Any Way the Wind Blows

From the Holy City of Westlake:

More than ten years ago, I suggested to a politically literate co-worker that the solution to the Palestinian problem was a unitary state with Yasser Arafat as leader. My friend, somewhat to the left of me, asked “why Arafat?” I replied that he was probably the only one who could impose the degree of order necessary for a viable peace settlement with Israel. When he replied that this was anti-democratic I noted that democracy as the term is commonly understood didn’t seem like a priority for the Palestinians [or the Arabs in general] compared with having their own state. Besides, I said, a democratically elected government which got the Palestinians annhilated in the process of trying to destroy Israel didn’t really seem to contribute to the furtherance of what the Palestinians claimed to want in the first place.

Time [and several hundred “peace” plans] came and went, and with it my fantasy of a stable Palestinian state while Yasser Arafat lived. Not to put too fine of a point on it, my suggestion was the equivalent of hiring Jeffrey Dahmer to teach better health through vegetarianism and celibacy.

Rather than a stabilizing factor, Arafat was a destabilizing factor of unimaginable proportions. I knew he was a terrorist. I knew his commitment to democracy was dubious at best. What I didn’t know was that he had no intention of actually GOVERNING whatever passed for a Palestinian state.

To rule a nation requires leadership. Even BAD leadership is better than none at all. Compared to Arafat, Saddam Hussein was a philosopher king of Solomonic wisdom. My problem was that it never occurred to me that Arafat wasn’t the President of the Palestinian Authority. Arafat was instead the President of Arafatistan. What was Arafatistan? Quite simply it was the region of space encompassing Yasser Arafat and the resources (human and material) required to maintain him in the style to which he wanted to become accustomed.

Certainly Saddam was venal and disdainful of the suffering his greed inflicted upon the Iraqi people. For all that, he still LED, even if brutally and ineptly.

Yasser Arafat by contrast no more led the Palestinian people than a surfer leads the wave. Since his SOLE priority was personal aggrandizement without personal responsibility, he developed an almost supernatural ability to be all things to all people, without actually being anyone or anything of substance.

A Saddam Hussein or a Hafez al Assad would have settled quickly the question of who ruled Palestine, the PLO or Hamas and the rest of the Clive Barkeresque patchwork of Islamist monsters which competed for power. Did I say “competed”? That’s a misnomer, actually. The truth is that as long as they didn’t try to steal the office machines out of PLO headquarters or shoot too many of his multiplicity of beret wearing thugs, Arafat was perfectly willing to let Hamas and Islamic Jihad do as they pleased. It was all about the Benjamins… or whoever is actually on what passes for PA currency. The Sheikh Yassins were in turn happy to let Arafat pretend to rule Palestine so long as he didn’t actually stop them from pursuing their own war with Israel.

This all of course doomed any possibility for actual peace from the start. Negotiating with Arafat was like negotiating with a randomly picked drunk in a wild bar fight during Mardis Gras. Those of us who thought Arafat would actually rule the PA deluded ourselves into thinking that the guy stealing liquor from behind the bar during the riot had [or indeed wanted] control over events. He’d happily tell us whatever we wanted to hear, so long as we didn’t turn off the beer [or in this case, money] spigot.

So, when the time actually came for Arafat to create a Palestinian state, he instead opted for a new “Intifada”, cutting both Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton off at the knees. And why not? If he’d actually accepted the peace deal [even with the intention of finessing the rest of his demands in the future], Arafat would have had to accept RESPONSIBILITY. He would have had to have actually enforced his authority as President of the PA. Clearly he found it preferable to sit serenely above the fray, as the fanatics blew up buses and discos, tut-tutting about Israeli “intransigence” and reading his bank statements.

To his credit, George Bush quickly sized up the situation and passed on ensnaring himself in this ongoing political version of the Enron scam. As soon as the cowboy observed to one and all that the king was "bare-assed nekkid”, the whole thing came crashing down. Having destroyed Barak’s political career, Arafat quickly got to know Ariel Sharon up close and personal. Rather than let Arafat feign isolation from events, he held him responsible for what went on in the PA, as its sovereign authority and punished him and his security apparatus at every turn. Between Sharon and Bush, the self-induced delusion of Arafat’s “leadership” was destroyed. Yasser Arafat was reduced to the status of a keffiyah wearing Ratso Rizzo, sitting on a pile of money he couldn’t do anything with.

Now that Arafat has snuffed it, I can’t predict the chances of peace and an independent Palestinian state. Certainly they can’t be any less.