Arafat and the Palestinian dream

M.J.Akbar, New Delhi

There comes a moment when every man's obituary appears on his face. Suddenly the hero of a hundred battles is suffused with a childlike helplessness, and his hand clutches for support from a friend, unsure whether this will be the last gesture. It is a moment of truth beyond denial. It is the face of a man who has seen the approach of the angel of death, and knows that there are no answers, there is no negotiation, there is only submission to the will of God.

It was such a face that a genuine hero of our times, Yasser Arafat, presented to television when cameras glimpsed him on Thursday, Oct. 28. May God grant Arafat a much longer life, but his days as the commander in chief of the Palestinian resistance are over.

No man can be a hero all his life, unless that life is a short one. Arafat was a hero in spasms, and stubbornly human the rest of the time, wandering through error, calculation and miscalculation. Tragedy was the inevitable fate of this refugee who never found any refuge, not even in the compound where Israel kept him imprisoned to humiliate as and when it suited some passing policy of Ariel Sharon.

What was Arafat thinking about on Thursday? That his life had been, as Shakespeare discovered in another context, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? The sound and the fury took him to the center of the world stage, where he played more than one part even as the cast of characters around him kept changing.

But because that part ended on the margins, did it also mean that his life signified nothing? That would be too harsh, perhaps. If nothing else, then Yasser Arafat embodied a national dream. The flaw was that it became a dream without a horizon. Or to put it another way, reality always fell short of the dream, and he repeatedly was unable to accept this reality.

The horizon was always beyond reach because he had trained himself to distrust what was within reach. Any trained negotiator, or any head of government, would have permitted space for pragmatism, for there are no perfect solutions. The Sadat- Begin pact was not perfect but it has anchored the peace in the region. The Assads of Syria have not, and cannot, forego their claim on the Golan Heights, but they have not gone to war over that claim for 35 years.

Arafat also persuaded his people that acceptance of anything less than the ideal was betrayal of the idea of Palestine, even though in the last six decades that ideal itself has shrunk repeatedly with time and defeat -- defeat on the formal battlefield and defeat on the official diplomatic table.

Yes, the spirit is undefeated, and heroically so. But the spirit has its limitations unless you are indifferent to time. There is always solace in the romance of the spirit. I wonder what images flit through Arafat's mind as he wanders through levels of consciousness.

My own image of Arafat is at least partly mythical: Trapped in Beirut with his depleted fighting force, forsaken if not forgotten, surrounded, down to his last bullet and last namaz but still possessed of that vibrant gleam in eyes that shone through folds of tired and tense flesh. In that depth of despair he found the courage and resolve of a man of destiny.

Tragically, that destiny eluded him. There are also real memories: Of him striding across the stage to shake hands with "my sister" Indira Gandhi (he was much shorter than her) during a Non-Aligned Movement conference in Delhi, his trademark revolver buckled on to his belt; of an interview in which he repeated his standard formula -- blame Israel and praise his hosts. Arafat tried his best never to bite the hand that fed him, although he did not always succeed. Some of that feed, particularly from his Arab brothers, was heavily barbed with septic wire.

Curiously, Arafat's last investment among his brothers was in Saddam Hussein. The second Iraq war has erased memories of the first, but emotions, intense in depth but limited in range, ran high on the streets in 1991 as well for Saddam did manage to rouse anti-American sentiment.

But his cause was palpably indefensible. He had invaded and occupied an independent country. Unlike in the present crisis, Iraq was aggressor, not a victim. The Arab countries of the region were formidable in their unity against Saddam. Arafat could have been more discreet, but he actually seemed to believe that Saddam could confront and succeed against a more powerful alliance than the one that defeated the Axis powers in the second world war.

He did not have the compulsions of King Hussein of Jordan, who had his trade with Iraq to protect. At the very least Arafat could have been a moderate. But he stuck his neck out. As miscalculations go this was in a class of its own.

But mistakes do not diminish the legitimacy of a cause, and the Palestinian movement remains the world's most visible struggle against oppression and injustice. That was one reason why he did not have to pay any price for his stand in 1991. In a surprising turn of events, Arafat actually found a friend in the White House after 1992.

No American President is going to damage Washington's relationship with Tel Aviv, at least in our lifetime, but Bill Clinton was as close to an ally that the Palestinians are going to get in the United States.

After he left office Clinton said repeatedly that the biggest failure of his presidency was his inability to persuade Arafat to sign the accord with Ehud Barak. The reasons vary depending on who you talk to. Did Arafat lose a nation because he made the 2 percent he could not get as important as the 98 percent he was offered? Were there powerful players in the Middle East who leaned on Arafat to ensure that the agreement was sabotaged? Bill Clinton, who had no particular need to be prejudiced after he left office, told me over a long conversation in Delhi that the differences had narrowed down to the comparatively insignificant, and even contentious issues like control of water sources were on the point of resolution.

Then? Clinton's conclusion was as clean as a surgical wound. Arafat did not sign the agreement, he said, because he could not reconcile himself to peace. Was this the hubris, the fatal flaw? Or is there some anger in Clinton's judgment? Perhaps. And yet a man of Clinton's maturity and experience would not have reached such a conclusion if he did not have genuine cause to think so.

Whatever the real reason the consequences are obvious: The rise of Ariel Sharon, the isolation of Arafat, the terrible price paid by innocents, an increasing sense of stagnant hopelessness in the region, and, finally, the laughing indifference with which Sharon and Shimon Peres treated the news that Arafat was on his deathbed. They had already killed Sheikh Yasin. They may not killed Arafat, although Sharon threatened often enough to do so, but they had reduced him to insignificance. Does this end the Arab-Israel war of 1967? Egypt and Jordan have made peace.

Syria is in limbo. The Palestinian resistance after 1967 was led by Arafat, and the more militant strain that traced a line between the Marxist Habash and the Islamic Sheikh Yasin. This generation has fought its battles.

But the battle itself is not over, and it will not be until there is an independent Palestine state at peace with an Israel that wants peace. We do not yet know the name of the next Yasser Arafat, but we do know that there will be one, for the idea of Palestine will never be short of either a flag or a flag-bearer.

The writer is editor in chief for The Asian Age, New Delhi.