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August
5, 2003
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August
5, 2003
The
Prisoner of Ramallah
Arafat
at 74
By
URI AVNERY
Every television viewer recognizes the bridge
between the last two buildings left standing among the ruins
of the Mukata'ah (compound) in Ramallah.
During one of my last visits, a Palestinian
officer pointed to a simple table and chair near one of the windows
of this bridge. Through this window a stretch of the Palestinian
landscape beyond the town is visible. "Here Abu-Amar likes
to sit between meetings and look out," he explained. Abu-Amar
is the affectionate name for Yasser Arafat.
21 years ago, when I went to Beirut and
met him for the first time, he was one of the most mobile leaders
in the world, if not the most mobile of all. Once he told me
that during the last five days he had visited seven countries,
sleeping on the plane between destinations. At the time, his
neck was in a surgical collar.
Now he has been imprisoned in the compound
for more than two years. For some of the time, the conditions
were worse than in an ordinary prison: he lived in a closed room
without fresh air and almost without water, with the sewage blocked.
He knew that at any moment Sharon's soldiers could storm in and
kill him.
In a few days, he will be 74 years old.
He will spend his birthday in his prison.
This is a good opportunity to take stock
of the man and his work.
He has been on the world stage longer
than any other current leader, apart from Fidel Castro. Many
of today's world leaders, like Bush and Blair, were infants when
he took the responsibility for the destiny of the
Palestinian people in his hands.
His face is well known throughout the
world.
He is one of the most maligned statesmen
in the world, perhaps the very most.
He is the most hated person in Israel.
Rightists and Leftists compete with each other in expressing
their hatred of him. There is hardly an article by an Israeli
"Leftist" which does not include some words of abhorrence
about him.
He is the most admired and beloved leader
of his own people, and apparently the leader most admired by
the masses throughout the Arab and Muslim world.
Not bad for a person who is turning 74.
The title most often attached to his
name is "symbol". Even the Palestinian opposition groups
call him "the symbol of the Palestinian people". That
is true, but also misleading.
Misleading, because a "symbolic"
person is usually someone in honor of whom statues are erected
and whose likeness adorns the walls. The President of Israel
is a symbol, and so are the presidents of Germany and Italy,
while Arafat is very much an active leader, dominating the Palestinian
scene.
Yet the title is also appropriate. Arafat's
progress, from leader of a tiny group of refugees to the present
stage, when the whole world supports the idea of a Palestinian
state, symbolizes the Palestinian struggle for survival. No one
symbolizes the condition of the Palestinian people, its suffering,
determination and courage, more than the man in the besieged
Mukata'ah, a prison within a prison (Ramallah) within a prison
(the Palestinian territories as a whole).
Much has already been written about his
early life, about his father, a merchant from Gaza who had settled
in Egypt; about his mother, who died when he was still an infant;
about his childhood with his mother's family in Jerusalem.
Lately, Arafat likes to recount to his
guests--Palestinians, Israelis and foreigners--about those happy
years, when he played with Jewish children near the Western Wall.
His years with his father's family in Cairo seem to evoke much
less nostalgia.
He likes to remind people that he studied
engineering. He attributes his legendary memory--especially for
numbers and facts--to his profession. More than once he has corrected
me on numbers--how many ultra-religious members were in the Knesset,
exactly what percentage of the West Bank Sharon has said he was
ready to "give" to the Palestinians as part of his
"painful concessions".
His political career started in the Palestinian Students' Association
in Cairo. It assumed historical significance when he was the
main founder, in the late 1950s, of the Fatah organization, the
first Palestinian liberation movement since the catastrophe of
1948.
Liberation--from who? Well, obviously
from Israel. But in reality, from the domination of the Arab
leaders, too. It is impossible to understand Arafat without knowing
this important chapter of his life. At the time, the Palestinian
cause served as a football in the inter-Arab game. Each Arab
ruler used it in order to reinforce his claim for leadership
of the Arab world and to beat his competitors. Gamal Abd-al-Nasser
in Egypt, Abd-al-Karim Kassem in Iraq, the young King Hussein
in Jordan and their equivalents in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and
the other countries--each proclaimed himself the Defender of
the Palestinian People while mercilessly suppressing any sign
of independent Palestinian activity in his own realm. In the
eyes of Arafat and his comrades, the "independence of Palestinian
decision-making" became a sacred goal.
Fatah was born into this reality. Arafat
and his group wanted to wrest the Palestinian cause from the
hands of the Arab rulers. The new movement had no power, no money,
no arms. It had no base anywhere where it could operate freely.
Its activists were at the mercy of the secret services of any
Arab country, if they did not fulfil the demands of the local
dictator. That happened many times. The climax was reached when
the Syrian dictator put the whole Fatah leadership, including
Arafat, in prison. Only the wife of Abu Jihad, Umm Jihad (now
the minister for social affairs in the Palestinian government)
was left outside and so she assumed the command of all Fatah
forces.
For the movement to survive, Arafat had
to manoeuvre between the leaders, flatter people he despised,
suck up to leaders who did not give a damn for the interests
of the Palestinian people. As an important Palestinian personality
told me: "For the survival of our people he had to dissemble,
lie, trick, be equivocal, use ruses. At was then that the typical
Arafat language evolved."
In spite of sabotage by the Arab regimes
and with the help of these methods, the power of Fatah slowly
grew. In order to block it and to subordinate the Palestinians
to Egyptian interests, Abd-al-Nasser initiated the founding of
the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) and appointed an
aging and ineffectual demagogue, Ahmad Shukairy, as its leader.
But the June 1967 war destroyed the respect for the rulers of
Cairo, Amman and Damascus. The battle of Karameh (1968), in which
the Fatah fighters, led by Arafat in person, won a victory against
the Israeli forces sent to destroy them, caused Fatah prestige
to rise sky-high. After three Arab armies had been shamefully
defeated by Israel, the fighters of Fatah had held on heroically.
The result: Fatah took over the PLO, the 39 years old Arafat
became the leader of the nation.
All the Arab leaders with whom Arafat
had to contend at that time have in the meantime died natural
or unnatural deaths. Arafat remains.
Perhaps his greatest achievement as a
national leader lies in his ability to hold the Palestinians
together.
Most liberation movements have known
fratricidal wars, bitter splits and desperate internal struggles.
The pre-state Hebrew underground, too, experienced the fratricidal
"saison" and the bloody Altalena incident. But the
Palestinians, whose situation was incomparably more difficult,
were spared this fate.
Almost all other movements grew from
populations that lived on their land, under one particular foreign
regime. But the Palestinian people were dispersed in a dozen
countries, almost all of them oppressive dictatorships. The name
"Palestine" had disappeared altogether from the map,
and even the Palestinians who had remained in their homeland
lived under oppressive rulers--first the Jordanian and Egyptian,
and then the Israeli military governor.
When the PLO grew, all the Arab regimes
tried to gain influence over it. Damascus, Baghdad, Riad, Cairo,
in addition to Moscow, set up Palestinian organizations in order
to impose their agendas on the Palestinian people. Secular and
religious, Leftist and Rightist organization tried to play their
games inside the movement. Arafat had to cope with all of them,
manoeuvre, cajole, threaten, appease. He became a past master
of this art, perhaps its outstanding practitioner in the world.
At the same time, he had to lead the
national struggle. Like almost all leaders of modern liberation
movements, from Garibaldi to Nelson Mandela, he was convinced
of the need for the "armed struggle" (always called
"terrorism" by the opposing regime.) The PLO organizations
carried out many bloody attacks, many of them brutal, some of
them outright monstrous, even if most of these were made by organizations
who also fought against Arafat.) All PLO leaders believed that
the "armed struggle" was necessary, considering the
vast disproportion between the might of Israel and the almost
negligible force of the Palestinians.
Arafat himself, according to the testimony
of his assistants, is far from being cruel or blood-thirsty.
Only in rare instances did he confirm death sentences, and that
only when the public demand was irresistible. The number of executions
carried out in his domain is incomparably lower than in former
Governor's George W. Bush's Texas.
It is accepted by most authorities that
without the "armed struggle", the Palestinians would
not have achieved anything and would have lost their homeland
long ago. They believe that the violent attacks enabled the Palestinian
people to return to the world map and allowed the PLO to attain
its historic achievements: its recognition as the "sole
legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people, its
invitation to the UN, its international standing, the Oslo agreement,
its return to Palestine and the creation of a world-wide consensus
supporting the idea of a Palestinian state.
But Arafat did not see the "armed
struggle" as an end in itself. Violence is for him a means
among others.
At the end of 1973 he did something that
is rare among leaders. After making one revolution (the creation
of Fatah and the start of the "armed struggle") he
initiated another. (Years later, Yitzhaq Rabin did something
similar.)
The October 1973 war changed his strategic
concept. Until then he believed that Israel could be overthrown
by force. The Palestinian struggle was designed, primarily, to
cause a general military confrontation between Israel and the
Arab world, as happened in 1967. In October 1973 Arafat realized
that this hope had no basis in fact. The armies of Egypt and
Syria did indeed attack Israel and achieved initial surprise,
giving them a resounding victory, but within two weeks the Israeli
army had turned the tables and was advancing on Cairo and Damascus.
Arafat, forever the rational engineer, drew the logical conclusion:
there exists no military option.
From there it was but one step to the
second conclusion: the Palestinian state can only be founded
on compromise, by a political settlement with Israel. He started
to work on it.
The necessary effort was immense. A whole
generation of Palestinians saw in Israel a monstrous enemy that
had expelled half the Palestinian people from their homes and
lands and continued to oppress and dispossess the other half.
In their time of desperation, the Palestinians clung to their
belief that the very existence of Israel is illegitimate and
that some day, somehow, it will be eradicated. Arafat had to
uproot this belief and to cause his people to accept a compromise
that left the Palestinian people only 22% of their historic homeland.
He worked as he always has done: with
infinite patience, sensitivity to human beings, tactical manoeuvres,
zigzags and equivocation. He started secret contacts with a tiny
group of Israeli peace activists (including myself), hoping that
they would open the way to the heart of the Israeli establishment.
He encouraged some of his people (mainly Sa'id Hamami and Issam
Sartawi, who were both murdered because of this) to express his
hidden thoughts publicly. He caused the Palestinian National
Council, the parliament in exile, to gradually change its resolutions.
In this effort, which lasted from 1974 to 1988, he was mainly
assisted by Abu Mazen.
At that time, Yitzhaq Rabin still was
an extreme opponent of a peace settlement with the Palestinians,
and Shimon Peres was the godfather of the settlements. Both advocated
the "Jordanian option" (returning parts of the West
Bank to Jordan and make peace with the king, ignoring the will
of the Palestinians). If anyone deserved the Nobel Prize for
the Oslo agreement, it was Arafat.
One of the attributes that endear him
to the Palestinian public is his rare personal courage.
When Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon in
1982, in order to expel the Palestinians and kill their leader,
Arafat could have easily left Beirut in time. This would have
been accepted by everyone as a sensible step. But he remained
with his fighters in the besieged city until the last day. After
a long battle, his men left with their heads held high, bearing
their arms, led by Arafat.
Another, almost forgotten, episode brought
him even more esteem. A year after the exit from Beirut, the
Syrians and their agents attacked the Palestinian forces in the
North Lebanese refugee camps near Tripoli. At the time, Arafat
was the guest of the UN in Geneva. He did something almost unbelievable:
he secretly returned to Lebanon, slipped into the besieged camp
and, in the end, left with his fighters, who did not surrender
this time either.
Most of his life he has spent in constant
danger, with a dozen secret services trying to kill him. He survived
several assassination attempts. Once he escaped with his life
when his plane had to perform a tough emergency landing in the
middle of the desert. His bodyguards were killed.
In the middle of the battle of Beirut
I asked him where he would go if he got out alive. Without hesitation
he said: "Home, of course!" Twelve years later, on
his first day in Gaza, he whispered to me: "Remember what
I told you in Beirut? Well, here I am."
As head of the new Palestinian Authority
he was confronted with one of the toughest jobs of his life.
He faced a challenge unknown to any other liberation movement:
to set up a kind of state while the liberation struggle was still
far from over.
Arafat returned together with the veterans
of the struggle, who believed, quite understandably, that it
was their right to control the National Authority. The same was
claimed by a new generation of fighters, veterans of the intifada,
the prisons and the underground. The same was claimed by thousands
of professionals who had studied in universities the world over.
(One of them told me: "OK, let's give medals to all the
fighters. But the state must be governed by people trained for
it.") Arafat had to give a part of the pie to the Christian
minority, to the representatives of the various regions, and,
most importantly, to the heads of the great families who have
dominated Palestine society for centuries and without whom one
cannot rule. Altogether, an almost impossible task.
It cannot be said that the establishment
of the Palestinian Authority was an unqualified success. But,
considering the objective pressures, Arafat did not do too bad
a job either.
One of the weak points was the centralism
of the new administration. During the decades of struggle, Arafat
has got used to deciding alone and quickly. His colleagues had
all too willingly let him take the historic decisions that demanded
courage and personal risk. Most of his closest comrades in arms
had been killed during the struggle, some by Israel, some by
the Iraqi agent Abu Nidal and his ilk. Like all leaders who have
been at the center of internal struggles and responsibility for
a long time, Arafat has become lonely and suspicious.
Some of the Palestinian personalities
believed that with the establishment of the Authority, the struggle
had come to an end. They started to look out for their own personal
interests, some became corrupt, assimilating the norms of the
neighboring countries (and not only theirs.) This aroused resentment
among the Palestinian public. Israeli Leftists began to condemn
the "corrupt Authority", the official Israeli propaganda
machine took the story up and gleefully distributed it around
the world. This caused grievous damage to the Palestinian cause
at a most sensitive time.
But not the slightest hint of suspicion
ever attached itself to Yasser Arafat himself. While Ariel Sharon
is sinking in a morass of corruption affairs and world leaders
like Helmut Kohl in Germany and Jacques Chirac in France have
starred in major scandals, Arafat has remained above suspicion.
Neither his opponents at home nor the Israeli intelligence agencies
have succeeded in discovering any spots. He lives a very simple
life, has no home of his own, his clothes are his khaki uniforms.
Throughout his life, Arafat has made
many mistakes. He may have exaggerated his opposition to the
1977 Sadat initiative, surrendering to the pressure of his enraged
colleagues. His support of Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf
war was a major mistake that cost dearly. More than once he erred
in choosing assistants and confidants.
But to his own people he has remained
the only leader who can be trusted unconditionally. Foreigners
are unable to understand this. They find it odd that the very
same attributes that made him abhorrent to many people in the
West make him a hero to his people.
For example: when, at Camp Davis, Arafat
emphatically rejected the proposals of Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton,
he was condemned by most of the Israeli "peace camp".
But in Palestinian eyes, it was the epitome of courage and national
pride. When he went to the summit meeting, many Palestinians
were afraid that he was walking into a trap and would not have
the strength to extricate himself. It was clear that the "generous
proposals" of Barak did not meet the minimum demands of
the Palestinians. When he came back without having surrendered,
he received a hero's welcome.
Now the Palestinians are ready to give
some credit to Abu Mazen, who believes that he can get some concessions
from Israel and the US. Abu Mazen is an old partner of Arafat
and respected by the public. But no Palestinian can imagine entrusting
him with the destiny of the nation.
One person only enjoys that kind of trust:
the man besieged in the Mukata'ah. He remains the ultimate judge.
Uri Avnery
is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He
is one of the writers featured in The
Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. One of his
essays is also included in Cockburn and St. Clair's forthcoming
book: The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org.
Weekend Edition Features for August 2/3, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet the Real WMD Fabricator: Rolf
Ekeus
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
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