The Eternal Agitator
He shook the world by demanding justice for the Palestinians. But Arafat's defiance ruined his chances to win them independence
By Lisa Beyer
Yasser Arafat loved the cartoon Tom and Jerry, he said, because the mouse, not the cat, always won. All his life, Arafat was the little guy of the Middle East, scampering feverishly to avoid one lethal trap or another. While he never quite prevailed over any of the region's heavies, he did have the indestructible quality of an animated figure. Or so it seemed until November 11, when Arafat, 75, died of an undisclosed cause at a French hospital.
His death, though well anticipated, was nevertheless difficult for many Palestinians to absorb, not least because he had cultivated an aura of immortality by rejecting earthly comforts. When he wed, in old age, the marriage seemed like a sideshow, fatherhood an even stranger subplot. "No personal questions," he used to tell reporters, as if any creaturely detail would detract from the power of his cause. Even those closest to Arafat experienced him as a mystery, which was how he liked it.
Who was Arafat then? A terrorist? Certainly in the early years and arguably again toward the end. A freedom fighter? Undoubtedly. He lofted the cause of a small, disenfranchised and basically powerless people to the top of the world's agenda. A peacemaker? Many Israelis say that was just an act, but if it was, it was a convincing one, at least for a time. In the end, though, Arafat, for all his calculated obfuscations, proved all too human.
For the last two years of his life, he confined himself to a few rooms within his bombed-out headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Israeli forces periodically besieged the place as punishment for his refusal to rein in suicide bombers who were terrorizing Israel. Having leveled the installations of Arafat's security forces and parked soldiers at the gates of Palestinian cities, the Israelis had greatly compromised Arafat's ability to govern. Both the Israeli and U.S. governments refused to deal with him, and by the end, even European diplomats, Arafat's last champions, had stopped calling on his compound.
In some ways, it was Arafat's choice to close his story as he did. At the Camp David peace talks brokered by President Bill Clinton in 2000, negotiators for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was determined to make a final deal ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for good, put forward compromises more generous than any Israeli leader had offered before. But rather than consider them or offer counterproposals, Arafat threw up a stone wall of rejection, prompting Clinton to publicly blame him for the failure of the summit. Two months later, when Palestinian riots in Jerusalem expanded into a new uprising against Israel, Arafat embraced the ferment, choosing not to use his forces to constrain Palestinian militants, as he had during the previous years of self-rule. The resulting intifadeh has left almost 3,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis dead and made the possibility of peaceful coexistence seem remote.
Still, Arafat continued to commit himself, at least verbally, to peace. 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. Better to leave the final accommodations to reality to a future leader. Better to die a revolutionary. —from TIME, November 22, 2004
Questions
1. How did Arafat respond to the peace proposal developed at the Camp David talks in 2000?
2. What did an aide cite as Arafat's "obsession"?