Who Is This Man, and Who Comes Next?

A Jordanian helicopter containing an ill and frail Yasser Arafat lifted off from the soil of Ramallah last week. Even those who opposed and fought against him felt a vague surge of respect at this significant moment. Arafat, disengaged from Palestine, the principal source of his life force.

He battled for decades for this land. He turned its story into a political reality that has preoccupied the world, and he became a powerful and universal symbol of a nation’s return to its homeland. Who is this man? A hero to most Palestinians and a terrorist to most Israelis, a man of artifices and enigmas. Even his closest associates admit that they don’t understand him and sometimes have difficulty deciphering his behavior. Arafat has declared that he is “married to Palestine.” He has devoted his life to it, eschewed for it the pleasures of the world (although, according to Israeli intelligence, that didn’t stop him from transferring millions of dollars belonging to the Palestinian Authority to his private Swiss bank account).

He is a man of one idea -- the establishment of an independent Palestinian state -- and all means were acceptable in seeking that goal. He committed murder with his own hands (in the war of 1948 he was said to have killed a Palestinian he suspected, mistakenly, of treason). He led freedom fighters in a campaign against the Israeli occupation, but also sent terrorists on operations against innocent civilians. With the agility of a trapeze artist he leaped, sometimes with genius, among politicians and countries. Without blinking an eye, he violated agreements he had signed and led his people to great achievements.

To a certain extent he even created and molded the Palestinians as a nation, while at the same time inflicting on them tragedies and serious errors. In the end he sent them plummeting into their current mortal condition.

Arafat arouses mixed feelings among Westerners. Many respect his fortitude and his determination but feel an aversion to his behavior, his capriciousness, his extremism.

The Palestinians have viewed him differently. For example, there was the time he stood on a stage in Cairo in 1994 to sign one of the agreements that failed. Israeli, Arab and Western leaders were there, dressed in fine suits, radiating confidence and even a bit of arrogance. Arafat stood out with his slipshod appearance, his strange gestures, even his physical abjectness. But the Palestinians loved him precisely for that. Because there, among the world’s great men, those who have everything -- countries, armies, money -- he was the destitute refugee, the wily tramp, doing tricks with the one coin he had in order to achieve for his people what was, for him, an existential need.

What will happen now in the Palestinian Authority? One possibility is that anarchy, which has until now been suppressed thanks to Arafat’s symbolic authority, will break out and that there will be a civil war among opposing factions -- especially Arafat’s Fatah and the extremist Islamic organizations. This is very likely, given the tensions between the factions and because there are already cities and villages overseen by the Palestinian Authority that suffer from the internal terror of criminal gangs trying to profit from the weakness of the central government.

A second possibility is that fear of anarchy will create unity, even if only temporary unity, among the Palestinian people. In such a case, a successor to Arafat will be chosen, and he will seek to bridge the fissures that divide his people. The new leader will have to confront the Israeli occupation and, at the same time, enter into negotiations for some sort of peace agreement as quickly as possible.

The successor will be in an unenviable position. He will inherit a divided people who suffer every possible injury brought on by four years of war and 37 years of occupation.

It’s quite characteristic that the Palestinians are unmoved. Few came to take leave of their leader when he took off for Paris, and in conversation they exhibit apathy, fatalism and the despair of people who are long accustomed to every change bringing them more trouble.

Israel is confused. Until now, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has used Arafat as his main excuse for not negotiating with the Palestinians. “There is no partner” is the slogan that Sharon has, with great skill and no little assistance from Arafat and his policy of terror, burned into the consciousness of a majority of Israelis and of President Bush. Now, when it seems likely that Arafat will disappear from the arena, what excuse will there be?

In fact, only when Arafat was in charge did Israel have a partner for a real accommodation. Who knows how much time will pass before Arafat’s successor is able to stabilize the Palestinian Authority? How much time will pass before he feels confident, before he gains the authority and respect from his people that he needs to make the difficult concessions that a real peace treaty will require? It may well be that an unconfident successor will, for a long time, find it necessary to take tougher stances than Arafat did in order to prove his loyalty to the Palestinian cause.

Israel is liable to discover, too late, that it missed a great opportunity when it ignored and humiliated Arafat during these last critical years. It takes a symbol to shatter a symbol. Sharon, the Israeli most identified with the settlements in the occupied territories, may well be the man who will dismantle them. Arafat, the greatest symbol of Palestine’s struggle and tragedy, might perhaps have been the man who could concede the Palestinian demands for Jerusalem and the right of return.

I say “perhaps” because Arafat has stubbornly refused to accept any compromise on these issues. His refusal was an important factor in the failure of the Camp David talks of July 2000, a failure that led to the outbreak of the current intifada.

No one can say with certainty what really was Arafat’s share of the blame for that failure. Ehud Barak and Shlomo Ben-Ami, who negotiated for Israel at that time, believe that the talks revealed Arafat’s true face. They say Arafat is a prisoner of a mythic, symbolic worldview that makes it absolutely impossible for him to make concessions. The argument against them is that if Israel had conducted its side of the negotiations better -- if Barak had not been so intent on revealing Arafat’s true face -- the results may well have been different. After obtaining significant concessions from Israel, Arafat could have gone before his people to tell the millions of Palestinian refugees that, in exchange for these gains, they must give up their dream of returning to the cities and villages from which they were exiled in the wake of the 1948 war.

This is, of course, only a conjecture that no one can prove or disprove. What is clear is that Arafat brought his people to the verge of realizing their dream of a state, but also took part in and was responsible for the error that prevented the realization of that dream.

There is something tragic in that thought, but perhaps even in his final hour Arafat will smile to himself. Because Sharon, his sworn enemy who tried untold times to assassinate him and who succeeded in persuading the Israelis and Bush’s United States that Arafat was a scoundrel, madman and terrorist, is beginning to carry out the major part of Arafat’s vision: the evacuation of Israeli settlements and the establishment of a Palestinian state.