December 2004

EDITORIAL
Arafat’s Flawed Vision

By Walter Reich

Yasser Arafat’s achievement was remarkable. Without him, the Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948 might have been as forgotten as the German refugees, at least 20 times as numerous, who were expelled from their homes in Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1945.

The trouble is that, having managed to focus the world’s attention on the Palestinians by every means available to him — from terrorism to diplomacy — Arafat couldn’t translate that focus, and the international support that flowed from it, into the creation of a Palestinian state.

The main reason he couldn’t do it wasn’t his use of terrorism, murderous though it was. Much of the world tolerated that, and even the Israelis forced themselves to try to get past it once he forswore it.

The main reason Arafat was unable to be the Palestinian Moses who would bring his people into the Promised Land of a Palestinian state was that he had a different and even more fundamental flaw — in vision.

The Palestinian state was from the beginning not a state alongside Israel but one instead of Israel. Despite his utterances accepting the existence and legitimacy of Israel, which brought him from exile in Tunis to where the state could have been, and which brought him the accolades of nations and the Nobel Peace Prize, he never accepted that existence. He always rejected Israel’s legitimacy and taught that rejection to his people even after he had been put on the land itself to help his people think anew about living in peace alongside their Israeli neighbors.

The problem for Arafat was in his deepest soul. For him, a Palestinian state alongside Israel would have been a rump entity, anathema to the vision of a Palestinian state in all of Palestine with which, over a period of 40 years, he mobilized and sustained his people as they wandered in the political wilderness. He never let go of that vision, never disabused his people of it and was never able, as a result, to accept the compromises that would have enabled them to enter his promised land.

Yes, he signed the Oslo accords in 1993, in which he recognized Israel’s right to exist. But in the subsequent years, when he controlled the Palestinian territories, the educational systems he put in place continued to deny Israel’s legitimacy, continued to identify cities in Israel as places in Palestine and left Israel itself off the map. His media incited the Palestinians against Israel’s existence. And he continued to vow that he would redeem Palestine with blood and fire.

Indeed, only six months after he signed the Oslo accords, Arafat reassured an audience that they were only temporary, like the peace treaty of convenience that Mohammed had signed with a more powerful enemy tribe — a tribe he destroyed when he was strong enough do so.

Small wonder that in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in the summer of 2000, and in December of that year, when President Bill Clinton bettered the offer, Arafat was unable to accept a deal that would have delivered to his people a viable and fair state. He later claimed that the deal would have carved the West Bank into cantons and bantustans.

In fact, the terms of the deal were astonishingly good for the Palestinians: a state in 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital and sovereignty over half of the Old City, including the surface area of the Temple Mount.

Had Arafat accepted that deal, there would have been a real state. And accepting it wouldn’t have precluded, in the most cynical view of Arafat’s plans, a future attempt from a stronger base at restarting the fight, using every means possible, including terrorism, to wear down what remained of Israel until all of Palestine was recovered.

In the end, though, Arafat couldn’t accept this triumphant deal, couldn’t give this gift to his people, couldn’t lead them into a reasonable promised land, because it just stuck in his craw. It would have meant a formal acceptance not of mere principles, as he did in the Oslo accords, but of final borders that would include less than the whole land. And it would have meant a formal acceptance of the idea that the millions of descendants of the original refugees of 1948, who are five times as numerous as the original refugees, didn’t have the right to move into, and overwhelm, Israel.

Moreover, it would have meant a rejection of the entire edifice of belief that Arafat and his colleagues had built to justify their vision. In this belief, the Jewish historical connection to the land was a fabrication created by the Zionists to justify their usurpation of the Palestinian homeland. At Camp David, the Palestinian delegation insisted — and, it appears, believed — that there had been no temples on the Temple Mount.

This is the belief system that didn’t allow Arafat or his colleagues to make a deal at Camp David or later. It’s a belief system that Arafat promulgated for decades. And it’s a belief system that, during those decades, permeated the thinking of young Palestinians.

After Arafat, it will take time, and a painful restructuring of thought, for young Palestinians to disenthrall themselves from Arafat’s teachings. But that’s what they’ll have to do in order to produce leaders who can recognize the reality of both the present and the past and finally bring their people into a land that, during Arafat’s reign, they had no way to enter.


Walter Reich, a psychiatrist, is the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Professor of International Affairs, Ethics and Human Behavior at The George Washington University.

This editorial originally ran in the Nov. 12, edition of the The Baltimore Sun.

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu