Peace after Arafat?

WHEN he formed the Fatah movement some 40 years ago, Yasser Arafat was determined to forge his stateless people, the Palestinians, into one nation occupying their own sovereign homeland. Last Thursday night, he died in a Paris hospital without seeing the fulfilment of that dream to which he had dedicated most of his life. While from that perspective Arafat may be considered a tragic figure, the fact is that history had bequeathed to him a mission that was uniquely difficult, where survival seemed all that could be hoped for in the struggle of a refugee people to regain their ancestral homeland from a formidable and immemorial enemy backed by the might of the United States. Viewed in that context, Arafat’s leadership of the Palestine people and their long battle to regain the occupied territory they once called home may be seen in a more positive, if not heroic, light.

Undoubtedly, his signal achievement is that he himself became a symbol of the unity and resistance of the Palestinians, the father of their aspiring nation, the freedom-fighter to whom the various factions scattered all over the Middle East rallied. In the forefront of the Palestinians’ marathon struggle against the occupying Israelis, Arafat in the early years came to be regarded as a terrorist and even when, in later life, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his participation in efforts to achieve a negotiated peace settlement, he was still regarded among the Jews and in the US as either supporting or unable to control radical groups engaging in terrorist attacks against the Israelis. However, sympathy for the Palestinian cause and appreciation of Arafat’s leading role in it gained wider international resonance as was exemplified in the ceremonial tribute which the French paid to him as a world leader yesterday, before his body left Paris for the funeral service in Cairo.

Whatever the varying views of him may be, the fact is that Arafat, by his charismatic leadership of the disinherited Palestinian people, dominated the history of the Middle East for four decades and kept one of the world’s oldest and most intractable conflicts before the eyes and conscience of the world. His passing thus brings an era in this long-standing confrontation to an end and, hopefully, will open fresh opportunities and generate new initiatives for bringing peace to this deeply troubled region. We would like to believe that the long history of tit-for-tat violence between these two societies would by now bring home to them the futility of this kind of senseless retaliatory warfare. The just cause of the Palestinians cannot with any honesty be denied and it now seems incumbent on the United States to apply the kind of pressure on the Israelis that would force them to get on with it.

Encouraging signs are already there. The decision of the Israeli government to withraw Jewish settlements from the Gaza is one. Tony Blair’s impending visit to George W Bush hoping to get this conflict placed as an urgent item on the international agenda is another. In this context, the most statesman-like declaration, in our view, has come from former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres who said yesterday that the time had come for both peoples to “let bygones be bygones” and move ahead to a peaceful settlement. Yasser Arafat has stamped his controversial personality on this bloody conflict for four decades. We expect that new and younger leaders will now take his place and,with them, a new reality will emerge, one that will set the stage for a peaceful end to this unholy war.