new york | Yasser Arafat may be remembered as a revolutionary or a statesman, a peacemaker or an arch-terrorist, the man who put Palestinian aspirations on the international map or the man who most harmed his compatriots.
But among Jews, both Arafat’s friends and detractors say the Palestinian Authority president — who died Thursday at age 75 — will be remembered as Public Enemy No. 1.
“He will go down as the largest mass murderer of Jews since Hitler,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “His life was devoted more to killing Jews than to the welfare of his own people.”
A Nobel Peace Prize winner who often issued formal condemnations of violence but never ceased using it, Arafat was snubbed by both Israel and the United States by the end of his life.
In the three years leading up to his death, the aging symbol of the Palestinians’ national hopes found himself quarantined in his Ramallah compound by an Israeli government that viewed him as both “irrelevant” and as the ultimate obstacle to Mideast peace.
In contrast to the frequent White House invitations extended by President Clinton to Arafat, President Bush treated him as a pariah, never once asking him to Pennsylvania Avenue.
Arafat’s sidelining and virtual house arrest capped a raucous progression of more than three decades during which the mainstream Jewish community moved from revulsion at the terrorist revolutionary who addressed the United Nations with a pistol holster at his hip to cautious optimism about the putative peacemaker who shook the hand of a reluctant Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn, and then to profound disappointment and resentment at the intransigent old man’s inability to abandon terrorism as a political tool and end his people’s conflict with Israel.
“History will judge him as never able to make the transition from revolutionary diaspora leader to a leader who is capable of governing with accountability and transparency with respect to the rule of law and capable of negotiating,” Aaron David Miller, president of the Seeds of Peace program and an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations to six U.S. secretaries of state, said in a telephone interview.
But if Arafat was unable to change from terrorist to statesman, the mainstream Jewish community did undergo transitions in its attitude toward Arafat. The shifts, said Kenneth Jacobson, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League, “reflected what was going on in Israel” at any given moment.
As long as Arafat refused to recognize Israel, dealing with him was seen by many Jews as taboo, Jacobson said. When Arafat accepted U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 in 1988, implying Palestinian recognition of Israel and at least formally renouncing terrorism, it appeared that some sort of rapprochement was in the offing.
But “the community as a whole didn’t buy it,” Jacobson said.
In 1993, the Oslo accords changed all that.
“I think Rabin’s famous reluctant handshake on the White House lawn typified the way the community felt,” Jacobson said. “We didn’t necessarily trust him, but this was an opportunity.”
With that opportunity, Arafat’s stature in segments of the Jewish world changed. When a group of American Jews met him in Stockholm in 1988, the encounter sparked an uproar. But after Oslo, meetings between Arafat and Jewish groups were not unusual.
But skepticism quickly re-emerged, especially when Arafat refused to seriously confront Palestinian terrorists even during the peace process and continuously sent signals to the Arab and Muslim world that he did not take his commitments to Israel seriously.
The final break came in the summer of 2000, after Arafat refused the peace plan proposed by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the Camp David summit. When the second intifada erupted a few months later, Jacobson said, Jews felt the promise Arafat once seemed to offer had been squandered.
Two years later, Bush came to agree with the Israeli view that Arafat was not a credible peacemaker, and that the Palestinians would have to find other leaders not “compromised by terror” if they wanted a state.
According to Dennis Ross, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former U.S. Middle East peace envoy, Arafat “will go down historically as someone in whom hopes were placed — but they were misplaced.”
“Yasser Arafat, ultimately, was a decision avoider, not a decision maker,” said Ross, whose book, “The Missing Peace,” chronicles the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “He succeeded much more at being a symbol than being a leader.”
Muhammad Abd ar-Rauf al-Qudwah al-Husseini — Yasser is a nickname — was born in Cairo in 1929. He spent the majority of his youth in Egypt, though he lived with an uncle in Jerusalem between the ages of 5 and 9.
In the late 1950s Arafat founded the Fatah movement, dedicated to armed struggle against Israel. In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded, and Fatah soon became its core group. In 1969, Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO’s executive committee.
Throughout the 1970s, Palestinian terrorists carried out a series of audacious attacks against Israelis, including shootings, bombings and hijackings. Intelligence reports from those years indicate that the plans for many of these attacks originated from Arafat’s office.
In 1982, Israeli forces invaded Lebanon and drove Arafat out of the mini-state he had established there, forcing him to set up shop in Tunis.
In 1993, following secret negotiations in Norway, Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo accords, establishing a framework for peace. The next year Arafat made his triumphant return to the Gaza Strip, and he, Rabin and Rabin’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1996, Arafat was overwhelmingly elected president of the Palestinian Authority, which voted to revoke portions of the PLO’s charter that called for destroying Israel, though the revision process was never completed.
In 2000, to the chagrin of Oslo supporters, including an incensed Clinton — who had staked his legacy in large part on forging Israeli-Palestinian peace — Arafat refused what many said was an unprecedented peace proposal from Barak at Camp David.
Later in 2000 the second intifada erupted. Blaming Arafat for spiraling Palestinian violence, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon confined Arafat to his Ramallah headquarters in 2001. Arafat could leave the Palestinian territories, Sharon said, but might not be allowed back.
In the end, Arafat left the shattered building only once, briefly, to survey the results of a major Israeli incursion into the West Bank in 2002, but did not leave again until October, when he flew for medical treatment to France, where he ultimately died.
Ross, who said he spent more time with Arafat than “any non-Palestinian,” called him a maddening negotiating partner.
“As a negotiator, he simply wouldn’t reveal anything,” Ross said. “He had the tactic of saying nothing, hoping that the Israelis or we would move towards him.”
But in the end, Israelis and Jews worldwide, not to mention the American president, chose to move away from Arafat — and that, Siegman said, will be part of his legacy.
“Arafat,” he said, “will not be rehabilitated within the Jewish community by his death.’
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