Warm Biography of Arafat Given a Cold, Hot Reception

To relax, Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat watches cartoons on television. He also drives too fast and has been in several car crashes. He is a fastidious dresser who spiffs up just to talk to the King of Saudi Arabia via a radio link. He has a ferocious temper and frequently shouts at subordinates. But he is not vindictive and has shown mercy to PLO traitors much more often than he has exacted vengeance.

This is the Yasser Arafat British television journalist and documentary-maker Alan Hart says he came to know over the past decade--a man capable of humor, recklessness, good grooming, respect, pity and a hundred other characteristics not popularly associated with the PLO chairman.

Hart first obtained these impressions as a go-between in a private Mideast peace initiative financed by wealthy London Jews in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although that effort came to nothing, it did give the Briton continuing access to Arafat over the next several years. Says Hart, “I got to know, I think, the man and his soul.”

Hours of Interviews

Hart is a former BBC correspondent and now heads his own London-based independent production group. His work includes a widely broadcasted documentary on world hunger and he is currently at work on a series about what the world will be like 60 years from now.

In writing the Arafat biography, Hart used hundreds of hours of interviews and encounters with Arafat and his closest associates as the basis for a long, sympathetic portrait of the controversial Palestinian leader and the Palestinian movement.

Although “Arafat: A Political Biography” was published in Great Britain in late 1984 and has gone through three editions there, the book--updated to include an account of the uprising of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories--only recently found an American publisher, Indiana University Press. More than 40 other U.S. publishers turned down the book because they privately feared a backlash from supporters of Israel, Hart charged during an interview in Los Angeles.

In a statement, the university press said it is “not unaware that some form of self-censorship might have been the cause” for the book not soon finding an American publisher. But the press said it did not consult other publishers and based its decision to publish on the advice of experts who felt “the book was valuable and needed to be more widely available in the American market.”

Whatever the background to the book’s publication, now that it is in print here Hart has been crisscrossing the country for the past month trying to spread the word of its existence. As he sees it, the book is an argument for genuine peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian-Arab world, not an apologia for the controversial Arafat and the Palestinian movement.

Arafat Advocate?

“I am more aware than anybody else that I am in danger right now of becoming an advocate for Yasser Arafat,” he says. “I fully appreciate that danger, but my answer to it is that if you actually read that whole book from Page 1 to Page 600 you will be aware that what I am is an advocate for peace and dialogue. My position is a very simple one. . . . If you don’t know the other side of the story, you must consider the other side of the story. Now that in my mind is a No. 1 journalistic function.”

Hart’s motivation, he says, grows out of his years covering the Middle East for British networks--first from Israel and later from exposure to Arab-Palestinian viewpoints. He became convinced that establishing a dialogue between Jews and Arabs would ultimately lead to a peace settlement, he says.

Hart, who made a documentary on the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier, added that he has come to believe that Arafat has become more likely than the Israelis to gamble for peace.

In his experience, “Arafat has always been willing to take the risks and stick his neck out and my Israeli friends wouldn’t,” he said, referring to the private peace initiative he attempted to orchestrate.

Perhaps predictably, opinions about Hart’s biography vary with political and national persuasion.

Riyad Mansour, a deputy in the PLO’s United Nations mission, said the book probably will be an eye-opener for Westerners unfamiliar with aspects of the PLO, such as its complicated, faction-ridden structure and its recent history. On the other hand, he said the book breaks little new ground for those immersed in the swirl of the modern Middle East. (Mansour declined to comment on Hart’s report in the book’s updated chapter that Arafat has maintained communications with Palestinians in the intifada , the uprising against Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, via satellite link, and that Arafat has been a factor in sustaining the spontaneous popular uprising.)

Israeli Response

Ohad Finkelstein, press officer at the Los Angeles Israeli consulate, said the biography is an attempt to portray “Yasser Arafat, who is a bloody murderer, as Mother Teresa.” Finkelstein said that Arafat is a “terrorist” and not the “respectable diplomat” that Hart pictures.

Somewhere in the middle is the University of Chicago’s Rashid Khalidi. “Arafat” is “the first book that is based on lengthy first-person interviews with the principals of the PLO,” he said. The biography is not a definitive scholarly work, Khalidi added, but is a useful “primary source” on the PLO.

Hart himself sees his creation as an effort to tell the truth about Arafat, who has been obscured by decades of rhetoric and propaganda on all sides in the Middle East. For instance, Hart argues that Arafat moved away from terrorism to diplomacy more than a decade ago and now has a sincere desire for peace with Israel. And Hart believes that Arafat’s image, enhanced by U.S. recognition of the PLO late last year, is becoming more savory in this country.

“I’m excited because I think attitudes toward Arafat are changing,” Hart said. “More importantly, perceptions of Arafat in the American Jewish community are changing and, insofar as there is hope, it seems to me it lies there.”

Arab Moderate

Hart said that he and many other Europeans see Arafat as a moderate in the Arab world and perhaps the last, best hope for a reasoned political settlement in the Middle East.

“Europe understands that if Arafat is not allowed to deliver (a peace settlement acceptable to Palestinians), Arab moderation--not just Palestinian moderation--over a period of years is going to take a beating and we could see an explosion of Arab-Muslim fundamentalist rage.”

Despite his clearly favorable inclination toward Arafat, Hart emphasized that his book is “not an authorized biography” and that Arafat initially “wasn’t too keen to cooperate” in its writing.

Moreover, Arafat “hates” parts of the book, Hart said, particularly passages about his unhappy early childhood and quotations that are more frank than the PLO leader would like to see in print. Specifically, Arafat disliked seeing in type his comment that being chairman of the PLO was comparable to being the only male in a brothel, Hart said.

a Second Copy

Hart recalled that after the Israelis bombed the PLO headquarters in Tunis in 1985, Arafat asked him for another copy of the book. Arafat told Hart, “The Israeli bomb took my desk apart and your book was on my desk. . . . Maybe that was the target.”

However, Hart’s conversations with the PLO chairman were usually serious, including a discussion about how Arafat could most easily be assassinated.

“I said to him, ‘Chairman Arafat, isn’t it true if someone wanted to kill you they’d just fire a missile on your plane?’ ” Hart explained. “And he said, ‘Oh sure, you fire it from a shoulder launcher. You do it over an Arab country and blame it on (my) Arab enemies.’ ”