Will an -ism appear after Arafat, asks Abdel-Moneim Said* Following the death of president Gamal Abdel-Nasser there emerged a group that referred to themselves as Nasserists and espoused a political ideology they called Nasserism. To Arab Nationalist purists at the time the labelling and the trend they stood for amounted to little more than intellectual charlatanism. It was ideological sophistry, the adulation of an individual over reverence for an ideal. A similar phenomenon occurred following the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, when a contingent of Iran's Islamic Revolution announced itself as the vanguard of Khomeinism while a more modest group described themselves as "disciples of the Imam". Similarly in Syria, following the death of president Assad, though to my knowledge no one has yet called themselves Assadists or "disciples of the president". Nor did such a phenomenon occur upon the death of His Majesty King Hussein Bin Talal or of the leader of the Faithful, Al-Hassan II, after him, though their sons and a large group of adherents have repeatedly insisted, both publicly and privately, that they are abiding by the wisdom of the two late leaders. Nor is there any reason why something of this sort will not happen in Palestine following the death of Yasser Arafat. The public outpouring of grief at the funeral ceremonies was no less passionate and tumultuous than during the funerals of the Egyptian, Iranian, Syrian, Jordanian and Moroccan leaders. And, as in Egypt, Iran, Syria, Jordan and Morocco, Palestinians have been effusive in the epithets bestowed upon their late president: the "leader and symbol", the "father, unifier and protector of the nation", the "liberator and spearhead of the resurrection of the Palestinian people". Whether or not we see the emergence of "Arafatists" and "Arafatism" or merely those who vow to abide by his wisdom, follow in his footsteps and dwell on the lessons and principles they learned from him, we can be sure of one thing -- the political existence of Abu Ammar has not ended with his death. Quite the opposite. True to Arab tradition he will remain with us for a long time to come, his physical presence kept alive through images recorded by the modern media, his ideas through countless speeches, press statements and interviews, his behaviour and actions through a life story replete with victories and setbacks. Arafat often said that the Palestinian cause, which he came to embody, represented the "difficulty factor" in Middle Eastern equations. One might take this expression to imply that the Palestinian cause represented an intractable political problem that persistently confounded the calculations of the most adept political mathematicians. It presumes that problems in the Middle East could have been easily solved were it not for the existence of the Palestinian problem. Yet the disintegration of Somalia, the civil war in Sudan, the Iraq- Iran war, the occupation and liberation of Kuwait and economic, political and social underdevelopment in the Middle East are not even remotely connected to the Palestinian cause. So why did the late Palestinian leader want to burden his cause with all the concerns and anxieties of the region. Why did he seek to represent his people, and himself, as the difficult factor? Perhaps what Arafat meant was that the Palestinian problem was difficult -- impossible, even -- to ignore and that no matter how obstinate other problems in the Middle East appeared, how stressful they might be for the international community, solving them will not solve the more intricate problem that lies at the heart of the Middle East. The Palestinian cause complicates the already complicated and intertwined problems of the Middle East, and it cannot be ignored because it is the most important of all Middle Eastern issues. It is a thesis that can be tested against historical observation. We could posit, for example, that the rest of the world agreed with Arafat's point of view, which is why it turned its attention away from the Palestinian cause and concentrated on other problems which did not pose quite such a dilemma. This might at least explain why the Palestinian problem has defied solution for more than half a century. If Arafat's theory is to stand it is because the rest of the world prefers to deal with solvable problems rather than with those that are not. When, in July, the US Senate's Foreign Affairs Committee solicited my opinion on the roadmap the members of the committee, without exception, believed Arafat to be the major obstacle to progress towards a settlement of the Arab- Israeli conflict. They did not quite describe him as the difficult factor, but they believed he constituted a problem rather than a solution. At the time I defended Arafat. I found it incomprehensible that a man imprisoned in less than 50 square metres of his compound, a man who could not take a bath without Israeli approval because Israel controlled the water mains, could be perceived as exercising so much power and influence. It appears now, however, that Arafat was correct, both with respect to his cause and his person. So now we can anticipate the rise of a group of Palestinians who will develop this concept into a fully-fledged political philosophy known as Arafatism and this, in turn, will inevitably engender another group arising that believes that it may well have been better for the Palestinian cause not to have been quite so difficult. Factors are much easier to deal with when they are divisible into manageable chunks, when these chunks can be processed by ordinary calculations and when results do not stretch out to infinity. This criterion will be the test of Arafatism, as it was of Nasserism when Sadat came to power and of Khomeinism when Mohamed Khatami became Iran's president. In the first instance respect for the nationalist leader remained alive while his political philosopht was scattered to the four winds. In the second theory triumphed and prevailed. With Arafatism we will have to wait and see. * The writer is the director of Al-Ahram Centre f or Political and Strategic Studies.
