Friday, Sep 5, 2008
His intransigence helped elect Ariel Sharon, and violence rages on. Can Yasser Arafat lead the Palestinians out of crisis?
Mar 8, 2001 | The first time I saw Yasser Arafat, I tracked his checkered head cloth as it moved down a double row of goose-stepping guards of honor to the stately oom-pah-pah tune played by a military band.
Arafat's trademark black-and-white keffiyeh moved slowly and steadily, no more than 5 feet 4 inches above a red carpet stretching from a lavish VIP lounge to a freshly landed aircraft. It framed Arafat's beaming, stubbly face as he personally greeted the first plane to touch down in Gaza. It was November 1998, the day of the inauguration of the Gaza International Airport, a perfect day for brass and pomp under the throbbing Middle Eastern sun.
The airport, the fruit of years of diplomacy, was a consecration of sorts for Arafat, the guerrilla commander turned jet-set dignitary, and a first step toward sovereignty for his embryonic Palestinian state. "Today the airport in Gaza, tomorrow the capital Jerusalem" promised a banner hung at the airport. Not far from the pageantry however, anarchy ruled.
A sea of ordinary Gazans in thongs and T-shirts, traditional embroidered dresses and jeans, had broken through the security lines separating the airport from Gaza's dusty streets and taken over the tarmac. Scraps from Arafat's dozen various security services celebrated in rowdy rings, carrying AK-47s over their heads as they chanted and danced. Women and children went for the sprinklers that had been laid down to breathe life into scraggly lawn patches and pierced the hoses to wash, drink and fill bottles with water -- a precious commodity in the overcrowded and underdeveloped Gaza Strip. Most people in the crowd had never seen a plane up close and could never afford to fly.
That opening scene is repeated every day in the 40 percent of the West Bank and two-thirds of Gaza that fall under Arafat's partial rule. There is not much authority in the Palestinian Authority. But there is plenty of misery and spontaneous combustion among Arafat's 3.1 million subjects.
Throughout the fall, when riots degenerated into deadly clashes, and up to the present, when Palestinians are waging a low-intensity guerrilla war against Israel, the division of powers in Palestine has remained more or less the same. Arafat, military garb notwithstanding, does the flying but leaves the fighting and nitty-gritty task of economic survival to the people. (It's against this backdrop that Ariel Sharon, the man whom many Palestinians blame for sparking the current wave of violence, assumes the mantle of Israeli prime minister this week.)
Among Western observers, Arafat's wiles and decisions are the subject of careful study and consternation. How could the Palestinian leader allow the territories under his control to spiral into violence and chaos? Why hasn't Arafat sought ways to put an end to an uprising that has already cost hundreds of lives? The widespread bafflement started after the collapse of the Camp David summit last summer, when Arafat walked away from generous Israeli peacemaking proposals without even making a counteroffer.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times summed up the feeling of many in a column addressed to Arafat and written in the voice of then-President Bill Clinton last October: "You have an opportunity to deliver a Palestinian state, and to end the misery of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and you're out there throwing stones and demanding an international investigation into the latest shootout. Are you nuts?"
"The Olso peace process was about a test," wrote Friedman again in February. "It was about testing whether Israel had a Palestinian partner for a secure and final peace. It was a test that Israel could afford, it was a test that the vast majority of Israelis wanted and it was a test Mr. Barak [Israel's former prime minister] courageously took to the limits of the Israeli political consensus -- and beyond. Mr. Arafat squandered that opportunity."
Publicly ridiculed by Clinton for the failure of diplomatic efforts at Camp David, Arafat is also widely blamed for the upsurge of terrorism in Israel. The dovish image produced by Arafat's historic handshake with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn in 1993 has been eclipsed again in people's minds by the image of Arafat as arch-terrorist. The Western media, however, could be giving too much credit to one man.
The demonization of Arafat is certainly at odds with the feeling on Palestinian streets, where Arafat's name and authority are increasingly irrelevant.
In five months of unprecedented violence, in which more than 400 have died, Arafat has addressed precious few words of solace or encouragement to his people. A victory sign here, a sound bite there -- but by and large the 71-year-old leader has distinguished himself by his absence from the battleground. Until Arafat met with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in the West Bank city of Ramallah two weeks ago, he had made only one other trip to the West Bank, where two-thirds of his subjects live, since the intifada broke out at the end of September. (He attended Christmas mass in Bethlehem -- hardly an electrifying moment in the life of embattled West Bankers.) At the same time, he has flown to dozens of capitals, relentlessly trying to rally support for Palestinian demands in a comatose Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
On the face of it, Arafat is in trouble. Arafat's international image, never very positive, has taken a serious blow over the past months. Domestically, his name is associated with the discredited Oslo peace process and, as the president of the Palestinian Authority, he heads a vast structure of ministries, civil services and security services now severely crippled by a 5-month-old Israeli-enforced siege.
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