After Arafat, Who? It’s Not Our Choice to Make and It’s the Wrong Question Anyhow
Yasser Arafat’s political life was extended for some time owing to the question, “If not Arafat, with whom will we negotiate?” Or a common variation, “After Arafat, who will lead the Palestinians?”
Yasser Arafat’s political life was extended for some time owing to the question, “If not Arafat, with whom will we negotiate?” Or a common variation, “After Arafat, who will lead the Palestinians?”
The answer to the first is,”Negotiate what?” The Palestinian Authority is making war on the State of Israel, and it is no more appropriate to consider “peace talks” now than it would have been with Hitler or the Emperor of Japan in 1943, or the Taliban in October. When someone makes war on you, you have to win the war. Only after you do, if you do, can you determine the parameters of the peace. If you don’t, never mind.
Which is part of the answer to the second question. It isn’t the job of Americans or Israelis to decide who comes after Arafat unless they are willing to assume full responsibility for the Palestinians. If they are, like America in Germany and Japan in 1945, they can defeat the PA and rule as benevolent conquerors – the U.S. was a darn good creator of democratic institutions for non-democratic people; the Israelis might prove to be as well. If they are not willing, which is more likely, they have to live with events they might influence, but don’t control. It was probably a mistake for the Americans and Israelis to anoint Arafat their “sole legitimate” interlocutor in 1993 – only submitting him to ratification by the local Palestinian electorate in an election that was not open or fair or democratic. They might wish to avoid anointing his successor.
Rather than beating the dead horse of Arafat’s continued utility, it might be useful to explore Prime Minister Sharon’s previous characterization of Arafat as “irrelevant.”
Arafat IS irrelevant. Eight years of PA mismanagement, corruption and vile propaganda about both the U.S. and Israel, plus the miseducation of a generation of Palestinian children, have swept Palestinian society into a poor and radical mode in which broad segments of the population believe they have little to lose and much to gain in the world to come by killing themselves and others or by supporting those who do.
The suicide bombers of the past two weeks are not “incidents” in an otherwise peaceful relationship. The Karine A wasn’t an aberration in otherwise successful Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation. They are symptomatic of the entire structure of the PA, an apparatus designed to make war and undermine whatever level of personal and civil relations existed between the people of the territories and the people of Israel prior to its establishment.
The real question is, “How will Israel deal with more than a million and a half poor, radicalized, non-democratic Palestinians who live on the border of a wealthy, free and democratic Jewish state containing more than a million Arab citizens?” Palestinian statehood? Jordanian sovereignty? Israeli annexation? UN protectorate? American colony? We don’t have the answer, but surely our question is more relevant than any pertaining to the miserable life of Yasser Arafat.