Here's some thoughts on Arafat from somebody else on the left, much maligned around here also. I was searching for one particular article, but quite a collection came up.
From: THE MIRAGE OF PEACE , By: Said, Edward W., Nation, 00278378, 10/16/95, Vol. 261, Issue 12
Database: MasterFILE Premier
Of course, the best response to terrorism is justice, not more repression. The deep tragedy of Palestine is that a whole people, their history and aspirations have been under such comprehensive assault--not only by Israel (with its patron and collaborator the United States) but also by the Arab governments and, since Oslo, by the P.L.O. under Arafat.
It is necessary here to try to describe the complicated mix of emotions and actualities that govern Palestinian life in the occupied territories today. True, Arafat's entry into Gaza on July 1, 1994, gave people there the sense that they are no longer as confined as they once were. They can go to the beaches, they do not have to be indoors after sundown, and they enjoy some rapport with a Palestinian (not an Egyptian or Israeli) police force. In every other respect life has become worse. There is a cynical Israeli policy of letting Arafat become as much a petty dictator as is consistent with their interests. Thus, the tolerance for his inflated police force and intelligence services, totaling about 19,000 (Oslo I and a subsequent Cairo agreement limited him to 9,000).
Arafat's political arm is his party, Fatah, which now plays the role of enforcer, armed by him throughout the territories. He himself governs unilaterally, in the absence of real laws or constitution. At the urging of Israel and the United States, he has instituted military courts that can arrest, detain and sentence people without due process. (When Warren Christopher and Al Gore visited the autonomy zones in March they commended Arafat's decision to establish these courts.) Raji Sourani, the brilliant Gaza lawyer who has spent his whole life defending Palestinians against Israeli measures of this kind, protested Arafat's fiat, and was arrested and detained for a short period without trial in February. He was recently stripped of the chairmanship of his own human rights group, with the connivance of Arafat's Palestinian Authority (P.A.).
Having effectively dismembered the P.L.O.--the only organization that Palestinians throughout the Diaspora have had to represent their national aspirations--Arafat now surrounds himself with a formidable network of hangers-on, sycophants, commission agents, spies and informers. All of his appointments to his Cabinet of eighteen ministers (seventeen of them men) are beholden to him for their budgets, and indeed for their political existence. In some ministries, whose work and authority exist mainly on paper, he continues to appoint deputies (plus about 750 "director-generals" without any known jobs to perform). The total number of people employed directly by Arafat for the P.A. is estimated at 48,000; this includes the 19,000 police plus about 29,000 members of the civil administration. Whatever money Arafat gets from donors (about $10 million a month), local taxes and taxes collected for him by the Israelis (a total of nearly $30 million a month) is all he has to spend. Little is left over for improving sewage, health services or employment.
With all the Palestinian competence in economics and engineering available, Arafat instead consistently engages the services of shady figures like the Moroccan Gabriel Banon and the Lebanese Pierre Rizk, former Phalangist contact for the Mossad in Lebanon, or one Khalid Slam (a k a Mohammed Rashid), a Kurd of uncertain background notoriously skilled at arranging quick deals. These are his fixers and advisers, along with a new group of American business consultants, who supposedly function as his economic counselors.
There is, moreover, no system of financial accountability. According to David Hirst, writing in The Guardian for April 15, Arafat's attorney general is "a man whom Fatah once sentenced to death for stealing funds destined for the intifada." Arafat does what he pleases, spends as he likes, disposes how he feels his interests might be served. Above all, as Julian Ozanne wrote in The Financial Times, his pact with Israel "keeps the Palestinian economy largely within Israel's broad macroeconomic trade and taxation policy, recognising the dependence of the territories on their neighbouring economic giant for the foreseeable future." All petroleum and petroleum products used by Palestinians come exclusively from the Israeli petroleum authority. Local Palestinians pay an excise tax, the net amount of which is held in Arafat's name in an Israel bank account. Only he can get to it, and only he can spend it. At a donors' meeting in Paris this past April an I.M.F. observer told me that the group voted $18.5 million to the Palestinian people: $18 million was paid directly to Arafat; $500,000 was put in the public treasury. How it shall be disbursed is at Arafat's discretion alone.
A group of wealthy Palestinian businessmen (most of whom made their fortunes in the Persian Gulf) have claimed to be fed up with Arafat's methods and have devised a series of projects for electricity, telecommunications and the like. These are financed through what they call "public" stock offerings, though the actual public is far too poor to invest in such schemes. These men (who additionally invest in, and profit from, real estate) nevertheless also deal directly with Arafat. They meet with him secretly and are not beholden to anything like a national planning or regulatory authority. They build the way they want, responsible only to themselves.
Given such activity, Arafat is lucky that the international media have largely spared him their investigations. This comes after dozens of books and articles before Oslo on the P.L.O.'s finances, its support of terrorism, etc. At home, meanwhile, the Palestinian press is not free. Very little that is critical of Arafat appears there. On May 5, al-Hayat reported that the offices of al-Ummah, an opposition paper in Jerusalem, were deliberately burned; the paper's owner blamed Palestinian police. The opinions of opponents are severely curtailed. Hanan Ashrawi, by now internationally known, cannot be read or seen or read about in the semi-official Palestinian daily al-Quds because she is considered too independent.
Arafat and his Palestinian Authority have become a sort of Vichy government for Palestinians. Those of us who fought for Palestine before Oslo fought for a cause that we believed would spur the emergence of a just order. Never has this ideal been further from realization than today. Arafat is corrupt. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are no alternative. And most Palestinian intellectuals have been too anxious to bolster their own case, following Arafat and his lieutenants in the abandonment of their principles and history just to be recognized by the West, to be invited to the Brookings Institution and to appear on U.S. television.
I do not pretend to have any quick solutions for the situation now referred to as "the peace process," but I do know that for the vast majority of Palestinian refugees, day laborers, peasants and town and camp dwellers, those who cannot make a quick deal and those whose voices are never heard, for them the process has made matters far worse. Above all, they may have lost hope. And that is also true of the Palestinian political consciousness in general.
At a time when people are suffering and shabby leaders are reaping Nobel Prizes that only enable more exploitation, it is crucial to bear witness to the truth. As Palestinians we must ask whether our century of struggle should conclude not with a state and not with a democracy but with an awful caricature of both, extracted by a country that alone in the world has no officially declared borders and manipulated by a man whose methods and patrons resemble those of Saddam Hussein.
I have been particularly disheartened by the role played in all this by liberal Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Silence is not a response, and neither is some fairly tepid endorsement of a Palestinian state, with Israeli settlements and the army more or less still there, still in charge. The peace process must be demystified and spoken about plainly. Palestine/Israel is no ordinary bit of geography; it is more saturated in religious, historical and cultural significance than any place on earth. It is also now the place where two peoples, whether they like it or not, live together tied by history, war, daily contact and suffering. To speak only in geopolitical cliches (as the Clinton Administration does) or to speak about "separating" them (as Rabin does) is to call forth more violence and degradation.
These two communities must be seen as equal to each other in rights and expectations; only from such a beginning can justice then proceed. This is not where Oslo I or Oslo II began; nor will they lead to a just settlement. The peace process as now understood is a process with no true peace at all. In its present form, I am convinced, it will not stand the test of time; it must be completely rethought and put on a fairer course. I urge fellow Palestinians, Arabs, Israelis, Europeans and Americans not to flinch from the unpalatable truth and to demand a reckoning from the unscrupulous leaders who have lied about the facts and tampered with the lives of far too many decent people.
From: Arafat's deal.
Source : Nation , 9/20/93, Vol. 257 Issue 8, p269, 2p
Author(s) : Said, Edward W.
Two weeks ago the only really independent members of the P.L.O. Executive Committee, Mahmoud Darwish and Shafiq al-Hout, resigned in protest; a few more are said to be considering the move. Hout said that Arafat had become an autocrat whose personal handling of Palestinian finances was a disaster and worse. I count no more than five people holed up in Tunis, including Arafat, who, with little legal background or experience of ordinary civil life, have hatched decisions affecting almost 6 million people. There has been no consultation to speak of. In the territories, the occupation has been getting worse, and this after ten rounds of fruitless negotiations. When I was there this summer no one I spoke with failed to make the connection, blaming Arafat and the delegation members in equal measure. Then in August three leading negotiators resigned, bewailing Arafat's undemocratic methods, implying that while they bled themselves dry with the Israelis, Arafat had opened up a secret channel for his negotiations. They were subsequently brought back into line, leaving their fellow negotiator, the respected Gaza leader and delegation head Dr. Haidar AbdelShafi, alone to issue statements calling for "reform and democracy."
In full:
BOOKLESS IN GAZA , By: Said, Edward W., Nation, 00278378, 9/23/96, Vol. 263, Issue 8
Three weeks ago I learned through a friend that two of my books were being picked up and confiscated from West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem bookstores by Yasir Arafat's security men. My first reaction was incredulity, so I asked my friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod to try to get me more information. Three days later, he rang me back to say that a bookseller in Ramallah had told him ten copies had been removed by order of the Ministry of Information. I have known the Minister, Yasir Abed Rabbo, for about fifteen years, so I asked Ibrahim to call him directly about the matter. Ibrahim told me that abed Rabbo professed complete ignorance on the matter. To date, no one has accepted responsibility for the ban and confiscations, which continue.
Over the days since those first calls, I have heard from other friends and sources that the two books being confiscated--both in Arabic and both compilations of my biweekly pieces in alHayat that include three Nation articles as well--had in fact made some impression on my readers in the West Bank and Gaza. I had already been a nonperson to the Palestinian media, although in March, while visiting my son in Ramallah, I was surprised that a twenty-minute radio broadcast on the Voice of Palestine was dedicated to attacking me.
Arafat, I know, has been greatly angered by my persistent critique not only of the Oslo accords and what I believe to have been a fraudulent (so far as Palestinians are concerned) peace process, but also of his increasingly dictatorial, profoundly corrupt and visionless attempt to rule his people. I always point out that he is not president but, in effect, the Israeli enforcer of the military occupation by other means. I regard him, therefore, as a Petain figure who has taken advantage of his people's exhaustion and kept himself in power by conceding virtually everything significant about our political and human rights. What he did after he came to Gaza in July 1994 has worsened the effects of the twenty-nine-year occupation (which still continues), and over the months I have reminded my readers, of whom he seems to have been one, that cronyism, a huge security apparatus, kowtowing to the Israelis, buying people off and torturing, imprisoning or killing dissidents at will, are not the ways to establish a new polity for our people.
Like every dictator and petty despot before him, Arafat thinks that by confiscating books, banning articles and imprisoning or murdering people who seem too independent, he can blot out dissent and dissatisfaction. I have always tried to act on the principle that intellectuals must try to change reality and be critical of power, not accommodate it. Yet so far--and I am not speaking here about the banning of my books--there has been an extraordinary Palestinian trahison des clercs, and I simply cannot understand why. Why does nationalism, and a primitive nationalism at that, suddenly shut off all the appeals to universal values that we had used so bravely in the past? The problem for Palestinian intellectuals is that too few of us have had the courage to speak up.
That is a widespread problem in the Arab world, where I believe the press and the media generally are uniquely compromised. In most Arab countries, it is legally impossible to criticize the ruler or a member of his family. In Jordan a few months ago, a courageous and outspoken man, Layth Shubeilat--who comes from a distinguished Jordanian (not Palestinian) family and is the head of the engineers' syndicate and a former Member of Parliament--was sentenced to three years in prison for giving a public lecture in which he criticized King Hussein and the history of the Hashemite family in its dealings with the Zionists. This lecture was delivered shortly after the King was seen on television publicly mourning his "old and dear friend, Yitzhak Rabin." To my knowledge, none of the charges against Shubeilat refuted anything that he said in his lecture.
This is not so uncommon an occurrence in the Arab world; what is truly startling is the uniform obduracy of these regimes embodied in their aging, largely minority kings, presidents, dictators for life. They have so far succeeded in maintaining a cowed silence among otherwise outspoken activists, writers and intellectuals. So there is a two-way relationship here that must be broken, I believe. And if it means doing it--opening up a debate--from the outside, then so be it.
A debate is exactly what Arafat does not want. In the Legislative Assembly recently he petulantly refused to allow further discussion of the proposed Constitution (which already gives him an egregious amount of power) and said that the Constitution was an "executive"--not parliamentary--issue.
In late August, a brave deputy, Ziad Abu Amr, raised in the Parliament the matter of the book-banning, and it is slated for discussion soon. That is an important development. But Arafat's view at present is, I believe, to rule without question and to try either to efface, humiliate or circumvent any challenge to his tattered authority. I say "tattered" because, despite flying around in two ancient Egyptian helicopters, he must always be monitored by his Israeli masters in a third.
The situation very much resembles the one portrayed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in The Autumn of the Patriarch. The man scarcely knows the difference between reality and illusion, and were it not for the cruelty with which he treats his dependent cronies and hangers-on, the situation would be comic.
I hope that, as a result of this censorship, there will be more candid and accurate discussion of the peace process. Mostly, the Western media have behaved scandalously, accepting the hyperbole and cant of the Americans and the Israelis and their Arab clients; they have neither read the texts of the Oslo agreements nor looked at the situation on the ground, in which Palestinians are now oppressed by Israelis and by a sort of Israeli-imposed enforcer--a situation that Benjamin Netanyahu will make a good deal worse. But my larger hope is that more Palestinian writers and intellectuals will begin to engage in the kind of questioning and challenge that our situation so desperately requires. |
