A juggler par excellence
He would be neither a Palestinian David Ben-Gurion leading his people toward practical politics and statehood nor an Anwar Sadat accepting the logic of peace and compromise. It was a pity for the Palestinians that Yasser Arafat was what he was: a juggler, a trimmer, a man who never had it in him to tell his people great historical truths about their condition in the world of nations and their practical possibilities. The void, and the failure, Arafat leaves in his wake were of his own making. He indulged his people's worst fantasies and squandered great opportunities that opened up for them.
The man born in Cairo in 1929--the Jerusalem birth was a convenient and transparent legend--led his people to a blind alley of futility and maximalism. He was, and could only be, a creature of his time. He came into his own in the aftermath of the Arab defeat in Palestine in 1948, during a time of recriminations, when moderation was branded as treason and assassins stalked the realists and the pragmatists among the Arabs. Arafat was to be the second Palestinian leader in a row to betray his people's hopes; the first was his distant relative, the mufti of Jerusalem, the notorious Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who dominated Palestinian politics from the 1920s until the 1950s.
Terror was the mufti's weapon. He turned away from reason and compromise, rejected the inescapable logic of partition, struck down his moderate rivals, and made his way to Berlin during the Second World War and bet on the Axis powers as redeemers of his people. The mufti was never repudiated by his own people. Arafat assimilated that legacy. He held a deed to the land of Palestine, wanted it all, as he repeatedly said, "from the river to the sea" --from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. He knew that a great verdict had issued from the war of 1948, but still he fed the impossible and self-defeating dream of the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees to the cities and towns of Israel proper. Jaffa and Haifa were lost, but Arafat stoked the subliminal hope of his people that history's verdict could somehow be overturned.
The world indulged Yasser Arafat, gave him plenty of room to maneuver, showered him with aid and money, and graciously offered him a place of prominence in the great diplomatic game. (The oddest gift, given Arafat's wayward ways and his habitual resort to terror, was a Nobel Peace Prize, which must surely stand as the supreme irony of his legacy.) Arafat took the world's indulgence as his due. He took the money of the princes and monarchs of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf--but sided with Saddam Hussein when the order of princes came under attack in the first Gulf War. He took the "hospitality" of Jordan and Lebanon--but scrupled not at all when it came to bringing ruin and bloodshed to those lands. He could forever hoodwink the Europeans, who were all too willing to believe the legend of his moderation.
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