Arafat: Making a Success Out of Failure : PLO boss’ brush with death reminds the world anew of the importance of being Yasser

Yasser Arafat’s leadership has come under increasing criticism from fellow officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and it is facing a growing de facto challenge from Palestinians chafing under Israeli rule on the West Bank. But when the PLO chairman’s plane was lost in the Sahara Desert for 15 hours this week the alarm expressed across much of the Palestinian world was for the most part unfeigned.

Arafat is not just the symbol of the Palestinian quest for nationhood. He has also been the indispensable unifying agent in the often brutally antagonistic world of Palestinian politics.

That role has not been based on any tangible record of external successes. Arafat has failed utterly to achieve the PLO’s territorial goals, and his often appallingly misguided political decisions--among them to support Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait--have brought misery to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Strip away the fading images of Arafat addressing the United Nations and the photo-ops provided by his globe-trotting meetings with friendly dictators and what remains is an inescapable reality--that no so-called liberation movement has ever been less successful in seizing and holding the territory it covets.

This failure has many causes, but lack of financing certainly is not one of them. The PLO has billions in invested assets--allowing its leaders to live in increasingly criticized high style--with Arafat personally directing where the money will go. “May God give you a long life,” an aide told him last week, “but if you die what is going to happen to us and to all the money you control?” What would happen to the money is probably something that only Arafat and his bankers know. What would happen to the PLO is more predictable.

Probably, in fairly short order, the organization would fragment, with each of its disparate factions drawing support from one or another Arab government, and with each claiming to be the true keeper of the flame of Palestinian nationalism.

The immediate results could well be an explosion of terrorism, as rival forces competed to show their vitality and ability to coerce, and a quick collapse of the Arab-Israeli peace talks, where the PLO has had an active, behind-the-scenes influence on the Palestinian delegation.

Longer-term, though, a PLO breakup could in fact serve the Palestinian cause, by allowing the emergence in the disputed territories of an indigenous leadership more committed to pragmatic and conciliatory solutions.

Arafat has survived his latest brush with mortality, but in the process he has provided a reminder that the PLO might not itself long survive his inevitable departure.