Yasser Arafat is the ultimate political Rorschach test. But it’s impossible to deny that he not only personified but virtually created the idea of Palestine, beginning in the mid 1960s. It was a time when Israel officially denied the existence of the Palestinians, when Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan refused to utter the word “Palestinians.” At the time, too, King Hussein of Jordan, on the CIA payroll, owned the West Bank and saw its Arab residents as a mortal threat to his regime.
To call Arafat a terrorist mixes up the world of the 1960s and 70s with the post-9/11 world, which, of course, is exactly what Israel has been doing for the past three years with glee. From 1948 to 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon and expelled the PLO, the violence perpetrated by the PLO was relatively minor, and for the most part it was carried out by splinter groups of one sort or another. A case can be made that Israel’s unchecked violence against the Palestinians, including the infamous Unit 101 massacres carried out by Ariel Sharon in the 1950s, were more bloody-minded than anything Arafat ever did.
Since the late 1970s, when the Likud of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir won control of Israel, the Israeli right has been on a 25-year campaign to destroy the PLO and the idea of Palestine. Begin and Shamir, of course, knew a lot about terrorism, having been terrorists themselves, officially. Not only did they expel Arafat from Lebanon, but they fostered the growth of Islamism in the West Bank and Gaza and helped create the Hamas organization, explicitly designed as a counterforce to the PLO. And it worked.
It’s hard to think of another leader who is more of a survivor than Arafat. He has weathered assassination attempts, a plane crash, the Black September civil war in Jordan in 1970, the civil war in Lebanon, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the rise of Hamas and more. Perhaps he was tactically wrong not to have accepted the Clinton-Barak deal in January 2001, even though he was being offered a Bantustan-style patchwork of territory on the West Bank, but it’s a close call. The fact is, while Bush claims that under Arafat the Palestinians haven’t been a partner for peace, the reverse is true: Israel under Sharon had no interest in peace with Arafat. Under any circumstances. Perhaps now Arafat has found peace.
As for the Palestinians, they can’t be encouraged that after Arafat’s death none other than Elliott Abrams is in change of designing the Bush administration’s approach to post-Arafat diplomacy. Hopefully, Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah, Egypt’s Mubarak and King Hussein’s little son will join with the PLO’s collective leadership to offer a peace deal that even Bush will find hard to refuse. If that happens, count on Sharon launching some provocation to stir up Hamas.
