Last summer I walked through the enormous piles of rubble of the Muqata in Ramallah where Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat sat under house arrest for three years. Directed by men carrying machine guns, I entered Arafat’s bare-walled conference room. After about five minutes of anxiety, the short, feeble leader, with his trademark black-and-white checkered khafia, walked in, kissed my hand and signaled for the guards to leave the room. I had a brief private meeting with Arafat. But even then, you could see the exhaustion and frustration in his eyes. He was soft-spoken and polite. The wrinkled lines on his face revealed how the last 55 years had taken a toll on his health and emotions. It was a very surreal experience. Sitting right next to me — in the flesh — was one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century.
Arafat, born in Cairo in 1929, began his lifelong fight for Palestinian rights as a teenager when he smuggled weapons into Palestine for use against the British occupiers and Jews fighting for their independence. In 1948 he fought in the Arab-Israeli War. Dismayed by the Arab armies’ poor performance and the establishment of the State of Israel, Arafat returned to school to obtain an engineering degree from the University of Cairo and became the leader of the Palestinian students.
In 1958 he founded Al-Fateh, an underground group of Palestinian nationalists determined to engage in an armed struggle against Israel in order to win independence for the Palestinians. By 1964, he devoted his life to the Palestinian cause, organizing guerilla raids into Israel from Jordan and helping to form the Palestine Liberation Organization. While the PLO was an umbrella organization of several groups of Palestinian resistance movements, Al-Fateh emerged as the strongest. The dismal performance of Arab armies against Israel in 1967 led Al-Fateh to take control of the PLO, electing Arafat as chairman of the executive committee.
After trying to establish a state-within-a-state in Jordan, and later Lebanon, Arafat was expelled to Tunisia where he formed a reputation as a political, rather than military leader, gaining wide support for the Palestinian cause in the international community. After the first Intifada, Arafat became more conciliatory toward Israel and began talks for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Motivated in part by its inability to reign in new Islamist groups, such as Hamas, which ironically Israel helped establish and promote to counter the increasing influence of the P.L.O., Israel agreed to the Oslo Accords in 1993, giving Arafat permission to return to the Occupied Territories and establish the Palestine National Authority in 1995. In 1996, Arafat was elected president with 88 percent of the vote.
Regrettably, Arafat proved to be incapable of governing democratically and was guilty of corruption and nepotism. His failure to improve the lives of Palestinians, combined with the intransigent right-wing Israeli government, which dragged its feet in withdrawing from the Occupied Territories in order to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the violent attacks against Israeli civilians by militant groups, weakened Arafat to the extent that he either could not, or was afraid to, clamp down on terrorism. When he had an opportunity to make a final peace in 2000 at Camp David, though the “generosity” of the take-it-or-leave-it Israeli offer is debatable and has become somewhat of a myth, Arafat lacked either the courage or the political strength at home to work with the proposals to achieve a settlement. A second Intifada began and the violence continued. In December 2001, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon placed Arafat under house arrest and used Arafat’s shortcomings as a pretext to stall withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.
Despite Arafat’s failure to improve the lives of Palestinians and to realize their dream of an independent state during his lifetime and his obsession with power, no one can deny his lifelong struggle to bring the plight of the Palestinians to the attention of the world and to bring them to the position where an independent state would be imaginable considering the long-held policies of the Israeli and American governments against any such thing.
No matter what his enemies and critics may think or say, Arafat made an enormous contribution to his people. Shakespeare’s eulogy for Julius Caesar by Mark Anthony best sums up the tragedy of Arafat’s life: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”
So what happens next? Both Palestinians and Israelis are weary from the conflict that has taken so many innocent lives. The Palestinian cause for freedom and independence, just as was the Zionist struggle, is larger than one man. The Palestinians will elect new leaders who will not be under the constraints that were, rightly or wrongly, on Arafat.
However, Israel now faces a major test. It can no longer use Arafat as an excuse for not taking bold actions for peace by easing restrictions on the Palestinians, withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza, releasing prisoners and accepting the inevitable. Yes, the Palestinian government must fight corruption and terror, but it cannot do it alone. Israel has a responsibility to do its part to prove to the Palestinians that there is hope and that it will accept a peaceful and viable Palestinian state. Otherwise, Hamas’ influence will only grow. Terrorism feeds on hopelessness, which in turn endangers security.
The best security and hope for peace for both Israelis and Palestinians is in respecting one another’s human, civil, political and economic rights.
Natalie J. Mikhail ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism and international relations.
