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Arafat’s legacy leaves conflicting views on Mideast peace

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Also by Ryan Masse:

by Ryan Masse

Friday, November 12, 2004

To some he was a Nobel Peace Prize winner fighting valiantly for his people, to others the embodiment of a terrorist, the mastermind behind a bloody uprising of coordinated suicide bombings. But almost everyone can agree on one thing about Yasser Arafat: for the last 40 years, the man in the kaffiyeh was Palestine.

Indeed, upon learning of Arafat’s death in a French hospital Thursday, President Bush succinctly stated: “The death of Yasser Arafat is a significant moment in Palestinian history.”

Palestinian leadership will now experience a sizable shift with the replacement of their longtime figurehead, and many hope relations in the war-torn Middle East will improve along with the change.

“I have long argued that Yasser Arafat is an obstacle to peace; that a responsible Palestinian leadership can only emerge once he is gone from the scene,” Silvan Shalom, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, said in a statement. “This argument will now be put to the test.”

Palestinians began to fill the leadership gap left by Arafat’s death Thursday, naming former Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He is widely expected to assume the role of Palestinian Authority president in an election in the next 60 days.

Abbas, seen as more moderate than Arafat, fuels hope for many that the U.S. and U.N.-backed roadmap, aimed at ending current violence and creating an independent Palestinian state, can once again attain feasibility.

However, experts at the University of Wisconsin differ over how effective Abbas will be. UW assistant political science professor Jon Pevehouse said the roadmap does not figure to accelerate in the short term and predicted Israel may even see increased violence in the near future. Abbas’s rise may bode well for the roadmap long term, though, Pevehouse said.

But he will not face an easy task in replacing the highly charismatic Arafat, UW senior lecturer Jennifer Loewenstein says. Loewenstein predicts Abbas would not be up to the challenge, because, like Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei, he is a “colorless bureaucrat” indebted to Arafat’s corrupt system.

“They’re part of [Arafat’s] machinery,” Loewenstein, who has traveled extensively in the Middle East and lived in the Gaza Strip, said.

Muhammad Abed, a member of UW’s Palestine Right to Return Coalition and a UW graduate student, said he thought Abbas would try to pursue diplomacy with Israel but said such efforts would likely fail.

“I don’t think the roadmap is a viable avenue,” Abed said, adding it imposes too many restrictions on Palestine.

Legacy

Arafat, meanwhile, leaves behind a decidedly split image between nationalist and terrorist.

At perhaps his most famous moment, Arafat agreed to the Oslo Accords with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993. The agreement, thought as an enormous leap toward a lasting peace in the Middle East, garnered Arafat and Rabin the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

Pevehouse said the agreement represented a high point in Arafat’s role as nationalist leader.

“With that handshake in ‘93, he brought attention to the Palestinians that the world ignored in the ’70s and ’80s,” Pevehouse said.

The Oslo Accords ushered in seven years of relative peace for the turbulent region.

But suicide bombings actually increased during the period, Pevehouse said, and Arafat went back to the negotiation table in 2000 for a summit with then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

It is there that some say the Palestinian showed his true colors — by rejecting the numerous concessions Barak offered, Arafat proved he would give lip service to peace but show no commitment to the cause. The current infitada started shortly after the summit.

As the uprising raged throughout the last years of Arafat’s life, certain foreign leaders increasingly called for his ouster. Throughout his first term, Bush condemned Arafat as an ineffective leader who needed to leave if Israeli-Palestinian relations were to improve.

In the end, Arafat never left power, although the ascension of Abbas and Qorei, along with Israeli-imposed captivity at his Ramallah compound, did weaken his influence.

Arafat’s lifelong goal of an independent Palestinian state was never realized. This failure, Loewenstein said, can be attributed to the fact Arafat never truly wanted an independent state. Instead, Arafat put his own selfish interests above those of his people.

“He was only really committed to getting his own name in lights — he was a megalomaniac,” Loewenstein said. “And the side that doesn’t get much press is that a very large percentage of Palestinians despised Arafat. He was giving his wife in Paris millions of dollars while people in the Gaza Strip suffered from horrible malnutrition.”

But other Palestinians revered Arafat, and Abed says the late leader will be remembered for representing the Palestinian people like no man before him.

“I think he was the embodiment of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination,” Abed said. “His legacy will be as the person who put our plight back on the international agenda.”