Yasser Arafat,
1929-2004
By The Electronic
Intifada
11 November 2004
Electronic
Intifada
Yasser
Arafat, Chairman of al-Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization
and elected President of the Palestinian Authority, died in Paris from
complications stemming from a blood disorder at the age of 75. Born
Muhammad Abd al-Ra'uf al-Arafat al-Qudwa, Yasser Arafat was related
to the Husayni family and had strong family ties to Gaza and Jerusalem.
He first became active in Palestinian politics while an engineering
student in Cairo in the early 1950s, where he headed the Union of Palestinian
Students at Fu'ad I University (now Cairo University) from 1952-1957.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Arafat launched his own contracting
firm in Kuwait and quickly prospered. He probably used his personal
wealth to launch al-Fatah, the most prominent of a number of exile groups
advancing armed struggle as a means of liberating Palestine.
For nearly five
decades, Yasser Arafat was a larger-than-life figure for those who admired
him as well as those who hated and feared him, or, to be more precise,
for those who hated and feared the Palestinian view of history, justice,
and politics. Since the late 1960s, Arafat was the icon of the Palestinian
cause. Like Che Guevara, Arafat's image on a poster, a T-shirt, or a
television screen could convey rich and complex meanings and sentiments
across wide and diverse social landscapes. With his trademark black-and-white
checkered kuffiyah draped carefully over his shoulder so as to assume
the proportions and shape of the map of Palestine, appearances by Arafat
were almost always electrifying political events.
Many are the tales
of Israeli, European, South African, and North American peace activists
and journalists who waited hours to meet "Abu Ammar," Arafat's
nom de guerre. After being whisked through the darkened streets of Beirut,
Damascus, Cairo or Tunis in the wee hours of the morning, many foreigners
had a chance to sip coffee in an office or parlor with the jovial, optimistic,
and often emotionally explosive Arafat. Although having attained international
status as a political leader of a major third world revolutionary movement,
Arafat was a small man, somewhat shy, yet approachable in informal small
group meetings and journalistic interviews. He could also be extremely
funny and often demonstrated a self-deprecating form of humor. Although
he stated for decades that he was married to the cause, he eventually
wed in his 60s, taking Suha Tawil, a woman 34 years his junior, as his
spouse in 1990. Since 2000, they had been living separately.
Though pro-Israeli
commentators' exaggerations of Arafat's viciousness and bloodthirstiness,
coupled with Arafat's poor command of English and a pervasive 5 o'clock
shadow, put off many Western interlocutors, no one who followed the
man's life, comments, transformations, and public appearances could
deny he possessed charisma and an ability to connect with Palestinians
of all classes, religions, and ideological currents, even after a series
of miscalculations on his part that damaged his credibility among Arabs
in general and Palestinians in particular. We send our condolences to
his family and colleagues, and share the feelings of sadness of the
thousands of Palestinians throughout the world.
Few modern figures
were as controversial as Yasser Arafat. Lionized by some and vilified
by others, Arafat was a complicated figure. He was the leader of the
PLO since before most Palestinians alive today were born. Even among
his most vocal Palestinian critics, Arafat could inspire affection and
loyalty in a way no other living Palestinian could. Palestinians, though,
were also always his first and most vocal critics, a reality rarely
conveyed by the mainstream press. And in the last decade of his life,
Arafat received considerable and consistent criticism from Palestinians
frustrated by the inevitable disappointments and injustices of the Oslo
Accords, particularly the accelerated settlement building of this period
and the lack of movement on key social justice and political issues.
Arafat also received stinging rebukes from former friends and supporters
in the Arab world as well as in the West for administrative corruption,
mismanagement, favoritism, and a politics of patronage that made a mockery
of democratic practice in the Palestinian Authority.
Arafat's backing
of Saddam Hussein following the Iraqi Army's occupation of Kuwait in
1990 was arguably the worst of several major blunders, costing him,
his people, and their cause dearly. Gulf states cut off financial and
political aid to Arafat and the PLO following this decision, and with
the concomitant collapse of the USSR and the emergence of the United
States as the sole arbiter of Middle Eastern politics, Arafat had little
leverage to resist the humiliating requirements of the Oslo peace process.
Though his return to Palestine was met with joy, parades, wildly ecstatic
crowds, and high hopes, the honeymoon was short-lived. Arafat did not
return alone, but rather was accompanied by security forces, politicians,
wheelers and dealers, and other hangers-on whose political styles and
personal values frequently clashed with those of Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza who had just waged a momentous and largely non-violent
intifada from 1987-1993. The end of Arafat's exile marked the beginning
of new political and social class tensions in Palestine and the entrenchment
of a political elite that, like Arafat, did not like to share power
and cared little for transparency and accountability in administrative
matters.
Despite his actual
and figurative weakness over the last two years, Arafat was still a
potent symbol of evil for Palestinians' enemies. Even in the recent
US election campaign, candidates pandering to Zionist interests routinely
flaunted their pro-Israel credentials by attacking and vilifying Arafat,
as President Bush did in his second debate with Senator John Kerry.
The Arafat who was routinely scorned by American politicians, talk show
hosts, and in thousands of American newspaper editorials for years was
not a real human being, but a crude and simplistic caricature that often
relied for its power on racist stereotypes about Arabs pervasive in
American popular culture.
When Arafat appeared
to be doing Israel's bidding, he was elevated to the status of heroic
figure and Nobel peace prize winner. When he refused to obey Israeli
and American diktats, he was demonized as a bloodthirsty terrorist.
As Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, wrote in a secret report for
pro-Israeli US lobbyists in April 2003, Arafat had been a great asset
to Israel because "he looks the part" of a "terrorist."
Arafat was routinely
portrayed as a cunning puppet-master who manipulated all Palestinians,
a sly political operator who could single-handedly stymie the peaceful
intentions of the world's greatest powers. In recent years, President
Bush, following Ariel Sharon's cue, ostentatiously sidelined Arafat,
and attempted to install a new and more pliable Palestinian leadership.
We have no doubt that those who worked hardest to demonize Arafat will
be the quickest to celebrate his death. But we also have no doubt that
they will be the most disappointed by Arafat's demise in the long run.
No longer will Israel have a convenient scapegoat on which to pin all
the blame for the suffering it has caused to its own people and others
through its relentless colonization of Palestinian lands and destruction
of Palestinian lives and homes.
Arafat's death will
not change any of the essential underpinnings of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. There are still 3.5 million Palestinians living under a brutal
Israeli military dictatorship in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. Israel still keeps tens of thousands of heavily armed troops
and hundreds of thousands of settlers in these territories, in violation
of international law and UN resolutions. Millions of Palestinians still
live in enforced exile, deprived of their fundamental human right, encoded
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and UN General Assembly
Resolution 194, to return to their own country. These stark facts ensure
that suffering will continue, and possibly even escalate, until the
root causes of a conflict that has taken tens of thousands of Palestinian,
Lebanese, and Israeli lives are directly addressed and resolved.
Because caricatures
of Arafat have dominated public and policy discourse in the United States
and Israel, few Americans and Israelis can truly grasp the lengths to
which Arafat and his officials went to try to end the current Intifada,
if for no other reason than to preserve their own roles and statuses
in the post-Oslo Middle East. Israel may now find that, with Arafat
gone, a restraining factor on the ground has departed with the deceased
Palestinian leader. This may even suit Ariel Sharon and provide a pretext
for ever greater Israeli violence, but it will certainly not bring peace.
For the Israeli
"peace camp," the progenitors of the discredited and disastrous
Oslo regime, Arafat's death will likely represent the disappearance
of what they see as a credible partner to try to revive an Oslo-style
deal in which Palestinians are given nominal or quasi-statehood within
a Greater Israel, in exchange for accepting most of the settlements
and relinquishing the refugees' right of return. All these schemes were
meant to secure a Palestinian signature to a status quo that is entirely
to Israel's benefit while resolving none of the basic causes of the
conflict. Arafat's death will be a setback to this discredited "peace
camp," and to such initiatives as the recent "Geneva Accord"
because the Palestinian participants in this unworkable plan drew the
little authority they had solely from their association with Arafat.
Although the last
two years of Arafat's life were profoundly bleak and lonely, spent under
house-arrest in the company of loyal courtiers in his bombed-out and
isolated muqata`a headquarters in Ramallah, he had known many moments
of triumph and glory in his long and varied political career. His rise
to prominence in the PLO, particularly during its period of greatest
power in Lebanon (1971-1982), his speech before the UN General Assembly
in New York City in 1974, as well as his important speech before the
UN in Geneva in 1988 in which he formally recognized, as the head of
the PLO, Israel's right to exist and the principle of peace in exchange
for territorial withdrawal, stand out not only as high points in one
man's life, but also as key landmarks in modern Middle Eastern history.
Although his political
obituary was written again and again, Arafat displayed a legendary tenacity
and an amazing ability to pull through at the eleventh hour, usually
thanks to his remarkable skill in cobbling together coalitions and allies
from very disparate backgrounds. Trapped by Sharon in the rubble of
his Ramallah headquarters, though, Yasser Arafat was marginalized politically
and virtually powerless militarily since the murderous Israeli attack
on Palestinian cities in March-April 2002 that killed over 500 people
and destroyed most of the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority.
Yet his steadfastness in maintaining dignity and decorum as the Palestinian
president in the rubble of al-Muqata'a (tr. "[Ramallah] District
Headquarters") showed much of his true nature: tough, patient,
cheerful, and uninterested in comfort, luxuries, and ostentation. Arafat
departs the Palestinian and Middle Eastern political stage as a wraith
of his former self, with no political heir apparent.
Yasser Arafat is
survived by his wife, Suha Tawil, and their daughter, Zahwa.