Middle East
Yasser Arafat (1929-2004)
The End of the Arafat Era
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A Palestinian security man grieves after the news of Yasir Arafat's death spread in Gaza City on November 11, 2004. (Photo: Christophe Simon/AFP-Getty Images) |
Palestinians streamed into the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip today in an outpouring of grief over the death of Yasser Arafat, the enduring symbol of their nationalist cause. Others flocked to the battered Ramallah headquarters where Arafat was confined by Israeli troops for 2-1/2 years.
In a statement, Egyptian President Mubarak honoured Mr. Arafat as "a historic leader who led his people with courage in all the stages of the national struggle."
In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees met news of Mr. Arafat's death with wails of grief and volleys of gunfire.
However, it was in Jordan that Mr. Arafat's death was felt particularly hard and many were angry the funeral would not be taking place in the kingdom. Jordan has the largest community of Palestinians in the diaspora - most of the 1.8 million refugees there still live in camps.
We are not sure if the last images of Yasser Arafat, the grey fox, the lion of Ramallah, will be the ones of him getting into the helicopter to be whisked away to Paris for medical attention. The few hundred onlookers who came to show their support during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan called out one of his favourite Palestinian sayings: The mountain cannot be shaken by the wind.
At the back of Muqata, his battered Ramallah headquarters there remains the metal poles several meters high encased in barrels of cement to provide a sufficient deterrent to Israel's Apache helicopters from descending far enough to get a clear shot at Arafat. From there, you can see the parking lot which serves as a kind of make-shift museum of blown-up BMW's, Mercedes and Fiats - a curated critique of Israeli military aggression.
From this perspective, the Muqata looks more like a gaudy, sprawling auto parts dealership than a palace befitting the president of a nation.
Today earth-moving equipment set to work digging up the grounds of Muqata, where Arafat will be buried and his destroyed headquarters will no doubt be turned into a shrine to the icon of Palestinian nationalism.
Arafat was not just the symbol of Palestinian aspirations; he was the controversial and misunderstood figure who defined "terrorist chic" for the Western world who never felt totally comfortable with him. Dressed in his khafiya, surrounded by advisors, he was always the face on the evening news after every act of violence, which spoke volumes about the Western view of Arafat.
Arafat was also associated with that method of dissent that so repulsed the rest of the world - the suicide bomb. And so it was easy for those in the West to malign him simply as a supporter of violence. But to do so was to undermine the complexity of the situation.
Arafat was born in 1929 in Jerusalem, Gaza or Cairo - nobody really knows for sure. His mother died when he was four and he was sent to live with his uncle in Jerusalem. He never spoke about his father.
One of his earliest memories was said to be of British soldiers breaking into the house after midnight, beating members of his family and breaking furniture. He would later fight against the British and also the establishment of Israel in 1948 by fighting in Gaza.
In 1949, Arafat began studying engineering at Cairo University where he was prominent in Palestinian student affairs. As founder of a Palestinian student movement, he presented a petition calling for Palestinian recognition to the Egyptian president written in blood. He settled in Kuwait where he worked in the department of public works and became a contractor.
He soon began resistance activities and formed Al Fatah “the conquest,” in 1959 and began publishing a magazine advocating armed struggle against Israel. He also spent brief stints in prison in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.
By 1964, Arafat had left Kuwait for Jordan and began armed raids into Israel earning his stripes as a revolutionary guerrilla leader. It was also in 1964 that the Palestine Liberation organization was formed under the hospices of the Arab League, by bringing together disparate factions supporting a Palestinian state.
After the 1967 Six Day War, Fatah emerged as the most organized Palestinian force and Arafat took over chairmanship of the more moderate Palestine Liberation Organization. At this point, the PLO ceased to be a puppet of the Arab states, but became an independent nationalist organization based in Jordan. In September 1970, concerned that Jordan was being used as a base for violent attacks into Israel, King Hussein exiled Arafat to Lebanon after the PLO leader had effectively set up his own mini-state with a security apparatus within Jordan.
By 1974, the PLO became, in effect the sole representative of the Palestinian people, and that November, Arafat became the first Palestinian leader to plead his people’s cause before the General Assembly.
In 1975, tensions between Palestinians and Lebanese helped set off the Lebanese civil war. Despite some antagonism, he maintained his headquarters in Beirut for several years.
The 1982 Israeli invasion into Lebanon sent Arafat and the rest of the PLO leadership to Tunis. As Arafat left Lebanon, he said he was "on his way to Palestine." And in a way, he was.
Arafat was by now developing a mythic reputation by surviving an airplane crash, several Israeli attempts to assassinate him and a serious stroke.
By 1987, the intifada erupted and Palestinian aspirations once again percolated to international attention. What began as rock throwing in Gaza, turned into the political impetus for Arafat to redefine himself.
In 1988, at a special session of the United Nations in Switzerland, Arafat declared that the PLO supported "the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to live in peace and security, including the state of Palestine, Israel and other neighbours."
After a brief setback when the PLO supported Iraq during the Gulf War, Arafat was a signatory to the Oslo Accords in 1993 with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
On the White House lawn where the final agreement was signed, Rabin, the legendary Israeli, said, "We are destined to live together, on the same soil in the same land. We, the soldiers who have returned from battles stained with blood...say to you today, in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough!...We, like you, are people - people who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live side by side with you in dignity, in affinity as human beings, as free men."
To which Arafat replied, "Our people do not consider that exercising the right to self-determination could violate the rights of their neighbours or infringe on their security. Rather, putting an end to their feelings of being wronged and of having suffered an historic injustice is the strongest guarantee to achieve coexistence and openness between our two peoples and the future generations."
This set the stage for Arafat's triumphant return to Gaza in 1994 and the struggle for power sharing between the Tunis old guard and the new leadership that had emerged from the intifada. Arafat's wife, Suha, remained in Paris.
After crossing Egypt into Gaza, he left his car and kissed the ground after 27 years in exile. He was welcomed by tens of thousands of cheering Palestinians and a city bedecked with the red, green, black and white colors of the Palestinian flag.
The assassination of Mr. Rabin in 1995 came like an earthquake and was a personal and political blow to Mr. Arafat. All the enthusiasm of the Western world that had seen the fall of the Berlin Wall and the bringing down of the apartheid regime in South Africa was not going to see an historic settlement that would bring peace to Israel and Palestine.
Binyamin Netanyahu followed as the new Israeli leader and the peace process stalled. One last attempt by outgoing President Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat at Camp David ended up without a deal and no agreement on the right of return issue. The Israelis called it "Barak's Generous Offer" and the Palestinians called it "Barak's Big Lie."
A month after Camp David, violence erupted when Ariel Sharon made his visit to the Temple Mount. September 11th changed the playing field and shifted American priorities related to the conflict. Bush and Sharon became tighter allies, further isolating Arafat. By 2002, Yasir Arafat was already a weakened leader when the Israeli siege took over the West Bank.
New settlements continued to be constructed in the Occupied Territories. Police headquarters in Bethlehem and Ramallah were ransacked. Arafat was accused of corruption, cronyism, not being able to crack down on the violence, and not breaking the links between Fatah and the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade.
Rival factions fought for control while Hamas solidified control of the Gaza Strip. The Occupation became more structured and solidified on the ground. The death toll continued to rise. Since the beginning of 2000, close to 6,000 Palestinians and Israelis lay dead as a result of the violence.
Israel benefited by maintaining a weakened Arafat and a weakened Palestinian Authority. Arafat, in turn, couldn't find a find a way to quell the anger and end the violence. The situation on the ground continued to deteriorate.
Israel was able to continue expansion into the West Bank and meet their security objectives unilaterally by building a Separation Wall and continuing incursions into Palestinian cities and villages, which included assassinations and home demolitions without international intervention, while supporting a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. In the short term, the Sharon gamble worked.
Even with Arafat's own weaknesses and inability to show a unified front in the face of deep adversity, he succeeded on a number of levels. The two state solution is still the language of the day. Most international institutions and United Nations resolutions support the Palestinian aspirations for nationhood and the International Court of Justice essentially declared the Separation Wall illegal.
As the old adage goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And in a nation where even the Israeli state was preceded by terrorist organizations and a leader named Menachem Begin who went on to become Prime Minister, Arafat's transformation from "terrorist" to Nobel prize winning statesman had its limitations.
When the heady days of the Oslo Accord were over and the reality of Rabin's death and the meaning of it sunk in, the leadership on all sides contributed to the vacuum that was created in the late nineties.
In a way, the violence that erupted in September 2000 was almost inevitable. It was the result of a profound failure of leadership on all sides.
So now, as the Occupied Territories prepares for a Palestinian power struggle and a power shift from within between the Tunis old guard, the young Fatah activists, the Communists represented by the Palestine People's Party, the more militant Hamas and other splinter groups, the Palestinian desire for self-determination will suffer in the short term. It will be up to people like Mahmoud Abbas, Ahmed Qureia, Saeb Arakat and others to fashion a responsible leadership that will take the Palestinians to the place they aspire to be.
Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian’s father figure who dominated his people's struggle for 40 years, whose body is being flown to Cairo for his funeral, will never be the leader that brought home the peace or signed the final deal. He wanted to die a martyr in the heart of a battle that forged his Palestine. But that was not to be. As the Globe and Mail recently said, "It will be the Arafat legacy, that he kept the fight alive; but his dream unfulfilled."
