The Dreamer Who Relied on Emotion and Failed to Protect His
Own People
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
U.K.
12 November
2004
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He was
everything loyal and everything miserable about the Palestinian dream. I
have a tape recording of Arafat, sitting with me on a cold, dark
mountainside outside the Lebanese port of Tripoli in 1983 where the old
man - he was always called the old man, long before he was elderly - was
under siege by the Syrian army, another of the Arab "brothers" who wanted
to lead the Palestinian cause and ended up fighting Palestinians rather
than Israelis.
Even worse,
the Syrians had suborned some of "their" Palestinians to join the siege.
Just a year before, Arafat and his PLO had withstood an 88-day
encirclement in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, by the Israeli army, led by
the then defense minister, Ariel Sharon. Now Arafat's fortunes had
crumbled again.
The tape
hisses and occasionally, far away, shells thump into a hillside. I played
it again yesterday, listening to the wind.
"I will not
be away from my freedom fighters while they are facing death and dangers
from death," says Arafat's voice, "It is my duty to be beside my freedom
fighters and my officers and my soldiers."
"A year
ago," I tell him, "you and I talked in west Beirut. Here we are on a windy
hilltop outside Tripoli, 50 miles further from the border of Israel, or
the border of Palestine, and people within Fatah are rebelling."
Arafat
replied: "You see, I give you another proof that we are a nut that is not
easy to be cracked. I hope you still remember what Sharon mentioned in the
beginning of his invasion. He was dreaming that in three or five days he
would liquidate or smash the PLO, our people, our freedom fighters, and
here we are. The siege of Beirut, the battles of the south of Lebanon,
this miracle, 88 days, the longest Arab-Israeli war - and after that we
have this war of attrition against the Israeli army, not only the
Palestinians - definitely, we and our allies the Lebanese, are
participating in this war of attrition and we are proud, I am proud, I
have this brave alliance."
"Fifty miles
further from Palestine!" I replied.
"What is the
difference to be 50 miles or to be 50,000 miles?" came the reply "One
meter outside the border of Palestine, I am far away."
Arafat was a
dreamer, a popular characteristic for Palestinians who had only dreams to
give them hope. Even in the early days, if compromise was required of him,
he could talk to Israelis, even hint at acceptance of the partition of
Palestine. "I will live on one square meter of my land," he would say.
But if one
of the PLO's more outlandish satellites embarrassed the Palestinians - and
the world - by murdering an innocent, Arafat would step in to prevent
further tragedy, thus acquiring prestige from the crimes of his own
organization. Hence the murder by Palestinians of a crippled Jewish
pensioner called Leon Klinghoffer on board the hijacked cruise ship
Achille Lauro in 1985 was supposed to be overshadowed by Arafat's
humanitarian gesture in arranging for the liberation of the other 300
passengers.
But it was
his greatest political error - his support for Saddam Hussein after the
1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait - that gave him his greatest and hollowest
victory. His refusal to support President George Bush Snr's Pax Americana
left Arafat weak enough to make peace with Israel; and the Oslo agreement
was the bait to pull him in.
Arafat
thought he was being given Palestine - statehood, stamps, a national
airline, prestige, admiration, east Jerusalem and an army - but he was
being offered nothing. Instead, Oslo turned out to be an offer of
collaboration: Arafat was being asked to police the West Bank and Gaza on
Israel's behalf. His job was not to represent his people but to "control"
them, which is why the mantra question, "Can Arafat control his own
people?" was taken up with such speed by the Israelis.
Of course,
he could not. Hamas had been an Israeli creation to balance Arafat's
power, when the PLO were the "super-terrorists" of the Middle East, and
Arafat was not going to fight a civil war in "Palestine" on Israel's
behalf. So he clung to power not with authority but with cash, paying off
his gunmen and his cronies, ignoring some of the PLO's splinter outfits
while promising security, peace, prosperity, statehood and all the other
things Oslo would not give him. His cronyism was part of his failure.
Unwilling to allow younger, educated Palestinians to run even his public
relations network, he surrounded himself with hopeless, middle-aged
spokesmen whose anger was loud but whose English was incomprehensible.
When Israel reneged on withdrawal agreements, Arafat pleaded with the
Americans for help in keeping to a timetable which no one but himself
believed in. "It is up to the parties concerned," the State Department
told him, handing all decisions to the most powerful of those parties, the
Israelis.
He could not
protect his people from Israeli military incursions or air raids and he
could not protect the Israelis when Palestinian suicide bombers began to
hurl themselves into Israel. He could not stop the illegal settlements for
Jews on Arab land and he could not obtain even a sliver of Jerusalem as a
Palestinian capital.
He could not
obtain permission for a single Palestinian refugee to return to live in
the home from which their family was driven in 1948. He could not guard
his own national frontiers. He was not allowed to control his own airport.
In the end, he could only leave the wrecked building in which he lived by
starting the long process of dying.
Arafat
governed by emotion rather than reason and this led him into flights of
rhetoric that were a panacea to his people as they were an insult to his
educated elite. Edward Said, that most brilliant of Palestinian scholars,
was driven to distraction by Arafat's nonsense as well as by his vain,
dictatorial rule; Arafat banned Professor Said's books and Palestinians
who wished to read them had to purchase them in Israel.
"The people
loved him, of course," Professor Said told me. "He stood on the podium and
he promised them a Palestinian state and they clapped and shouted and
banged their feet. Someone asked him what the state would be like and
Arafat pointed to a small child in the front and said, 'If you want to
know the answer to this, you must ask every Palestinian child what he
wants.' And the crowd went wild again. It was a popular reply. But what
was he talking about? What did he mean?"
Only Hanan
Ashrawi could speak her mind to Arafat. "I was the only one who would call
him up and say he was wrong," she told me. "I would say, 'Mr. Chairman,
this is wrong, this will not work.' And after, his advisers would come to
me and say, 'How can you speak to the Chairman like that? How dare you
criticize him.' But someone had to."
There was
another, more profound conversation, between Professor Said and Arafat, in
1985 when they were discussing Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem who supported the 1936 revolt against British rule, and who
believed the Zionists would take Palestinian land but who ended up in
Berlin, urging Hitler to prevent the emigration of Jews to Palestine and
encouraging Bosnian Muslims to join the SS. Professor Said told me Arafat
said: "Edward, if there's one thing I don't want to be, it's like Haj Amin.
He was always right and he got nothing and died in exile."
What will
they say of Arafat? The Israelis refused permission for Haj Amin to be
buried in Jerusalem. Ariel Sharon has said the same rule will apply to
Arafat. In death, at least, Arafat and Haj Amin were equal.
Bulatlat
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