Arafat Gambles Again, and Palestinians Will Suffer for It

Why is anyone still surprised by Yasser Arafat?

By 1970, Arafat had succeeded in establishing a mini-state inside Jordan. King Hussein allowed him considerable autonomy to arm and organize his men in specific frontier zones, so long as he respected the king’s authority and the country’s laws. But having been given half the kingdom, Arafat tried to get even more, confident in the strength of his expanding Fatah militia. Its much-photographed men, who made the AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle world famous, looked tough but did no real training, because Arafat himself had no military expertise, and would not let anyone else take command.

After many provocations, King Hussein in September 1970 unleashed his small but seriously trained army, which easily routed the Fatah. When the fighting of “Black September” ended, many of Arafat’s men were dead, along with civilians caught in the cross-fire, and the rest were expelled to Lebanon.

By 1980, Arafat had once again acquired a mini-state, this time in southern Lebanon. With Egyptian support, he had been given a wide sphere of autonomy under the 1969 “Cairo agreement.” This gave Arafat a free hand to fight the Israelis, but prohibited any interference with the local Lebanese population. Once again, Arafat believed that he had real military strength because his Palestine Liberation Army had tanks and artillery, though it did no real training. Once again, Arafat violated his promises, imposing the rule of his undisciplined followers over the local Lebanese. They reacted violently, forming their own militia, which did nothing to help Arafat’s men when the Israelis invaded in 1982. Arafat lost everything once more, and many of his men, along with many civilians, lost their lives before the rest were expelled to Tunisia, Iraq and Yemen.

By 1990, Arafat had succeeded in rebuilding his organization and his influence from his Tunisian exile, thanks to the generous financial support of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, whose Palestinian residents paid a special income tax to Arafat’s treasury. That assured his total control over the Palestine Liberation Organization’s salaried bureaucracy and armed units. Saudi and Kuwaiti petro-dollar influence was also a powerful help to Arafat’s successful diplomacy around the world.

When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, Arafat did not remain loyal to his patrons, nor did he seek to protect Palestinians everywhere by adopting a position of strict neutrality. Completely miscalculating the balance of power, convinced that he would share in a glorious victory, Arafat gave his total support to Saddam Hussein. The result was that hundreds of thousands of previously affluent Palestinian residents were expelled from Kuwait when the Iraqis were defeated, while the Saudis and other Gulf states stopped all subsidies to the PLO.

By 2000, under the terms of the Oslo accords, Arafat was once again in control of his own mini-state, in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Arafat also had his own police force, authorized by the Israelis under strict numerical limits in the wake of Arafat’s written promise to renounce all violence. Those limits were soon exceeded, as Arafat raised several different forces, eventually to have 45,000 armed men. But the Israelis were ambivalent about complaining, because they relied on Arafat’s men to control the Hamas fundamentalists.

Years of negotiations under the Oslo rules culminated in the Camp David summit meeting this last July, during which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak split his government coalition to offer Arafat 90% of the West Bank and parts of East Jerusalem. Arafat’s negotiators reacted very favorably and much progress was made on every issue, except one. No agreement could be reached over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Rather than throw away all that had been achieved, the obvious solution was to defer the issue. But the Americans at Camp David discovered that Arafat was no longer in harmony with his own negotiators. He was not at all satisfied with 90%; he wanted 91%, which happened to be more than Barak could give and still remain Israel’s prime minister, as Arafat’s own negotiators well knew. Moreover, Arafat seemed determined to spoil the intensely cooperative atmosphere: At one point, he denied that the Jews had any historic connection to Jerusalem (“just biblical tales”), an obvious gambit to induce an Israeli walk-out. That is why in the aftermath President Clinton broke all the rules of diplomacy by publicly blaming Arafat personally for the failure of the talks.

At that point, the classic Arafat pattern reemerged. First, there was his characteristic willingness to gamble everything he had already won--the Palestinian state in Gaza and 90% of the West Bank--to gain a little more. Second, there was his peculiar confidence in the use of force, even though time after time Arafat has lost by violence what he had gained by diplomacy.

Leaving his own negotiating team in the dark, Arafat activated his network of Fatah activists to prepare a campaign of riots and stone-throwing in Gaza and the West Bank. He ordered his different police forces--some dressed and armed like soldiers--to shoot at the Israelis once the riots started, to compel them to open fire against the crowd.

Earlier, Barak had won worldwide diplomatic support with his peace initiative, so much so that after the failure of the Camp David summit, governments everywhere, including China and Russia, urged Arafat to go back to the negotiating table. Arafat’s counter-move was to mobilize Arab solidarity and worldwide sympathy by sending Palestinian youths and children to stone Israeli soldiers while his men shot at them, knowing that some would die in the cross-fire, in front of television cameras.

Although the Israeli government discovered Arafat’s plans almost immediately, and made its own preparations, it failed to prevent Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, which provided an excellent opportunity for the start of Arafat’s campaign. Inflammatory broadcasts on Palestinian radio and TV inaugurated the violence, proving that it was not a spontaneous reaction.

We will soon find out if the outcome will repeat the pattern of the past. In 1970, 1980 and 1990, it was Arafat’s gambling urge, combined with his over-confidence in miscalculating the balance of power, that led him to disastrous defeat, inflicting many deaths and much suffering on his followers. Once again, Arafat has chosen to challenge a much stronger enemy.

There is no chance whatsoever that Arafat will gain by violence what he could not win by negotiation, because no Israeli government can concede more than Barak offered. One possible result could be the demolition of Arafat’s emerging state structures. Another could be a resumption of deal-making between the two sides, but now without any false hope of achieving a real peace.

Either way, many Palestinians will continue to live in squalid poverty while Arafat’s power remains unchallenged by the Palestinian entrepreneurs and technocrats who would soon displace him and his gunmen if a peace treaty were signed. That after all was the ultimate threat of the Camp David summit that Arafat was determined to avoid.