Being Yasir Arafat: A Portrait of Palestine's President

Yasir Arafat may be the most polarizing man alive today. To his detractors, he is an unscrupulous terrorist, responsible for the murders of thousands of innocent civilians; to his supporters, he is the embodiment of Palestinian nationalism and the person who placed the Palestinian cause on the world stage. Depending on one's vantage point, both the archterrorist and father-of-the-nation portrayals are accurate. But like all stereotypes, they tell us more about the person making the assertion than they do about the subject. Rare is the work on Arafat that is nuanced, objective, and analytic.

Two new biographies by Israeli scholars, unfortunately, do not stray from the depressing norm, painting Arafat solely, in the colorful language of one of the authors, Efraim Karsh, as a "bigoted and megalomaniacal extremist blinded by anti-Jewish hatred ... and profoundly obsessed with violence." Neither biography is without value. Their biggest contribution, however, is less to add to our knowledge about Arafat than to document the broad consensus about him now in place in Israel: that he is an incorrigible terrorist and liar who used the peace process as a "strategic deception" in his goal to destroy the Jewish state and who alone scuttled negotiations in order to launch a terror war. If one wants to understand why Israel will never again negotiate with Arafat, and why the Israeli government recently announced its formal intention to "remove" him, these books are a good place to start.

THE BLAND REVOLUTIONARY

Although Arafat has had a propensity to re-create his life story whenever convenient, the basics of his youth are well known. His parents had recently moved to Cairo from Palestine when he was born in 1929. Arafat periodically visited Jerusalem, but he was raised in Cairo, and to this day he speaks with an Egyptian accent. Although distantly related on his mother's side to the aristocratic Husseini family of Jerusalem, he was raised in modest surroundings more reminiscent of his father's Gazan upbringing. Arafat spent his early professional career as an engineer in Kuwait, where, in the late 1950s, he helped found what would later become the largest faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization, Fatah. His life as head of Fatah and then the PLO itself is also well known, including his long and troubled stints in Jordan (until 1971), Lebanon (until 1982), Tunisia (until 1994), and the West Bank and Gaza.

As for Arafat's ideology, almost all of his biographers agree that he has no guiding vision of a better society, no grand strategy, and that he views the world as a series of tactical challenges to be overcome. Although he is a self-styled "revolutionary," there has never been a socially transformative aspect to his world view. He is neither a Marxist believing in the efficacy of class struggle nor an Islamist advocating an austere view of the good polity nor even a true revolutionary nationalist in the mold of his own hero, Gamal Abdel al-Nasser, Egypt's nationalist president. Instead, Arafat appears to be someone who believes simply that his national group has superior claims to a small patch of land and who is dedicated to defeating those he sees as usurpers.

The blandness of Arafat's ideology reflects his urban, lower-middle-class origins. Fatah's Palestinian nationalism and the social origins of its leaders stood in sharp contrast to the pan-Arabism of the 1950s and 1960s and the well-to-do Arab intellectuals who formulated it. In the internal Palestinian struggle over whether to advocate a separate Palestinian nationalism or be part of the larger pan-Arab movement, Arafat and the nationalists won, and Arafat's background helped thrust him past more glamorous figures into the leadership of the Palestinian national movement.

Arafat's advocacy of armed struggle should also be understood as in large part a byproduct of internal Palestinian politics. Violence was what urban toughs could offer that pan-Arabist cafe intellectuals could not; it was an ideological stick with which to beat up political rivals. The concept of armed struggle allowed diaspora Palestinian nationalism to be consolidated as a lower-middle-class national movement, and it is this formulation that has been at loggerheads since 1994 with the more urbane Palestinian nationalism that developed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

By not putting the history of the PLO's violence into context, Karsh and Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin render it a virtually unintelligible phenomenon. For them, violence and terror happen primarily because Arafat is an evil man who believes in the "absolute glorification of violence." But almost all nationalist movements have resorted to some degree of violence against their enemies. The PLO has not been unique in this regard, nor has Fatah been unique in using violence as part of its intracommunal maneuvering. Without in any way excusing horrible atrocities against civilians, it is crucial to understand the use of violence, even terror, in terms that go beyond a single individual.

TO OSLO AND BEYOND

Arafat's ideology is simplistic and, as his critics charge, may not really have changed over the years vis-à-vis Israel, but the same cannot be said of the broader Palestinian community. By far the most important ideological change in Palestinian nationalism over the past quarter century has been the transformation from advocating a Palestinian state in place of Israel to advocating a Palestinian state next to Israel. Not all Palestinians have adopted this change -- as we know from the pronouncements of Hamas and others -- but certainly most of those living in the West Bank and Gaza have. Polls consistently show that about 70 percent of Palestinians there want a two-state solution and believe in reconciliation with Israel after the Palestinian state is created. This is also the official policy of the PLO.