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"Don’t speak evil
of the dead," the adage goes. And when historical figures are evaluated
after they are gone history stands as the judge, the witness and as the hangman
at the same time. No one though considered great while living, can escape the
judgment of history which is merciless while handing out its verdict. Evaluating
a dead person is one of the most difficult tasks when taken up by other mortals.
But again, history is made out of a larger canvas of controversies and
contradictions that the people of various ideologies put forward. When the final
solution comes up the persons and events tower up or crumble down laying all
debates and paradoxes to rest.
The man popularly
known by the name of Yasser Arafat, born as Mohammad Arafat, and introduced to
the world as Abu Ammar, once most feared guerrilla leader of the Palestinian
freedom movement, passed away on November 11, 2004 in a hospital in the French
imperialist capital, Paris. His dead body was brought back to Ramallah (a town
in the West Bank), his prison, where he remained incarcerated as the president
of the stillborn mini-state of Palestine. More than a hundred thousand people,
many of them with moist eyes or weeping, thronged the Muqata grounds around his
Ramallah office, indicating he was still revered and honoured widely among the
Palestinian masses. And right in Palestine there were others who had the opinion
that he recognised the Zionist State of Israel imparting it legitimacy, and
compromised the rights of the Palestinian nation. In the later years of his life
he became "irrelevant" for the U.S.A.; Israeli P.M., Sharon, "regretted" not
killing him during the early eighties; and Hamas and many others wanted him
replaced as leader of the Palestinian national struggle. In a way, he was
unwanted in many quarters —for some an unreliable capitulationist, for others an
unreliable nationalist, for still others a revolutionary who betrayed his cause.
Arafat’s life history
is also a history of the Palestinian national struggle, a life which intertwined
with the contemporary history of the Palestinian people. In his life we can also
see the larger phenomena that appeared on the world stage, especially, that of
the national liberation struggles, the imperialist and social imperialist
machination vis-à-vis national struggles, the character and role of the Arab
regimes and that of the so called anti-imperialist non-aligned countries, and
the wavering behaviour of leaders of the national movements who saw liberation
not as a complete break from imperialism and all reaction but a sort of
compromise with them and co-option into the world imperialist system.
Let us go through a
brief history of the Palestinian national liberation struggle and that of the
life and times of Yasser Arafat.
The land where the
Zionist state of Israel stands today was known as Palestine since ancient times.
The Palestinians have been living there for more than three thousand years. This
land is also home to Judaism, Christianity and Moslem religions. In ancient
times, most of the Jews migrated mainly to Europe and also other parts of the
world. In the process of historical development they developed as part and
parcel of the respective nations where they lived. Only a small number remained
in Palestine. The Zionist movement started in the late nineteenth century with
the aim of establishing a Zionist state extending from the Nile to the city of
Baghdad in Iraq, with the active help and support of the British imperialists.
By the time the First World War was over, the Jewish influx into Palestine
started gathering momentum as Palestine came under the direct rule of the
British after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. After oil was discovered in
the Middle-East the region increasingly acquired importance as a strategic point
for imperialists to use it for world domination. The Zionist movement with the
active support from the British army indulged in terrorism, terrorizing and
driving out Palestinians from villages and setting up Jewish colonies in their
place.
When the State of
Israel was declared through a British sponsored and American supported
resolution in the U.N. in 1948 Israel was a tiny enclave and had only 56
thousand Jewish settlers. But after the withdrawal of British forces from
Palestine the Zionists invaded much of the rest of Palestinian lands driving out
vast majorities of the Palestinian masses. Thus the creation of Israel itself
was an act of aggression exterminating and pushing out Palestinian people from
their homes and lands in great numbers. For the Palestinians it was the Nakba
(the catastrophe) that brought untold sufferings and homelessness which are
still continuing despite the so called peace process.
Arafat, as a young
man of 19, took part in the 1948 war as a fighter. The Arab governments fought
against Israel half-heartedly and did not do enough to support the Palestinian
people’s resistance against Zionist aggressors, allowing the latter to occupy
most of Palestine. These reactionary Arab governments, being protectorates of
the British imperialists could not have been expected to genuinely support the
Palestinian national cause. Like most of the Palestinian people, Arafat too felt
"betrayed by these regimes." The resistance of the Palestinian masses was brave
though spontaneous, scattered and unorganized and, without a military
organization of their own. Nevertheless, they fought the Israelis bravely and
did not take their defeat as final and irreversible. This sentiment is still
strong among the Palestinians despite the fact that they have been betrayed,
hounded, terrorized and continuously killed.
The first seeds of
organized Palestinians to Zionism arose with the formation of Fatah (Victory),
an underground organization in which Arafat had played a prominent role. Then he
also became the leader of Palestine Liberation Organisation, the P.L.O. Under
Arafat the P.L.O became an independent umbrella organization of various militant
Palestinian groups that had taken up arms against the occupation of their
country. The dominant group in the P.L.O. was Arafat’s Fatah and the victory
symbol of two raised fingers (V) that gained popularity among the fighting
organizations throughout the world, had derived its power and appeal from the
Palestinian national struggle.
The reactionary Arab
governments tried to control the expanding power of the Palestinian Resistance
and the first major attack on it by them came in 1970 when American puppet king
Hussein of Jordan opened a whole sale aggression on the Palestinian refugee
camps in and around Amman in September 1970, known as the Black September. The
Palestinian refugees and fighters in tens of thousands were pushed into Lebanon,
and the P.L.O. declared King Hussein as an agent of the U.S. imperialists and
Israel, and an enemy of the Palestinian revolution. The Jordanian attack on the
Palestinians was in the making right from the days of the 1967 "Six Day War" in
which the Arab governments had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the
U.S. and British backed Israeli army. In this war, the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip were overrun and occupied by the Israeli army and they captured Sinai
Peninsula from Egypt, and the strategic Golan Heights from Syria. The Arab
governments considered the Palestinian revolutionary struggle as a dangerous
nuisance. The Black September of 1970 opened the chapter of open hostilities of
the reactionary Arab governments against the Palestinian national liberation
movement.
Why the Arab
governments feared the Palestinian movement was not difficult to understand as
the establishment of a radical, democratic, secular and a socialist Palestine
would have unleashed a chain of revolutions in the Arab countries ruled by
pro-imperialist and reactionary kings, sheikhs and presidents. The Arab masses
have always identified themselves with the sufferings and national cause of the
Palestinian people. The national liberation movement of the Palestinians has
always exerted a radicalizing impact on the Arab masses and aroused
anti-imperialist hatred in them. The Arab governments, fearing radical upsurges
in their own countries, have paid lip service to the Palestinian cause while at
the same time indulged in conspiracies against the Palestinian revolution.
After the
Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when a part of Sinai was wrested back from Israel by
the Egyptian army, Sadaat, the president of Egypt went to Camp David and signed
the document of surrender of the Palestinian national rights to the Israeli
government by extending recognition to the State of Israel and legitimizing its
existence, thus, paving the way for the idea of a Palestinian mini-state
alongside Israel. Sadaat had to pay for his life for his betrayal of the
Palestinian cause. Till then, no Arab government had dared to recognize the
State of Israel, not even the puppet king Hussein of Jordan or the kings of the
reactionary sheikhdoms. Sadaat’s signing of the agreement with Israel did a
great damage to the charter of the P.L.O. that categorically rejected the State
of Israel and instead worked for the establishment of a unified single Palestine
where both Jews and Palestinians would live together democratically. It opened
the way for further betrayals of the Palestinian national cause.
After the Camp David,
Arafat shunned the pro-U.S. Egyptian regime and sought greater co-operation with
Syria and even Saudi Arabia. In the Lebanese civil war of 1976, the
Palestinians, along with the Lebanese government troops, fought against the
pro-Israel Phalangist party and helped the Lebanese preserve their autonomy. In
1982 Israel invaded South Lebanon, enacted the massacre of the Sabra and
Shattila refugee camps and carried out a long war against the Palestinian
fighters. In that war of extermination of the Palestinians the Syrian regime
worked for the defeat of the Palestinian resistance fighters while consolidating
and strengthening one pro-Syrian faction of the Palestinian fighters, thus
breaking their unity in action. The then Soviet Union, which had lost its clout
and influence in Egypt, helped the Syrian designs by not supplying the
Palestinian fighters much required ammunition and equipments to fight against
Israel and instead, gave huge aid to the Syrian regime declaring it a bastion
against the Zionist State of Israel. The Syrian forces in Lebanon and the
pro-Syrian Palestinian faction did not engage the Israeli army but remained
restricted to the Becca Valley over which Syria always had an eye.
The results of the
1982 Israeli aggression on Palestinians in South Lebanon proved disastrous for
the liberation movement. South Lebanon came under Israeli occupation, the PLO
had to surrender its arms and move its headquarters form Lebanon to Tunis. And
worst of all, Arafat, as head of PLO, started his journey towards the two-state
solution, the thing which Sadaat had initiated in 1973 at the dictates of the
USA. It is said that Arafat had started contemplating this, not after 1982, but
after 1973 itself. Whatever be the real fact, the crux is that the decline of
Arafat and a major part of the PLO, except groups like the People’s Front For
the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), culminated in the Oslo process when in 1988
he recognized the existence of Israel as legitimate and condemned terrorism, an
oblique reference to the Palestinian liberation movement, thus initiating a
complete somersault.
Arafat became a
disillusioned man as he tried to use reactionary Arab governments and the
guerrilla movement as tactics to pressurise Israel to come to the negotiating
table for a compromise. He stopped relying on the strength of the Palestinian
people to resist the Zionist aggressors and their imperialist backers. Expelled
from Amman he went to Egypt, then to Syria and Lebanon, staying a long time in
Damascus (Syria). When Sadaat started openly collaborating with the US and
Israel, he again built bridges with King Hussein. Imagine Hussein or the king of
Saudi Arabia acting as the puppets of the US and at the same time smiling and
shaking hands with Arafat to pose as a friend of the Palestinian revolution!
Arafat continuously
visited the revisionist Soviet Union to get help, and these social-imperialists
were happy to use him and the Palestinian movement in their rivalry with the US
to control and dominate the strategic oil rich region of the Middle East. The
Soviet social-imperialists once threatened to bomb Israel out of existence. But
in reality they tried to mislead and sidetrack the Palestinian liberation
movement. They also sent tens of thousands of Russian Jews to Israel to help it
buttress its fighting capacity with human resources.
The downward plunge
took Arafat into the lawns of the White House where he signed the historic
surrender of the PLO in 1993, known as the Oslo Agreement. In the presence of
Bill Clinton he recognized Israel, abandoned armed struggle and accepted the
road map to a truncated, spineless, dependent and helpless Palestinian state.
The charter of the PLO trampled under foot, he took charge as a tool of the US
imperialists and the Zionist Israeli terrorist State to impose peace on the
fighting and struggling masses of Palestine. Collaborating with the CIA and
Israeli secret police he arrested militant Palestinians. He wanted to act as a
willing cop but the demands of US and Israel were so exacting that he found it
difficult to cope with them in the absence of a commitment from the US and
Israel on some highly sensitive issues like the return of the refugees, the
issue of Jerusalem as the capital of "Palestine", and dismantling of the Jewish
settler colonies in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He, as the "President" of
‘Palestine’ and head of the Palestinian Authority, had no power to stop
occasional Israeli incursions into Gaza and the West Bank showing his own
helplessness and powerlessness. He took up the duty of a policeman acting at the
behests of the US and Israel and could not deliver as an efficient man in face
of a powerful resistance of the Palestinian masses against the Israeli
onslaught. This resistance movement also forced him not to use his clout
indiscriminately and he had to humbly ask the people to shun guns and instead
protest "peacefully" against the invading tanks, bulldozers, bombers and
helicopter gun ships. He advised the people that the Intifada should not go
beyond peaceful means.
The Gaza and West
Bank, which were to comprise his Palestinian state, remained under constant
Israeli occupation, never fully retrieved to the Palestinian Authority. Even he
himself was put under office arrest in his presidential office in Ramallah for
more than two years, till his death in Paris, where he was flown after Israeli
permission was given to leave his premises. His offices were attacked many a
times and many of its apartments were razed to the ground, reminding him that he
was able to survive only at the benevolence of the Israeli State. When such was
the situation of the head of the state, what could be his state besides being
completely at the mercy of the Zionist enemy? It was a pathetic and humiliating
end for a heroic beginning — a historical lesson for all those who seek the path
of compromise and a ‘dignified adjustment’ with the imperialists. Imperialism
and all reactionaries demand only total capitulation; for them compromise is
only the first step in their path to disarm the masses and get total servility.
A similar course was to be seen not only with Arafat’s PLO, but also the
liberation movements of Africa (Nelsen Mandella being the best example),
Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc. etc. And what was the solution granted in the
‘compromise’— the two-state solution, where one state was only on paper, with no
spine, no punch, no army, no economy, no dignity?
With Arafat gone, the
two-state theory needs to be buried and the original P.L.O. charter of a
single democratic, secular and socialist Palestine needs to be revived where
Jews and Palestinians would live together, and the national struggle needs to
get rid of the influences of reactionary ideas and forces of all kinds rejecting
all acts of capitulation, and to once again aggress upon the right path of
national liberation from Zionism, imperialism and all reaction. But, for the
present, the man that has replaced Arafat, has been hand-picked by the
US-Zionist gangsters. The answer lies with the masses of Palestine and the Arab
peoples.
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