30.10.04
The Importance of being “Irrelevant”
I remember
standing on the roof of a warehouse near
When I came back to Tel-Aviv, I was invited to a radio debate. For the
sake of balance, a right-wing journalist was also invited. It was Tommy Lapid,
the present Minister of Justice. Before entering the studio, we chatted. I
wonder if he remembers now what I told him then: “You have buried
him a hundred times, and you a going to bury him a hundred times more.”
22
years later, the same announcements fill the media again: “End of the Arafat
era! Arafat is politically a dead horse! Thank God we are rid of him once and
for all!”
The man who years ago was officially declared by the Israeli government to
be “irrelevant”, was headline news all over the world this week. There are very
few leaders around whose state of health would command similar attention.
I
don’t know how serious his medical condition really is. I only hope that he
will recover fully. And I know that if, God forbid, he should pass away, Israelis
will learn to appreciate him in his absence.
In the days of the first
If one does not want peace and prefers a Greater
“My
hand,” Arafat once said, “is the only hand that can sign a peace agreement with
Since this is so, there is no substitute for Arafat: he is the only
Palestinian leader with the towering moral authority that is needed not only to
sign a peace treaty with
Where
does his authority come from? I have seen him many times in the company of
other Palestinian leaders. Each time I was impressed by the power of authority
that he radiates, without any manifestations of power. It is difficult to
explain its source. Unlike Fidel Castro, for example, who appeared on the world
stage at the same time as Arafat, the Palestinian leader has no army, no vast
secret police apparatus and no prisons for his opponents. His power emanates
solely from the respect his compatriots accord him as the “Father of the Nation”,
the Palestinian George Washington.
Already at our first meeting in besieged
A
European reporter once asked me about his hobbies. What does he do when he is
not busy with the Palestinian cause? I answered that he has no hobbies, that
there is not a single moment when he is not busy with the Palestinian cause.
His identification with the Palestinian struggle is total. He has no other
life.
Everyone who sees him for the first time in the flesh is amazed by the
huge difference between the media personality and the man. On TV he looks fanatical, aggressive. In real life
he is a warm person, considerate, radiating emotions. Even a person meeting him
for the first time needs only a few minutes to feel like an old acquaintance.
He loves to pamper his guests at meals, offering them choice morsels with his
fingers. He likes to touch the people he talks with, to take them by the hand
and conduct them along the corridors, to offer them small presents.
He is no intellectual, not a man of books
and theories. He is all intuition. He grasps things with incredible speed and never
forgets details. Once, talking with him, I made a mistake about the number of
Agudat
Like
all Arab heroes in history, he is a man of gestures. One gesture is worth a
thousand words. On the day of his return to
I
sat there and racked my brains: What was this whole exhibition about? Suddenly
I got it. In this simple way he was showing to the entire Arab world: This is
it. I am sitting with the Israelis. I am going to make peace with them.
He
flourishes in situations of great stress. I have seen him more than once in
such a situation, when he was at his best, focussed, eyes glittering, joking.
He is used to this: his whole life consists of ups and downs, successes and
failures. He has, of course, made many mistakes (his support of Saddam Hussein during
the first Gulf War springs to mind), but they pale in comparison to his huge
achievement. It was he who created the modern Palestinian national movement
when the Palestinian people had almost vanished from the map, and he has
brought them to the threshold of national independence. Like Moses, he has led
his people from slavery to the gates of the Promised Land. I hope that it will
not be said about him that, like Moses, he saw the Promised Land from afar but
did not enter it.
Everything
he achieved was achieved in face of
And no less important: for decades he has kept
the Palestinians together, in spite of huge internal differences. The
Palestinian movement has had almost none of the kind of bloody internal
confrontations that have been typical of most liberation movements.
During its first few years, the movement had to function in Arab
countries that were afraid of it and tried to suppress it. All its leaders,
Arafat included, have been held at one stage or
another in Arab prisons. Every one of the Arab regimes has tried to use the
Palestinian cause for its own advantage. Arafat needed all the stratagems that
have since become his trade-mark. As a Palestinian diplomat once explained to
me: “For the movement to survive and advance, Arafat had to use all tricks and
ploys, use double-talk and half-truths, play one Arab
leader against the other, all this in rapidly changing situations. He always had
several balls in the air, never letting one fall to the ground. This way he led
our movement forward and brought us to where we are.”
Like every leader of a national liberation movement, he had to make the
most of the few means at his disposal – shrewdness, violence, diplomacy,
propaganda. His steps can be foreseen, if one enters his head and understands
the constraints he is working under and the aims he has set himself. In the
last 30 years I have not once been taken by surprise, not when he went to
For 45 years now, Arafat has lived in the shadow of death. There was not
a moment when a plot to kill him was not being hatched somewhere or other. When
I met him in 1982 in besieged
Once he was asked in my presence if he expected to see the day peace
comes. “Both I and Uri Avnery will see this day in our lifetime,” he promised. For
the sake of