Modest in his personal habits and his material desires, Yasir Arafat was grandiose only in his sense of mission. By bringing low “the Zionist entity,” he would win the most glorious Muslim victory since the noble Saladin drove the Crusaders out of Jerusalem. Then, having restored the city to Arab rule, he would go to his rest in the sacred soil of the grounds of the Al Aksa Mosque.
History had other ideas. Last week, in the Paris suburb of Clamart, a French general named Christian Estripeau stood in front of the cameras and announced, “M. Yasir Arafat, president of the Palestinian Authority, died at the Percy Military Training Hospital in Clamart on November 11, 2004, at three-thirty.” French privacy laws prevented him from disclosing the medical details.
And so, after half a century of armed struggle and tactical diplomacy, the figure Palestinians called Al Khityar, “the Old Man,” died—not in Jerusalem, or even in Abu Dis, but in a modern clinic in the heart of Europe. The funeral was in Cairo. The burial was in Ramallah, ten miles from Jerusalem—the longest ten miles in the Middle East.
After Arafat founded the Fatah organization, in 1957, he began crafting the cruder instruments of political modernity, a bloody influence that today is everywhere. He was hardly the inventor of terrorism—countless practitioners preceded him, including two who became Israeli prime ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir—but he was an innovator, and never left terror behind. He combined technology (he had been a demolitions expert for Egypt in the Suez War of 1956) with a gift for media spectacle and political timing. Either on his orders or with his artfully ambiguous assent, commandos and ordinary people mastered the arts of hijacking, kidnapping, massacre, car bombing, bus bombing, and suicide bombing. With a nod, he could halt an Olympiad or turn an Israeli election. Ma’alot, Black September, Munich, Lod Airport, Entebbe, Kibbutz Eyal junction, French Hill: these are a few of the resonant moments. The spasms of violence had led, in recent years, to a cult of death in parts of Palestinian society, a psychology of ecstatic martyrdom reinforced so thoroughly in Gaza and elsewhere that no successor will likely reverse it for years to come. After a suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv disco, Arafat told the killer’s family, and, by extension, the Palestinian people, that the young man “who turned his body into a bomb is the model of manhood and sacrifice for the sake of Allah and the homeland.” This was in 2001, seven years after he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.
But even the most skeptical historian will have to admit that, between the rise of Fatah and the signing of the Oslo accords, in 1993, Arafat came to embody something that the Israelis and much of the Western world had cynically dismissed: Palestinian suffering and a Palestinian national identity. Especially in the years after the Six-Day War, in 1967, Israeli triumphalism and self-righteousness left no room for the admission that seven hundred thousand Palestinians had fled or been driven from their land in 1948, and that the unending occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, along with the accelerating construction of settlements there, amounted to a moral failure that could not be excused or ignored.
Arafat’s capacity for organization, maneuvering, deception, and the projection of himself as an icon of Palestinian identity insured that his people would not be forgotten. Arafat was the great semiotician of the Middle East, and his supreme creation was himself, the “father of the Palestinian people.” He told interviewers that he was born in Jerusalem (or Gaza) when in fact he was born in Cairo, and he spoke with an Egyptian accent all his life. Arafat’s public presentation—the beard, the fatigues, the pistol, the kaffiyeh folded, he claimed, in the triangular shape of Palestine—was unique; no one, even in his circle of lieutenants, looked like him.
Although he was a devout Muslim and as a young man had close contact with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Arafat seemed, at first, to play the role not of an Islamist soldier but of a Palestinian Che Guevara. His rhetoric was blunt. “Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else,” he told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1970. With time, ambiguity became a more important weapon. But, even as he adapted to the language of international diplomacy, he kept the dream of absolutism alive at home. In 1989, a year after recognizing Israel’s right to exist, he said that he was seeking not the peace of compromise but “the peace of Saladin”—a peace in which the Other is vanquished.
Rarely has a leader blundered more, left more ruin in his wake, and courted death more ardently. Yet Arafat survived, and his people’s claims grew more prominent. A Palestinian state, which had once seemed beyond imagining, became a diplomatic commonplace, a given, a stipulation—everything but a reality. Arafat’s tactical sense, combined with the Israeli capacity to fuel Palestinian rage, guaranteed that even in his worst and weakest periods the cause persisted as both a strategic irritant and a moral requirement.
Between the signing of the Oslo agreements and the collapse of the Camp David negotiations, in 2000, neither side did much to create the level of trust that might have led to a final two-state pact. Israel nearly doubled the number of settlements, situating them in a way that would maximally haunt a Palestinian future, and strangled the Palestinian economy. Arafat, for his part, did not seriously combat terror as he had promised; on the contrary, under the banners of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Arafat’s own armed factions, terror developed and advanced. He failed to build institutions of basic public order, administration, or power-sharing. He ruled the West Bank and Gaza as his fief, personally controlling accounts filled with billions in foreign money and doling out lucrative concessions to his deputies and millions in cash to his wife.
The logic of events and the morality of the Palestinian claim dawned only slowly on most Israelis, but certainly by the time of the Camp David summit only a minority failed to see that security would be most threatened by the lack, not the presence, of a Palestinian state. To this day, there is debate over why Arafat rejected the proposals at Camp David and, later, at Taba, without even making a serious counter-offer. The core proposal—a demilitarized Palestinian state comprising all of Gaza and connected by highway or tunnel to at least ninety-two per cent of the West Bank; a capital in East Jerusalem; and a means of sharing the Old City and the area around the Western Wall and the Al Aksa Mosque—was surely not everything Arafat wanted when he started out, but it was, even for some in his own retinue, a livable compromise, a future.
Arafat, however, faced a Draconian choice. On the one hand, he could dispense with his dreams of driving out the Zionists and become the leader of the thirteenth-largest Arab state, a leader who would have to forgo the life of a media-age revolutionary and spend his remaining years dealing with matters of road-building, sewage, agronomy, tax collection—the tedious business of governance. At the same time, he would have to confront his people with the limitations of their future, particularly the divided status of Jerusalem and Israel’s refusal to commit demographic suicide by absorbing the Palestinian refugees from abroad. Inherent in the first choice, too, as Arafat confessed to Bill Clinton, was the possibility that, like King Abdullah of Jordan and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, he could be assassinated for the offense of having made peace with Israel.
The alternative was the temptation of permanent resistance and popularity. Arafat saw compromise as a trap, one that would bring an end to the perquisites of romantic struggle and deprive him of absolute victory and the glory of his hero, Saladin. Rejection, not acceptance, would enlarge him and keep the old mythologies alive.
Having chosen rejection, Arafat returned to the nihilism of armed struggle, this time with a far greater emphasis on the lexicon and imagery of Islam. The “Al Aksa” intifada began, and the result has been more than a thousand dead Israelis, almost three thousand dead Palestinians, collapsed diplomacy, a “peace” fence, and a growing sense on both sides that the Other is never again to be trusted.
This is Arafat’s tragic and disorienting legacy. In the near term, even as Ariel Sharon begins a disengagement from Gaza, how can a Palestinian leader such as Mahmoud Abbas, who has none of the symbolic magnetism of Arafat, dare to make compromises that the Old Man rejected? It is for Arafat’s mourners that one’s sympathy should be reserved, and Israel, the United States, and Europe ought to do what they can to re-start the process of negotiation, and to support any sign of renewed pragmatism among the Palestinian leaders. At the same time, Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza cannot be accepted as an end but only as a preface to a similar exit from the West Bank. In the past quarter-century, a succession of remarkable and unexpectedly imaginative statesmen—Sadat and Rabin in the Middle East, de Klerk and, perhaps above all, Nelson Mandela in South Africa—emerged to leave their peoples and their world better than they found them. Like Mandela, Arafat was acclaimed the father of his country. But, unlike him, he failed to provide his people with the patrimony they deserve.
