Yassir Arafat, 1929-2004

EARLY LIFE

It’s ironic that the man who personified the Palestinian movement was neither born in the region it claims, nor conforms to his own organization’s definition of Palestinian identity. Yassir Arafat, whose real name is Abdel-Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, was born in August 1929 in Cairo, son of an Egyptian textile merchant. He was sent to Jerusalem as a small child after his mother died, then returned to Egypt via Gaza.

Throughout his career, Arafat’s Egyptian background was a political impediment and source of personal embarrassment. One biographer notes that upon first meeting him in 1967, ‘West Bankers did not like his Egyptian accent and ways and found them alien,’ and to the very end Arafat employed an aide to translate his Egyptian dialect into Palestinian Arabic for conversing with his West Bank and Gaza subjects.

As a young man, Arafat took no part in the formative experience of the Palestinian movement ? the 1948 Arab-Israeli war ? but he would nonetheless claim refugee status throughout his life: ‘I am a refugee,’ he cried out in a 1969 interview, ‘Do you know what it means to be a refugee? I am a poor and helpless man. I have nothing, for I was expelled and dispossessed of my homeland.’ (Arafat’s congenital lying would continue for decades.)

FATAH AND THE PLO

In the mid-1950s, Arafat joined the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, then rose to the head of the Palestine Student Union at the University of Cairo. In the late 1950s Arafat moved to Kuwait, where he co-founded Fatah (‘Palestine National Liberation Movement’ ? an acronym meaning ‘conquest’), the faction that would later gain control over the entire Palestinian movement. Fatah’s motley ranks of Islamists, communists and pan-Arabists expanded via brute violence. ‘People aren’t attracted to speeches, but rather to bullets,’ Arafat quipped at this stage. (At right: Fatah logo of rifles and grenades over Israel)

Fatah began military-style training in Syria and Algeria in 1964, and the following year tried unsuccessfully to blow up a major Israeli water pump. Fatah’s stated goal was the obliteration of the State of Israel, and well before the 1967 war would supply a pretext, Arafat’s organization repeatedly attacked Israeli buses, homes, villages and rail lines.

This violence against Israeli civilians was a pillar of the Palestinian National Covenant (the foundational charter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization – PLO), which states that ‘the liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence’ and that ‘armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine and is therefore a strategy and not a tactic.’ (Despite repeated Palestinian commitments in the late 1990s to annul these sections of the covenant, it was never officially changed.)

Arafat’s public profile got a boost in 1968, when the IDF raided a Fatah terrorist stronghold in the Jordanian village of al-Karameh. The uniformed, keffiyah-clad Arafat took this opportunity to project himself as a fearless Arab leader who, despite the post-Six Day War gloom, dared to confront the Israelis. The image stuck, and Fatah’s numbers swelled with new recruits.

Arafat and Fatah consolidated power through bribery, extortion and murder, and at the Palestinian National Congress in Cairo in February 1969, Arafat was appointed head of the PLO ? a position he would never relinquish.

JORDAN, LEBANON AND TUNISIA

By the late 1960s, heavily-armed, Arafat-led Palestinians had formed a terrorist ‘state within a state’ in Jordan, not only attacking Israeli civilian targets, but also seizing control of Jordanian infrastructure.

The tension reached a height during late 1970, when Jordan’s King Hussein cracked down on the Palestinian factions. During this bloody conflict, known as ‘Black September’, Palestinians hijacked four Western airliners and blew one up on a Cairo runway (pictured at right), to both embarrass the Egyptians and Jordanians and, in their words, ‘teach the Americans a lesson for their long-standing support of Israel.’ With the broad publicity this generated, Arafat had hit the world stage.

When King Hussein drove Arafat’s faction out of his Jordanian kingdom (causing thousands of civilian deaths), they relocated in Lebanon. As in Jordan, Arafat soon triggered a bloody civil war in his previously stable host country. Simultaneously, the PLO launched intermittent attacks on Israeli towns from southern Lebanese positions.

Yassir Arafat then brought the high-profile terrorist act to western soil. In Sept. 1972, Fatah-backed terrorists kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic games. And in 1973, Arafat ordered his operatives in the Khartoum, Sudan office of Fatah to abduct and murder US Ambassador Cleo Noel and two other diplomats. (In 2004, the FBI finally opened an official investigation against Arafat for the Khartoum murders.)

The wanton violence fueled Arafat’s political goals, as his presence on the world stage grew: In 1974, he became the first representative of a nongovernmental organization to address a plenary session of the UN General Assembly (pictured at left) In the speech, with a gun holster strapped to his hip, Arafat compared himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Arab heads of states declared the PLO the sole legitimate representative of all Palestinians, the PLO was granted full membership in the Arab League in 1976, and by 1980 was fully recognized by European nations.

In 1978-82, the IDF invaded Lebanon to root out PLO groups that had continually terrorized the northern Israeli populace. The U.S. brokered a cease-fire deal in which Arafat and the PLO were allowed to leave Lebanon; Arafat and the PLO leadership eventually settled in Tunisia, which remained his center of operations until 1993.

During the 1980s, Arafat received financial assistance from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which allowed him to rebuild the battered PLO. This was particularly useful during the first Palestinian intifada in 1987 ? Arafat took control of the violence from afar, and it was mainly due to Fatah forces in the West Bank that the anti-Israel terror and civil unrest could be maintained. Arafat would then become nearly the only world leader to support Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War. (Saddam would later repay this loyalty by sending $25,000 checks to families of Palestinian suicide bombers.)

THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY

In the early 1990s, the U.S. led Israel and the PLO to negotiations that spawned the 1993 Oslo Accords, an agreement that called for the implementation of Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a five-year period. The following year Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

In 1994, Arafat moved his headquarters to the West Bank and Gaza to run the Palestinian Authority, an entity created by the Oslo Accords. Arafat brought with him from Tunisia an aging PLO leadership that would bolster his ongoing monopoly over all Palestinian funds, power and authority. Elections in 1996 extended Arafat’s control over the PA, but under the Oslo agreement, the term of that candidacy ended in 1999. Arafat never allowed new elections to take place.

While Israel went about implementing its side of the Oslo agreements ? removing troops from nearly all Palestinian areas, recognizing the PA, and educating for peace ? the PA utterly failed to live up to its commitment to renounce and uproot anti-Israel terrorism. Instead, unprecedented incitement from Arafat’s official PA media and school textbooks, and active and passive PA support for terrorist groups led to a string of suicide bombings in the mid-1990s that killed scores of Israeli civilians. In October, 1996, at the height of the Oslo years, Arafat cried out to a Bethlehem crowd, ‘We know only one word – jihad! Jihad, jihad, jihad! Whoever does not like it can drink from the Dead Sea or from the Sea of Gaza.’ [For more on the failure of Oslo, see HonestReporting's documentary film, Relentless.]

In July 2000, U.S. president Bill Clinton attempted to keep the Oslo Accords viable by convening a summit at Camp David between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. There, Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in Gaza and 92% of the West Bank, and a capital in East Jerusalem ? the most generous offer ever from an Israeli government. Yassir Arafat rejected the offer and ended negotiations without a counteroffer. As American envoy Dennis Ross concluded, ‘Arafat could not accept Camp David… because when the conflict ends, the cause that defines Arafat also ends.’ [See also this interview with Ross on Oslo.]

Immediately following this breakdown, the PA media machine under Arafat’s control ramped up the war rhetoric, and preparations were made for riots that were unleashed following Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. The Arafat-supported ‘al Aqsa intifada’ would continue for four years. This unprecedented wave of anti-Israel terrorism, which would result in over 1,000 Israeli deaths, was marked by over 120 Palestinian suicide bombers and the growth of an Islamic martyrdom cult.

This stage of violence revealed that Arafat and the PA had never abandoned their longstanding plans to liquidate the Jewish state. Arafat had told an Arab audience in Stockholm in 1996, ‘We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion… We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.’ Likewise, Arafat explained to a South African crowd in 1994 that the Oslo agreement was merely a tactical ruse in the larger battle to destroy the Jewish state ? a modern version of the Muslim prophet Mohammed’s trickery against the ancient tribe of Quraysh. Arafat’s colleague Faisal al-Husseini was even more explicit, describing the Oslo process as a ‘Trojan Horse’ designed to promote the strategic goal of ‘Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea’ ? that is, a Palestine in place of Israel.

TERRORIST TO THE END

The final phase in Arafat’s life-long commitment to organized terror was channeled through the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a Fatah group that was responsible for many of the most deadly attacks against Israeli civilians between 2000-2004. Though many media outlets described a mere ‘loose affiliation’ between Arafat and this terrorist group, the evidence clearly indicated a direct financial and organizational bond between the two:

? In November, 2003 a BBC investigation found that up to $50,000 a month was funneled by

An ammunition bill for the terrorist Al Aqsa Brigade, signed by Yassir Arafat – see larger version

Fatah, with Arafat’s approval, directly to the Al Aqsa Brigades, for the purpose of organizing bombings, snipings and ambushes against Israeli civilians.

? Documents ca
ptured by the IDF in 2002 indicated Fatah’s ‘systematic, institutionalized and ongoing financing’ of the Al Aqsa Brigades. (See Arafat’s signature on the weapons budget, and this full report from Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.)

? The leader of the Al Aqsa Brigades in Tulkarm told USA Today on March 14, 2002: ‘The truth is, we are Fatah, but we didn’t operate under the name of Fatah…We are the armed wing of the organization. We receive our instructions from Fatah. Our commander is Yasser Arafat himself.’

[For more on the Arafat-Al Aqsa connection, click here.]

In addition, Arafat granted free rein to the radical Islamic terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad to perpetrate dozens of horrific acts of civilian murder between 2000-2004. (At left: Arafat with Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin, 2003)

DELEGITIMIZATION

In January 2002, the Israeli Navy seized a Gaza-bound, PA-owned freighter ? the Karine A ? that was loaded with more than fifty tons of Iranian ammunition and weapons, including dozens of surface-to-surface Katyusha rockets. (See more on the Karine A.)

In June 2002, upon recognizing Arafat’s ongoing financing and abetting of terrorism, U.S. President Bush called for Arafat’s removal from power. Progress toward peace required, according to Bush, ‘a new and different Palestinian leadership…not compromised by terror.’ Release of a U.S.-backed ‘road map’ for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was therefore delayed until such a new Palestinian leader emerged. On its part, the Israeli government chose to isolate Arafat in his Ramallah compound, the ‘Muqata’, where he would remain from early 2002 until his final days, and where he was buried.

In April 2003, hours after Mahmoud Abbas assumed the role of Palestinian prime minister, the official road map was released and diplomatic progress began. But Arafat consistently undercut the authority of Abbas, leading to Abbas’ resignation and the halting of the road map peace process.

CORRUPTION, AUTOCRACY, JIHAD

Over the course of his ‘revolutionary’ career, Arafat siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars of international aid money intended to reach the Palestinian people.

Estimates of the degree of Arafat’s wealth differ, but are all staggering: In 2003, Forbes magazine listed Arafat in its annual list of the wealthiest ‘Kings, Queens and Despots,’ with a fortune of ‘at least $300 million.’ Israeli and US officials estimate Arafat’s personal holdings between $1-3 billion.

And while the average Palestinian barely subsisted, Arafat’s wife Suha (at left) in Paris received $100,000 each month from PA sources as reported on CBS’ 60 Minutes. That CBS report also noted that Arafat maintained secret investments in a Ramallah-based Coca Cola plant, a Tunisian cellphone company, and venture capital funds in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands.

Arafat also used foreign aid funds to pay off cronies who bolstered his autocracy: An International Monetary Fund report indicated that upwards of 8% ($135 million) of the PA’s annual budget was handed out by Arafat ‘at his sole discretion.’ And Arafat’s select PA policemen, far from keeping the peace, were repeatedly among the suicide bombers and snipers.

Money was just one method of strengthening Arafat’s power apparatus. Critics of his PA government were routinely imprisoned, tortured or beaten. One example: In 1999, Muawiya Al-Masri, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, described Arafat’s corruption to a Jordanian newspaper. For this, he was attacked by a gang of masked men and shot three times. Al-Masri survived the ordeal and described Arafat’s grip on PA power: ‘There is no institutional process. There is only one institution ? the Presidency, which has no law and order and is based on bribing top officials.’

From 2000-2004, Arafat permitted Muslim imams to incite unprecedented anti-Israel and anti-American violence from their mosques and through official PA media. Arafat’s Religious Affairs Ministry employed preachers who regularly called for children to ‘martyr themselves’, and PA television glamorized the act of suicide bombing.

Under Arafat, the Palestinian Authority school textbooks denied Israel’s very existence, and jihad was presented to Palestinian children as an admirable course of action. The Jewish people, meanwhile, was represented to schoolchildren as a tricky, greedy and barbarous nation.

Freedom of the press was virtually non-existent during Arafat’s reign in Gaza, Jericho and Ramallah ? if it didn’t speak favorably of Arafat, it didn’t get printed in the PA-con
trolled media. Moreover, the PA enacted a systematic policy of intimidation of foreign journalists. One case among many: When an AP cameraman captured footage of Palestinian street celebrations following the 9/11 attacks, he was kidnapped, brought to a PA security office, and Arafat’s cabinet secretary threatened that the PA ‘cannot guarantee [his] life’ if the footage was broadcast.

Yet beyond the terrorism, extortion, embezzlement and intimidation lies Arafat’s most unfortunate ongoing impact: The inculcation of murderous values in an entire generation of Palestinians, who have been educated ? under Arafat’s direction ? to continue the fight of jihad against Israel, rather than compromise to end the decades-long conflict.

How many generations will it take to undo Arafat’s dark legacy?

EDWARD SAID (1935-2003)

The leukemia that a couple of days ago killed Edward Said lasted long enough for the polemist and political activist who had settled in the US to watch his projects and hopes crumble.

Said owes his fame to having become the most articulate apologist for the "palestinian cause", something that wasn’t all that difficult when one considers that most of his rivals in this field, whenever they’re not too busy blowing up school buses and pizza parlours, satisfy themselves spreading anti-Semitic forgeries like "The Protocols of the Sages of Zion". Even so, although his prose reminds one of a post-modern English version of a deconstructionist French translation of the Germanic ravings of some Heidegger epigone, his academic dance of the seven veils with successive layers of Marxist, anti-imperialist and post-colonial jargon never hid the fact that his goals were fundamentally the same.

A large part of his so-called moral authority came from Said presenting himself as a refugee from a Palestinian homeland. In spite of having been put in doubt by his adversaries, the truth or falsity of this claim isn’t too important. The internal borders of the Arab world are all artificial and, half a century ago, loyalties there were established in relation do clans, families, cities or villages and religious sects, not countries or nations, an European import that has had no time to grow deep roots in the Middle East. The Palestinian nationality as a distinct identity has not begun to be developed before the 60s.

Born in an upper middle class Christian family, a student at the best local schools and a member of the most exclusive clubs, Said became since the 50s an American and he benefited both from this condition and from the romanticized image of an exile to reach the top of the academic pecking order. Since the beginning of the anti-Vietnam movements in the following decade, any cause that could be related to the Third World became first popular and then compulsory among Western intellectuals. Attuned to such a context, Said, whose speciality were Literary Studies, published in 1978 the book that would make him famous, assuring his role of guru almost until his death: “Orientalism”.

His "classic" is a confused, misinformed and angry diatribe that consists in applying to a particular case an overused generic thesis according to which intellectuals are mostly the servants of the ruling class. What “Orientalism” tries to show through half-truths, non-sequiturs, weird examples and exceptions turned into rules is that the discipline or, rather, the disciplines generically called Orientalism that study the Eastern peoples and cultures are nothing but the theoretical arm of imperialism. In short, whoever studied difficult languages such as Chinese or Sanskrit, whoever translated or annotated old or forgotten Japanese or Persian works, whoever unearthed lost temples and palaces did it only for the profit of British or French capitalists.

If such a childish reductionism weren’t enough, the author limited his analysis to the less Oriental of all the non-European regions: the Arab-Muslim world. Surrounding the publication of his work with a whole series of polemics where, to any substantive objection, he only answered questioning the ideological credentials of his critics, he managed, helped by the spirit of the times, to turn his book in the cornerstone of an academic fashion that is still strong enough, that is, judging people and works according not to scholarly criteria but in the light of their political choices. His greatest success was to have coined the very expression "Orientalism", making it work, like similar terms (fascist, racist, communist), as an insult that, shutting up those with a different point of view, allows its users to avoid any discussion.

One year later, in 1979, he published his other "classic", « The Question of Palestine », a book the purpose of which was to narrate the tragedy of his people but which touches historical truth only tangentially, at best. Among the many lies with which this deformed view of the past is built, the most scandalous is the mysterious disappearance of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hadjj Amin al Huseini (1893-1974). The main leader of what Said calls Palestine and of its revolt, in 1936-39, against British rule, the ally of the Nazis who wanted Hitler to help him exterminate the Jews of Haifa and Tel Aviv, the personality that dominated, between the 20s and the 60s, the life of the local Arabs, taking them from catastrophe to catastrophe, makes only one very brief appearance in the whole volume. It is as if a history of the US or Italy, covering the same period, simply omitted the names of FDR or Mussollini.

For two long decades, until the day when the Al Qaeda atrocities, demoralizing his apologetic view of the Islamic world, occasioned his final eclipse by his nemesis, Bernard Lewis, Said kept a powerful and evil hold over many intellectuals. And, though below such euphemisms as the “creation of a secular bi-national state where Jews and Arabs would live democratically together” what really lurked was his mad dream of abolishing Israel, something that would result in the extermination of its “non native” population, the real victims of his ideas were first and foremost his own countrymen whom he helped to guide towards new disasters.

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Folha de S. Paulo, 29 de setembro de 2003
NELSON ASCHER

Edward Said (1935-2003)

A leucemia que, há poucos dias, matou Edward Said prolongou-se o bastante para que o polemista e ativista político radicado nos Estados Unidos pudesse assistir à falência de seus projetos e expectativas.

Said deve sua reputação a ter se tornado o mais articulado defensor da "causa palestina", algo que nada tinha de difícil se considerarmos que seus competidores nessa área, quando não estão ocupados explodindo ônibus escolares ou pizzarias, satisfazem-se divulgando falsificações anti-semitas como "Os Protocolos dos Sábios de Sião". Ainda assim, se bem que sua prosa evoque uma versão pós-moderna para o inglês de uma tradução desconstrucionista francesa dos delírios germânicos de algum epígono de Martin Heidegger, sua dança acadêmica dos sete véus, sobrepondo camadas de jargão marxista, antiimperialista e pós-colonial, jamais ocultou que seus objetivos eram idênticos.

Boa parte de sua, digamos, autoridade moral resultava de ele se apresentar como um refugiado da terra natal palestina. Não obstante ter sido posta em dúvida por adversários, a veracidade ou não dessa reivindicação é uma questão secundária. As fronteiras internas do mundo árabe são artificiais e, meio século atrás, as lealdades se estabeleciam em relação a clãs, famílias, cidades ou aldeias e seitas religiosas, não a países ou nações, uma importação européia que nem sequer teve tempo de se aclimatar ao Oriente Médio. A nacionalidade palestina, como identidade distinta, começou a ser elaborada somente nos anos 60.

Nascido numa família da alta classe média cristã, educado nas melhores escolas, frequentador dos clubes mais exclusivos, Said tornou-se, desde os anos 50, um norte-americano e beneficiou-se tanto dessa condição como da imagem romantizada de exilado para atingir o ápice do mandarinato universitário. A partir dos movimentos de contestação à Guerra do Vietnã na década seguinte, a defesa de qualquer causa remotamente vinculada ao Terceiro Mundo tornou-se primeiro popular e logo compulsória entre os intelectuais do Ocidente. Sensível a tal contexto, Said, que se especializara em estudos literários, publicou em 1978 o livro que o projetaria, garantindo-lhe, quase até o final da vida, o papel de guru: "Orientalismo".

Seu "clássico" é uma diatribe confusa, desinformada e raivosa que se resume na aplicação a um caso particular da batida tese genérica de acordo com a qual intelectuais são, em sua maioria, lacaios da classe dominante. O que "Orientalismo" tenta expor com meias verdades, com um "non sequitur" após o outro, com exemplos abstrusos e exceções convertidas em regras, é que o orientalismo, a disciplina, ou melhor, o conjunto de disciplinas dedicadas ao estudo dos povos e culturas ao leste da Europa não passa do braço teórico da prática imperial. Trocando em miúdos, quem quer que tenha se aprofundado no estudo de línguas difíceis, como o chinês ou o sânscrito, traduzido e anotado obras antigas ou esquecidas da Pérsia ou do Japão, localizado e restaurado as ruínas de templos e palácios soterrados fez o que fez para que capitalistas londrinos ou parisienses extraíssem confortavelmente a mais-valia gerada por povos distantes.

Não bastasse seu reducionismo pueril, o autor circunscreveu sua análise à menos oriental das regiões extra-européias: o mundo árabe-islâmico. Envolvendo a publicação de sua obra numa sucessão de polêmicas em que às objeções substantivas retorquia questionando as credenciais ideológicas de seus críticos, ele conseguiu, auxiliado pelo espírito da época, transformá-la na pedra angular da moda acadêmica que vigora até hoje: a de julgar pessoas e trabalhos não por seus méritos científicos, mas por suas opções políticas. Seu grande sucesso reside em ter, com a expressão "orientalismo" , cunhado um insulto que, como "fascista", "racista" ou "comunista", possibilita ao usuário esquivar-se do debate desqualificando os interlocutores.

Um ano depois, em 1979, sairia seu outro "clássico", "A Questão da Palestina", um livro que pretende narrar a tragédia de seu povo, mas cujos contatos com a verdade histórica são, na melhor das hipóteses, tangenciais. Em meio às incontáveis mistificações sobre as quais se constrói essa versão deformada do passado, a mais escandalosa é o misterioso desaparecimento do Grão Mufti de Jerusalém, Hadj Amin Al Husseini (1893-1974). O principal líder político daquilo que Said chama de Palestina, o desencadeador e dirigente da revolta antibritânica de 1936-39, o aliado dos nazistas que tentou convencer Adolf Hitler a exterminar os judeus de Tel Aviv e Haifa, a personalidade que dominou a vida dos árabes da região entre os anos 20 e 60, conduzindo-os de catástrofe em catástrofe, aparece uma única vez, de passagem, no livro inteiro. Isso equivale a escrever sobre os EUA ou a Itália dos mesmos anos omitindo respectivamente os nomes de Roosevelt e Mussolini.

Durante duas boas décadas, até que os atentados bin-ladenistas, desmoralizando sua apresentação apologética do mundo islâmico, levassem seu arqui-rival, o arabista octogenário Bernard Lewis, a eclipsá-lo, Said exerceu uma influência intelectual tão avassaladora quanto perniciosa. E, embora sob eufemismos, como o da criação de um país binacional onde judeus e árabes convivessem democraticamente, ele continuasse acalentando o sonho maníaco de abolir Israel, exterminando-lhe os habitantes "não-nativos", as verdadeiras vítimas de suas idéias foram antes seus conterrâneos, que ele ajudou a conduzir rumo a novos desastres.