The voice of his people but never of reason

James Klurfeld
November 11, 2004

Yasser Arafat's greatest failure as a leader was his unwillingness or his inability to tell the Palestinian people the truth about their future: that to achieve a state of their own and end the war with Israel would take compromise.

The measure of the next Palestinian leader - and it might take some time for that person to emerge - will center on this same issue.

Arafat was unable to act at the crucial moment in the summer of 2000 because he had not prepared Palestinian public opinion for the reality that if there was going to be a deal with Israel the Palestinians would not get everything they had wanted, everything that he had promised. This was at the Camp David summit conference where Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had made breathtaking concessions on almost every major point, including sharing Jerusalem as a capital. In fact, New York Times columnist William Safire made the provocative point in his column yesterday that Israelis would have rejected Barak's plans in a referendum and were spared a public relations disaster with world opinion because Arafat turned the offer down first.

I'm not so certain that Safire is correct. The great middle of Israeli public opinion - the part that keeps swinging from Labor to Likud depending on the level of terrorism directed against Israel - has shifted party allegiance with the level of violence or chance for peace. Ariel Sharon is prime minister now not because the population is as hawkish as he is (or had been) but because of the intifada directed against it.

Israeli public opinion, by a significant majority, has understood the need for compromise for more than a decade. What a final peace agreement would look like had been a matter of intense debate in Israel for years. With a free press and a wide spectrum of public opinion, there was plenty of discussion and debate - indeed, for anybody who has spent time there, no end to the debate.

I hedge on whether Arafat was unwilling or unable to talk compromise because it's impossible to know what was going on in his mind. Arafat certainly came a long way to accept the Oslo Accords and shake the hand of his most hated adversary, Yitzhak Rabin (not Sharon) in the summer of 1993. But the question with him was always: Did he mean it? Was it all a tactical game in which he would negotiate concessions from Israel but not stop the violence, always asking for more and threatening and using terrorism when he didn't get his way?

Arafat constantly told the Palestinians they would get all their land back from the Israelis and that they could return to Israel. On this point in particular, the so-called right of return, he never wavered. That, of course, is the one point on which all Israelis said there could be no significant give. But Arafat also never really made an attempt to say that, to achieve the goal of a state, the Palestinians would have to compromise on territorial issues as well.

Arafat's genius was in preserving his own power, his own status as the leader of the Palestinian movement. But to do that he had to appeal, always, to the lowest common denominator. Unlike Barak, or Rabin, Arafat would take no chances. His own survival was the real goal.

The result was that in the summer of 2000 he was in no position to suddenly go back to the Palestinians and say he had accepted a territorial compromise or that there would be, at best, a symbolic right of return. He had never really leveled with the Palestinians, never gone into any of the specifics on what it would take to come to agreement with Israel. Maybe he never understood that himself.

When Anwar Sadat decided it was in his self-interest to make peace with Israel in 1977, he had a profoundly important insight: that the Israelis' problem was as much psychological as it was military. Sadat went to Jerusalem because he understood that he had to break through the psychology of mistrust before he could put the specific issues on the table. This understanding of his enemy was never part of Arafat's makeup. He was able to shape a movement, but never to lead it to its goal.

The immediate dilemma for the peace process is that the next Palestinian leader will have to maximize his rhetoric in any struggle for power. Anybody who would speak the truth - that compromise with Israel will be necessary - would severely undercut his chances for becoming the leader. And that, in the end, is the tragedy of Arafat. He was the acknowledged leader and he had the authority to speak the truth to his people. He chose not to do that and, in doing so, has prolonged their agony and diminished his historical stature.