Writing off Arafat?

If Arafat does go down, he will take a lot with him, writes David Hirst, and the alternative will not be to Israel's liking
If all had gone according to plan, Yasser Arafat would, round about now, have been installing himself in Jerusalem as president of the state of Palestine, co-existent with Israel, which has been the object of all his strivings. But the closer he gets to the fulfilment of his long-standing 'dream' the more his plans seem to go awry, and, instead, he is confined, like a prisoner, to an old hill-top British barracks in Ramallah, a mere six miles from the Holy City, but with his chances of ever entering it looking just about their bleakest ever.
His arch-enemy Ariel Sharon, himself facing prosecution in a Belgian court for his role in the Sabra and Chatila massacres, calls him -- Nobel prize winner and architect of the 'peace of the brave' -- a congenital liar and murderer with whom business is no longer possible.
He demands the arrest and punishment of all the terrorists in his midst, but bombs the very institutions of the Palestine Authority which are supposed to carry out this task. Indeed, he bombards the Arafat compound itself, his way, apparently, of amplifying the message that the whole, dominant rightwing Israeli establishment trumpets forth: if he himself won't do the job, then Israel will do it for him, and banish, or kill, him into the bargain.
The Great Survivor has been written off many times before. Yet his resilience in adversity is legendary, his political comebacks only outdone by his narrow escapes from violent death. So while this is one of the most desperate crises of his long and turbulent career, it may still not be his terminal one.
It has deep roots, in both the sheer, endemic implacability of the Arab- Israeli struggle, and the manner in which he has waged his side of it.
Former terrorist and current, though surely reluctant, harbourer of terrorists he may be; but of all the villainies Israelis ascribe to him, intransigence, an unwillingness to compromise, is the most undeserving. For his whole career is one of ever growing moderation. True, it may have been his endless setbacks that forced it on him. Or his indomitable egotism -- only thus could Mr Palestine retain the position of sole and indispensable embodiment of his people's cause which has been his for more than thirty years. But the fact is that, out of failure and retreat, he always managed to build a new platform for another seeming advance in his personal odyssey, or, as he puts it, his 'long march' to the 'spires and minarets' of Jerusalem. He did so by ever greater curtailment of original goals. For a long time he carried most of his people with him, using the institutions of his 'Palestinian democracy' to endorse them. But however drastic the curtailments, they were never enough for the most moderate of Israelis, while he found it increasingly difficult to persuade his own people that he could ever achieve goals which, in their eyes, were becoming modest to the point of treason. And the greater his difficulties the more he relied on dubious methods -- a shelving of his democracy, and all the well- known flaws and frailties of his Authority -- that have merely compounded them in the end. Now, trapped between Israel diktat, and the popular militancy of his Islamist rivals, an embattled Mr Palestine toys with the terrible necessity of carrying moderation to the point of open war on Palestinians.
His original goals were absolute, essentially the same, in secular-nationalist guise, as those which, in religious guise, Hamas has made its own. On 1 January 1965, a group of ill- trained guerrillas mounted their first raid against the 'Zionist gangster-state.' They belonged to Arafat's then clandestine Fatah organisation. Their aim was the 'complete liberation' of Palestine, the return of the refugees and the dismantling of the Zionist settler-state.
But all that these early Arafat exploits led to was his first great setback. In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war Israel seized the 22 per cent of original Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza, that remained outside its grasp, and on which, 30 years later, he now wants to build his state.
After 1967, he settled in Jordan, a half-Palestinian state. In the 1970, 'Black September' civil war, he suffered the second of his great setbacks, this time at Arab hands. He settled in Lebanon. Though it was a stronger power base than Jordan, it took him further from his natural Palestinian environment, and the possibility of effective 'armed struggle.' After the October, 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and the serious bout of US peace-making it engendered, he edged towards a 'doctrine of states.' He would now seek 'immediate gains' from a political settlement without renouncing the 'historical' right to all of Palestine. Thus began that 'moderation' which would eventually take him further him than he could ever have imagined.
In 1982, the Israelis invaded Beirut, where General Sharon, then Defence Minister, tried countless times to kill him. Driven into a yet another, far-flung, Tunisian exile, his political fortunes sank to their lowest ebb.
They were revived less by his own endeavours than by those of the Palestinian 'insiders,' inhabitants of the occupied territories, who now took on the main burden of the struggle from the 'outsiders' of the refugee Diaspora. Their unarmed 'Intifada of stones' proved more effective than the 'outsiders' Kalashnikovs. Seizing the opportunity for another great advance in moderation, Arafat in 1988 reduced his goals to a 'two-state solution' involving the renunciation of 78 per cent of original Palestine. It earned him the slender reward of a 'US-Palestinian dialogue.'
More setbacks followed, chiefly the largely self-inflicted one of siding with Saddam Hussein in his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That led to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, which the Palestinians -- though not even Arafat himself -- attended at the price of yet more concessions.
But in the end it got him nowhere either, and so it was that, in 1993, he staged the greatest coup of his career, that quantum leap in moderation, the Oslo Accord. With this, Mr Palestine reclaimed, with a vengeance, the role of sole, indispensable, internationally acknowledged peace-maker from which the rise of a new, articulate 'insider' leadership, and the appeal of Hamas fundamentalists, had threatened to exclude him.
But the price of this Faustian compact was great. He claimed that it set in train a momentum that would lead inexorably to the end of occupation and the establishment of his state. Nine months later he did himself return 'home.' But only his coterie of loyalists, and guerrillas-turned-policemen, came with him. The Diaspora saw it as betrayal of the refugees on whose sufferings and sacrifices he had built his now abandoned 'revolutionary' career.
And he came as collaborator as much as liberator. For the Israelis, security -- theirs, not the Palestinians' -- was the be- all and end-all of Oslo. His job was to supply it on their behalf.
But he could only sustain the collaborator's role if he won the political quid pro quo which, through a series of 'interim agreements' leading to 'final status,' was supposedly to come his way. He never could. So-called 'momentum' worked against him, not for him; inevitably so, because in this new dispensation that outlawed violence, spurned the whole accumulated corpus of pro-Palestinian international jurisprudence and consecrated a congenitally pro-Israel US as sole arbiter of the peace process, the balance of power shifted more overwhelmingly in Israel's favour than ever. Obeying the logic of 'take what you can now and seek the rest later' which weakness thrust upon him, he acquiesced in accumulating concessions that only widened the gulf between what he was actually achieving and what he assured his people he would achieve, by this method, in the end.
He was Mr Palestine still, with a charisma and historical legitimacy all his own. But he was steadily losing them, not only because of the abortive peace process, but because he was proving grievously wanting in that other great and complementary task, building his state-in-the-making. Economic misery, corruption, abuse of human rights, the creation of a vast apparatus of repression -- all those flowed, wholly or in part, from the Authority over which he presided.
At the Camp David summit in July 2000, the Oslo fallacy was finally and brutally exposed. Former Israeli premier Ehud Barak may have offered more than ever before. But he was still demanding much more than 78 per cent of Palestine, plus a whole array of other gains which Arafat, standing firm this time, could not accept.
From Camp David's collapse grew the second Intifada. In essence, it was a popular revolt, first against the continued Israeli occupation, and the realisation that Oslo would never end it, and, potentially, against Arafat and his Authority which had so long connived in the fiction that it could.
It took on a momentum of its own, with an ever weaker Arafat at best in nominal control. He did not stem the armed violence and outright terrorism, outlawed by Oslo, into which it slid, either because, with Israel's violence killing far more Palestinians than theirs was killing Israelis, he could not, or because he simply would not without securing real political movement in return.
So all Israelis, left and right, now laid all their anguish at Arafat's door, a national consensus that led to the rise of Sharon at the head of the most extreme, bellicose government in Israel's history.
Sharon had one, ill-disguised ambition: to suppress the Intifada by the use of as much brute force as he could politically risk. If, as a result, he brought Arafat down he did not mind one bit; he would thereby escape from any obligation to pursue the peace process he abhorred by eliminating the only party he could pursue it with.
When, on 11 September, Osama bin Laden struck, the two arch-enemies competed to put themselves on the side of the angels. Endorsing America's 'war on terror,' Arafat tried to end the Intifada; his police arrested militants who broke the new ceasefire and shot and killed demonstrators protesting the assault on Afghanistan. But this appeasement did not yield the commensurate, tangible gain from the Americans he was banking on.
For his part, Sharon contended that Arafat and his Authority had exactly the same relationship to the Islamist militants as the Taliban to al-Qa'eda. And he won the argument hands down, after he assassinated one of Hamas's top militants just as a new American peace mission arrived in the region. Hamas obliged with its latest, suicidal rampage through Jerusalem and Haifa.
Now, in its fateful aftermath, Arafat is called upon to carry the collaborator's role that Oslo requires of him to impossible lengths. If he does or he doesn't he risks his own political, even physical, elimination.
For Hamas is now so popular that to move against it could spell civil war. Not to do so exposes him and his Authority to further military onslaughts from a vengeful Sharon. A Sharon who patently does not even want him to succeed -- for that would rob him of the pretext to get rid of him all together -- and, by his actions, virtually ensures that he won't.
If, at last, the Great Survivor does go down, he will take a lot with him, not merely the failure of that whole generation of Palestinian struggle he embodied, but also any chance -- and some Israelis' hope -- that a succeeding generation that will be significantly more moderate than he. On the contrary, in the chaos that will probably ensure, Hamas may become an even more potent champion of that goal of 'complete liberation' which Arafat and his generation had laid aside.
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The noose tightens 6 - 12 December 2001
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A war without rules 29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001
Dodging responsibility for past killings 29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001
The limits of terror- 29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001
Robbed and humiliated 22 - 28 November 2001
Sticks and stones 22 - 28 November 2001
Israel's Ramadan gift 22 - 28 November 2001
Conditions for war 22 - 28 November 2001
See Intifada: year one 27 Sep. - 3 Oct. 2001
Intifada in focus
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