Arafat: Planless in Gaza

One of the scary things about the current Palestinian nationalist movement is the degree to which the sheer personal vanity of one stubborn old man has succeeded in paralyzing nearly the entire (secular) part of the national movement for more than four years now.
Why does Yasser Arafat continue to cling to the trappings (if absolutely none of the realities) of political power so long after the failure of the strategy he spearheaded in the 1990s was so vividly demonstrated?
That’s one good question. It’s easy to answer. Vanity is enough of an answer, buttressed perhaps in this case by the degree of self-delusion he has succeeded in engendering throughout the decades, along the lines of la Palestine, c’est moi.
And of course, Sharon and Bush have known how to play on this vanity like a fine violin: they know full well that every time they attack him, or reject the claims he makes to represent the Palestinian people, that he’ll wrap himself ever tighter in the shroud of la Palestine, c’est moi-ism. It has never so far failed to work!
(Maybe it’s due to fail soon though?)
But here’s another question, even tougher to answer than the first one. Why have the Palestinian people put up for so long, in this era that is so critical for their cause, with Yasser Arafat and his absurd and very damaging claims to “represent” them?
Yes, I know, I know all the very heavy national-ideological baggage about the “historical” role he played in the national movement. (I even wrote some of that history myself.)
But just because a person played a historical role in a national movement doesn’t mean he continues to be asset to that movement in every succeeding era.
I’ve been following the guy’s career very closely for 30 years now. Indeed, it was July of 1974 when I left Britain for Beirut, planning to make a career as a foreign correspondent. I’d start in Beirut, I thought, and then maybe move elsewhere. As it was, the “stories” there were so gripping that I stayed for seven years, and got thoroughly bitten by the Middle-East affairs bug. The very first book I wrote (1984) was a study of the PLO.
I’ve written some fairly critical reflections on his performance over the years. But with all the latest news about Abu Alaa’s resignation and the escalating political chaos inside Gaza, I got to reflecting once again on how I would try to define YA’s shortcomings. So if I were writing the “bill of particulars” against him at this time, it might look like this:

1. His failure to build a coherent national leadership cadre.

Until the late 1980s, Fateh, which has always been the main organization in the secular national movement, had a collective leadership. It had its dysfunctionalities, sure. But more or less there was a balance of power in the leadership there that had been honed over time. Then, within short order, the lives of three of the four mainstays of the ‘historic’ collective leadership came to an end. Abu Jihad was killed by the Israelis in 1988. Abu Said died. Abu Iyad was killed by the Iraqis in 1991.
After they all died, there was no-one else ‘weighty’ enough in the historical leadership to counter-balance Arafat. He got to exercise all his own personnel-management proclivities virtually unchecked. Those proclivities have been fatal to the movement. Because of an apparently bottomless inability to trust others, or to delegate to them, Arafat’s personnel-management style has always been to play one aspiring leader or middle manager off against another; to play one network off against another; never to let a coherent leadership structure get into place (lest it challenge him!); to play endless games of highly personalized patronage and favoritism.
Oh boy, you can see the sad results in the quality of the people who stay around him in his office for any length of time.

2. His active opposition to the grassroots movement in the occupied territories.

It was, as I have noted in several places before, the grassroots movement in the West Bank and Gaza that, through its heroic organizing and strength in the first intifada (1987-93) succeeded in bringing Arafat and the rest of the long-exiled PLO leadership back into the homeland in 1994. And almost immediately, Arafat set about dismantling that movement. Because he couldn’t control it in the same way that he controlled all of the networks in the diaspora, maybe? Because he had fundamentally not understood the role they had played in bringing him back to the homeland? Because for some other reason he felt threatened by their effectiveness? Who knows?
Whatever the reasons were, it happened.

3. His toleration of fraudulent and corrupt activities of those around him.

Actually, I see this as a corollary to the above two points. Like tactical-level manipulators of all colors, you get the sense he’s often very happy for people around him to be corrupt because then he can yank on their chains whenever he wants to…

4. His inability to make the transition from the politics of an exile-based undergound group to those of a national movement based in its own homeland.

This is certainly linked–perhaps causally?–to both #1 and #2 above.
The essential point here is that exile politics are, almost by nature, secretive, dangerous, and riddled with plots, coups, and conspiracies. The politics of a people fighting on their own homeland are quite different. At a very fundamental level, the issues that people are struggling over within their own homeland are quite real and tangible; they are not merely ‘theoretical’ or ideological. Inside the homeland, the whole question of the Israeli settlement project– the building and peopling of the settlements, the building of all the incredibly large-scale infrastructure that supports the settlements–is a very real, tangible issue that affects the lands, lives, and livelihoods of the people. Viewed from Beirut or Tunis, it is mainly a political shadow-play, in which abstract ‘points’ can be scored or lost through the passage or failure to pass of yet another U.N. resolution.
They are quite different games. At a very fundamental level he–and many of the people around him–never seemed to ‘get’ that. I watched speechless in 1999, at a conference at Bir Zeit University, where a PLO apparatchik talked about the settlements issue in a completely delusional, abstract way. I think most of the indigenous West Bankers in the room viewed it the same way, too.

5. His acting–in the above way and a number of other ways– in a manner that is, quite simply, delusional.

Like his being ‘President’ of Palestine means anything these days? Like the US administration is about to do anything to help him? Like Tony Blair is going to succeed at persuading Bush to do so?
Where is reality in any of this? What is its relevance to the grinding reality faced by the 6,000-plus Palestinian prisoners rotting in Israeli jails; or the Gazans having their homes demolished in record numbers; or the snaking concrete fist of the ‘barrier’ slamming down around so many West Bank villages?
Can anyone tell this emperor he has no clothes? (See #1 above.)

6. His inability to make and act wisely on solid strategic calculations.

This is a consequence of all of the above. But it is also a consequence of his seeming inability even to know what a strategic decision would look like.
James Bennet had a good article on Gaza in the NYT on July 16, in which he reported about the former Palestinian security boss Muhammed Dahlan in the following terms:

In an interview in his office one recent evening, Mr. Dahlan tore a blank sheet of paper from a notebook and held it up. That was all the orders he had ever received in 25 years within Mr. Arafat’s dominant movement, Fatah, he said. “They are against the intifada; at the same time, they are with the intifada,” he said of Fatah’s leaders, without naming the top one. “They are against the terror, and they are with the terror.”

Throughout all his career, Arafat has been a master tactician. And that was okay, so long as he was in a collective leadership with other people who had some sense of strategy. But now, he has had 13 years as the unequaled Numero Uno in the national movement. What do he and his people have to show for it?
… This is all so tragic. It need not have been like this. I’m sure outsiders could and should have helped him out more along the way. But at the end of the day he needs to take the rap for his own performance in politics.
On July 1, 1994, when he returned to Gaza under the terms of the Oslo Accord, Yasser Arafat was in a position of unparalleled power inside the occupied Palestinian territories. It was a historic development–for him and those in his entourage, returning to the homeland from a long exile; and also for the 3 million people of the occupied territories who had been steadfast in requring that only the PLO could represent them in the peace negotiations with Israel.
In January 1996, he still had enough support from the people of Gaza and the West Bank that in the well monitored, territories-wide elections held that month he won a smashing victory in the race for “Ra’is” (President or Chairman).
But already, by then, he was starting to turn on the people in the grassroots base. What a long, tragic story it has been since then…
I’ve just been re-reading some in the history of South Africa’s ANC. It makes for some fairly depressing comparisons. The ANC too had been for many years an exiled nationalist movement, that was then “brought back” into the country and into negotiations with the dominant power primarily as a result of the steadfast struggle of well-organized networks of pro-ANC grassroots groups operating throughout the homeland. The ANC leaders, too, had many of exactly the same kind of “political-cultural” differences with the grassroots organizers of the UDF (pro-ANC) networks based inside the homeland: the ANC leadership had of necessity been secretive and hierarchical, while the people and groups in the UDF placed much more emphasis on participatory leadership and on all leaders being accountable to their base…
In that case, too, these differences of “political culture” took some working out. But they worked out in almost exactly the opposite way to what happened in Palestine. In the ANC’s case, the returned-from-exile leaders adapted by becoming much more democratic in their relations with their supporters as they melded their existing leadership structure with the UDF’s many widespread networks.
That certainly didn’t make the negotiations the ANC leaders were conducting with the apartheid people any easier–the black communities in South Africa, like the Palestinian communities inside Palestine, were highly mobilized and fairly militant. But at the end of the day, the melding of the ANC’s outsiders and insiders, and the relative ‘victory’ within the movement of the insiders’ more democratic and accountable way of doing things, made for a very effective and savvy political force… The rest is history.
In Palestine, by contrast, Arafat and the yes-men around him decided to beat back the “challenge” they perceived directed against them from the base inside the homeland. The result? The Palestinian people’s true history got deadended and thrown into paralysis many years ago. Which has had bad consequences, I would argue, for both the Palestinians and the Israelis.