Walk a Mile in Arafat’s Shoes
They say that you
can never really judge a person unless you have walked a mile in his
shoes. True, and nobody in the Arab world today has walked a mile in
the shoes of Yasser Arafat. Lately, accusations have been mounted
against the Palestinian leader by so-called radical elements of Arab
nationalism, claiming that his concessions to Israel are
"unacceptable." Conservatives have slammed Arafat
for his willingness to deport the Palestinian hostages in the
Church of Nativity,
and his May 4, 2002
speech where he coined suicide attacks as terrorist. Everyone,
however, is judging Arafat by a nationalist yardstick from the
distant luxury of their air-conditioned offices, claiming that he
"should have" shown less flexibility with the U.S. negotiators and
"should have" refused the Israeli deportation of the armed
guerillas. In order to understand the logic behind Arafat's
reasoning, one must first walk a mile in his shoes.
Arafat is probably the only leader in the
world with a record of defeat that he has managed to transform into
victory. His enemies in the Arab
world are currently trying to portray him as the Marshall Petain of
the
Middle East, in
reference to the World War I French war-hero who collaborated with
the Nazi regime in World War II, allegedly to save occupied France,
and was tried in Paris following the fall of the Third Reich as a
traitor. Arafat on the other hand, unlike
Petain, has managed to convince his people that any decision he may
take is best for
Palestine - and
they have always believed him. No matter how badly defeated he was,
no matter how many people died, and how long it took to recover
Palestine, the Palestinians have stood by their leader. Opponents of the PLO Chairman would
argue that his success is derived from the lack of alternative
leadership. However, Arafat was threatened by other leaders before,
especially during his distant and prolonged exile in Tunis, yet
remained atop the Palestinian movement.
In the late 1980s, during the first
Intifada, Abu Ammar was far away from day-to-day affairs in
Palestine, and was nearly isolated by leaders who had stayed behind
in the Occupied Territories. In 1991, while preparing for the Madrid
Peace Conference, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker punished
Arafat's alliance with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the
Gulf War by not inviting him to the peace talks. He approached a
group of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories and asked
them to represent their country instead.
His choice of leaders could not have been
better: Dr Haydar Abdul Shafi, Dr Saeb Erekat, Dr Hanan Ashrawi, and
Dr Faisal al-Husseini. All of them went to Madrid, but rather than
take decisions on their own, flew to Tunis on every single night of
the conference to confer with Arafat.
He was making his point - if he could not go to the Madrid
Conference, then simply, the Madrid Conference would have to come to
him. And, eventually peace was signed by none other than the same
person Baker had sidelined in Madrid.
Earlier this year, Israel tried following
the same policy by alienating Arafat and marketing several
Palestinian leaders as possible alternatives. All of them; Jibril
Rajoub, Mohammad Dahlan, Mahmud Abbas, and Ahmad Qure' also rallied
around Arafat and refused to deviate.
The reason, simply put, is Arafat's ability to lead and impose
himself on world events and leaderships.
True, Arafat's willingness to coin martyr
attacks as terrorist and his readiness to deport Palestinian
citizens to Cyprus and Portugal might seem offensive to the Arab
public at first glance, but one has to observe the pressures he is
facing and the pluses, rather than the minuses, that he has scored.
By internationalizing the Church Affair, he
has achieved two objectives: proven to Israel that force alone
cannot defeat a resistance movement, and brought his struggle to the
limelight of the world arena. He has transformed it from a clash
between Hamas and the IDF into a clash between Zionism and
Christianity. By Christianizing the
affair, and forcing the U.S. and EU into it, Arafat has made the
Palestinian cause always relevant and impossible to ignore. One
would argue that Arafat survives as long as others are willing to
die for the cause; that he lives through the martyrdom of others.
This is also true, but then again, in the
world of revolutionary politics, the rule of law and logic is
absent. Hanan Ashrawi once gave a lecture at the American University
of Beirut (AUB) and advised: "The first rule in being a
revolutionary is to break all the rules."
That's exactly what Arafat has done - break
every rule there is to break in conventional politics. Arafat does
not ask his people to die, but rather invests in their death, and
contrary to what President Bush believes, nobody in Palestine is
complaining.
At the end of the day, even if Arafat dies
before attaining statehood, he will be remembered as having
re-shaped the Palestinian identity in the 20th century.
He did for the Palestinians what Zionism did
for the Jews; bring them from oblivion, persecution of the 1950s,
and ghettos (or refugee camps) into the world order as key
international players in the Middle East.
This identity was first established as
"revolutionary" in the 1960s, where Arafat courted revolutionaries
like Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Gamal Abdul Nasser.
Once an ally of the rebels, he turned to the statesmen at a time
when it became un-popular to be a revolutionary in the 1980s and
1990s. Arafat became a freedom
seeking, peace-loving statesman and portrayed his people as such.
From Chairman Mao and President Castro he shifted to world leaders
like Charles de Gaulle, Jacque Chirac, Jimmy Carter and Bill
Clinton. Arafat also derived
legitimacy by managing to keep all factions of the resistance under
his "spiritual" leadership. He achieved this at times through the
patron-client system, through fake promises, bribes, and in some
cases, lies. His fluid nature made him lose credibility with
hard-line groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but they too rallied
behind him during his six-month siege in Ramallah.
As a national leader, however, he is
entitled to punish those whom he sees as taking miscalculated
decisions, like Hamas following last week's suicide bombing in Tel
Aviv. The attack embarrassed him before the world order and gave
Israel all the reason it needed to victimize itself before President
George Bush. If Sheikh Ahmad Yassin
or Khalid Meshal were at the apex of Palestinian leadership and
Fatah carried out such a foolish operation, they too would have
ordered a similar clampdown. The only
common denominator between all Palestinians is an independent
Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. This position was
agreed to by everyone and included in the PLO Charter that was
drafted in Cairo in 1964. Apart from that, Arafat has kept himself
loose from any ideological commitments and bended with the
prevailing wind, whether it is coming from Washington, Moscow, or
Tel Aviv. By doing so, he has managed
to survive bombardment, siege, plane crashes, warfare, and repeated
assassination attempts by Israel, Libya, Jordan, Syria, and rival
Palestinian groups. Everyone who meant anything in the Middle East
tried assassinating Arafat at one point or another.
He outlived them all, and managed to open
PLO offices in over 100 countries, as well as embassies and
consulates for a state, which until the present, has no definite
borders and is more or less, invisible.
He managed to gain recognition for peoples
whom the world had forgotten. Of course, Arafat also did this with
$300 million per year funneled from the Arab world, which he used to
establish social services, education programmes, media campaigns,
and diplomatic missions, making an estimated 70,000 Palestinian
families directly dependent on him and the PA for their livelihood.
To better
understand Arafat's current position, I found a need to recount the
following story. In 1988, Arafat was trying to open a diplomatic
channel with the United States. Secretary of State George Shultz
sent him a word-for-word declaration that condemned terrorism,
asking him to use it in an official speech in order for Washington
to accept him as a freedom fighter and not a terrorist.
Arafat showed reservations about giving the
speech, but agreed to say it at the upcoming United Nations
Conference in New York, for which the U.S. refused to grant him an
entry visa. To avoid a conflict, the
UN moved the conference to Geneva and Arafat began preparing to
deliver Shultz's required speech verbatim. He called on the poet
Mahmoud Darwish, and asked him to incorporate the speech into
flowery prose, believing that it would have a softer effect on his
audience. Even with the skill of
Darwish, Arafat found the speech to be too much of an insult and
tore it up before the UN meeting. Instead, he wrote his own speech
but did not take out a single word Shultz had used, but arranged
them in a form to seem ambiguous. The Reagan administration, furious
at his ploy, snapped back that his "efforts were not adequate" and
that he had to be "more serious in renouncing terrorism." Fed up
with the ordeal Arafat called for a late night press conference and
angrily addressed the reporters saying: "The executive committee of
the PLO condemns individual, group and state tourism."
The pressure was so high that Chairman
Arafat got his tongue tied in the process. Realizing his blunder, he
shyly looked at the cameras and said, "Sorry, I meant terrorism!"
When he finished reading he shouted to his aides, and to Egyptian
Ambassador Amr Moussa saying: "What more do they want me to do?
Striptease?" The ordeal helps explain
the reasons for Arafat's latest actions, which many have tended to
coin as "treason" and part of an "international conspiracy" against
Palestine. Nobody has walked a mile in Arafat's shoes, and
therefore, nobody is entitled to judge him fairly.
Beirut
Gulf News
May 14, 2002