Max Boot:
The Soviets, U.S., EU and other foreign enablers helped this thug stay in
power.
COMMENTARY
It is considered bad form to speak ill of the dead, but I will make an exception
for Yasser Arafat, the pathetic embodiment of all that went wrong in the Third
World after the demise of the European empires.
All too many rulers of "liberated" nations in the second half of the 20th
century — the likes of Mao Tse-tung (China), Sukarno (Indonesia), Robert Mugabe
(Zimbabwe), Moammar Kadafi (Libya) and Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt) — proved to be
devotees of the Louis XIV school of political philosophy: L'etat, c'est moi.
Their rapaciousness knew no bounds. Neither did their cruelty.
Yet even as these rulers were torturing their own people, they were lionized in
the salons of the West. European and American intellectuals, motivated by a
combination of guilt for their countries' past conduct, vicarious zest for
revolutionary adventure and condescension toward Africans and Asians who were
thought incapable of conforming to Western standards, were willing to excuse any
crime committed in the name of "national liberation."
Arafat benefited from this deference ever since taking over the Palestine
Liberation Organization in 1969. He and his cronies pocketed billions of dollars
and kept their grip on power through the cruel application of violence against
various enemies and "collaborators." In return, Arafat reaped worldwide
adulation and a Nobel Peace Prize.
There has been no more successful terrorist in the modern age. Yet his biggest
victims were not Israelis. It was his own people who suffered the most. If
Arafat had displayed the wisdom of a Gandhi or Mandela, he would long ago have
presided over the establishment of a fully independent Palestine comprising all
of the Gaza Strip, part of Jerusalem and at least 95% of the West Bank. In fact,
he seemed well on his way toward this goal when I met him in 1998 as part of a
delegation of American scholars and journalists.
The place was his Ramallah compound, the time after midnight (Arafat was a night
owl). He was wearing his trademark fatigues, and his hands and lips were shaking
uncontrollably. Much of the session was conducted via translator, but Arafat
broke into English when asked a question about Palestinian violations of the
Oslo accords. It was the kind of query a democratic statesman would have batted
away without a second thought.
Arafat, however, grew visibly agitated and stammered: "Be careful when you are
speaking to me! Be careful, you are speaking to Arafat!" The threat of violence
hung in the air as we left. Clearly Arafat had not quite mastered the art of
being a politician or, rather, he was a politician in the mold of Mugabe or Mao.
His refusal to compromise, his unwillingness to give up the way of the gun
consigned his people to economic and moral suicide. The current intifada,
launched in September 2000 after Arafat turned down a generous peace offer from
the Israelis at Camp David, has claimed three times as many Palestinian as
Israeli victims. It has also led to a precipitous plunge in living standards in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip — not something Arafat's wife and daughter would
notice from their cozy Paris residence.
As the uprising's failure became evident, many of his own people grew
increasingly disenchanted with their corrupt and feckless leader, though they
could not quite shake off a Stalinist cult of personality nurtured over many
decades.
Though Arafat, of course, bore ultimate responsibility for his many sins, he
could not have been so destructive without so many outside enablers, ranging
from the Soviet Union, which supported him from the 1960s to the 1980s, to the
European Union and the United States, which stepped into the sugar daddy role in
the 1990s. And let us not forget his fan club among the Western intelligentsia,
many of whom even now weep for his passing as if he were a great man instead of
a criminal with a cause.
George W. Bush, alone among Western leaders, had the courage to stop dealing
with the Palestinian thug-in-chief. On June 24, 2002, the president gave an
important speech in which he called on the Palestinian people "to elect new
leaders … not compromised by terror" and to "build a practicing democracy, based
on tolerance and liberty." Now that Arafat has gone to the great compound in the
sky, there will be pressure on Bush to resume the pointless "peace process," but
it will be premature to do so as long as the terrorist kleptocracy spawned by
Arafat continues to exist.
Only if his successors show a genuine commitment to peace and pluralism should
they be rewarded by the West. In the meantime, the U.S. and its allies need to
work behind the scenes to identify and support genuine Palestinian democrats —
not a new generation of gunmen in the Arafat mold.