Arafat's Agenda - Yasir Arafat

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2001 by Charles Foster

ON 9 August 2001, a 23 year old Palestinian, Izz el-Din al-Masari, walked into the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem and blew himself up. Fifteen others, including six children and two foreign tourists, died with him. There was nothing left of the bomber except a picture which appeared in all the papers. He held an M16 assault rifle and a copy of the Koran. His eyes were already dead. Islamic Jihad quickly, and inaccurately, claimed responsibility. It was really, on one level, done by Hamas. But on another level all sorts of people were arguably to blame. It was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's fault, said some, for not being hard enough on the militants. It was Ariel Sharon's fault, said others, for being too hard on the Palestinians in general, and generating the discontent which makes martyrs out of nobodies from the Territories. It was the fault of the Jerusalem police and the army; still others said: the net around Jewish Jerusalem was too easily breached. For some it was Iran's fault, for funding Hamas; or Syri a's, for hosting them. Some laid the dead toddlers at President Bush's door: he could and should have forced Israel to be more sensible about giving up Palestinian land. Even ex-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was in the frame: he had a unique opportunity at Camp David to solve the problems, and his failure to put even more on the table than he did, made him a murderer. Other commentators blamed God for suggesting to the Jews that they might be a chosen people with inalienable territorial rights, or blamed Him (under another name), for suggesting that blasting babies through restaurant windows was ever an acceptable way to make a point.

Yet even the papers which were capable of blaming it all on Israel were disgusted by the act itself. It was the foretaste of a disgust which was, in a different political context, to reach its apotheosis in the reaction to the apocalyptic events in New York and Washington. The world saw something new in the Sbarro pizzeria bombing. Previously, dead Israelis were the oppressors who had got what was coming to them. They were young men in olive fatigues who had been caught out in South Lebanon, where they should never have been in the first place. But in Jaffa Road the photographers saw blood on the Donald Duck teeshirt of a four year old. Even the most high-brow, detached editorials found it difficult to say that the four year old was an oppressor.

The world saw something else, too. It saw that the Palestinians did not share its disgust at the blood on the teeshirt. In the Territories and in the camps of Lebanon there were parties. Men and women danced and children clapped and whooped because children had disintegrated. And for a moment the world wondered if the Israelis were not the more civilized ones after all. It did not last long, of course. Soon the Israelis' seizure of Orient House, the Palestinian headquarters, and its razing of the Ramallah Police headquarters were being described with the same adjectives which the editors had used of al-Masari's act. But nonetheless the Sbarro bombing will remain a public relations disaster for the Palestinians so far as Western opinion is concerned. Arafat, whatever his faults, cannot be said to be unaware of what Western opinion can do to events in the region, or of what influences that opinion. So what is Arafat up to?

It is widely assumed that Arafat has the ability to stop Islamic fundamentalist terror in Israel and the Territories. That is presumably the thinking behind Israel's destruction of Palestinian Police stations in Ramallah and Jenin: stop the fundamentalists, the bombs say to the Palestinian Police, or we'll get you. It is rather an ironic strategy (since doing this truncates Arafat's power to do anything about Islamic terror), but it has been applied consistently by Israel at least since the mid-1980s, when Islamic elements within the Palestinian resistance started to be significant.

The assumption may already be, and certainly soon will be, wrong. A leaked report to the Israeli Chief of Staff suggests that Arafat is losing control and cannot, even if he wanted to, knock the Islamicists on the head.

If Arafat has no effective control over the Islamic groups, the blame for this is his own. Islamic fundamentalism thrives on despair. And despair was inevitably going to be the consequence of Arafat's rejection of Ehud Barak's recklessly and possibly unconstitutionally generous offer, at Camp David, of the return of 90 per cent of Gaza and the West Bank to Palestinian control and the establishment of a Palestinian political presence in East Jerusalem. The reasons for Arafat's rejection have been much discussed. However they are dressed up, they come to this: bad judgment, with or without fear. The offer was the best the Palestinians are ever going to get. No war is going to force Israel to give more. Yes, extreme Islamic factions would have kicked up a fuss and talked about Arafat's betrayal of the Palestinians. But the vast majority of Palestinians, and the vast bulk of Palestinian fire-power, would have been relieved to have got that much, and would have made the agreement work. Arafat would have been able to keep the Islamicists in check.