I remember standing on the roof of a warehouse near Beirut harbor and observing the armedand uniformed PLO fighters, headed by Yasser Arafat, getting on the ships that took themwestwards. “End of the Arafat era!” rejoiced the newspapers in Israel the next day. “Arafat ispolitically a dead horse!” said the radio commentators. “Thank God we are rid of him once andfor all!” TV talk-show hosts announced.
When I came back to Tel-Aviv, I was invited to a radio debate. For the sake of balance, aright-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: “Youhave 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!
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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 leadersaround 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 recoverfully. And I know that if, God forbid, he should pass away, Israelis will learn to appreciatehim in his absence.
In the days of the first Camp David conference, a noted Egyptian thinker, MohamedSid-Ahmed, told me: “If Arafat didn’t exist, you would have to invent him. With Arafat around,you have a single address to negotiate with and make peace. If he were not there, thePalestinian people might split into a hundred splinters, and you would have to talk with eachof them.”
If one does not want peace and prefers a Greater Israel , one does not need Arafat. On thecontrary. But if one thinks that peace is essential for Israel to develop and flourish, oneneeds him very much.
“My hand,” Arafat once said, “is the only hand that can sign a peace agreement with Israel.”
Since this is so, there is no substitute for Arafat: he is the only Palestinian leader withthe towering moral authority that is needed not only to sign a peace treaty with Israel , but –which is even more important – to carry his people with him. Any peace agreement will demandfrom the Palestinians concessions that will tear their hearts, such as giving up the right tounlimited return of the refugees to the territory of Israel . No other Palestinian leaderwould have the courage to stand up and ask his people to do this.
Where does his authority come from? I have seen him many times in the company of otherPalestinian 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 FidelCastro, for example, who appeared on the world stage at the same time as Arafat, thePalestinian leader has no army, no vast secret police apparatus and no prisons for hisopponents. 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 Beirut , in July 1982, I was struck by the totalabsence of ceremonial around him. During meetings, his people interrupt him and debate withhim. His authority is clear without the need for any outward signs.
A European reporter once asked me about his hobbies. What does he do when he is not busy withthe Palestinian cause? I answered that he has no hobbies, that there is not a single moment whenhe is not busy with the Palestinian cause. His identification with the Palestinian struggleis total. He has no other life.
Everyone who sees him for the first time in the flesh is amazed by the huge differencebetween the media personality and the man. On TV he looks fanatical, aggressive. In real lifehe is a warm person, considerate, radiating emotions. Even a person meeting him for the firsttime needs only a few minutes to feel like an old acquaintance. He loves to pamper his guests atmeals, offering them choice morsels with his fingers. He likes to touch the people he talkswith, to take them by the hand and conduct them along the corridors, to offer them smallpresents.
He is no intellectual, not a man of books and theories. He is all intuition. He graspsthings with incredible speed and never forgets details. Once, talking with him, I made amistake about the number of Agudat Israel members of the Knesset. He corrected me at once.Another time, I got the date of one of the Oslo agreements wrong. He corrected me then, too. “I aman engineer by profession,” he said and laughed. “I never forget a number.”
Like all Arab heroes in history, he is a man of gestures. One gesture is worth a thousandwords. On the day of his return to Palestine he invited me in, just when he was about to give apress conference to the media of the Arab world. He entered the hall, went straight up to me, andafter the usual embrace he took my hand and drew me, almost forcibly, towards the tribune. Heled me up the stairs, asked his spokesman to get up and seated me next to him. For an hour he spokein Arabic to the media people, turning to me from time to time for confirmation.
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 theIsraelis. I am going to make peace with them.
He flourishes in situations of great stress. I have seen him more than once in such asituation, when he was at his best, focussed, eyes glittering, joking. He is used to this: hiswhole life consists of ups and downs, successes and failures. He has, of course, made manymistakes (his support of Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War springs to mind), but theypale in comparison to his huge achievement. It was he who created the modern Palestiniannational movement when the Palestinian people had almost vanished from the map, and he hasbrought them to the threshold of national independence. Like Moses, he has led his people fromslavery to the gates of the Promised Land. I hope that it will not be said about him that, likeMoses, he saw the Promised Land from afar but did not enter it.
Everything he achieved was achieved in face of Israel ’s colossal material superiorityin all fields, the hostility of the Arab governments and the world-wide sympathy for Israel asthe state of the Holocaust survivors.
And no less important: for decades he has kept the Palestinians together, in spite ofhuge internal differences. The Palestinian movement has had almost none of the kind of bloodyinternal confrontations that have been typical of most liberation movements.
During its first few years, the movement had to function in Arab countries that wereafraid of it and tried to suppress it. All its leaders, Arafat included, have been held at onestage or another in Arab prisons. Every one of the Arab regimes has tried to use the Palestiniancause for its own advantage. Arafat needed all the stratagems that have since become histrade-mark. As a Palestinian diplomat once explained to me: “For the movement to survive andadvance, Arafat had to use all tricks and ploys, use double-talk and half-truths, play oneArab leader against the other, all this in rapidly changing situations. He always had severalballs in the air, never letting one fall to the ground. This way he led our movement forward andbrought us to where we are.”
Like every leader of a national liberation movement, he had to make the most of the fewmeans at his disposal – shrewdness, violence, diplomacy, propaganda. His steps can beforeseen, if one enters his head and understands the constraints he is working under and theaims he has set himself. In the last 30 years I have not once been taken by surprise, not when hewent to Oslo nor when he took charge of the intifada . If Israeli intelligence has so often beencaught unawares, it is because they don’t understand Palestinian reality. “They knoweverything and understand nothing,” as Boutros Boutros-Ghali once said about IsraeliArabists.
For 45 years now, Arafat has lived in the shadow of death. There was not a moment when a plotto kill him was not being hatched somewhere or other. When I met him in 1982 in besieged Beirut ,nobody believed he would get out alive. Since then, Ariel Sharon has been trying to kill him.Half a dozen secret services have been after him. Arafat has an uncanny ability to confoundthem. He believes that he lives under the protection of Allah. Proof? When his aircraft made ahard crash-landing in the Libyan desert and his bodyguards lost their lives, he walked outalmost unscratched.
Once he was asked in my presence if he expected to see the day peace comes. “Both I and UriAvnery will see this day in our lifetime,” he promised. For the sake of Israel ’s future, I wishhim a full recovery.