Arafat’s Legacy
by Dr. Azzam Tamimi

It is not without good reason that the world has been so intensely focusing on the death-illness of Yassir Arafat and on his multi-national multi-stage funeral. The seventy five year old founder of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) and its head since 1957, the Chairman of the PLO since 1968 and President of the Palestinian Authority since 1994 has for the past forty years been recognized worldwide as the unrivalled Mr. Palestine. In spite of having been placed under virtual house arrest and in total isolation from the outside world for the past three years he continued, until air-lifted to a French hospital, to be the man in charge. For many years after his departure people will talk and write about his extraordinary career and adventurous journey through the wilderness of Middle East politics.

The most amazing aspect of his illness and death has been the obscurity that shrouded his two weeks stay at the Paris hospital. From the time he arrived there until just about twenty four hours before he was eventually – officially – pronounced dead, conflicting statements from Paris and Ramallah kept people guessing. As journalists could no longer hide their frustration at the unexplained blanket of silence, Palestinian streets had already become filled with all sorts of rumors. Initially it was thought the matter had to do with an ongoing power struggle within the leading ranks of the Fatah, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. However, Suha Al-Tawil (Mrs. Arafat) suddenly put an abrupt end to all speculations by appealing to the Palestinian people via a TV broadcast (aired by Aljazeera) to be alert to a conspiracy hatched by the top leaders of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority to allegedly bury Yassir Arafat alive. Surprisingly enough her suspects flew to Paris only to return a few hours later to Ramallah to set in motion the preparations for meticulous and elaborate funeral preparations for the leader who every one still maintained had not died yet. An Arabic internet news service by the name Filastin Press informs us now that this whole fiasco had been about concluding a deal with Suha Al-Tawil over an ongoing dispute over Arafat’s millions (some say billions) in numerous European secret bank accounts. Upon reaching a deal, we are informed, it became possible to allow Arafat to die. The specifics of the deal are not known for certain but according to rumors it involves a payment to Suha of twenty million dollars in addition to the eleven millions she had already taken plus a monthly stipend for herself and her daughter of around fifteen thousand dollars.

Marrying Suha Al-Tawil, a woman who is far removed from anything that can, even remotely, be identified with the plight or struggle of the Palestinian people, was not, as future generations will discover, Arafat’s only sin. His entire adult life has by all accounts been a struggle in pursuit of prominence, which he successfully achieved but not without incurring disaster after disaster upon the Palestinian cause itself. Acquiring fame by claiming to himself the success of others at times and by portraying defeat as victory at another, future generations of Palestinians will not be barred from seeing Arafat’s responsibility, even if partially, for Jordan’s Black September 1970 or for the many crises that gripped Lebanon throughout the seventies and part of the eighties until he and his forces were forced out.

One of his other sins, future generations will also discover, was his collusion with the Israelis and the Americans to end the Palestinian people’s 1987 Intifada by agreeing to peace-making on Israeli terms because he feared the emergence of an alternative leadership of the Palestinian people within Palestine. Furthermore, his insistence on monopolizing the Palestinian people and their cause brought about the severing of ties between the two Banks of the River Jordan the ramifications of which are still suffered by many Palestinians. It was such claimed monopoly that ended up with the Palestinians paying for his unwise siding with Saddam Hussein as the latter invaded Kuwait and pillaged it. On a more conceptual level, the national Palestinian identity he is widely accredited for led to the isolation of the Palestinian people and the dwarfing of the cause of confronting the Zionist project from being an Islamic and Arab cause to a mere ‘Palestinian’ one. Reshaping the Palestinian struggle in a nationalistic format has been the one single most damaging act to the cause. The problem of Palestine is not caused by the lack of Palestinian nationhood but is the symptom of the Western Zionism colonial project whose manifestation is the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine.

Arafat’s most immediate sinful legacy, which will be the talk of the Palestinians and observers alike for a while, will be the shambles in which he left his own organization after several decades of tribal rule. Having insisted throughout his life to name no deputy or successor, and by virtue of the whimsical manner in which he ran his organization since it was set up about forty five years or so, Arafat’s death will inevitably cause more than one tremor. On the one hand, his departure will mark the end of an era and of an entire generation. Of those who co-founded Fatah with him in 1957 only three men remain alive and are still part of the organization: Mahmud Abbas, Salim Al-Za’nun and Faruq Qaddumi. The word is already out that the former is likely to be the leading contender for the presidential elections that will take place on 9 January 2005 to replace Yassir Arafat. However, having been the discredited Oslo architect and failed ‘first’ prime minister, Abu Mazin, as he is also known, is unlikely to fill the shoes of the departed leader. The other most powerful old guard remaining is Qaddumi who, until appointed head of Fatah upon the death of Arafat, has been acting as the de facto ceremonial head of the foreign affairs department in exile. Observers seem to agree that none of those who are above the age of sixty in Arafat’s close entourage is capable of steering the ship that Arafat leaves stranded in the shallow waters of Palestinian politics.

On the other hand, the Fatah movement, which only Arafat could keep together for so long, has for some time been on the brink of imploding. Rampant corruption, the failure of the peace process and the rise of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) as a credible and serious alternative have collectively contributed to the emergence of angry and frustrated clusters within the Fatah ranks. Mahmud Abbas, the current head of the PLO, and Ahmad Quray’, the current Prime Minister, will initially work together to fill the vacuum but eventually neither will be able to hold Fatah together and avert an imminent split. There is so much boiling underneath the surface within Fatah. The boiling has been fueled further by the failure of the peace process and the crippling corruption. Apart from the circle of the old guards, two opposing trends can be identified: a pro-settlement security-minded trend under the leadership of Israel’s favorite Muhammad Dahlan, former head of Palestinian Preventive Security in Gaza, and a pro-resistance anti-Israel trend led by the detained field commander Marwan Baghuti. The latter trend is commonly identified with the Fatah military wing Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades that came to being with the eruption of the second Intifada (uprising) on 28 September 2000.

However, despite any clever arrangements that Israel, Egypt and Jordan may seek singularly or collectively, with or without U.S. participation, the most important factor that makes the post-Arafat era a completely different one is the emergence of Hamas as the leading resistance movement among the Palestinians not only within the occupied territories but worldwide. In pursuit of an accomplished policy and in accordance with an established tradition Hamas is expected to stay out of any power struggle within the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the internal feud that will escalate to ever higher dimensions within the Fatah movement. While calling for unity and peaceful resolution of disputes, Hamas will maintain that the power struggle is none of its business. The Islamic organization has never agreed to join the PLO in the distant past and remained adamant in rejecting all calls to join the PA in more recent years. Furthermore, it has passed the test of resisting the temptation to respond to provocations by the PA’s various security instruments with violence focusing instead on its objective of forcing the Israelis out of the territories occupied in 1967 while maintaining the popular Palestinian position, long forfeited by the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, that Israel is an illegitimate entity created on Palestinian land that one day will be free and independent.

Insisting that Hamas is a terrorist group with which no business can be done, the Israelis and their U.S. friends will be hoping that Arafat’s disappearance will pave the way for the resumption of peace negotiations with the Israelis. The assumption that Arafat has been the obstacle to peace prompted the Israelis and the Americans to stop talking to him and to even punish him severely until his health deteriorated and his life was lost. This is where they went miserably wrong; for this is not how the Palestinians analyze the situation. Yassir Arafat will be remembered by most Palestinians as someone who gambled and lost; he conceded more than enough and crossed all lines in compromising with the ‘enemy’ in the hope of getting something. He agreed to transform himself from a defender of his people’s rights to a politician whose primary concern was to remain afloat and stay politically alive. Prior to the eruption of the Second Intifada he was being pressed to pay the last two installments of the debt he owed to his ‘peace partners’ in Israel: give up the right of the Palestinian refugees to return home and give up Islamic exclusive rights to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. He knew, as every Palestinian, Arab and Muslim knew, that any compromise on these issues would have meant only one thing: his political demise. His refusal to sign at Camp David after marathon negotiations with former Israeli Prime Minister Barak and former U.S. president Clinton revived him and restored some of the loss in credibility and authority he incurred as a result of traveling the path of peace-making with Israel. His position also made it possible to bolster the unity and solidarity among various Palestinian factions and groups and turned the hostility between him and Hamas into a national alliance against ‘the one enemy’ of the Palestinian people.

The world is witnessing the beginning of a new era in post-Arafat Palestine. It is an era that demands a fresh start. Having suffered so much at the hands of Ariel Sharon, the Palestinians are not in the mood for peace making with the Israelis on terms dictated by the Israelis or the Americans. Therefore, if a fresh start is to be attempted an entirely new formula will have to be presented; a formula that emanates from an initiative whose underpinning assumption is the fact that the Palestinians are victims of occupation and oppression and that their struggle for freedom and independence is not terrorism. However, no such initiative will ever be successful if it excludes the major powers in today’s Palestinian society including Hamas.