Arafat's Legacy: What He Succeeded in Doing

Kareem Fahim, in the Village Voice (Nov. 17, 2004):

... Arafat led the movement for another 36 years, until he died last week in a Paris military hospital. That he had never achieved an independent state was viewed by a spectrum of observers as proof of his failings as a leader. Arafat had seen his legacy differently.

"We have made the Palestinian case the biggest problem in the world," he told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly last month, when he was still in Ramallah, and in the mood to reflect on his accomplishments. "One hundred and seven years after the [founding Zionist] Basel Conference, 90 years after the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Israel has failed to wipe us out. We are here, in Palestine, facing them. We are not red Indians."

That achievement, viewed in context, was considerable. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been as symbolic as it was military, and the task for Arafat and a generation of Palestinian leaders was to meet the power of Israel's founding narrative—a people persecuted by European fascism, escaping to a land "without a people," where they would make the desert bloom—with a compelling counternarrative. Racism also dogged their efforts, evidenced in the ceaseless caricatures of Arafat and the Palestinians that transcend any legitimate comic or discursive value.

Arafat's movement managed all this with few friends: just occasional, unreliable suitors. The U.S. and the Soviets pursued their own agendas, and so did the Arab governments. Solidarity was a compact between Palestinians and a worldwide audience of conscience.

While Arafat's dramas played in the headlines, the Palestinians soldiered on. In exile, they had distinguished themselves, many of them well educated and professionally accomplished. At home, or in the refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries, despite abysmal living conditions, they created a culture of rights: Anyone who has visited Palestinian towns notes the fluency of even young children in complex matters of international law.

Arafat, of course, had traded his life for the cause. Wearing secondhand military fatigues, with sunglasses in various states of vogue and one of his two kaffiyehs as an ascot, he pressed Palestine's case in capitals where he thought he could get it heard, even the ones that, in retrospect, he might have done well to avoid.

While the notion that Arafat never ideologically abandoned armed struggle is unsupported, he never convinced the world that he opposed attacks on civilians, a mistake that came back to haunt him after September 11. His critics called terrorism part of his character, while those closer to him recognized a leadership flaw; rather than banishing militants who hurt the cause, he often sought to co-opt them.

The most serious concerns about Arafat came, of course, from Palestinians themselves. That debate was vigorous, especially during the years of the Oslo accords. Palestinians demanded of their government freedoms, transparency, and the right to participate in the rump of land they had so far regained through negotiations with the Israelis. Arafat, insecure as a governor, started to resemble a tyrant, imprisoning dissidents, hoarding power, and refusing to quash the network of cronyism that had sprung up around him. The protests against him came not just from militant groups like Hamas, but also from secular intellectuals.

But when George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon tried to sideline Arafat—Bush, in part, because it fit his odd strain of liberation theology, and Sharon because he didn't want to give up any land—Palestinians rallied around the leader who they knew had stayed too long, incensed at the interference in their business.