution 242 planted in its wording, is still there, it’s the... ha ha, the invisible stumbling block of a missing definite article, the word "the". Israel said all right, we will withdraw from occupied territories. Some of them. The Palestinians have always taken it to mean withdrawal from the occupied territories. All of them.

When this whole pother about Mr Arafat’s permission to speak before the UN has blown over, we shall still find ourselves lined up with or against the Israelis and their holding on to the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

Mr Shultz knew as well as anybody that Mr Arafat is not going to make any concessions on that point in any imaginable speech in the foreseeable future. But Mr Arafat’s recognition of 242 did represent a triumph for him and the PLO over its extremist wing, which always had a veto over the votes of its delegates.

For the first time, at the Algiers meeting, the Palestine national council practiced and upheld majority rule. And the most conspicuous loser was the leader of the extremist wing, Mohamed Abdul Abbas, who was convicted in Italy of murdering that crippled American passenger on the cruise ship.

I think that the presence of Mr Abbas at the Algiers meeting was Mr Shultz’s sticking point. The state department announcement mentioned the terror on the cruise ship, and there were men on Mr Shultz’s staff who watched the assembling of the delegates in Algiers to see if Mr Abbas would be barred. It would have been a sign that Mr Arafat and the PLO were declaring that they would cease terrorism in Israel and occupied territories.

Mr Shultz has been waiting, hoping against hope, that the PLO would at some point turn Mr Abbas over to the Italian authorities. Whether or no, Mr Arafat is so inclined plainly he does not yet have the overriding authority in the PLO to do that or even, as we have seen, to exclude its extreme wing. For the time being, Mr Arafat must believe that being suddenly able to paralyse its veto is as far as he can go.

All of which is rehearsed by other Americans and by many Democrats in Congress to convince them that Mr Arafat is changing and moving towards an eventual reconciliation with Israel – therefore, why not let him come and prove it. Two things we should remember, one is that since President Truman in 1947, every American president has sworn to uphold and defend the State of Israel. And that since 1975, presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan have said, that terrorists must never be negotiated with.

Against that pledge, that declared policy that sticks up of course, like a sore thumb, the dreadful messy fact of the arms trade with Iran. Which, miraculously no one has ever been able to prove President Reagan has had a hand in or, even more miraculously, knew about.

The memory of the Iran-Contra affair, the trading of arms with Iran in the first place, may be fading in the American memory although it's likely to be sharply revived in the coming trial of Colonel North and Mr Poindexter but it has lost none of its ugliness and stupidity in the mind of Mr Shultz.

He, more than anybody was absolutely against the deal from the moment he first heard about it and said so in a well-documented meeting of the national security council. He was stormily against it on the often-repeated ground that you don’t negotiate with terrorists or with states that support terrorism.

Mr Shultz had a rough and humiliating time of it through all the Iran-Contra hearings before Congress. He alone in this administration can claim an absolutely clean record on this pledge. So when the application for Mr Arafat’s visa came up, Mr Shultz saw it as a test of that record, as a challenge to the principle he has maintained more than anyone. And last Tuesday, after he received a bipartisan letter from senators supporting him, Mr Shultz said he would stay with his decision.

Before he made it, he said he’d expected general opposition. I doubt he expected the whole general assembly except Israel and the US to vote against him, or have Great Britain abstain with scolding regrets, but again he said the issue is terrorism. He thought that too many people quote “forget what an important problem that is and what a threat it is to civilised society. If we made the point that we really care, and are concerned, that is good."

But how about the right of any nation, any interested party whatever its ideology, whatever its previous record of terrorism, to speak at the United Nations? Mr Shultz said, as for the ability of the Palestinians to speak for themselves, they can do that in New York through their observer mission at the UN, we have no problem with that. We want to hear what they have to say.

Mr Reagan, who is rarely heard from on anything these days, said through his press secretary that he was aware of the reaction of other countries and remains firm in his belief that the secretary of state made the right decision. Mr Bush, who is heard from on everything, present and to come, wisely stayed out of this one, saying simply that he was not consulted on the visa decision and for once, he must be deeply grateful for being left out in the cold, for Mr Arafat, Mr Abbas, the PLO, the Palestine national council, the occupied territories, they will all pile up on his plate after 20 January.

I have gone into Mr Shultz’s motives and the line of his thinking because he had as much as anyone in the government of the west to do with Middle East shuttle diplomacy. He must privately ache for 20 January and the day when he can retreat to San Francisco and work on his handicap.

But mainly I have talked about him because, among both the allied and the Communist and the so-called non-allied countries, he stands alone and looks to the rest of the world like the only man in the boat rowing in time. He is, in conviction anyway, right in line with the former secretary of state of long ago, Dean Acheson who, speaking with blazing conviction before the United Nations and talking about Communist China’s annual application to become a member nation said absolutely not, no country has a right to shoot itself to the United Nations.

Well, in time, it got there. A cynical friend of mine shortly after that said, the Acheson principal is noble but won’t survive. And, one day, sure enough, you will see Yasser Arafat as the president of the general assembly.

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