Arafat's Moment of Truth: It's now or never

National Review, August 28, 2000 by David Pryce-Jones

The mood music after the failure of the Camp David talks is in a minor key, suspiciously soft and low. To be sure, Yasser Arafat marked his return home with a we-will-never-surrender-an-inch speech. The crazies, both Israeli and Palestinian, echoed him, with their mutually exclusive claims to Jerusalem. But where has Arafat been since? Doing what he loves and does best, flying around the world on his private jet in order to whisper into the ears of dignitaries and heads of state. Arafat is testing out the likely effects of accepting concessions from Israel that he refused at Camp David.

If you go into the jungle, following some sound advice from Kipling, you must be sure what size beast you are. For decades, Arab and Palestinian leaders made the mistake of believing that they spoke for a large beast, capable of charging right through the jungle in tandem with the Soviet Union, an even larger and fiercer beast. War after war, uprising after uprising, these leaders found themselves that much worse off each time. And still they said no to Israel, no to compromise, no to power-sharing. To them, peacemaking was an admission of weakness, shaming them publicly in the eyes of the world. It is this cultural perception of shame that maintains the unbridgeable divide between Arabs and Israelis. In hard fact, the expiry of the Soviet beast exposed these constant noes as empty wish-fulfillment, and that was a first and most necessary step out of the jungle. The recent Camp David meeting is best seen as another step on the same path.

For Arafat himself, this path out involves a radical and comprehensive reordering of his mindset. From beginning to end, his career has been based on violence. Humanly speaking, Arafat is a hoodlum and racketeer, nothing less than a monster. He is responsible for the deaths of many thousands of innocent people in deliberate atrocities ranging from civil war to the pitiful murder of the invalid Leon Klinghoffer, thrown overboard in his wheelchair from a ship hijacked by the PLO.

Seizing the leadership of that organization in 1968, Arafat found a fragmented people, too few and too poor to mobilize in any strength. Their elite had long since settled in other countries. Terror was the instrument with which to convert weakness into strength and a national cause. Squat and unshaven, in military fatigues, the Arab headdress as chic as Che Guevara's beret, Arafat set out to hold everyone at gunpoint as he climbed to become a self-made one-man ruler. In Arab eyes, this was not in the least shocking. Crime brings reward to whoever excels in it. To the winner the spoils and the honor; to the loser nothing but shame. Whispering into the ears of Arab one-man rulers and Soviet leaders, Arafat built a patronage system with which to buy allies, and to acquire arms against enemies. Had Palestine been able to provide Arafat with a power base the equivalent of Syria and Iraq, he would have come to be a tyrant as sinister as Hafiz Assad and Saddam Hussein. Politically speaking, the career startlingly illustrates the whole Arab social order.

Successive Israeli governments underestimated him. They watched with satisfaction while the PLO was driven out of Jordan and then Lebanon, finally to Tunis, far away. Arab countries could apparently be relied on to police the PLO. The costs might be painful, but Arafat's terrorism could be contained. The occupied territories remained astonishingly peaceful. What were these territories, General Dayan once asked, except six little towns? Sharing Israel's condescension, neighboring Jordan and Lebanon relied on Israel to police the PLO.

In December 1987, grievances in the occupied territories in fact erupted, in the so-called intifada, or uprising. At first Arafat was as surprised as the Israelis, but he soon perceived that this violence marked the start of the genuine national movement that would fulfil his ambitions. This insight allowed him gradually to initiate a process of bargaining with Israel, over which he could acquire substantial control, balancing the promise of peace with carefully calibrated resorts to violence. Under pressure from the United States, Arafat grudgingly agreed to renounce violence altogether, knowing that he could always provoke it while disclaiming responsibility. His real attitude was revealed when in the Gulf War of 1991 he proclaimed his support for a Saddam Hussein who was threatening "to burn half of Israel" with his missiles.

Alarmed on the one hand at the prospect of a Palestinian national movement that could not be contained, and reassured on the other by Arafat's nominal acceptance of a peace process, Israeli governments over the last decade evolved a new policy of crafting a separation between Israelis and Palestinians. The main vehicle for this purpose has been the so-called Palestinian Authority. The more the Palestinians abstained from violence, the more self-rule they could have. Appetite grows with eating, as the French proverb has it. Today the Palestine Authority consists of the Gaza Strip and half the West Bank-Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David was prepared to concede up to 90 percent of it, with consequent dismantling of some Israeli settlements. Arafat's threat to declare a state on September 13 plays on definitions. Under another name, Palestine is already a state.