|
|
|
|
Middle East Review of International Affairs
The Terror and the Pity: Yasir Arafat and the Second Loss of Palestine
by Barry Rubin
*
Introduction
As has so often happened before, some observers have underestimated Yasir Arafat's ability to survive political or military disasters partly of his own making. Others have overestimated Yasir Arafat's willingness to make peace or his ability to change his positions. This article presents a long-term view of Arafat's leadership and a short-term analysis on the current state of Palestinian politics.
In the year 2000, Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian leadership initiated a new, self-inflicted nakba, a catastrophe equaled only by the 1948 Arab defeat. The decision to reject a negotiated solution building on the Oslo peace process, the Camp David proposals, and the Clinton proposal constituted nothing less than a second, and long-term, loss of a chance to achieve a Palestinian state. Whatever rationales can be made for this choice, the cost already incurred-only a small part of the ultimate price--vastly exceeds any of these decision's supposed reasons and certainly any likely benefits to be achieved.
This debacle was brought about by the same leadership and thinking which had contributed to other, earlier disasters like those in 1967 (the provocation and loss of war with Israel), 1970 (the PLO's defeat and expulsion from Jordan), 1978 (failure to use the opportunity afforded by the Egypt-Israel Camp David agreements), 1982 (the defeat by Israel in Lebanon), 1983 (the defeat by Syria in Lebanon), 1988 (the inability to make a major policy shift toward negotiations), 1990 (the sacrifice of the U.S-PLO dialogue and Arafat's decision to back Iraq in the Kuwait crisis), and others.
In the atmosphere of self-justification at rejecting the opportunities of 2000 and of self-congratulation at having launched a war of independence, these issues have not been seriously examined, at least publicly. Instead, traditional themes of Palestinian political thinking and structure have continued or reemerged. This article analyzes some of these main themes and structures. It has been very much influenced, and its arguments have been largely based, on many private discussions with Palestinian political figures and intellectuals.
The evaluation of Arafat's attitude toward the Oslo process itself is unknowable and is not this article's subject. Moreover, it is unnecessary to argue that Arafat has never changed but only that he has always kept major parts of his world view and strategic concepts consistent. Whatever permutations occurred in the course of his career, he was ultimately unable to break with the past.
Regarding the peace process, it is possible that he never intended to make an agreement (viewing the Oslo agreement merely as an escape from the dead end he faced in the early 1990s); or that he had no particular plan; or that he held ambiguous and conflicting ideas which predominated at different moments or over different specific issues. What seems unlikely, though, was that he could ever really have expected Israel-a country whose good intentions he never accepted-would offer him a political settlement in which he received all the territory he wanted plus the acceptance of all refugees to live in Israel without even an end-of-conflict agreement.
Equally, it is not necessary to argue that Arafat has always, or even today, views his personal mission as Israel's destruction. Rather, his priority has proven to be keeping the door open for that goal's future achievement. Ironically, if he had been willing to compromise, he might have obtained a state on terms which would have allowed the pursuit of that goal at some future stage. What he refused to do was to set in motion a psychological, ideological, and structural process that might have led to permanent acceptance of a two-state solution or to run the risk of appearing to be a traitor to his original goals by making a compromise deal. In short, he would not "risk" making the agreement permanent or take responsibility for appearing to make a full and final peace treaty.
Full PDF Document, 17 pages, 97kB
Endnotes
Note *: Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs GLORIA) Center of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His books include Revolution Until Victory? The Politics and History of the PLO and From Revolution to State-Building: The Transformation of Palestinian Politics, both published by Harvard University Press. He is author of Tragedy of the Middle East (Cambridge University Press), Islamic Fundamentalists in Egyptian Politics (Second, revised edition, Palgrave) and, with co-author Judy Colp Rubin, of a forthcoming biography of Yasir Arafat (Palgrave). Back