Arafat: Malevolent conspiracy or conspiracy theory
Palestinian officials have already taken steps, once religious authorities give the go-ahead, to exhume Yasser Arafat’s body in an attempt to investigate claims that he may have been deliberately poisoned. A more useful act would be to exhume his legacy. The choice here is between gratifying the pathological needs of conspiracy theorists and edifying a new generation of Palestinians about why, after close to four decades of leading the national struggle, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization failed dismally to achieve statehood, independence and freedom for his people.
Conspiracy theorists, sadly, abound in the Arab world. Their platforms, equally sadly, could be found no less in the op-ed pages of prominent Arab journals than in the chatter heard at folksy, working class coffee-shops. This, I say, is to the impoverishment of the public discourse. Consider these loony-tunes notions that were given credence in this very discourse over the last decade or so: The 9/11 attacks were the work of Israeli Mossad; the death of Princess Diana was the result of some diabolical plot by British intelligence to end her life rather than see her married to an Arab Muslim; Monica Lewinsky was an agent-in-place put there in the White House by the Jewish lobby; and the tragedy of EgyptAir 990, which plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on Oct. 31, 1999 carrying 217 passengers, among them 27 Egyptian Army officers, was brought about by the collaborative machinations of the CIA and Mossad. And so on with other infantile whimsies.
In Arab culture, this cognitive dissonance, which drives otherwise educated, rational and seemingly worldly individuals to hold simultaneously conflicting ideas about the objective reality they inhabit, is a function of this culture’s helplessness at meeting the challenges of modernity. For note how, conversely, in classical Arab culture — a culture imbued with the elan of ‘assabiyeh’ and self confidence, where a posited theory had to meet a certain threshold of credibility before it was taken seriously — conspiracism was not common at all.
Alas, in the marketplace of ideas in the modern Arab world, the ideas that are responsive to the paranoid need of the alienated man to see the influence of some malign force behind the suffering he endures, are the ones that sell best. For where else would this alienated man go to explain a confounding social reality where pain is incessant, poverty endemic and freedom elusive?
All of which takes us back to Yasser Arafat and the ongoing attempt to exhume his body for traces of deliberate poisoning by some covert agency. Indeed, calls for the body’s exhumation began three years ago when delegates to the Fatah Convention in the West Bank clamored to declare, one after another, and all with a straight face, that the leader of the PLO — an organization that by then had become, like its chairman, a ghost of its old self — was done in by Israel.
To be sure, Yasser Arafat was indeed done in by Israel. He was done in, however, not by a deadly poison, but by deprivation, so to speak, of his spiritual support system: This peripatetic man, who loved nothing more in life than to be on the move visiting world capitals, ambling down the red carpet like a model swaggering down the runway, was confined, under virtual house arrest for close to three years, to his fetid, half-demolished headquarters in Ramallah.
It did not take long for him to begin showing the first signs of Parkinson’s Disease, a loss of faculty at articulating ideas, and a penchant for resorting to laborious, flat and long-winded monologues about how he had been wronged all around.
This was a far cry from the man I had known since the late 1970s, and came to know more intimately in 1987 when I accompanied him on his private plane, a Falcon, that took us, over seven days, from Tunis to Baghdad to Kuwait (for the Islamic Conference Organization) and then to Riyadh — given as I had an unprecedented access in order to write a long article about a “week in the life” of the Palestinian leader. He then had zest. He exuded the aura of a man of history who had been around the block a few times and knew how to fight with a few arrows still in his back. He was a commanding authority figure. When he spoke — in the rhythmic cadence of Egyptian Arabic — he spoke in the style of a traditional Arab leader, savoring his ornate words, passing them over his tongue like a taster of rare vintage. And he knew his myriad “morafekeen,” or aides, all too well — their names, their marital status, their eccentricities, their failings — much in the manner that shepherds could tell every sheep in their flock.
That was the PLO leader I knew, not the PA leader that pathos, incarceration and fatigue had transformed into a caricatural parody of his former self.
So, this is what this column is saying: Yasser Arafat died in November 2004, in a military hospital in France while under expert medical care and supervision, and under the watchful eye of a security detail. He died of a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder. He was not poisoned. Let forensic specialists, who will soon exhume the body, prove me wrong and I will lose my credibility with readers, my job with Arab News and my ability to pay the milk bills.
I say let’s exhume the legacy, not the body, of this legendary political leader about whose contribution, or lack thereof, to the Palestinian national struggle there’s yet much to be learned.
— This article is exclusive to Arab News
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