Free Crawling from the Wreckage by Gwynne Dyer Page A

notion that a new Palestinian leader might be able to reopen peace talks with Israel is built on the myth that they only failed because of Arafat’s stubborn personality. His career seems to be ending in failure—and yet he did achieve something.
    He should have died at least ten years ago, of course. It would have been better for his reputation, for he never had the skills to run a proto-state like the Palestinian Authority: even as “President” of the PA , he remained at heart a guerrilla chieftain who ruled through cronies and relatives, co-opted his opponents with bribes of one sort or another, and never failed to appoint at least two rivals to any position of power.
    His death then would also have been better for peace in the region, for a more astute Palestinian leader might just have pulled off a final peace agreement at the Camp David talks with Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in 2000. It was already late in the game. The 1995 assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat’s partner for peace in the Oslo Accords, and the subsequent delaying tactics of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996–99, used up most of the available political time and patience, but a more flexible and imaginative man than Arafat might just have managed it.
    Arafat was too cautious, and so the Camp David deal failed. A month later, Ariel Sharon, guarded by hundreds of Israeli soldiers and snipers, marched onto the square in front of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem with the manifest intention of provoking a violent Palestinian response. The Palestinians threw rocks, the snipers opened fire, and that triggered the intifada, just as Sharon (and maybe Barak, too, by that time) intended. Four years later, all the peace plans lie in ruins and nothing awaits the Palestinians and the Israelis but endless violence.
    So what did Arafat do right? Just two things, but they were big. First, he broke the hold of Arab governments who tried to control the Palestinian resistance movements for their own purposes. Then, even more importantly, he made the whole world acknowledge the existence of the Palestinian nation. He did that, for the most part, by successful acts of terrorism.
    When Arafat created the Fatah guerrilla movement in 1959, the Palestinian refugees who had fled or been driven from their homes in 1948, in what is now Israel, were known simply as “refugees”: stateless Arabs who could theoretically be “resettled” anywhere. Arab governments resisted this definition, but in the West it was universal. Arafat changed all that.
    The key event in his life was the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel conquered the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where most of the 1948“refugees” had ended up. In response to that disaster, Arafat took his guerrilla movement, Fatah, into the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1968, became the PLO ‘s leader the following year, and launched the campaign of international terrorism that made him famous.
    It was universally condemned in the West, and all the authorities vowed that terrorism would never succeed, but by the time Arafat called off the campaign in 1989 he had achieved his goal. The world no longer talked about “refugees”; it talked about “Palestinians,” and giving them that name implicitly recognized their right to a particular territory. The result: American and Israeli recognition of Arafat as a valid negotiating partner, the Oslo Accords of 1993, and the peace negotiations that took up most of the 1990s.
    The peace negotiations failed, and Arafat bears a share of the blame (though only a share). As he departs from power and perhaps from the land of the living, the future of the Palestinians and the Israelis has rarely looked grimmer. But the history of the future is just as long as the history of the past; we just don’t know it yet. There is still hope, and the historians of the future may be kinder to Yasser Arafat than the judgment of his contemporaries.
    Yasser