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| Israel-Palestine |
| In a Ruined Country: How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine |
| 2005-07-29 |
| I know this was in yesterday, but I didn't feel like subscribing to Atlantic Monthly to read it. But I found a site that pulled some highlights which are actually pretty good. Long, but interesting. EFL. ...[Dennis Ross speaks] "The first time I went to complain to him about the bombing - the first set of bombings were, I guess, in April '94, in Hadera and Afula - and I'm with him, and he leans over like this and he whispers, 'You know, it's Barak. He's got this group, the OSS, in the Israeli military, and they're doing this.' And I said to him, 'Don't be ridiculous.' I said, 'You know the Israelis are not killing themselves.' This was classic Arafat, never wanting to be responsible." Q: "So you don't think that he was actually a hysteric?" A: "No, I think it was all an act." ...Terje Roed-Larsen was the father of the Oslo Accords and is the most visible representative of the United Nations in the Middle East.He met weekly and often every other day with Arafat for more than a decade. Q: "What was it like when he lied to you?" A: "He lied all the time. And he knew it. I'd say, 'Abu Ammar, cut the crap. Let's talk serious.' And then he could either talk serious or not talk serious. He'd say nonsense." Q: "The nonsense would consist of what?" A: " 'It's not me - it's al-Qaeda.' 'It's the Iranians.' 'It was a Lebanese ship.' 'It's the Syrians.' All that kind of stuff. Of course everybody around him knew he was behind it. ...Al-Masri remembers sitting with Arafat one night in 1988 as the Palestinian leader negotiated a formula that would allow the United States to recognize the PLO. "They gave him the formula, and he said it in a speech in Geneva, but he put in extra words, so no one could figure out what he was saying," al-Masri remembers. "The Americans said, 'No way.' So I stayed up all night with him and Dick Murphy, the assistant secretary of state, to work out what he must say. The formula was 'We totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism.' So they called a press conference, and he said everything right, except instead of 'terrorism' he said, 'We announce tourism! We announce all forms of tourism!' " ..."How long did you know that he was sick?" I ask."For the last year. Last year in September he told me he doesn't feel well. So, and he felt that something was not right, and it looks like he had the same symptoms again, but the last time he had enough immunity. Yeah, he knew."I am struck by al-Masri's use of the word "immunity," which is a word characteristically associated with aids. Rumors that Arafat died of "a shameful illness" spread quickly through the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat, who married his wife, Suha, in 1990, was often surrounded by children and was openly affectionate with some of his bodyguards. The Palestinian leadership denounced reports that Arafat was a homosexual as lies spread by Mossad, the Israeli foreign-intelligence agency. Accounts also circulated that a secret agreement had been reached between the Israelis and Arafat's heirs, stipulating that the truth about Arafat's fatal illness would not be released, the Palestinian leader would be buried in Ramallah and not in Jerusalem, and the wanted men who had accompanied him in his captivity would not be pursued by Israeli forces. "He knew that it was the same disease that he had a year ago?" I ask. Al-Masri nods his head. ...The amounts of money stolen from the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people through the corrupt practices of Arafat's inner circle are so staggeringly large that they may exceed one half of the total of $7 billion in foreign aid contributed to the Palestinian Authority. The biggest thief was Arafat himself. The International Monetary Fund has conservatively estimated that from 1995 to 2000 Arafat diverted $900 million from Palestinian Authority coffers, an amount that did not include the money that he and his family siphoned off through such secondary means as no-bid contracts, kickbacks, and rake-offs. A secret report prepared by an official Palestinian Authority committee headed by Arafat's cousin concluded that in 1996 alone, $326 million, or 43 percent of the state budget, had been embezzled, and that another $94 million, or 12.5 percent of the budget, went to the president's office, where it was spent at Arafat's pe rsonal discretion. An additional 35 percent of the budget went to pay for the security services, leaving a total of $73 million, or 9.5 percent of the budget, to be spent on the needs of the population of the West Bank and Gaza. The financial resources of the PLO, which may have amounted to somewhere between one and two billion dollars, were never included in the PA budget. Arafat hid his personal stash, estimated at $1 billion to $3 billion, in more than 200 separate bank accounts around the world, the majority of which have been uncovered since his death. ...In their cities and villages Palestinians were subject to the extortion and violence of Arafat's overlapping security services, which competed among themselves for payoffs, arbitrarily arrested people and seized their land, and forced citizens to pay double or triple the price for everything from flour and gasoline to cigarettes, razor blades, and sheep feed. The fact that nearly everyone in Palestinian political life had taken something directly from Arafat's hand made it hard to criticize him; it was easier to go along...The economy of the Palestinian territories, which had enjoyed startlingly high growth rates after 1967, when it passed from Jordanian and Egyptian control into the hands of the Israelis, stagnated and then went backward. In less than a decade Yasir Arafat and his clique managed to squander not only the economic well-being but also the considerable moral capital amassed by the Palestinian people during two and a half decades of Israeli military rule. ...Young Fatah cadres in the West Bank and Gaza soon found that the corruption of their elders was matched by a complete lack of positive ideas - however farfetched or loony - about the form that a future Palestinian polity might take... What followed Arafat's return to Palestine was a decade-long thieves' banquet at which Fatah's old guard divided up the spoils of Oslo and treated ordinary Palestinians as conquered subjects. ...Mamduh Nofal is the former military commander of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the commander of the Palestinian forces during the siege of Beirut. The sign outside his office identifies him as a high-ranking official of Fatah. Nofal tells me that Arafat's strategic use of violence after Oslo began with permitting Hamas and Islamic Jihad to launch terror attacks. Arafat would then crack down on those same organizations to show that he was in control. Nofal first heard Arafat give orders that led directly to violence, he says, before the riots that erupted over the excavation of the Hasmonean tunnel, near the Haram al-Sharif, in 1996. Nofal says that the impetus for the violence was the statement by the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that he would not speak to Arafat directly. Arafat was furious at the slight. "I was with him in his office," Nofal recalls. "He got up and walked around the desk. He was very, very angry. Finally he calmed down a bit and he pointed to the phone on his desk. He said, 'I will make Netanyahu call me on this phone.' " Arafat ordered demonstrators into the streets, and told them to provoke the Israelis. When violence erupted, the Israelis were blamed. "I was sitting with him again when the phone on his desk rang, and he looked at me and said, 'It's Netanyahu.' And it was him." ...The second intifada also began with the intention of provoking the Israelis and subjecting them to diplomatic pressure. Only this time Arafat went for broke. As a member of the High Security Council of Fatah, the key decision-making and organizational body that dealt with military questions at the beginning of the intifada, Nofal has firsthand knowledge of Arafat's intentions and decisions during the months before and after Camp David. "He told us, 'Now we are going to the fight, so we must be ready,' " Nofal remembers. Nofal says that when Barak did not prevent Ariel Sharon from making his controversial visit to the plaza in front of al-Aqsa, the mosque that was built on the site of the ancient Jewish temples, Arafat said, "Okay, it's time to work." ... "And I think Saudi Arabia also played a role in Arafat's decision to keep the intifada going," Nofal says, agreeing with a similar analysis presented to me by Abd Rabbo. "Clinton put his initiative on the table on the eighteenth of December, after three months of intifada. Arafat visited Saudi Arabia. At that time the Saudi Arabian leadership told him, 'Wait, don't give this card to Clinton. Clinton is going, Bush is coming. Bush is the son of our friend. We will get more for you from him.' Then we discovered that Saudi Arabia couldn't do anything, that it is not a matter of personal issues or friendship. And Sharon succeeded very well, and put us in a corner." ...The next morning I meet with Iyad Sarraj, a human-rights activist and the director of the leading mental-health organization in Gaza. In the 1980s, during the first intifada, many of his patients were prisoners who had been tortured by the Israelis. In the 1990s the prisoners he treated were victims of torture by the Palestinian Authority's principal militia, the Preventive Security Service. When Sarraj complained about the poor state of civil liberties under President Arafat, he was jailed three times, beaten, and tortured. "Palestinians have lost the battle because of their lack of organization and because they have been captives of rhetoric and sloganeering rather than actual work," he says. "I believe that the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians in one way or the other is between development and underdevelopment, civilization and backwardness. Israel was established on the rule of law, on democratization, and certain principles that would advance Israel, while the Arabs and the Palestinians were waiting always for the prophet, for the rescuer, for the savior, the mahdi. Arafat came, and everyone hung their hats on him without realizing that there is a big gap between the rescuer and the actual work that needs to be done. This is where the Palestinians lost again the battle. They lost it in '48 because of their backwardness, ignorance, and lack of organization in how to confront the Zionist enemy. They lost it when they had the chance to build a state, because the PA was absolutely corrupt and disorganized." ...Dahlan is widely seen as the power behind Mahmoud Abbas's government and the paramount warlord in the Palestinian territories.When I ask him for his final verdict on Arafat's mistakes, he is openly dismissive."He managed the relationship with the U.S. the way he manages relations with the Arab countries and the Third World countries," Dahlan begins. "Second, he didn't distinguish between a personal relationship and a political one." Dahlan pauses before he completes the list. "And the third thing, which is also important, he thought he was as powerful as the Jews in the U.S. He overestimated himself. In my view, my interest lies with the U.S. My duty is how to create an interest for the U.S. with me, so that they will serve me."... |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #2 I read the article. It's pretty obvious from what his inner circle says that Arafat died of AIDS. Am interesting read. I think the Atlantic has some of the best journalism in the English language nowadays. |
| Posted by: Javiter Thiter7940 2005-07-29 19:18 |
| #1 Palestinians have got to be about the stupidest god damned people on the face of the earth. They beg for retaliation, insist on punishment and demand reprisal. When, I say when are they going to wake up and make a better life for themselves? Tens of thousands of them have been sitting around in refugee camps for 50 years waiting to be given a new life, or a new home or a job or something , anything for free. That isn't how it works, there are no free lunches(liberals take note here). |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2005-07-29 16:30 |