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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Time after time, Israel and the U.S. have made sure that the Palestinian leader survives the corruption of his regime, the doubts of his henchmen, and the anger of his people.
Apr 16, 2002 | Even as he remains holed up in his crumbling Ramallah compound, hungry, dirty, besieged, Yasser Arafat has enjoyed a good week. His meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday yielded little, but Powell is expected to return to see the Palestinian leader on Tuesday. And Israel's supposed concession on Sunday -- calling for an international peace conference, but without Arafat -- was roundly rejected by Arabs and Palestinians, who said there could be no peace talks without the Palestinian Authority chairman.
"People have no choice but to rally behind Arafat now," said one West Bank man, speaking on condition of anonymity. Before Israel isolated him at his Ramallah compound, Arafat's approval rating was hovering around 20 percent in polls cited by the BBC and others. But now, pictures of the Palestinian leader trapped in his headquarters, working by candlelight, are circling the globe, bringing Arafat his greatest glory since Oslo. In fact, Israel's military campaign has so far had the exact opposite of its desired political outcome, which was to isolate and discredit Arafat. Instead of clearing the way for independent leadership to emerge, as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President Bush both publicly said would be desirable, Israel's military sweep has reinstituted Arafat as the ultimate symbol of Palestinian nationalism, and America's lone Palestinian partner in peace.
This is, of course, not the first time Israel has helped elevate the status of the Palestinian leader. Since the beginning of the Oslo peace process, Washington and Israel's desire to deal with a Palestinian strongman -- who could control his population, keep a tight lid on popular dissatisfaction in the West Bank and Gaza and deliver on promises to the West -- has consistently salvaged Arafat's standing with his people, despite his increasingly repressive ways. The start of the early 1990s peace process, for instance, was marked by Israel and the U.S. abandoning talks with leading West Bank independents and moderates, to embark on secret talks with the exiled PLO chairman instead. Former Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin used to defend shaking the hand of a man most Israelis considered a terrorist by arguing that only Arafat could handle Hamas and other troublemakers without worrying about "the Supreme Court and [the human rights organization] B'Tselem."
Even today, pick up any glossy newsmagazine and you are likely to come across a discussion on the possible successors to head the Palestinian Authority after Arafat. The fact that Americans and Israelis have traditionally discussed Palestinian politics as a "succession question," rather than a democratic process, is telling. The quest for a Palestinian moderate has always focused on the strongmen around Arafat -- his deputies, cronies and security chiefs. Most notable among these were West Bank security czar Jabril Rajoub, Gaza security chief Mohammed Dahlan, the secretary general of the PLO Mohammed Abbas (alias Abu Mazen) and Ahmed Qureia (aka Abu Ala), the speaker of the Palestinian Parliament. Some have identified Fatah commander Marwan Barghouthi, arrested by Israel Monday, as another possible Arafat successor, but he was probably too radical to ever have gained the U.S. support a Palestinian leader requires. But all of Arafat's possible successors have been his protigis, men who preside over various Palestinian apparatchiks and owe their position to their direct association with Arafat and his organization, Fatah. Never mind that large sectors of the Palestinian public had become disenchanted with the corruption and the despotism of Arafat's government, that human rights abuses had increased under his security structure, that journalists and opponents complained of daily infringements on free speech, that corruption by P.A. officials is legendary. Arafat's henchmen have always been hot, hot, hot in Washington.
But the quest to anoint one of them Arafat's successor has so far failed. American favorite Jabril Rajoub, the 48-year-old Palestinian security chief, found himself caught up in the latest military sweep, his security compound stormed by Israelis, his men arrested. Rajoub's story is illuminating. Like an ambitious young Roman notable in the court of Julius Caesar, Rajoub rose among peers and allies in the West Bank over the last few years of Palestinian self-rule to emerge as a leading contender to replace Arafat. Among the myriad security and intelligence units of the burgeoning Palestinian administration, Rajoub's Preventive Security Service was arguably the best-equipped and the least tainted by involvement with attacks on Israelis. With great ties to Israel's security brass and the Central Intelligence Agency, and the leader of 10,000 armed loyalists, for a time Rajoub seemed Israel and Washington's best hope in their search for a Palestinian Karzai.
