Embodiment of Palestinian Hopes Wages a Lonely Battle
 

A few days ago, while in Amman, I drove down to the Dead Sea for dinner at the Movenpick Hotel. A checkpoint for the Jordanian army refused to let us pass, claiming that they had orders from the their government to prevent foreign nationals from getting through, fearing that they would penetrate into Israel to carry out violent attacks. This was obviously a paranoid measure taken to avoid a worsening of relations between Israel and its neighboring countries. After much debate, the officer let us pass on the condition that we show ourselves on the way back, so he could see that none of us stayed back to blow ourselves up in Israel. We drove on, thinking about the conspiracy theory that dominates the Middle East. En route, we were overwhelmed by the sight of the West Bank, Ramallah and Jerusalem in the immediate horizon. This was the closest any of us would ever get to occupied Jerusalem, I believed, and noticed that a friend, who is a Palestinian from Haifa, forced to leave in 1948, was trying hard to hold back his tears. He, and others as well, believes that the Arab-Israeli conflict is a conspiracy against the people of Palestine, orchestrated by the US to guarantee the existence of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. While we were there, news broke that the Israeli army had broken into Yasser Arafat's compound and was once again, calling on him to come up and surrender himself and 200 of his followers. Unlike the Ramallah siege of March 2002, however, this time, there were no parades in Amman or any Arab capital. Apart from the occupied territories, there were no strikes in Arafat's favor, no posters, and no Abu Ammar on satellite television repeating his trademark slogans. Why has the world forgotten Yasser Arafat?

For a few months, given the rising American rhetoric over Iraq, the international community was seemingly too busy to mind the occupied territories or its beleaguered political leader. Everyone has been talking about Saddam Hussein and no one was interested in Arafat's domestic problems: the arguments within the Legislative Council, the upcoming presidential elections in January 2003, or the resignation of Arafat's new cabinet. A section of the 'Arab street' unfortunately has fallen for the conspiracy theory and come to believe that Arafat, not Ariel Sharon, is the cause of the Palestinian people's present plight. When all else fails to offer a suitable explanation as to why the world turned against them, people turn to conspiracy theories. This has been the case repeatedly since 1948. Since them, millions of people have convinced themselves that all developments taking place around them are the handiwork of one dark force or another, acting at the behest of and controlled by invisible enemies. This tendency is characteristic not only of ordinary citizens, but also of thinkers, secular intellectuals, communists, radical nationalists and even of prominent members of the political mainstream.

Personally I have always treated conspiracy theories with the contempt that they deserve. And I have always dismissed the arguments of conspiracy theorists with reference to any leader, big or small, leftwing or rightwing. Some have made drastic miscalculations that have served no one but their enemies, but this is not because they were acting at the behest of somebody or the other. In my view, under no circumstances should their nationalist credentials be subjected to doubt or suspicion. Yasser Arafat is a man who has lost every war he has waged, survived more hardships than any other leader, and outlived all conditions and contemporaries. Admittedly he has made mistakes - notably the guerrilla activities conducted on Lebanese soil that sparked off the civil war in the country way back in 1975. However, if the man were to die today, he should be hailed for at least one major achievement - that of bringing his people back into Palestine to wage a war from within the occupied territories. Maybe Arafat knew that the Oslo agreement would not last when he signed it in 1993, but he went along with it for many reasons. First, he transformed his own image from "terrorist" to peacemaker. Second, he succeeded in obtaining international recognition for an entity called "Palestine". Before that, Palestine was not even mentioned on the world map. Now at least, some maps have the term "Palestinian Territories" written on them, and the Palestinians have a parliament, a government and state institutions of their own. Then, Arafat brought a miserable population out of exile in impoverishment to their homeland, to build it from within. True they are being killed, and true their life is one hardship after another, but the fact remains that they are there and they are fighting. Making the world a battleground for the Palestinians was a temporary phase that lasted briefly in the 1980s, and it was bound to come to an end. Leading a diplomatic struggle became impossible when the Gulf War ended and Arafat's ally Saddam Hussein was defeated. He was viewed with scrutiny from then onwards for siding with Baghdad, and many in the United States refused to endorse his proposals for peace. They even refused to let him attend the Madrid peace conference to express their unhappiness.

Fighting from Jordan was crossed out of the list of options in 1970, fighting from Syria was never an option for Arafat, and fighting from Lebanon was eliminated when the Israelis invaded Beirut in 1982. And fighting with Gulf money was also dropped the minute Arafat allied himself with Saddam. Arafat realized, long before I did, that there were no idealistic nationalists left. The only true nationalists remaining are the people of Palestine and the struggle is no longer a Nasser-style regional conflict but essentially a Palestinian-Israeli war.

Beirut
Khaleej Times
September 27, 2002