The Eternal Agitator

  • SCOUT TUFANKJIAN / POLARIS

    Even as President, Arafat kept his military medals on display

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    He came to learn the limitations of his power after he arrived in the Palestinian territories following an absence of a quarter-century. His hard-line critics remarked that he had been reduced to the status of "governor of Gaza," responsible for such matters as trash collection. Arafat, who loved power, didn't think much of governance and was ill suited to it. It was one thing to be the icon of Palestinian aspirations, another to manage an economy, deliver health care and pave roads. On top of those challenges, Arafat and his P.L.O. had to compete for popular standing with Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, which violently opposed any compromise with Israel. And the peace process proved harder and harder to sell since even in the early days of relative goodwill between the Israelis and Arafat's Palestinian Authority, every expansion of self-rule promised in Oslo was hard won and overdue.

    Still, Arafat continued to commit himself, at least verbally, to peace. He wept when Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed Oslo with him, was assassinated in 1995. He beamed in 1996 when he shook hands with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though the hawkish Israeli leader had sworn earlier never to take Arafat's hand.

    But Arafat couldn't make the final leap of faith. To reach an agreement with Israel on a Palestinian state, Arafat knew, would require deep compromises on what have become almost sacred demands among his people: that traditionally Arab East Jerusalem, including Islamic holy sites in the Old City, become part of Palestine and that Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war that followed Israel's creation be allowed to return to their homes in what is now Israel. At the time of Camp David in 2000, Arafat's "obsession," an aide said, was that if he made those concessions, he would be remembered by his people as a traitor, perhaps even assassinated, as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was after he made peace with Israel. Better to leave the final accommodations to reality to a future leader. Better to die a revolutionary.

    In that role, at least, Arafat will be remembered as a success. When Golda Meir said in 1969 that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people, her remark wasn't entirely preposterous. Israelis didn't believe the Palestinians were a people, but neither did leaders of the Arab states or for that matter Palestinian intellectuals taken with the cause of pan-Arabism. It was Arafat who insisted on a separate identity for the Arabs of what had been the British mandate of Palestine. He articulated the cause of Palestinian independence, organized and fought for it and, despite sometimes deplorable means — including the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the massacre of 21 children at an Israeli school in 1974--won its legitimacy. It was a testament to Arafat's leadership that Palestinians continued to support him in the early years of self-rule even as he performed miserably as their hands-on governor, imposing a regime that was blunt, brutal, inept and corrupt.

    By the time of Arafat's death, though, a good number of his supporters had tired of his implacable devotion to struggle. While few Palestinians thought their salvation would come through the kind of peacemaking with Israel that Arafat's obstinacy had foreclosed, few thought he was leading them anywhere worth going. Despite the show of emotion after his death, many will greet his passing as much with quiet relief as with sadness. The P.L.O. leader told TIME in 1968 that all he wanted was for the Palestinians "to be like other people and have no need for Arafat." He got the second half of his wish.

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