Yasser Arafat: Modern era’s Saladin

The west saw him as a terrorist; to the rest of the world he was an intrepid warrior trying relentlessly to right the wrong his nation was done in 1948. He was fighting to regain for his nation a country which was cynically snatched away from the Palestinians through a mix of British treachery and western hypocrisy. To his people, he was an icon of the struggle for freedom. Unfortunately, he did not live to see the full fruition of his dreams, a Palestinian state. 

Sixteen years ago on this day Yasser Arafat, who had assumed the nom de guerre Abu Ammar, passed away under questionable circumstances that have not quiet been answered satisfactorily. But this is not the occasion to dwell on the circumstances of his death; suffice it to say that doubts remain regarding the cause of it even today. Instead, let us look at the man who dominated global news and influenced world and in particular Middle Eastern politics, for a good part of four decades, with a dispassionate eye.

Yasser Arafat and Palestine are linked umbilically, and one day his name may become a symbol for the state of Palestine. He was one person with three personae—leader of a freedom movement that was being participated in by more than one group fighting for the liberation of Palestine, each with their individual ideological leanings, an acclaimed leader of a stateless nation whose homeland had been usurped, and an administrator of a nebulous state entity that went by the name of Palestinian Authority—a leader with people but no well-defined state.

According to Adam Shatz, the well-known literary editor at the London Review of Books, "In the Arab imagination, Palestine is not simply a plot of land, any more than Israel is a plot of land in the Jewish imagination. As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has observed, Palestine is also a metaphor—for the loss of Eden, for the sorrows of dispossession and exile, for the declining power of the Arab world in its dealings with the West." And it was to right the wrong, to retrieve the loss and revive the Arabs that Arafat dedicated his life. Those who belittle Arafat as being merely a symbol rather than a leader, caring more about the state than his legacy, often forget that a person cannot be one without being the other, but that first and foremost he has to be a leader before he can assume the status of an icon. Near the end of his life Arafat had subsumed himself within the people saying, "Each Palestinian is Yasser Arafat, who is part and parcel of the Palestinian people, the great people, who will stand fast until doomsday."

He is often vilified for his failure to transform the Oslo Accord into a permanent peace, unfairly, overlooking Israel's contribution to the failure of the 1993 Accord. Given the disparate and divergent views within the Arabs and within the Palestinians, since, by the concept of the Palestinian struggle, "Islamicists and others hoped the struggle was to end Israel's existence, while Palestinian nationalists believed the battle was for the West Bank and Gaza", reconciliation and bringing the various groups together was a tall order. That led to a deficit of trust between the stakeholders. In return for Israeli recognition of PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians, PLO accepted Israel's right to exist, thereby, risking Arafat's own future. He is criticised for acceding to the Accord since he could not achieve a Palestinian state during his lifetime. But the critics do not realise that the Accord was not an end in itself since it was meant to be a prelude to future negotiations. Yasser Arafat may not have lived to see success but that the Palestine issue remains at the top of the global agenda is because of him.

The Oslo Accord was bound to fail, being flawed ab initio. What else could be the fate of a treaty that did not address the fundamental abrasive issue for the Palestinians—illegal settlements? Giving in to the pressure of the rejectionists, Rabin refused to include the settlement freeze clause. This saw settlement double between 1993 and 2000. If Arafat is blamed for not clamping down on violence, Israel can be blamed, according to a Hamas leader, for "misusing such negotiations to win time with a view to imposing more realities on the ground." Violence was as a reaction to Israeli actions. There were 100,000 settlers before the agreement and now the number hit 750,000 settlers living illegally in the occupied West Bank. Currently, Israel has annexed 30 percent of the occupied territory under Trump's so-called "Deal of the Century" announced on January 28 this year. It refers to Jerusalem as "Israel's undivided capital" and recognises Israeli sovereignty over large parts of the West Bank. Trump's acknowledgement of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the latest Middle East peace plan has pushed back any immediate resolution of the problems, including the implementation of Oslo Accord.

The US and the west are known for their hypocrisy as far as terrorism is concerned. But their greatest hypocrisy is labelling Yasser Arafat as a terrorist. Not surprisingly, these critics do not see their own faces in the mirror, particularly the Israelis; for them it is convenient to overlook history selectively. At least the leaders of Israel, a country that was born out of a violent terrorist movement, have no moral right to label any other group or nation fighting for their independence as terrorists. Recall the name Irgun, the Jewish right-wing underground movement in Palestine, founded in 1931, an extremist nationalist group which called for the use of force to establish a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River. It has many terror acts to its credit, including the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946. Interestingly, this very terrorist group was subsumed in the Israeli defence forces after Palestine was given away to the Jews, in 1948. Perhaps the names Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir would jog our memory too. Apart from the fact that they were the sixth and seventh prime ministers of Israel, they were also leaders of this terrorist organisation. Several Israeli politicians and prime ministers are offsprings of Irgun members. And for the US to apply the terrorist label to others is like the pot calling the kettle black. It was fined by the ICJ in 1986 for its support for, and acts of, terror in Nicaragua. Even Nelson Mandela's name remained on the US terrorism watch list till 2008. His ANC was dubbed a terrorist organisation during the period of the Cold War.

Sixteen years after Yasser Arafat's death, people are still dissecting his legacy. His name has become synonymous with Palestine and its aspirations. He can be credited with reviving the Palestinian cause after the serious reverses of the 1967 Arab Israeli War along with his generation of Palestinian leadership by bringing the disparate groups under one umbrella and giving it an identity and a revolutionary character. He wanted to give peace a chance, but Israel had other plans. Even after more than 70 years, Israel continues to be motivated by Golda Meir's view that: "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."

Brig Gen Shahedul Anam Khan, ndc, psc (Retd), is a former Associate Editor of The Daily Star.