W & Yasir: Soul Brothers?

W and Yasir have a LOT in common. Both have done more with less than any leader alive today. In fact, we ought to loan Karl Rove and Karen Hughes to Yasir Arafat for one year (no cash involved). There would be peace in the Middle East because the Palestinians wouldn't understand a damn thing that Yasir was saying. If this be (fair & balanced) treason, make the most of it.

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Yasir Arafat: Mystery Inside an Enigma
By BARRY RUBIN

Writing a biography of anyone is a challenging task, but narrating and analyzing Yasir Arafat's life is a particularly daunting one. Arafat has held the international spotlight for longer than almost any other politician on the planet. He has been a political activist for 55 years, head of his own organization for 44, leader of his people for 36, and head of a virtual Palestinian government for 10. He has achieved little material progress for his people, but, even in the twilight of his career, he has neither given up nor been pushed aside.

Despite that long and dramatic history, Arafat remains largely an unknown person. Everything about him is controversial, starting with the location of his birthplace. The most basic facts about his background, thoughts, and activities are disputed. Even the emotions he evokes are passionate and opposing. To make matters still more complex, he has always used highly secretive methods as the leader of what was -- and in many ways remains -- an underground organization.

Indeed, it has been Arafat's inability to transform himself from clandestine revolutionary, his preferred persona, to statesman on the world stage (or even pragmatic politician) that has been a key factor in his failure: He has succeeded at creating the world's longest-running revolutionary movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization, but has been unable to bring it to a successful conclusion.

Consider Arafat in a bunker in 2002 at his headquarters in the town of Ramallah, his provisional capital, as the Israeli army advanced. Once again, he was surrounded by the enemy, the sound of gunfire echoing in his ears, the world riveted by his every word. What could be more proper, fulfilling, glorious? No one could call him a sellout. And so, once more, he achieved that state of revolutionary nirvana. What others would have thought to be his most desperate moment seemed to satisfy him far more than negotiating peace or administering his near-state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"The more destruction I see, the stronger I get," newspapers quoted him saying.

Length and continuity of observation are important here. I have been studying Arafat for more than 30 years, and such continuity makes a difference in making connections among themes and events, even in hearing the echo of specific statements and how they hark back to earlier situations. Over time, too, one can glimpse the ability of a political figure to change -- or to be paralyzed by the inability to do so.

Without that kind of long-term perspective on Arafat, it is much harder to understand his career. Many people have thought everything about him was obvious -- even if they could not agree on facts and interpretations. There have been journalistic biographies, some hagiographic, some apologetic. Those works are at least a decade old, written before key events and without access to material in British and American archives subsequently opened; more important, they lack the perspective that could be provided only near the end of Arafat's career.

Still, my own research project faced major barriers. Those who have not dealt with the Middle East may be unable to conceive of how difficult it is to establish even the simplest facts. A Palestinian journalist has written that she was asked, in passing, how many people lived in her hometown, Ramallah. She spent weeks on a quest for the answer, talking to a wide variety of officials, each of whom gave wildly differing figures. When my co-author, Judith Colp Rubin, and I were trying to put together a list of the members of leading PLO bodies, officials in the West Bank were unsure and had to call the PLO headquarters in Tunis to find the answers.

Part of the problem is the unavailability of archival sources. Government archives in the Middle East are simply not open, and there is no Freedom of Information Act in those countries. Still, Arafat's is one of the few contemporary careers that dates to an era when there are available Western archives containing materials about him. Those include U.S. and British Embassy reports, which are open through 1973. Such materials contain quite a bit of information about Arafat's early career, although they sometimes also show how little was known about him at the time. For example, the archives show, in detail, both London's and Washington's secret negotiations with Arafat in the 1970s, offering to help his movement if it did not attack civilians. The British government was even ready to stand aside and watch Arafat overthrow its old client, King Hussein of Jordan, in 1970.

Arafat's early rise was rapid. Growing up mostly in Cairo, he became a student activist in the 1940s. But, in 1957, unemployed and no longer welcome in a country where he had backed the losing, Islamist political side, he emigrated to Kuwait. By 1959, he had established his own group; in 1965, he began guerrilla attacks on Israel, with Syrian backing. Arafat aspired to be the Che Guevara of the Middle East. Two years later, having gained the patronage of Egypt, he became the PLO's leader. He has held that position ever since.

Arafat had learned how to court Arab rulers and to run his movement quite effectively. It took him a bit longer, but he also became adept at international public relations as well. As he became a more significant figure, he increasingly played to the mass media, and more of his sayings and doings became available. That coverage produces a major source about his life. I don't mean just The New York Times or The Washington Post, since more obscure publications, or those in the region, have much of the best material. One of the most interesting items we found on the 1970s, for example, was a March 1973 speech by the Sudanese president, Jaafar Numeri, published in a Kenyan newspaper, detailing Arafat's involvement in the assassination of the U.S. ambassador to his country, and in subverting a regime that had given the Palestinian leader much help.

What has struck us perhaps most is how rarely Arabic primary sources like newspapers have been used in Western attempts to write about Arafat. It's not just a question of language, because there are literally tons of available textual translations from the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, the British Survey of World Broadcasts, the Arabic news media itself, and PLO sources. Comparing Arafat's statements to Arab journalists and his discussions with Western writers is another way of teasing out the enigma. The contrast reveals a gap that is important in analyzing Arafat's real thinking compared with, to cite a phrase he often uses himself, what is "Blah, blah, blah." For example, frequently in the last few years, Arafat would make a statement in English condemning violence and calling for a cease-fire and then, a few hours later, give a speech in Arabic extolling suicide bombers. (At one point, in a secret meeting, he urged Palestinian groups to stop their attacks temporarily, because U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was visiting him.)

The same point applies to comparing the Western image of Arafat with that held by Arabs and Palestinians. That is only of value, though, if one can get behind the scenes and hear what people say in private. Thus much of our book is based on a large number of interviews -- many of them with veteran Arafat watchers and people who have worked closely with him, many off the record at the request of those involved. So often, at the end of our discussions, people would tell us that they still found Arafat a mystery. They looked forward to reading our finished book, hoping to understand.

In 1990, I set off to interview a top Palestinian leader in Tunis. As the taxi driver screeched to a stop at his home, a half-dozen guards pointed their Kalashnikovs at us. At first, the interview didn't seem to be yielding anything that might have been worth the risk. The official and his associates were simply giving out the current propaganda line, including the claim that Israel sought to conquer all of the Arab world from the Nile to the Euphrates. What could break through the verbiage? "Look, this is all nonsense. We both know it. So why don't we have a serious discussion." Talk moved on to real issues, and a friendship with one of Arafat's key colleagues began that lasts to this day.

The promise to keep interviews on background, not for attribution, was key: They would have been worthless otherwise. Officials of Arab states, and most Palestinians, at least until the last few months, would not publicly say anything negative about Arafat. Privately, however, they would go on at great length about their criticisms and offer candid accounts of events. A Lebanese leader ended a long talk about why Israel should make concessions to Arafat by saying, "Not that I'd ever trust him myself."

An Egyptian leader complained how he felt Arafat had misled him about what went on at the Camp David summit. And a Jordanian official recalled jokingly how, when suffering from a bad cold, he felt better after greeting and kissing Arafat -- in the hope of infecting him.

But background interviews raise another set of issues. There are always temptations to use material -- often the most sensational -- that one cannot be sure is accurate. To resist, it is necessary to corroborate all important pieces of information from several sources, a painstaking and slow process. Sometimes, in the end, that meant for us not using material that journalists might have seized upon as the most newsworthy items.

Once the second intifada began in 2000, we faced more difficulties. Trips that had once been made routinely became a matter for serious consideration in a time of violence. Not long after one of us had coffee with a longtime Fatah activist in his home, the man was shot in an internal feud. Hiring local researchers to do interviews was also difficult, since Palestinian journalists or students were often reluctant to ask the probing questions we had prepared, lest they face retaliation. We ended up using such surrogates on only one occasion.

As a result, some of our most useful interviews ended up being conducted in various Middle Eastern countries, Europe, or the United States. Once, during a rather unfruitful interview, one of us spotted a photograph on an office shelf. "Who was that other man standing next to Arafat?" A secret emissary to the PLO head. The man's phone number was quickly procured, and he was most forthcoming, on background of course.

Interviews were especially critical for our understanding of the important Camp David summit meetings of 2000. Talking to members of the Palestinian, Israeli, and American delegations, we found that, contrary to what readers might expect, there was an overwhelming unanimity about what had happened at the meeting, an event that could be called the ultimate test of Arafat's abilities and intentions. Israel put forward an independent Palestinian state, with its capital in East Jerusalem, and more than $20-billion in refugee compensation as its opening offer. Arafat rejected any negotiations. Later that year, President Clinton proposed another, even better deal, which Arafat also refused. Instead, he placed his faith in a new war that he claimed would bring unilateral Israeli concessions and international intervention in his favor. The Palestinians suffered high casualties, massive infrastructure damage, and military defeat.

Thus, some of the most interesting questions we sought to answer ended up revolving around the reasons for Arafat's failure to achieve a Palestinian state, or more victories along the way, and the paradox of his long survival despite that fact; his inability to break with self-defeating behavior patterns; and his sustained credibility in the face of so much evidence to that effect.

The answers lie partly in Arafat's great abilities as a survivor. Defeated in Jordan in 1970, he fled to Lebanon; beaten in Lebanon, he moved on to Tunis; at a dead end in Tunis, after his support for Saddam Hussein in 1991 led Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to cut off his funds, he leaped into a deal with Israel that allowed him to revive his fortunes.

Of equal significance, however, has been Arafat's marked inability to grow as a strategist or tactician over the years. By refusing to acknowledge defeats, he has failed to learn the lessons from them. Indeed, his career shows four nearly identical cycles, each ending in failure: His time in Jordan (1967-71), Lebanon (1971-82), Tunis (1982-94), and in the West Bank/Gaza Strip (1994-present). From each of those headquarters, he organized terror attacks on Israelis that brought neither Israel's surrender nor a liberated Palestinian state. At the same time, he disillusioned Western forces trying to help reach a compromise solution, while antagonizing his Arab allies and hosts. Sponsoring violence led him into military defeats -- at the hands of Jordan's army in 1970, and of Israeli and Syrian armies in 1981 and 1982, for example. Equally, Arafat's refusal to rein in radical Palestinian groups or to keep his commitments discredited him. Each time, his hosts demanded his departure.

Arafat's main strategy for achieving victory, one that he has openly acknowledged and for which he is rightly seen as one of history's great revolutionary innovators, has been terror. Believing that Israel was not a real state that could stand the test of attrition -- despite its strong army -- from the mid-1960s he began advocating direct attacks on its civilian population. In 1968, giving his first interview ever to the Western news media, he explained his rationale: "We are not trying to destroy the Israeli army, of course. But Israel is not just an army. It is a society that can only survive and prosper on peace and security. We aim to disrupt that society. Insecurity will make a mess of their agriculture and commerce. It will halt immigration and encourage emigration. We will even disrupt their tourist industry." Those words accurately describe his strategy today.

Thirty-five years later, despite all evidence to the contrary, he continues to portray terror asa brilliant strategy that will force Israel to surrender to his demands. Faced with what others -- including such leaders within his own movement as Abu Mazin, Abu Alaa, and Muhammad Dahlan -- thought tempting peace offers in 2000, for instance, he chose to launch a new war on Israel.

Within his organization, too, Arafat has long adapted an anti-institutional strategy that has had its advantages but has been equally destructive: a sort of loosely directed anarchy. In contrast to many successful nationalist movements, he has let each group and faction in his coalition maintain substantial independence. Not only have uncontrolled rivalries often disrupted diplomatic plans, but they have triggered a race to verbal and tactical militancy. Moderates have been marginalized or killed, and a discourse of compromise -- or even recognizing the limits of specific situations -- has been made to seem like treason.

Failing to make the all-important transition from revolutionary to politician, Arafat has been left wandering in the wilderness. His life shows us that, for him, the struggle has become an end in itself, whose sheer joy motivates him even when he is surrounded by enemy forces and has clearly suffered defeat. Even launching a losing war in 2000, and being twice besieged in his Ramallah office, did not seem a sufficiently pressing reason to change course.

That kind of thinking stems, in part, from his personality. He has been too much in love with revolution to end his own; too visionary to settle for banal practicality; too profound a believer in violence to see how counterproductive it so often is; too patient for his people's own good. He has consistently underestimated his enemy. Too confident of victory and too indifferent to the costs, Arafat has made the dangerous mistake of believing his own propaganda.

One key to understanding his worldview is to recognize that Arafat has never been a pragmatic nationalist, seeking a state quickly and focusing on the improvement of his people's material lot, but more of a mystic. Indeed, in contrast to his PLO colleagues, from his earliest years, when he was close to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, he has had a strong streak of Islamist radical thinking. Only liberating the holy land and changing the course of Middle East history will suffice as a satisfactory goal for him.

Yet Arafat has been able to avoid paying for his errors, for a number of reasons. There was never a strong figure in his movement ready to challenge him personally; his great skill at internal politicking kept his lieutenants in line; he has been given the benefit of the doubt as the leader of a victimized people. As one of his veteran followers-turned-critic, Abbas Zaki told us, "You may argue with the man, but not question the fact that he's the supreme commander of the people." Arab states have tolerated him because they wanted to manipulate the Palestinian cause, while Western countries have indulged him in the belief that toleration would bring them benefits in the Arab world.

As a result of his experiences, Arafat came to the conclusion that his will could reshape everything else. Symbolically, he "changed" his birthplace from Cairo to Jerusalem at an early age and has continued to maintain that fiction despite the fact that journalists discovered his Egyptian birth certificate. Similarly, he claimed to have been a hero in the 1948 war though, as we found from an examination of his own statements and contemporary records, he failed to fight in the war at all, a shameful secret that may have been one factor in his obsessive need to prove his courage and to proclaim himself a general.

Of course, until now, there has always been the possibility that Arafat would make a sharp change in course, exhibit a newfound determination to make and keep a compromise peace. Such a shift seemed likely when the 1993 Oslo agreement was signed. Yet the ensuing decade has shown all too clearly that Arafat has not changed. Now, as he nears the end of his career, his historical fate has become more apparent.

Despite the appointment of Abu Mazin as prime minister earlier this year, Arafat still controls his movement, and he does everything possible to sabotage the man he considers a rival. He is unwilling to conclude peace and determined to prevent anyone else from doing so. Doubtless, he will continue to hold power, and block progress, for as long as he lives.

This, then is the epitaph for Arafat's career: He led his people far but on too long a journey, at too high a cost, and with an inability to bring them to a better life and the fulfillment of at least some of their aspirations.

Nevertheless, especially in his shortcomings, Arafat emerges as a unique figure, who must be explained if the history of this most enduring of contemporary conflicts is going to be understood.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs. With Judith Colp Rubin, he is the author of Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography, published this month by Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education