Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, recently published an op-ed in The Houston Chronicle on Yasser Arafat's vision of the Palestinian future.
It took many people quite a long time to come to the realization that Arafat genuinely rejected Israel's legitimacy, that is, that he rejected its right to exist. I always thought that this was fairly obvious, but Arafat's insistence on a Palestinian right of return made abundantly clear what he really desired.
Here's Morris' take on this aspect of Arafat's life:
When Arafat set out as a young engineer in the Palestinian Diaspora to bring justice to his people, he thought and spoke, clearly and insistently, of the return of the Palestinians to Palestine and the return of Palestine to its "rightful owners." Nothing less. That is what Arafat strove for all his life, wavering only on tactics and strategy, not on the goal.By the 1990s he understood that only a combination of political-diplomatic stratagems (resulting in international - meaning mainly American - pressure on Israel), terrorism and demographics would do the job, producing a Palestine with an Arab majority.
Whatever deluded Westerners might believe, Arafat was no liberal, taking account of others' views and feelings and seeking solutions through conciliation and compromise. In Arafat's eyes and those of his people, there is only one justice: Palestinian justice. Only what the Palestinians believe and seek is just.
That is why, according to Dennis Ross, former chief American negotiator in the Middle East, Arafat insisted at Camp David in July 2000, to President Bill Clinton's astonishment and chagrin, that there had never been a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The small, walled hillock, called the Noble Sanctuary, with its two mosques, was an Islamic Arab site. That alone. And so there had to be sole Palestinian Arab sovereignty over the site.
Of course, Arafat was actually making a more comprehensive point - that all of Palestine belonged rightfully to the Palestinians and that Jewish claims lacked any legitimacy. That was why he turned down the peace proposals of Ehud Barak in July 2000 and the proposals from Clinton the following December. It was not because Barak declined to kiss both his cheeks or because Palestinians wanted an additional sliver of land here or there.
Arafat said no because he refused to accept any settlement that did not include a mechanism for its future subversion, a loophole that would allow the Palestinians, down the road, to undermine its two-state core - specifically, the "right of return" of the Palestinian refugees to Israeli territory.
Such a return would, of course, spell Israel's demise. (Israel has a population of about 5 million Jews and almost 1.3 million Arabs; there are about 4 million Palestinians registered as refugees by the United Nations.) In short, Arafat wanted all of "Palestine," not a watered-down 22 percent solution.
Morris rightly points out that Arafat's greatest success was a political one:
. . . on the political front, Arafat's achievements have been nothing short of stupendous. Over the decades he orchestrated an unrelenting terrorist-political campaign that has placed the Palestinian problem at the top of the international agenda and garnered for Palestinian sovereignty and statehood almost consensual international support (compare this with the almost complete lack of interest in the Palestinian problem between 1949 and 1967). Within two decades of assuming the chairmanship of the PLO, Arafat managed to forge the political tools and alliances, despite military setbacks, that were to carry the Palestinians to the brink of statehood.While Arafat failed to deliver a Palestinian state, the clamor in the overlapping Arab and Islamic worlds for Palestinian self-determination is overwhelming. And no worthy Western European can be seen abroad without a metaphorical kaffiyeh draped around his neck. Even George Bush and Ariel Sharon say they support Palestinian statehood.
Moreover, by engineering a rebellion that is widely perceived as the weak versus the strong, the Third World against the first, Arafat maneuvered Israel, through provocative terrorism, into crushing an impoverished, suffering people seemingly bent only on liberation. This has raised serious doubts among many Europeans and even some Americans about the legitimacy of Israel's existence.
Indeed, some serious Western (and Israeli) intellectuals now openly advocate Israel's replacement by a unitary Arab-Jewish state, which would eventually devolve into an Arab majority state. In his last years, Arafat seems to have set the international community on a course which may eventually lead to a reversal of its historic endorsement of Jewish statehood.
Since Arafat expressed the views of the vast majority of Palestinians, Morris concludes that Arafat's death might not make any difference at all for the search for peace.
More: Morris recently reviewed Dennis Ross' The Missing Peace for The New Republic. Unfortunately, the review isn't available on-line. If you want to find the print version, see the issue dated November 8, 2004. Morris argues, in short, that Ross could never admit that Arafat opposed making peace with Israel.
Even more: I blogged about Morris some months ago — "The Disillusionment of Benny Morris" — and so I thought that I should add that what Morris is saying in this recent piece on Arafat is perfectly consistent with the views discussed in my earlier post on him.
Update: Since writing this post I've learned that Morris' op-ed first appeared in The New York Times.
Another update: Two weeks after writing this post I wrote another in which I quoted a large chunk of Morris' review of Dennis Ross' book — "Benny Morris on the Collapse of the Peace Process."