For Israel

The Death of Arafat by George Friedman

Interesting analysis, emailed in full to me, but available only to subscribers. Selection below:

"....And this was Arafat's fatal crisis. He had established the principle of Palestine, but what he had failed to define was what that Palestinian nation meant and what it wanted. The latter was the critical point. Arafat's strategy was to appear the statesman restraining uncontrollable radicals. He understood that he needed Western support to get a state, and he used this role superbly. He appeared moderate and malleable in English, radical and intractable in Arabic. This was his insoluble dilemma.

Arafat led a nation that had no common understanding of their goal. There were those who wanted to recover a part of Palestine and be content. There were those who wanted to recover part of Palestine and use it as a base of operations to retake the rest. There were those who would accept no intermediate deal but wanted to destroy Israel. Arafat's fatal problem was that in the course of creating the Palestinian nation, he had convinced all three factions that he stood with them.

Like many politicians, Arafat had made too many deals. He had successfully persuaded the West that (a) he genuinely wanted a compromise and (b) that he could restrain terrorism. But he had also persuaded Palestinians that any deal was merely temporary, and others that he wouldn't accept any deal. By the time of the Oslo accords, Arafat was so tied up in knots that he could no longer speak for the nation he created. More precisely, the Palestinians were so divided that no one could negotiate on their behalf, confident in his authority. Arafat kept his position bysacrificing his power.

By the 1990s, the space left by the demise of pan-Arabism had been taken by the rise of Islamist religiosity. Hamas, representing the view that there is a Palestinian nation but that it should be understood as part of the Islamic world under Islamic law, had become the most vibrant part of the Palestinian polity. Nothing was more alien from Arafat's thinking than Hamas. It ran counter to everything he had learned from Nasser....As Hamas rose, Arafat became entirely tactical. His goal was to retain position if not power, and toward that end, he would do what was needed. A lifetime of tactics had destroyed all strategy.....The chaos and failure that marked Black September became emblematic of his life...."

posted by ninelives @ 7:15 PM