Arafat: Peacemaker, peacebreaker or neither

Friday, November 19, 2004 | by

mitchell plitnick

Whether he is seen as the person who put the Palestinian issue on the map, as a lifelong terrorist, as the only elected leader of the Palestinians or as the person who blocked the dream of peace, Yasser Arafat was a huge figure. But as with most larger-than-life characters, Arafat’s actual history was much more complicated. He was a violent man who made groundbreaking agreements. But his portrayal as the sole obstacle to peace is distorted and covers failures that, while partly Arafat’s, must be shared as well by others. Since all of us want peace in the Middle East, we are all better served by working hard to find out the realities and get away from the myths.

Arafat coalesced the Palestinian national movement and was the Palestinian leader who, as early as 1988, recognized Israel and accepted the two-state solution. Arafat was also a militant who oversaw many attacks on civilians in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s and headed a corrupt Palestinian Authority where cronyism, misappropriation of funds and human rights abuses were all commonplace.

For the past four years, we have been told the falsehood that Arafat was the sole reason that the Camp David summit failed. The story goes that Arafat was offered almost everything he wanted, rejected this offer and instead began the second intifada. The reality is far more complicated.

Arafat had pleaded with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Clinton not to call the Camp David summit. He insisted that the Palestinian people were not prepared for the sorts of compromises he would have to make. Due to their own lack of understanding of Palestinian politics combined with their own domestic political concerns, Barak and Clinton would not heed Arafat’s warning.

At Camp David, Arafat was offered much more than Israel had ever offered before, but much less than he needed or expected. Barak offered the Palestinians around 80 percent of the West Bank, with Israel controlling the Jordan Valley and the major settlement blocs cutting into three major areas of Palestinian control connected by narrow strips of land. Palestinians would get control over the Muslim and Christian Quarters of Jerusalem’s Old City, but their capital would be in the suburb of Abu Dis, not in Jerusalem. This was presented to Arafat as a take-it-or-leave-it offer.

It turned out that the subsequent Clinton proposal and negotiations at Taba produced proposals that were much more acceptable to the Palestinians. Barak and Clinton had both promised before the summit that blame would not be laid on Arafat for its failure, a promise both immediately broke.

Camp David failed for many reasons. Neither the Israeli nor Palestinian publics were prepared by their leaders for the compromises that needed to be made. Barak and Arafat both must be held responsible for that. Barak and Clinton both gravely underestimated the pressures Arafat faced over the issues of Jerusalem and refugees.

The summit was held after a year in which Barak paid little attention to the Palestinian track and after settlement construction under Barak had accelerated to a pace greater than under the previous government of Benjamin Netanyahu, eroding Palestinian faith in the process.

Arafat can certainly be held responsible for the inflow of arms into the Palestinian territories during the Oslo years. But it was Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, with Barak’s blessing, that raised the pressure even higher. When stone-throwing Palestinian protesters were killed the next day, there was an explosion of violent protest. It is only a self-serving historical revisionism that casts the intifada as a planned and orchestrated uprising rather than what it was — a spontaneous eruption of frustration and anger, directed as much against the corrupt Palestinian Authority as against the Israeli occupation.

Evidence for all of this can be found in recent books by Tanya Reinhart and Clayton Swisher, and articles and statements by former National Security Council member Robert Malley, former member of Barak’s Cabinet Shlomo Ben-Ami and former head of Israel Defense Forces intelligence Amos Malka, among others.

Arafat was a complicated figure, with extremes of both achievement and crime. But whatever his failings, it is disingenuous to use him to escape the reluctance of Israel to end its illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. If we want to move toward a better future, we need to avoid either lionizing or demonizing figures in this conflict. We need to find a way out of the morass and stop playing the blame game.




Mitchell Plitnick is the director of education and policy for the Oakland-based Jewish Voice for Peace, www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org.




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