Wherever he may be buried when he passes away, the day will come when his remains will be reinterred by a free Palestinian government in the holy shrines in Jerusalem.
Yasser Arafat is one of the generation of great leaders who arose after World War II. The stature of a leader is not simply determined by the size of his achievements, but also by the size of the obstacles he had to overcome. In this respect, Arafat has no competitor in the world: No leader of our generation has been called upon to face such cruel tests and to cope with such adversities as he.
When he appeared on the stage of history, at the end of the 1950s, his people was close to oblivion. The name Palestine had been eradicated from the map. Israel, Jordan and Egypt had divided the country between them. The world had decided that there was no Palestinian national entity, that the Palestinian people had ceased to exist, like the American Indian nations — if, indeed, it had ever existed at all.
Almost all Palestinians lived under dictatorships, most of them in humiliating circumstances.
When Yasser Arafat, then a young engineer in Kuwait, founded the “Palestinian Liberation Movement” (whose initials in reverse spell Fatah), he meant first of all liberation from the various Arab leaders, so as to enable the Palestinian people to speak and act for itself. That was the first revolution of the man who made at least three great revolutions during his life.
It was a dangerous one. Fatah had no independent base. It had to function in the Arab countries, often under merciless persecutions.
Those years were a formative influence on Arafat’s characteristic style. He had to maneuver between the Arab leaders, play them off against each other, use tricks, half-truths and double-talk, evade traps and circumvent obstacles.
He became a world champion of manipulation. This way he saved the liberation movement from many dangers in the days of its weakness, until it could become a potent force.
Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian ruler got worried about the emerging independent Palestinian force. To choke it off in time, he created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and put at its head a Palestinian political mercenary, Ahmed Shukeiri. But after the shameful rout of the Arab armies in 1967 and the electrifying victory of the Fatah fighters against the Israeli Army in the battle of Karameh (March 1968), Fatah took over the PLO and Arafat became the undisputed leader of the entire Palestinian struggle.
In the mid-1960s, Yasser Arafat started his second revolution: The armed struggle against Israel. The pretension was almost ludicrous: A handful of poorly armed guerrillas, not very efficient at that, against the might of the Israeli Army. And not in a country of impassable jungles and mountain ranges, but in a small, flat, densely populated stretch of land. But this struggle put the Palestinian cause on the world agenda. The PLO was recognized as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people”, and thirty years ago Yasser Arafat was invited to make his historic speech to the UN General Assembly: “In one hand I carry a gun, in the other an olive branch.”
Immediately after the October 1973 Yom Kippur, Arafat started his third revolution: He decided that the PLO must reach an agreement with Israel and be content with a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. That confronted him with a historic challenge: To convince the Palestinian people to give up its historic position denying the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and to be satisfied with a mere 22 percent of the territory of pre-1948 Palestine. Without being stated explicitly, it was clear that this also entails the giving up of the unlimited return of the refugees to the territory of Israel. He started to work to this end in his own characteristic way, with persistence, patience and ploys, two steps forwards, one step back.
Historic justice demands that it be clearly stated that it was Arafat who envisioned the Oslo agreement at a time when both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres still stuck to the hopeless “Jordanian option”, the belief that one could ignore the Palestinian people and give the West Bank back to Jordan. Of the three recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Arafat deserved it most. From 1974 on, I was an eyewitness to the immense effort invested by Arafat in order to get his people to accept his new approach. Step by step it was adopted by the Palestinian National Council, the Parliament in exile, first by a resolution to set up a Palestinian authority “in every part of Palestine liberated from Israel”, and, in 1988, to set up a Palestinian state next to Israel.
Arafat’s (and Israeli) tragedy was that whenever he came closer to a peaceful solution, the Israeli governments withdrew from it. His minimum terms were clear and remained unchanged from 1974 on: A Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
I respected Arafat as a Palestinian patriot, I admired him for his courage, I understood the constraints he was working under, I saw in him the partner for building a new future for our two peoples.
