I hope no one takes offence. It is just a question.
Well, I, personally, am no fan of Arafat.
Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone else on the horizon who would treat Israel any better if Arafat dropped dead tomorrow.
So, the answer, IMHO, is no. But that doesn’t meant that Israel is better off because he is around.
Zev Steinhardt
It depends on what you mean by “better.” If Israel gets rid of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, one likely outcome is a Palestinian “civil war” as various factions fight for control. This might be of some short-term benefit to Israel. The eventual winner, however, would be far more radical than the current regime.
On the other hand, there’s an argument to be made that Arafat’s biggest problem is not his unwillingness to control the populace and the radicals, it’s his inability to do so. From this perspective, Arafat is actually in the way of any future peace deal because he no longer has the authority to bind the Palestinian people. If so, the best thing to do may be to bite the bullet and let a new, more radical,leadership emerge that has enough leverage with the Palestinian populace to negotiate on its behalf.
It’s also remotely possible that Israel may have intentions to attempt to “divide and conquer” the Palestinians as they tried to do in Lebanon. By lending covert support to various Palestinian factions, they could probably keep the pot boiling for quite some time. Things might eventually become so anarchic that Israel could get away with the “unilateral separation” option that they have threatened in the past.
Can someone name an alternative leader?
I have seen Arafat’s ability to control grassroots supporters mentioned before. But wouldn’t this be perpetuated by his successor?
A somewhat related question - Arafat has been the leader of the PLA forever, it seems. What is the mechanism for appointing the chair of the PLA?
The PLA (properly PNA) is, of course, really the PLO. The PLO is really an umbrella organization which included a lot of different liberation groups. Arafat is also head of Fatah, the largest of these groups.
There is a large assembly (Palestinian National Counsel) made up of representatives of the various groups that is supposed to make all the major decisions. Arafat had to go to this counsel for a vote to formally recognize Israel’s right to exist. As far as I know, none of the members of this counsel have ever been directly elected. I suppose that this counsel would elect a successor.
The problem is that a group like Hamas would likely attempt to replace the PNA (Palestinian National Authority) all together.
Official PNA website
Interesting website that actually tells you what you want to know
Sorry, I seem to have the “People’s Liberation Army” on the brain today.
But on the other hand, Arafat is the only figure which Palestinians have consistently rallied around, and he is almost the only Palestinian to have made the leap from reprehensible terrorist to statesman. He controls a plurality of al-Fatah, which in turn controls a plurality of whatever the PLO is calling themselves today, which makes him the lynchpin of the entire scheme–and it is a scheme on the part of Palestine.
Arafat is an unabashed charlatan who explicitly approved the “Phased Plan” for the destruction of Israel in 1974 and has stuck to it ever since.
The plan was for the Palestinians to occupy any territory released by Israel and to negotiate for strategic concessions from the Israelis, the key spots being the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. Once the situation was deemed ripe, the Palestinians would revolt, invite invasion by their Arab neigbors and complete the ultimate plan of the destruction of the state of Israel:
(There is one strategic tumbler in the Israeli lock which has not yet been finessed, and that is an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. I wonder how many students of history have looked at that strategic location and thought “Sudetenland.”)
As I mentioned earlier in another thread, Article 15 of the PLO Charter specifically calls for the destruction of Zionism in Palestine, which incidentally remains the entirety of Israel. That article has never been officially renounced except by Arafat’s own hollow edict, in spite of the Oslo agreement and other similar promises (which have only been met when they are expedient to the ultimate PLO aim of the destruction of Israel). The problem appears to be that it is not possible to gather the two-thirds majority of representatives necessary to amend the charter and remove the offending article.
Somebody has definitely felt that Arafat is better off alive than dead, until today. I can’t help thinking that it was some sort of Nixon-era power brokering in the wake of the near-disaster that resulted from the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the Soviets threatened to inject troops in order to stem the simultaneous Israeli counterattacks which opened the roads to both Damascus and Cairo. But that’s just a guess about an absurd part of the world that continually keeps one guessing.
Since then, the plan–the written, advertised plan–has been to crack the egg from the inside, simple as that.
I think the idea was to clothe the Palestinians in statehood and then trust that they would realize that honest commitment to peace is the only reasonable solution. But that must have got lost in the translation, or more likely, it was never the intent of the bequeathed in the first place.
And the key to it all is the lone statesman in the midst: Yassir Arafat. What are the ramifications of Arafat’s demise or political emasculation? I don’t know, but I can tell you it’s bad news. This guy, asshole bold-faced liar and terrorist that he is, is the best guy to come forward and work, however half-heartedly, toward a solution in the Middle East. And his loose hold on the garden hose of power among the Palestinians that he has is the best chance anyone has yet seen at sealing a deal there.
But to date there has been no reasonable evidence to suggest that the Palestinians as a collective group have accepted the situation, whether or not Arafat finally has (or has not). We see occasional moves toward peace; they appear to see progress toward a completely unreasonable–and to date unreachable–objective which posits their own existence above and in the place of that of another, extant, people and government.
That’s the plan, and they spelled it out, and Arafat took it and ran with it from the moment he had the chance.
Nice post, Sofa King.
Is there any truth to the theory that Arafat is only able to maintain power in the PLO by perpetuating violence? I read someone’s post here to that effect a few months ago. And if so, doesn’t any replacement for Arafat suffer the same problems?
I had a professor who once said that the PLO was unlike most revolutionary organizations in that it was already a bureaucracy in search of a state. Arafat had the horns of the equivalent of the Department of State; other organizations had complete autonomy to run their organizations as they saw fit.
Honestly, I don’t have any insight into the intricacies of the power sharing arrangement that Arafat made in the creation of this latest entity, but I guarantee you that it was a hard-bargained arrangement whatever it was. I’m tempted to look only at the results and infer from them, but then I don’t think my position is a particularly objective one, and my arguments have exploded themselves before all of us. We need a perspective I cannot offer.
My uncle in Israel says that he has heard that some of the Palestinian leadership is far more moderate than Arafat in the long run. The one name he mentioned that sticks with me is Yasir Raboo, I believe the Information Minister. Other names who seem to have more of a moderate outlook on things when they are not regurgitating the policy line are Hanan Ashrawi and Saeb Erakat. Anybody have any information?
Lets try to keep from using personal insults. I think the only people who have really worked for peace, was two people: Yasser Arafat, and Shimon Peres.
These two people need to be rewarded. Instead of insulted
I don’t think it is fair to exclude Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak from that list.
Interesting opinion from Uri Avnery, Israeli “war hero and peace campaigner”.
Fair enough. Consider the “asshole” part retracted.
Israel has been negotiating with Arafat for years and still the violence continues. There are two possibilities: Arafat wants to control the violence but can not or that he can but does not want to. In either case why are they negotiating with him since the violence will not stop? Negotiating with Arafat has proven to be a dead end, Israel has to try something different.
How about fulfilling UN resolution 242? They haven’t tried that yet.
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Thats true, I forgot about past peace pushers. Yitzhak Rabin was killed for his views.
I guess todays war-mongers would rather take revenge, then stand and maybe fall for peace.
I think that it would also be wrong to call him a terrorist.