Arafat and Palestine: an Onerous Legacy
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Area: Mediterranean & Arab World- ARI Nº 194/2004 (Translation from Spanish) 17/12/2004 Arafat and Palestine: An Onerous Legacy Samuel Hadas ∗ Theme: The death of Yasser Arafat presents an opportunity for the emergence of a democratic, legitimate Palestinian leadership. Summary: The death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat begins a new era, say politicians, experts and analysts around the world. Most of the hundreds if not thousands of comments published in recent weeks agree that his passing could at least make it possible to reopen the window of opportunity brusquely closed so many times before (some even consider it ‘a great doorway opened wide’). Indeed, the window is open a crack, but instead of the breeze of hope that many predict and desire, the winds of war could well blow again, closing the window for the umpteenth time if the leaders of both sides and the powers involved do not act coherently. Analysis: Palestinians in the Post-Arafat Era Acting rationally has never been a salient quality of most politicians in the Middle East. In this part of the world, rational steps are taken only after all the mistakes have been made. Anyone who closely follows the nearly century-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict comes easily to this conclusion. The Middle East, a region affected since time immemorial by prolonged periods of political, economic, social and religious conflict, and where uncertainty is the general rule, is far from its best moment. The region suffers from serious political, economic and social problems with no end in sight. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is outstanding among those in the region, peaking in violence precisely when a new international initiative seemed to presage a solution acceptable to all parties, falling back into an unstoppable spiral of violence due to the perennial cycle of terrorism and retaliation, and frustrating any search for solutions. A new peace plan, after so many others, designed by the Quartet for the Middle East (the United States, the European Union, the UN and Russia) and titled the Roadmap, was finally accepted by both parties after hard negotiations and a certain amount of pressure from the Quartet. Its presentation coincided with the speech by President George W. Bush ∗ First Ambassador of Israel in Spain and before the Holy See, diplomatic analyst, contributor to the daily newspaper La Vanguardia and the magazine Política Exterior, consultant to the Peres Center for Peace, president of the Israel Jewish Council for Inter- religious Relations and consultant to the Jewish World Congress for Inter-religious Relations. 1 Area: Mediterranean & Arab World- ARI Nº 194/2004 (Translation from Spanish) 17/12/2004 in June 2003, in which he expressed his vision of ‘two States, Israeli and Palestinian, living together peacefully’. According to its text, this peace initiative is aimed at both parties taking reciprocal steps to advance politically, socio-economically and in the area of security, with the fundamental goal of coming to a final and general agreement to terminate the conflict before the end of 2005, ultimately leading to the creation of a Palestinian State. However, the actions of both parties and the lack of political will on the part of those who inspired it, especially the Bush administration, quickly altered the Roadmap, leaving it directionless. Palestinians and Israelis failed to meet their commitments and strayed from the roadmap set down by the Quartet, entering a complex labyrinth that they have not been able to escape from to date. In the annals of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, no peace plan has been taken to its final consequences. Will this also be the fate of the Roadmap? Everything changed for the Palestinian-Israeli peace process with the start of the second intifada on September 28, 2000, when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat decided to use violence as a legitimate instrument to achieve political objectives that could not be obtained at the negotiating table. Instead of trying to convince Palestinians that sending out human bombs is inhuman and intolerable, he once again began to speak repeatedly of the millions of ‘martyrs that will reconquer Jerusalem’. He gave the go-ahead to radical fundamentalist Palestinian organizations such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas to carry out suicide operations against Israeli civilian targets; he freed from prison or did not pursue potential suicide bombers and their sponsors and authorised militias belonging to his own Fatah party, such as Tanzim and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, to participate in anti-Israeli actions. Now over four years old, the Palestinian Intifada has produced a terrible river of blood, more than four thousand deaths and thousands of wounded, and ongoing hardships that make daily life impossible for people living in the Palestinian territories, as well as the destruction of infrastructure. This is the dramatic result of violence that should have become a thing of the past when the parties signed the Oslo Declaration of Principles in September 1993, in which they officially recognised each other, beginning a process for negotiating a just solution to the conflict. But the first steps taken in Oslo quickly led to a dead-end. The constructive and optimistic atmosphere gave way to antagonism and a deep crisis of confidence that not only greatly hindered negotiations, but in fact derailed them. The process of reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis suffered a great setback. The romantic vision of a new, peaceful and cooperative Middle East advocated by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, in which countries in the region would cooperate to solve serious economic and social problems, faded away, once again to reveal the all-too-well-known spectre of an unstoppable spiral of violence. The Middle East presaged by Peres in his book Battling for Peace1 –one without wars, enemies, ballistic missiles or nuclear warheads– is for now nothing more than an illusion. Israelis and Palestinians continue to show their inability to learn the lessons of history. The best summary of the situation may be the editorial in the prestigious Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, which said: ‘As long as Palestinians did not internalise the fact that violence is the problem and not the solution, they will continue to see the end of violence as submission to occupation. As long as the occupation continues, so will the violence. As 1 Shimon Peres, Battling for Peace, Random House, New York, 1995, p. 309. 2 Area: Mediterranean & Arab World- ARI Nº 194/2004 (Translation from Spanish) 17/12/2004 long as Israelis do not recognise that the occupation is the problem and not the solution, Israelis will continue to consider its end to be a capitulation to violence. The occupation will go on and, with it, the violence.’ To summarise the Palestinian-Israeli political process, I have chosen the simile of light at the end of a tunnel: with the Oslo accords, Israelis and Palestinians saw, for the first time, light at the end of the long, twisting tunnel that leads to peace. But they only ended up in another tunnel, where they could again see light at the end, at the peace negotiations sponsored by President Bill Clinton at the end of his term, held at Camp David in July 2000. Still, the light turned out to be only the reflection of a new firestorm, that of the Intifada that was to break out just two months later. Some time before, an American diplomat who for many years had been involved in mediation between Palestinians and Israelis, had said that there was a new tunnel with clear light at the end –the Roadmap– but that the insoluble problem was to simultaneously get the leaders of both sides, the Israeli Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian Yasser Arafat, into the tunnel. International diplomacy was not able to do this. The death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat begins a new era, say politicians, experts and analysts around the world. Most of the hundreds, if not thousands, of comments published in recent weeks agree that his passing could at least make it possible to reopen the window of opportunity brusquely closed so many times before (some even consider it ‘a great doorway opened wide’). Indeed, the window is open a crack, but instead of the breeze of hope that many predict and desire, the winds of war could well blow again, closing the window for the umpteenth time if the leaders of both sides and the powers involved do not act coherently. A New Era on the Palestinian-Israeli Front or a Fleeting New Reality? Are we then at the threshold of a new era or is this only a new reality that will have no lasting effects on peace, as has been the case in the past? And if so, what may come with this new era that so many are predicting and hoping for? The passing of Arafat, the unquestionable leader and most prominent symbol of the Palestinian cause, left a void that his heirs will find difficult to fill. Since the 1960s, Arafat has been the hero of the Palestinian national cause, the only one capable of unifying his people and leading them in their long struggle after the defeat suffered at the hands of the Israelis in 1948. He globalised his people’s cause to the point that the entire Arab and Muslim world took it on as their own. None of the countless criticisms he received was able to damage his image. He was the founder of the Palestinian nation and his devotion to the cause made it possible to pardon him for the errors he committed, though his people have suffered greatly for many of those errors. His omnipresent and controversial legacy has left the Palestinians with serious questions that his successors will have great difficultly answering in the foreseeable future.