Thoughts after Arafat

Some thoughts from Beirut about the post-Arafat period (RIP):
(1) We’ve been having amazing, wall-to-wall coverage of the Arafat events on the BBC’s Middle East feed. Riveting stuff, and very well anchored from Ramallah by Lyse Doucet. I can’t imagine anyone in US television who could do half as good a job: well-informed, balanced, capable, great stamina…
The vignette that really caught my eye happened at around 3 this afternoon, local time, after the helicopters bringing YA’s mortal remains and the entourage back to Ramallah landed in the teeming-full Muqataa. The waiting Palestinians–nearly all of whom in that place were male– all surged forward and surrounded the choppers. Saeb Eraqat, the shaved-head, rather self-important guy who’s been in charge of “Negotiations Policy” for a while, tried with some colleagues to let down the chopper door that has the stairway in it so they could all get out. The crowd would not move back to let the stairway down.
He stood there for some 20-30 minutes making big gestures and evidently loud appeals to people to back off… But no-one responded to him, at all. All the PA humpty-humps were kept virtual prisoners in the chopper for all that time.
(2) I wonder if that signifies something bigger? I know that many Palestinians, inside and outside the homeland, lost patience with the “negotiation” team a long time ago. Also, with the “negotiations”…
So many talking heads– people, I should add, who often know diddly-squat about Palestinian politics– have been saying things like, “Well, after the death of Arafat there’s a window of opportunity, and a new generation of more moderate leaders can come forward…”
Boy, that’s a tired old tune. We certainly heard it back in 2000 when Hafez al-Asad died…. That his son Bashar, the present Preisdent, was a “new generation” guy, which in the eyes of many westerners equates with being either extremely pro-western or completelyt warm and fuzzy on negotiations and ready to give away the store in them…
They were wrong about Bashar, and I dare say they will most likely be wrong about whoever it is that– eventually–takes over from Arafat.

Hafze al-Asad, remember, had the historic stature and internal legitimacy to be (relatively, from the Syrian viewpoint) flexible on many aspects of the negotiations with Israel. Arafat, ditto. But their successors? No…
So in the post-Arafat phase, too, I’m not expecting the successors to be any more flexible on the negotiations than the Old Man was.
Plus, in the Palestinian context, you have the additional factor, unlike in Syria, that waiting in the wings and exerting considerable political influence is a well-organized, well-respected Islamic movement that will certainly be keeping the heat up in the post-Arafat phase.
So people should take all those pronunciamentos about the “flexible new generation” or the post-Arafat “window of opportunity” with a whole bushel of salt.
(3) In fact, those pronunciamentos would only have any validity if you had, in the first place, bought in to the whole Sharonist argument that “the issue was Arafat,” That is, that it was only that stubborn old man who was standing in the way of the most amazing progress in the peace negotiations.
No. The issue wasn’t Arafat (though he himself usually liked to think it was, and he thus colluded in Sharon’s argument.) The issue was–and remains– the issue: That is, the very complex collection of claims and counter-claims in the negotiations that have never been satisfactorily resolved or, in some cases, even adequately discussed… Like the Palestinian refugees’ claims; like the all-important territorial question; like Jerusalem; like the need for the Palestinian state to have full sovereign powers including over its own borders and natural-resource base…
Those issues remain. Arafat dying hasn’t made a bit of difference in them.
(4) Then later in the afternoon I watched the Blair/Bush press conference. Their big argument, articulated more clearly there than previously though it’s been mentioned previously, was that the Palestinians have to have a full democracy before they can be “given” an independent state.
How’s that again? Where, in any canon of international law, does it say that before colonized or occupied nations can get their independence they have to be fully democratic?
(It doesn’t.)
Also, how on earth are the Palestinians supposed to develop all the institutions and practices of democracy while they are under hostile military occupation– occupation, moreover, by a power that has ongoing designs on their land base and that for four years now has kept the occupied people trapped by tight movement controls that allow none of the freedom of movement that’s a basic prerequisite of any democratic activity…
It strikes me that Bush and Blair are imposing this new, quite unrealizable standard on the Palestinians in order further to delay their march toward independence. (And Bush virtually admitted as much when he replied to a clear question about “Do you have as a goal the establishment of a Palestinian state during your four-year term of office” with bluster, hemming and hawing, and no clear answer.)
Well, it’s tragic days all round. I won’t even, here, get into the whole issue about what we could expect if, indeed, the Palestinians are allowed to express themselves freely and elect a fully accountable national leadership… Given the immense frustrations and anger from the whole Oslo years, you could certainly expect that any leadership elected now would be far firmer in the negotiations than Arafat ever was…
No, I don’t expect they would be “totally intransigent”. Not even the Islamists–who have shown their capacity for pragmatism on numerous occasions. But one thing they wouldn’t do is allow themselves to get snookered into one of those endless negotiating-about-meaningless-details processes like the one that flowed from Oslo.
But of course, all that’s on offer now, negotiation-wise– the Road Map– is almost exactly like that. Crucially, it shares with Oslo the feature that it has no firm and defined destination.
Would you care to take a road trip (in a car driven by a power-crazed madman like Ariel Sharon) on such a basis?
No? Well, neither would I. But that is, it seems what Bush and Blair are asking the Palestinians to do.
Like I said, tragic.