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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
The PLO leader's legacy is rife with violence and failure. Yet his central achievement is undeniable: He kept alive the idea that a Palestinian people existed.
Nov 11, 2004 | I found myself across a table from Yasser Arafat eight months ago. The Israelis had just assassinated Sheik Yassin, the leader of Hamas, and word got out that Arafat was going to hold a rare press conference. So I went to the Muqata, the smashed-up Palestinian Authority headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Along with a few dozen reporters and photographers, I waited for Arafat to come out in a courtyard outside the half-destroyed building. The Palestinian flag waved over its shattered, shell-pocked walls, near a huge pile of cars crushed by IDF tanks. The Israelis had blasted the compound, an old British army headquarters from the Mandate days, when they invaded the West Bank in 2002 in reprisal for Palestinian terrorist attacks. During a month-long siege, tanks fired on his office. Arafat and his associates were confined to two rooms in the building. He had remained an effective prisoner ever since.
Arafat never came out, but after a couple of hours there was a commotion and all the photographers got up and started going in through the sand-bagged entrance. My Palestinian guide told me to quickly mingle with the crowd and try to go upstairs. One of Arafat's elite Force 17 guards, a handsome, vaguely Italian-looking guy with a machine gun slung rakishly over his shoulder and wearing combat fatigues that looked as if they had been tailored, took one look at my tiny camera, waved his finger and said, "Only photographers. I know you are a writer." But I kept shuffling forward and he must have decided it wasn't worth the trouble to stop me. We climbed through a confusing maze of stairs and turns, past dull dirty walls of institutional concrete. Then we found ourselves milling outside a medium-size room where Arafat, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and other Palestinian leaders were greeting some European visitors.
There he was, Mr. Palestinian, guerrilla warrior, Nobel Peace Prize winner, terrorist, president, the most famous national liberation movement icon in the world, in Israel a man almost as hated as Hitler, the most argued-about significant non-state leader of the last century, sitting 20 feet away, and no one had even searched me. Arafat sat on the other side of a long table, a small, frail-looking man, beaming at his visitors. He was talking about his life under quasi-house arrest. "I am living here," he said in a quiet voice in which resignation mingled with mischievousness, "sleeping here, eating here..." But I never heard what Arafat said next, because at that moment one of the guards pulled my arm and gestured brusquely to the door.
Eight months later, Arafat is dead. The Palestinian Authority left the surreal ruins of the Muqata intact, intending it to serve as a symbol of Palestinian summud, steadfastness. But it is hard not to see in those shattered walls a darker metaphor for the career of Yasser Arafat. Arafat ended his life a virtual prisoner, his secular movement challenged by radical Islamist groups, his people still living under the longest military occupation of the 20th century, his dream of a viable Palestinian state still only a dream. Ordinary Palestinians fed up with his incompetence, cronyism and corruption had long stopped expecting anything from him, even though they still regarded him as an icon. Had it not been for the Israeli incursion, which turned him yet again into a victim, his star among his own people would have waned still further. In historical terms, Arafat was a loser.
And yet, just as the bullet-riddled Muqata still stands, Arafat's legacy endures. That legacy is ambiguous and problematic, yet its central achievement is undeniable: For almost 40 years, Arafat kept alive -- sometimes with violence, sometimes with statesmanship -- the simple idea that a Palestinian people existed. This fact is now acknowledged by the world, but it took a bitter struggle for that to occur. For decades, Israeli leaders, who correctly saw in the very notion of "Palestinians" an existential challenge to the idea of a Jewish state, rejected it or dismissed its significance. (Golda Meir, who like so many other Israeli leaders insisted that Jordan was Palestine, famously said, "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.") Arafat and his guerrillas forced the world -- using violence, sometimes appalling violence -- to recognize that Palestinians existed, that they had been unjustly exiled from their homeland, and that their grievances needed to be addressed.
It is understandable that Americans have never found it easy to think about Arafat -- and not just because his goal of Palestinian independence challenged the myth that Israel's creation was innocent. (It remains perhaps the most painful moral irony of our time that history's ultimate victims, the Jews, victimized another people in the process of creating their state.) His career defies comfortable moral assumptions. He was a statesman and a terrorist, a guerrilla leader and a politician. The idea that terrorism, seen from a historical perspective, could serve a legitimate political purpose is not easy to swallow -- and to argue that position has become taboo after 9/11. Yet our position has no moral consistency. We claim to subscribe to Kant's categorical imperative, to treat humans as ends, not as means, but we live in a world of ends where the bloody traces of the means are quickly forgotten. We celebrate French Resistance fighters, or Mandela's African National Congress, or the Jewish terrorists who would later become Israeli statesmen, like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, or any other "terrorist" group whose cause we support and who ends up victorious. But this is not easy to acknowledge. How much easier simply to denounce Arafat as a terrorist and murderer.
Which he was. But there are no clean hands in the Middle East.
