Seeking to Be the ‘Founder,’ Arafat Tightens His Grasp

Perhaps as a leftover from his days as a guerrilla fighter, Yasser Arafat has a special feeling for security and secrecy. In January 1997, as president of the Palestinian Authority, he came to Hebron on the day it was officially “liberated” from Israeli occupation. His helicopter, accompanied by the usual decoys, landed behind a protective cloud of red and green smoke, and he was hustled to the former Israeli army headquarters inside a tight, thick cordon of police motorcycles.

When he spoke to the thousands gathered outside, he made his pronouncements from such a high terrace of the old Israeli army headquarters that it was almost impossible for the crowd to hear him, in spite of the patchwork sound system. Arafat that day was a tiny, dot-like historic figure--no more than a voice beneath a keffiyeh--surrounded by security, looked up to by all. Communication was not what the scene was about. It was about authority.

It has been shown, time and again, that the tiny, faraway figure has a long reach. Nablus lies almost all the way across the state of Israel from Arafat’s Gaza headquarters. Yet, there, last week, Arafat’s security forces arrested four signers of a petition against corruption in the Palestinian Authority, and another signatory was shot in the leg.

In a sense, the sprawling, hillside city exemplifies the domestic political problems of the emerging Palestinian state. Though the Authority does not have a standing army, fully 36% of its budget is spent on security forces--more than five times what it spends on health, social services and education combined. In Nablus, huge amounts of money come in as payment to Arafat’s police and his personal security guards. One man, who can be viewed as typical, lives in a one-bedroom house in Nablus’ Balata refugee camp with his wife and two children and receives a regular paycheck (not a big one, but the only one he’s ever had, at age 36) for guarding the person of President Arafat on his visits to Nablus, of which there are often not more than two or three a year. His weekly paycheck, like thousands handed out by Arafat’s Authority, is not so much payment for services rendered as a purchase of fealty.

The swiftness and brutality of Arafat’s reaction to last week’s petition was surprising to many: Besides the four in Nablus, seven other signers were arrested; and Arafat has threatened to take into custody another eight legislators who signed but are protected from arrest by their government status. At first glance, Arafat’s toughness seems needless, since the petition does little more than restate concerns (in, it must be said, powerful and unequivocal language) that have been voiced informally and privately by almost every Palestinian not directly on Arafat’s payroll--and even by some who are.

Rumors and unpublished accusations of corruption have proliferated over the years, as the corruption, itself, has intensified. Arafat’s key economic advisor, Muhammad Rashid, has been the chief target of increasing Palestinian ire. As overseer of state monopolies like gasoline, as well as Authority holdings in private-sector industries like cement, Rashid has failed to disclose either the amount or the fate of profits reaped from these enterprises, which are estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

In other words, the petition represents a departure not because of its content but because of its public nature. What was, for years, a serious at-home grumble has, overnight, turned into an international protest, and Arafat immediately sensed the threat implicit in the petition’s publication. He sensed a change in the tide of Palestinian politics--one that does not bode well for him in the long run.

Arafat does not take well to criticism of any kind and has surrounded himself since becoming president with yea-sayers, lackeys and sycophants. Even the best and brightest of Palestinian militants fear his anger and are reluctant to criticize him in public. Over the past few years, he has imprisoned a handful of prominent critics: One editor was jailed for failing to publish a particular positive story on the front page of his paper. A poll conducted in September by the Center for Palestine Research and Studies in Nablus shows that 60% of Palestinians believe “people cannot criticize the Palestinian Authority without fear.” In a healthy polity, this should not be the case.

Arafat is admittedly in a tight spot. Right now, he has to deal with the rock-hard Israelis on sensitive issues like Palestinian prisoner release and refugee return. The last thing he needs, as he attempts to wheedle the Barak government into a final-status negotiation that the Israeli side can countenance, is a fractious bunch of Palestinian legislators and intellectuals attacking him for his domestic policies. He is undoubtedly afraid that if he lets something like this petition go, the next thing he knows, he’ll have members of his own legislature leading protests in the streets of Ramallah and Bethlehem against the very peace process on which he has staked his claim to posterity. He’s afraid he will lose control.

For that is what is at the heart of all this: Arafat, in his own lifetime, wants to be the father of his nation. He wants nothing less than to be a veritable George Washington: general, nationalist, revolutionary, statesman, president. The “Founder.” But the signatories to the petition are not happy with Arafat’s conduct of the peace process, not pleased, in other words, with the process that is to result in the state of which he is to be the founder. It’s as earthshaking to Arafat as it would have been to Washington had John Hancock signed a petition accusing the general of corruption.

The Palestinians fear that Arafat is selling out all Palestinian aspirations, won at a terrible cost in blood, for an agreement that will satisfy only him and his cronies. While the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu was prime minister, Arafat had many opportunities to grandstand against Israeli intransigence and show his solidarity with his people. Now, with the seemingly more agreeable Ehud Barak in power, Palestinians have begun to view Arafat, once again, as a toady of the Israelis, a sort of high-class collaborator.

There is also the future of the Palestinian Authority--indeed, of Palestine--to consider. The petitioners have disingenuously, or perhaps mistakenly, said the goal of their document is “to get the ordinary person to think.” But, of course, the ordinary person has been thinking for a long time, thinking these specific thoughts. The real object of the petition is to let the ordinary person know there are members of the Palestinian elite who think as the ordinary man does, and who would, by extension, like to have the ordinary man’s support and vote in any future election.

The petition-signers clearly sense that the popular groundswell against Arafat is coming to a head, or they would not have risked this move. (Everything in the Middle East is political.) They want the Palestinian people to know there are leaders--perhaps not the best known internationally, but still leaders of reputation and courage--ready to replace Arafat as leaders of the new Palestine. That is the sin for which they are now arrested, imprisoned and silenced. They have committed the worst crime: The crime of offering an alternative to Arafat.