The End Of The
Arafat Era
By Am Johal
09 November 2004
Countercurrents.org
As
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat lies on his deathbed in a Paris hospital,
in a coma, lurched in that place between life and death, there is much
cause for sober reflection in the Israeli and Palestinian camps. He
was controversial in life, just as he will be in death when they try
to find a proper burial place for him. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has
already said that Arafat would not be buried in Jerusalem so as not
bolster Palestinian claims to the city or the Temple Mount.
We are not sure
if the last images of Yasser Arafat, the grey fox, the lion of Ramallah,
sporting that dapper hat, will be the ones of him getting into the helicopter
to be whisked away to Paris for medical attention. The few hundred onlookers
who came to show their support during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan
called out one of his favourite Palestinian sayings: the mountain cannot
be shaken by the wind.
The stories of Arafat
are legendary in this part of the world. There are those who still talk
about the time Arafat kissed their hand. At the Muqata, his battered
Ramallah headquarters, you are more likely to be met by amiable security
guards and be taken for dinner by his scheduler than find your life
in danger. In the back of the compound there are metal poles several
meters high encased in barrels of cement to provide a sufficient deterrent
to Israel's Apache helicopters from descending far enough to get a clear
shot at Arafat. From there, you can see the parking lot which serves
as a kind of make-shift museum of blown-up BMW's, Mercedes and Fiats,
almost curated, as if to serve as a critique of Israeli military aggression.
From this perspective, the Muqata looks more like a gaudy, sprawling
auto parts dealership than a palace befiting the President of a nation.
When the fighting
did get tough, Arafat was quick to be on the phone with Egyptian President
Husni Mubarek and French President Jacques Chirac pleading for diplomatic
missives against Israel and support from abroad. When he was under siege
in 2002, remaining steadfast, he again captured the attention of his
people as a symbol of resistance at a time when his support was waning.
If Israel had really
wanted Yasser Arafat dead, they could have killed him long ago just
as Sheikh Yassin and Abdel Rantisi had been assassinated by the IDF
earlier this year. The difference was that Arafat was the President
and the international outrage would have isolated Israel and sent it
further in the direction of a pariah state.
Arafat was basically
under house arrest since late 2001 and had to seek permission just to
leave the compound and get assurances from Prime Minister Sharon that
he would be allowed back in the country after his medical treatment.
Arafat was not just
the symbol of Palestinian aspirations, he was after all the controversial
and misunderstood figure who defined "terrorist chic" for
the Western world and who never felt totally comfortable with him. Dressed
in his khafiya, surrounded by advisors, he was the face on the evening
news after an act of violence. This told more the Western view of Arabs
than being anything close to reality.
Arafat's return
was also associated with that method of dissent that so repulsed the
rest of the world and made allies of the Israeli and Palestinian street
- the suicide bomb. And so it was easy for those in the West to malign
him simply as a supporter of violence. To do this, was to undermine
the complexity of the situation. President George W. Bush, never one
to grasp a complex situation, continued to vilify the weakened and increasingly
irrelevant Arafat, the former Nobel prize winner.
Arafat was born
in 1929 in either Jerusalem, Gaza or Cairo - nobody really knows for
sure. His mother died when he was five and he was sent to live with
his uncle in Jerusalem. He never speaks about his father.
One of his earliest memories are of British soldiers breaking into the
house after midnight, beating members of his family and breaking furniture.
He would later fight against the British and also the establishment
of Israel in 1948 by fighting in Gaza.
Arafat went on to
university in Cairo where he founded a Palestinian student movement.
He presented a petition calling for Palestinian recognition to the Egyptian
president written in blood. He settled in Kuwait where he worked in
the department of public works and became a contractor. He soon began
resistance activities and formed Al Fatah in 1958 and began publishing
a magazine advocating armed struggle against Israel in 1959. By 1964,
Arafat had left Kuwait for Jordan and began armed raids into Israel
earning his stripes as a revolutionary guerrilla leader. It was also
in 1964 that the Palestine Liberation organization was formed under
the hospices of the Arab League, by bringing together disparate factions
supporting a Palestinian state. He also had a brief stint in a Syrian
jail.
After the 1967 Six
Day War, Fatah emerged as the most organized Palestinian force and Arafat
took over chairmanship of the more moderate Palestine Liberation Oraganization.
At this point, the PLO ceased to be a puppet of the Arab states, but
became an independent nationalist organization based in Jordan. Concerned
that Jordan was being used as a base for violent attacks into Israel,
King Hussein exiled Arafat to Lebanon after the PLO leader had effectively
set up his own mini-state with a security apparatus within Jordan. The
1982 Israeli invasion into Lebanon sent Arafat and the rest of the PLO
leadership to Tunis. To say that Sharon and Arafat have history would
not do justice to the terrible human tragedy of that conflict.
As Arafat left Lebanon,
he said he was "on his way to Palestine."
And in a way, he
was. Arafat was developing a mythic reputation by surviving an airplane
crash, several Israeli attempts to assassinate him and recovering from
a serious stroke.
By 1987, the intifada
erupted and Palestinian aspirations once again percolated to international
attention. What began as rock throwing in Gaza, turned into the political
impetus for Arafat to redefine himself as the messenger of peace. 1n
1988, at a special session of the United Nations in Switzerland, Arafat
declared that the PLO renounced terrorism and supported "the right
of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to live in peace
and security, including the state of Palestine, Israel and other neighbours."
After a brief setback
when the PLO supported Iraq during the Gulf War, Arafat was a signatory
to the Oslo Accords in 1993 with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Arafat once again denounced terrorism and recognized Israel.
On the White House
lawn where the final agreement was signed, Rabin, the legendary Israeli,
said, "We are destined to live together, on the same soil in the
same land. We, the soldiers who have returned from battles stained with
blood..., say to you today, in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood
and tears. Enough!...We, like you, are people - people who want to build
a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live side by side with you in dignity,
in affinity as human beings, as free men."
To which Arafat
replied, "Our people do not consider that exercising the right
to self-determination could violate the rights of their neighbours or
infringe on their security. Rather, putting an end to their feelings
of being wronged and of having suffered an historic injustice is the
strongest guarantee to achieve coexistence and openness between our
two peoples and the future generations."
This set the stage
for Arafat's triumphant return to Gaza in 1994 and the struggle for
power sharing between the Tunis old guard and the new leadership that
had emerged from the intifada. Arafat's wife, Suha, remained in Paris.
After crossing Egypt into Gaza, he left his car and kissed the ground
after 27 years in exile.
Even with the failings
of the Oslo Accord, the Rabin assassination in 1995 came like an earthquake.
All the enthusiasm of the Western world that had seen the fall of the
Berlin Wall and was bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa
was not going to see an historic settlement that would bring peace to
Israel and Palestine.
Binyamin Netanyahu
followed as the new Israeli leader and the peace process stalled. One
last attempt by outgoing President Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak and Yasser
Arafat at Camp David ended up without a deal and no agreement on the
right of return issue. The Israelis called it "Barak's Generous
Offer" and the Palestinians called it "Barak's Big Lie."
The agreement after all would have come with fifteen pages of Israeli
reservations. The Geneva Initiative, which has recently captured the
attention of the elite builds on the framework of Camp David and forecasts
what an agreeable final status solution might look like. It sits there,
like a telegraphed pass in football, waiting to be knocked down.
A month after Camp
David, the violence erupted when Ariel Sharon made his visit to the
Temple Mount. September 11th changed the playing field and shifted American
priorities related to the conflict. Bush and Sharon became tighter allies,
further isolating Arafat. By 2002, Yasser Arafat was already a weakened
leader when the Israeli siege took over the West Bank. New settlements
continued to be constructed in the Occupited Territories. Police headquarters
in Bethlehem and Ramallah were ransacked. Arafat was thrown legitimate
charges of corruption, cronyism, of not being able to crack down on
the violence, of not breaking the links between Fatah and the Al Aqsa
Martyr's Brigade. Rival factions fought for control while Hamas solidified
control of the Gaza Strip. The Occupation became more structured and
solidified on the ground. The death toll continued to rise. Since the
beginning of 2000, close to 6,000 Palestinians and Israelis lay dead
as a result of the violence.
Israel benefited
by maintaining a weakened Arafat and a weakened Palestinian Authority.
Arafat, in turn, couldn't find a find a way to quell the anger and end
the violence. The situation on the ground continued to deteriorate.
Israel was able to continue expansion into the West Bank and meet their
security objectives unilaterally by building a Separation Wall and continuing
incursions into Palestinian cities and villages which included assassinations
and home demolitions without international intervention, while supporting
a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. In the short term, the Sharon gamble
worked.
Even with Arafat's
own weaknesses and inability to show a unified front in the face of
deep adversity, he succeeded at a number of levels. The two state solution
is still the language of the day. Most international institutions and
United Nations resolutions support the Palestinian aspirations for nationhood
and view the Israeli government as the agressors. The International
Court of Justice essentially declared the Separation Wall illegal.
If anything, the
Arafat tenure as head of the PLO and then the Palestinian Authority
even with its deep problems, was able to showcase the hypocrisy of Israeli
policy in their dealings with the Palestinians and of the Occupation
itself.
As the old adage
goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And in a
nation where even the Israeli state was preceded by terrorist organizations
and a leader named Menachem Begin who went on to become Prime Minister,
Arafat's transformation from "terrorist" to Nobel prize winning
statesman had its limitations.
When the heady days
of the Oslo Accord were over and the reality of Rabin's death and the
meaning of it sunk in, the leadership on all sides contributed to the
vacuum that was created in the late nineties. In a way, the violence
that erupted in September 2000 was almost inevitable. It was a profound
failure of leadership on all sides.
So now, as the Occupied
Territories prepares for a Palestinian power struggle and a power shift
from within between the Tunis old guard, the young Fatah activists,
the Communists represented by the Palestine People's Party, the more
militant Hamas and other splinter groups, the Palestinian desire for
self-determination will suffer in the short term. It will be up to people
like Mahmoud Abbas, Ahmed Qureia, Saeb Arakat and others to fashion
a responsible leadership that will take the Palestinians to the place
they aspire to be.
The Yasser Arafat
that lies on his deathbed in Paris today, the one who has Jews and Arabs
leaving him flowers outside his hospital, was not ever going to be the
leader that brought home the peace or signed the final deal. As the
Globe and Mail recently said, "It will be the Arafat legacy, that
he kept the fight alive; but his dream unfulfilled."
Yasser Arafat was
what he was - and tomorrow's another day.