Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat died this morning in a French military hospital. He was 75 years old. Arafat spent the last three weeks of his life in France with an unspecified illness, and his last few days in a deep coma. He led the Palestinian movement from 1968 until his death but failed to bring his people their own state, the goal he said he desired most.
There are conflicting reports as to where Arafat was born on August 4, 1929. Some claim he was a native of Cairo, while others say it was in the Gaza Strip. He was educated as an engineer in Cairo and later served in the Egyptian Army. He helped found the Fatah movement, which became the backbone of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Arafat’s career as PLO leader was a controversial one and, in the long run, must be considered a failure. He did succeed in keeping the issue of Palestinian refugees on the world’s agenda, but he did so through terrorism, bloodshed and by abusing even his own people. There is little doubt that Arafat had a lot of blood on his hands, from planning and/or condoning the hijacking of planes and boats to the killing of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972 and the suicide bombers of the recent intifada.
To Arafat, the goal was awareness of his people’s plight and the destruction of the State of Israel through any means necessary. “As long as the world saw Palestinians as no more than refugees standing in line for U.N. rations, it was not likely to respect them. Now that the Palestinians carry rifles, the situation has changed,” Arafat claimed.
Arafat was, above all else, a survivor. Many times he was counted out of the political picture and each time he managed to rally and survive the ordeal to fight another day. The PLO was involved in a civil war in Jordan in the early 1970s before Jordanian troops defeated the PLO fighters and expelled Arafat from Jordan. The Israeli Army later expelled Arafat from Lebanon in the early ’80s, but Arafat managed to survive that debacle as well and re-established himself in Tunis. He was in Tunis in 1987 when the first intifada broke out in Gaza and the West Bank.
By the late ’80s, Arafat began to change his tune and made public overtures toward recognizing Israel’s existence, which allowed him to open a dialogue with the United States for the first time. The dialogue remained in an indefinite holding pattern when the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait changed the landscape of the Middle East in 1990. Arafat supported Sadam Hussein, further alienating the United States and losing credibility once more. Yet he recovered from this blunder as well.
By the 1990s, Arafat began to enter into direct negotiations with Israel and, in 1993, he signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Rabin and Shimon Peres of Israel. The Palestinian Authority was created and Arafat was named as its president. He was given the autonomy to run the internal affairs of the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank and began to receive American aid. Hope for a Palestinian state seemed high.
Arafat’s style of rule in the territories came under harsh criticism—even within Arab circles. Graft and corruption ran rampant and much of the aid money designated for refugees ended up in the coffers or Arafat and his cronies. Arafat also never named a successor, probably in part due to the deep divisions in Palestinian society. He always prevented anyone else from gaining too much prominence and often played his top assistants off against each other.
If the Oslo Accords were Arafat’s crowning achievement, they also led to his greatest failure. The accords began to unravel, mostly due to Arafat’s inability or unwillingness to confront terrorists who were attacking Israeli civilians from his territory. More importantly, perhaps, Arafat was not willing to prepare his people for the compromises that they would have to make to achieve statehood. The Palestinian school curriculum contained vicious anti-Semitic teachings and the Palestinian media continued to incite hatred and mistrust. Arafat often made peaceful overtures to the foreign press in English while turning around and inciting jihad, or holy war, to his people in Arabic on the same day. He still spoke of the right of return for all Palestinians to any part of the Jewish state and did not lay the groundwork for peace and compromise within the Palestinian community.
Despite these problems and difficulties with Israel’s continually expanding settlements in the West Bank, Arafat was given his biggest chance to make his people’s dream come true during negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000. Barak made an unprecedented offer of all of Gaza and approximately 95 percent of the West Bank to Arafat, along with Palestinian sovereignty over parts of Jerusalem. Arafat rejected the deal without making any kind of counter offer.
Dennis Ross, the U.S. negotiator at Camp David, wrote in his recent book The Missing Peace, “Arafat had the best deal he could get. He could not get more and he had hit the proverbial wall. He could not wring out one more concession or gain one more tactical advantage … We now had to face a reality: Arafat could not do a deal that ended the conflict … He was not up to it. He could live with a process but not with a conclusion.”
Arafat was a uniting force for Palestinians everywhere for many years. Even those who opposed him respected him for what he represented: the face of his people in world affairs, a symbol that they would not be defeated without a fight. Yet, when his moment of truth came and peace and statehood were at hand, Arafat was unable to make the transition from terrorist to statesman.
Shortly after the Camp David talks broke off, Arafat launched the second intifada, which was characterized by a new form of terror: suicide bombings. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, affiliated with Arafat’s Fatah faction of the PLO, was actively involved in suicide bombings that mostly targeted civilians on buses or in crowded cafés. The peace talks quickly broke off; the Israeli government secluded Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters, where he spent the last few years of his life before being transferred to Paris three weeks ago.
The major question now is what comes next for the Palestinians. Will the post-Arafat world be dominated by moderates seeking peace or radicals continuing to seek the destruction of the State of Israel? It is possible that, in death, Arafat could pave the way for statehood for the Palestinians, the one thing he could not accomplish during his lifetime.
