Naseer Aruri* takes stock of the twofold legacy of Arafat The contrast between the three ceremonies marking the death of Yasser Arafat -- in Paris, Cairo and Ramallah -- reflected the significance and controversies that surrounded the life and time of the Palestinian leader. The farewell departure of Arafat's body from the Paris military airport was that of a head of state with full military ceremony, including a full contingent of the French Republican Guard, whose orchestra played, in addition to the requiem, the Palestinian and French national anthems. It was a dignified, respectful send-off of a head of state. A number of Palestinian youths, gathering at the burial site of Arafat in Ramallah, waved French flags as well as Palestinian flags. The funeral in Cairo was also a full military state funeral with Arafat's coffin carried on a horse-drawn caisson, but the Egyptian masses were no place to be seen, having been kept a great distant away from the sight of dignitaries who attended the ceremonies. All of that was in sharp contrast to the people's funeral in Ramallah, where all the formal preparations were summarily dismissed by a public eager to be part of the welcome and the farewell to the only leader they knew for more than four decades. It was a moving spectacle as I watched on television the distant rules of decorum and solemnity spontaneously traded for a ready-made collective reunion of an orphaned community and the symbol of its struggle for emancipation. The legacy of Yasser Arafat, who has been a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination since 1967, is twofold: One is the re-weaving and re-uniting of a shattered nation. He took the lead in transforming Palestine from a community of refugees and a stateless people languishing under occupation, dispossessed, dismembered, and disenfranchised, to a nation-state-in-waiting supported by a global consensus. The fractured Palestinian nation with its three separate components -- those under the 1967 Israeli occupation, the second class citizens of Israel and the refugees -- found unity and coherence within the framework which Arafat's movement had built -- the PLO. He placed the Palestine question on the international agenda and secured the affirmation of Palestinian fundamental rights. The second component of his legacy is the mapping of the PLO peace policy based on the pursuit of a two-state solution. By the end of the 1970s, a global consensus had effectively prevailed on the right of the Palestinians to establish their independent state alongside Israel. The right of Palestinian self-determination and sovereign political existence became the PLO's and Arafat's principal contribution to the Palestinian cause. During the past decade, however, a Palestinian state has been rendered impractical due to the creation of facts on the ground and US diplomatic cover for vigorous Israeli conquest of Palestinian land and resources. ARAFAT'S EARLY CAREER: Mohamed Abdul-Raouf Arafat, whose career as Palestinian leader spanned four decades, was one of seven children born to Palestinian parents, Abdul- Raouf Arafat (from the Al-Qudwah family of Gaza and Khan Younis) and Zahwa (from the Abu Al-Saoud family of Jerusalem). Born on 24 August 1929, he spent his youthful years going back and forth between Cairo and Jerusalem. He acquired interest in the Palestine question at an early age, and by 1946, at the age of 17, he was smuggling weapons to Palestine from Cairo. He participated in some of the battles of the 1948 war, and preached the idea that the Palestinians should do their own fighting to protect their country from the Zionists, while Arab governments should confine their role to supplying military and material help. When he enrolled at King Fuad University (now Cairo University) in 1950, he was highly politicised, leading a number of demonstrations trying to persuade the Egyptian authorities to allow him to set up a military training camp in preparation for a future struggle inside Palestine. It was in student politics in the early 1950s where he met most of his future colleagues in the Palestine Liberation Organisation during the next decade, including Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Salim Zanoun (Abu Adeeb) and others. By 1952, he was elected president of the Union of Palestinian Students, a position from which he addressed the new Egyptian revolutionary leaders, focussing on the need to create an independent Palestinian movement. He succeeded in gaining permission to publish a student newspaper, The Voice of Palestine, but he also succeeded in landing himself in an Egyptian jail because of his perceived cooperation with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. According to his biographer, Alan Hart, Arafat's first major act turning a regional conflict to a potential global confrontation was the sabotaging of huge Israeli water stores near Faluja. It provoked the 28 February 1955 Israeli attack on Gaza, bringing Nasser's Egypt into an eventual effective alliance with the Soviet Union. The resultant change in Egyptian policy and the subsequent Israeli invasion and occupation of Gaza and Sinai brought Arafat closer to Nasser's government, which had offered him a job in the Egyptian Army. But by 1957, he made his decision to leave Cairo for Kuwait in order to pursue his long-standing goal of organising the Palestinians. There, together with Khalil Wazir (later known as Abu Jihad), Khaled Al-Hassan and other activists, he established the first underground cell of what became known as Fatah (Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine) -- Harakat Al-Tahrir Al-Watani Al- Filastini. It remained as a nationalist movement, devoid of a real ideology and a clear vision THE PLO POST-1967: Arafat and colleagues went on to eventually capture the seats of power in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which had been established in Cairo in January 1964 by Arab regimes as a tool to manipulate the Palestinians. After the 1967 debacle, with Arab regimes on the defensive in the battle for Arab public opinion, Arafat and his movement penetrated the hearts and minds of the Palestinian masses, and indeed, of many Arabs everywhere. The movement's slogans of armed struggle, people's war and a democratic secular state in all of Palestine captured the imagination of ordinary Arabs, now disenchanted with Arab armies, Arab diplomacy and world public opinion. Having failed miserably to redress Palestinian grievances since 1948, not to mention their failure to protect their own territorial integrity, the regimes stepped aside for a few years following the June 1967 defeat, effectively allowing Arafat to set the pace in the public arena. Arafat was transformed to a revolutionary hero as the mystique of guerrilla warfare was taking hold in a new Arab generation. It was a short honeymoon, however, as Arafat's experience with guerrilla warfare was rather brief. His ability to engage in real guerrilla war, Vietnam style, was impeded by serious constraints, including an unfavourable terrain, an imbalance of power, an inability to organise inside the occupied territories, as well as poor leadership. Moreover, while he was a master tactician, he had never been an effective strategic thinker or a competent military leader, though he was a statesman, defined as representing the real will of his people/ nation in the wider world. While he spoke the language of ordinary Palestinians, his autocratic style was at variance with the egalitarianism associated with the cause which he came to represent. His widely-publicised "revolution" was launched from bases controlled by Arab regimes which had to contend with savage retaliatory aerial bombardment by Israel. By 1972, diplomacy had replaced that illusory armed struggle, when Arafat agreed to scale down military operations in exchange for Arab economic and diplomatic support. The first manifestation of the quid pro quo was the recognition of the PLO as sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people by the Arab Summit meeting at Rabat, Morocco in 1973. A tangible result of that endeavour and Arafat's diplomatic skill was the emergence of the PLO as the national address of the Palestinian people, repository of their fundamental rights, and their government-in-waiting. Under Arafat's leadership as PLO chairman, the United Nations reaffirmed the rights of the Palestinians to statehood, to return home, to recover occupied East Jerusalem, to be rid of illegal Israeli settlements, to gain freedom from occupation and to struggle by all means necessary, including "military resistance", to secure these rights. ARAFAT AND OSLO: Arafat's trip to Oslo, however, followed by his long-coveted visit to the White House in 1993, were to consign these essential rights to the status of deferred issues to be negotiated only after a transitional period of Palestinian "self-government", in isolated and fractured communities, under over- all Israeli control. There was no reason to assume that the final status negotiations could possibly produce anything more than a truncated Palestinian state lacking real sovereignty, territorial contiguity and economic independence. The global consensus on Palestine and the reaffirmation of Palestinian fundamental rights by the United Nations have constituted Arafat's legacy, which has unfortunately been undermined by his fateful trip to the Norwegian capital in 1993. There, he signed that open-ended agreement to reach agreement, which continues to inflict great suffering on the cause and the people. A formidable Palestinian position, supported by the international community and bolstered by international law, has been traded for one that became hopelessly dependent on an imaginary US willingness and ability to persuade or pressure Israel, which has never materialised to this day. The Oslo process, which downgraded Palestinian rights, had briefly solidified Arafat's own power both in the Palestinian domestic arena and at the level of the international community, but it ended in a calamity for the Palestinians. To his three pre-Oslo titles (PLO chairman since 1969, chair of Fatah Central Committee since the late 1950s and president of the State of Palestine since the 1988 PNC meeting), he added president of the Palestine Authority in October 1993. The Oslo documents, however, which were drafted by the Israeli foreign office lawyers, refer to him as "Ra'es of the Palestinian Council", in order to purge any connotations of real executive authority in a sovereign entity. The PA over which he presided has been managed without a constitution, not because the text did not exist, but because he neglected to promulgate the very document, which he had commissioned. Arafat's personal style of governance, both within the PLO during the past three decades, and later in the PA since Oslo, has not only been incompatible with pluralistic norms, but may have been counter-productive in terms of nation- building requirements. During his last years as head of the PA, he exercised more than 60 functions, which included the chairmanship of various newly-established boards and committees created under the Oslo agreements. His style of micro-management, whereby he combined mundane matters, such as approving airline tickets for ordinary employees and higher-ranking officials, with ruling on matters of state, had always constituted an impediment to rational decision-making. His leadership would have been more effective had he paid more attention to the macro level rather than investing his energies in the micro sphere. His government was more involved in symbols and trappings of statehood than in the real functions of a state, which include development, planning, production and social welfare. For many in his ruling faction, the "revolution" in the past, and the PA bureaucracy later, had become a source of employment and livelihood. He kept the many factions in the fold by a system of patronage over which he himself presided, making sure that his power remained uncontested. In a recent article about the succession of Yasser Arafat, Jean Francois Legrain wrote the following about the 1996 PA elections under Oslo, which gave Arafat 87 per cent of the vote for the post of Rais: "Far from making a break with the past by transforming Palestinian politics into a democratic party system, the PA's modus operandi is a revival of the 'politics of notables', a tradition well adapted to making an un-integrated political society work. The PA, like the Porte in the 19th century and later, the Hashemite dynasty, operates as a centre, while the population remains as a periphery, with mediation between the two being assumed by the 'neo-notables' -- the elected Legislative Council members and/or the apparatchiks." Arafat's rehabilitation by the US and Israel in the 1990s, which had earned him a Noble peace prize and a temporary statesman's role, might have been an expensive package for his own oppressed constituents who received neither a peace dividend nor a realistic prospect for a dignified existence, and whose very existence on the land was later challenged seriously by Sharon's Draconian measures. Unlike contemporaries in third world revolutionary movements, who survived to see liberation emerge from either armed struggle or diplomatic success, or most often a combination of the two, Arafat opted for a long-drawn process that promised neither emancipation for a segment of his people nor restitution for the Palestinian people as a whole, a process that did not even recognise the fact that the West Bank and Gaza are occupied territories. The lawyers of the Israeli foreign office, who drafted the Oslo agreements, insured that the legal basis of what they presented for Arafat's signature would exclude Palestinian sovereignty on any portion of the land extending between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Meanwhile, Arafat's core negotiators were not dominated by lawyers and the requisite cartographers and other experts (who had been utilised by the Abdul-Shafi-led team in Madrid), but rather, consisted mainly of entrepreneurs and loyalists who were eager to cash in on the many investment and power-driven opportunities that Oslo was expected to yield. In the hundreds of pages of the Oslo documents there was no mention whatsoever of such terms as occupation, withdrawal, international law, the Geneva Convention of 1949, Palestinian sovereignty and other phrases that might even hint that the endgame included Palestinian emancipation and independent statehood. The Oslo process has, effectively, released Israel from the occupier's obligations and rendered international law inoperable. In fact, Israel used the Oslo process as a diplomatic cover to extend and consolidate the illegal occupation and to double the settler population, thus rendering a two- state solution, Arafat's strategic goal, a geographic impossibility. Three years ago, when the Palestinian uprising (Intifada) entered its 14th month, US leaders began to parrot Israel's Ariel Sharon's call on the Palestinians under occupation to "stop the violence" and "end the terrorism". That happened even as the Israeli military persisted in assassinating Palestinian leaders and other non- combatants with US-supplied equipment and as it tightened the crippling siege on more than three million Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories, including the imprisonment of Arafat in a few battered rooms in his Muqataa headquarters in Ramallah. Israel's offensive strategy was also exemplified at the time of the presumed peace negotiations when the supposedly dovish Labour prime ministers, the late Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, clashed with Arafat repeatedly over the meaning and interpretations of Oslo, shortly after the latter set up his regime in Gaza in 1994. Long after Rabin's assassination, Arafat kept referring to him with nostalgia as "my friend and partner", ignoring Rabin's and Peres' agenda which differed from that of Sharon only in style. Arafat was obliged by Peres to summon his parliament-in-exile (which I and a number of my colleagues on the PNC had boycotted) for the express purpose of amending the Palestinian National Covenant, in the presence of former President Bill Clinton, and in accordance with Israeli wishes. All references to armed struggle to achieve liberation were thus removed from the Charter, without any reciprocal obligation on the part of Israel to re-examine Israeli legislation legalising land conquest, colonial settlement and other apartheid-like practices. Nor did it seem to matter that the Noble Laureate, Peres, had just ordered the Israeli military in the spring of 1996 to attack south Lebanon causing the exodus of nearly a million civilians and the massacre of more than 100 defenceless Lebanese taking shelters at the UN compound in Qana. CAMP DAVID: Arafat's biggest challenge came during the summer of 2000, after he was manoeuvred into the diplomatic trap of the Camp David II summit. To his credit, he initially recognised the danger and, thus, resisted attending a high-level meeting which lacked adequate preparation, but around which great expectations had been deliberately built. And yet he soon succumbed to the pressure exerted by Clinton whose own agenda called for incorporating some sort of a Middle East peace into his tarnished legacy, six months prior to leaving office. Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's own agenda called for something that can be called a diplomatic breakthrough. Arafat's agenda, on the other hand, required a genuine settlement that must terminate the belligerent occupation and grant his people a viable, contiguous and independent state existing alongside Israel. Such an outcome was not in the offing, and thus Arafat's rejection of Barak's famous "generous offer" has proven to be the pretext for demonising him and undermining the cause of his people. Although President Clinton's assistant, Robert Malley, revealed in the New York Review of Books and in a New York Times op-ed that the notion of the presumed 95 per cent of the West Bank conceded by Barak to Arafat was untrue, the US media kept on trumpeting the myth, in effect manufacturing truth and constructing a non- existent, totally fictitious reality. Moving from Camp David to Taba in January 2001, US consumers of the mass media not only failed to realise that the figures were delusional, but also overlooked the fact that both Clinton and Barak were going out of office, and thus nothing could be implemented. It is not known to what extent Arafat knew that Israel's Labour "slower" approach to peace with the Palestinians was to squeeze them in untenable arrangements and gridlock conditions while the strategic goal was to accomplish a "legal" closing of the files. Such conditions would then encourage the Palestinians to either become completely compliant or to emigrate, thus creating a "voluntary transfer", as known in Zionist parlance. The difference between that and Sharon's strategy is that the latter would simply destroy the Palestinian nation, demolish its infrastructure, complete land acquisitions while not sharing Labour's concern for the façade of international law. Indeed, Sharon's model of colonialism is one combining the North American and the South African. The Palestinians have neither a sovereign existence nor even an autonomous structure anywhere in pre-1948 Palestine; hence the two-state solution was more a phantom than a realistic strategy. ARAFAT AS A PRISONER: Beginning in December 2001 Arafat was forced by Sharon to sit as a virtual prisoner in his office, surrounded by Israeli tanks which moved a few yards closer with every act of Palestinian resistance, as Sharon's US-provided F-16s and Apache helicopters proceeded to systematically demolish most of the infrastructure Arafat had built during the Oslo years. That included his airport, the Gaza seaport, the Radio and Television station, numerous police buildings and administrative offices, plus much of the road system connecting Palestinian villages and towns to each other, placing most of the three million inhabitants under a virtual town arrest. Arafat remained prisoner through the month of May 2002 when Sharon's armies invaded all the Palestinian cities in his domain except Gaza, which he attacked in the summer and autumn of 2004. In fact, Arafat's imprisonment only ended with his departure to France for medical treatment on 29 October 2004. He returned home and to his prison in a coffin to a tumultuous and highly emotional welcome on 11 November 2004. President George W Bush's rhetoric about Arafat seemed different from that of Sharon only in style and nuance, but for both men Arafat's claimed irrelevance and inability to lead his people were used as a tactic to delegitimise Palestinian rights -- to enable Sharon to move forward with his unilateral Gaza "disengagement" and its concomitant annexation of West Bank territory and to relieve Bush from committing the US to a diplomatic solution actually ending the occupation. Arafat accomplished the extraordinary feat of injecting Palestine in the global public mind, but he was also a victim of US and Israeli rejectionist policies. He has been demonised and branded an unqualified partner for peace. His death will rob Israel and the Bush administration of the "no partner" mantra. It will remove a red-herring that has long served to freeze the so-called peace process and block any meaningful advance toward peace. In his absence, we cannot underestimate Israel's propensity to foment disorder and instigate chaos in the occupied territories in order to support its spurious claims that Palestinians cannot govern themselves. In fact, the Palestinians in the occupied territories have already demonstrated a visible political maturity by insuring a smooth transition and pursuing decentralisation. Arafat's absence from the scene will undoubtedly be felt by all sectors of Palestinian society, including his most ardent critics. It is not to be forgotten that the PLO which he chaired throughout his adult life remains the anchor and address of eight million dispersed Palestinians. Even in death Arafat will continue to epitomize the Palestinian tragedy: a funeral in stages including a state funeral in Cairo, shielded from the masses, followed by a presumed "transitional" burial in the West Bank ironically recalls the infamous Oslo modality for dividing the issues into an "interim phase" and "final status". The remark by the so-called Israeli Minister of Justice Yosef Lapid (born in Yugoslavia) that "Jerusalem is a city where Jews bury their kings. It's not a city where we want to bury an Arab terrorist, a mass murderer" captures the essence of this conflict: while actual terrorist -- such as Menachem Begin -- are deemed kings, and millions of European Jewish settlers enjoy full rights in Arafat's homeland, his right at death for burial in the land of his birth has been denied. * The writer is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
