Arafat - From Defender to Dictator

Title: Arafat – From Defender to Dictator
Author: Said K Aburish
Publisher: Bloomsbury 2004 (First published 1998)
ISBN: 0-7475-4430-1
Pages: 332


Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was the voice and face of the Palestinian people. For over 40 years, he filled the political space available for an occupied state and helped the flame of nationhood unextinguished. We come to think of him as the genial, gentle and patriarchal figure who hopped the capitals of the world in pursuit of recognition and support for his cause. Arafat earned the respect of the world through his steadfastness to the principle of Palestinian statehood and to the right of his people to self-determination. There was no way the outside world could’ve imagined that this man would be considered in any other way than respectfully by his own people. That belief would be rudely shattered by this book by Abu Rish, who is also a Palestinian. Being a journalist, he has produced several books and is marked by the sharp and unequivocal condemnation of Arafat’s policies. The criticism often seeps into his personal life and the author accuses the leader of corruption, nepotism, incompetence, dictatorial tendencies and self-aggrandizement.


The book is the biography of Yasser Arafat. He was born in Cairo as Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al Qudua Al Husseini. In his effort to promote himself as a son-of-the-soil, he claimed later that he was born in Jerusalem and changed his first name to Yasser. He lived his early years as an Egyptian and fought battles along side their soldiers. When Gemal Abdel Nasser cracked down on Palestinian groups in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez war, he moved to Kuwait and obtained a job in a civil engineering consultancy. He amassed a good fortune there and even in his last days, he used to boast that he was living on the money he earned in Kuwait. Along with close friends, he formed Fatah. One incident which led to the murder of a close friend prompted the authorities to arrest him. Fatah planned and executed several armed incursions into Israel and caused strife between the Arab nations and Israel. The war in 1967 with Israel dealt a crushing defeat on the Arabs. The military might of Egypt, Syria and Jordan decimated before the clever, pre-emptive strike by the Israelis, and they had to concede West bank, Gaza and several strips of land. Until then, the Palestinian problem was handled as one of Arab nationalism, in the sense that Palestine didn’t have a separate identity. King Hussein of Jordan openly claimed that Palestine was a part of Jordan. But the 1967 war changed all that. The Arabs realised the futility of confronting a state with far superior military power and thought it best to engage the Palestinians themselves against Israel. After all, it was their own home land! Arafat rose to prominence during this period and assumed leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The group’s base was in Jordan and the terrorist activities they committed from Jordanian soil against Israel invited punitive strikes from them. Jordan found the situation unpalatable and strife existed between the hosts and PLO.


PLO and Arafat was confident that the King enjoyed no popular support in Jordan. In what came to be called the ‘Black September’ plot of 1970, the Palestinians conducted a coup against Jordan and tried to wrest power from the King. This was a miscalculation which backfired and they had to flee Jordan. Arafat moved to Beirut, Lebanon which also shared the frontier with Israel. PLO involved massively in terror tactics including random acts of violence against civilian targets and plane hijackings. The greatest blow to human conscience came in 1972 when armed Palestinian terrorists killed Israeli athletes in the Olympic Games village in Munich, Germany. International pressure mounted on him and he was forced to seek a peaceful solution to his problems with Israel.


The Arabs joined hands once again to deal a punishing blow to Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. Even though the losses on the Arab side were far greater, the disproportionate loss of life and material was crushing for the Jewish state. Rejuvenated by the victory, PLO turned to highhanded methods in Lebanon, their temporary home, which had equal prominence to the Muslims and Christians. Fights between Arafat’s men and Christian militias became the order of the day and the Lebanese government was powerless to do anything. This escalated into a civil war between the two factions and the ensuing Arab mediation under the leadership of Anwar Sadat caused peace agreements to be effected. Israeli military intervened in the conflict and provided active support to Christian forces. Large scale massacre at two refugee camps at Sabra and Chatilla in 1982 by Christian fighters under the blind eye of Israeli army evoked international condemnation. Arafat dillydallied between peace and revolution and had to leave Beirut to Tunis. PLO’s involvement in the hijacking of the yacht Achille Lauro from Alexandria caused their image to be tarnished. King Hussein’s peace efforts also proved to be futile.


Intifada, the uprising by Palestinian children and women against the Israeli army began in 1987 which attracted world wide attention for the largely peaceful antics of the protestors. Arafat was hesitant at first to throw in his lot with the movement as he feared for the usurpation of his stature, though he later reversed his stand. However, this was a clear indication that the matters on Palestinian soil was going out of the hands of its leader in exile. Terrorist organisations, the Islamic Jihad and Hamas gained further ground. Arafat sought the help of Saddam Hussein at this juncture. He had to support the Iraqi dictator’s aggression into Kuwait and had to suffer loss of credibility. It was widely thought that Arafat failed to correctly judge the international response to Saddam’s blatant act of vandalism. U.S intervened heavily in support of Kuwait and Iraqi forces were wiped off from there.


The victory over Saddam in the 1991 Kuwait war prompted George Bush to seek ways to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine problem as he was sure that without solving it, a lasting peace in the middle-east wouldn’t materialise. Peace conferences were held in Madrid and Washington between the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinians and Israel. Though Arafat didn’t participate in the negotiations personally, he was desperate to arrive at a presentable solution. His miraculous escape from a plane crash while the discussions were progressing, enhanced his image. Unknown to his negotiators in Washington which included Hannan Ashrawi, Arafat was engaged in a semi-official dialogue with Israel in Oslo, Norway. When the Oslo negotiations succeeded, the official delegates in Washington resigned in protest. Arafat signed the historic peace agreement in Washington with Prime minister Yitshak Rabin under the watchful eye of Bill Clinton. Autonomy to Gaza and Jericho were admitted, but no statehood was granted. A Palestinian authority was to be formed to administer these territories. Arafat entered Gaza as the President of the Palestinian National Authority. His rule, however, turned dictatorial. He filled all governmental and NGOs with his sycophants and cronies. He controlled the flow of money from outside and it often ended up lining the pockets of his associates. The peace deal was not endearing to the muslims as Israel continued the settlement programme in violation of the accord. The Palestinians, under the guidance of terrorist organisations began bombing and rocket attacks against Israel, which prompted them to block all access to Gaza and forcing the labourers there without work in Israel. Matters were rapidly deteriorating. Arafat’s running of Palestine was riddled with corruption from the very outset. He muffled the legislative, frightened the judiciary, owned the executive and stifled the press. The legislators were not even allowed to raise charges of corruption in the assembly. His security service’s regard for human rights were observed in the blatant violations of it and the number of people in its preventive custody exceeded that of the Israeli period. Nepotism ran supreme, as the surest way to move up in the hierarchy was to be someone special to the leader. Arafat died in 2004 in France due to prolonged illness.


Aburish’s treatment of Arafat is very harsh and unsympathetic. He assails right from the leader’s pretensions to the nativity of Jerusalem, exposing the family details and the nuances with which the people interact in the middle-east. Every chapter is replete with countless accusations of megalomania, nepotism, self-aggrandizement and ignorance. Arafat’s use of foul language under stress is also mentioned on several occasions. Even if we accept all the author’s accusations at face value, there still remains the issue of who else could handle the difficult Palestine issue. True, the peace accord was not entirely satisfactory to the Palestinians, but it was also unacceptable to Israeli hardliners too! Aburish terms the deal a surrender, but fails to explain why it was so vehemently opposed by Benjamin Netanyahu, the right wing Likud prime minister of Israel. The author’s allies seems to be the Islamic terrorists like Hamas as he maintains an inscrutable silence about the merciless acts of terrorism conducted by the organisation. Aburish offers a review of every activity in the field, but resorts to simple statement of the facts when the atrocity was perpetrated by Hamas or Islamic Jihad. It is easy to find fault with a tall leader, who represented a nation in waiting, but to find viable alternatives is a tougher proposition which is evaded by the author. The style of the author is impeccable, while the content is doubtful. The entire book is delightful to read as it is full of scathing wordplay, though with contradictions every now and then. The work is however, commendable and is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star