The legacy of Yasser Arafat
Plus, the election of 1992: Bush, Clinton, Perot, Buchanan!
A couple weeks ago in this newsletter I mentioned familiar faces. As I listen to news conferences or speeches from decades ago to prepare for my interviews, sometimes I see figures who still hold positions of power and influence today such as President Biden. He won his first Senate term in 1972. Another is Benjamin Netanyahu. For the episode Netanyahu’s War, published on March 14, I had to reach back to the 1970s and 1980s to begin studying his long career.
Producing a podcast about someone who survived decades in the spotlight – or if their influence endured for decades after leaving power – is challenging. Think of it this way: it takes less time to prepare to talk about, for instance, former Vice President Dan Quayle than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And then comes what to include/what to omit. It is not practical (or entertaining) to turn a podcast into a complete biography. You can visit a library for that. Rather, I try to understand the origins of current events through the lens of, say, Netanyahu’s now shattered dream of assuring Israelis they could have settlements, security, and peaceful coexistence with Palestinians without resolving the problem of Palestinian statelessness.
After Netanyahu’s War dropped, a devoted listener emailed me a suggestion for a follow-up episode: Yasser Arafat. The father of Palestinian nationalism died 20 years ago. Round-number anniversaries do have a way of concentrating our minds on a subject. Anniversary or not, now is an appropriate time to examine Arafat’s legacy.
The Palestinians are as far away from achieving liberation – Arafat’s life mission – than at any point since the early to mid-1990s, a rare moment of optimism in this conflict. The Hamas attack of 10/7 provoked the worst crisis for Palestinians since 1948, the year thousands were driven from their homes and into refugee camps in Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan.
Like the aforementioned Biden or Netanyahu, Arafat’s time in the public eye spanned many decades. Before he gained international notoriety by rising to chairman of the PLO in 1969, Arafat and his fellow militants founded the Fatah movement in 1959. They had spent the 1950s attacking Israel in commando or guerrilla raids from Gaza, raids the Egyptian occupiers of the Gaza Strip tried to thwart to avoid provoking massive Israeli retaliation. In the 1970s Palestinian groups, some of which were not in the PLO, committed brazen acts of terrorism including hijackings and massacres. Eight members of the Black September organization murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Point is, my preparation covered a lot of ground for Tuesday’s episode with Omar Rahman of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs. In Rahman’s view, Arafat left a mixed legacy in the eyes of Palestinians whom his leadership style did not always serve well.
“He passed away 20 years ago, so his immediate presence in Palestinian life is not there. At the same time, he is an iconic figure, the father of the Palestinian national movement… and when you juxtapose him to the current Palestinian leadership, he was a leader in a way the current leaders are not,” Rahman said. “He believed in inclusivity. His role as the chairman of the PLO was to bring the various factions of the Palestinian national movement together, and to lead a cohesive national movement with a coherent national agenda. Mahmoud Abbas has done the opposite of that.”
But Arafat’s commitment to armed struggle against Israel often proved counterproductive, to say nothing of all the lives it ruined, both Israeli and Palestinian. Yes, the PLO gained ground at the United Nations – Arafat delivered his “olive branch” speech in 1974 before the General Assembly – and garnered a good deal of international sympathy (Nelson Mandela was an Arafat supporter). But Israel could not be militarily defeated. Jordan kicked the PLO out in 1970. After relocating to Lebanon, its presence helped destabilize that country leading to a terrible civil war from 1975. The Israeli invasion in 1982 shattered the PLO’s base in southern Lebanon, exiling Arafat to Tunisia.
“This ended up being a disaster for the PLO’s fortunes. For one, it was broken up. The military cadres went to Yemen and were dispersed. And the political leadership went to Tunisia. For the first time the PLO was no longer on the border of its former homeland, unable to carry on the struggle for liberation,” said Rahman, who is a highly regarded expert on Israel-Palestine. Earlier in his career, Rahman worked as a journalist for three years in the Palestinian territories.
Arafat’s enemies hold to a harsher verdict. In their view, he was a notorious terrorist who took too long to renounce violence and to explicitly accept Israel’s right to exist (1988). After returning to Gaza in 1994, these critics contend, the PLO chairman failed to stop groups like Hamas from launching suicide raids into Israel, undermining the peace process. Adored by some, reviled by others, this New York Times obituary demonstrates why “people viewed his role in various ways -- terrorist, statesman, dreamer, pragmatist, his people's warrior, his people's peacemaker.”
With Arafat temporarily out of the picture in Tunisia, Palestinians in 1987 rose up against Israel’s occupation policies. The First Intifada was a spontaneous, grassroots reaction to the occupation and consisted of general strikes, boycotts, and large street demonstrations. Palestinians also engaged in some rioting and rock-throwing. The IDF responded with deadly force. The uprising was crushed, but it did convince enough Jews and Arabs to try something new. It led to the first direct negotiations by all parties in the Arab-Israeli conflict (Madrid 1991). The Oslo Accords followed in 1993. Although, it should be noted, fanatics on both sides of the conflict opposed the peace process.
A question that looms over Arafat’s legacy today is whether he should have accepted Ehud Barak’s offer of 92 percent of the West Bank in the waning hours of the Camp David summit in 2000. Other questions relevant to Arafat’s legacy that Rahman and I grapple with are: when is armed resistance justified? When is it terrorism? What is the acceptable way for Palestinians to defy the oppressive conditions they live in? Is there any military solution to this conflict?
Related, in January historian Jean-Pierre Filiu enlightened us on the history of Gaza and the many wars Israel has waged against the Palestinians there. If you missed it, listen here.
The election of 1992
It’s the second installment in my monthly series on important elections. Historians Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Engel bring us back to that moment of post-Cold War triumphalism, the early 1990s. Except ordinary Americans weren’t throwing a party for very long. Recession was followed by a sluggish recovery and a general sense that, despite having “won” the Cold War, the country wasn’t moving in the right direction.
Bill Clinton defeated George Bush. Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan left a lasting mark, although the rise of populism and economic nationalism was not strong enough to stop the free trade consensus. Nafta passed with bipartisan support. The political consequences would be felt a generation later.
If you missed the first installment on the election of 1980, listen here.
Related, a few weeks ago I discussed the shifts in global capitalism and Clinton’s economic approach to these shifts with Nelson Lichtenstein. His book, “A Fabulous Failure,” is a provocative interpretation of Clinton’s “neoliberal” turn.
What’s next?
The podcast will return to the Middle East. I’ll talk to Renad Monsour about Iraq, and to Peter Bergen about ISIS-K. In each of these conversations, we’ll also discuss the various militias and terrorist groups aligned with Iran that are complicating U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.