As noted in these previous posts, Richard Chesnoff is one of America’s foremost commentators on Middle East affairs. He is also one of the relatively few American journalists to have interviewed and spent time with Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.
With Arafat near death, Mr. Chesnoff writes this NY Daily News op-ed in which he notes what could have been:
If anyone had the ability to forge a Palestinian state then, it was Arafat. He had the political power, the money and the military force.
Tragically, like other Palestinian leaders before him, he wasted his chance. He used his political power to gain more power and the money to corrupt and control. Worst of all, instead of using his military force to squelch terrorism, he financed it, bringing more destruction to his people as well as to Israelis.
Then, Mr. Chesnoff zeros in on Arafat’s fatal leadership flaw:
Why did a man who had both the opportunity and the intellect to deliver his people a state of their own fail to do so?
He lacked the realism, the vision and, most important, the courage to make the shift from terrorist to statesman. He spoke (in Arabic) not of peace with Israel but of a truce, something he could always break. And he refused to tell his people that Israel never would commit demographic suicide by letting millions of Palestinians return.
He also feared that if he ever told his people to accept a state that was less than what he had promised, he would lose stature, popularity and the place he believed he deserved in Arab history.
False pride is often a fatal error in the Arab world – a character flaw born not of heroism but of cowardice.
Read the entire piece. Would not it be ironic if Arafat’s legacy is a new generation of Palestinian leadership that understands the destructive futility of Arafat’s strategy towards Israel and embarks on a new, realistic path toward a Palestinian state?
Meanwhile, Max Boot writes of Arafat in this L.A. Times piece:
There has been no more successful terrorist in the modern age. Yet his biggest victims were not Israelis. It was his own people who suffered the most. If Arafat had displayed the wisdom of a Gandhi or Mandela, he would long ago have presided over the establishment of a fully independent Palestine comprising all of the Gaza Strip, part of Jerusalem and at least 95% of the West Bank. In fact, he seemed well on his way toward this goal when I met him in 1998 as part of a delegation of American scholars and journalists.
The place was his Ramallah compound, the time after midnight (Arafat was a night owl). He was wearing his trademark fatigues, and his hands and lips were shaking uncontrollably. Much of the session was conducted via translator, but Arafat broke into English when asked a question about Palestinian violations of the Oslo accords. It was the kind of query a democratic statesman would have batted away without a second thought.
Arafat, however, grew visibly agitated and stammered: “Be careful when you are speaking to me! Be careful, you are speaking to Arafat!” The threat of violence hung in the air as we left. Clearly Arafat had not quite mastered the art of being a politician or, rather, he was a politician in the mold of Mugabe or Mao.