Yasser Arafat never achieved his childhood dream of “liberating” Palestine from the Israelis. He did not even succeed in his lesser aim of creating a Palestinian mini-state in the West Bank and Gaza with Jerusalem as its capital. Yet through long years it was he who kept the flame of Palestinian nationhood flickering, and on his death hope had not been extinguished.With an unprepossessing physical appearance, topped by a trademark black and white headscarf, Arafat was hardly the revolutionary leader of romantic imagination. Yet unlike more glamorous freedom fighters Arafat displayed remarkable staying-power, dominating his movement for more than a generation and achieving at times a degree of international recognition and respect that had seemed beyond his grasp in the early days of struggle.As it has turned out, Arafat goes to his grave with mixed reviews, marginalised internationally, his support base fractured and his reputation as a player in the Middle East much diminished. He was widely blamed for the failure of the Camp David summit in July 2000 when Bill Clinton, in the last months of his presidency, again sought to forge an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.Student contemporaries spoke with awe of his almost encyclopaedic memory for the minutiae of Palestinian student life, and his frequent resort to theatrics to get his way in debates. It was during this period that Arafat’s brand of myth-making also began to take shape.By 1969, when he began his long reign as PLO chairman, Arafat had become something of a mythic figure. But the responsibilities of office, his difficulties in controlling his own faction (let alone the fractious Palestinian movement itself), and pressures from his Arab hosts often saw him mired in regional conflicts at the expense of doing what he saw as the main task: confronting Israel. To loyalists, Arafat’s huge achievement was to give expression and direction to the national will. “How else”, asked one of his key supporters, “do you explain the decision of countless women to let their children die for the cause?” Edward Said, the late Palestinian scholar and frequent critic of Arafat, regarded his main achievement as giving coherence, unity and national leadership to the cause of Palestine. That may prove to be Arafat’s political epitaph. It would certainly not have accorded with his own impatient aims. He may have secured a toehold for his people in their promised land, but Middle East circumstances conspired to deny him a bigger prize. His legacy is far from secure. Excerpted from an obituary by Tony Walker and Harvey Morris in The Financial Times, November 11
