A legacy of loss and heartbreak
With Yasser Arafat's passing, Palestinians have a chance to put the past behind them
RAMALLAH, WEST BANK--One last time, Yasser Arafat inspired his people to wild emotion, to a sense of invincibility. Firing in the air, chanting and crying his name, Palestinians surged toward the helicopter carrying his casket, swarming over the coffin, fearless, free. This was the Palestine of their dreams. Then Arafat was buried in Ramallah's crumbling Mukata, his virtual prison for the past three years. Their catharsis over, thousands of heartbroken Palestinians returned home to their powerless lives.
It was a truly historic moment. The crowd was bidding goodbye to an era--the tumultuous, wayward era of the Palestinian nation's adolescence. "He was our father," said a young woman, Samia Abbas, who came from Jerusalem to the funeral. Many Palestinians called Arafat "the father of the nation."
Yet there was nothing fatherly about Arafat's political persona, nothing steady, reassuring, or protective about him. He wasn't so much the Palestinians' leader as he was their superstar. With his checkered kaffiyeh, frumpy military uniform, scruffy beard, and flashing temper, he was an operatic figure. Since assuming the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in 1969, at age 39, Arafat gave his people an indelible, if sometimes unfortunate, international presence. What he never gave them was direction. He flitted instead between "armed struggle" and diplomacy, between seeking a Palestine alongside Israel and a Palestine instead of Israel.
Decision time. Trying to figure out Arafat, as legions of burned-out Middle East peacemakers can attest, was an exercise in futility. Judging by his words, he wanted to create a Palestinian state; judging by his actions, he wanted only the excitement and adulation attendant to leading the struggle for such a state.
When a people hail a man for so long as their unchallenged leader, they cannot blame their failures on him; Arafat's leadership was, necessarily, a reflection of Palestinian desires. In his ultimate refusal to compromise with Israel, Arafat's choice of violent resistance over careful nation building, his sense of himself as a victim who held himself above criticism for fecklessness or failure, Arafat was the Palestinians, and they were him.
Now he is gone, and the Palestinians have a choice. Gray but practical men, men in suits like Mahmoud Abbas, will try to steer Palestinians onto a new, peaceful course. At the "street" level, other men--like those who fired into the air at the Mukata--want to hew to Arafat's course, if not to something worse. The Palestinian people's adolescence is over. It's time, finally, for them to decide: Either settle down and build a life, or keep right on marching, on the road to nowhere.
This story appears in the November 22, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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