"A prince is a bandit who doesn't move." --Mancur Olsen Cheers, RAH -------- <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB109962052189665752,00.html> The Wall Street Journal November 5, 2004 COMMENTARY A Gangster With Politics By BRET STEPHENS November 5, 2004; Page A12 In 1993, the British National Criminal Intelligence Service commissioned a report on the sources of funding of the Palestine Liberation Organization. For years, it had been Chairman Yasser Arafat's claim that he'd made a fortune in construction as a young engineer in Kuwait in the 1950s, and that it was this seed money, along with a 5% levy on the Palestinian workers in Arab League countries, which kept the PLO solvent. But British investigators took a different view: The PLO, they concluded, maintained sidelines in "extortion, payoffs, illegal arms-dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud," bringing its estimated fortune to $14 billion. In retrospect, it would seem amazing that 1993 was also the year in which the head of this criminal enterprise would be feted on the White House lawn for agreeing peace with Israel. But then, so much about the 1990s was amazing, which is perhaps why Arafat, of all people, thrived in that time. The ra'is, as he is commonly spoken of among Palestinians, may basically have been a gangster with politics, but he was also one of the 20th century's great political illusionists. He conjured a persona, a cause, and indeed a people virtually ex nihilo, then rallied much of the world to his side. Now that he is dead, or nearly so -- news reports vary as of this writing -- it will be interesting to see what becomes of his legacy. Who was Yasser Arafat? For starters, he was not a native Palestinian, although his parents were and he variously claimed to have been born in Gaza or Jerusalem. In fact, he was born and schooled in Cairo, spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent, and took no part in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Nakba (catastrophe) which Palestinians regard as their formative national experience. Nor did Arafat take part in the Suez War, again despite later claims to the contrary. But this was the period of Third World ferment -- of the "anti-colonialist" Bandung politics of Indonesia's Sukarno, Algeria's Ben Bela, Cuba's Fidel and Egypt's Nasser -- and at the University of Cairo Arafat became a student activist and head of the Palestine Student Union. He also began developing the Arafat persona -- kaffiyah, uniform, half-beard and later the holstered pistol -- to compensate for his short stature and pudginess. The result, as his astute biographers Judith and Barry Rubin write, "was his embodiment of a combination of roles: fighter, traditional patriarch, and typical Palestinian." Around 1960, Arafat co-founded Fatah, or "conquest," the political movement that would later come to be the dominant faction of the PLO. Aside from its aim to obliterate Israel, the group had no particular political vision: Islamists, nationalists, Communists and pan-Arabists were equally welcome. Instead, the emphasis was on violence: "People aren't attracted to speeches but to bullets," Arafat liked to say. In 1964, Fatah began training guerrillas in Syria and Algeria; in 1965, they launched their first attack within Israel, on a pumping station. But the bomb didn't detonate, and most of the other Fatah raids were also duds. From this experience, Arafat took the lesson to focus on softer targets, like civilians. So began the era of modern terrorism: the 1972 Munich massacre, the 1973 murder of American diplomats in Khartoum, the 1974 massacre of schoolchildren at Ma'alot, and so on. Yet as the atrocities multiplied, Arafat's political star rose. Partly this had to do with European cravenness in the face of the implied threat; partly with the Left's secret love affair with the authentic man of violence. Whatever the case, by 1980 Europe had recognized the PLO, with Arafat as its leader, as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people. The U.S. held out for another decade, but eventually it too caved in to international pressure under the first Bush administration. For the Palestinians themselves, however, this was not such a good development. If Arafat's violence against Jews and Israelis was shocking, his violence against fellow Palestinians was still worse. In the manner of other would-be national liberators, he did not look kindly on dissenters within his ranks. In 1987, for instance, Palestinian cartoonist Ali Naji Adhami was murdered on a London street; his crime was to have insinuated in a drawing that the ra'is was having an affair with a married woman. Once in power in Ramallah, the abuses became much worse. Critics of his government were routinely imprisoned and often tortured. In 1999, Muawiya Al-Masri, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, gave an interview to a Jordanian newspaper denouncing Arafat's corruption. He was later attacked by a gang of masked men and shot three times. (He survived.) Yet for all this, Arafat continued to ride the wave of international goodwill. The Europeans gave him the Nobel Peace Prize. The Clinton administration saw him as the one man who could "deliver" the Palestinians to make peace with Israel. The peace camp in Israel, championed by the late Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, more or less agreed: to them, Arafat was the thug who'd keep the Palestinian street quiet. Arafat strung them along, more or less, until his bluff was called by the Israeli peace offer at Camp David in July 2000. After that, there was just no point in keeping up appearances, and so came the intifada. It was a premeditated act. As Arafat had already 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." It goes without saying that Arafat failed in that endeavor. The Israelis belatedly realized that the maximum they could concede was less than the minimum Arafat would accept, and refused to deal with him. For its part, the Bush administration cut off the international life support. In this sense, Arafat's illness -- so far undisclosed by his doctors -- can easily be diagnosed: He died of political starvation. What remains? Very little, I suspect. None of his deputies can possibly fill his shoes, which are those of a personality cult, not a political or national leader. There is nothing to unite Palestinians anymore, either: their loyalties to the cause will surely dissipate in his absence. Arafat was remarkable in that he sustained the illusion he created till the very end. But once the magician walks off the stage, the chimera vanishes. Mr. Stephens, former editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, is a member of the Journal's editorial board. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Camels, fleas, and princes exist everywhere." -- Persian proverb