A New Dawn for Palestine?

The PLO must come up with a strong and real leadership structure, one that can assert, writes Binay Kumar.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
- Shakespeare recalling the contribution of Julius Caesar.

In principle, I'm sorry that we didn't liquidate him.
- Ariel Sharon, on not having killed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Lebanon 25 years ago.

Yasser Arafat, terrorist-politician, freedom fighter, prodigious opportunist and Nobel laureate, a man capable of arousing extremes of emotions around the globe, passed away last week into the history books. His supporters would have us remember him as THE man who put Palestine on the world map; the public face of the struggle, the dedicated voice of a voiceless people.

Unfortunately, for the hapless peoples of Palestine and the equally beleaguered citizens of Israel, his record does not bear out the adulation he received in many quarters, including India. On the contrary, despite the pan-Arab mourning characterizing him as a great leader, Arafat and his coterie personified all that was wrong with the official efforts to secure a Palestinian state.

Mr Arafat's squandering of the Palestinian argument in favour of personal enrichment - not just material but political as well - by way of the proverbial begging bowl he carried on his trips around the world ultimately benefited no one, except perhaps the media heads who were happy to use his face to explain a devastatingly complex problem. Instead of administering welfare and providing real leadership to the hundreds of thousands' in the Gaza strip, the Arafat syndicate looked for the next opportunity to appear on the BBC or CNN et al, perhaps accept another peace prize, grab another photo op to pontificate in front of a university audience somewhere in the world.

Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini was born on August 24, 1929 in Cairo. His father a textile merchant was a Palestinian with some Egyptian ancestry and his mother came from an old Palestinian family in Jerusalem. She died when Yasir, as he was then called, was five years old, and he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Jerusalem, the capital of British-administered Palestine. He never revealed much about his childhood except that amongst his earliest memories were that of British soldiers breaking into his uncle's house after midnight, beating members of the family and smashing furniture.

Around the age of seventeen, Mr Arafat was smuggling arms to aid the struggle against the British and the Jews. In the late fifties he founded the Al-Fatah movement that advocated an armed struggle against Israel. After the 1967 war Al-Fatah emerged from the underground as the most powerful and best organised of the groups that made up the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization that was founded three years earlier under the sponsorship of the Arab League. Mr Arafat took over the organization in 1969 and became the chairman of the PLO executive committee.

The aims of the PLO were always laudable; the organization was meant to represent the struggle of the besieged people of Palestine when British largesse to the Jews of Europe left them without a state. Overnight an entire population was robbed of a national identity, and left to languish as refugees in their own homes.

Unfortunately, by the nineties Mr Arafat and the PLO appeared more interested in lining their pockets and playing to the western gallery than making any substantial political gains on behalf the people they were meant to represent. The biggest headline grabber of that decade was the Oslo effort, billed by many as a 'real chance for peace'; it was nothing more than a token gesture. Edward Said, Palestine's most eloquent, admirable and able champion, was one of the few people who saw through the rouse, and held not just the Americans and the Israelis but also this 'great leader' to account, "we must admit that he can neither lead, nor plan, nor take a single step that makes any difference except to him and his Oslo cronies who have benefited materially from their people's misery."

The tragedy of Arafat's life (and checkered legacy) is that the world hopes to find in his death that golden opportunity which will make finally a Palestinian State a reality, as if its most visible face was the final stumbling block. If the Palestinians use this chance to unify behind a leader of their choice (rather than one imposed from Washington or London), the Americans and the Israelis will have little opportunity to browbeat the political process anymore. We can only hope that the Palestinians themselves come to recognize that their cause is larger than one man's legacy and elect new leaders who will not be under the constraints that were, rightly or wrongly, on Arafat.

Of course, on its part, Israel has to act responsibly too. The international community, particularly the Bush Administration, has spent the last four years using Arafat's record as an excuse for not being able to affect change in the region. It is now incumbent upon Israel to provide to the Palestinians demonstrable evidence that it will accept a peaceful and viable Palestinian state. Otherwise, the Americans and the Israelis will not be able to escape responsibility for aiding Hamas' influence to grow larger and more sinister. Nobody knows this better than America that terrorism feeds on endemic hopelessness.

Yesterday, President Bush appointed Condoleezza Rice as his new Secretary of State. Ms Rice is well known as a hawk in foreign policy matters, and one would expect her to be more demanding than usual of the Palestinians. In order to meet her challenge the PLO must come up with a strong and real leadership structure, one that will properly assert what is quite simply a right of the Palestinian people. Otherwise, what is being hailed as a new dawn might just end up looking like a longer, darker night!

(Binay Kumar is a resident of California, in the US. His column appears every Thursday.)