Arafat, Like Nader, Sails on a Sea of Political Perversity

“We must expose this subtle bobcat’s claws. He even now collects the straying sheep and nudges them so gently toward the fold. O sheep, awake and flee this fenced corral. He’s just like all the rest. They’re all alike.”

The lines are from “MacBird,” the 1960s Barbara Garson play beloved of counterculture radicals. Garson’s theme that two seeming alternatives are no alternative at all seems to be cropping up all over the place. In 2000, this idea’s major adherent was Ralph Nader, who insisted that there wasn’t a lick of difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Yet the new year’s most important poster boy for this sort of political perversity seems to be Yasser Arafat, which offers an explanation for the Palestinian leader’s inscrutable behavior that is both plausible and unsettling.

On the stump last year, Nader gleefully insisted that both Democrats and Republicans were wholly owned corporate subsidiaries. Nader’s kamikaze mission, complete with eleventh-hour stumping tours in swing states, left many Democrats with the sour certainty that Nader actually wanted the Republicans to win. Nader, the argument goes, saw the entire electoral system as unsafe at any speed and hoped that conservative ascendancy would force a crisis for liberals and prompt radical overhaul.

So too with Arafat, it seems. Ever since the Al Aqsa intifada erupted last year, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s poll numbers have sunk like a stone. As the body count rose, prominent Palestinians began insisting that Barak was just as bad as his Likud rivals. Meanwhile, Arafat’s response to the violence--somewhere between a wink and a hoot of approval--left Barak exposed on his right flank, perhaps fatally. Yet even after an increasingly desperate Barak accepted the inevitable and called for new elections, Arafat continued to let Barak circle the drain.

A certain grim deja vu is at work here. In 1996, Arafat’s lax attitude toward the Islamic militants of Hamas helped cost Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres his election fight against Benjamin Netanyahu. The current intifada has also scared most Israelis away from Labor.

Why is Arafat risking the loss of his partner in Oslo? One increasingly convincing explanation is that, much as Nader preferred Bush, so Arafat may actually prefer right-wing Likud leader Ariel Sharon. After all, having the defense minister who brought the world the Sabra and Shatila massacres promoted to prime minister would spare Arafat the headache of convincing a dubious world that Barak’s willingness to break taboos and offer the most sweeping concessions in Israeli history somehow camouflaged a villain out to prolong the occupation. With international sympathy for a Sharon-ruled Israel on the wane, Arafat might hope to rally the West Bank and Gaza. He might simultaneously slip the surly bonds of Oslo, dodge American mediation and remold the politics of peace--turning a bilateral Israeli-Palestinian conversation into an international choir hectoring a truculent Israel to return to the 1967 borders.

After the Camp David summit last year, Arafat bristled when President Clinton blamed him for its failure and when even such pro-Palestinian stalwarts as Russia and France warned him not to unilaterally declare statehood. Arafat’s preferred pose of aggrieved victimhood was so much easier to strike under Netanyahu.

To be sure, both Nader and Arafat are not without a point: The differences between Republicans and Democrats and Laborites and Likudniks have narrowed over the 1990s, sometimes dramatically. Yet the blunt fact is that there is still plenty of daylight, and that leaves both men looking foolish and callous toward their causes. In the U.S., the nomination of John Ashcroft for attorney general speaks for itself. In Israel, Barak has offered Arafat 95% of the West Bank; sovereignty over the mosques atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount-Haram al Sharif; control over East Jerusalem, including most of the Old City; and some rhetorical nods toward the principle (if not the practice) of a return for some of the 1948 refugees. It would be virtually impossible for any Israeli prime minister to offer a sweeter deal--let alone the ruthless Sharon.

Depressingly, Arafat’s Nader problem matters more because of America’s Nader problem. Now that Nader has helped throw the 2000 race to Bush, U.S.-Israel relations have a real chance of heading for the skids. The epic bickering between the new U.S. president’s father and Sharon’s Likud colleagues in the early 1990s augurs ill for ties between the Bush administration and a Sharon administration.

Bush’s realist foreign policy team may well bristle when unintended consequences from the current Israeli-Palestinian fiasco start snarling its attempts to put Washington’s Gulf policy on a firmer footing. Meanwhile, neo-conservatives will howl at attempts to pressure Sharon, making Israel even more of a migraine for the White House. The Bush administration--having seen what sort of return Clinton got on his Camp David investment--may well be tempted to pull back at least some of the way, which would leave Arafat alone with Sharon to sort matters out. That would be tragic for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Some politicians, it seems, are determined not to see differences--even the difference between solving a problem and striking a pose.