A Gangster With Politics

[R.A. Hettinga]

"A prince is a bandit who doesn't move." --Mancur Olsen


Cheers,
RAH
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<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.


-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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"Camels, fleas, and princes exist everywhere."  -- Persian proverb