After Arafat Who?
GREEN, DAVID B.
The Critical Question After Arafat Who? By David B. Green Jerusalem One of the most serious disagreements within the Israeli security world during the past year concerned the extent to...
...Today it's in question on both sides...
...Ehud Ya'ari, the Arab affairs editor for television's commercial Channel 2 and Israel's most influential commentator on the Arab world, does not take the polls very seriously: "People answer according to what they feel is expected of them at the moment...
...At the moment, laments Ross, "a final agreement is not possible, because both sides have lost faith that they have a genuine partner...
...Thus the Palestinians believe that whereas their "resistance to Israeli control is legitimate, the Israeli response to that resistance is not...
...In addition, the Clinton scheme would have allowed Israel to retain several West Bank settlements in exchange for relinquishing equivalent pieces of its own land...
...He has an iconic status...
...For over 50 years, they have been teaching their children, 'This is the key to your house in Jaffa...
...All of Israel is seen as one big settlement...
...But none of them should be expected to go for the deal a stronger, more respected Arafat was never willing to make, warns Abu Toameh, who adds: "I don't see it happening in the next few decades...
...In the Gaza Strip," Ya'ari continues, control "will be assumed by somebody like Muhammad Dahlan and some of the top generals of what people mistakenly called the 'police.' They have more power in Gaza because most of the Fatah brigades are in the Strip...
...He didn't even prepare himself...
...Danny Rubinstein and Khaled Abu Toameh say no...
...Ross, who says he will "never give up" on trying to help Israelis and Arabs make peace, advocates what he calls a "code of conduct" that would re-establish trust and lead to the resumption of a "political process allowing for disengagement...
...A refinement of the Barak plan, it would have enabled the Palestinians to build their state in the West Bank and Gaza, but they would have had to give up demanding as a right the return of their refugees (who number, according to UN estimates, some 3.5 million) to the homes their families once occupied in Israel...
...That's not by chance...
...That does not seem to be the historic role Yasir Arafat chooses to play...
...It found that nearly 70 per cent support the suicide bombings (an increase of 42 per cent compared with March 1999), and that 79 per cent think the intifada should continue...
...The fig trees and olive trees in Jaffa and the Galilee...
...They, on the other hand, have a "perpetual feeling of being victims.' An equally discouraging picture is drawn by Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli Arab who is a local producer for NBC News and a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report...
...The widespread Israeli assumption," he says, "is that there's nothing to be done with Arafat...
...In a weird twist of logic, it suggested that the attack was actually an Israeli-American conspiracy to strengthen the position of Rajoub—whose forces have for the most part not taken part in the intifada—by turning him into an adversary/victim of the Israelis...
...History is not written in the stars...
...Rubinstein sees Arafat as the epitome of the enormous conceptual gulf that separates the two peoples...
...But an effective retaliation could very possibly require an incursion into Area A regions, generally urban, that are under complete Palestinian control...
...But another June poll, by Bir Zeit University, reported that 72 per cent think the liberation of the territories would be sufficient justification for ending the current uprising...
...Look at the documentaries on Palestinian TV and elsewhere...
...Ghazi Jabali [the Palestinian police chief], says, ? understand so much about the Palestinians, I should be a professor at Harvard.' Abu Ala [the speaker of the Palestinian Parliament], who was Arafat's representative at the negotiations leading to the Oslo agreement, says, 'The Constitution stipulates that I should be acting president.' Arafat's deputy, Abu Mazen, says, 'I'm the successor...
...Never a word of thanks, say, to Hadassah Hospital, for taking care of their patients...
...For argument's sake, Abu Toameh posits a situation where Israel gives in to all of the Palestinians' demands...
...He would rather die as a hero, as the father of the revolution, than as the leader of a small, poor, Third World country...
...Since early summer, too, the conventional wisdom here, heard nearly across the political spectrum, has been that Arafat's time as a peace partner "has passed...
...It's in the Israeli interest to see the process relegitimized while he's leader...
...would have recognized Muslim and Jewish claims to Jerusalem's Temple Mount...
...I've been reading the Palestinian papers for 30-plus years...
...Danny Rubinstein, a veteran journalist who covers the Palestinians for the daily Ha 'aretz, and is the author of The Mystery of Arafat (1995), thinks the enduring leader (he will be 72 in August) is as much a symptom of the PalestinianIsraeli problem as he is the problem itself...
...Power, though, "will move from the center to three or four regions" in the West Bank and Gaza...
...But from the Palestinian point of view, Oslo was supposed to end Israeli control...
...From the day of Israel's re-establishment 53 years ago, Rubinstein maintains, the Palestinians, starting with Arafat, have perpetuated among themselves a sense that the Jews are "aliens...
...Abu Toameh explains that while to a disinterested observer (not to mention most Israelis) the Barak offer appeared generous, "for Arafat to have given up on the right of return would have been to commit suicide...
...A few gangs get orders directly or indirectly from Arafat to carry on [with attacks...
...Ninety-five per cent of the Palestinian leaders see themselves as Arafat's successor," observes Abu Toameh...
...And when Arafat is no longer with us...
...He derides the notion that "once Israel deports Arafat and destroys his authority, the average Palestinian of the West Bank or Gaza will bless Israel and the new leader, and will stay calm and hope for a better future...
...According to Rubinstein, Arafat was personally ready to accept the plan President Bill Clinton presented to the two sides last December...
...He put the Palestinian cause on the map...
...Arafat thought he couldn't get his people to buy such a plan," says Rubinstein...
...Moreover, his sense is that Arafat is washed up: "There is no popular dimension to this intifada...
...Ross urges the Israelis not to engage in "wishful thinking...
...My far more painful assumption is that we can't make an agreement with the Palestinians in general...
...In Ya'ari's estimation, when Arafat goes—however he goes —he will probably have a nominal replacement...
...Nevertheless, Ross is convinced that as long as Arafat is around, "it will be possible for the process of peacemaking to be relegitimized, and for peace to be made later...
...No one will have authenticity if they don't adopt the most extreme positions...
...Such a move would be seen as a conspiracy by outside powers...
...With the 3 million living in the West Bank and Gaza, you might succeed, but the other half will never go along...
...Their approach is not necessarily incitement, but Israel is always presented as something bad, something not nice, not just...
...Yet they have reminders every day that Israel still controls them...
...This is what the average Palestinian in the street believes...
...But someone has to inspire them to change...
...Listen to the poems and the songs...
...It allows for greater influence by the Egyptians in Gaza, and the Jordanians in the West Bank," which is bound to be a moderating factor...
...The refugees see themselves as having lived in their land until the Jews came and kicked them out...
...What do they talk about...
...This battle will have to be decided before the funeral, not after," he says...
...More chillingly, although 45.6 per cent of respondents said they thought the goal of the intifada was ending "the Israeli occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza, an almost equivalent 41.2 per cent saw the target as the "complete liberation of Palestinian land," namely the territories and the State of Israel...
...In the West Bank, where Fatah has a relatively small presence, the players will be Jibril Rajoub, allied with the bigger part of the Tanzim, versus Tawfiq Tirawi [the PA's General Intelligence chief], backed by a smaller portion of the Tanzim...
...What about the 3 million Palestinians living in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan...
...During his late June visit to Washington, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised that "there will not be a war and there will not be escalation" of the violence from the Israeli side...
...By David B. Green Jerusalem One of the most serious disagreements within the Israeli security world during the past year concerned the extent to which Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Yasir Arafat was "in control...
...We can do that quite easily...
...It almost doesn't matter, so long as his nature prevents him from telling his people what he doesn't think they are ready to hear...
...What is the likelihood that any of them would be able or willing to make the historic compromises he rejected...
...For Israel, the reasons range from the violence to the Palestinian insistence on the right of return...
...In any event, Abu Toameh emphasizes, "as long as Arafat is breathing, no one will challenge him...
...Arafat is the Palestinian leader, that's the reality...
...it is made by the actions of men and women, and both individuals and whole societies can change...
...Though he doesn't make the analogy himself, and probably wouldn't much like it, he seems to view Arafat as a Palestinian Moses bringing his people through the desert toward the Promised Land, but destined never to enter it himself...
...He may not give the instructions to carry out specific atrocities (often it is actually to his benefit not to know), but if anyone could stop the violence—and the incitement that fills the Palestinian airwaves and is so crucial to maintaining an atmosphere of war—he is the one...
...On the other side the analysts of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, argued that Arafat's control was not absolute...
...Exiling Arafat would be a grave mistake, says Dennis Ross, the State Department's former special envoy to the Middle East...
...I'm the number 2. I'm the natural.'" Eventually, of course, one of the above, or perhaps Muhammad Dahlan, the Preventive Security head in Gaza, will become at least the nominal head of what is already a very weak Palestinian Authority...
...Whoever stands by the grave will be the successor, most likely one of the founding fathers of Fatah, like Farouk Kaddoumi...
...To illustrate the point, Abu Toameh cites the leaflet that circulated among the Palestinians after the Israeli Army shelled the Jericho home of Jibril Rajoub, the PA's head of Preventive Security in the West Bank...
...David B. Green, aprevious contributor, is an editor of the Jerusalem Report...
...But if Arafat's time has indeed passed, who are his potential successors...
...Nor is there much evidence today to suggest that any of his potential successors would be willing to depart from the course he has charted...
...I don't know of one Palestinian saying, 'We should have accepted the [Barak] proposals.' Even from those who participated at Camp David, you hear that the Barak offer was a trick...
...They should give it back.' It's not only the refugees...
...A June poll within the Palestinian community, conducted by the Jerusalem Media Center, tends to bear out Abu Toameh's gloomy analysis...
...If Yasir Arafat is both the problem and the solution, is there a realistic way out of the present debilitating state of affairs...
...Ehud Ya'ari and Dennis Ross say yes...
...After being unable or unwilling to seize the comprehensive peace package offered him by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in July 2000, the reasoning goes, he resumed the armed struggle because he has never really come to terms with the very existence of the State of Israel...
...Arafat, he told me, "can't redefine himself to make a final peace possible...
...Ya'ari believes that Arafat, having failed to bring the masses into the streets consistently, knows he's losing the intifada and is dying to drag the rest of the world into the conflict— but won't succeed...
...In such an unlikely case, particularly under a Sharon government, Abu Toameh grants that the majority of Palestinians in the territories and Jerusalem might very well be satisfied...
...Rajoub says, 'I spent 17 years in Israel prisons, and I'm close to Abu Amar' [Arafat's nom de guerre...
...The public is out of it...
...Lately, however, even the Shin Bet has come to the conclusion that responsibility for every suicide bombing, sniper attack and mortar firing can ultimately be laid at Arafat's door...
...I have never read anything positive about Israel, not once in 30 years...
...The departing Army Intelligence chief, General Amos Malka, consistently argued that Arafat called the shots both of the organizations under his direct control (Fatah, its affiliated Tanzim militia, and the PA's other paramilitary and police forces) and the terrorist groups that officially oppose him (Hamas, Islamic Jihad or their offshoots...
...and the Israel Defense Forces were quickly withdrawn...
...You will go home.' How can you tell them now, 'You can go to Ramallah?'They don't wantthat...
...They are cynical and sarcastic" in speaking about the PA chairman, "and I don't even want to go into the jokes they make about him...
...and would have designated Arab Jerusalem as the capital of the nascent Palestinian state...
...Read the literature...
...That came as a surprise and disappointment to many Israelis, who assumed it was merely a matter of time before Sharon's patience wore thin and he unleashed the Army...
...This scenario, Klein insists, is not only an example of "the blindness of the occupier" but "a total misreading of the Palestinian agenda and priorities...
...Out you go...
...And they can base themselves with Hosni Mubarak [in Egypt], or in Tunis...
...If he leaves [the scene] before that sense returns, I think it will be much longer before you have peaceful coexistence and the possibility of real peace.' Bar-Ilan University political scientist Menachem Klein, who is writing a book about the failed Camp David talks, goes even further...
...Consequently, when the deadline came for giving Clinton an answer, the chairman responded with a tentative yes and then raised so many reservations, as well as requests for clarification, that it was obvious he wasn't really in the game...
...Since the fall, Palestinian attacks, together with Israeli restraint, have been responsible for the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli intifada deaths shifting from 10:1 to 2:1...
...Rubinstein places much of the blame for the Palestinians' lack of readiness for genuine compromise on Arafat: "He didn't prepare his people for real, full reconciliation...
...Peacemaking needs to be seen as the right thing to do...
...The last time Israel did that, in April, it brought a swift rap on the knuckles from the U.S...
...Anything that makes it look like Israel is trying to force Arafat out," he contends, "will bring in a more extreme leader...
...Unlike Abu Toameh, Ya'ari says that many of the Palestinians he talks with "think that Arafat made a mistake in rejecting Barak's offer...
...One knowledgeable Israeli, who understandably asked to remain nameless, told me: "If we hit, and we may ultimately have to, there would be only one objective—to expel Arafat and his entourage...
...But then," he asks rhetorically, "what would you do with Hamas, with Islamic Jihad...
...Is it what Arafat believes...
...To anyone who tries to mention an Israeli connection to the land, they say, 'What connection...
...To this day, you have songs about fishermen at the port of Jaffa...
...There is very little Israel can do about it, but I'm not sure this configuration is necessarily the worst one from our point of view...
...And to make compromises on Al Aksa, I think, scared Arafat...
Vol. 84 • July 2001 • No. 4
