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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