It was on the night before the opening of the Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting in Kuwait, in January 1987, when I discovered that Yasser Arafat loved to swear in English, often using the “f” word. The problem was that he always prefaced it with the British “bloody,” which made him sound, like most non-native speakers unaccustomed to slang, engagingly comical.
I made the discovery, for all its worth, on the Palestinian leader’s private plane, a Falcon, as it sped east from Tunis to Baghdad, for an overnight stop, and then on to Kuwait for the four-day conference. I was being given unprecedented access to the Palestinian leader in order to write either a short book or a long piece about him titled “A Week in the Life of Yasser Arafat.” A decade passed before I brought myself to cobble together that profile, a long piece that appeared in the academic journal Critique, in the spring issue of 1997.
It was also that night when I thought Arafat, a man known to have had a bit of a temper, was going to take a swing at me. Nothing Mike Tyson-like, to be sure. Maybe the knocking out of one of my teeth, or just a split lip. And who would have dared hit back at Abu Ammar, as he was known to his people, a nom de guerre that translates as the Building Father, one of the most charismatic revolutionary leaders in the last quarter of the 20th century, as he was known to others — though forgive me here if I think that’s stretching the words charismatic, revolutionary and leader, not to mention Building Father, a term evocative of, say, George Washington.
The source of Arafat’s ire was the blunt news I brought him from the US about the egregious practices and unseemly conduct of his many Fatah officials there.
They are totally corrupt, decadent and self-serving, I blurted, and wasteful in how they spent the millions of dollars the PLO sent them, ostensibly to promote the Palestinian cause. I was equally offended, as were most other Palestinian-Americans, I said, by how visiting dignitaries of his organization traveled on the Concorde with Samsonites full of cash, cash they were quite brazen in spending on their personal needs, often openly salacious ones.
And the incompetence of his appointees at PLO offices around the world — who I hesitated to point out to him clearly got their jobs not thanks to professional qualifications but to the cronyism and the patronage system that were endemic in the movement — was beyond measure. “Good heavens, Abu Ammar, our man in London, the head of the PLO office there, he can barely speak English!”
I had a litany of other complaints to share with him about how our political movement could not go far, and our aspirations for independence would not be realized, if that kind of off-the-cuff leadership continued in place.
But Arafat at this point was getting angry, nervously fiddling with two prescription glasses on the tray in front of him, and fastidiously cleaning them with the tip of his hatta, then rolling them over his fingers, much as a riverboat gambler would twirl silver dollars in his hand.
“I know that,” he thundered. “You think I don’t know all that!”
I recall those other occasions when Arafat was angry at subordinates, occasions I witnessed both in Beirut and Tunis. In anger the Palestinian leader took on the appearance of a stern Ahab, and his face, covered with that famous grey stubble, bristled with rightful indignation. His speech, accompanied by a rending of the air with clawed hands, was that of a man who wanted to convince you that he knew it all, he knew his men and what they were up to.
“Brother, you think I don’t know that!” he kept repeating over and over again. But he did not elaborate. He did not say what he was going to do about it. I dare say the issues I brought up were nebulous. To a peripatetic man who loved the red carpet treatment, the prospect of attending the conference in Kuwait was more important to him than having to deal with the corruption, nepotism and kleptocracy that were rampant in his administration.
But he was wrong. The chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization was dead wrong. The many ills that afflicted the Palestinian movement, and that he failed to address himself to, not only destroyed the chance of the people of Palestine achieving a half-way decent settlement of their dispute with Israel, but destroyed Fatah as well, traditionally the ascendant faction.
If you examine closely the psychodynamic of intifada II, you will find that at a seminal level of relating to it, it was as much an uprising against Israeli occupation as it was against a bumbling, shameless old guard that lived high on the hog while the mass of people in the territories lived in abject poverty with seemingly no way out, round or through their economic destitution and political oppression.
The Palestinians will go to the polls next Wednesday to elect new parliamentary representatives. All projections are that those representatives associated by ordinary Palestinian folk with the old guard — a pejorative term in the territories now — will be left by the wayside. A new generation of leaders is clearly on the rise.
There has always been a fitful transition of generations in Palestinian society, both in the Diaspora and in the home ground, but nothing as jolting as the one we are witnessing today.
The generation gap — a term that came into prominence in the US in the 1960s to describe the cultural differences between the baby boomers and their parents — has never been wider in Palestine. There has never a greater and more disruptive divide between generations, a divide that will become evident when Palestinians cast their ballots on Jan. 25.
Just as in the US in the 1960s, baby boomers had a strong generational identity, with the catch phrase “don’t trust anyone over thirty,” young Palestinians today have had their sensibility honed at the whetstone of two costly uprisings against the occupation; and just as the baby boomers’ alienation was expressed by The Who in their anthem song “My Generation,” in which the composer Peter Townshend wrote of how “I hope I die before I get old,” young Palestinians have equally supped their fill of the empty slogans of an old guard that no longer cared about anything other than their personal interests.
It doesn’t really matter what group or groups will sweep the ballot next week. That would be the people’s choice, as it were. And it doesn’t really matter if Israel, our military occupier, is not enamored of our choices. Come to think of it, we never liked Israel’s choice of leaders over the years either, but we went along and negotiated with them. We never liked Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, or the other yahoos Israelis elected as their representatives — representatives with blood on their hands — but we decided to bite the bullet and deal with them. Israel will have to do the same. It has no other choice. As simple as that.
Meanwhile, I keep wondering, to this day, why Yasser Arafat, a man who was at once enigmatic and transparent, did not stop the hemorrhaging of his organization if, as he told me almost twenty years ago on that Falcon, he knew “all that.”
I wouldn’t blame young Palestinians if they sing along with The Who about how they hope to die before they get old — old, that is, like the old guard.
