Palestinian struggle:
Arafat’s legacy and challenges for the future
by Roland Rance
The death of Yassir Arafat, which has been portrayed by the bourgeois media as a “new opportunity” for the Middle East, does indeed mark a turning point in the Palestinian struggle. It is seen by Israel and its western backers as an opportunity to install a more compliant Palestinian leadership. For the Palestinian people, however, it can only become a real opportunity for progress if they engage in a serious strategic reassessment. However, the election of Mahmoud Abbas to succeed Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) is a sign that they are not yet ready to draw the necessary balance sheet of Arafat’s successes and failures, and to reach the necessary strategic conclusions.
Despite the strong criticism of much of Arafat’s politics and decisions, virtually all strands of Palestinian opinion were united in mourning a man who symbolised their struggle for liberation, and who, during the early decades of a remarkable fifty-year political career, ensured the survival of the Palestinian cause and its central importance in Middle Eastern and world affairs. Ironically, those Israelis who, stigmatising him as “someone we cannot deal with,” most welcomed his demise, are likely to come to the realisation that he was the only Palestinian leader capable of negotiating a deal favourable to Israel and then persuading the Palestinians to accept it.
Any assessment of Arafat’s legacy needs to balance his undoubted achievements – principally the crystallisation of the Palestinians as an independent political entity – against the failures and sell-outs which have characterised much of the past twenty five years. His passing leaves many unresolved questions, just as his life contained many controversies, and several mysteries.
The first of these relates to his birth in 1929, to the eminent Palestinian Husseini family. Whether born in Jerusalem, Cairo or Gaza, Arafat – like many young Palestinians of his generation – spent his childhood in both Palestine and Egypt. Although this easy movement came to an end with the partition of Palestine and Israel’s defeat of the Arab armies in 1947-8, Arafat’s family did not themselves become refugees. His family home in Jerusalem’s Old City stood until it was bulldozed by the Israelis following the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967.
By then, Arafat was already an active fighter for Palestinian liberation. While studying engineering at Cairo University, Arafat became leader of the Palestinian Students Union, and by 1959 was able to use this position to establish Fatah, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement.
By this time, most Arab states – including Egypt under the nationalist Nasser regime – were engaging in strenuous covert efforts to reach an agreement with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. In an attempt (apparently at the behest of the US government) to create a compliant Palestinian organisation, in 1964 Nasser set up the PLO with diplomat Ahmed Shukeiry at its head. Despite its bombastic rhetoric about armed struggle as “the only way to liberate Palestine”, the PLO under Shukeiry carried out no attacks on Israel, while Arafat’s Fatah and other small guerrilla groups carried out dozens of attacks.
The 1967 war, in which Israel occupied the remainder of Palestine, provided an opportunity which Arafat grasped. It exposed the inefficiency, even cowardice, of the regular Arab armies (years later, Arafat boasted that the PLO had lost more men defending the Beirut rubbish dump from Israeli attack in 1982 than had the entire Arab armies in defence of Jerusalem in 1967), and it brought hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many with military training, under direct Israeli rule.
Guerrilla attacks, and Israeli retaliation, increased massively as Israel tightened its grip on the occupied territories and began the establishment of settlements. In 1968, this led to the Battle of Karameh, in which Fatah fought off an Israeli attack on its base in Jordan. Despite heavy Palestinian losses, this was the first occasion on which the Israeli army had faced a military reverse. This galvanized the Palestinians and indeed the whole Arab world. Within a year, Fatah had seized control of the PLO from Shukeiry and his Egyptian sponsors; in 1969 alone, the PLO carried out over 2000 attacks on Israel.
Arafat became a hero for many western radicals during the 1968 uprisings, but being a social conservative, he was always an unlikely symbol for the 60s generation. It was during this period that the PLO amended its charter, defining its goal as a democratic secular state in Palestine, and began a series of clandestine meetings with Israeli dissidents in Europe. It is likely that, even then, Arafat’s intention was to use this as a means to reach an agreement with the Israeli state, leaving him as head of a truncated Palestine. Unlike the more radical People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Arafat rejected the strategy of Arab revolution leading to Palestinian liberation, preferring to seek alliances with the existing Arab regimes. He sought diplomatic pressure on Israel, backed up by the threat of armed attacks across the border.
This strategy faced its strongest challenge following the disaster of the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970s, and the Israeli invasion of 1982. Across the refugee camps, PLO members, disappointed at the failure of the PLO to defend Palestinians, and dismayed at the growing evidence of political and financial corruption, joined the rebellion against Arafat’s leadership, which culminated in the “Camps War” of 1984-5. The dissidents, however, missed the point by counterposing a “military” strategy against a “political one, rather than addressing the real question of how to build a mass struggle, with both political and military elements.
The uneasy truce which followed this crisis lasted until the first Intifada erupted in December 1987. The Intifada, although obviously a mass uprising against Israeli occupation, was widely seen as a movement against Arafat and an increasingly out-of-touch leadership in exile. For the first time since the “Arab Revolt” of 1936-9, it showed the potential for mass civilian struggle against occupation and oppression. Despite brutal repressive measures, Israel was unable to defeat the Intifada, and was forced to turn to Arafat to act is its surrogate in governing the Palestinian people and lands. Israeli PM Rabin famously insisted that Arafat rule “Without the High Court and without the civil rights movement” – two elements which have constrained Israel’s potential for unbridled barbarism.
Arafat did not disappoint the Israelis. The past ten years, since the signing of the Oslo Agreement and the return of Arafat and his coterie to Palestine, have seriously weakened and demoralised the Palestinian resistance. The turn to Islamist forces, and to the tactic of “suicide bombing”, testify to the destruction by Israel, aided by Arafat, of the popular institutions which led the first Intifada.
This legacy, and the failed strategy which lies behind it, is the challenge for a new Palestinian leadership. But it was hardly addressed during the election campaign. The election was generally described in personal terms, with Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) – Israel and the USA’s favoured candidate – referred to as a “realist” and a “moderate”, while other candidates – several of whom were arrested or beaten during the campaign – were stigmatised as violent, anti-Jewish extremists.
But this is to miss the point entirely. The election, in which only Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation could vote, was for a head of the Palestinian Auhority (PA). Of Arafat’s other roles, Abbas had already been appointed head of the PLO, while Farouq Qadumi, a veteran Palestinian critic of the Oslo agreement (previously considered to be the Kremlin’s closest contact in the PLO) was elected head of the Fatah movement. However, the election result will widely be seen as an endorsement for Abbas’s claim to represent all Palestinians, even though the majority of them were not allowed to participate in the election.
If the Palestinians suffering under Israeli military occupation, or their leaders, agree to ameliorate their situation at the cost of sacrificing the rights of the Palestinian refugees and exiles, this could lead to a decisive split within the Palestinian people, and the formal acceptance of the partition, not merely of the land of Palestine, but of the people too.
Israel favoured Abbas because it believes he will renounce both the armed struggle and the Palestinian right to return. If he were to do so, he would quickly find himself isolated from the Palestinian masses, and irrelevant to their struggle. But the real question that needs to be addressed is not the name of the leader of the PA, nor even what sort of arrangement can be made with Israel, but rather how to rebuild the Palestinian struggle, and the PLO, as a mass movement capable of mobilising the Palestinian people to assert and gain their rights.
The first Palestinian Intifada, which erupted in 1987, was a challenge to the increasing reliance on a strategy of diplomacy and negotiations. It did not counterpose armed struggle and political activity, but rather represented a mass popular struggle involving both approaches. This is the real challenge facing the Palestinian people; the election of Mahmoud Abbas as president of the PA is a sideshow to the need to rebuild this popular movement.
Roland Rance is a revolutionary socialist living in London, and convenor of Jews Against Zionism (info@jewsagainstzionism.org)