Arafat’s Legacy: A Premodern People

The picture of the newly sworn-in Hamas cabinet could not but evoke in the viewer a profound sorrow for the fate of an entire people. Whether or not the Palestinians ever existed as a true people, as a nation with any identity, is doubtful and problematic, but the withdrawal from the West Bank by the Jordanians and from Gaza by the Egyptians did provoke and create a body politic born of suffering. Leaving their brothers and sisters to fend for themselves, the Jordanians and Egyptians created a nation, and as a result they also created the “refugee” camps that gave rise to a festering, imprisoned, resourceless people, politically adrift and economically bereft. Rather than working out a political plan with the Israeli army, who turned annihilation into annexation and then occupation, the Jordanians and Egyptians took a page from the Bedouins and simply struck camp…leaving behind the mobility-challenged ex-Transjordanians to be recast as Palestinians.

Into this social and economic void stepped Yassir Arafat and the PLO with a political plan to forge a nation with a strategy born of armed confrontational challenge and guerrilla war—which immediately morphed into civilian atrocities that we now call terror. Decades later, it all ended with his wife Suha shopping for shoes on the Champs Elysées and some missing billions stolen from the West and socked away in Switzerland or thereabouts. The revelations that the PLO stole billions has not been in any manner analyzed, internalized, or understood by the global media, but it should, because behind that story lies the rise of Hamas. Behind that story lies the failure of all Western peace efforts and the degradation and return to religious and social fundamentalism of a people once characterized by and envied for their urbanity. Anyone who has read accounts of Ottoman-ruled Transjordan knows that the Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea were known for a gentleness, a grace, a cosmopolitanism that reflected itself in the coffeehouses of Jaffa and the lovely apartments of Jerusalem. More educated than their desert Arab brethren, the Palestinians were professors, doctors, and engineers; a greater equality existed between the sexes than almost anywhere else in the Arab world. Yes, there were ugliness, pogroms, carnage, ignorance, and violence, but in a relative universe Transjordan was light-years ahead in modernity.

Hamas, with its one woman official (in charge of women’s affairs) and its Islam-is-the-solution political, social, and economic policy, is the mirror image of the Palestinians before Arafat. What the West can see is that the politics of denying Israel’s right to exist, the politics of violence, and corrupt politics at every level only beget more extremism. Hamas exists today at the pinnacle of power because in the many years of war Arafat delivered nothing positive to his people: not land, not peace, not an economy, not the return of refugees, not a state…nothing. What he did leave behind were refugees in vaster numbers than before, noncitizens for three generations in hostile neighboring lands who have been abandoned by the energetic, successful educated classes that are now raising their children in Dearborn, not Qalqilya; London, not Tulkarm. The peace-loving generational improvers who wish a better life for their children are all gone…vanished into the open arms of the modern world. Leaving behind green-headband chanting fanatics.

When Westerners think of corruption, they think of Enron or Jack Abramoff. They think of these things while sitting in gigantic SUVs or watching 60-inch plasma TVs in their media rooms. They are probably overweight and have problems with their kids downloading inappropriate stuff on their computers. Arafat’s corruption was not of this kind. It literally killed people…his people. The United Nations has been warning of malnutrition amongst the Palestinians for years. Food and medicine are in short supply. People in Jericho and Tulkarm do not get medical care on demand, their children do not get orthodontia, their old people do not get kidney dialysis, their aged forgetful do not get MRI brain scans. Yet amidst this suffering and poverty, amidst a bribe-based economy, their leader and his inner circle stole billions intended to relieve his people’s suffering. This was not money made in stock scams like Tyco or HealthSouth; this was not tax shelters falsely set up to minimize the pain of taxation. This was international aid sent to his government to distribute to his people so they could eat, breathe, and live in decency while they carried out their war against the occupation. Their would-be liberator, their leader, feted at countless dinners in the red-carpet capitals of Europe, ripped them off to clad his wife in designer shoes and lingerie. That is why Hamas won and Fatah lost the election: What sane person would vote to continue to be robbed? And, what did Arafat deliver on the battlefield? The intifada continues in Jenin while the Israelis are sipping Italian wine in Tel-Aviv; Hebron is under a curfew while the nightclubs of South Tel-Aviv are packed—the restaurants, too. The stock market is zooming; travel abroad and tourism into Israel is at an all-time high. Internationally famous architects have made the skyline of Tel-Aviv look like Hong Kong on the Med. Meanwhile, a few kilometers away, an entire people of distinction have become a synonym for suicide-bomber terrorist and martyrs have replaced laureates as the heroes of the young. Clans and gangs have replaced the police and the rule of law. Feuds are settled with AK-47s, not the courts, and economic activity has come to a standstill, as the fight for Haifa takes precedence. The Palestinians today are as degraded a people as you could find; that, however, is only part of Arafat’s legacy.

The rest of the legacy started last week with the swearing in of the cabinet and the transfer of power to Hamas. He has delivered his people to doom. The Hamas leadership does not recognize the state of Israel; it is doubtful Israel will recognize them. After the first inside-the-’67-borders suicide bombing, this leadership will be rounded up or assassinated. They will not be given legitimate recognition as elected leaders because they have not extended that courtesy to their neighbors. They have chosen to allow war to be waged against a civilian population and announced this week that there will be no effort to prevent terrorist attacks. On the contrary, they will be encouraged as “resistance.”

When Hamas is decimated, there will be a strongman government, perhaps led by Mohammad Dalan. It will step in and take the reins of power, and the people who have had no say before will remeet that fate. Radical, noncompromising Islam cannot win the battle for Palestine against a modern people armed with technology and a prosperous economy. All it can do is hasten and heighten the wall, and cause death and smoldering ruins in the wall’s shadow. Arafat led his people into this blind alley, he has prepared them for nothing save jihad, they think of a future awash with blood, they dream an impossible dream of return, and they sacrifice today and gain nothing for tomorrow. Hamas is the ultimate curse, a sick joke by a corrupt failed leader bestowed to a once proud and now sorrowful people.