TIME EUROPE
October 23, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 17
The Many Minds of Arafat
Faced with chaos all around, the Palestinian leader looks for a solution — and an enduring legacy
By JOHANNA MCGEARY
Yasser Arafat must have had an objective in mind when he sat down in late September with leaders of the Tanzim, the Palestinians' grassroots militias, and instructed them to prepare for possible confrontation. Maybe he thought a judicious application of violence could strengthen his negotiating hand with the Israelis. Or he wanted to restore his footing with Palestinians alienated by the deeply frustrating process of peace. Or he had given up hope of ever negotiating a settlement acceptable to his people and decided to let them express their profound dismay.
Whatever his intent, Palestinian anger has set off an explosion with fallout far beyond anyone's imaginable game plan. The Palestinians-and the Israelis-have rushed into a mind-set in which bloodletting has overtaken common sense, religious and ethnic hatred have overwhelmed political disagreement. Each vicious act has inspired vicious reprisal, locking the combatants in a circle in which neither is ready or willing to desist first. In the process, both have inflicted wounds that cut to the core of their dilemma: how to coexist. Logic, even self-interest, has been sacrificed to emotions run out of control.
How did this happen? What brought Palestinians and Israelis to a place where communicating a point entails raw violence? How did seven painstaking years of building toward peace smash apart in two weeks? Why did Barak and Arafat, who had just taken the unprecedented step of dining together at Barak's home three weeks ago, preside over the worst bloodshed between their peoples in three decades? What went so awfully, fatally wrong?
The story seems to begin on Sept. 28, when Israeli hard-liner Ariel Sharon decided to pay a provocative visit to the Jerusalem site both Jews and Muslims hold most holy. But that's only the last chapter in a crisis that traces its roots back to Maryland, at Camp David, in July.
Arafat did not want to be there. He had warned President Clinton that he was not ready for the hard decisions of a final settlement, and the cia had been advising the Administration for some time that ordinary Palestinians were even less so. Arafat, aging and in uncertain health, was tired of the continuous pressure to compromise principles he held sacred, especially after all the concessions he had already made. His people were fed up with a process that had won them only the shards of an independent state and a life in which checkpoints and expanding Jewish settlements rubbed their noses daily in the continuing indignity of occupation. But Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak had urgent reasons to get a deal done: fearful violence could quickly erupt, Clinton had a legacy to secure before leaving office, and Barak needed to fulfill his promise of peace to hold on to his.
Many Israelis assert, especially now, that Arafat never-ever-intended to make peace. He just wanted to spin out a process that had proved immensely rewarding, elevating him to the heady level of statesman, Nobel Prize peacemaker, a strutter on the world stage without the distraction of workaday governing. But Barak's intimates say that back in July they genuinely didn't know his end game. "He went through all the rounds of talks," says an Israeli official involved in the negotiations, "and we never had a clear indication that he wants an agreement that is obviously a compromise." It is just as possible that Arafat believed he could eventually accomplish the impossible-to push and provoke Israel, with the help of Washington and an eager international community, into giving the Palestinians most, almost all, maybe even all, they demanded. Hadn't Barak eventually offered Syria all of the Golan Heights and withdrawn from all of Lebanon? Arafat has so often fluctuated between romantic and realist, freedom fighter and peacemaker, that few could be certain which psychology held the upper hand. MORE>>
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