From The New York Times:
Obituary: Yasir Arafat, Father and Leader of Palestinian Nationalism, Dies at 75
November 11, 2004
By JUDITH MILLER
Yasir Arafat, who died this morning in Paris, was the wily and enigmatic father of
Palestinian nationalism who for almost 40 years symbolized his people's longing for a
distinct political identity and independent state. He was 75.
No other individual so embodied the Palestinians' plight: their dispersal, their
statelessness, their hunger for a return to a homeland lost to Israel. Mr. Arafat was once
seen as a romantic hero and praised as a statesman, but his luster and reputation faded
over time. A brilliant navigator of political currents in opposition, once in power he
proved more tactician than strategist, and a leader who rejected crucial opportunities to
achieve his declared goal.
At the end of his life, Mr. Arafat governed Palestinians from an almost three-year
confinement by Israel to his Ramallah headquarters. While many Palestinians continued to
revere him, others came to see him as undemocratic and his administration as corrupt, as
they faced growing poverty, lawlessness and despair over prospects for statehood.
A co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994 for his agreement to work toward peaceful
coexistence with Israel, Mr. Arafat began his long political career with high-profile acts
of anti-Israel terrorism.
In the 1960's, he pioneered what became known as "television terrorism" - air
piracy and innovative forms of mayhem staged for maximum propaganda value. Among the more
spectacular deeds he ordered was the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich
Olympics. In 1986, a group linked to Mr. Arafat but apparently acting independently seized
the Achille Lauro cruise ship and threw overboard an elderly American Jew in a wheelchair.
In 2000, after rejecting a land-for-peace deal from Israel that he considered
insufficient, Mr. Arafat presided over the Palestinians as they waged a mix of guerrilla
warfare and terror against Israeli troops and civilians that has lasted more than four
years.
Indeed, shifting between peace talks and acts of violence was the defining feature of his
political life. In his emotional appeal for a Palestinian state at the United Nations
General Assembly in 1974, he wore a holster while waving an olive branch. After his pledge
of peace with Israel in 1993, Palestinians associated with him carried out suicide
bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He officially condemned such violence but called for
"martyrs by the millions" to rise for the Palestinian cause.
Mr. Arafat assumed many poses. But the image that endures - and the one he clearly
relished - was that of the Arab fighter, the grizzled, scruffy-bearded guerrilla in
olive-green military fatigues and his trademark checkered head scarf, carefully folded in
the elongated diamond shape of what was once Palestine.
He seemed to thrive when under siege. Surrounded in the spring of 2002 by Israeli tanks in
two rooms of his compound in Ramallah, he cried out, "Oh God, grant me a martyr's
death."
Until 1988, he repeatedly rejected recognition of Israel, insisting on armed struggle and
terror campaigns. He opted for diplomacy only after his embrace of President Saddam
Hussein of Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in 1991 - and the collapse of the Soviet Union
- left his movement politically disgraced and financially bankrupt, with neither power nor
leverage.
In September 1993, he achieved world acclaim by signing a limited peace treaty with
Israel, a declaration of principles that provided for mutual recognition and outlined a
transition to Palestinian autonomy in parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,
territories that Israel had controlled since its decisive victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli
war. The culmination of secret negotiations in Oslo, the agreement was blessed by
President Bill Clinton and sealed with a stunning handshake between Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin of Israel and Mr. Arafat on the White House lawn.
But in 2000, he walked away from a proffered settlement based on the Oslo accords proposed
by Prime Minister Ehud Barak - the biggest compromises Israel had ever offered.
The Israeli proposal appeared to meet most of his earlier demands, but Mr. Arafat held out
for more. Mr. Clinton and Mr. Barak charged that Mr. Arafat had failed to respond with
proposals of his own, effectively torpedoing the American-brokered talks. The Palestinians
had a different interpretation, saying that despite being pushed into negotiations before
they were ready, they had nonetheless responded with counterproposals but that the Barak
offers kept shifting and ultimately fell short of their needs.
After the talks collapsed in 2000, Ariel Sharon, then in the opposition in Israel, visited
the Jerusalem plaza outside Al Aksa Mosque in late September. Palestinians erupted in
violent protest, igniting what came to be called the second intifada. That campaign has
killed more than 900 Israelis and almost 3,000 Palestinians, and plunged the fragile
Palestinian Authority into armed conflict.
Mr. Arafat died without achieving any of the essential goals he had espoused at various
stages of his career: the destruction of Israel, the peace with the Jewish state he backed
after 1988, or the creation of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its
capital. Moreover, the political concessions that produced the 1993 Oslo accords - accords
for which he, Mr. Rabin and Shimon Peres of Israel shared the Nobel Peace Prize - deepened
both the admiration and hatred of him. Few Arabs or Israelis were neutral about Mr. Arafat
or his Oslo deal with Israel.
Mr. Arafat leaves an ambiguous legacy. He succeeded in creating not only a coherent
national movement, led by the Palestine Liberation Organization, but also the very
consciousness that made it possible. A master of public relations, he made the world aware
of Palestine as a distinct entity. And he helped persuade Palestinians, who now number
five million to six million, to think of themselves as a people with a right to
sovereignty. "He put the Palestinian cause on the map and mobilized behind his
leadership the broadest cross section imaginable of Palestinians," said Khalil E.
Jahshan, an Arab-American political activist who knew him well for more than a decade.
His detractors, however, grew more numerous over time. Mr. Arafat, those critics
contended, betrayed the Palestinian and Arab cause to maintain his own power. They called
him a traitor for having accepted what Hisham Sharabi, the Palestinian scholar and former
supporter, called an Arab Bantustan, an entity that was neither politically coherent nor
economically viable. Critics noted that while "President Arafat" toured the
globe being welcomed by world leaders, Israel doubled the size of its settlements on what
was envisioned as soil for a future Palestinian state.
Other detractors argued that he had waited too long to accept political reality. His
reluctance to recognize Israel's existence and renounce the violence that claimed hundreds
of Israeli and other lives prolonged the pain of the Palestinians and left a new
generation stateless, ill treated under Israeli occupation and by most Arab governments.
Palestinians in many Arab countries, including Syria and Lebanon, were restricted to camps
and denied citizenship, while their host governments spoke in heartfelt tones of the
Palestinian cause.
Both admirers and enemies agreed that like King Hussein of Jordan, his late longtime rival
and eventual partner in peace with Israel, Mr. Arafat was a survivor. Having experienced
perhaps 40 attempts on his life by Israelis and Arabs, he was strengthened as a
revolutionary leader by single-mindedness in pursuit of his dream and uncanny energy. Yet
after Oslo, his enemies said he continued living mainly because Israel permitted him to do
so.
Until 1991, when he wed Suha Tawil, his Palestinian secretary, and had a daughter, Zahwa,
he was married only to his cause. He slept and ate little, took no vacations and neither
drank nor smoked. People viewed his role in various ways - terrorist, statesman, dreamer,
pragmatist, his people's warrior, his people's peacemaker. Even admirers described him as
a chameleon. Virtually all the biographies about him express bewilderment about his
actions and character, about what an Israeli author, Danny Rubinstein, in his book
"The Mystery of Arafat," called "this strange phenomenon."
Many Palestinians compared him to David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founder and first leader,
seeing Mr. Arafat as an Arab pioneer who struggled to lead his people back to their
promised land. Many Israelis, by contrast, regarded him as an archterrorist, an
opportunist who endorsed peace merely as a tactic to destroy Israel - "a beast on two
legs," as the late Israeli leader Menachem Begin once called him.
After the Oslo accords, Mr. Arafat became as controversial among Arabs, especially
Palestinians: revered by many as the father of their country, reviled by others as an
autocrat, a divisive and sometimes indecisive buffoon, a traitor. Even many Arab
supporters of his 1993 agreements with Israel eventually came to loathe him for what they
saw as his political duplicity, his administration's endemic corruption and his
dictatorial tendencies.
An exasperating and mercurial man, Mr. Arafat, with his ever-present silver-plated .357
Magnum, was one of the most recognizable of world figures. He was known by many names: Abu
Ammar, his nom de guerre; the "chairman," after he became leader of the P.L.O.
in 1969; and the "old man," the name he once said he preferred because in Arabic
it conjures an image of a beloved uncle. At the end of his life, he referred to himself as
"general," often speaking of himself in the third person.
Over the years, "old man" became apt. His once-taut stomach gave way with age to
paunch despite his frequent walks and the treadmill behind his office. What remained of
his hair, almost always hidden by his trademark head scarf, turned gray. The face, with
its three-day stubble, became visibly lined, his eyes weary.
The Young Guerrilla
The mystery surrounding Mr. Arafat starts early, as accounts of his origins vary. The man
who became "Mr. Palestine" was probably not born there. He has claimed to have
been born on Aug. 4, 1929, in Jerusalem, or alternatively in Gaza. What seems certain is
that this son of a lower-middle-class merchant spent much of his childhood being shuttled
among relatives in Cairo, Gaza and Jerusalem after his mother, who came from a prominent
Jerusalem family, died when he was 4.
In 1949, he began studying engineering at Cairo University, where he was prominent in
Palestinian student affairs. When Israel, Britain and France invaded Egypt in 1956, Mr.
Arafat, as an Egyptian military reservist, is said to have taken a course in which he
learned how to use mines and explosives, skills that proved useful. That same year, he
also began wearing his trademark kaffiyeh, which impressed both Arabs and Westerners when
he first traveled to Europe in a Palestinian student delegation.
After graduating, he worked as an engineer in Egypt and moved first to Saudi Arabia, then
to Kuwait in 1957, where he plunged into clandestine Palestinian nationalist activities.
In October 1959, he and four other Palestinians founded Al Fatah, "the
Conquest," which later became the core of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
From the beginning, Mr. Arafat was intent on building a revolutionary organization with
three hallmarks: unity, independence and relevance. He knew that all three were essential
to prevent the Arab nations, torn by bitter rivalries, from exploiting the Palestinian
cause for their own purposes. He spent brief stints in prison in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.
In May 1964, Egypt created the P.L.O. under Arab League auspices, but only as a front for
the Arab nations. Ahmed Shukairy, an Egyptian bureaucrat who headed the P.L.O. and had
never held a gun, resented Mr. Arafat and Al Fatah, denouncing them as "enemies"
of the liberation movement.
The 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which brought humiliating defeat to the Arabs' conventional
armies, gave Mr. Arafat's group a chance to become heroes to Arabs desperately in need of
some. But it still took Mr. Arafat two years to wrest control of the P.L.O. from the
lower-key Palestinians to whom the Arab states had entrusted it.
His genius for attracting media attention became evident in the spring of 1968, when he
made his first appearance on the cover of Time magazine.
That March, the Israeli Army attacked Karameh, the Jordanian town east of the Jordan River
where Al Fatah had set up headquarters. Mr. Arafat insisted that his commandos not
retreat. After the Israelis withdrew, he staged a victory celebration around several
destroyed Israeli tanks that was attended by representatives from many Arab countries and,
of course, the news media.
Calling Karameh "the first victory of the Arabs against the state of Israel,"
Mr. Arafat, with his kaffiyeh and Kalashnikov, became an instant sensation and a leading
spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Money and volunteers poured in. Guerrilla training
camps sprang up in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, and Al Fatah became paramount among
Palestinian guerrilla groups.
At the same time, wrote Abu Iyad, a late top aide to Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian National
Council, the P.L.O.'s parliamentary body, adopted Al Fatah's goal: "Creating a
democratic society in Palestine where Muslims, Christians and Jews would live together in
complete equality."
Though such a state would have meant the destruction of Israel, Mr. Arafat and other
Palestinians kept openly advocating it until the early 1980's.
The Evicted Guest
The guerrillas' power grew steadily in Jordan, to which 380,000 Palestinians had fled
after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, joining others who had arrived in 1948 when
Israel was founded. By 1970, thousands of guerrillas were there, many of them adherents of
Al Fatah.
Spurred on by Palestinian radicals, Mr. Arafat committed what was to be the first of
several blunders: he countenanced an attempt to wrest power from King Hussein, whose
grandfather, a religious and tribal leader from Saudi Arabia, had been placed in charge of
the country when Britain recognized its independence in 1923.
Palestinian guerrillas began interfering with highway traffic, controlling Palestinian
refugee camps, clashing with the Jordanian Army and systematically defying the Jordanian
government. In September 1970 - later known to Palestinians as Black September - King
Hussein sent troops and armor into Amman, his capital, to suppress the P.L.O. After days
of shelling refugee camps where some 60,000 Palestinians lived, the army drove the
would-be usurpers out of Jordan into Lebanon.
Conservative estimates put Palestinian losses at 2,000. Mr. Arafat, who made his way
unharmed to Cairo, later claimed that Jordan's Army had killed 25,000. By the following
summer, the Jordanian Army had nullified the P.L.O. as a military power in the country.
Sapped and shaken, the guerrilla movement drifted into Lebanon.
In Lebanon's atmosphere of banking secrecy, duty-free trade and political freedom, Al
Fatah expanded its political and military institutions as never before. Working among some
400,000 Palestinians in the country, the P.L.O. built its own police force, clinics and
hospitals, a research center and a network of business interests that made it a
"virtual state within a state."
Moreover, it set about developing a formidable military arsenal.
By 1974, the P.L.O. became, in effect, the sole representative of the Palestinian people,
and that November, Mr. Arafat became the first Palestinian leader to plead his people's
cause before the General Assembly.
Mr. Arafat and his P.L.O. seemed at their peak, but as he had done in Jordan, he soon
overplayed his hand. In 1975, tensions between Palestinians and Lebanese helped set off
the Lebanese civil war. Despite some antagonism, he maintained his headquarters in Beirut
for several years, and during this period armed Palestinians based in southern Lebanon
harassed northern Israel.
Sensing an opportunity to rid itself of Mr. Arafat and his movement, Israel invaded
Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut in 1982. General Sharon, who later complained that he
should have killed Mr. Arafat in Lebanon when he had the chance, dealt the Palestinians
heavy blows before an agreement sponsored by Washington led to the withdrawal of thousands
of P.L.O. guerrillas in August 1982. The guerrillas scattered to eight Arab cities, with
their leaders fleeing to Tunis, the new Palestinian headquarters.
Mr. Arafat ventured back to Lebanon in 1983. But rebel Palestinian guerrillas backed by
Syria challenged and besieged him and his commandos in northern Lebanon. After a six-week
siege in December, the anti-Arafat Palestinians drove him out.
Thus Mr. Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization lost a base of military
operations near Israel, as well as a sense of unity. And in moving to Tunis, a political
backwater, he also jeopardized his organization's relevance in any peace talks.
The Pragmatic Survivor
Mr. Arafat still managed to stage a limited revival. Traveling incessantly in Arab
countries, he refilled his organization's depleted coffers and commanded world attention,
especially when he escaped death in 1985 in an Israeli attack on his compound.
But weakened and increasingly on the margins of Arab politics, he and the P.L.O. leaders
gradually became convinced that political survival demanded a shift in both propaganda and
tactical courses.
The man who had vowed in 1969 to ignite "armed revolution in all parts of our
Palestinian territory" in order "to make of it a war of liberation" against
Israel, realized that while he had exhorted and overseen many armed actions against
Israel, the terrorism had never amounted to a war of liberation. He and his advisers
became increasingly convinced that Israel could not be vanquished by force.
Moreover, the cold war was ending; the Soviet Union, a crucial patron, was broke and
uninterested in his cause. The only Arab nation that had succeeded in reclaiming land lost
to Israel was Egypt, whose president, Anwar el-Sadat, had been denounced by Mr. Arafat as
an American "stooge." Increasingly, however, the United States seemed like the
only power that could press Israel to make political concessions.
The outbreak of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising that erupted without the P.L.O.'s
approval or encouragement in the Israeli-occupied territories in late 1987, also pushed
Mr. Arafat toward greater pragmatism, if not moderation.
In November 1988, after considerable American prodding, the P.L.O. accepted the United
Nations resolution that called for recognition of Israel and a renunciation of terrorism.
Yet this achievement was soon eclipsed by yet another miscalculation: Mr. Arafat's support
for President Hussein in the Persian Gulf war enraged his remaining wealthy Arab patrons.
The Persian Gulf states and other backers cut off at least $100 million in annual support,
and the P.L.O. became even more isolated.
Mr. Arafat, however, did not see it that way, and later claimed that he had not sided with
the Iraqi dictator. In an interview in Tunis soon after the gulf war, he insisted that the
P.L.O. was at its "peak" and that he was "more popular than ever
before" with the "Arab masses, the Muslim nation, the third world."
But with his coffers bare and Palestinians increasingly calling for his ouster, he had
little choice but to grab the lifeline of peace talks that Israel had thrown him. Though
Prime Minister Rabin was initially reluctant to engage the P.L.O. in secret peace talks,
his fear of the growing power of Hamas, the militant Palestinian Islamic movement that had
taken hold under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, was stronger than his
disdain for Mr. Arafat and his bedraggled guerrillas.
Mr. Arafat endorsed the Arab-Israeli peace talks that began in Madrid in October 1991,
with Palestinians (but not the P.L.O.) taking part. The Arab participants sought a
settlement under which Israel would yield land it occupied. Concurrently, in early 1992,
secret contacts between representatives of the P.L.O. and Israel got under way in Tel
Aviv. The talks continued, at Oslo and other sites, and by early September 1993, the
essence of the proposed pact was generally known: mutual recognition and the creation of
self-rule areas in Gaza and Jericho, with that autonomy envisioned as the beginning of a
larger transfer of authority to the Palestinians in the occupied lands.
The Oslo peace accords of 1993 were the first between Israeli officials and the P.L.O.,
and many Palestinians and Israelis argue that with the organization and even his own Fatah
so divided about the accords, only Mr. Arafat could have secured their approval.
But many diplomats and scholars say he could have secured a better deal for the
Palestinians much earlier had he not placed priority on his organization's survival and
unity rather than on establishing autonomy and a state on any sliver of his people's
original land that he could secure.
In 1978, Mr. Arafat joined most Arab nations in rejecting Mr. Sadat's peace with Israel
under the Camp David accords. But unlike the others, Jordan and the P.L.O. had something
to gain by taking part. The accords provided for an end to Israeli occupation of vast
sections of the West Bank and Gaza and for "autonomy" for the Palestinians
there, the possibility of eventually establishing the kind of national autonomy the P.L.O.
had been seeking since 1974.
William B. Quandt, a scholar and former American official who was intimately involved in
Israeli-Arab diplomacy for years, said even the Camp David accords would probably have
provided a better deal than the one Mr. Arafat ultimately accepted in 1993. "In 1975
there were only 10,000 Israelis on the West Bank," he said. Today, there are 225,000
in the West Bank and 200,000 more Jews in East Jerusalem.
Some of Mr. Arafat's most euphoric and frustrating moments occurred after the 1993 Oslo
accords. Among the highlights was his triumphal return to Gaza in July 1994. Welcomed by
tens of thousands of cheering Palestinians and a city bedecked with the red, green, black
and white colors of the Palestinian flag, he established the first Palestinian government.
The assassination of Mr. Rabin by a Jewish hard-liner in November 1995 was a personal and
political blow to Mr. Arafat, according to several associates, including Edward G.
Abington, the American consul general in Jerusalem until mid-1997. Mr. Abington said Mr.
Arafat "broke down and sobbed over the phone" after learning that Mr. Rabin had
been assassinated.
But in January 1996, the Palestinian leader presided over one of the freest elections ever
held among Arabs. Some 85 percent of the Palestinian electorate chose from a bewildering
array of 700 candidates for an 88-member Palestinian Council.
With 88 percent of the vote for him as president, Mr. Arafat became the undisputed leader
of his people - no longer (or so it seemed) dismissible by Israelis as a terrorist who
derived his authority from the gun, or by Islamic nationalists who had assailed him as the
hand-picked collaborator of Israel and the United States. "This is a new era,"
he said after the 1996 elections. "This is the foundation of our Palestinian
state."
The Criticized Symbol
Such optimism proved short-lived.
The Palestinian Authority was soon locked in increasingly bitter struggles with Hamas,
which insisted on the continuing need to stage terrorist attacks not only against Israeli
soldiers and settlers in their midst, but also on civilians inside Israel.
Opposition to Mr. Arafat and his Oslo accords also increased among secular Palestinians.
Some of the most rabid critics accused him of having betrayed the Palestinian cause.
Palestinians grew ever more critical of his autocratic style and what they called his
inept stewardship, the brutal, arrogant methods of his 14 security services, his crackdown
on dissenters and the corruption among the "outsiders" who had accompanied him
from Tunis.
In Israel, opposition was also building to what Mr. Arafat had once called the "peace
of the brave." After Mr. Rabin's assassination, a series of lethal suicide attacks by
Hamas helped elect the hawkish government of Benjamin Netanyahu in May 1996.
Palestinian hopes for economic development were also repeatedly dashed, partly by punitive
Israeli actions that denied Palestinians jobs in Israel and work at home. In 1996, the
border with Gaza was sealed by Israel for 3 days of every 10. By 1997, three years after
Mr. Arafat's triumphal return to Gaza, the Palestinian economy was stagnant and per-capita
annual income in Gaza had declined by $100, to $1,050. Refugee camps remained mired in
squalor.
Mr. Arafat's penchant for trying - once more - to satisfy all constituencies further
undermined confidence in his leadership. Successive Palestinian crackdowns on Hamas and
other militants invariably gave way to deals, pledges of forgiveness and rounds of kisses.
Still, Mr. Arafat presided over an autonomous Palestinian sector that was, relative to
most Arab states, tolerant and politically free-wheeling. And his popularity prevailed
relative to challengers.
Ever the careful balancer, he insisted on making decisions alone and in private. Indeed,
he found himself increasingly isolated in his final years, with almost all his former
close aides having been killed over the years by Israeli or Arab assassins.
Plagued by a neurological illness that doctors said stemmed from an airplane crash in the
Libyan desert that nearly killed him in 1992, Mr. Arafat slowed down. No longer able to
work his legendary 18-hour days, he was forced to delegate some power, if not real
authority, as he grew ever more frail. His trembling lower lip and shaking hands increased
Palestinian concerns about the future. He had not appointed or groomed an obvious
successor.
Some Americans and Israelis involved in the Oslo peace negotiations continued to view him
as the only Palestinian leader willing and able to make the compromises needed to end the
bitter conflict. They disagreed with the growing number of Israelis who suspected that he
secretly sought Israel's destruction while negotiating for peace.
This upbeat assessment, however, was challenged in Israeli and American eyes by the
collapse of the Oslo talks at Camp David in July 2000 and a last ditch round of
negotiations that continued despite growing violence until January 2001. The talks with
Mr. Barak's Labor government failed despite the intervention of President Clinton, who
offered Mr. Arafat an 11th-hour peace package to secure a final settlement before the end
of his term in office and before Mr. Barak faced elections in February 2001.
The package would have given the Palestinians all of Gaza and more than 94 percent of the
West Bank, much closer to Mr. Arafat's goal of securing the return of all the territories
lost in 1967 than he had ever come before. The Israelis also agreed to give Palestinians
full sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem and air rights over Israel. But Mr.
Arafat, who had already blessed the uprising and was facing growing Palestinian criticism
of his stewardship, still insisted, among other things, on the right of return of refugees
into Israel. Henry Siegman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, called
Mr. Arafat's rejection of the American-brokered peace package a "disastrous
mistake.'' But, he added, "based on my 14 years of dealings with Arafat, I reject the
notion that he was bent on Israel's destruction." Rather, he said, Mr. Arafat's
decision reflected his political weakness, a result partly of Israel's acceleration of
settlement expansion and Mr. Barak's lack of interest in peace with the Palestinians until
his own government began collapsing.
But Dennis B. Ross, who spent 12 years trying to negotiate an Arab-Israeli peace
settlement in Republican and Democratic administrations, ultimately concluded that while
Mr. Arafat might have been prepared to die with Israel in existence, he was not prepared
to have history regard him as the man who betrayed the vision of a single Palestinian
state. "In the end, he was not prepared to give up Palestinian claims and declare
that the conflict is over," Mr. Ross said in an interview.
Even worse, Mr. Ross wrote in his book documenting the collapse of the American-brokered
peace effort, "he continued to promote hostility toward Israel.'' To avoid potential
opposition, he remained a "decision-avoider, not a decision-maker," Mr. Ross
wrote, "all tactics and no strategy."
In the February 2001 elections, Mr. Barak lost to Mr. Sharon, the candidate of the
conservative Likud Party and a figure hated by Palestinians for his invasion of Lebanon,
his settlements policy and his September 2000 visit to the Jerusalem plaza outside Al Aksa
Mosque, an act intended to demonstrate Israeli sovereignty over what Jews call the Temple
Mount and Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary.
After Mr. Sharon's election, the newly elected Bush administration refused to help broker
a serious peace effort similar to that of Oslo or the Madrid conference staged by the
first President Bush. As a result, Palestinians argue, Mr. Arafat and others who
ostensibly favored a diplomatic option lacked the political leverage they required.
Mr. Arafat's critics, by contrast, maintain that it was he who set off the violent
Palestinian protests in September 2000, using the weapons and terrorist infrastructure he
had secretly built alongside Israel while he negotiated for peace.
After almost 60 suicide bombings in 17 months, Mr. Sharon surrounded Mr. Arafat's compound
in Ramallah in late March 2001 and later confined him there, leaving the Palestinian
leader to rail against Jewish "extremists" as his cellphone battery died and his
entourage ran short of food.
Pressure by Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies prompted the Bush administration to
re-engage in an American-sponsored peace effort in the summer of 2001. Although Mr. Bush
had been tentatively scheduled to meet Mr. Arafat on the periphery of the United Nations
General Assembly in the fall of 2001, the session was canceled after the attacks of Sept.
11. Mr. Bush never met with Mr. Arafat.
The White House's hostility to the Palestinian leader hardened over time as American
intelligence officials informed the White House that he was lying about his opposition to
violence against Israelis. Officials said Mr. Bush came increasingly to equate Palestinian
attacks on Israeli civilians with militant Islamic attacks on Americans.
Mr. Ross, the longtime negotiator, said a low point came in January 2002, when Israelis
interdicted in the Red Sea the Karine A, a ship carrying Iranian arms for use against
Israelis. In a letter to Mr. Bush, Mr. Arafat disavowed any connection to the ship, though
it turned out that the shipment had been arranged by a crucial Arafat aide, and the pilot
was a Palestinian navy officer. Mr. Bush angrily dismissed the letter, insisting that Mr.
Arafat must have known about the weapons. Though Mr. Arafat finally acknowledged
responsibility for the arms, the diplomatic damage was done.
Increasingly, the United States looked on with indifference as Prime Minister Sharon took
unilateral steps to protect Israelis that infuriated the Palestinians, including building
walls to cut Israel off from suicide bombers and ordinary Palestinians, dividing up the
West Bank into supposedly temporary zones of security and more permanent zones of
settlement.
Efforts by the Bush administration to force Mr. Arafat to share power with other
Palestinian leaders also failed. Because he steadfastly refused to designate a successor,
a generation of lieutenants has been jockeying for power.
The International Crisis Group, an independent Brussels-based group that studies global
issues, partly blamed the Palestinian leadership. "Recent power struggles, armed
clashes, and demonstrations do not pit Palestinians against Israelis so much as
Palestinians against each other,'' the report stated.
Under Mr. Arafat, local actors like mayors, kinship networks and armed militias competed
for authority in the vacuum. One result, the report said, was growing chaos.
Nor did Mr. Arafat deliver prosperity. According to United Nations figures, 50 percent of
the 2.2 million Palestinians on the West Bank live below the poverty line, compared with
22 percent in 2001; the figure is now 68 percent in teeming Gaza, with its 1.3 million
residents.
Despite deteriorating political and economic conditions, many Palestinians blamed Israel
and not their leader for their plight. For many, until the end, Mr. Arafat remained the
symbol of Palestinian aspiration to a state, the only man who could have sold the painful
compromises for peace to his people had he chosen to do so.
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