[Marxism] The Nation's obit/editorial on Arafat

["Charlie Parks" <jcparks5550@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

(it's relatively brief, so I'm posting it in full)

editorial | Posted November 11, 2004

Yasir Arafat

Yasir Arafat died just as he lived most of his life, giving mixed signals to
the world, provoking rivalries among intimates and arousing wild speculation
from allies and enemies alike.

It's not easy to take the measure of a man whose career has been obscured by
so much propaganda and mythmaking. Especially in America, Arafat has been
demonized as an arch-terrorist and derided as a bumbling rejectionist. Even
as he lay on his deathbed, the New York Times repeated the accusation,
branding him as "the man who refused to say yes" to Bill Clinton and Ehud
Barak's inadequate and insulting Camp David 2000 settlement offer.

We in the West too often ignore what no Palestinian will ever forget: After
the Palestinians' catastrophic defeat of 1948, when some 750,000 were
expelled from their homeland and began living in destitution in refugee
camps scattered across half a dozen countries, forgotten by the world,
abused and cynically exploited by Arab despots and demagogues, it was Arafat
who, along with a few comrades, gave birth to the Palestinian liberation
movement. It was the PLO, under Arafat's leadership, that restored
Palestinian pride and helped to forge a nation out of a population that was
geographically dispersed and politically divided. And it was Arafat who led
the PLO, in the face of fierce internal resistance, into adopting the
two-state solution in the mid-1970s. But his conciliatory peace offering at
the UN General Assembly in 1974, and numerous subsequent peace feelers, were
met with persistent rebuffs from Israel and the United States.

The caricature of Arafat as a rejectionist obscures his real failures. In a
bid to regain the leadership role that he saw slipping away during the first
intifada, when he was exiled in Tunisia, he signed the deeply flawed Oslo
Accords. That may have won him a Nobel Peace Prize and grudging acceptance
from the Israelis and Americans, but his people got very little in return:
no end to the occupation, massive expansion of Israeli settlements,
accelerated expropriation of Palestinian land, and economic strangulation.

Arafat compounded the damage by imposing a corrupt and incompetent regime on
his own people after his return from exile. The great Palestinian critic and
activist Edward Said, once an Arafat ally, came to revile him, denouncing
him in these pages as "a Pétain figure who has taken advantage of his
people's exhaustion and kept himself in power by conceding virtually
everything significant about our political and human rights...buying people
off and torturing, imprisoning or killing dissidents at will." Arafat also
impeded the transition to a new generation of leaders, which the
Palestinians desperately need now, in the thirty-seventh year of an
increasingly brutal occupation.

Yasir Arafat has often been called the father of Palestinian nationalism.
Yet if the national liberation movement survives his death, it will be
because of the steadfastness and resilience of the Palestinian people, and
in spite of Arafat's leadership rather than because of it. They deserve
better than they have been given, by the world and by their first leader.



_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism