Arafat's ebbing authority

July 20, 2004

THE UNFOLDING power struggle among Palestinians in Gaza was set off by the prospect of an Israeli withdrawal and by concurrent pressures on Yasser Arafat to cede his control over security, personnel, and money. Nonetheless, this crisis over Arafat's misrule was a long time in coming. From the moment in 1994 when he and his PLO entourage, acting under the aegis of the Oslo Accords, came from Tunis to impose their ways on Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, something like the current revolt against Arafat was inevitable.

The late critic Edward Said, once a defender of Arafat, observed as early as 1995: "Arafat is building in the territories a government that is a combination of Lebanon's chaos and Saddam Hussein's tyranny." Said had come to favor the internal leadership of democratic figures such as Hanan Ashrawi, who were brushed aside when Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization took over the Oslo talks and imposed their corrupt, repressive structures on Gaza and the West Bank.

There is a crisis in Gaza today because Arafat, once the embodiment of Palestinian national aspirations, never altered his gang boss style of leadership forged in the PLO's clandestine era. All the money passed through Arafat's hands, and he wrote all the checks. Like police state rulers in Damascus and Baghdad, he appointed and controlled the heads of several security services.

Now, after a disastrous decade under Arafat's rule, Palestinians are suffering more than ever before from Israeli closures, curfews, and missiles fired into crowded civilian areas. The Palestinian populace has had the worst of two worlds, so it is no wonder that young armed men associated with Arafat's own Fatah group kidnapped his security chief for a while in Gaza last week and then rioted to protest Arafat's appointment of his nephew Moussa Arafat as the new Gaza security boss.

The Gaza rebellion, which does not involve the Islamists of Hamas, coincides with denunciations of Arafat from many quarters. Not only is his prime minister and old comrade Ahmed Qurei vowing to resign if Arafat does not relinquish power, but the UN envoy to the Mideast, Terje Roed-Larson, in a report to the UN Security Council last week, blamed Arafat for "the deterioration of law and order" and for sabotaging an Egyptian effort to reorganize Palestinian security services. "The collapse of authority cannot be attributed only to the Israeli incursions and operations inside Palestinian towns," Larson said. A similar call for Arafat to permit reforms came from the European Union.

It will be better if Palestinians throw off Arafat's old guard now rather than after an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Israel can best help by ending its own collusion with the corrupt practices of that old guard and offering to enter real negotiations with a reformed Palestinian Authority