Ancient Egyptians made a high art out of mummification. They, however, dealt strictly with the dead, clinically or otherwise. We have inherited some of that art and now are elevating it to the science of keeping our leaders alive. Arafat is dead, or he isn’t; might it be that he was never alive? Then again, we might need an Arab summit to declare that humans, of all walks of life, grow old and die.
The obscenity of clinging to power and life is beyond belief. There is no humility of the basic human kind that says: If I don’t retire, I will die one day in office. Charles de Gaulle was chastised for resigning from office. “Who would you leave France to?” he was asked. The great man said that cemeteries were full of people who thought the world could not go on without them.
We in the Arab world refuse to take this honorable line in our daily political life. It is indeed strange behavior for a nation that firmly believes in destiny and is more or less fatalistic.
Had Arafat retired before his latest illness, he would have had a chance to shape and influence the succession and keep his wife silent in her Paris abode. Instead, he hung to power with kisses and hugs. Now we have a wife clearly demented, and heirs-apparent visibly impotent. This is unseemly, if nothing else.
Arafat might be a symbol of something. To the majority outside Palestine, he is a symbol of failure. He fought and lost; he made peace and found himself imprisoned in his office. He started from Kuwait, swung into Jordan and then Lebanon.
He turned against Kuwait when Saddam marched in. That is hardly a curriculum vitae worth publishing.
Now is the time to exit this stage, strutting, as the bard would have it, or on a stretcher. The end result is one.
Death is an existential necessity if only because it clears the stage for others to try their hand at old problems. No one in this world has the right to lord it forever. No one has the right to think that they can do that either. We suffer miserably from this malaise to a point where we are the laughing stock of humanity.
Where else the president of a republic leaves office in such conditions? By the nature of its system, a kingdom can get away with this measure, yet, a European queen just abdicated in favor of her heir for the simple reason that she wanted to retire.
Lost hopes do not make history, but deeds over a long lifetime do. Arafat’s place, for better or worse, is now the pages of history.
History understands that politics is the art of the possible and not the science of righteousness and the esoteric. Esotericism in our political scene means only the ones who have been there forever can manage our daily lives when reality and history knows perfectly well that they are responsible for our demise and malaise.
How else could one interpret Mrs. Arafat’s outburst? She now believes that she is his heir and she has the providential right to his money and his power. She is following a set path opened to her by decades of Arab politics. She was not wise enough to see otherwise, but on the whole, she behaved admirably as an Arab.
