KK-Forum
David Hirst fra The Irish Times, om Arafats og Israels valgmuligheter.
Knut Rognes
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The Irish Times, Friday, October 13, 2000
If Yasser Arafat backs down, he will be seen as a traitor by his own
people. Israel had better hope he survives, writes David Hirst, in Beirut,
because if he goes, shatred and destruction will follow
It is not for nothing that Yasser Arafat is known as Mr Palestine. For over
30 years he has dominated the Palestinian national struggle.
First, he was the leader of the armed resistance he helped to found; then,
ever more controversially, he became the champion of a what he called his
"peace of the brave"; and now, in addition, he is the would-be president of
his Palestinian state-in-the-making.
His dominance has grown with time. He occupies no fewer than 30 official
posts. He occupies himself with the minutest details of control and
management in both Palestine proper and the diaspora.
He may be excoriated for cronyism, corruption, the brutalities of his
police and his disdain for what he used to call his Palestinian democracy,
but his people still look to him as their only possible chief. All possible
rivals have been killed. He has appointed no successor and there is no
obvious one. He is an egoist; he tends to assume he is immortal.
Yet who, or rather what, comes after him has suddenly become a very
pertinent question. A mere two weeks ago one could, at a pinch, have
prophesied that he was close to his promised land, his Palestinian state
within grasp. But, with Israeli helicopters now in action against the very
institutions of his Palestine Authority, Arafat faces a supreme personal
test, which is at the same time the supreme crisis of the whole generation
of struggle which he embodied.
Certainly his political survival, and very possible his physical survival
also, is on the line.
Arafat will not go easily. In so far as the continued survival of this
arch-survivor depends on his own decisions, he probably faces a basic
choice. It has been long foreshadowed by all that he has done in recent
years, as he moved further and further away from his original role as
freedom fighter towards his "partnership for peace" - a partnership which,
if it was to continue at all, was leading him into compromise after ever
more discreditable compromise.
It is a choice, which, at its most dramatic, could mean his dying, all his
original revolutionary credentials restored, as the true hero of his people
and martyr to the cause - or else as a traitor to his people, and agent of
Israel and the Americans. Less dramatically, it could mean his capture and
expulsion by the Israelis, or his repudiation by his own people when the
Intifada that first erupted against the enemy turns against him and his
Palestinian authority.
Ever since Gen Sharon walked on to the esplanade of the al-Aqsa Mosque, the
inevitability of that choice has been growing more and more acute. To begin
with, Arafat tried to exploit the spontaneous wrath of his people as an
instrument in the negotiations.
Reports have it that he himself gave orders for his own Fatah militants to
play a key role in the street battles. This was partly for diplomatic
purposes. But it was also a means of keeping control, of burnishing his own
patriotic reputation. That would make it easier for him to sell to his
people the dangerous compromises he knew he would have to make if the peace
process resumed.
There was already a danger of his losing control over his own followers;
some of his followers, quite independently of him, were distrib uting
leaflets calling for a true "people's war".
There were also the Hamas religious militants, ideologically wedded to the
armed struggle which he has long since renounced. He needed to upstage
them. And, for the time being, secularists and fundamentalists are making
common cause as never before.
"Blood is uniting the Palestinian people," said Imad Falouji, an Islamist
cabinet minister.
But clearly the passions unleashed were growing too large for Arafat. And
now - after the helicopters and all they could portend - they will grow
larger still. The only way he can preserve himself is for the former
guerrilla leader to assume the mantle of the leader of a nation at war, in
the hope that, with the stature thus acquired, he can eventually end the
war and achieve a peace with honour.
At the moment, the other course - to bow to Israel and America and end the
violence - hardly seems to be possible. Not at least in the unreciprocated
one fell swoop which the Israelis seem to expect. That would be the
traitor's choice. He could perhaps work on it by stealth and in stages.
But even if, in the end, he did manage to call a halt, the Palestinian
people would surely not accept that the price of their blood was the
resumption of the peace talks on the same old basis.
But what will be the price of the first course? The reconquest of all the
occupied territories? Huge civilian casualties? A full-scale war between
the Israeli army and the Palestinian police? The storming of Arafat's
headquarters? The very worst seems possible.
If Arafat does go, one way or another, there will be no successor to lead
the Palestinian people out of the catastrophe that would accompany his
departure.
In destroying Mr Palestine, the Israelis will have destroyed the very
instrument of all their expectations. And there will only be chaos, burning
hatred - and a conviction, whose portents are already clear, that there can
be no peace, ever, with enemies such as they.
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