The man with the ready handshake
Frederic Raphael
ARAFAT: FROM DEFENDER TO DICTATOR by Said K. Aburish Bloomsbury, £20, pp.360 How many people outside the Arab world have any notion that Yasser Arafat speaks with an Egyptian accent? The sym- bol of Palestinian identity, and to a large degree its creator, was born in Cairo. Though he has claimed, for authenticating purposes, to be a native of Jerusalem, he lived there only in the house of an uncle, having fled an unloving father (whose funeral, defying Muslim piety, he failed to attend). The deprived Palestinians found their most eloquent tribune in a marginal man who had difficulty establishing the identity he now incarnates.
When GoIda Meier asserted, with conve- nient callousness, that there was no Pales- tinian people (cf. Mrs Thatcher and 'society), she was not wholly wrong: in her youth, there had been people in Palestine, but 'the Palestinians' had, until the depar- ture of the British, signified resident Jews. Palestinian Arabs had considered them- selves 'south Syrians'. In the days of the Mandate, the Mufti of Jerusalem invented Palestinian Arab 'nationhood' in order to distinguish his fiefdom from the encircling (and potentially voracious) Arab states.
The feelings or wishes of his constituents played little part in his plans. The Mufti was reluctant to have regular Arab armies participate in the 1948 war and in the spoils which would issue from the extirpation of the Jews. When Egypt and the others did take a largely inglorious and finally calami- tous part, the failure to kill Israel was attributed to the corruption and treachery of outsiders. The Palestinians have thus, in their own eyes at least, remained eternally innocent victims alike of Israeli hard- and of Arab half-heartedness. Fatah mythology has required that Arafat can be wronged, but can do no wrong.
When things serve his purpose — the intifada is the prime instance — Arafat will take eager responsibility and credit, even though that insurrection owed nothing to his inspiration and was, to a degree, a symptom of Palestinian rejection of his absentee leadership. On the other hand, when in 1989 the town of Beit Sahur con- ducted a brave and independent campaign against Israeli occupation, Arafat connived at the uprising's defeat: its success might have argued against his claims to sole authority.
The frequent folly of Arafat's 'policies' cannot, in his eyes, be judged by the usual rules: he has had to keep his cause alive by promising everyone everything, whether it be war, peace, terror, partnership, or back- handers. Personally, as Said Aburish con- cedes in his seemingly fair-minded polemic, he has amassed no great fortune, but his own integrity has encouraged him to pur- chase that of others (Franco was similar). People like Hanan Ashwari who disdain his baksheesh have been slandered and repudi- ated.
Aburish's fair-mindedness is limited to his subject. Although he pays some tribute to individual Israeli moderates, he makes some reckless assertions. Is it true that the Israelis 'would like to demolish the mosque [of Omar] and erect in its place a new Temple'? As true, I suppose, as that Britannia would like to rule the waves, which does not entail practical intentions to do so. In fact, many (I hope most) Israelis react with alarm to the dotty ambi- tions of a lunatic fringe to storm the Tem- ple Mount. Elsewhere, it is said that 'many resistance fighters were believed to have been executed' in Gaza in 1967. Does that mean they were? If Aburish disdains over- statement in his illuminating analysis of Arab politics, Baruch Goldstein's slaughter of praying Arabs in Hebron he calls 'a supreme act of religious pornography': this is to denounce iniquity with gross hyper- bole: the murders were neither religious nor pornographic.
In general, Aburish sympathises with the exasperation which led King Faisal of Saudi Arabi to say, in 1970, 'All Arab leaders must obviously be mentally unbalanced.' The unity of the Arabs would scarcely have been insisted on so endlessly if the Arabs had been united. Despite their common loathing of Israel, when it comes to practical politics they are schismatic and mutually spiteful. In some sense, they can 'trust' Israel — at least to be a known, if diabolical, quantity — more than they can each other.
The Arabs are not a nation, though they share a culture. In private, Egyptians will tell you that they are not Arabs at all, and that ces messieurs are, some of them, e.g. Algerians and Iraqis, pretty well beyond the civilised pale. Jews and Israelis, of course, are similarly prone to mutual con- tempt. Arafat's apparently bizarre changes of style — from fawning devotion to rant- ing abuse — are the result not so much of personal vacillation as of general (and incurable?) Levantine anomie.
When Arafat and Rabin were coerced into a facsimile of reconciliation, we may be sure that their famous handshake was more painful to the Israeli than to Arafat, who has never been reluctant to embrace anyone who enhanced his prestige. His availability for kisses is evidence less of promiscuity (he is chaste in his habits) than of a willingness to use any means, violent or seductive, humane or savage, to achieve his ends.
Arafat is a conventional Muslim, without an ideological programme like the 'social- ist' Dr Habbash; survival and self-advance- ment are all his policy. If he recruits collaborators, he does not listen to them or delegate power. The PLO has a written charter and a supposedly democratic constitution, but the kitbag of modern tyrannies always contains elaborate rules for consultative procedures which, in practice, rubber-stamp erratic dictatorial fiats. What matters to the neo-Mufti Arafat is, as the Eartha Kitt number has it, that he is here.
The long-running tragicomedy of the peace process — which bien pensants soft- ies like myself long to take seriously — is that it has been conducted as if there were common ground between the parties. Of course, it is precisely common ground that is between them, but cannot be shared by them. As it is, Arafat's repulsive charm for the Israelis is precisely that he cannot hon- our his commitments without — or by — turning his followers into mercenaries against Hamas, whose fanaticism has the 'purity' of those excluded from political power or perks. Hence Mr Netanyahu (with the prospects of US cash to sweeten both sides) shakes hands with a paranoid mythomane who cannot deliver, even to his own people, what both they and secular Israelis crave: an honourable, practical compromise.
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