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Posted on 15-11-2004 Yasser Arafat by David Hirst, November 11, 2004
From an early age, Muhammad Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, the
sixth child of a Palestinian spice, incense and grocery merchant, sensed
that a high destiny awaited him. It did - but Yasser Arafat, who has died
aged 75, assuredly earned it by his own endeavours too.
By the standard of lifelong, indefatigable, and for him courageous
dedication to a cause, he deserved the title of Mr Palestine that he held
for a whole generation of his people's struggle. But by the standards of
ultimate achievement, he didn't; rarely can a "liberator" have strayed
further from the original ideals of "liberation".
Arafat was born in Cairo, where his father had settled for business
reasons, but after the death of his mother, the four-year-old was packed
off to Jerusalem to live with his uncle in a house by the Wailing Wall and
al-Aqsa mosque.
The Zionists' passionate struggle to have exclusive control of the
traditionally Muslim-administered Wall made these holy places an
emotionally charged arena for the wider struggle for Palestine unfolding
under British mandatory rule. Arafat witnessed anguished family debates
about the country's future, and saw something of the "great rebellion",
the armed uprising of a desperate and dispossessed peasantry which served
as an inspiration for the later, equally unavailing "armed struggle" of
his own making.
In 1937, on his father's second marriage, he returned to Cairo, where
middle class comforts were more than offset by the emotional troubles
which an unloved stepmother spread about her. When his father married yet
again, his elder sister Inam was assigned the task of bringing up her
siblings.
The dominating role of women in Arafat's early life probably contributed
to a compulsive desire to dominate and lead himself. Inam soon concluded
that he was "not like other children in playing or in his feelings... He
gathered the Arab kids of the district, formed them into groups and made
them march and drill. He carried a stick and he used to beat those who did
not obey his commands."
Outside Palestine during "the catastrophe" - the 1948 imposing of Israel
upon some 78% of the country - he didn't directly suffer the terrors and
humiliation of mass flight and exile. But long before that he was steeping
himself in political and military affairs. By 1946, the 17-year-old Cairo
schoolboy realised that, with the Zionists pressing their armed violence,
the Palestinians would have to fight. He became a key, intrepid figure in
smuggling arms from Egypt into Palestine.
But his adolescent exploits were wasted. As Arab armies entered Palestine,
"an Egyptian officer came to my group and demanded that we hand over our
weapons ... we protested ... but it was no good ... in that moment I knew
we had been betrayed by these regimes."
He plunged into preparation for the coming struggle - convinced that if
Palestinians relied on others to decide for them, they would never recover
their homeland. They had no decision-making institutions, so he set about
creating them. He took over the stagnant Cairo-based League Of Palestinian
Students.
Tireless, wily, domineering, he exhibited another vital trait which helped
shape his career, and, through it, the history of the Middle East. At a
congress in Prague, he suddenly donned the keffiyeh, or traditional
chequered head-dress, which, as well as hiding his entirely bald pate,
became his emblem. The gesture sprang from his delight in surprise,
showmanship and the theatrical gesture. Style is often the man, and there
was surely an intrinsic affinity between this and a remarkable ability to
adapt himself and his movement, suddenly, spectacularly, to new goals and
policies in a changing strategic and political environment.
In Prague, the 26-year-old student was already advertising his sense of
destiny, referring to himself, only half-jokingly perhaps, as "Mr
Palestine". And yet, like many contemporaries, he might well have eschewed
politics altogether, and become a self-made man of a more conventional
kind. Armed with a Cairo university engineering degree, he went to Kuwait
in 1958, one of those stateless Palestinians searching for work in the
remote, uncomfortable, undeveloped, but newly oil-rich British-protected
emirate. He began as a public works department junior site engineer. Then
he set up his own company, subsequently claiming that he had been "well on
the way to becoming a millionaire".
An exaggeration, perhaps, but his brief business foray later consolidated
a carefully cultivated, if genuine, aspect of his personality. As the
leader of his people, he disposed of billions and made canny use of them
as an instrument of policy and patronage, but led the most spartan of
private lives. Similarly, for all his reputed liaisons with women, he
could claim that, at great cost in contentment, his only marriage was to
his Revolution.
Helped by the funds which his dalliance with material things procured him,
he took the first, clandestine steps that led to his emergence as one of
the household names of the age: the incarnation, however flawed, of all
their aspirations to most Palestinians; of evil and the would-be
destruction of their state to most Israelis; of their most sacred,
exasperating, and unavoidable obligations to most Arab regimes; of a
gradual conversion from "terrorist" to politician, even statesman, in the
eyes of an outside world.
In Kuwait, in 1959, with his close friend Abu Jihad, he began publishing a
crudely edited magazine, Our Palestine, which, with impetuous and uncouth
vigour, lamented the Palestinian refugees' plight and the inaction of Arab
regimes, and trumpeted the ideal of the Return, with a full-scale
"population liberation war" as the only means of achieving it. Together
they formed the Fatah guerrilla organisation's first, five-man underground
cell. On January 1 1965, ill-trained, pitifully short of both weapons and
funds, the Feyadeen (those who sacrifice themselves), mounted their first
trans-frontier raid into the "Zionist gangster-state".
Arafat's guerrillas were always a much greater challenge to the Arab
regimes than they were to the Israelis. In theory, the regimes too were
preparing to liberate Palestine - but by conventional military means in
their own good time. The first "martyr" fell victim, characteristically,
to the Jordanian army. Upon his return from a raid, Arafat himself had a
spell in a Syrian jail, amid rumours that the new Syrian defence minister,
one Hafiz al-Assad, wanted to hang him and all his comrades.
These early Arafat exploits, though mere pinpricks, gave Israel another
reason to fight a war that would end with the country gaining the
remaining 22% of Palestine - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza -
which had eluded it in its "war of independence". Even after the
shattering Arab defeat in the 1967 war, his guerrillas never put down
roots in the newly occupied territories, let alone original Israel proper.
Arafat is said to have made his getaway across the Jordan river disguised
as a mother carrying a baby, a story that reinforced his growing
reputation for the narrow escape and an uncanny sense of survival.
After the battle of Karameh, a small Jordanian town in which, on March 21
1968, an ill-armed band of guerrillas inflicted heavy casualties on a
vastly superior force of Israeli invaders, the Fedayeen became the Arab
world's darlings. Volunteers flocked to join it and Fatah became a state
within the Jordanian state, with Arafat as its "spokesman". Soon he became
chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), that assembly of
generally docile notables which Egypt's President Nasser had established
in 1964 as a way of keeping in check just such ardent young men as
himself.
Too many fledgling "freedom-fighters" took to swaggering around the
Jordanian capital Amman, advertising their ambition to replace the
Hashemite kingdom with their own revolutionary order - and Arafat fell
victim to his sudden, meteoric success. His movement suffered from organic
defects typical of too-rapid growth - together with those of his
individualistic, haphazard leadership style. In "Black September", 1970,
King Hussein unleashed his Bedouin soldiers against him - an Arab army
dealing Arafat the first of his great reverses.
In a new Lebanese exile, exploiting that country's divisions, he built
himself a stronger power base. Yet he was now further from his natural
Palestinian environment and his goal of "complete liberation" through
"armed struggle". After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the partial Arab
military comeback that engendered a serious bout of American peace-making,
he began edging away from "revolution till victory" towards a "doctrine of
stages". He sought what immediate gains he could from a political
settlement without renouncing the historical right to all of Palestine. It
was the beginning of a moderation that was to take further him than he
could have imagined.
For a while his diplomatic successes overshadowed his military ones. In
1974, King Hussein, his historic Arab rival, recognised the PLO as "the
sole legitimate spokesman of the Palestinian people". Two weeks later, he
addressed the United Nations general assembly at its first full-dress
debate on the "Palestine question" since 1952, becoming the first leader
of a "national liberation movement" to be so honoured.
That triumph was followed by a dreary period of diplomatic stagnation -
and more military-strategic reverses, inflicted first by Arabs, then
Israelis, then Arabs again. He took sides in the Lebanese civil war. When
his proteges, the Muslim-leftists, were getting the upper hand, Syria's
President Assad switched sides, sending in his army to help the right-wing
Christian Phalangists. The civil war's first phase ended in 1976 with the
atrocious siege and fall of the Palestinian refugee camp of Tal al-Zaatar.
At an emergency summit, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait rescued Arafat from Syrian
onslaughts.
In 1982 it was the Israelis who invaded Lebanon. In the three-month siege
of Beirut, they hunted the PLO leader in person, using F15s as flying
assassination squads while their quarry slept on the beach and in parks to
evade them. Two hundred people died when, with a laser-guided vacuum bomb,
they flattened an apartment block he had left moments before.
With the loss of his last Lebanese politico-military power base, Tunis
became his headquarters. Though the Phalangist pogrom of defenceless
refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila followed his exile, these were
not his personally bleakest moments. They came 15 months later after he
had slipped back into the Syrian-controlled part of Lebanon, where Assad
had helped foment a rebellion against him in the ranks of what was left of
the Fatah guerrillas.
Arafat's bold stroke failed: bombarded by Israel from the sea, besieged by
Syria, he sailed from Tripoli under a European-arranged safe passage.
"Such," prematurely declared the New York Times, "is the bizarre ending of
a movement that, for all its daring, never found a political vision."
Three years of seemingly growing irrelevance did indeed lie ahead. And in
1985 Israeli F15s killed 73 people at his seafront Tunis headquarters. His
nose for danger had supposedly saved him yet again: he had been out
"jogging" at the time. But his political fortunes were sinking to their
lowest ebb - at Arab hands. At a 1987 summit, to his fury, Arab leaders
for the first time put something other than Palestine - the Iraq-Iran war
- at the top of their agenda.
But within weeks the great survivor was savouring a sweet recovery. With
the spontaneous, non-armed intifada as his new asset, he found himself in
a stronger position than the long, costly "armed struggle" ever conferred
on him; the stones that youngsters hurled at Israeli soldiers were more
potent than Kalashnikovs. In 1988, he solemnly proclaimed his adherence to
the "two-state" solution, involving the Palestinians' renunciation of 78%
of their original homeland. He recognised Israel's right to exist. There
began a long dreamt of US-PLO dialogue; he called it the Palestinians'
"passport to the world".
His historic offer was a delusion, a failed gamble, such was the
continuing weakness of Palestinians - and Arabs. For Israel, he was the
unregenerate terrorist; and Washington would not gainsay its protege.
To enhance his bargaining power he looked more to a militarily powerful,
increasingly militant Iraq. And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he
backed him, a fatuous miscalculation. In American eyes he forfeited much
of the moral and diplomatic respectability he had slowly garnered. If he
had taken the other side, he would have been better placed to secure
Palestine's place in the "new world order" the US sought to bring into
being.
Still, it was a measure of his personal ascendancy that he persuaded the
Palestinians to go to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, the first time
Israel and its Arab neighbours had talked to each other across a table.
But they did so at the price of historic concessions. The Israelis chose
which Palestinians they talked to: there was no place for PLO members, let
alone Arafat, in the Palestinian delegation. They also largely set the
agenda; the Americans backed their refusal to discuss anything suggesting
the Palestinians might benefit from such a fundamental 20th-century right
as "self-determination".
Madrid got nowhere. It became tempting to speculate that he was tiring of
his devotion to the revolution, when, at 62, and to the often disapproving
surprise of his people, he took a 28-year-old Palestinian Christian wife,
Suha Tawil. Tempting, but wrong. He kept up his endlessly airborne
routine. In 1992, his aircraft crash-landed during a Libyan sandstorm. The
crew sacrificed themselves to save him - testimony to the loyalty he
inspired.
One Jerusalem newspaper called his escape a "heavenly referendum"; for
many Palestinians, the relief and joy was genuine enough. Yet before long
it was the Israelis who, though they could never love him, re-cast him as
an enemy who gave them much more than they had dared to hope.
He began the secret talks that astonished the world as the Oslo agreement.
Some of his officials whispered that the crash, the shock it caused to
faculties already going awry, had pushed him into this last extremity of
"moderation". Weaknesses in Arafat the man now impinged, as never before,
on the cause he embodied. Individualism, vanity, deviousness,
authoritarianism, a mystical belief in his infallibility had long been
apparent. But now it became clear just how primary a concern to Mr
Palestine was the destiny of - Mr Palestine. What he wanted, and was ready
to pay almost any price to secure, was to come back into the game from
which the terms of the Madrid conference, the rise of the "insider"
leadership, and the appeal of Hamas fundamentalists, threatened to exclude
him.
In one stroke, he did come back. On September 13 1993 he won his accolade
as a world statesman. In the signing ceremony on the White House lawn, the
64-year-old former "terrorist" chieftain shook hands with Yitzhak Rabin,
prime minister of the Jewish state which he had once made it his mission
to remove from the earth.
The price was immense. He claimed that, with Oslo, he had set in train a
momentum inexorably leading to Israel's withdrawal from all the occupied
territories; the Palestinians were on the road to statehood; he saw the
beckoning spires and minarets of its capital, East Jerusalem.
Nine months later he did at least achieve a strictly physical proximity to
them. He returned "home". But the self-governing areas he returned to were
the merest fragments, in Jericho and Gaza, not merely of original 1948
Palestine, but of the post-1967 22% of it on which he was to build his
state. And he came as collaborator as much as liberator.
Oslo provided for a series of "interim" agreements leading to
"final-status" talks. An Israeli commentator said of the first of them:
"when one looks through all the lofty phraseology, all the deliberate
disinformation, the hundreds of pettifogging sections, sub-sections,
appendices and protocols, one clearly recognises that the Israeli victory
was absolute and Palestine defeat abject."
It went on like this for six years, long after it had become obvious that
his "momentum" was working against, not for him. It had been bound to do
so, because, in this dispensation that outlawed violence, spurned UN
jurisprudence on the conflict, and consecrated a congenitally pro-Israeli
US as sole arbiter of the peace process, the balance of power was more
overwhelmingly in Israel's favour than ever. The "interim" agreements
which should have advanced his conception of "final status" only advanced
the Israelis' conception.
Meanwhile he was grievously wanting in that other great, complementary
task - the building of his state in the making. His vaunted Palestinian
"democracy" was no different from the Arab regimes he had so excoriated
for the abuse of his own people and their own. More people were then
dying, under torture and maltreatment, in Palestinian jails than in
Israeli ones. His unofficial economic "advisers" threw up a ramshackle,
nepotistic edifice of monopoly, racketeering and naked extortion which
enriched them as it further impoverished society at large, and - being so
inefficient - reduced the economic base for all. In 1999, unprecedentedly,
20 leading citizens denounced not just high officials and their business
cronies, but the "president", who had "opened the doors to the
opportunists to spread their rottenness through the Palestinian street".
With his fortunes again at such a dangerous low ebb, he was approaching
another critical point: persist in policies and methods which were slowly
undoing him, or revert, to some form of a strategy of militancy and
confrontation - and rely anew on the support of his people, rather than
the favour of the US, to carry it off. But it was less he, than Israeli
prime minister Ehud Barak, who imposed this choice.
Barak conceived the fantastically overweening notion of telescoping
everything - the "interim" stages which had fallen hopelessly behind
schedule as well as the "final status" ones which had been left to the end
precisely because they were so intractable - into one climactic conclave.
This would "end the 100-year conflict" at a stroke. In July 2000, at
President Clinton's Camp David retreat, he laid before Arafat his
take-it-or-leave-it historic compromise. In return for his solemnly
abjuring all further claims on Israel, Israel would acquiesce in the
emergence of a Palestine state. Or at least the pathetic travesty of one,
covering even less than the 22% of the original homeland to which he had
already agreed to confine it; without real sovereignty, East Jerusalem as
its capital, or the return of refugees. Most of the detested, illegal
settlements would remain.
After 15 days the conference collapsed. Arafat had stood firm, evidently
deciding that it had been bad enough, and tactically ruinous, to cede
historic goals temporarily; but quite another to cede them for all time,
in the context of a final settlement. He might be Mr Palestine, but he had
no Palestinian, Arab or Islamic mandate for ceding Jerusalem's sovereignty
or abandoning the rights of four million refugees.
>From this collapse grew the second intifada, essentially a popular revolt,
first against the Israeli occupation and the realisation that the Oslo
peace process would never bring it to an end, and, potentially, against
Arafat and the Palestine Authority (PA) which had so long connived in the
fiction that it could.
It took on its own life and momentum. Arafat was at best in nominal
control; its true leaders were men of a younger generation such as Marwan
Barghouti. As a member of the secular, mainstream Fatah organisation, he
owed him formal allegiance, but his growing popularity, partly stemming
from the decline in his boss's, gave him a measure of autonomy. His
objective was confined to ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
and that being so, he confined his followers' attacks to the soldiers and
settlers who were the symbols and instruments of it.
The intifada's other activists were the fundamentalists of Hamas and
Islamic jihad. They did not oppose Arafat, but nor did they owe any
allegiance to him. Their suicide exploits inside Israel proper betokened
the much larger meaning which the intifada carried for them: "complete
liberation" to which, in his early years, Arafat had subscribed.
The death toll mounted beneath the overwhelmingly superior firepower the
Israelis could bring to bear: from small-scale attrition of sniper and
small arms fire, through systematic assassinations, to tanks, helicopter
gunships and F16s unleashed on targets in densely populated civilian
neighbourhoods. Poverty, hatred and despair mounted too.
Most Israelis saw the intifada as an existential threat. And they all
blamed Arafat. For the peace-seeking left he had betrayed them and all
their strivings, with a resort to violence just when a historic
breakthrough seemed within grasp.
For the right, he had revealed himself once more as the unregenerate
killer they always held him to be. This consensus led, in February 2001,
to the rise of Ariel Sharon, the "hero" of Sabra and Shatila, at the head
of Israel's most extreme, bellicose government in history.
Sharon had one ambition: to suppress the intifada by as much brute force
as he could risk without antagonising the Americans or his Labour
coalition partners beyond endurance. And he did not mind if in the process
he was to bring Arafat and the PA down; he would escape from any
obligation to pursue the peace process by eliminating the only party with
whom he could pursue it.
Like Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the events of September 11 2001
were another of those unforeseeable cataclysms that impinged on the
Palestinian arena. This time Arafat was determined to put himself on the
side of the angels. Endorsing America's "war on terror", he sought to end
the intifada. His police arrested militants who broke the ceasefire and
shot and killed demonstrators who protested against the Anglo-American
assault on Afghanistan.
But it did not yield the tangible gain from the Americans in the shape of
a serious, impartial peace initiative at last, on which he was banking. On
the contrary, after a brief and humiliating attempt, under Arab pressure,
to rein Sharon in, George Bush II, the most pro-Israeli president ever,
did little more than look on as he re-conquered much of the West Bank,
wreaked havoc on the infrastructure of the PA, and subjected Arafat
himself to a humiliating siege in his headquarters in Ramallah. Only
Arafat's office was left standing amid mounds of rubble.
In the summer of 2002, Bush pronounced Arafat unfit to rule - as
"irrelevant", in other words, as Sharon said he was - and a prime target,
along with Saddam Hussein, for those "regime changes" which Bush now
envisaged across much of the Middle East.
In 2003, after overthrowing Saddam through full-scale war, he sought to
oust Arafat by diplomatic, less dramatic means. He secured the appointment
of a docile prime minister, Abu Mazin, who he hoped was ready to do what
Arafat was not - go to war against the Islamic militants without any
assurance that in return the Israelis would make any worthwhile
concessions in the peace-making.
But Arafat, with his continued grip on the levers of power, joined Sharon,
with his intransigence and continued "targeted killings", and drove the
hapless and unpopular appointee to despair and resignation. With the total
breakdown of the ceasefire that had come with the latest "road map", and a
resumption of the suicide bombings, the Israeli government announced its
intention to "remove" Arafat, this "absolute obstacle to any attempt at
reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis."
"Removal" to a new exile or removal to "the other world" - that was the
question. But this time the great survivor survived only to be carried off
by what for him was the most extraordinary, because ordinary, of deaths.
Yasser Arafat (Muhammad Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini),
politician, born August 4 1929; died November 11 2004
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