ARAFAT: The Destroyer
The
supreme irony has emerged:
The Palestinians will elect a
Legislative council on Wednesday, January 25.
“www.moshereiss.org”
(VIRUS
DANGER NOTED AT END OF THIS COLUMN)
How Yasser Arafat Destroyed the State
of
In a Ruined Country
by
David Samuels
He
was the father of the Palestinian nation, and the
successor to the Muslim conquerors of
Unlike his Hero’s he did not conquer
As
much as any other man, Arafat was responsible for
the making of the modern
It
took Arafat more than an hour each morning to arrange
the tail of his kaffiya in the shape of
Inside
the pockets of his jacket were the small black
notebooks in which he wrote about money. When he was in doubt about a
particular sum, he would withdraw a notebook with a flourish, cite a
specific
figure, and then put the notebook back in his pocket. Inside the
notebooks were
the codes that unlocked the secret bank accounts to which only he had
access.
At
his death in November 11, 2004 the idea that
Arafat might have expired from natural causes was deemed too farfetched
for
serious consideration.
Dennis
Ross noted "The first time I went to
complain to him about the bombing—the first set of bombings were, I
guess, in
April '94, in Hadera and Afula—and I'm with him, and he leans over like
this
and he whispers, 'You know, it's Barak. He's got this group, the
Roed-Larsen
the most visible representative of the
United Nations in the
Al
Masri, a leading Palestinian financier, who in his
home has what he claimed is the oldest mirror in the world was an
associate of
Arafat. "Yes, the Palestinians missed a lot of opportunities, but don't
blame us," he tells me. "We were a million people in this land, and
the Israelis were less than a hundred thousand people. But they came
here very
determined, and they worked very hard. Then they committed a few
massacres that
made people afraid, and then our stupid leaders told the people to
leave. We
always tend to say it's a Zionist plot with the British. What we call a
plot,
they call a plan."
"No
doubt Arafat was a great man," al-Masri
says. "No doubt he had vision. Most of the people that you see now
being
very important, I see them wanting the grace of Yasir Arafat. They want
to be
in his grace. Ah, he thought money was power," al-Masri adds, with a
wistful glance around his study. The money he spent to buy the loyalty
of his
court, al-Masri gently suggests, could easily have paid for a
functioning
Palestinian state instead.
"With
three hundred, four hundred million
dollars we could have built
For
those at the top of the heap the rewards were
much larger and more systematic. The amounts of money stolen from the
Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people through the corrupt
practices
of Arafat's inner circle are so staggeringly large that they may exceed
one
half of the total of $7 billion in foreign aid contributed to the
Palestinian
Authority. The biggest thief was Arafat himself. His corruption was of
a
sober-minded type. He was a connoisseur of power, who used the money
that he
stole to buy influence, to provoke or defuse conspiracies, to pay
gunmen, and
to collect hangers-on the way other men collect stamps or butterflies.
Arafat
had several advisers who oversaw the system of patronage and theft,
which was
convincingly outlined in a series of investigative articles by Ronen
Bergman
that appeared during the late 1990s in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.
The
Young
Fatah cadres in the West Bank and
"Arafat's
great secret is patience," Yasir
Abd Rabbo explains, of the man he served for more than three decades.
"He
does not cut even a thread to a fly. He keeps lines open with
everybody. He is
Arafat the progressive, Arafat the Islamist, Arafat the conservative,
and
Arafat the enlightened. So he was with the Saudi kings and with the
kings of
the Kremlin at the same time, with Fidel Castro and all kinds of imams
and the
pope. The one main issue he did not compromise in his life was the
independence
of the Palestinian movement. He believed since the beginning that if he
did not
preserve the independence of the Palestinian movement from the other
Arab
regimes, he will be doomed."
Ramduh
Nofal says that the impetus for the violence
was the statement by the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, that he would not speak to Arafat directly. Arafat was
furious at
the slight. "I was with him in his office," Nofal recalls. "He
got up and walked around the desk. He was very, very angry. Finally he
calmed
down a bit and he pointed to the phone on his desk. He said, 'I will
make Netanyahu
call me on this phone.'"
Arafat
ordered demonstrators into the streets, and
told them to provoke the Israelis. When violence erupted, the Israelis
were
blamed. "I was sitting with him again when the phone on his desk rang,
and
he looked at me and said, 'It's Netanyahu.' And it was him."
The
second intifada also began with the intention of
provoking the Israelis and subjecting them to diplomatic pressure. Only
this
time Arafat went for broke. As a member of the High Security Council of
Fatah,
the key decision-making and organizational body that dealt with
military
questions at the beginning of the intifada, Nofal has firsthand
knowledge of
Arafat's intentions and decisions during the months before and after
Camp
David. "He told us, 'Now we are going to the fight, so we must be
ready,'" Nofal remembers. Nofal says that when Barak did not prevent
Ariel
Sharon from making his controversial visit to the plaza in front of
al-Aqsa,
the mosque that was built on the site of the ancient Jewish temples,
Arafat
said, "Okay, it's time to work."
When
it became clear that Ariel Sharon, then the
Israeli opposition leader, would win the Israeli elections in February
of 2001,
Nofal went to Arafat and urged him to call off the intifada. "There
were a
lot of people sitting around, including Saeb Erekat and Yasir Abd
Rabbo,"
Nofal remembers.
"I
told him, 'Abu Ammar, I need the security to
speak openly.' The Bedouin say, 'Give me the security to speak freely.'
He said
to me, 'Speak.'
"I
said to him, 'Abu Ammar, Barak will lose,
"Those
who were sitting around Arafat, they
said, 'Ah, you are afraid of
"And
I think Saudi Arabia also played a role in
Arafat's decision to keep the intifada going," Nofal says, agreeing
with a
similar analysis presented to me by Abd Rabbo. "
Iyad
Sarraj, a human-rights activist and the director
of the leading mental-health organization in Gaza; when he complained
about the
poor state of civil liberties under President Arafat, he was jailed
three
times, beaten, and tortured. A handsome secularist in his forties
stated:
"Palestinians
have lost the battle because of
their lack of organization and because they have been captives of
rhetoric and
sloganeering rather than actual work," he says. "I believe that the
conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians in one way or the
other is
between development and underdevelopment, civilization and
backwardness. Israel
was established on the rule of law, on democratization, and certain
principles
that would advance Israel, while the Arabs and the Palestinians were
waiting
always for the prophet, for the rescuer, for the savior, the mahdi.
Arafat
came, and everyone hung their hats on him without realizing that there
is a big
gap between the rescuer and the actual work that needs to be done. This
is
where the Palestinians lost again the battle. They lost it in '48
because of
their backwardness, ignorance, and lack of organization in how to
confront the
Zionist enemy. They lost it when they had the chance to build a state,
because
the PA was absolutely corrupt and disorganized."
Early
on in the
Copyright © 2005 by The Atlantic
Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
The
Atlantic Monthly; September 2005; In a Ruined
Country; Volume 296, No. 2; 60-91
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