A Man And His
People
By Uri Avnery
07 November, 2004
Gush
Shalom
Wherever
he may be buried when he passes away, the day will come when his remains
will be reinterred by a free Palestinian government in the holy shrines
in Jerusalem.
Yasser Arafat is
one of the generation of great leaders who arose after World War II.
The stature of
a leader is not simply determined by the size of his achievements, but
also by the size of the obstacles he had to overcome. In this respect,
Arafat has no competitor in the world: no leader of our generation has
been called upon to face such cruel tests and to cope with such adversities
as he.
When he appeared
on the stage of history, at the end of the 1950s, his people was close
to oblivion. The name Palestine had been eradicated from the map. Israel,
Jordan and Egypt had divided the country between them. The world had
decided that there was no Palestinian national entity, that the Palestinian
people had ceased to exist, like the American Indian nations - if, indeed,
it had ever existed at all.
Within the Arab
world the Palestinian Cause was still mentioned, but it
served only as a ball to be kicked around between the Arab regimes.
Each of them tried to appropriate it for its own selfish interests,
while brutally putting down any independent Palestinian initiative.
Almost all Palestinians lived under dictatorships, most of them in humiliating
circumstances.
When Yasser Arafat,
then a young engineer in Kuwait, founded the Palestinian Liberation
Movement (whose initials in reverse spell Fatah), he meant first
of all liberation from the various Arab leaders, so as to enable the
Palestinian people to speak and act for itself. That was the first revolution
of the man who made at least three great revolutions during his life.
It was a dangerous
one. Fatah had no independent base. It had to function in the Arab countries,
often under merciless persecutions. One day, for example, the whole
leadership of the movement, Arafat included, was thrown into prison
by the Syrian dictator of the day, after disobeying his orders. Only
Umm Nidal, the wife of Abu Nidal, remained free and so she assumed the
command of the fighters.
Those years were
a formative influence on Arafats characteristic style. He had
to manoeuver between the Arab leaders, play them off against each other,
use tricks, half-truths and double-talk, evade traps and circumvent
obstacles. He became a world-champion of manipulation. This way he saved
the liberation movement from many dangers in the days of its weakness,
until it could become a potent force.
Gamal Abd-al-Nasser,
the Egyptian ruler who was the hero of the entire Arab world at the
time, got worried about the emerging independent Palestinian force.
To choke it off in time, he created the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) and put at its head a Palestinian political mercenary, Ahmed Shukeiri.
But after the shameful rout of the Arab armies in 1967 and the electrifying
victory of the Fatah fighters against the Israeli army in the battle
of Karameh (March 1968), Fatah took over the PLO and Arafat became the
undisputed leader of the entire Palestinian struggle.
In the mid-1960s,
Yasser Arafat started his second revolution: the armed struggle against
Israel. The pretension was almost ludicrous: a handful of poorly-armed
guerillas, not very efficient at that, against the might of the Israeli
army. And not in a country of impassable jungles and mountain ranges,
but in a small, flat, densely populated stretch of land. But this struggle
put the Palestinian cause on the world agenda. It must be stated frankly:
without the murderous attacks, the world would have paid no attention
to the Palestinian call for freedom.
As a result, the
PLO was recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian
people, and thirty years ago Yasser Arafat was invited to make
his historic speech to the UN General Assembly: In one hand I
carry a gun, in the other an olive branch
For Arafat, the
armed struggle was simply a means, nothing more. Not an ideology, not
an end in itself. It was clear to him that this instrument would invigorate
the Palestinian people and gain the recognition of the world, but that
it would not vanquish Israel.
The October 1973
Yom Kippur war caused another turn in his outlook. He saw how the armies
of Egypt and Syria, after a brilliant initial victory achieved by surprise,
were stopped and, in the end, defeated by the Israeli army. That finally
convinced him that Israel could not be overcome by force arms.
Therefore, immediately
after that war, Arafat started his third revolution: he decided that
the PLO must reach an agreement with Israel and be content with a Palestinian
state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
That confronted
him with a historic challenge: to convince the Palestinian people to
give up its historic position denying the legitimacy of the State of
Israel, and to be satisfied with a mere 22%
of the territory
of pre-1948 Palestine. Without being stated explicitly, it was clear
that this also entails the giving up of the unlimited return of the
refugees to the territory of Israel.
He started to work
to this end in his own characteristic way, with persistence, patience
and ploys, two steps forwards, one step back. How immense this revolution
was can be seen from a book published by the PLO in 1970 in Beirut,
viciously attacking the two-state solution (which it called the
Avnery plan, because I was its most out-spoken proponent at the
time.)
Historic justice
demands that it be clearly stated that it was Arafat who envisioned
the Oslo agreement at a time when both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres
still stuck to the hopeless Jordanian Option, the belief
that one could ignore the Palestinian people and give the West Bank
back to Jordan. Of the three recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Arafat
deserved it most.
From 1974 on, I
was an eye-witness to the immense effort invested by Arafat in order
to get his people to accept his new approach. Step by step it was adopted
by the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile, first
by a resolution to set up a Palestinian authority in every part
of Palestine liberated from Israel, and, in 1988, to set up a
Palestinian state next to Israel.
Arafats (and
our) tragedy was that whenever he came closer to a peaceful solution,
the Israeli governments withdrew from it. His minimum terms were clear
and remained unchanged from 1974 on: a Palestinian state in the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip; Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem
(including the Temple Mount but excluding the Western Wall and the Jewish
Quarter); restoration of the pre-1967 border with the possibility of
limited and equal exchanges of territory; evacuation of all the Israeli
settlements in the Palestinian territory and the solution of the refugee
problem in agreement with Israel. For the Palestinians, that is the
very minimum, they cannot give up more than that.
Perhaps Yithak
Rabin came close to this solution towards the end of his life, when
he declared on TV that Arafat is my partner. All his successors
rejected it. They were not prepared to give up the settlements, but,
on the contrary, enlarged them incessantly. They resisted every effort
to fix a final border, since their kind of Zionism demands perpetual
expansion. Therefore they saw in Arafat a dangerous enemy and tried
to destroy him by all means, including an unprecedented campaign of
demonization. So Golda Meir (there is no such thing as a Palestinian
people). So Menachem Begin (Two-footed animal
the man
with hair on his face
the Palestinian Hitler), so Binyamin
Netanyahu, so Ehud Barak (I have torn the mask from his face),
so Ariel Sharon, who tried to kill him in Beirut and has continued trying
ever since.
No liberation fighter
in the last half-century has faced such immense obstacles as he. He
was not confronted with a hated colonial power or a despised racist
minority, but by a state that arose after the Holocaust and was sustained
by the sympathy and guilt-feelings of the world. In all military, economic
and technological respects, the Israeli society is vastly stronger than
the Palestinian. When he was called upon to set up the Palestinian Authority,
he did not take over an existing, functioning state, like Nelson Mandela
or Fidel Castro, but disconnected, impoverished pieces of land, whose
infrastructure had been destroyed by decades of occupation. He did not
take over a population living on its land, but a people half of which
consists of refugees dispersed in many countries and the other half
of a society fractured along political, economic and religious lines.
All this while the battle for liberation is going on.
To hold this packet
together and to lead it towards its destination under these conditions,
step by step, is the historic achievement of Yasser Arafat.
Great men have
great faults. One of Arafats is his inclination to make all decisions
himself, especially since all his close associates were killed. As one
of his sharpest critics said: It is not his fault. It is we who
are to blame. For decades it was our habit to run away from all the
hard decision that demanded courage and boldness. We always said: Let
Arafat decide!
And decide he did.
As a real leader, he went out ahead and drew his people after him. Thus
he confronted the Arab leaders, thus he started the armed struggle,
thus he extended his hand to Israel. Because of this courage, he has
earned the trust, admiration and love of his people, whatever the criticism.
If Arafat passes
away, Israel will lose a great enemy, who could have become a great
partner and ally.
As the years pass,
his stature will grow more and more in historical memory.
As for me: I respected
him as a Palestinian patriot, I admired him for his courage, I understood
the constraints he was working under, I saw in him the partner for building
a new future for our two peoples. I was his friend.
As Hamlet said
about his father: He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall
not look upon his like again.