After the Death of a Partner

-
Aa
+
a
a
a

11 November 2004Adam Keller

Three months ago, in the beginning of August, a delegation of Israeli Gush Shalom activists visited Yasser Arafat at the Presidential Compound in Ramallah, half-ruined in repeated raids by the Israeli armed forces.We have maintained this dialogue for over two decades, in changing circumstances. There was the time before Oslo, when meeting Arafat (or any PLO official) was illegal under Israeli law and could carry a maximum of three years' imprisonment. Then a sharp shift to the days of the flourishing peace process, when meetings with the Palestinian President had become a commonplace in the Israeli mainstream and in his waiting room one could frequently encounter senior Israeli government officials. And from there, again to times of bloodshed and soaring hatred, when Sharon and Bush (with the voluntary help of numerous columnists and politicians) were eminently successful in depicting Arafat as a terrible monster - and meeting him became once again a highly controversial and taboo-breaking act, sometimes involving physical danger at times when government ministers spoke seriously of sending commandos in, to capture or kill Arafat.By keeping contact with and even acting on occasion as human shield for the man venerated by millions of Palestinians as their leader and the father of their nation, we felt that we were serving the long term interests of Israel. And whatever the outside circumstances, inside the meeting room Arafat was always the affable, gracious and attentive host, with the old-fashioned gallantry of handkissing women. The meeting in August this year was not an exception. Arafat seemed strong and vigorous when we discussed the situation in the Gaza Strip (at that time afflicted by a combination of an extensive invasion by the Israeli army and internal strife between Palestinian factions). We came out with a clear message from Arafat: a call upon Sharon to resume the peace negotiations broken off by Barak in 2001, as well as to facilitate the holding of new, internationally-supervised elections for the Palestinian institutions. Arafat himself was quite ready to face in the ballot box any contestant for the presidency. For the longer range, Arafat had set out the vision of a Benelux-type confederation beween Israel, Palestine and Jordan, and recalled in vivid detail a discussion on the subject which he had with Prime Minister Rabin and King Hussein. There was nothing to indicate that this meeting would be the last. If he already felt the symptoms of whatever killed him, he concealed them well - from us and from others who met him at the time. But then, Arafat just did not have the option available to an ordinary 75-year old: to declare himself ill and go to seek the best of medical attention. We will never know if he could have been saved, had he gone to France earlier. But even if completely cured, Sharon would surely not have let him come back, and he would have lived out his remaining days in exile. For Arafat, that was an unacceptable price. He could only carry on with his daily routine - a paradoxical mixture of being head of state and being a closely-guarded prisoner, with the accumulated strain of both roles - until the final collapse. The Paris hospital refused to divulge details of the exact cause of Arafat's death, citing "privacy". Yet he had had precious little privacy in these two final weeks. His dying, like his life, was conducted in the spotlight of publicity, drama and high tragedy mixing with elements of farce and burlesque, when Suha Arafat started an unseemly squabble with senior Palestinian officials - and all too many Israeli politicians and commentators expressing a disgusting glee and hope for the death of an old ill man.Two busloads of Israelis, from Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, will go to the funeral in Ramallah t the initiative of Gush Shalom - to share in the Palestinians' mourning for the Father of their Nation and pay the final respect to Israel's enemy who could have been our partner in building up a peaceful future. We will also mourn the thousands of Israelis and Palestinians who died - and will die - because that chance to make Arafat into Israel's partner was allowed to slip away (or rather, was deliberately smashed and destroyed).And now - what? For all that he had conducted a kind of personal vendetta with Arafat, Sharon may not be entirely happy with the Palestinian leader's passing - which makes much less plausible the claim that Israel has "no partner". Now, quite a few mainstream politicians are calling for the withdrawal from Gaza to be transformed from a unilateral Israeli measure into a bilateral agreement, the beginning of an overall end of the occupation also on the West Bank. And on the extreme right, the call is rather facetiously made "to halt withdrawal from Gaza while watching developments among the Palestinians". For his part, Sharon is already preparing to prove that even with "Arafat the monster" gone, Israel still has "no partner".Meanwhile, the Palestinians confounded the pundits' predictions of "a bloody succession struggle" by a smooth and orderly passing on and division of Arafat's powers among a provisional collective leadership. But Abu Mazen, Abu Ala and the other new leaders have little of the charisma and public standing which Arafat had. Even if hailed in the Western media as "moderates" and "pragmatists", Abu Mazen and Abu Ala will be much less able than Arafat to confront radical militias head-on or make any concessions on for example the implementation of the Right of Return. And some of the leaders who do have a charisma and public standing remotely comparable to Arafat's - such as Marwan Barguthi - are now incarcerated in Israeli prisons, from which Sharon shows no inclination to release them.The key to the situation, in the crucial period immediately ahead, may lie in the article of Palestinian law which mandates new general elections within sixty days of the president's death. Obviously, new elections are vitally necessary in order for any new Palestinian leadership to truly have a legitimacy and popular mandate - and having such a leadership is a vital Israeli need just as much as it is a Palestinian need. But free elections are hardly compatible with an ongoing harsh occupation and daily fighting: free elections cannot take place when any Palestinian voter or candidate can at any moment be "eliminated" by a missile from an Israeli helicopter gunboat or hauled off in the middle of the night for the tender mercies of the Israeli Security Service interrogators. In effect, free elections require a comprehensive cease-fire and an effective reversal of Israel's re-occupation of the West bank cities, imposed since April 2002.Sharon, clearly, has not the least inclination in this direction. And it also seems too much to hope that George W. Bush will start taking seriously his own pronouncements about "the need for a functioning Palestinian democracy"... Adam KellerGush Shalom spokesperson+972-3-5565804 / +972-50-6709603

http://www.geocities.com/keller_adam/gu_no_linebreaks.html