MacPherson couldn't help but laugh at that.
"I bet you'll enjoy that."
MacPherson asked a few practical questions.
Sa'id answered them as best he could. But he could tell there was something else Sa'id wanted to tell him, something that apparently wasn't easy for Sa'id to bring up. Time was running out. He needed to get back to Doron immediately. This was going to take a lot of explaining, and a whole lot more convincing, and MacPherson wasn't sure the Israelis were going to buy it. But he couldn't simply cut off the call now.
"Mr. Prime Minister? I'm getting the sense there's something else you want to say, something else you want me to know. Is that the case?"
There was a long pause.
"Well, yes, it's just that you must all understand — and Prime Minister Doron must understand, as well — something that is difficult for me… […"
"You're among friends here, Ibrahim," assured the president. "Please."
"Very well. It's just that — you must understand how central the concept of honor is in Arab society. So few American presidents have truly understood this. The Arab people have felt abused for so many centuries by foreign occupiers, our own bloodthirsty dictators, by radicals of all kinds. We've repeatedly been stripped of our honor, and this has had a devastating psy-chological impact. We look at our military weakness compared to the West, compared to Israel. We look at our poverty compared to the West, compared to Israel. We look at how few great works of art or music we have produced or how few literary or scientific discoveries we can point to in the modern age. We look at how poorly educated our children are, how many of our women are illiterate, how many of our men are illiterate, how the West and the world and even our worst enemies in Israel are just surging past us in so many areas of life — we see it on our satellite dishes and we know it to be true — and we are deeply ashamed."
As Sa'id spoke, his back was turned to Bennett, McCoy, and Galishnikov. He looked as though he carried the full weight of the Arabs' painful history, and was almost desperate to explain it all to his American friends that they might have even the slightest glimpse of the psychological mine field through which he was about to walk.
"We feel like we've failed as a society," Sa'id continued, "that we have so little to show for centuries of bloodshed and hardships. Especially when we can look back and see that the Arab civilization and Islamic civilization was once the greatest the world had ever known. We once dominated in every area of life. And now we have fallen so far behind the Christians and the Jews and it stabs at our hearts. Honor and shame are sacred values we have in the Arab world, and what do we have that is honorable in the eyes of the world? These are the questions we are wrestling with today. What went wrong? How did we sink so low? And what do we do about it?"
The room was quiet. The man was baring his soul, and the soul of his people, and none of them dared interrupt him. There were many questions that would have to wait.
"Some say we have forgotten our roots, that we are living under sin and Allah's judgment," Sa'id went on. "They say that we must get back to a more fundamental, more militant form of Islam to become great again. And those who believe this — the mullahs in Iran, the wahabbis in Saudi Arabia, the remnants of Al-Qaeda — these are the ones who are waging a jihad, a holy war, against the West. These are the ones who believe the Arab world can only rise again when every Christian and Jew is wiped off the face of the earth. These are the ones who sent jet planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. These are the ones who blow themselves up in Israeli buses and cafes. These are the ones who set into motion the civil war being waged up above us. And these are the ones we must fight to the bitter end. There can be no compromise with such people. They are extremists, and they pose the worst kind of danger."
He paused for a moment, to take a breath, to order his thoughts.
"But, Mr. President, these extremists represent a small fraction of the Arab world, and a small fraction of the Palestinian people. Most of us yearn for freedom. We want to raise our children in safety and security and freedom, with the freedom to choose our own leaders, and start our own businesses, and travel around the region and the world without being treated as terrorists and criminals. We are the silent majority. And when we have had no leadership, and our prospects for a future and hope have grown dimmer and dimmer, we have — in our weaker moments — cheered on the militants. Be-cause though they are wrong, they are dying with honor. They are dying as heroes. And we want heroes. We are desperate for some heroes. We want men of honor to show us that we are not second-class citizens, that we can take on the Israelis and win, that we can stand up to the Americans and get Washington to do what we want, not bow down to their every demand."
Bennett stopped taking notes. He set his pen down and just listened, as Sa'id tried to break through to three Americans who saw the world from the top of the heap, and had no idea how it looked or felt from the bottom.
"In the historic pantheon of Arab heroes, Mr. President, there are no businessmen. Only generals, and commandos, and fedayeen. Because people believe it's on the battlefield — not in the boardroom — where a man can prove he has honor. Now, I was raised differently. I see the world differently than many of my countrymen, at least those who currently hold guns and thus power. I'm willing to give my life, if that's what it takes, to try to take the Palestinian people to a new place. I'll do everything I can to take us into a new era of peace and prosperity. But I cannot ignore our culture or traditions. And that's why I'm asking you to follow this admittedly bizarre script. Not because I can guarantee you it'll work. But because it offers the thinnest reed of a possibility that people will follow me, and right now I may be the only thing that stands between a slim prospect of peace and a thousand years of darkness."
THIRTY
Bennett now took the lead.
Dozens of decisions needed to be made immediately. Bennett had started scribbling down a checklist of issues and questions during the conference call, and with MacPherson's permission, he began working his way through them one by one.
"Mr. President," Bennett began, "are you comfortable with the scenario so far?"
It was a huge gamble, no question about it. Sa'id might be right. There might not be any other way, and they had almost no time to come up with a plan B. But the risks were enormous. In a sense, Sa'id was asking Mac-Pherson and Doron and their top advisors to deceive their own countries, the world, and the Palestinians. Well, deceive might be too strong. It felt like deception, but it wasn't really a lie, was it?
Doron was about to order an invasion of the West Bank and Gaza. The prospect of massive Palestinian casualties at the hands of Israeli forces was high and growing higher by the hour. The White House was deeply reluctant to launch another series of U.S. military strikes in the region, and particularly in the West Bank and Gaza, a place where U.S. forces had never been before. The PLC was appointing Ibrahim Sa'id to be acting prime minister, and it was doing so precisely because of the connections Sa'id had to the MacPherson administration. And Sa'id was, in fact, a reluctant participant. He was demanding the introduction of U.S. forces in Palestine as his price of admission. And he was doing so — in part, at least — to keep Israeli forces at bay. He was also doing so, in part, to strike a lethal blow at Islamic radicals operating in the West Bank and Gaza, and to dismantle or destroy all twelve separate and competing Arafat-era Palestinian security organizations whose mafialike reign of terror had to come to an end once and for all.