Arafat

I don't have much to say about Yasser Arafat's passing.  There seems to be a lot of vague talk about how this could be a new opportunity for progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace.  But I don't take it very seriously.

The Palestinian leadership and the people themselves seem fractured into so many competing sects that it's hard to imagine any general consensus on a peace settlement with Isreal in the immediate future.  Without some kind of unifying leadership on the Palestinian side, it's hard to see how an meaningful peace settlement could be reached and enforced.

On the Israeli side, Ariel Sharon and his ruling Lidud Party haven't shown many signs of being interested in a settlement at all.  On the contrary, they are committed to expanding the settlements in the West Bank, and no peace agreement will be possible without Israel giving up essentially all those settlements.  Sharon's military actions have seemed aimed at discrediting the more moderate elements (relatively speaking) in the Palestinian leadership.  More influence by the extremists on the Palestinian side seems to fit with Sharon's vision of escalation.

Sharon is currently taking criticism in his own Likud Party and from other partners in his governing coalition over his current plan of evacuating Gaza and proceeding with a forced settlement in the West Bank.  But that conflict is a difference between extreme hardliners and extreme hardliners with different tactics.  Neither seems interested in a lasting peace.

And without American support and pressure for a settlement, it won't happen.  Bush and Karl Rove have made the Republican Party more beholden than ever to the Christian Right.  And the Christian Right takes it as their mission from God to support the Likud hardliners in Israel in order to escalate conflict in the Middle East to hasten the End of the World.  Bush seems inclined to agree with them on a personal basis anyway.  And the "neoconservatives" (or Vulcans, if one prefers) who dominate Bush's foreign policy also support Likud Party hardliners, if for somewhat less cosmic reasons.

I hope I'm wrong.  Nothing could work toward defanging the jihadist movement politically as a meaningful peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.  But I see no hope of it happening as long as Sharon or Bush is in power.

Here are a couple of links on Arafat:

Yasser Arafat, 1929-2004: Father of the Palestinian nation by Danny Rubinstein Ha'aretz (Israel) 11/11/04.

From the point of view of many Palestinians, including Arafat, the Arab rulers not only failed in the war [at the time of Israel's independence], but compounded the affront by not allowing the Palestinians to see action. For years afterward, whenever he was asked what caused the Palestinian tragedy, Arafat replied: The Arabs betrayed us.

It was against this background that Arafat (like many other Palestinians of his generation) formulated a worldview after 1948 that the Arab regimes could not be relied upon and that their entire purpose was to exploit the Palestinian problem for their own profit.

Arafat determined to be loyal to the Palestinian people, and to them alone. During his political career, which began in 1950 as chairman of the Palestinian Students Organization at the University of Cairo and continued with the establishment of the Fatah organization in Kuwait in 1959, Arafat was embroiled in dozens of disputes and quarrels with almost every Arab leader.

He was imprisoned in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria and pursued relentlessly in Jordan - always as a result of his suspiciousness and mistrust of the Arab rulers, who in his view were ready to sell out the Palestinians and sacrifice their interests at the drop of a hat in order to benefit themselves. Arafat even found himself in a serious crisis of relations with the authorities in Egypt, the Arab country in which he was born and which he felt closest to, after President Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel. There were even some who said, with a little exaggeration, that Arafat's loyalty to the Palestinian cause had turned him anti-Arab.

Profile: President Yasir Arafat Al-Jazeera 11/04/04.

In November 1988, the PLO's Palestinian National Council declared the independent state of Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital.

Arafat read the declaration of independence and later publicly rejected "all forms of violence" and met US conditions for dialogue. 

The move represented a significant departure for the man who in 1974 appeared at the United Nations bearing an olive branch and a gun, famously saying: "Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."

In 1988, he again addressed the UN General Assembly, declaring the PLO's acceptance of Israel's right to exist.

That declaration was Arafat's ticket to a kinder US perception of him and the PLO, but hardly served his image among other Palestinian faction leaders, who saw his approach as an insult to the Palestinian struggle for independence.