Being Yasir Arafat: A Portrait of Palestine's President

The transformation of the Palestinian national consensus has not been based on a growing recognition of Israel's intrinsic legitimacy, however. Even the most moderate peacenik Palestinian will always believe that the creation of Israel in 1948 constituted an historic injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people. But the strong international consensus concerning the legitimacy of Israel within its 1967 borders and the legitimacy of a Palestinian state in the remaining 23 percent of historical Palestine has gradually convinced most Palestinians that this is their best shot at self-determination.

The Oslo peace process reflected and was supposed to capitalize on this transformation, but unfortunately it was designed in such a way as to make ultimate failure much more likely. It is an indication of the weakness of the Oslo structure that the Rubins and Karsh cannot even agree on where the process was supposed to lead. The Rubins repeatedly state, incorrectly, that Oslo mandated the creation of a Palestinian state. But no such final outcome can be found in any of the Oslo agreements. Karsh correctly identifies this weakness in Oslo, calling it "nothing short of mind-boggling" to have no final status goal toward which to work.

Oslo reflected the naive hope of its drafters that if Palestinians and Israelis focused for a few years on interim steps and confidence-building measures, then the really difficult issues at the heart of the conflict could be solved. Without a vision of what a final settlement would entail, however, Oslo merely gave rejectionists on both sides time to mobilize. Every minor mistake or missed deadline was portrayed as a sign of bad faith, part of the master conspiracy each side accused the other of perpetrating. By not laying out a two-state solution at the outset in 1993 -- when it was truly possible -- Arafat and especially then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin missed in their caution a rare historic opportunity to end the conflict.

The latest peace initiative -- the "road map" put forward by the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations -- corrects one of Oslo's two fatal flaws: it contains a clear vision of two states living side by side in peace. Lest anyone believe that separated Bantustans will be a credible substitute for a Palestinian state, it calls for an "independent and viable" Palestine based on the 1967 borders. But the road map repeats Oslo's mistake of drawing out the process of getting there into many steps and stages, which will allow each side to halt the process by alleging that the other has not fulfilled its latest commitment. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a lifelong opponent of Palestinian national aspirations, has proved a master at this tactic.

Oslo's structure also helped to encourage the dismal politics practiced by Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (PA) after 1994. Although neither biography focuses much on internal Palestinian politics, both note the pa's authoritarian and largely corrupt practices. Arafat was not the absolute dictator these authors suggest, but neither was he any democrat. Oslo allowed an external leadership to return to Palestine and consolidate its power over supportive but distinctive local elites. Karsh notes that there has been a fundamental political cleavage within Palestinian society under the pa -- not the PLO versus Hamas, but rather Arafat and his outsiders versus the West Bank and Gazan insiders. This same cleavage has been analyzed, in more nuanced form, by the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki as one pitting an old guard against a new one. Still others describe it as the Oslo elite versus the new or intifada elite.

In its drive to consolidate power over a population with which it had many emotional and familial ties but no practical political experience, the Oslo elite needed to construct a politics that favored its brand of old-school urban thuggery over the locals' more modern and democratic sensibilities. As a result, the PA favored diktat over democracy, personalism over institutions, and corruption over good governance. And this "politics of antithesis," as I have called it elsewhere, did indeed, at least until the al Aqsa intifada, allow Arafat and his "Tunisian" allies to be remarkably successful in fragmenting and defeating their homegrown rivals.

'48 VERSUS '67

Both Karsh and the Rubins pin the failure of the July 2000 Camp David negotiations and the subsequent intifada squarely on Arafat. Indeed, it is conventional wisdom these days in Israel and even the United States that Israel made a generous offer to Arafat, who turned it down, failed to make any counteroffer, and went home to start a violent uprising. Efforts to provide a more nuanced and complex understanding of what happened at that fateful summit -- where there was plenty of blame to go around -- have had only limited effect in displacing this narrative.

It is true that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's proposal at Camp David -- to transfer 92 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza to a Palestinian state, along with some control over East Jerusalem -- stunned Israelis with its generosity. But it is important to remember that Arafat's rejection of the proposals was hugely popular among Palestinians. Explaining away the rejection simply as a product of Arafat's idiocy or venality, as so many authors do, does little to illuminate the deeper forces at work.