What if Palestine was without Arafat?

Riza Sihbudi, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta

In international politics, there are only two countries -- the United States and Israel -- that believe they enjoy a monopoly over international legal truth, so that not a single country can put a stop to what they are doing.

With the support of the international information network, the U.S. and Israel can easily twist the truth. They cry "terrorists" regardign Palestinian fighters, but call it self-defense when Israeli soldiers murder Palestinian women and children. So under the pretext of "eradicating terrorism", the U.S. has ruined Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel has been launching a brutal aggression into Palestinian territory.

A few years ago, the U.S. freely arrested Panamanian president Manuel A. Noriega, and toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Now Israel is doing exactly what the U.S. has done toward those states.

With the conviction of impunity, Israel, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, has been launching aggression into Palestine freely and has placed the president of the Palestinian Authorities, Yasser Arafat, under house arrest. Israel is even planning the eviction of Arafat from the Palestinian territory. Even killing him is now an "official" option.

Arafat and Palestine have become inseparable. Arafat is often referred to as the most visible symbol of Palestinian nationalism. What will happen if Arafat, now 74 with increasingly deteriorating health, can no longer put up with Sharon's cruelty?

Yasser, meaning "gentle at heart", was born on Aug. 24, 1929 as Muhammed Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa. Different sources say he was born in Cairo, Egypt, or in Jerusalem. His mother died in Cairo when he was just four years old. He was then sent to Jerusalem to stay with one of his uncles and returned to Cairo in his adolescence. When the Palestinian crisis broke out in 1947, Arafat returned to Jerusalem.

From his mother's side, Arafat is related to the then great ulema of Jerusalem, Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, from whom he learned a lot about Islam. In 1948, the Palestinian war broke out and the state of Israel was proclaimed. Arafat, then 19, was among the fighters who sent arms from Egypt to Palestine. After al-Qadir died in 1948 and the Palestinian fighters suffered a defeat, Arafat went to the Gaza Strip and then returned to Cairo, where he later studied at Cairo University.

He majored in engineering, but studied political philosophy, reading everything from Marx's Communism to the Islamic fundamentalism of Ikhwanul Muslimin.

He was thus drawn to the idea of blending Marxism, Islamism and pan-Arabism as a basis for the struggle of the Palestinian people. Not surprisingly, Arafat became embroiled in a conflict with Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser.

Palestinian students in Egypt believed Nasser manipulated them for his own political goals. Once, they were forced to carry Nasser's pan-Arabic banner into battle against Israel and Western imperialism in the Suez War in 1956. Nasser and the Palestinian fighters celebrated their victory in this 1956 war, but the Palestinians, determined to fight for their land, turned to Kuwait and joined the newly emerging organization, Fatah.

Fatah, or al-Fatah ("subjugation" in Arabic) -- the reverse acronym of Haradat al-Tahrir al-Falastin, or the Palestinian Liberation Movement -- was set up by Palestinians living in Kuwait.

Following a successful stint as a contractor in Kuwait, Arafat later become a full-time guerrilla along with other fighters like Farouk Qaddumi, who is still one of his close allies. In 1964, Arafat was entrusted to lead Fatah.

He then left Kuwait, because he thought he had stayed too far away from the Palestinian land. Egyptian president Nasser, worried about the development of Fatah's militancy, gathered 13 Arabic leaders in the first Arab Summit -- also in 1964 -- to set up the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), an organization made up of Fatah and over 40 other Palestinian guerrilla groups.

Ahmad Shuqayri, a Palestinian fighter close to Nasser, was appointed PLO's first chairman. However, Arafat managed in 1969 to take over the PLO leadership and has been its chairman since then. His leadership, both as PLO chairman and president of the Palestinian Authorities -- set up following the conclusion of the 1993 Oslo Treaty -- has commanded respect from friends and foes alike.

He is believed to be a moderate Palestinian figure willing to make peace with Israel, and is thus not liked to hard-liner Palestinian groups, either Islamic -- such as the Hamas and Jihad Islamic groups -- or Christian -- such as the factions of George Habbash and Nayef Hawatmeh. In 1994, Arafat became a Nobel Laureate for peace along with late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, now Israel's foreign minister.

Until now, Arafat has always managed to get out of difficult situations, for which he has been likened to a ballet dancer who maintains his balance in the face of a fall. In the early 1970s, King Hussein of Jordan drove him and the Palestinian guerrillas out of Jordan. In 1982, Israel destroyed his base in Lebanon, forcing Arafat and his followers to move to Tunisia. Then, in the 1990-1991 Gulf War, Arafat took a miscalculated step when he supported Saddam Hussein. As a result, Western countries and his Arab allies isolated him.

Today, under house arrest, he faces a much more serious situation. The U.S., which has been trying to maintain good relations with Arafat since 1990, is now under a highly pro- Sharon administration dominated by a hard-line conservative group. Therefore, Arafat and the Palestinians can only hope for greater pressure from the international community on the U.S., the United Nations and Israel.

Should Arafat be assassinated, a direct confrontation between the Palestinians -- most certainly supported by Muslims and the Arab community, but not the Arab rulers -- and Israel seems inevitable. Large-scale rallies in Arab and Islamic countries and in non-Islamic countries like Japan, in Europe and Latin America, show support for Arafat way beyond Palestinian land.

These rallies and the 1994 Nobel Prize for Peace indicate the international community's recognition of Arafat's commitment to peace. If he is killed, world peace will also be doomed. Or, is it continued political violence that Ariel Sharon and his chief patron, George W. Bush, wish to seeWhat if Palestine was without Arafat? ?