The Importance
Of Being Irrelevant
By Uri Avnery
03 November, 2004
Gush
Shalom
I remember
standing on the roof of a warehouse near Beirut harbor and observing
the armed and uniformed PLO fighters, headed by Yasser Arafat, getting
on the ships that took them westwards. End of the Arafat era!
rejoiced the newspapers in Israel the next day. Arafat is politically
a dead horse! said the radio commentators. Thank God we
are rid of him once and for all! TV talk-show hosts announced.
When I came back
to Tel-Aviv, I was invited to a radio debate. For the sake of balance,
a right-wing journalist was also invited. It was Tommy Lapid, the present
Minister of Justice. Before entering the studio, we chatted. I wonder
if he remembers now what I told him then: You have buried him
a hundred times, and you a going to bury him a hundred times more.
22 years later,
the same announcements fill the media again: End of the Arafat
era! Arafat is politically a dead horse! Thank God we are rid of him
once and for all!
The man who years
ago was officially declared by the Israeli government to be irrelevant,
was headline news all over the world this week. There are very few leaders
around whose state of health would command similar attention.
I dont know
how serious his medical condition really is. I only hope that he will
recover fully. And I know that if, God forbid, he should pass away,
Israelis will learn to appreciate him in his absence.
In the days of
the first Camp David conference, a noted Egyptian thinker, Mohamed Sid-Ahmed,
told me: If Arafat didnt exist, you would have to invent
him. With Arafat around, you have a single address to negotiate with
and make peace. If he were not there, the Palestinian people might split
into a hundred splinters, and you would have to talk with each of them.
If one does not
want peace and prefers a Greater Israel, one does not need Arafat. On
the contrary. But if one thinks that peace is essential for Israel to
develop and flourish, one needs him very much.
My hand,
Arafat once said, is the only hand that can sign a peace agreement
with Israel.
Since this is so,
there is no substitute for Arafat: he is the only Palestinian leader
with the towering moral authority that is needed not only to sign a
peace treaty with Israel, but which is even more important
to carry his people with him. Any peace agreement will demand from the
Palestinians concessions that will tear their hearts, such as giving
up the right to unlimited return of the refugees to the territory of
Israel. No other Palestinian leader would have the courage to stand
up and ask his people to do this.
Where does his
authority come from? I have seen him many times in the company of other
Palestinian leaders. Each time I was impressed by the power of authority
that he radiates, without any manifestations of power. It is difficult
to explain its source. Unlike Fidel Castro, for example, who appeared
on the world stage at the same time as Arafat, the Palestinian leader
has no army, no vast secret police apparatus and no prisons for his
opponents. His power emanates solely from the respect his compatriots
accord him as the Father of the Nation, the Palestinian
George Washington.
Already at our
first meeting in besieged Beirut, in July 1982, I was struck by the
total absence of ceremonial around him. During meetings, his people
interrupt him and debate with him. His authority is clear without the
need for any outward signs.
A European reporter
once asked me about his hobbies. What does he do when he is not busy
with the Palestinian cause? I answered that he has no hobbies, that
there is not a single moment when he is not busy with the Palestinian
cause. His identification with the Palestinian struggle is total. He
has no other life.
Everyone who sees
him for the first time in the flesh is amazed by the huge difference
between the media personality and the man. On TV he looks fanatical,
aggressive. In real life he is a warm person, considerate, radiating
emotions. Even a person meeting him for the first time needs only a
few minutes to feel like an old acquaintance. He loves to pamper his
guests at meals, offering them choice morsels with his fingers. He likes
to touch the people he talks with, to take them by the hand and conduct
them along the corridors, to offer them small presents.
He is no intellectual,
not a man of books and theories. He is all intuition. He grasps things
with incredible speed and never forgets details. Once, talking with
him, I made a mistake about the number of Agudat Israel members of the
Knesset. He corrected me at once. Another time, I got the date of one
of the Oslo agreements wrong. He corrected me then, too. I am
an engineer by profession, he said and laughed. I never
forget a number.
Like all Arab heroes
in history, he is a man of gestures. One gesture is worth a thousand
words. On the day of his return to Palestine he invited me in, just
when he was about to give a press conference to the media of the Arab
world. He entered the hall, went straight up to me, and after the usual
embrace he took my hand and drew me, almost forcibly, towards the tribune.
He led me up the stairs, asked his spokesman to get up and seated me
next to him. For an hour he spoke in Arabic to the media people, turning
to me from time to time for confirmation.
I sat there and
racked my brains: What was this whole exhibition about? Suddenly I got
it. In this simple way he was showing to the entire Arab world: This
is it. I am sitting with the Israelis. I am going to make peace with
them.
He flourishes in
situations of great stress. I have seen him more than once in such a
situation, when he was at his best, focussed, eyes glittering, joking.
He is used to this: his whole life consists of ups and downs, successes
and failures. He has, of course, made many mistakes (his support of
Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War springs to mind), but they
pale in comparison to his huge achievement. It was he who created the
modern Palestinian national movement when the Palestinian people had
almost vanished from the map, and he has brought them to the threshold
of national independence. Like Moses, he has led his people from slavery
to the gates of the Promised Land. I hope that it will not be said about
him that, like Moses, he saw the Promised Land from afar but did not
enter it.
Everything he achieved
was achieved in face of Israels colossal material superiority
in all fields, the hostility of the Arab governments and the world-wide
sympathy for Israel as the state of the Holocaust survivors.
And no less important:
for decades he has kept the Palestinians together, in spite of huge
internal differences. The Palestinian movement has had almost none of
the kind of bloody internal confrontations that have been typical of
most liberation movements.
During its first
few years, the movement had to function in Arab countries that were
afraid of it and tried to suppress it. All its leaders, Arafat included,
have been held at one stage or another in Arab prisons. Every one of
the Arab regimes has tried to use the Palestinian cause for its own
advantage. Arafat needed all the stratagems that have since become his
trade-mark. As a Palestinian diplomat once explained to me: For
the movement to survive and advance, Arafat had to use all tricks and
ploys, use double-talk and half-truths, play one Arab leader against
the other, all this in rapidly changing situations. He always had several
balls in the air, never letting one fall to the ground. This way he
led our movement forward and brought us to where we are.
Like every leader
of a national liberation movement, he had to make the most of the few
means at his disposal shrewdness, violence, diplomacy, propaganda.
His steps can be foreseen, if one enters his head and understands the
constraints he is working under and the aims he has set himself. In
the last 30 years I have not once been taken by surprise, not when he
went to Oslo nor when he took charge of the intifada. If Israeli intelligence
has so often been caught unawares, it is because they dont understand
Palestinian reality. They know everything and understand nothing,
as Boutros Boutros-Ghali once said about Israeli Arabists.
For 45 years now,
Arafat has lived in the shadow of death. There was not a moment when
a plot to kill him was not being hatched somewhere or other. When I
met him in 1982 in besieged Beirut, nobody believed he would get out
alive. Since then, Ariel Sharon has been trying to kill him. Half a
dozen secret services have been after him. Arafat has an uncanny ability
to confound them. He believes that he lives under the protection of
Allah. Proof? When his aircraft made a hard crash-landing in the Libyan
desert and his bodyguards lost their lives, he walked out almost unscratched.
Once he was asked
in my presence if he expected to see the day peace comes. Both
I and Uri Avnery will see this day in our lifetime, he promised.
For the sake of Israels future, I wish him a full recovery.