ARAFAT: A GANGSTER WITH POLITICS

A Gangster with Politics - Bret Stephens (Wall Street Journal)
In 1993, the British National Criminal Intelligence Service commissioned a report on the sources of funding of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO, it concluded, maintained sidelines in "extortion, payoffs, illegal arms-dealing, drug trafficking, money laundering and fraud," bringing its estimated fortune to $14 billion. Arafat may basically have been a gangster with politics, but he was also one of the 20th century's great political illusionists. He conjured a persona, a cause, and indeed a people virtually ex nihilo, then rallied much of the world to his side.

Arafat was not a native Palestinian. He was born and schooled in Cairo, spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent, and took no part in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Around 1960, Arafat co-founded Fatah, or "conquest," the political movement that would later come to be the dominant faction of the PLO. Aside from its aim to obliterate Israel, the group had no particular political vision. Instead, the emphasis was on violence: "People aren't attracted to speeches but to bullets," Arafat liked to say.

After the Israeli peace offer at Camp David in July 2000 came the intifada, a premeditated act. As Arafat had already told an Arab audience in Stockholm in 1996, "We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state....We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem."

The Israelis belatedly realized that the maximum they could concede was less than the minimum Arafat would accept, and refused to deal with him. The Bush administration cut off the international life support. In this sense, Arafat's illness can easily be diagnosed: He died of political starvation. None of his deputies can possibly fill his shoes, which are those of a personality cult, not a political or national leader. There is nothing to unite Palestinians anymore either: their loyalties to the cause will surely dissipate in his absence. Arafat was remarkable in that he sustained the illusion he created till the very end. But once the magician walks off the stage, the chimera vanishes.