The rise and fall of Yasser Arafat
CBC News Viewpoint | October 29, 2004
I met Yasser Arafat during the first week of January 1969. He was 39 years old. Our first meeting was in the early hours of a cold damp morning, at his then headquarters in Amman, Jordan. We were a green Canadian television crew from CBC. We had made our first trip to the Middle East to produce a documentary on the Palestinians, and there wasn't a lot to go on.
Yasser Arafat salutes while attending the Palestinian Islamic Christians Conference at his compound in Ramallah, Tues., Aug. 10, 2004. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
Nobody really knew much about Palestinians or the man destined to become their principal leader. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had already asserted that there was no such thing as a "Palestinian," and in a way she was right, at least as far as the world was concerned.
Until the Six-Day War, Arafat was a nobody, and Palestinian Arab nationalism was in its infancy. Political Islam as we know it today, was virtually non-existent. It was the war, and the tough Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, that gradually gave rise to what would become a Palestinian identity, although it would never become a fully and truly national one.
Arafat himself was a civil engineer, with little military background apart from a year or so of service in the Egyptian army. He had taken his engineering degree at the University of Cairo, and it was there that he gained a reputation among Palestinian students as a wily politician.
After graduating, he set up a construction consulting company in Kuwait and cashed in on the oil boom of the 1950s and '60s. It was in Kuwait that al-Fatah was formed and that Arafat made his decision to one day become the Palestinian leader, a goal he reached in 1969, when he took over the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Our main goal as journalists at the beginning of that year, was to find out more about just how strong that identity was – and to learn more about the man who was helping to forge it. (Our secondary objective was to get an interview with Arafat before 60 Minutes, which we did.)
After two days of waiting, negotiating and cajoling, we finally decided to spend a night at Arafat's office. At around 4 a.m. he arrived, by himself, and with no security. We saw a short, unimpressive-looking little man in a shabby khaki uniform. His inner office in central Amman was below ground – dingy, disorganized and cluttered.
He told us he did not want to be interviewed, that he was just another Palestinian soldier and that he was unimportant. Nevertheless, eventually he agreed to consider it and said he'd let us know the next day.
Word came to our hotel that he would meet us, but not in Amman. We were taken by jeep past two Jordanian checkpoints, to the outskirts of the city. After at least two hours of driving, we were blindfolded and eventually found ourselves in what appeared to be a cave. It was there that Arafat gave his first television interview to a North American network.
He was trying to pull together a ragtag collection of young men and women to build what he called a "credible" Palestinian military. Most of his recruits were illiterate youngsters, drawn from the teeming refugee camps of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria; some belonged to poorly trained, poorly armed militia factions, which ranged from conservative Muslim groups all the way to Marxist-Leninist and Communist organizations.
Arafat's own outfit, al-Fatah, was more or less middle-of-the road and was made up mainly of secular Palestinians, Christians and liberal Muslims. In fact, part of Arafat's appeal to the small Palestinian middle class, was his lack of religious zeal. But as one Palestinian intellectual told me, Abu Amar (Arafat's code name), was just the tip of the iceberg. She said that Palestine would someday be "liberated" with or without him.
One of the points Arafat made over and over to us in the interviews we did was that he believed it was wrong to build a state around a religious belief. His great desire, he said, was to create a secular, democratic Palestine, in which Jews, Muslims and Christians could live together in peace. He pointed out that Jesus Christ was a Jew and that the Prophet Muhammad respected all religions.
He insisted there was no reason why Jews and Arabs shouldn't get along together. "After all," he said, "We are all Semites." He went on, "It's not the Jews I am against," he said, "It's the philosophy of Zionism, which wants to take our land and return to the ancient Kingdom of Israel."
(Years later, when Arafat formed a close bond with the family of Yitzhak Rabin, I recalled his words about not being anti-Jewish.)
Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, inspects the bomb damage in the Arab University area of West Beirut Monday, Aug. 2, 1982 following the heavy bombardment by Israel the day before. (AP Photo/Mourad Raouf)
To us, back in 1969, fresh from the pro-Israel West, Arafat seemed exotic and a bit frightening; nevertheless we also found him charming and reasonable. He was thoughtful and intelligent in his conversations and he certainly had the respect of those around him.
But his proposed solutions to the regional conflict bore little relation to reality. And over the years, it has become apparent that his rapidly growing power and influence, combined with his appetite for one-man rule, would eventually be his downfall, and indeed the downfall of the Palestinian people.
Yasser Arafat's great failure, both as a guerrilla leader and as president of the Palestinian Authority, has been his inability or unwillingness to control the extremist elements within the Palestinian community. That failure to act against the fringes, discipline them and rein them in, resulted in the bloody expulsion of his forces from Jordan, in repeated clashes with the government of Lebanon, in the current disastrous intefadeh and, finally, in a gradual alienation of the international community.
Worst of all for Arafat's legacy as a leader, is that his authoritarian approach combined with his cronyism has also lost him the respect of much of the ordinary Palestinian community. Amira Hass writes in the Israeli newspaper Haartez, that one Palestinian official said Arafat's death by natural causes would be considered a solution of sorts. "When there is no internal change," he said, "people wait for an external one." No successor has been appointed or named and the next step will likely be up to the Palestinian parliament, which has the power to appoint an interim leader.
