Arafat: a Palestinian tragedy

Yasser Arafat reportedly collapsed yesterday evening while eating soup with present “prime minister” Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa) and former PM Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). The new reports coming out of the Muqataa compound in Ramallah where he has been imprisoned by the Israelis since March 2002 give a hint of the unseemly political jockeying and chaos that are underway there as contenders for power try to position themselves for the succession era.
The AP’s Muhammed Daraghmeh writes this:

A Palestinian official in Arafat’s office said the Palestinian leader had created a special committee of three senior officials, including Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, to run Palestinian affairs while Arafat was incapacitated.
However, other Palestinian officials, including his spokesman Nabil Abu Rdeneh, denied that such a committee had been formed.

How tragic, then, that it’s “business as usual” in the Muqataa, a place that over the past 31 months has become the focus of nearly all the international concern about Palestinian politics when in my view people should have been paying a lot more attention instead to the parlous situation of the broad Palestinian communities on the ground–whether in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, or elsewhere.
When looked at from that perspective, the sad effects of the many political mistakes that Arafat has made over past decades are evident. But his personal flaws are so deep that– as I have written a number of times here and elsewhere–he started to think increasingly that the Palestinian question was all about him. Sharon was then able to play to that fantasy like a maestro, making it seem in the world of international diplomacy that the Palestinian issue was indeed all “about” dealing, or not dealing, with Arafat.
I’ve been following Arafat’s political progress fairly closely for 30 years now– I last saw him in person in the Muqataa, last February–and I can honestly say that I don’t think he’s a bad person… Just extremely, extremely limited in his political capabilities and personal vision.
At one level he’s quite a phenomenon. The post-colonial world has in the past couple of decades–tragically– seen all too many of what the Africans call “big men”. You know: men who in their youth led daring and visionary independence movements, who were then handed the reins of power and spent some years in the heady and sometimes productive phase of nation-building… but whose rule later hardens into the autocracy/kleptocracy of the “big man”, who has come to identify his own fate almost totally with that of his “nation”…
Arafat skipped through that middle phase–the one of nation-building–almost completely.
That is one dimension of the tragedy of Arafat…

Another is that I really don’t think he ever understood the sinews of real strategic power in any real way at all. He understood grievance, and was endlessly willing and able to play that whining tune. And he was nearly always–with some notable exceptions– a master of tactics. But a strategy that might direct what all those tactics andf all that sense of grievance should lead to? No, he never understood that.
If he had, he would not– after his return to the occupied homeland in 1994– have disbanded and battled against all the grassroots, mass civilian organizations in the West Bank and Gaza whose very steadfastness and liberationist creativity throughout by then 27 years of foreign military occupation had succeeded in bringing him back to the homeland long after the Israelis had determined that he and the whole PLO should be eliminated from history.
If he had understood the sinews of real popular power, he would never have wilfully cut his ties with the communities of the far-flung and in many cases very hard-pressed Palestinian diaspora, as he did by agreeing that a vote for a “national” authority that was held in 1996 should exclude all the Palestinian living as refugees outside the homeland. (Look at the contrast with the votes of recent years held for Bosnians or Afghans: in those votes, there was no question of disfranchising people simply because they were refugees.)
If Arafat had understood the sinews of power, he would never have placed his people’s fate so firmly in the hands of a Washington that is almost structurally incapable of being evenhanded, and taken it so far away from the realm of international law, international legitimacy, and international coalition-building…
Okay, I can make all these laments about the old man’s shortcomings. But the fact is that for many, many Palestinians Sharon’s (and Arafat’s) ploy of making the issue into one that was all “about” Arafat succeeded to the extent that it caused them to rally defensively and almost reflexively around “the old man” and his position as their “ra’is” (president).
And yes, of course it has been a continuing outrage that Sharon has treated the man who is the Palestinians’ elected leader in such a humiliating way… Who could deny that?
Now, however, we are most likely entering an era when the most lasting of Arafat’s bitter legacies will start to have its effect: the danger-fraught period of political “succession”.
As the AP clip I included above indicates, the succession period is likely to be highly contentious and damaging.
That fact is certainly one of his legacies, since the main method of his rule until now has been to set up large numbers of institutions of overlapping jurisdiction with the express aim of keeping all the people “beneath” him competing against each other for his time, attention, and resources. He has never really had an interest in building political or other institutions of lasting stability and durability– for fear that the people who headed such institutions effectively might one day be able to compete against him.
This is, by the way, typical “big man”-ism. Think Mobuto, or Marcos.
I see that over at the BBC website, and doubtless elsewhere as well, pundits are starting to offer “mentions” of which individual they think is going to emerge as the next leader. I’m not going to get into that game. At this perilous point in the history of the Palestinians and their neighbors the Israelis, I don’t think that the rise or fall of one or another individual within the existing PA/PLO structures makes much difference… I’ll be looking at what happens to those structures, and to their relative durability vis-a-vis the much more stably anchored structures of the Palestinian Islamists, in a broader way. And from that standpoint, the fortunes of the secular Palestinian nationalists don’t look good. But I’ll have to wait for another time to write about that.