Yasser Arafat passed away twenty years ago this month, on November 11, 2004, at 75 years old.
Born in 1929 in Cairo, Arafat’s activism led to the founding of the Fatah movement in 1959, eventually becoming one of the major Palestinian factions that led to the formation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994.
The two decades since Arafat’s death have seen some major changes for the Palestinians, but in many ways, the failure of their cause in the last two decades is a result of the decisions of Arafat during the ten years he presided over the PA. This surely wasn’t the legacy he expected to have. He likely thought that he was leading the Palestinians toward statehood.
In the wake of October 7, it is unlikely they will have a state and it is more likely the future will consist of an endless conflict that grows and declines every few years.
Spelling out Arafat’s failures
What went wrong? It was two decades since Arafat’s death, a testament to how much he has been obscured by current events.
Arafat once held court in this region, meeting with leaders, showing up at international meetings with his kaffiyeh, sometimes in sunglasses even when it was daylight, or with a paramilitary uniform, all part of a style choice very much in line with the 1960s and 1970s that helped form Arafat.
To spotlight this history, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour recently did a segment on “20 years after Yasser Arafat’s death, we revisit his complex legacy, his impact on the Palestinian quest for statehood, how world leaders reacted to his passing and what it meant for peace.”
What can we conclude by looking back at Arafat’s legacy? As noted above, his rise to prominence came against the backdrop of the 1960s and 1970s. He tried to channel the fervour for “revolution” and “armed struggle” in the region, hoping that the Algerian war that forced the French to leave that country by 1962 would also have headwinds for the Palestinians.
Unlike French Algeria though, the Palestinians were divided and occupied in 1962 by the Egyptians and the Kingdom of Jordan. Initially, the war waged by the Palestinians was against the existence of Israel, not against the “occupation” because the Palestinian national movement was a tool of countries like Egypt to destabilize Israel. It wasn’t designed to “liberate” Jerusalem, because Jordan ran eastern Jerusalem and controlled Al-Aqsa at the time.
Only after 1967 did things shift. Arafat and his movement took on a new look. Now, it claimed to be conducting a struggle against Israel in the West Bank and Gaza.
Arafat had founded Fatah through students and friends he met in Kuwait and other places among the Palestinian diaspora. The movement achieved more success after 1967 when it could to actually be fighting Israel, such as in clashes at Karameh in Jordan in 1968.
Destablizing the Middle East
Arafat and his men tried to destabilize the Kingdom of Jordan, even threatening its existence in 1970 in fighting that led to the Jordanian Civil War. It is in this era the Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Arafat took shape on the international stage. He appeared in photos, with sunglasses on during the day, looking more like a cartel boss than a political leader. But this was the style of the time, however ridiculous, clownish and thuggish it appears in retrospect.
By 1974, Arafat was speaking at the UN. The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, determined “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” on 10 November 1975. Arafat seemed to be winning, even though his movement had caused a war in Jordan and also carried out the Brutal Munich Olympics massacre.
Books lauded Arafat for his vision appeared, such as Alan Hart’s Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker. When I was in middle school my social studies teacher “Mr. P” was enthusiastic about the book. I read it a few years later.
By this time Arafat and his movement hadn’t just destabilized Jordan, but after they moved to Lebanon they also helped destabilize and destroy that country beginning in 1976 with the Lebanese Civil War. They caused the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982 and Israel stayed in Lebanon until 2000. Arafat left Beirut in 1982 for Tunisia, coming to Gaza in 1994 for his triumphant return to what he thought would be a Palestinian state in the making.
If the 1960s milieu made Arafat into the sunglass-wearing-khaffiyeh-wrapped paramilitary “icon,” it was the end of the Cold War that turned him into an actual leader who was legitimized by the international community.
He returned to the Palestinian territories the same year that South Africa had its first full and free elections with the end of Apartheid. At the time democracy was sweeping the world. The Berlin Wall was gone. Conflicts were ending around the world. The US was a global hegemon presiding over the new world order.
There were some inklings of the failure to come, such as the Black Hawk Down disaster in 1993, the Rwandan Genocide, the Khobar Towers Bombing in Saudi Arabia, and the Al Qaeda attack on US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. However, the 1990s gave the Palestinians the chance to create a state in the making.
In Gaza, an international airport was built. In Abu Dis, the Palestinians wanted to build a makeshift capital overlooking Jerusalem. Everything was going well. In May 2000, Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Arafat had the chance to build a state. Instead, he chose war. He likely believed that Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon meant that if Israel was pushed a little more via violence, it would fold.
In September, he gambled that Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount could be used as a spark. Clashes began in Gaza and spread. The Second Intifada began. This wasn’t like the First Intifada that helped bring Arafat to Gaza from Tunisia and helped create the PA. This was bloody and like October 7 led to disaster for the Palestinians. By 2002, Israel had re-entered many Palestinian cities. The airport in Gaza was in ruins. Arafat died in 2004, he didn’t even get to live to see Disengagement.
Arafat left a chaotic and corrupt PA in the hands of Mahmoud Abbas. Handed a potential win through Disengagement, Abbas fumbled and let Hamas win Palestinian elections and then let Hamas through Fatah out of Gaza. Backed by the US-trained Palestinian Authority Security Forces, Abbas hung on but his regime was a slowly aging edifice.
In Gaza, the UN and NGOs partnered with Hamas and by 2012 Hamas leaders were in Doha being groomed for higher things. Several wars later and, Hamas was ready to launch the October 7 genocide, the goal of which was to end the concept of two states forever and plunge Israel into endless wars so that Hamas could take over the West Bank. Arafat’s failure to fulfil a vision for the Palestinians in that narrow window of opportunity in the 1990s has allowed Hamas to be a driver of the movement and lead them to disaster.
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