Before leaving a Jordanian airfield last Friday, where he was transferred to a French aircraft that was to take him to a military hospital on the outskirts of Paris, an ailing, frail and gaunt Yasser Arafat waved forlornly at aides who were there to bid him farewell. “I’ll be back soon,” he muttered. “And God willing, I’ll see you soon.”
It is not clear yet what the 75-year Palestinian leader’s ailment is, with conflicting medical reports describing it as severe flu, an internal infection, gallstones, a blood disorder and possibly leukemia. Whichever it is, French doctors say he will need weeks of intensive care followed by months of recuperative therapy.
Meanwhile, a Cabinet meeting was held over the weekend in his absence for the first time in well over three decades.
Yasser Arafat was known to his people by many an engagingly affectionate name, including the Building Father, the Old Man, Dad and commander in chief. He was a national symbol and a political leader who embodied the Palestinians’ desperate quest for freedom, independence and statehood.
Moving feline and tenacious on the international stage from 1969, when his organization, Fatah, wrested control of the PLO, to 1994 when he returned from exile to oversee the implementation of the Oslo Accords, Arafat’s one great victory was this: He not only succeeded in projecting on the consciousness of the world the existence of a long-forgotten people, but also in reminding the world that Israel’s statehood was brought about at the cost of Palestinian statelessness.
The torrential energy he displayed in promoting his people’s cause — Arafat was probably the most peripatetic of world leaders — was what propelled acceptance by the international community of the notion that the Palestinians are the injured party in the dispute, and that the Zionist movement had been running a rigged game from the outset, shuffling the cards of the region’s history to make it appear that the victimizer was victim.
On the home front, he created a movement that drew its weld of sensibility from every stratification of class and ideology, commanding a wide context of social response among Palestinians for a struggle that was to be, he told them, long and grim. They followed him.
As a national symbol he succeeded. As a political leader, however, he was a flop, having failed in the end — though he is by no means wholly at fault here — to bring his people the liberation they had sought and sacrificed so dearly to achieve.
He failed equally dismally by his adoption of a style of leadership that alternated between avuncular and absolutist. He began, in his early days, by proclaiming that, given the geographical dispersal of the Palestinians, the PLO must substitute itself to the will of the people.
Then he moved in later years to having a few select individuals in his inner circle to substitute themselves for the organization as a whole. And then finally it degenerated to the idea of one leader who would unite in his own person the functions, processes and decisions of the whole movement. Note how, as a case in point, the Oslo Accords were brazenly negotiated and signed in 1993 by a handful of men behind their people’s back and without their approval.
Then, after his arrival in the territories in 1994, most Palestinians there believed that once the institutional machinery of statehood was put in gear, stability and independence would follow. What followed instead was a period of gross corruption, patronage and cronyism by an ineffectual and authoritarian elite that lived high on the hog amid unspeakable poverty. Meanwhile, the PA’s nine intelligence services pursued those figures regarded by any civilized society as being central to the health of the body politic —with heretical editors silenced, human rights activists hounded, recalcitrant labor unionists jailed and innovative intellectuals harassed. Arafat allowed all that to flourish around him, on his watch, in his patch.
To that extent, it is reasonable to suppose that with the dissolution of civil society, of civilized norms and of human hope in the territories, the intifada was as much directed at those who occupied the Palestinian people’s homeland as at those who occupied their home.
In his last years, holed up in his half-destroyed compound in Ramallah, he would regale foreign visitors, as the Economist put it last week, “with rambling reminiscences and convoluted justifications for past failures,” meanwhile refusing to contemplate his imminent mortality by grooming an heir to lead his people.
He was a man who led off the cuff, who never made studied decisions. By 1970 he had totally alienated the Jordanian people and, by 1982, the Lebanese people. He backed a loser in Iraq when that loser invaded Iran and then Kuwait. And he failed to take advantage of that opportunity afforded to him by an invitation, in November 1974, to address the UN General Assembly where he could have called then for a Palestinian state in the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, a call that the international community, including the US, would have genuinely promoted.
Instead, he called for the establishment in the whole of historic Palestine of a “secular, democratic state,” seen even by the Palestinians’ most ardent supporters as an improbable agenda advanced by a people who had never in their entire history been secular, democratic or a state.
In the end, it can be said that Yasser Arafat failed the test of what defines a great leader — possession of that antenna which reaches beyond the rim of the present and sees into the future. Under his watch tragedy piled upon tragedy — diplomatic disasters, military defeats and acts of social grief — from Black September in 1970 to Tel Zaatar in 1976 and from Sabra and Shatilla in 1982 to Jenin and Rafah in 2004, till doom came to be seen by Palestinians as a norm, a historical process with its own irresistible fascination, as if it involved some hidden complicity between torturer and victim.
You can describe Arafat, as some Palestinians still do, in hagiographic terms, but in the end he was a little man who never grew with his job.
We are given to say that when a man dies, his life ends, but when a martyr dies, his life begins. Well, we can equally postulate that when a great leader dies, or leaves the scene, his legacy will bequeath a mastering grip on the marrow of his people’s consciousness, the actuality of their present and the potentiality of their future. And for generations to come, they will hear the echo of that great leader’s words around every corner of their national sensibility.
It is doubtful that, when the hour meets the man, Arafat’s contribution to Palestine and its long suffering people will bear such a stamp.
