There
have been many obituaries of the Palestinian leader
Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini,
known to all Palestinians as Abu Ammar and to the
world as Yasser Arafat, including two on this site.
However whilst many were accurate in there historical
content, few caught the measure of the man and the
reasons why he was a living icon for millions of
Palestinians and others across the world. It is
as if many of these writers could not accept the
real Arafat and thus concentrated on his faults
and weaknesses, as if they seem to prefer their
political leaders to be strong men, without human
frailties, as if such a leader has ever existed
beyond hack biographies. The whole point about Abu
Ammar is that his very physique told you he could
not possibly fall into this category, even if they
did exist; even his most ardent supporters would
agree he was not blessed with looks or physical
stature. The fact that he was in many ways a very
ordinary man was part of his great strength. Indeed
his unthreatening appearance in the often macho
world of the early days of Fatah and the PLO was
the very reason he achieved power. As is often the
way in politics, those who are not seen as a threat
by the more likely leadership contenders often win
the crown and so it was with Arafat..
Until Arafat took the helm of the PLO in 1969 it
was little more than a satrap organisation, having
been founded in 1964 by the Arab League on the insistence
of Egyptian President Gamal Nasser. Nasser saw it
as a means to advance Egypt's Foreign Policy by
uniting the Arab world under Egyptian rule and by
rallying the Arab states under the banner of destroying
Israel. Its first head, Ahmed Shukeiry, mainly hung
about in the ante chambers of various Arab governments
awaiting handouts and patronage, as I have already
said, most notable from Egypt. With the emergence
of radical Palestinian groups like Arafat’s
Fatah and George Habash’s PFLP and their affiliation
to the PLO, this all changed when Arafat took its
helm. One of his great services to the Palestinian
people was his recognition of two pertinent facts,
if Statehood was ever going to become a reality.
One has to remember that back in the 1960s &
70s armed struggle was paramount within the world's
Liberation Movements, upon which Arafat’s PLO
was based. Victorious Liberation Movements were
then moving from the battlefield into government
and by so doing had set the agenda for change. Politics
would come later; the gun was to be the tool to
bring about Statehood. Arafat gradually and before
most recognised as far as Palestine was concerned,
armed struggle alone could never bring about a Palestinian
State, for two reasons. Israelis did not consider
themselves to be a settler population and the dreadful
experiences of European Jewry under the Nazis reinforced
in them that they were never going to be forced
out of their Nation, They would fight to the last
and secondly as the USA underwrote Israel, it was
unlikely that they would ever need to do so. Thus
especially in the early days of the PLO the armed
struggle really was propaganda by deed much in the
manner of the Russian Narodniks.
With
his famous United Nations speech about the Kalashnikov
and the Olive Branch Arafat demonstrated his firm
hold on real politic and thus he was more willing
than most to see the advantages of a genuine two
State solution.
What made Arafat head and shoulders above almost
all other Palestinian leaders of his generation
was that he refused to bend the knee to any of the
Arab Satraps who were then governing the Arab nations
in the region. Yes, he had no problem in holding
out his begging bowl for them to fill, nor offering
up in their direction the most obtuse praise, but
that was as far as he went. Under Arafat, Fatah
and the PLO were never allowed to become an arm
of the various Satraps foreign policy, to be used
not in the interest of the Palestinian people but
of Saddam’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria, Anwar
al Sadat’s Egypt and Gadaffi's Libya. Of course,
once these wretched dictators realised that Arafat
had not only tricked them with his honey but also
binned a great deal of their cash in the process,
they raged against him and placed him on their not
inconsiderable lists of their mortal enemies to
be shot on sight. Yet when the dust settled it was
they who had to swallow their pride and once again
greet Arafat at the foot of the steps to his private
jet, which more often than not had been borrowed/flinched
from one or other of this group of freeloaders and
useless Satraps. No matter what they would like
to do to him, they did not wish to go down in history
as having done the Israeli's dirty work for them
and in any case they were well aware that the Arab
street would not stand for it. As for Abu Ammar,
he would greet each of the Satraps as if they were
his favourite long lost brothers, kissing them in
greeting with his stubbly chin with an impenetrable
smile on his rubbery lips.
To understand the Palestinian people's admiration,
if not love for Arafat, one only has to turn to
what was, although a major defeat, also one of his
finest hours. On the 6th June 1982 when Arial Sharon
and his sidekick, the then chief of the Israeli
Defence Forces, Rafael Eitan conceived a plan, Peace
for Galilee, which was intended to not only drive
the PLO from southern Lebanon, as Sharon claimed
to the then Israeli PM and his cabinet, but would
militarily destroy the PLO once and for all and
in the process kill Arafat and the rest of the Palestinian
leadership who resided in Lebanon. Within a short
space of time the Israelis were in Beirut, knocking
on Arafat's door; he was, however, never at home
to receive them, although Arafat seemed to be everywhere
else. As soon as the Israelis got wind of where
he was, they rained down hell and fire onto that
neighbourhood in their frantic attempt to exterminate
him, only for him to reappear shortly afterwards
with a look of innocence on his face to proclaim
victory for the PLO and their Lebanese allies was
near — and this was not done in the manner
of Comical Ali in Iraq* but was heartfelt. Not only
did it help to rally the PLO fighters but apparently
drove Sharon mad with rage when he watched Arafat’s
performance on CNN TV.
This funny little man with his silly clothes and
kefiyah at that time made grown men weep in admiration.
On one occasion he was asked were not his own and
the PLO’s defeat and surrender near. He looked
at the questioner as if he was a madman, and he
gently took his hand in a sign of sympathy with
this poor inflicted fellow, who Arafat clearly regarded
was in need of urgent medical treatment. Then he
suddenly turned to the small group of journalists
and cried out, "Come, come, come, I show you
defeat," and he rushed across the road with
his bodyguard in a state of panic, the journalists
a step behind with Arafat still repeating, "Come,
come, come, come," as if he was herding a class
of naughty school kids. He then stopped at a group
of young PLO fighters who were dug in amongst West
Beirut’s bombed out cityscape. "Do they
look defeated, ask them, and ask them if you dare."
As if on queue the fighters started chanting “Lebanon,
Palestine, one struggle one trench.” Defeat,
he muttered the words quietly to himself with such
contempt, it looked as if he was still mulling over
such a silly statement as he and his escort drove
off. An act, perhaps, but never forget this little
interlude was shown on TV throughout the world,
including in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Was
it any wonder that within a short period of time
after this the first intifada began?
Finally, due to international pressure, Sharon was
forced to strike a deal to let his hated adversary
leave the city with his fighters. A deal was struck
in which the PLO fighters would turn their heavy
weapons over and leave Lebanon by Sea. This they
did with rifles firing into the air, as is the Arab
tradition. Sharon and Eitan were reduced to watching
this spectacle from the roof of one of Beirut’s
surviving sky scrapers, although they were to have
their revenge in the most cowardly and criminal
way. They quelled their anger at Arafat's miraculous
escape from the jaws of defeat, by turning their
rottweiller’s, in the human form of the Lebanese
Phalangist militia, loose on the Palestinian elderly
men, women and the children who the PLO fighters
were forced to leave behind in the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps. Their slaughter went on for well
over 24 hours whilst the IDF sat on their arses
taking a break and looking the other way. Thus Generals
Sharon and Eitan forever blackened the name of the
IDF.
Of course, what happened in Lebanon was a major
defeat for the PLO from which its military infrastructure
has never recovered to this day. But Arafat and
the core PLO leadership survived to fight another
day. Arafat himself was indefatigable and he soon
bounced back, plotting and conniving from his exile
in Tunis, whilst suffering more blows from the IDF.
This time more personal when they murdered in 1988
and 1991 two of his closest comrades, Saleh Khalaf
(Abu Iyad) and Khalil El Wazir (Abu Jihad).
Incidentally it was claimed in the Israeli newspaper
Maariv
that the leader of the Israeli Defence Force team
that carried out the assassination of Abu Jihad
was none other than Arafat’s future adversary
in the early stages of the Oslo accords, Ehud Barak,
who it is claimed ran the assassination operation
from a command centre on a navy missile boat off
the shore of Tunis. Once again this goes to show
what a small world, as far as personalities are
concerned, the struggle between the Palestinians
and Israel is.
Finally we come to the Oslo accords which some still
claim was Arafat’s great-lost opportunity.
Maybe, but he did not seem to feel this and the
price asked of him was always going to be far too
high, especially for a man who understood his position
in a historical context so clearly, he was never
going to blot his biography for a will of a wisp.
What he was asked to do was disown the three million
plus Palestinians in the Diaspora by signing away
their right of return to their homeland. He understood
that this was simply something that it was not his
right to do; he had after all spent most of his
life in exile and understood all too clearly the
dream within every Palestinian exile and their families
to one day return home. It was not only the Jewish
people who cried out, next year in Jerusalem. For
Barak to ask Arafat to do such a thing, when he
himself knew that throughout the centuries of exile
this was something no Jew would be prepared to do
brought shame on him and his Government.
Maybe, if only subconsciously, many Israelis also
thought this, for a short while after his Government
fell and Arafat's arch nemesis Arial Sharon formed
a government. On being asked what the future held
for the Palestinian people and indeed himself and
what should be done, Arafat stoically replied, "Endure".
As in Beirut he refused safe passage and remained
with his people and like them he suffered their
humiliations, confinement and bombardments. He knew
any offer from Sharon, backed up by Bush’s
Republican government in the White House, would
be worthless. So the final period of his life, like
his people, was one of endurance, of such, great
men are made. Under his leadership, he and his people
would resist and suffer rather than become ‘kaffers’
in an Israeli Bantus-land, until better days and
thus opportunities came.
*
Saddam Hussein's Minister of Information.
