With questions yet unanswered as to the causes of Arafat's death, Samir Ghattas examines the lost political savvy that preceded his passing and wonders if the two are not related On Friday 11 November, Palestinians commemorated the first anniversary of Yasser Arafat's death. The posters came out again, speeches were delivered and, leading the ceremonies, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Abu Mazen placed a wreath on Arafat's tomb and laid the cornerstone for a museum that is to be constructed on the site dedicated to the late Palestinian leader's eternal memory. All the while, an unanswered question seemed to hover in the somber air. Did treachery have a hand in Arafat's death? Had his food been poisoned or had the AIDS virus been injected into his bloodstream, as the rifest rumours in Palestine have it? Indeed, several Palestinian officials have suggested as much. In his speech during the commemorative ceremonies, Nasser Al-Qidwa, PA minister for foreign affairs, and Arafat's nephew, asked for an international investigation to clear up the mystery surrounding the medical reports citing the causes of Arafat's death. Setting aside this question for a moment, it was also striking how modest the commemorative ceremonies were compared to the historic stature of the man they were intended to honour. It was Arafat who radically altered the fate of the Palestinian people. It was he who placed their cause on the international map, brought it to the forefront of the UN agenda and transformed it from a simple refugee matter to a question of fundamental human and national rights. Nor did the ceremonies appear commensurate to a person whose name had rarely been absent from the headlines of the international press over the past 30 years, whose face became a symbol of the Palestinian people and their cause, and whose championship of that cause inspired a number of liberation and protest movements the world over. Some, in their attempt to explain why the commemorative ceremonies were so subdued only one year after his death, argued that the strains of life under the Israeli occupation prevented the Palestinians from paying appropriate tribute to Arafat. Others countered that the interest was simply not there; Arafat had already met his political death several years before his physical death on 11 November 2004. The latter contention compels our interest. Supposing that is the case, it would not be unreasonable to give as much attention to unearthing the causes of this political death as clearing up the mystery surrounding his physical death. Certainly the passage of the year since Arafat's death seems an appropriate occasion to discuss and analyse a number of long unspoken aspects of Arafat's political career with the purpose of extracting those lessons and values that should survive his passing. With the more pressing question of his alleged assassination by poison or an AIDS virus injection at hand, at least an "investigation" into the question of Arafat's political death may throw some light on the assassination rumours, for there is ample reason to believe that the two are connected. The notion that Arafat had died politically well before he died physically is not unfounded. There are at least four strong indicators that substantiate this hypothesis. First, it was astounding, even to the Israelis, how quickly the image of Arafat vanished after his death. Over the past year since his funeral ceremonies Arafat's continued political presence was conspicuously absent at both official and popular levels, and even within Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Not only have the Palestinians not exhibited the anticipated nostalgia for Arafat, one could not help but observe how rapidly he began to fade as a Palestinian symbol, an ideological authority, and a source of political legitimacy. Second, although throughout most of his political career Arafat far outstripped any of his rivals in the level of popular support and veneration he received, there is no denying that his popularity declined steadily in the last years of his life. Apart from a brief upsurge in his popularity at the time of the Israeli siege on his headquarters in March 2003, the general trajectory of his popularity ratings remained downwards, peaking under the best of circumstances at between 35 and 37 per cent of those surveyed in the public opinion polls conducted during this period. Third, during the same period Arafat was clearly losing his political clout and his ability to control the situation in Palestine. Testifying to his weakening grip over Palestinian affairs was the growing opposition in the Palestinian Legislative Assembly, even among some Fatah representatives, to many of the executive decisions he wished approved. His ability to protect close associates and others in his camp was also slipping: Colonel Abu Lahya, commander of the Special Police Forces, was assassinated; so too was his personal adviser Khalil Al-Zaben; and General Ghazi Al-Jibali, former chief of police was kidnapped and then forced to resign in concession to the demands of his kidnappers. These and many other similar incidents testify to Arafat's virtual political paralysis in his final years. A fourth piece of evidence is to be found in the fact that Abu Mazen was elected as Arafat's successor. We recall that it was Arafat who had forced Abu Mazen to resign as prime minister in the wake of a vicious mudslinging campaign that had sunk to the depths of dubbing Abu Mazen the "[Hamid] Karzai of Palestine". The subsequent rupture between the two Palestinian leaders was an open secret. Yet, when in the immediate aftermath of Arafat's death Abu Mazen was chosen to succeed Arafat, this choice met not the slightest opposition from within the ranks of Fatah, which not long before had been one of Arafat's instruments to smear Abu Mazen. Then, in the presidential elections Abu Mazen received a substantial majority of the popular vote in spite of the fact that his campaign platform had clearly departed in substance and in tone from many of Arafat's established positions and his rhetoric. To this we can add that over the past year Abu Mazen's popularity has steadily increased, which is no small consideration in view of the prediction that he would never be able to fill Arafat's shoes. If on the basis of the foregoing evidence we grant that Arafat's political death had long preceded his physical death, the next logical step is to establish the causes that led to the gradual demise of a political leader probably unparalleled in contemporary history for his inexhaustible energy, his political cunning and his almost stubborn determination to survive in power in spite of the many threats to his life. Arafat's political death was not so much a product of the aging process as it was of the loss of his ability to fathom the changes that time had brought. Despite profound developments that have swept the region and the world, he continued to believe in his ability to revive those unrecoverable golden years when he was at the peak of his popularity. Prey to this illusion, he failed to act quickly enough to break the freeze in the political process that had begun to set in following the collapse of the Camp David and Taba talks, as a result of which the Palestinian leader, who had once understood better than any of his contemporaries how dangerous political stagnation was, not only to the Palestinian cause but also to his own career, found himself increasingly hemmed in until he lost his manoeuverability entirely following the militarisation of the Intifada and beneath the fallout of the events of 11 September on the Palestinian question. To compound his predicament, Arafat fell into another type of trap that was not entirely of his own making. Arafat had struck a record as the most frequently invited Arab leader to the White House in the Clinton era. That situation reversed itself entirely with Bush's succession, with the new president inaugurating his foreign policy towards the Middle East on the premise that almost everything his predecessor had done with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict was wrong. Nevertheless, after a period of applying a hands-off approach, the Bush administration was encouraged to get involved again, which it did through a string of Middle East envoys, the last of whom was General Anthony Zinni. Unlike the Israelis, Arafat was happy to deal with General Zinni, who, in January 2002, was just about to set off to Washington carrying new ideas from Arafat when Israel announced that it had seized the ship Karine, bound for Palestine with some 50 tonnes of weapons on board. Israeli authorities supplied Zinni with a large dossier of photographs, documents and confessions linking the weapons ship directly to Arafat. Soon afterwards, Israeli newspapers reported Bush as saying, "to us, Arafat is dead." Whether Bush actually did say this or not, it became one of the White House's central premises for dealing with the Palestinian situation. Another cause of Arafat's political death is more directly related to his head-on collision with Sharon. Arafat had boasted that he had survived at the vanguard of the Palestinian struggle through five Israeli presidents and nine Israeli prime ministers. In Israel he was widely regarded as a prime cause of political instability: since Oslo no Israeli prime minister had succeeded in completing his full legal term, as political crises always compelled them to call for early elections. When Sharon came to power, however, he revived his personal vendetta against Arafat. Arafat believed that by escalating the Intifada, Sharon would be lured into committing grave tactical errors that would expose to the Israeli electorate his incompetence at handling the Intifada and remind the world of his record as a war criminal. For his part, Sharon campaigned to fix in the mind of international public opinion the image of Arafat as a leader of international terrorism, towards which end he persistently held Arafat responsible for all suicide bombings against Israel, even if Hamas or the Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. Sharon then shifted the thrust of his attack against the Palestinians. He now lashed out against Arafat as a corrupt dictator and called upon the international community to pressure the Palestinians into instituting wide-ranging political reforms -- a demand that became Israel's new precondition for any progress in the political process. Arafat failed to realise that the rules of the game had changed entirely. Sharon, unlike his Labour Party predecessors, had no desire whatsoever to reach a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, and the purpose of his assault was not so much to pressure Arafat into making concessions as it was to back the Palestinian leader into a corner, preparatory to ousting him entirely. It was no coincidence that at this time people began, for the first time, to contemplate a successor to Arafat. Arafat thus passed the remaining years of his life not only as a prisoner in his Ramallah compound but also politically paralysed. Bereft of avenues for exercising his familiar genius for wriggling out of predicaments and seizing the initiative, he was effectively politically dead, which brings us back to his physical death and the suspicions surrounding that death. Any serious investigation into this question must, of course, rest upon official documents. These are the medical report issued by Percy Military Hospital in France where Arafat was treated until his death, which was submitted to Arafat's nephew, Nasser Al-Qidwa; and the report issued on 12 October 2005 by the committee formed by the PA to investigate the causes of Arafat's death. In addition to these reports, there are other potentially useful documents. One is the account that appeared in one of the chapters of Avi Yissacharoff and Amos Harel's recently published The Seventh War, and which contains the views of several Israeli medical experts on the hypothesis of the poisoning of Arafat. Another source is to be found in the provocative statements issued by Arafat's personal physician, Ashraf Al-Kurdi, who is reported to have said, "I know that the doctors in Paris found the AIDS virus in Arafat's blood," adding, "Arafat was poisoned and the AIDS virus was introduced into his bloodstream in order to cover up the traces of the poison." Al-Kurdi relates that when he had last visited Arafat on 27 October 2004, he could barely recognise him. "He had lost a lot of weight. He complained of severe kidney and stomach pains. He had no appetite. His red blood cell count was down. He had red spots on his face and his skin was jaundiced. Any doctor could tell you immediately that these are the symptoms of poisoning." Dr Jill Logasi, head of the Israeli Federation of Blood Analysts, said that these conditions were symptomatic of infection by AIDS. The Seventh War, on the other hand, cites an AIDS expert who contended that the likelihood of Arafat being infected by AIDS was extremely weak. Even if the virus had been deliberately injected into him at a relatively recent date, it would be almost impossible for it to wreak such damage on his digestive tract in such a short period of time. The book also cited the opinion of an Israeli blood expert who ruled out the possibility of poison. "If Arafat had been poisoned there would also have been a drop in the white blood cell count and this did not occur in this case," he said, to which Al-Kurdi responded: "Perhaps he was administered a new type of poison that doesn't affect white blood cells." The French medical report was of a different opinion: "The tests that were conducted were unable to identify a cause that would explain the combination of symptoms that resulted in the death of the patient ... Tests for poisoning were conducted against the various types of poison in French laboratories, and these tests did not demonstrate that poisoning could account for the condition of the patient." As for the report by the Palestinian fact- finding committee, it stated: "Death resulted from a severe brain haemorrhage that terminated a complex clinical condition that cannot be explained by known pathology. Although many specialists were consulted and asked to conduct all possible tests, none of these were able to determine an identifiable cause or ailment that would have led to the clinical condition that ultimately resulted in the death of President Arafat." The report concluded that an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Arafat's illness might, at some point in the future, shed light on that clinical condition. On this basis, Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Alaa appended a comment to the report stating, "This extremely important file must remain open until the full truth is revealed." Surprisingly, the Palestinian medical report confirmed that Arafat had been given a full battery of tests, including a range of tests for HIV antibodies, and that these turned out negative. This confirmation is in stark contradiction to the Israeli account and the statements of several physicians, all of which deny that Arafat was tested for AIDS in France. On the other hand, all the rumours agree that Arafat's ailment was introduced via the digestive tract and that this occurred precisely following his dinner on 12 October 2004. Apart from the fact that it is virtually impossible to identify a specific date for an ailment that would produce that array of complications in such a short time before his death, there is another report that indicates that Arafat suffered the same symptoms almost exactly a year earlier. On 7 October 2003, Israel's daily Maarev reported that Arafat suffered a sharp decline in his health as the result of an intestinal inflammation and liver malfunction. The report went on to conjecture that Arafat was infected by Hepatitis E or B, or by some bacterial contaminant in his vascular tract that would cause liver and possibly kidney failure and eventually death. It added that Arafat suffered from vomiting, diarrhoea, severe fatigue and lack of concentration -- the same symptoms he was said to have displayed so suddenly after dinner on 12 October 2004. The same Maarev news item of a year earlier observed that some at the time had speculated that Arafat's condition was terminal. Clearly, then, Arafat's condition had originated sometime earlier than 12 October 2004. That something deadly had been put into his dinner that evening is also ruled out by the fact that others joined him in that meal and that Arafat had the habit of giving guests bites of food from his own plate. Therefore, the only way he could have been poisoned that night was if he partook of a sweet presented to him by one of his guests or if he had been pricked by a contaminated pin of some sort while welcoming his guests with his customary embrace. It is also noteworthy that the symptoms Arafat suffered a year earlier appeared several days after he had received a delegation of Israelis and other foreigners who had offered themselves as human shields in the event that Sharon moved to expel him from Ramallah. That one of the 10 Israelis and 30 other foreigners in that delegation may have had a hand in that illness merits consideration in light of a book that appeared in Norway last month and that contains a confession by a Norwegian woman to the effect that she had worked as a Mossad agent, who had posed as an ardent advocate of the Palestinian cause and that she had played a central role in the assassination of Abu Jihad in Tunisia in April 1988. This is not to suggest that all Israeli or foreign pro- Palestinian activists are Mossad plants. However, one cannot help but be struck by the coincidence of the release of this information at the time of the investigation into the mysterious causes of Arafat's death.
