Yasser Arafat, R.I.P.

We awoke today to the BBC presenting breaking news of Arafat’s death. I now have to crash-edit an obit-style column on him that I drafted ten days ago. It’s more an evaluation of him as a person/leader than a piece about the politics: what comes next, etc.
Tough piece to write because I feel so much of the disappointment, anger, etc towards him that many of my Palestinian friends (and some Israeli friends) feel… (See this JWN post.)
And yet he did play an important role, historically. That is undeniable. Plus, it’s not appropriate to speak too harshly of the recently departed.
I reckon that some similarly complex mixture of feelings and assessments may explain why the reaction to the news of his failing over the past couple of weeks, coming from Palestinians inside and outside the homeland, has been notably muted. That, and the very unseemly public set-to between Suha and the old guys.
Oh yes, and let’s not forget that the Palestinian “leadership” still doesn’t have any real strategy for success beyond the essentially defensive strategy of avoiding internal breakdown. Though avoiding that is extremely important, I know.
Best of luck to them all.
Gotta go.
Update 11 a.m. Beirut/Ramallah time:
Was just watching Al-Jazeera. Saw Salim al-Zaanoun announcing that Abu Mazen’s been named head of the PLO Executive Committee. At the same time a crawl at the bottom saying that Fateh’s Central Committee has named Farouq Qaddumi as its head. Interesting.
Then, over to the BBC: reporters on the streets of Ramallah where a quiet though fairly sparse-looking group of Palestinians had started to gather. This seems like interesting evidence of the remoteness of the old guys inside the Muqataa from the actual Palestinian people all around them… That they didn’t even have people outside the Muqataa organizing anything?
Reportedly, more activity in the Ain al-Helwa refugee camp in south Lebanon, which has long been a hotbed for a fairly radical form of pro-Fateh activism.

25 thoughts on “Yasser Arafat, R.I.P.”

  3. Yasser Arafat really was, I think it doesn’t need repeating, an enormous symbol for Palestinians. He was born in 1929. It’s not clear — he was born in Jerusalem, but it’s not clear at that time, good records weren’t kept for a lot of people. He became as a young man, a prosperous engineer. Starting in the early 1950’s, he was an engineering student at Cairo University, and that’s when he first became active in politics. He headed the Union of Palestinian Students, and really his was the generation that had suffered the expulsion and the ethnic cleansing from Palestine. After a few years in which Palestinians regrouped, they began to found the Palestinian national movement to bring justice to Palestinians who had been expelled from their country so that Israel could be created. And after becoming an engineer, he went to Kuwait where he set up an engineering firm and was very prosperous, he did very well. He set aside success in order to push his activism in the Palestinian national movement. He was one of the founders of Fatah, the main party in the PLO. Really, from the night 60’s on, he has been the key figure. At that time, Fatah, among other groups, espoused armed struggle as a response to the Israeli violence, which not only expelled the Palestinians, but prevented them returning to their homes. This was important in bringing the Palestinian cause to international attention. In the late 1960’s, the movement was based in Jordan, but growing tension with the Jordanian government led to its expulsion after a fight in 1970, and he went to Lebanon. Lebanon, Arafat’s tenure there ended in 1982 with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed over 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese. Then he went to Tunis. Many people thought he was finished until the Oslo Accords revived him and he returned to the occupied territories as the head of the Palestinian Authority. But this is the period, I think, which most Palestinians became more and more frustrated with him, because they really saw the Oslo Accords as a dead end and a trap, allowing Israel to solidify the status quo of occupation and colonization, with no intention whatsoever of really giving the Palestinians their independence and freedom. I’d just like to say now that Arafat is gone, this is a moment for reflection on his achievements and failures. I think there were many of both. But it’s also important to say that you’re going to hear in the next few days a lot of talk that this is an opening to revive the peace process, and this sort of a thing, from the entrenched peace process industry. But it’s very important for people to recognize that Arafat has passed, that’s historic, but nothing essential about the conflict has changed. The problem was not Palestinian leadership. The problem is that Israel has no intention whatsoever of ending its rule in the occupied territories, and occupied east Jerusalem. Israel’s refusal to allow Arafat to be buried in Jerusalem, where he wished to be buried, is emblematic of why we have a conflict. There are two peoples in Palestinian, but Israel doesn’t recognize the Palestinians to the extent that it doesn’t even allow them to be buried in their own earth. And Israel, as the occupying power, under Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, has no right to prevent the burial of Arafat in occupied East Jerusalem. It has no right to interfere with the religious worship and rituals of the people living under Israeli military occupation. And it

  4. If “occupation” were the problem, why were there deadly fedayeen raids into Israel BEFORE 1967?
    How many Israeli settlers were there in the West Bank and Gaza BEFORE 1967?
    Who were the occupying powers in the West Bank and Gaza BEFORE 1967?
    Why was the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan giving Palestinian Arabs 80% of Palestine (Mediterranean to the Jordan River) rejected by them?
    Why was the UN General Assembly Partition Plan rejected by them in 1947?
    Why did Nasser send UN peacekeepers in the Sinai packing in 1967, blockade the Strait of Tiran, mobilize his army, encourage the Syrians to do the same and send them to the borders with Israel?
    Why was the 5-year Autonomy Plan proposed by Carter/Sadat/Begin rejected in 1978?
    Why wasn’t the Clinton/Barak offer in 2000 met at least with a counteroffer instead of a suicide bombing campaign?
    Some leadership indeed!!

  5. The father of modern terrorism is dead.
    He killed for his people, lied for his people, and stole from his people.
    No good records were kept in the 20’s of people that were born in Egypt.
    Brought death and misery wherever he went, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon.
    I don’t know if Allah will yarhamu or not, but Arafat belongs in the dustbin of history.

  7. Take your medication Rowan. We Americans are the only ones who are not hiding, and are comfronting the radical Islam poison face on. We are paying in blood and dollars.
    If you meant this as an individual challenge, I’ll be happy to address you face to face, anytime. Just name time and place.

  8. You could start by telling us your real name. I never use pseudonyms, and I’m in the London phone book. This is all rather childish really. You would be better advised to spend your time with people who ‘think’ (if that is the word) as you do. Incidentally, your dollars are worth absolutely nothing unless the central banks of Asia continue to buy your Treasury Bonds. Of course, if they stop, you can expend a little of ‘your’ blood invading them too …

  10. quite telling how none of the substantive points are addressed amidst the foggy patch of name-calling and a suggestion that diverse opinions are not welcome here.

  11. Which substantive points? If you’re referring to anonymous’s laundry list, the answers are obvious. The post was tendentious propaganda.
    However, are there any particular questions from that list that you think need a reply? Pick up to two. I’ll respond.

  12. “If “occupation” were the problem, why were there deadly fedayeen raids into Israel BEFORE 1967?”
    Perhaps because one-million-plus of God’s children who had been ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homes in 1948 had repeatedly had their claims to return to them– based on rights confirmed in UN GA resolution 194 and the UN Declaration on Human Rights–repeatedly refused? Those were the Palestinian refugees. Their desire to return to live at peace in their own homes– just like the similar desire of refugees the world round, from Bosnia to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq– was never even considered seriously by the Israelis from 1948 through 1967.
    The efugees’ desire to return home was the main issue then. And it is still unresolved, forming a big part of the Palestinians’ ongoing political cause.
    If the Israelis want to deny most of those refugees the right to return to their original homes, then at least they need to give the Palestinian state a large enough land base that it can reabsorb them there, as well as giving them compensation for all their privately-owned properties foregone inside Israel…
    Unless, that is, you think that Palestinian individuals should for some reason be accorded fewer rights than Jewish individuals. But there’s a name for people who hold discriminatory vierws like that…
    “Why was the UN General Assembly Partition Plan rejected by them in 1947?”
    Because the Palestinian Arabs, though 80% of the land’s people at that point, were being offered under 30% of its land base in the plan.
    The emerging general norm in international affairs then was for total withdrawal of colonial powers (as in India/Pakistan etc.) Palestinians saw the Israelis as colonists coming from different lands and judged themselves part of the global movement against colonialism.
    Since then, the secularists among the Palestinians have come to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a separate state within its own (pre-1967) borders. That was a huge concession for them to make. Did it get reciprocated by any Israeli move to withdraw back to within those borders? Hasn’t happened yet…

  13. There are lots of people in the phone book Rowan.
    There is much more value in the anonymous opinions of citizens than in the junk transcripts from paid propagandists, like Ali Abunimah.
    Self identifying is risk free for you Rowan when you badmouth the USA, but it is not for anybody speaking up against anything Arab or Islamic. Have you heard about Teo Van Gogh? So much for Dutch progressive attitudes, they already burned eight mosques. We haven’t burned one in the US after 3000 Van Goghs. The famous European soft touch…
    Feel free to post your address and phone number and I’ll try to stop by when I am in town.
    Oh, and also feel free to object to any of my points about Arafat (murderer, impostor, liar, or thief).

  14. This is what I really find cowardly about the Freepers and similar supporters of the current world rulers : they hide behind anonymity because they apparently think that Zarqawi is under the bed, waiting to cut their throats with his snicker snee. It’s all because of Hollywood, which has created a hysterical mind cast impervious to what we stodgy old Europeans call ‘reason’. It will self-destruct, in a magnificent financial meltdown, I hope. Surely the Asian banks will not continue to finance their own subjugation after this global display of inanity.

  15. Richard Reid and Zacaharias Moussawi didn’t come from Hollywood, they came from London(istan), poisoned by your untouchable clerics breeding a whole generation of terrorists.
    If our finances suffer we’ll work harder and do just fine. You are compromised by the Islamic invasion of your cities, and no money or reason can salvage that.

  17. “Unless, that is, you think that Palestinian individuals should for some reason be accorded fewer rights than Jewish individuals.”
    in point of fact, it’s the other way around. An equal number of Jewish individuals were driven out of Arab lands in the 1948 period. Why are they less deserving of compensation?

  19. 1. While many of the Jewish individuals you refer to were in fact driven out, far from all of them were. Many of them were “encouraged” to emigrate to Israel by Zionist underground groups using various methods, including what was termed “cruel Zionism” (Iraq is a well documented case in point). Others were “rescued” by coercive and/or deceptive means.
    2. Jewish individuals whose property was confiscated by the governments of their countries of origin should indeed be entitled to either return of or compensation for that property. However, it makes no legal, moral or logical sense to tie their right to compensation to that of the Palestinians.

  20. Many of them were “encouraged” to emigrate to Israel by Zionist underground groups using various methods, including what was termed “cruel Zionism” (Iraq is a well documented case in point).
    “Documented,” mind you, by confessions under torture, an Iraqi government investigation with a fairly obvious agenda, and subsequent accusations largely piggybacking on same. I have yet to see anything even resembling proof that would stand up in a court of law (and evidently neither have the accusers, at least one of whom withdrew his allegations after Mordechai Ben-Porat sued him for libel).
    However, it makes no legal, moral or logical sense to tie their right to compensation to that of the Palestinians.
    Agreed; they are separate issues to be resolved separately. I’d actually go further and say that Israel owes the Palestinian refugees compensation regardless of fault, because it has benefitted from their property.

  21. Jonathan, the part the Zionist underground played in the departure of the majority of Iraq’s Jews in 1950-51 has not been in question for several decades. It includes so-called cruel Zionism. The exodus of most of the Jewish community, which had been there continuously for millenia and was a vital part of the fabric of Iraqi society was a terrible loss for Iraq, and for many of the Jews who felt coerced and deceived into leaving. The confiscation of the property of the Jews who left was a shameful thing on the part of the Iraqi government. Both the Zionists and the Iraqis share this terrible shame.
    As for your remarks about compensation, I agree 100%, and have been saying just this for decades.

  22. Zionists share blame because the Iraqis stole their property? What kind of twisted logic is that?
    Shirin, you came here for whatever reason you had, if your property back home was stolen is that also the US fault?

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