After Arafat, All Things Are Possible

For at least the second time in 20 years, Ariel Sharon had Yasser Arafat in the cross hairs last week and decided against killing him.

The first occasion was Beirut 1982, when Sharon opted against ordering a sniper to liquidate the Palestine Liberation Organization leader boarding a boat for exile. And now, if media reports are accurate, Sharon apparently promised President Bush that even Israel’s revved-up anti-terror efforts would not target Arafat personally.

There is much wisdom in Israel (or any outside party) not bearing responsibility for trying to determine who should or shouldn’t lead the Palestinians. But peacefully or otherwise, eventually Arafat will no longer be with us. When that day comes, the Middle Eastern sky will not fall, as many predict.

In fact, if Washington is prepared to do its part, it may even brighten.

Worst-case fears about a descent into anarchy in the immediate aftermath of Arafat’s death are misplaced. While Arafat has no designated heir, the post-Arafat vacuum is unlikely to be filled by radical opposition movements such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Though they are enjoying a burst of popularity, these groups lack real power. Arafat’s myriad security and intelligence organs--with a staff of at least 40,000--dwarf the armed fighters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad who, by all estimates, number fewer than 2,000. Arafat doesn’t clamp down harder on militants because of lack of will, not lack of ability.

As a result, Arafat’s death is more likely to trigger a power grab by his current political and security lieutenants in the West Bank and Gaza. Their goal will be to defend their collective authority while protecting their individual slices of power in their zones of influence.

Toward Israel, the putative “national leadership” probably won’t offer any political concessions that Arafat was unwilling to countenance, but they are likely to go further than Arafat toward meeting Israel’s immediate security concerns. After all, they will want to secure their home front before challenging the Israelis.

According to this analysis, Arafat’s death will produce neither civil war nor national euphoria, neither movement toward better governance or compromise with Israel nor backsliding toward full-scale kleptocracy or open warfare against Israel. For the key players, the goal will be to get and keep power. There is little that outside players, including the U.S., can do during this process.

Eventually, however, this will change. Over time, Arafat’s death will free Palestinian politics from the stranglehold of the chairman’s unique and dominating persona.

On the hopeful side, Arafat’s passing may permit different Palestinian constituencies to advance their own interests, rather than submit to the lowest-common denominator that has been Arafat’s stock-in-trade. West Bankers and Gazans, for example, may assert local interests that allow them to shelve the long-held demand for the repatriation to Israel of millions of refugees scattered in camps throughout the Middle East. This process is likely to make the Israeli-Palestinian dispute more open to solution.

A gloomier forecast is also possible. Arafat’s failure to determine an orderly succession and his failure to take advantage of diplomatic opportunity to settle the Palestinian-Israeli dispute will leave secular nationalism, including his Fatah movement, leaderless and deflated. Into this vacuum would come an Islamic alternative that appears more responsive to popular needs and unburdened with the failed strategies of the past. Over time, the result would be the transformation of a nationalist conflict--whose solution is through the repartition of Palestine--into an irreconcilable religious war.

Unlike the power grab likely to follow Arafat’s death, outside actors can affect the outcome of this longer-term process. The U.S. role could be pivotal, especially if Washington avoids repeating one key mistake from the past: betting on individuals rather than institutions.

For an entire generation of U.S. policymakers, contemplating an alternative to Arafat has been unthinkable. The sad result of this Arafat fetish was both to retard any development of independent Palestinian political institutions and to frustrate any serious effort at imposing consequences on Arafat for failing to fulfill his security commitment to Israel. Arafat always had the insurance of knowing that he was indispensable.

When Arafat departs the scene, Washington gets a rare second chance to get it right. Precisely because the opportunity for diplomacy with Israel will be slim, that is the moment to press forward with an American-Palestinian agenda that emphasizes both democracy and security, both respect for the rule of law and persistence in the fight against terror. With democracy at home and security in relations with Israel, peace will not be far behind.

*

Robert Satloff is the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.