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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Benny Morris, one of Israel's so-called new historians (the term refers to those younger academics who rejected the official propaganda that dominated Israeli historiography until the late 1980s), concisely summed up the moral ambiguity that surrounds Palestinian terrorism. "In retrospect, the various Palestinian campaigns from the late 1960s through the 1980s outside the Middle East had a dual and contradictory effect," he wrote. "They put the 'Palestinian problem' on the world agenda while substantially undermining sympathy for the Palestinian cause; the terrorist outrages were both useful and important to the cause while at the same time putting it into disrepute."
It was Arafat's fate to never be able to entirely free himself from this duality. The man who in 1974 famously proclaimed to the United Nations "Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun" was never able to convince the only two countries that mattered, the United States and Israel, that he was fully committed to the olive branch. To be sure, both of those nations bear a large measure of responsibility for this. As another one of the Israeli new historians, Avi Shlaim, notes, both Israel and the United States consistently refused to trade land for peace -- even after Arafat felt sufficiently strengthened by the first intifada to finally recognize Israel's legitimacy in 1988. Both of them demonized him and his movement, the PLO, as eternal terrorists, bent on Israel's destruction. By the time the United States finally accepted the idea of a Palestinian state, and bent to reality in recognizing the PLO, Islamists far more implacable and opposed to Israel than Arafat had grown in power.
But Arafat, too, must take his share of the blame for the failure of the peace process. Time and again, he failed to make the bold moves that might have broken the logjam. It was never a viable option for the PLO to confront the rejectionists Hamas and Islamic Jihad militarily -- that would have meant a full-scale civil war -- but he could have marginalized them if he had been a better leader. Unwilling to either rule out the military option or embrace it, he was a master tactician who seemed never capable of delivering the bold strategic stroke. (In that sense, he resembled his ancient nemesis, Ariel Sharon, a brilliant field general who lacks a larger vision.) Danny Rubinstein, the Haaretz correspondent who has covered the Palestinians for years, noted on Thursday that Arafat could not resist the siren song of the Palestinian street: If it called for violence, he delivered violence. "This was his weak side. This is how it came out," Rubinstein says. "He always felt it necessary to speak to his people such that they would continue to embrace him, to esteem him, to idolize him, and, most importantly, to obey him."
The greatest question mark about Arafat concerns the failed Clinton-brokered 2000 peace talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. There is zero historical consensus on who was responsible for the breakdown of the talks that began at Camp David and came tantalizingly close to succeeding at Taba. Even what was actually offered is disputed, but it involved giving the Palestinians about 95 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, with Israel retaining the large settlement blocks along the 1967 border. The Palestinians were not given full sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem -- home to the holiest site in Judaism, the Wailing Wall -- and the Palestinian refugee issue was left vague, but with the clear understanding that only a few would be able to return to Israel proper.
The mainstream Israeli and American view is that Arafat rejected the most generous offer that Israel would ever make the Palestinians. Many Israelis, perhaps most, believe that this proved that contrary to his words, Arafat never had any intention of making peace with Israel and was intent on eventually destroying the Jewish state. Palestinians and some other analysts say variously that the offer was fatally flawed because it would result in a series of fenced-in Bantustans, that Barak never really offered it, and that the United States and Israel, in their haste to get a deal, failed to establish the trust necessary for negotiations to succeed. They also point out that Palestinians did not break off the negotiations at Taba: They came to an end when Ariel Sharon, who had vowed not to pursue the peace plan, was elected.
Perhaps the best judgment was rendered by the Israeli journalist Tom Segev, who simply noted that issues as intractable and complex as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are rarely resolved at a single throw.
At the end of his life, although he still held all effective Palestinian power in his hands, Arafat had come to serve a purely symbolic function. That function was sentimentally useful: Arafat represented the last hope for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees around the world, still holding their yellowing deeds and keys to houses in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem to which they will never return. But practically, it was an encumbrance. He was a statue, a myth, and his larger-than-life stature blocked a new, more pragmatic generation of Palestinian leaders from emerging. Those leaders will make the same demands Arafat did -- a contiguous state in most of the West Bank, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, shared sovereignty over the holy sites, some fair resolution of the refugee question that does not spell the end of Israel. But perhaps they will actually be able to achieve them.
It does not, of course, depend only on the Palestinians. If all the engaged parties -- the Palestinians, the United States and Israel -- seize the moment, the Palestinian state Yasser Arafat dreamed of could come into being. If it took his death to make that happen, that would only be the final uncanny twist in a life and career full of them.
Arafat was born in 1929, 19 years before the state of Israel came into existence. The place of his birth, like almost everything else about him, is disputed: Arafat liked to claim he was born in Jerusalem, but most authorities agree that in fact his birthplace was Cairo. (It is one of the many ironies of Arafat's life that neither the birth nor the death of the father of Palestinian nationalism occurred in Palestine.) His father was a middle-class merchant in Gaza. Arafat studied civil engineering at Cairo University; after the creation of the state of Israel amid war and the attendant expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians, he moved to Kuwait. There he and other Palestinian exiles established the Palestine National Liberation Movement, also known as Fatah, dedicated to reclaiming historic Palestine (the land bounded on the west by the Mediterranean and the Sinai, and on the east by the Jordan River and the Dead Sea) from Israel by the use of force.
Arafat's innovation was to insist that the Palestinian struggle was a Palestinian affair, not part of a pan-Arab struggle. Salah Khalaf, another founder of the movement, recalled, "Yasser Arafat and I ... knew what was damaging to the Palestinian cause. We were convinced, for example, that the Palestinians could expect nothing from the Arab regimes, for the most part corrupt or tied to imperialism, and that they were wrong to bank on any of the political parties in the region. We believed that the Palestinians could rely only on themselves."
