- WASHINGTON (MER) - There
are only a small handful of Western journalists who have the background,
the credibility, and the conviction, to write with historical depth and
considerable insight about the death of Yasser Arafat. David Hirst, still
writing for The Guardian after all these years, the man who authored THE
GUN AND THE OLIVE BRANCH, is right up there at the top of that list. This
article was published in The Guardian last week just as Arafat's death
was announced.
-
- ----
-
- From an early age, Muhammad Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa
al-Husseini, the sixth child of a Palestinian spice, incense and grocery
merchant, sensed that a high destiny awaited him. It did - but Yasser Arafat,
who has died aged 75, assuredly earned it by his own endeavours too.
-
- By the standard of lifelong, indefatigable, and for him
courageous dedication to a cause, he deserved the title of Mr Palestine
that he held for a whole generation of his people's struggle. But by the
standards of ultimate achievement, he didn't; rarely can a "liberator"
have strayed further from the original ideals of "liberation".
-
- Arafat was born in Cairo, where his father had settled
for business reasons, but after the death of his mother, the four-year-old
was packed off to Jerusalem to live with his uncle in a house by the Wailing
Wall and al-Aqsa mosque.
-
- The Zionists' passionate struggle to have exclusive control
of the traditionally Muslim-administered Wall made these holy places an
emotionally charged arena for the wider struggle for Palestine unfolding
under British mandatory rule. Arafat witnessed anguished family debates
about the country's future, and saw something of the "great rebellion",
the armed uprising of a desperate and dispossessed peasantry which served
as an inspiration for the later, equally unavailing "armed struggle"
of his own making.
-
- In 1937, on his father's second marriage, he returned
to Cairo, where middle class comforts were more than offset by the emotional
troubles which an unloved stepmother spread about her. When his father
married yet again, his elder sister Inam was assigned the task of bringing
up her siblings.
-
- The dominating role of women in Arafat's early life probably
contributed to a compulsive desire to dominate and lead himself. Inam soon
concluded that he was "not like other children in playing or in his
feelings... He gathered the Arab kids of the district, formed them into
groups and made them march and drill. He carried a stick and he used to
beat those who did not obey his commands."
-
- Outside Palestine during "the catastrophe"
- the 1948 imposing of Israel upon some 78% of the country - he didn't
directly suffer the terrors and humiliation of mass flight and exile. But
long before that he was steeping himself in political and military affairs.
By 1946, the 17-year-old Cairo schoolboy realised that, with the Zionists
pressing their armed violence, the Palestinians would have to fight. He
became a key, intrepid figure in smuggling arms from Egypt into Palestine.
-
- But his adolescent exploits were wasted. As Arab armies
entered Palestine, "an Egyptian officer came to my group and demanded
that we hand over our weapons ... we protested ... but it was no good ...
in that moment I knew we had been betrayed by these regimes."
-
- He plunged into preparation for the coming struggle -
convinced that if Palestinians relied on others to decide for them, they
would never recover their homeland. They had no decision-making institutions,
so he set about creating them. He took over the stagnant Cairo-based League
Of Palestinian Students.
-
- Tireless, wily, domineering, he exhibited another vital
trait which helped shape his career, and, through it, the history of the
Middle East. At a congress in Prague, he suddenly donned the keffiyeh,
or traditional chequered head-dress, which, as well as hiding his entirely
bald pate, became his emblem. The gesture sprang from his delight in surprise,
showmanship and the theatrical gesture. Style is often the man, and there
was surely an intrinsic affinity between this and a remarkable ability
to adapt himself and his movement, suddenly, spectacularly, to new goals
and policies in a changing strategic and political environment.
-
- In Prague, the 26-year-old student was already advertising
his sense of destiny, referring to himself, only half-jokingly perhaps,
as "Mr Palestine". And yet, like many contemporaries, he might
well have eschewed politics altogether, and become a self-made man of a
more conventional kind. Armed with a Cairo university engineering degree,
he went to Kuwait in 1958, one of those stateless Palestinians searching
for work in the remote, uncomfortable, undeveloped, but newly oil-rich
British-protected emirate. He began as a public works department junior
site engineer. Then he set up his own company, subsequently claiming that
he had been "well on the way to becoming a millionaire".
-
- An exaggeration, perhaps, but his brief business foray
later consolidated a carefully cultivated, if genuine, aspect of his personality.
As the leader of his people, he disposed of billions and made canny use
of them as an instrument of policy and patronage, but led the most spartan
of private lives. Similarly, for all his reputed liaisons with women, he
could claim that, at great cost in contentment, his only marriage was to
his Revolution.
-
- Helped by the funds which his dalliance with material
things procured him, he took the first, clandestine steps that led to his
emergence as one of the household names of the age: the incarnation, however
flawed, of all their aspirations to most Palestinians; of evil and the
would-be destruction of their state to most Israelis; of their most sacred,
exasperating, and unavoidable obligations to most Arab regimes; of a gradual
conversion from "terrorist" to politician, even statesman, in
the eyes of an outside world.
-
- In Kuwait, in 1959, with his close friend Abu Jihad,
he began publishing a crudely edited magazine, Our Palestine, which, with
impetuous and uncouth vigour, lamented the Palestinian refugees' plight
and the inaction of Arab regimes, and trumpeted the ideal of the Return,
with a full-scale "population liberation war" as the only means
of achieving it. Together they formed the Fatah guerrilla organisation's
first, five-man underground cell. On January 1 1965, ill-trained, pitifully
short of both weapons and funds, the Feyadeen (those who sacrifice themselves),
mounted their first trans-frontier raid into the "Zionist gangster-state".
-
- Arafat's guerrillas were always a much greater challenge
to the Arab regimes than they were to the Israelis. In theory, the regimes
too were preparing to liberate Palestine - but by conventional military
means in their own good time. The first "martyr" fell victim,
characteristically, to the Jordanian army. Upon his return from a raid,
Arafat himself had a spell in a Syrian jail, amid rumours that the new
Syrian defence minister, one Hafiz al-Assad, wanted to hang him and all
his comrades.
-
- These early Arafat exploits, though mere pinpricks, gave
Israel another reason to fight a war that would end with the country gaining
the remaining 22% of Palestine - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza
- which had eluded it in its "war of independence". Even after
the shattering Arab defeat in the 1967 war, his guerrillas never put down
roots in the newly occupied territories, let alone original Israel proper.
Arafat is said to have made his getaway across the Jordan river disguised
as a mother carrying a baby, a story that reinforced his growing reputation
for the narrow escape and an uncanny sense of survival.
-
- After the battle of Karameh, a small Jordanian town in
which, on March 21 1968, an ill-armed band of guerrillas inflicted heavy
casualties on a vastly superior force of Israeli invaders, the Fedayeen
became the Arab world's darlings. Volunteers flocked to join it and Fatah
became a state within the Jordanian state, with Arafat as its "spokesman".
Soon he became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO),
that assembly of generally docile notables which Egypt's President Nasser
had established in 1964 as a way of keeping in check just such ardent young
men as himself.
-
- Too many fledgling "freedom-fighters" took
to swaggering around the Jordanian capital Amman, advertising their ambition
to replace the Hashemite kingdom with their own revolutionary order - and
Arafat fell victim to his sudden, meteoric success. His movement suffered
from organic defects typical of too-rapid growth - together with those
of his individualistic, haphazard leadership style. In "Black September",
1970, King Hussein unleashed his Bedouin soldiers against him - an Arab
army dealing Arafat the first of his great reverses.
-
- In a new Lebanese exile, exploiting that country's divisions,
he built himself a stronger power base. Yet he was now further from his
natural Palestinian environment and his goal of "complete liberation"
through "armed struggle". After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and
the partial Arab military comeback that engendered a serious bout of American
peace-making, he began edging away from "revolution till victory"
towards a "doctrine of stages". He sought what immediate gains
he could from a political settlement without renouncing the historical
right to all of Palestine. It was the beginning of a moderation that was
to take further him than he could have imagined.
-
- For a while his diplomatic successes overshadowed his
military ones. In 1974, King Hussein, his historic Arab rival, recognised
the PLO as "the sole legitimate spokesman of the Palestinian people".
Two weeks later, he addressed the United Nations general assembly at its
first full-dress debate on the "Palestine question" since 1952,
becoming the first leader of a "national liberation movement"
to be so honoured.
-
- That triumph was followed by a dreary period of diplomatic
stagnation - and more military-strategic reverses, inflicted first by Arabs,
then Israelis, then Arabs again. He took sides in the Lebanese civil war.
When his proteges, the Muslim-leftists, were getting the upper hand, Syria's
President Assad switched sides, sending in his army to help the right-wing
Christian Phalangists. The civil war's first phase ended in 1976 with the
atrocious siege and fall of the Palestinian refugee camp of Tal al-Zaatar.
At an emergency summit, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait rescued Arafat from Syrian
onslaughts.
-
- In 1982 it was the Israelis who invaded Lebanon. In the
three-month siege of Beirut, they hunted the PLO leader in person, using
F15s as flying assassination squads while their quarry slept on the beach
and in parks to evade them. Two hundred people died when, with a laser-guided
vacuum bomb, they flattened an apartment block he had left moments before.
-
- With the loss of his last Lebanese politico-military
power base, Tunis became his headquarters. Though the Phalangist pogrom
of defenceless refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila followed his
exile, these were not his personally bleakest moments. They came 15 months
later after he had slipped back into the Syrian-controlled part of Lebanon,
where Assad had helped foment a rebellion against him in the ranks of what
was left of the Fatah guerrillas.
-
- Arafat's bold stroke failed: bombarded by Israel from
the sea, besieged by Syria, he sailed from Tripoli under a European-arranged
safe passage. "Such," prematurely declared the New York Times,
"is the bizarre ending of a movement that, for all its daring, never
found a political vision."
-
- Three years of seemingly growing irrelevance did indeed
lie ahead. And in 1985 Israeli F15s killed 73 people at his seafront Tunis
headquarters. His nose for danger had supposedly saved him yet again: he
had been out "jogging" at the time. But his political fortunes
were sinking to their lowest ebb - at Arab hands. At a 1987 summit, to
his fury, Arab leaders for the first time put something other than Palestine
- the Iraq-Iran war - at the top of their agenda.
-
- But within weeks the great survivor was savouring a sweet
recovery. With the spontaneous, non-armed intifada as his new asset, he
found himself in a stronger position than the long, costly "armed
struggle" ever conferred on him; the stones that youngsters hurled
at Israeli soldiers were more potent than Kalashnikovs. In 1988, he solemnly
proclaimed his adherence to the "two-state" solution, involving
the Palestinians' renunciation of 78% of their original homeland. He recognised
Israel's right to exist. There began a long dreamt of US-PLO dialogue;
he called it the Palestinians' "passport to the world".
-
- His historic offer was a delusion, a failed gamble, such
was the continuing weakness of Palestinians - and Arabs. For Israel, he
was the unregenerate terrorist; and Washington would not gainsay its protege.
-
- To enhance his bargaining power he looked more to a militarily
powerful, increasingly militant Iraq. And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait,
he backed him, a fatuous miscalculation. In American eyes he forfeited
much of the moral and diplomatic respectability he had slowly garnered.
If he had taken the other side, he would have been better placed to secure
Palestine's place in the "new world order" the US sought to bring
into being.
-
- Still, it was a measure of his personal ascendancy that
he persuaded the Palestinians to go to the 1991 Madrid peace conference,
the first time Israel and its Arab neighbours had talked to each other
across a table. But they did so at the price of historic concessions. The
Israelis chose which Palestinians they talked to: there was no place for
PLO members, let alone Arafat, in the Palestinian delegation. They also
largely set the agenda; the Americans backed their refusal to discuss anything
suggesting the Palestinians might benefit from such a fundamental 20th-century
right as "self-determination".
-
- Madrid got nowhere. It became tempting to speculate that
he was tiring of his devotion to the revolution, when, at 62, and to the
often disapproving surprise of his people, he took a 28-year-old Palestinian
Christian wife, Suha Tawil. Tempting, but wrong. He kept up his endlessly
airborne routine. In 1992, his aircraft crash-landed during a Libyan sandstorm.
The crew sacrificed themselves to save him - testimony to the loyalty he
inspired.
-
- One Jerusalem newspaper called his escape a "heavenly
referendum"; for many Palestinians, the relief and joy was genuine
enough. Yet before long it was the Israelis who, though they could never
love him, re-cast him as an enemy who gave them much more than they had
dared to hope.
-
- He began the secret talks that astonished the world as
the Oslo agreement. Some of his officials whispered that the crash, the
shock it caused to faculties already going awry, had pushed him into this
last extremity of "moderation". Weaknesses in Arafat the man
now impinged, as never before, on the cause he embodied. Individualism,
vanity, deviousness, authoritarianism, a mystical belief in his infallibility
had long been apparent. But now it became clear just how primary a concern
to Mr Palestine was the destiny of - Mr Palestine. What he wanted, and
was ready to pay almost any price to secure, was to come back into the
game from which the terms of the Madrid conference, the rise of the "insider"
leadership, and the appeal of Hamas fundamentalists, threatened to exclude
him.
-
- In one stroke, he did come back. On September 13 1993
he won his accolade as a world statesman. In the signing ceremony on the
White House lawn, the 64-year-old former "terrorist" chieftain
shook hands with Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of the Jewish state which
he had once made it his mission to remove from the earth.
-
- The price was immense. He claimed that, with Oslo, he
had set in train a momentum inexorably leading to Israel's withdrawal from
all the occupied territories; the Palestinians were on the road to statehood;
he saw the beckoning spires and minarets of its capital, East Jerusalem.
-
- Nine months later he did at least achieve a strictly
physical proximity to them. He returned "home". But the self-governing
areas he returned to were the merest fragments, in Jericho and Gaza, not
merely of original 1948 Palestine, but of the post-1967 22% of it on which
he was to build his state. And he came as collaborator as much as liberator.
-
- Oslo provided for a series of "interim" agreements
leading to "final-status" talks. An Israeli commentator said
of the first of them: "when one looks through all the lofty phraseology,
all the deliberate disinformation, the hundreds of pettifogging sections,
sub-sections, appendices and protocols, one clearly recognises that the
Israeli victory was absolute and Palestine defeat abject."
-
- It went on like this for six years, long after it had
become obvious that his "momentum" was working against, not for
him. It had been bound to do so, because, in this dispensation that outlawed
violence, spurned UN jurisprudence on the conflict, and consecrated a congenitally
pro-Israeli US as sole arbiter of the peace process, the balance of power
was more overwhelmingly in Israel's favour than ever. The "interim"
agreements which should have advanced his conception of "final status"
only advanced the Israelis' conception.
-
- Meanwhile he was grievously wanting in that other great,
complementary task - the building of his state in the making. His vaunted
Palestinian "democracy" was no different from the Arab regimes
he had so excoriated for the abuse of his own people and their own. More
people were then dying, under torture and maltreatment, in Palestinian
jails than in Israeli ones. His unofficial economic "advisers"
threw up a ramshackle, nepotistic edifice of monopoly, racketeering and
naked extortion which enriched them as it further impoverished society
at large, and - being so inefficient - reduced the economic base for all.
In 1999, unprecedentedly, 20 leading citizens denounced not just high officials
and their business cronies, but the "president", who had "opened
the doors to the opportunists to spread their rottenness through the Palestinian
street".
-
- With his fortunes again at such a dangerous low ebb,
he was approaching another critical point: persist in policies and methods
which were slowly undoing him, or revert, to some form of a strategy of
militancy and confrontation - and rely anew on the support of his people,
rather than the favour of the US, to carry it off. But it was less he,
than Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who imposed this choice.
-
- Barak conceived the fantastically overweening notion
of telescoping everything - the "interim" stages which had fallen
hopelessly behind schedule as well as the "final status" ones
which had been left to the end precisely because they were so intractable
- into one climactic conclave. This would "end the 100-year conflict"
at a stroke. In July 2000, at President Clinton's Camp David retreat, he
laid before Arafat his take-it-or-leave-it historic compromise. In return
for his solemnly abjuring all further claims on Israel, Israel would acquiesce
in the emergence of a Palestine state. Or at least the pathetic travesty
of one, covering even less than the 22% of the original homeland to which
he had already agreed to confine it; without real sovereignty, East Jerusalem
as its capital, or the return of refugees. Most of the detested, illegal
settlements would remain.
-
- After 15 days the conference collapsed. Arafat had stood
firm, evidently deciding that it had been bad enough, and tactically ruinous,
to cede historic goals temporarily; but quite another to cede them for
all time, in the context of a final settlement. He might be Mr Palestine,
but he had no Palestinian, Arab or Islamic mandate for ceding Jerusalem's
sovereignty or abandoning the rights of four million refugees.
-
- From this collapse grew the second intifada, essentially
a popular revolt, first against the Israeli occupation and the realisation
that the Oslo peace process would never bring it to an end, and, potentially,
against Arafat and the Palestine Authority (PA) which had so long connived
in the fiction that it could.
-
- It took on its own life and momentum. Arafat was at best
in nominal control; its true leaders were men of a younger generation such
as Marwan Barghouti. As a member of the secular, mainstream Fatah organisation,
he owed him formal allegiance, but his growing popularity, partly stemming
from the decline in his boss's, gave him a measure of autonomy. His objective
was confined to ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and that
being so, he confined his followers' attacks to the soldiers and settlers
who were the symbols and instruments of it.
-
- The intifada's other activists were the fundamentalists
of Hamas and Islamic jihad. They did not oppose Arafat, but nor did they
owe any allegiance to him. Their suicide exploits inside Israel proper
betokened the much larger meaning which the intifada carried for them:
"complete liberation" to which, in his early years, Arafat had
subscribed.
-
- The death toll mounted beneath the overwhelmingly superior
firepower the Israelis could bring to bear: from small-scale attrition
of sniper and small arms fire, through systematic assassinations, to tanks,
helicopter gunships and F16s unleashed on targets in densely populated
civilian neighbourhoods. Poverty, hatred and despair mounted too.
-
- Most Israelis saw the intifada as an existential threat.
And they all blamed Arafat. For the peace-seeking left he had betrayed
them and all their strivings, with a resort to violence just when a historic
breakthrough seemed within grasp.
-
- For the right, he had revealed himself once more as the
unregenerate killer they always held him to be. This consensus led, in
February 2001, to the rise of Ariel Sharon, the "hero" of Sabra
and Shatila, at the head of Israel's most extreme, bellicose government
in history.
-
- Sharon had one ambition: to suppress the intifada by
as much brute force as he could risk without antagonising the Americans
or his Labour coalition partners beyond endurance. And he did not mind
if in the process he was to bring Arafat and the PA down; he would escape
from any obligation to pursue the peace process by eliminating the only
party with whom he could pursue it.
-
- Like Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the events of
September 11 2001 were another of those unforeseeable cataclysms that impinged
on the Palestinian arena. This time Arafat was determined to put himself
on the side of the angels. Endorsing America's "war on terror",
he sought to end the intifada. His police arrested militants who broke
the ceasefire and shot and killed demonstrators who protested against the
Anglo-American assault on Afghanistan.
-
- But it did not yield the tangible gain from the Americans
in the shape of a serious, impartial peace initiative at last, on which
he was banking. On the contrary, after a brief and humiliating attempt,
under Arab pressure, to rein Sharon in, George Bush II, the most pro-Israeli
president ever, did little more than look on as he re-conquered much of
the West Bank, wreaked havoc on the infrastructure of the PA, and subjected
Arafat himself to a humiliating siege in his headquarters in Ramallah.
Only Arafat's office was left standing amid mounds of rubble.
-
- In the summer of 2002, Bush pronounced Arafat unfit to
rule - as "irrelevant", in other words, as Sharon said he was
- and a prime target, along with Saddam Hussein, for those "regime
changes" which Bush now envisaged across much of the Middle East.
-
- In 2003, after overthrowing Saddam through full-scale
war, he sought to oust Arafat by diplomatic, less dramatic means. He secured
the appointment of a docile prime minister, Abu Mazin, who he hoped was
ready to do what Arafat was not - go to war against the Islamic militants
without any assurance that in return the Israelis would make any worthwhile
concessions in the peace-making.
-
- But Arafat, with his continued grip on the levers of
power, joined Sharon, with his intransigence and continued "targeted
killings", and drove the hapless and unpopular appointee to despair
and resignation. With the total breakdown of the ceasefire that had come
with the latest "road map", and a resumption of the suicide bombings,
the Israeli government announced its intention to "remove" Arafat,
this "absolute obstacle to any attempt at reconciliation between Palestinians
and Israelis."
-
- "Removal" to a new exile or removal to "the
other world" - that was the question. But this time the great survivor
survived only to be carried off by what for him was the most extraordinary,
because ordinary, of deaths.
-
- Yasser Arafat (Muhammad Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini),
politician, born August 4 1929; died November 11 2004
-
- MID-EAST REALITIES - www.MiddleEast.Org Phone: (202)
362-5266 Fax: (815) 366-0800 Email: MER@MiddleEast.Org Copyright ©
2004 Mid-East Realities, All rights reserved
|