November 8, 2004

BY MICHAEL C. KOTZIN

Yasser Arafat's mother died when he was 4 years old. The loss was compounded when, sent to live with his mother's family, he was separated from his father.

There is irony here since, inverting the Palestinian narrative of dispossession that he would later embody, the young Arafat moved from Egypt, where he was born, to the Old City of Jerusalem. Still, one wonders to what extent he may have drawn upon the emotions wrought by the trauma of his personal loss and separation to imbue the national narrative with mythic qualities, and also to what extent that experience may have made him an uncompromising advocate for "return." In any event, Arafat became both the voice and symbol of his people's dreams and the major single reason why they and the Israelis have failed to resolve their conflict. And now, as I write this, his death appears imminent.

During his schooling as an engineer in Cairo, Arafat was exposed to the radical Muslim Brotherhood. He and several fellow students applied the then more fashionable leftist, Arab nationalist ideology to the Fatah movement, which they founded, and to the Palestine Liberation Organization, made up of Fatah and other Palestinian groups. Taking over in the 1960s, he shaped these groups to advance the revanchist desires of the Palestinians.

Arafat and his followers became global masters of terrorism. In hijacking airplanes and raiding civilian targets, they defined the tactics of modern terrorist assault. In their gun-wielding, mask-wearing raid on Israel's athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, they established the popular image of the modern terrorist. And with his trademark kaffiyah, military garb and pistol holster, Arafat put his stamp on the theatrical mode of modern terrorism, using the media to gain attention and project a romantic aura.

After being told that Arafat no longer sought Israel's elimination and that only he, the universally regarded representative of his people, could be an interlocutor, Israel was prepared to take a risk for peace, reversing its long-standing policy of refusing to talk to him and entering into the Oslo Process.

But though he was now seen as a statesman and was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Arafat's behavior belied that identity. Once he returned to Gaza and the West Bank to head the Palestinian Authority, he built up multiple police and military groups. Contrary to expectations, he never definitively challenged the growing Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror organizations. While others may have regarded those groups, with their Islamist ideologies, as threats to Arafat's power base, they kept alive the "armed struggle" he had championed, serving his longtime strategic approach even as he publicly committed himself to abandoning violence.

At Camp David in 2000, Arafat had the opportunity to obtain what he had proclaimed he wanted: an independent Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem. But he walked away from that discussion, and the breakdown of those talks was followed by violence not only from the Islamist terror groups but also from offshoots of Arafat's PLO, with the latter soon adopting the suicide bombing tactics of the former. The terror war against Israel had resumed full scale. The Palestinians named it the Al-Aqsa Intifada -- a religion-based term for an increasingly religious conflict.

Arafat never espoused any vision of the kind of state he wanted for his people. He projected no sense of civil society, no social or economic philosophy, no consolidating statecraft. He enunciated no constructive hopes, but only repeated the mantra of leading a million Palestinian martyrs into Jerusalem. In continuing to encourage the Palestinian refugees and their descendants to believe they would ultimately return to their homes of a half a century before and making that a deal-killer at Camp David, he steadily championed a formula for the elimination of Israel, the only tangible goal that his voiced aspirations ever added up to.

The years of Arafat's stewardship over the Palestinian Authority were a disaster. Mafia-like fiefdoms were created by his henchmen, instituting a culture of corruption and neglect. Rather than teaching his people the ways of reconciliation and talking to them about the compromises needed to make peace, Arafat and company, now having their own media, used it to inculcate hatred and resentment and to incite violence.

After giving up on Arafat following Camp David and then watching his continuing role in the terror war that followed, Israel declared him "irrelevant" and isolated him in Ramallah. And then the United States, witness to his part in the Karine A arms smuggling episode and his lies about it, concluded that for progress toward peace to be accomplished, the Palestinians would need to have another leader.

Arafat is credited with advancing the spirit of Palestinian nationalism while bringing his people's cause to the attention of the world. At the same time, his leadership repeatedly prevented the Palestinians and Israelis from resolving their differences in a peace that would address the legitimate needs of both peoples. He time and again brought suffering to both Israelis and Palestinians and foiled American plans for bringing stability to the Middle East.

With Arafat off the scene, there will be the opportunity for power to pass to a leadership that will take the Palestinian people on the path to a peaceful settlement good for Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Michael C. Kotzin is executive vice president of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.