Can the Palestinian movement survive Arafat? asks Mohamed Sid-Ahmed Following the announcement of Arafat's death, the main question on everybody's mind was whether the Palestinian factions could prove themselves capable of ensuring a smooth and dignified transition of power. Before he passed away, a most undignified dispute broke out between Arafat's wife Soha and top PLO personalities. Under French law, a wife has the right to make all decisions about her husband's treatment and to control all information about his medical condition. Jealously guarding access to her husband while he lay in a deep coma at the Percy military hospital near Paris, Soha Arafat accused the Palestinian delegation that flew in to see him of "trying to bury Abu Ammar alive". The sudden solicitude for a husband she had not seen since the second Intifada broke out in early 2001 did not ring true. Interpreted by many as an attempt to intimidate the new Palestinian leadership into giving her a share of money belonging to the PLO and held in Arafat's name, her ill-advised outburst did nothing to endear her to the Palestinian people, who already resented her for abandoning their leader in his time of need. So far, the Palestinian leadership has shown impressive discipline and self-restraint. A potential clash was averted when the last surviving member of Fatah's founding fathers, Farouq Qaddoumi, who differed with the organisation's current leadership over the distribution of leading positions, was named chairman of Fatah. The glue which bonded the different factions together was grief over the passing of Arafat, whose role in consolidating Palestinian national unity rebuts allegations that he promoted discord, was responsible for the spread of terrorism and placed obstacles in the way of reaching a settlement. What has happened so far is encouraging. But the situation remains highly volatile, and the Palestinians must remain vigilant if they are to avoid falling prey to provocations at this particularly sensitive moment. Arafat embodied two distinct stages in the history of the Palestinian movement, each reflecting two different aspects of his personality. In the first stage, Arafat was called upon to highlight his talents as a guerrilla fighter leading an armed liberation struggle, in the second his talents as a statesman and peace negotiator. The lines of demarcation between the two stages were not always as clear as they should have been. Ever since he appeared before the UN General Assembly in 1974 wearing a holster and carrying an olive branch, Arafat shifted between peace talks and armed struggle. He passed from the first stage to the second on 13 September 1993, when he signed the Oslo Accords with Yitzhak Rabin. This placed Arafat in a position where he had to assert his role as a negotiator side by side with his role as a fighter resisting occupation. The two roles are obviously irreconcilable. A negotiator is required to desist from acts of violence, contrary to a resistance fighter who cannot totally exclude violence. The violence to which Palestinian resistance fighters resort is described by both Bush and Sharon as terrorism in order to justify the violence Sharon is systematically raining down on the Palestinians. Actually, Sharon's logic is based on a fallacy, because armed resistance to military occupation is a right for all peoples, as sanctioned by the United Nations Charter, and thus cannot be described as terrorism. However, with Arafat gone, it is no longer possible to overlook the ambiguity surrounding the issue of violence, to blur the distinction between legitimate resistance and unjustified violence. There is no doubt that violence against innocent civilians and against civil society as a whole should be banned. Using violence against military targets is justified, using it against civilian targets is unacceptable. Resistance, including armed resistance, displays characteristics that distinguish it from diplomatic activity and a process of negotiations. Contrary to diplomatic action, which requires openness, transparency and finding common ground, a resistance movement engaged in guerrilla warfare operates under a veil of secrecy. Also, resistance movements require unquestioning obedience and strong centralisation, while political and diplomatic action requires a democratic climate of give and take, laying the foundations for a process of collective decision-making that limits individual centralised action by a leader with exceptional powers. The history of the Palestinian resistance movement shows that there is no replacement for Arafat. He symbolised the Palestinian cause in all its dimensions, to the extent that his enemies claim that without Arafat, there would have been no Palestinian movement! Can the Palestinian factions prove that the Palestinian struggle will not disappear with the disappearance of his person? Can they ensure its continued vitality by making the fundamental changes required as quickly as possible? Can they use the massive outpouring of grief at his passing to imbue the movement with a new spirit of democracy by replacing the long-standing tradition of centralised authority with a pattern of collective decision-making? Unconventional in life, Arafat was equally unconventional in death, receiving not one but three ceremonial send-offs. The first was in France, where the French prime minister presided over a solemn airport ceremony at which an honour guard carried his coffin, draped in the Palestinian flag, on board the military jet which flew him to Cairo. There the state funeral was held, attended by an impressive number of Arab and Muslim leaders, who were of course unable to accompany him to his final resting place. His third and, for the moment, final, stop was Ramallah, where he will rest until his remains can be moved to East Jerusalem when conditions so permit. The prospects of this happening any time soon are extremely remote given the continued intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Sharon has reoccupied most of the West Bank and has announced that his withdrawal from Gaza is the last Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territory. Arafat's death has left the Palestinians feeling bereft and has plunged the region into a state of uncertainty. The new Palestinian leadership is facing huge challenges both on the internal front and in their dealings with Israel. These challenges can only be overcome if unity is preserved and serious reforms are initiated. A new era of openness and transparency is called for, and democratic foundations for the Palestinian movement need to be set in place. This entails rooting out corruption and bribery. Confusing openness and transparency in the Palestinian ranks with activities inherited from the exceptional prerogatives exercised by the unchallenged leader of a resistance movement created opportunities for various forms of corruption. If this was tolerated under Arafat's unchallenged leadership, it is not so under any other leader who does not enjoy the late president's credentials. Democracy is the cornerstone for Palestinian movement's ability to face the challenges of the coming period and the safety valve that can prevent the situation from sliding into chaos. Arafat's position at the head of the Palestinian Authority was used by Sharon to justify his argument that Israel had no partner with whom to negotiate for peace. Now that Arafat is no longer there and can no longer be used as an excuse for Israeli intransigence, will negotiations be resumed? Or will Israel look for some other pretext to justify dragging its feet? The real problem is that Sharon does not want to negotiate at all. In his eyes, the roadmap is the result of negotiations undertaken by former Israeli governments which are not binding on his government. Sharon was fixated on the idea of doing away with Arafat altogether, often hinting at the possibility of assassinating the man he called an arch-terrorist. Khaled Mishaal, a leading Hamas figure, has accused Israel of having poisoned Arafat. Other sources have excluded the possibility that he was poisoned, but in view of the secrecy surrounding his diagnosis and the silence of the treating doctors over the cause of death, rumours of Israeli involvement persist. What is worth noting is that Arafat's demise has been a central subject of the Western media in a way that has surpassed all expectations. CNN devoted two full days to the event. It seems that there is a price to pay for a leader like Arafat to make his breakthrough to respectability. In this case, Arafat had to be totally absent in order to become totally present! Throughout his life, Arafat's indefatigable dedication to the Palestinian cause made him a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and the embodiment of his people's aspirations for statehood. His role on the world stage and in the history of the region gave him an almost mythical stature which is likely to grow after his death, despite the mistakes he made and the fact that at the time of his death the Palestinian struggle is at one of its lowest ebbs, physically if not politically. CNN's coverage of the event differs totally from Bush's appraisal of the Arafat legacy. Arafat has acquired a new dimension. Does this augur a new development that nobody predicted?
