• Yasser Arafat’s departure Yasser Arafat’s departure From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – November 10 , 2004 Yasser Arafat’s departure from the world stage after half a century as one of the world’s most durable and divisive leaders, creates the
• Yasser Arafat’s departure
Yasser Arafat’s departure
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – November 10 , 2004
Yasser Arafat’s departure from the world stage after half a century as one of the world’s most durable and divisive leaders, creates the possibility of pulling the Middle East peace process out of the ditch.
Mr. Arafat formed the Fatah movement in the 1950s and was elected chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1969, in the days of Richard Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev and Golda Meir. He has personified Palestinian nationalism, but he never made the difficult decisions necessary for the creation of a Palestinian nation. He claimed to oppose terrorism but used terrorism to achieve his goals. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for the Oslo Accords, but desecrated the prize with a decade of counterproductive defiance and deviousness.
Mr. Arafat will go down in history as a leader who failed his people and who never could escape the tactical calculations of the moment to seize the goal those tactics were supposed to serve. Dennis Ross, a Clinton-era Mideast negotiator who met frequently with Mr. Arafat, says Mr. Arafat was more effective as symbol than a leader. “The cause defined him,” Mr. Ross said while in St. Louis to promote his book, “The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.” “He never gave up his grievances. He couldn’t end the conflict without ending himself.”
Because Mr. Arafat was incapable of achieving peace, his demise would offer a glimmer of hope. If he is replaced by stable Palestinian leadership, Israel and the United States might find a more reliable partner for negotiations.
Elections are the best way to choose new Palestinian leaders. Once Mr. Arafat is gone, Mr. Ross said, the United States should negotiate an election plan with Israel and the Palestinians. Israel would have to agree on troop withdrawals, and international election monitors would be needed to guarantee the process.
The election might pit the more moderate Fatah factions against Hamas, but Fatah most likely would win because most Palestinians favor a two-state solution. New Palestinian leaders couldn’t immediately confront Hamas. But if peace is ever to be achieved, Palestinian moderates eventually will have to confront the terrorists, something Mr. Arafat never did.
Palestinian leaders shouldn’t be expected to immediately make big concessions, such as compromising on Jerusalem and giving up the right of Palestinians to return to their former homesteads in Israel, Mr. Ross said. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would have to take steps toward peace, such as releasing prisoners and easing military checkpoints.
The peace plan presented to Mr. Arafat at the end of the Clinton administration was the basis for negotiating a final peace. But Mr. Arafat lacked the wisdom and courage to seize that moment. And so the prospects for peace slipped away just as surely as Mr. Arafat is now slipping away. Palestinians will hail their dead leader, but in the pages of history he will die in ignominy.
