Today, it is the sealed-off seat of the Palestinian Authority, and the only part you can see from the road is a mausoleum. Cubic, like the Kaaba in Mecca but in Jerusalem stone, this is Yasser Arafat’s tomb. Framed by glass, water and an honour guard, it is unremarkable for a Middle Eastern leader. Apart from one thing: the constant reminders, from the signs or guides, that this mausoleum is temporary. The entire edifice, facing Jerusalem, is built on train tracks, a symbolic reference to what is hoped will be Palestine’s eventual liberation and Arafat’s reburial on the holy mount.

This mausoleum was opened in 2007 by his successor Mahmoud Abbas, the second President of his half-state, the Palestinian Authority, and the fourth secretary of his movement, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Solemn, even surly, Abbas swore to the crowds that day that “we will continue the path of the martyred President Yasser Arafat to be reburied in Jerusalem, which he loved…”        

But despite the commonality of their aims, the contrast between how the two ran the Mukataa could not be greater. Arafat withered away in his besieged basement bunker between cans of gasoline and AK-47s, his intifada in ruins. Abbas, in his political twilight, uses it to greet a non-stop delegation of diplomats and NGOs. His Ramallah is uneasy, but MacBooks still open in its cafés, while Gaza is in ruins. Such disparity speaks to the biggest question in Palestinian politics. Is the way forward, as Arafat finally decided, one of violence — or that of Abbas, one of negotiation? 

Initially, they had offered the same answer. When Abbas, a refugee from Galilee, first met Arafat in Qatar in 1961, the two were of one mind about revolutionary struggle: neither relying on Arab patrons nor swallowing their ideologies, the Palestinians themselves had to become the main force of their liberation. The museum in the Mukataa documents what happened next. Fatah, their party, entered the refugee camps, slowly at first, then rapidly as posters announced the resistance’s arrival. Despite the huge Arab defeats of 1967 and 1973, a myth emerged: that out of shame came honour, thanks to the PLO campaign, forcing Israel to accept it had to negotiate with the Palestinians themselves.

In 2000, as President Clinton fretted about his legacy and convened the fateful Camp David summit between the parties, it seemed to Western diplomats as if Arafat and Abbas had almost won. Exiled to Tunis, after Ariel Sharon expelled the PLO from Lebanon, the legitimacy they had gathered and the revolt they had inspired in the First Intifada meant Israel had not only negotiated with them, but brought them back to run Gaza and the main towns of the West Bank. Arafat had triumphed in rebellion; Abbas, the architect of the secret talks and the Oslo Process, in negotiation. All they needed to do was sign on the dotted line.

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But this was not how it looked to many Palestinian intellectuals, who feared the PLO had fallen into a trap. In New York, Edward Said denounced the Oslo Accords as “an instrument of Arab surrender”. In the territories themselves, the corruption and oppression the Mukataa was seen to personify meant Arafat was increasingly seen as a dictator rather than a defender. The Islamist Hamas started to gain on the nationalist Fatah, launching its own terror campaign to derail the peace process. Unrest stirred.

Recollections differ about what happened at Camp David. Israeli and American diplomats believe they presented a generous final offer to the Palestinian team, which Arafat vetoed, instead resorting to violence from the Mukataa. Palestinian negotiators such as Ghaif al-Omari claim that nothing approaching final terms were presented, with Arafat undecided and his team fissured between old and young. In this telling, Abbas and Ahmed Querei, the elders, became intransigent, suspicious that the juniors, such as Mohammed Dahlan, were trying to seal a deal and take the credit. 

What is clear, however, is that in that moment of compromise, Arafat became obsessed with Jerusalem, insisting that Israel had no rights to the holy mount, as King Solomon’s Temple was in Nablus. He rejected Clinton’s essential proposal: that everything above ground (both Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock) would be Palestinian, while everything below ground and the Wailing Wall would be Israeli.

His motivation is a matter of speculation. Was it the four years that Arafat spent in the Old City, living in the Israeli-bulldozed medieval warren of the Murghabi district under the golden glint of the Haram al-Sharif? Or a sense that, if he failed to liberate the third holiest site in Islam, he would always be viewed as a compromiser and not Saladin? Or, as Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian politician and negotiator at Camp David, believed, was it a moral claim — that Arafat simply could not accept Israel had any right to it? 

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The truth is that, whatever thoughts there were beneath his keffiyeh, there was nothing remarkable about Arafat’s refusal to compromise. So central is the Temple Mount to Judaism that it is often overlooked how important what they call the Haram al-Sharif is for Palestinians, a people whose very essence of nationhood is bound to the idea of being the defenders of Al-Aqsa. But this intransigence shocked and infuriated the US President. “You are leading your people and the region to catastrophe,” a frustrated Clinton is said to have exclaimed.

Camp David failed in July. That autumn, protesting Israeli Prime Minister Barak’s willingness to trade it for peace, Arafat’s old enemy Ariel Sharon chose to visit what he called the Temple Mount. Rioting erupted. And very soon it was apparent these were more than days of rage. Even now, Palestinian officials remain divided about how the intifada truly exploded. One side stresses that Arafat was being overtaken by events — the visit of Sharon, the sudden riots, spontaneous lynching — and decided to go along with it, thinking a bit of violence would mean better terms, while others see him as more forcefully encouraging it once it began.

The reality, however, hardly mattered, given Arafat would soon decide to fight the intifada from the Mukataa. Instead of forcing a return to the negotiating table, his soldiers, such as Marwan Barghouti’s Tanzim and the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, were soon launching suicide bombings inside Israel. First quietly then loudly, Abbas opposed this — viewing the war as a disaster for Palestine.

Dying in his bunker, Arafat was consumed with the idea that King Solomon’s Kingdom was never in Palestine, but in Yemen. By 2003, it was obvious he had dug his political tomb. Yet few recognised he had also buried the Palestinian state for a generation, trapping the West Bank in the kind of “joint-rule” hawkish Israeli strategists always wanted. Nor was it clear that, by personifying the Palestinian resistance, only Arafat could have made peace.

You do not have to visit the walls of the Mukataa to realise that Abbas is the inheritor of Arafat’s tomb. That Abbas, the man who heroically denounced violence amid the disaster of the intifada and worked to end it with Israel and the United States, has not been able to escape his legacy. This applies both to Palestine’s territory and its expansion. After all, Abbas is unable to agree a new proposal, because he knows that, unlike Arafat, he has had no legitimacy to sign one. Those by his side in 2005 remember a man overwhelmed, bunkering down. 

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And yet, there is a strand of continuity in the politics of Abbas, stretching back to the heady days of the PLO in Lebanon. From the mid-Seventies, Palestinian politics were divided between rationalists, who saw the future involving some kind of accommodation with Israel, and radicals, who would accept none. Arafat flitted and played with the two. But Abbas was squarely rationalist.

This remains true to this day. Rationally, he knows he never had the power to lead a successful intifada against Israel. Rationally, he knows he has never had the legitimacy to sign a peace accord, whose compromises vast swathes of the nation would see as a betrayal. And rationally, ever since he lost Gaza to Hamas in 2007, he has decided that the best course of action is to simply hold on. 

This logic has turned the Mukataa from what was once a symbol of revolution into a symbol of an authoritarian Arab regime in miniature: a system tied together by corruption, where no elections have been held since 2005. Fatah, in turn, is now widely derided as an empty card-carrying shell — like the Ba’ath party in Syria or the old Eastern bloc. Across the West Bank, the system is largely outright despised.

Abbas, in his twilight, has never been weaker but also never more central. At night in Ramallah, there are protests, but things are still quiet. At night in Gaza, there is the thunder of bombs. Never in Palestinian history has the contrast between violence and negotiation been so stark. No longer between Abbas and Arafat, the contrast is between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. This appears hard to see from a distance, but October 7 was the start of a new war for Jerusalem, launched “in defence of the Al-Aqsa mosque”. Named “Operation Al Aqsa Floods”, Hamas’s massacre was only the latest offensive in what they see as an unending one, to stop the Jews “erecting their alleged temple on the ruins of the shrine of our Prophet Mohammed”.   

Hamas sought, on October 7, not only to start a war with Israel but to detonate the West Bank. Their leaders dreamed that with mass hostage-taking they could bring Israeli society to its knees and force the release of all Palestinian prisoners — grabbing in one jubilant swoop the ownership of the Palestinian cause from the PLO. Opinion is divided among Palestinian analysts over their successes. All agree Hamas’s popularity is soaring in the West Bank, with crowds chanting its slogans even in the heart of Ramallah. But opinions differ over whether or not tensions in the West Bank actually threaten the Mukataa. 

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Abbas’s response has mostly been silent. Rationally, he believes the best strategy is to avoid tempting a possible intifada or Israeli action against him. But behind this muted response to the bloodshed, the Mukataa believe that Hamas has led the Palestinian people — with the destruction of Gaza City and now Khan Younis — into the greatest disaster of their history since 1948. Massacres are not new to the land, but never before has a city been levelled in the entire conflict. “Hamas entered a battle and the result was the complete destruction of Gaza. To blindly follow slogans to satisfy an illusion and the result is the destruction of the Palestinian people.” These were the words of Abbas a decade ago, but they could have been said yesterday. “I am responsible for the people and I will not allow their destruction to happen again.”

This is the crux of Palestinian politics. Hamas believes only violence can force the liberation of Al-Aqsa. Abbas believes only negotiations and the international community can. Hamas sees him as a corrupt collaborator. Abbas sees himself as protecting his people from what Gazans call the Israeli “monster” and guarding the mechanism that will eventually deliver a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, Western and Arab diplomats have come to see him as an intransigent obstacle to any progress towards a “two-state solution”. The tragedy, however, is that with the Palestinian people now so divided, the only man who could have made peace on behalf of all of them is buried in the Mukataa.   

Instead, Abbas launched into a tirade about Israeli crimes, saying that Israel had committed not only “50 massacres” but, in fact, “50 Holocausts”. The visibly annoyed Scholz did not think on his feet quickly enough to contradict Abbas’s relativisation of the Holocaust. Somewhat surreally, after Abbas had finished the two men shook hands and walked off.

Outrage was quick to follow. Abbas backtracked on his statement, and Scholz publicly stated his anger at what Abbas had said. Some German commentators suggested that Germany should rethink its funding for the Palestinian Authority. That idea did not gain traction. After all, the Palestinian Authority governs over those dense population centres in the West Bank that Israel, the occupying power since 1967, does not wish to govern itself. Germany’s funding of the corrupt, inefficient, and undemocratic Palestinian Authority is in Israel’s interest. Ironically, yet largely unbeknown to the outraged German Twitterati, defunding Abbas is a demand that many of Israel’s strongest critics would happily get behind.

As much as it likes to claim the role of the peace-seeking outsider, Germany is deeply entrenched in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not only because of the importance of the Holocaust to the creation and self-understanding of the Jewish state. Germany played an important role in the conflict via its crucial economic, financial, and military support of Israel, especially before 1967. But the 1972 terrorist attacks, and Germany’s relationship with them even 50 years on, throw a spotlight on Germany’s true role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and its connected efforts to whitewash its barbaric past.

Munich was the second time Germany had been invited to host the Olympics. The first invitation came after the First World War, the follow-up after the Second. Both times, the idea was to symbolically welcome Germany back into the circle of “civilised” nations. When, in 1931, Germany was awarded the games to be held in 1936, the Olympic Committee did not envisage the imminent rise of Adolf Hitler to power. The infamous Nazi Olympics became a showcase for Nazi power and ideology. Jews were largely barred from participating.

In 1972, with Social Democrat and former Nazi opponent Willy Brandt in power, the danger of Germany backsliding into Nazism seemed remote. The Federal Republic appeared to be firmly entrenched in the Western bloc. It was also becoming a more autonomous player on the world stage via Brandt’s Russia-embracing Ostpolitik (itself a policy under much scrutiny these days). For West Germany, the 1972 Olympics were another milestone on the road to normalisation, and an occasion to show the world the friendly face of the “new” Germany.

There was, however, something schizophrenic about this effort. Twenty-seven years after the German defeat, most former Nazis and their legions of enablers were still alive. More than that, they were respected members of society. Post-war Germany had normalised its Nazis even before the world had normalised the new Germany. The bureaucrats, professors, diplomats, teachers, journalists, and captains of industry on which the West German state was founded all too often were compromised figures.

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And it could not have been otherwise. The main reason Western allies never saw denazification through was that getting rid of the Nazis would have meant crippling the German state to such a degree that it would have been unable to fulfil its function as a frontline state in the Cold War. The Cold War enabled the survival of the German state at the cost of letting most perpetrators go unpunished. Most recently, David De Jong’s new book Nazi Billionaires shows to what extent Germany’s tycoon families owe their wealth to their involvement in Nazi crimes. His study is the latest of historical efforts to show the extent to which the new Germany was built on the old.

Due to the manifold continuities of Nazism in the new republic — not least in terms of lingering antisemitic and racist attitudes and an only slowly-eroding authoritarian mindset — West Germany needed to signal to the outside world a democratic and civil character. While this was especially true of the immediate post-war years, virtue signalling to the outside world has long become part of the German foreign policy package (a tough pursuit of economic interest being the other and more important part).

And so, in 1972, the German hosts wanted to organise Games that were opposite in spirit to those of 1936. Instead of demonstrating the superiority of the master race, the Olympics were meant to showcase the newfound German pacifism. And this they did, uncompromisingly so. Die heiteren Spiele — the joyous games — went the official slogan. To ensure that nothing disturbed the joyousness, German security guards at the Olympic village were unarmed and dressed in light blue suits, the literal opposite of the black-clad and armed SS-men patrolling the grounds in 1936.

By today’s standards, the lack of security measures was baffling. About as baffling as passengers smoking on a plane, or, for that matter, smuggling guns onto a plane and hijacking it. After all, these were the Seventies, a golden age for anti-colonial and radical Left-wing terrorism. As archival research by journalists of German magazine Der Spiegel revealed, German security services were warned of potential terrorist plots on the Games. However, no effort was being made to increase security measures. Showcasing the peacefulness of the new Germany took priority over safety concerns for Israeli athletes.

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On the morning of September 5, eight members of Black September climbed the walls of the Olympic compound and proceeded to the quarters of the Israeli team. They killed two athletes and took nine Israelis hostage. The next day, after a catastrophically botched German rescue mission undeserving of its name, all Israelis had been killed by the terrorists. One German policeman was dead, as were five of the eight Palestinians. Zvi Zamir, chief of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, was present at the final shootout. “They didn’t make even a minimal effort to save lives,” an exasperated Zamir reported. Zamir was shocked to realise that the German priority had been to continue the Games with as little interruption as possible. Surprisingly and bizarrely, the “joyous Games” had remained uninterrupted almost throughout the whole hostage crisis. While the Israeli team left the Games, the rest of the world continued with the competition.

Two months later, Black September hijacked a Lufthansa plane in Beirut and blackmailed Germany into releasing the three surviving members of the Munich squad. Israel had warned Germany of such a scenario and had asked Bonn not to give in to terrorist demands. Germany did the opposite and expedited the three Palestinian prisoners to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, where they were given a hero’s welcome. Israel was furious. Germany, its crucial ally, had not only refused Israeli help and advice during the Munich hostage crisis but had acted against every principle of Israeli counterterrorism policy.

The attack by Black September was an attack not only on the Israeli team but implicitly also on the political rationale behind the games. Black September named its operation “Ikrit and Biram” after two Palestinian villages razed to the ground after the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and whose inhabitants were banned from returning. All of a sudden, Ikrit and Biram were violently forced into one historical equation with Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement, and nearby Dachau, the first concentration camp on German soil. This was a brutal collision of different historical events and logics. A terror attack rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took on a new meaning: Jews were murdered in what was meant to be the new Germany. And more than just a historical footnote in this context is the fact that Black September was aided in its preparations by a known German neo-Nazi. 

The Munich attacks and Israel’s uncompromising retaliation mission in its aftermath have been covered in academic writing, a Steven Spielberg movie, and the Oscar-winning 1999 documentary One Day in September. It is the stuff of Cold War spy thrillers. Less attention has been paid to the German role in the whole affair. One question is why Germany had been so insensitive to Israeli wishes and opinions throughout the crisis. Germany had widely been considered a key ally of Israel up to that point, and for good reason. However, wondering why Germany had acted irresponsibly towards Jewish lives on its soil misses the original point of West Germany’s pro-Israeli orientation. This point was explained by former chancellor Konrad Adenauer on primetime German television in 1966: “We had done to the Jews so much injustice, committed such crimes against them that somehow these had to be expiated or repaired if we were at all to regain our international standing… Furthermore, the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.”

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Here, as well as on other occasions, Adenauer stated clearly that the goal behind Germany’s support of Israel was rehabilitation — regaining international standing. That goal is then intertwined with a core idea of modern antisemitism: supposed Jewish influence over world affairs. To Adenauer, this was a natural thing to say to the German public as late as 1966. Rehabilitation, whitewashing the past, faking democracy — whatever you want to call it, the Federal Republic consistently prioritised its international reputation over domestic efforts at working through the past.

Belatedly, the German government is seeking to make amends for its 50-year old failure to protect its Israeli guests. Last week, a €28 million compensation deal was finally agreed with relatives of the Israeli victims. No amount of compensation, however, can undo history.

What Black September did in September 1972 was to crash a German party that was all about celebrating and showcasing a novel Germany to the world. And the German response to the terrorist attack was guided by one overarching desire: to throw the party crashers out the door and to continue the party. In the process, 11 Israeli athletes were killed. Perhaps, when the German journalist asked Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas whether he wanted to apologise for what happened in Munich 50 years ago, he should have addressed this question to Chancellor Scholz as well.