When There's Will

When There's Will ...

via Real Clear Politics. George Will on ABC's "This Week":

In June 2002, the President said there's no problem getting to peace in the Middle East and the Palestinian state if the Palestinian people can generate a leadership that is a peaceful interlocutor for Israel. 60 days we're going to do it? The Palestinian people have been the most execrably led people of the 20th century. Palestinian leaders supported Germany and the central powers in the first World War, Hitler in the second World War, Stalin in the Cold War, Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. That's a losing streak. Tomorrow morning, Palestinian children will get up and go to schools where teachers appointed by the Palestinian Authority and textbooks selected by them will teach them a kind of virulent anti-Semitism akin to that in Nazi Germany. We need ten years of de-Nazification to get over what the Oslo Accords produced when they brought that thug and his "thugocracy" back to Palestine.

Dahlan Watch I

Dahlan Watch I

Yasser Arafat ran the PLO, not as a revolutionary movement (despite his rhetoric) but as an (dis)organized crime family. Thus whoever will take over for him will not be a political successor. (Yes I know, we keep hearing that the election will take place within 60 days as stipulated by the Palestinian constitution. Right. The Palestinian constitution is a nice fig leaf, but I suspect it's rarely referred to - except when its provisions can be promoted by Western journalists trumpeting Palestinian "democracy.")
Arafat's successor will have two important attributes: Guns and money. In Gaza, the man with the most solid credentials in those areas are former security chief Mohammed Dahlan. I'm going to try to keep up with his antics over the coming months.
Because Dahlan headed the security service in Gaza he should have plenty of armed men whose loyalty he commands. Because he has lots of money he should be able to buy the loyalty of others. How did he get his money? Here's part of the answer:

This tax enables Rajoub to expand his organization's power. There are approximately 20 different security apparatuses operating in the territories today; they compete with one another, and the extent of their influence is naturally derived from their economic prowess. Avraham Biger, CEO of Paz up until two months ago, wrings his hands in chagrin: "Pedasco was simply too serious; we believed the Palestinians would live up to their obligations under the Paris agreement and would honor previous agreements. We never received any formal tender announcement from the Palestinians, and this fell on us like a bolt out of the blue."

Overnight, Pedasco found itself without contracts, without customers, and without the equipment it had leased to the gas stations. After the fact, it turned out that the Authority had even had an exclusive contract for supply with the German-French company Marimpex, signed by Yasser Arafat, when suddenly Dor showed up and snatched all the marbles. The agreement was signed between Joseph Antverg, then the CEO of Dor, and Muhammad Rashid, representing the Palestinians, as "senior economic advisor" to Arafat.

The gas station owners have no business relationship with Dor Energy. Dor sells the fuel to the Palestinian monopoly at a certain price, and the monopoly sells it to the station owners at a much higher price. The monopoly keeps the difference. The station owners have no alternative, because Rajoub's outfit in the West Bank and Muhammad Dahlan's in the Gaza Strip prevent any other, competing importation and assign armed guards to escort Dor's tankers right up to the stations themselves.

Another way in which the security apparatuses finance their augmented activity is through the collection of unloading taxes. Rajoub and Dahlan control, in effect, all the discharging platforms at the transit points to the Palestinian Authority. Dahlan is also the owner of the loading pitchforks at the Erez checkpoint. Every merchant and truck owner must pay the preventive security apparatus a tithe in order to proceed. Sometimes, its done in a simpler fashion. An Israeli importer of cleaning products, who opened a branch in Gaza, was asked to pay $2,000, a "donation" to Force 17. A year ago,a rich Arab from East Jerusalem was asked to purchase 14 new jeeps, out of his own money, for Rajoub's organization's use.

I don't believe Hamas will really be a serious player for awhile as Yassin and Rantisi pre-deceased Arafat. But it really doesn't make much of a difference as Dahlan has had a pretty good working relationship with Hamas in the past.

On Thursday, five Israelis were wounded, one critically, in Palestinian attacks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The attacks came as Palestinian sources confirmed that Hamas militant Mohammed Deif, who tops Israel's most-wanted list for his involvement in terrorist attacks, has escaped from a Palestinian jail.

According to Israel Radio, a Hamas Web site claimed that Mohammed Dahlan, the head of Palestinian security in Gaza, helped Deif escape. Deif and Dahlan reportedly became friendly while serving time together in an Israeli jail.

According to the site, Dahlan arranged for Deif to be moved to a safe house amid concern that Israel might bomb the jail to assassinate Deif.

And I expect that he still does.

After Arafat's death, the Scotsman interviewed Dahlan:

Palestinians need time to Â?build a new houseÂ? following the death of Yasser Arafat, and the key to a cease-fire with Palestinian militants is in IsraelÂ?s hands, said Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan in an interview published today.

Dahlan, who holds no official position but who commands a loyal following in Gaza, told the Israeli Yediot Ahronot daily that halting four years of violence with Israel will not be the first priority of the post-Arafat leadership.

Â?If you want, there will be a cease-fire. If you donÂ?t want, there wonÂ?t be. The key is in your hands,Â? he was quoted as saying, blaming Israel for the breakdown of previous cease-fires.

Â?But a cease-fire is not the first stage. We are building a new house now from the foundations. That is the first task,Â? he said.

Then there's this gem:

Dahlan is expected to hold a key position of power in the post-Arafat Palestinian power structure, though it is not known if he will enter the Cabinet.

As if the only power to wield is political. Having armed men supporting him, I'm sure that Dahlan will hold a "key position of power" he need not join the cabinet. This isn't Washington, it's Gaza.

Still it's interesting apparently that Dahlan is considered close to America as this article about the killing of 3 Americans in Gaza tells us:

Ranking Palestinian Authority officials know the solution to the mystery, but lack clear proof. What's more, they are afraid of talking about it in public. Almost certainly, the solution is that the explosive charge was indeed intended to cause American casualties, but the people behind the attack intended to devalue the status of the man considered to be closest to the Americans in the Gaza Strip. This is Mohammed Dahlan, once described as the most powerful strongman in Gaza. The Preventive Security Service, which Dahlan created and also led, received widespread assistance from the United States. Dahlan has maintained contact with American government agencies and authorities, and any disruption of the relationship between the U.S. and the Palestinian Authority harms him.

(It's also interesting as Dahlan said in the Scotsman article:

Dahlan appealed to Israel to allow the Palestinians to hold elections within 60 days, as set out in Palestinian law. Â?The next president cannot receive legitimacy from Israel or America,Â? he said, Â?but only from our street, from the refugee campsÂ? and population centres.

I'm curious to what degree Dahlan still gets support from the US. Or is it just perception now?
For now Dahlan has bowed out of the presidential race and thown his support behind Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). That would be good news for Abbas. But it suggests that he would be a puppet. At the end of the article, talking of the attempted assassination of Abbas on Sunday, Dahlan said:

Dahlan said he was confident the campaign for president could proceed without violence, and played down Sunday's shooting at a mourning tent for Arafat, moments after Abbas arrived. Abbas was whisked to safety, but two security agents were killed and five people wounded.

Dahlan said the names of the gunmen were known to police, but refused to elaborate. "Measures will be taken against them," he said.

Hmm. Think there'll be some "collaborator" executions in Gaza soon?

From Swaziland to Tzfat

Thanks to It's Only Supernatural for a link to this fascinating story.

A State or not a State

A State or not a State

Earlier I had noted that both Jackson Diehl and Daniel Pipes predicted that President Bush would start bringing undue pressure on Israel to move forward with negotiations with whatever exists of the PA. The former wrote with barely concealed glee; the latter with a sense of foreboding. In his blog, Pipes sees more evidence and concludes:

There is more on this same topic in the press conference, but this suffices to show how determined the president is to see a Palestinian state emerge on his watch. Also, he is saying (along the lines of his June 2002 speech and the policy in Iraq) that if the Palestinians develop a democratic system, they will for sure live in harmony side-by-side with Israel. To which I say that if the Palestinians still retain their intent to destroy Israel, democracy cannot take place. Instead, the goal of U.S. policy should be to get the Palestinians to give up on this foul goal.

On the other side Barry Rubin in "US Outlook on the Middle East" predicts:

Arab-Israeli conflict: The administration has no illusion of any breakthrough happening soon. Envoys will be sent to run around, meetings held, plans announced, yet this is also done with a profound doubt that anything is going to change. There will be much talk about helping Palestinian moderates win the leadership battle but the United States is going to have little influence and any hint that someone is an American candidate for Palestinian leadership will only hurt his chances. U.S. policy will still back the Roadmap plan but emphasizing that the Palestinians must act fully to stop terrorism before they receive any political rewards. American commitments to Israel will stay in place to support the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and building the security fence. U.S.-Israel relations will remain quite good.

While Rubin's article was written before the thug died, an article in Friday's Washington Post seems to support this view:

Privately, administration officials made it clear that Bush will keep the onus on the Palestinians, saying that the United States cannot impose a desire for peace on them if they do not want it themselves.

Actually that was only one paragraph in the article. Most of the other statements in the article appear to show an administration hellbent on creating creating a Palestinian state regardless. (I give a little more credence to the paragraph I cited because it was said "privately.")

Arafat's (and the world's) Disgraceful History

Arafat's (and the world's) Disgraceful History

Andrew McCarthy wrote an excellent overview of the history of "The Father of Modern Terrorism." He covers the violent history of the recently deceased terrorist.

For the last week of his life, the scuttlebutt about the Palestinian movement's centrifugal force concerned whether his impending demise was driven by AIDS, likely contracted, according to leaked foreign-intelligence reports, by his omnivorous, orgiastic sexual appetite. This as if, after three quarters of a century's worth of megalo-sadism, additional indicia of Yasser Arafat's throbbing depravity were somehow necessary. And so, evidently, they were. Thus is reflection on his life, a signal emblem of the late 20th century's triumph of terror and fraud over security and reason, as instructive about our times as it is about him.

(This first paragraph recalls Daniel Pipes's "Arafat's Bedroom Farce.")
McCarthy's point about how Arafat's life representing the "...triumph of terror and fraud over security and reason" is important. Perhaps a worthwhile exercise would be to study McCarthy's history next to Jeane Kirkpatrick's "How the PLO was legitimized"
While McCarthy outlines Arafat's terror CV, Kirkpatrick gives a history of how the PLO became accepted internationally. (The aritcle is 15 years old; but still relevant.) I think studying these two phemomena in parallel would be quite instructive. What outrages were being ignored while the PLO was getting an international legal imprimatur for its actions?

Mendacity Alert II

"Vote For Peace" ex President Jimmy Carter's obituary for Yasser Arafat is riddled with gross distortions and untruths. It is a testament to the lack of editorial control that such a sloppy piece of garbage made it to the op-ed page of an elite American newspaper. So it begins:

For more than 40 years, Yasir Arafat was the undisputed leader of the fragmented and widely dispersed Palestinian community and the symbol of its cause. His pre-eminent role was not perpetuated by his boldness or clarity of purpose, but was protected from challenge by his status as the only common denominator around which the disparate factions could find a rallying point.

No clarity of purpose? Arafat never accepted a Jewish connection to the land of Israel. Consider article 20 of the Palestinian National Charter:

Article 20:
The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

Oh but the Palestinian Legislative Council rejected those sections of their charter that denied Israel's right to exist (in 1996 and in 1998)? Well consider the following from "Clinton Won't Meet His Goal Of Mideast Peace, Aides Fear" by Jane Perlez from the NY Times of September 8, 2000:

Mr. Arafat has been saying since the Camp David talks, when the question of sovereignty over the site was raised, that the Temple does not exist, a senior administration official said. By insisting that what the Jews consider to be the most sacred of their holy sites was not even a Jewish place, Mr. Arafat was denying a basic respect to his main negotiating partner, the official said.

The denial of the historical connection between Jews and Israel is an essential component of Palestinian nationalism. It is not something that can be voted down. It is essential to the Palestinian cause to cast Jews as interlopers. It is a belief that Arafat subscribed to and embodied, even as it became one of the main obstacles to peace with Israel.
The lack of Arafat's "clarity of purpose" is simply a projeciton of Carter's. He can't believe that anyone would hold such beliefs, so he denies and rationalizes the denial.

When given a chance by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, Mr. Arafat responded well by concluding the Oslo Agreement of 1993, which spelled out a mutually satisfactory relationship on geographical boundaries between Israel and the Palestinians. The resulting absence of serious violence by either side was broken when a Jewish nationalist assassinated Mr. Rabin. Mr. Arafat later rejected a proposal devised by President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel, but its basic terms have led to positive initiatives between private groups of Israelis and Palestinians, in particular one known as the Geneva Accords. This proposal addresses the major issues that must be resolved through further official negotiations before a permanent peace can be realized.

No serious violence until November 1995? Let's see:

Apr 6 94 Asher Attia, 48, of Afula, bus driver; Vered Mordechai, 13, of Afula; Maya Elharar, 17, of Afula; Ilana Schreiber, 45, a teacher from Kibbutz Nir David; Meirav Ben-Moshe, 16, of Afula; Ayala Vahaba, 40, a teacher from Afula; and Fadiya Shalabi, 25, of Iksal were killed in a car-bomb attack on a bus in the center of Afula. HAMAS claimed responsibility for the attack. Ahuva Cohen Onalla, 37, wounded in the attack, died of her wounds on April 25.

Apr 13 94 Rahamim Mazgauker, 34, of Hadera; David Moyal, 26 of Ramat Gan, an Egged mechanic; Daga Perda, 44, who immigrated from Ethiopia in 1991; Bilha Butin, 49, of Hadera; and Sgt. Ari Perlmutter, 19, of Ir Ovot in the Arava were killed in a suicide bombing attack on a bus in the central bus station of Hadera. HAMAS claimed responsibility for the attack.

13 people killed in two bus bombings isn't serious? I guess that depends on your point of view? (And that wasn't the only post-Oslo terror prior to the assassination of PM Rabin.)
Besides the violence of early 1996 (which presumably is what Carter is referring to) occurred after Israel withdrew from Jenin, Nablus, Kalkilye, Bethlehem and Ramallah (and one other city) suggesting that the terror increased due to the greater opportunity that Hamas had to operate once the PA took control of those cities.

In effect, peace efforts of a long line of previous administrations have been abandoned by President Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. For the last three years of his life, Mr. Arafat was incapacitated and held as a prisoner, humiliated by his physical incarceration and excluded by the other two leaders from any recognition as the legitimate head of the Palestinian community. Recognizing Mr. Arafat's failure to control violence among his people or to initiate helpful peace proposals, I use the word "legitimate" based on his victory in January 1996 by a strong majority of votes in an election monitored by the Carter Center and approved by the occupying Israelis.

Yes the man who certified dictator Hugo Chavez's stolen election earlier this year is an expert in electoral democracy. Dan Polisar has a different view:

As the January 1996 elections approached, Arafat was assured of victory for himself and his loyalists in Fatah. The steps he had taken since assuming power had succeeded in bolstering his position and shunting aside most potential challengers. In fact, Arafat almost ended up running unopposed, as the best-known individuals who considered challenging him-including rights activist Iyad a-Sarraj and the popular Haydar Abed a-Shafi (who had headed the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid conference) decided that there was little point in running in the political climate that had been created. In the end, the only person who decided to face off against Arafat was Samiha Halil, a little-known, 72-year-old women's rights activist, who was hardly in a position to compete for mainstream support in the traditional society of the West Bank and Gaza.

Nonetheless, Arafat took advantage of his monopoly on power to turn a sure victory into a landslide. He adopted an electoral system for the Council races that favored Fatah and undercut the chances of the smaller parties, and that played a role in persuading most Islamic and left-wing groups to boycott the elections.154 Within Fatah, he overturned the results of party caucuses and replaced independent-minded local nationalists chosen in balloting among party activists in each district with his own hand-picked slates-often dominated by loyalists who had come with him from Tunis. During the campaign, PA police stepped up their intimidation of candidates running against Fatah nominees for seats in the Council, while government ministers and other PA officials used the resources of their offices to further their candidacies. On election day, the massive presence of Palestinian policemen in and around the polls-in direct violation of the campaign law Arafat had promulgated-had a clear effect on voters. This effect was especially pronounced with regard to the approximately 100,000 illiterate voters, who were often "assisted" in filling out their ballots by policemen or Fatah officials.

Another deeply disturbing change is the decision by Hamas and other militant factions to resort to suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism, whereas the hope for peace and justice discouraged such violence eight years ago. After that election, Hamas representatives rejected my efforts to have them accept Mr. Arafat as their political leader, and they continue to act independently.

As noted before, Hamas bombings are not a new phenomenon; they go back ten years and in early 1996 with Shimon Peres as Prime Minister, it's hard to say that prospects for peace were any greater. Yet that's when Hamas first turned up the violence to unprecedented levels killing scores in a two week period. Violence is not a function of hopelessness. (Carter tried to restrain Hamas? I never heard that one before.)

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain has stated recently that peace in the Middle East is the most important international issue. It is to be hoped that, in Washington and Jerusalem, there is also recognition that a bold and balanced move to achieve this goal will help to attenuate the Middle East tension and hatred that exacerbates the global threat of terrorism.

What exacerbates the global threat of terrorism is coddling the likes of Yasser Arafat. It sends a message that violence works. Taking a tough stand against the terrorist leaders and not allowing them independent states is the most important deterrent we have. Forcing Israel to make concessions to terrorists will only encourage the terrorists more.

On G Jefferson Price

Mendacity Alert III

G Jefferson Price III, former Jerusalem bureau chief for the Baltimore Sun as well as a former editor weighs in with his assessment of Yasser Arafat and what he meant, "Palestinians pay tribute not just to Arafat, but to an idea". First he takes a potshot at Binyamin Netanyahu:

ISRAEL'S FINANCE minister and former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, noted on the day of Yasser Arafat's death that Mr. Arafat did not have the stature of Arabs who have signed peace treaties with Israel, men such as Egypt's Anwar el Sadat and Jordan's King Hussein.
Mr. Netanyahu, who as prime minister shared plenty of culpability in the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, was speaking to CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

This is a common refrain for Israel critics and one to which I've responded before. First of all as Prime Minister, Netanyahu ceded over 80% of Israel's second holiest city, Hebron to the Palesitnian Authority. Secondly he eschewed closures over Palesitnian territory and his government announced late in its term that legal Palestinian employment in Israel had reached a six year high.
Critics of Israel lament the inconvenience that the security fence brings to the Palestinians, but they never acknowledge when Israel was doing all it can to improve the lot of the Palestinians.

What he did not note was that, unlike Mr. Arafat, President Sadat and King Hussein were the heads of undisputed sovereign states. They had their own governments, and their own armies.

He also did not note that in Egypt and Jordan, Israel had no territorial ambitions. Palestine is all about territorial ambitions.

And Mr. Netanyahu did not note that no matter what Egypt and Jordan said about their mission on behalf of the Palestinians in making war and in signing peace agreements with Israel, the Palestinians were very low on their lists of priorities.

And where exactly is Price going with this? Does he mean to imply that if Arafat had a state he'd have acted differently?

For more than four decades, the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the other Arab states gave a lot of lip service to Palestinian nationalism, but they did little to make it happen. In that respect, in that time, they were complicit in Israel's determination that there should never be a Palestinian state. Today, Israel acknowledges the possible eventuality of a Palestinian state, but does nothing to create an environment in which a legitimate, sovereign Palestinian state might emerge. Quite the opposite.

There's a reason that the Arab world supported Palestinian nationalism. Here it is:

Article 20:
The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

It's not that Arab states want a Palestinian state; it's that they don't want a Jewish one in the Middle East. The Palestinian national movement expressed that idea in its covenant and couched it in terms of a national struggle somehow making the destruction of the Jewish state acceptable or at least palatable.

Little has been said about this in the days before and since Mr. Arafat's death Thursday, but 2004 is an anniversary in the chronology of the Palestinians' ambition to speak for themselves rather than through proxies in Cairo, Amman, Damascus and elsewhere. Thirty years ago, in 1974, the Arab league, meeting in Rabat, Morocco, declared that the Palestine Liberation Organization and thus Mr. Arafat - not President Sadat, not King Hussein - was the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

I suppose the reason that not many of those remembering Yasser Arafat mention the Rabat conference is because they realize the implication of its declaration. It was hardly a compromise. Here's the exact language:

2. To affirm the right of the Palestinian people to establish an independent national authority under the command of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in any Palestinian territory that is liberated. This authority, once it is established, shall enjoy the support of the Arab states in all fields and at all levels;

Given that, at this time, the PLO was unambiguously devoted to Israel's destruction this appears to be the equivalent of the Arab league ascenting to that goal. (I still believe that to be the goal of the PLO, it's just sufficiently ambiguous now that there are those who are convinced it has changed.)

The Israeli occupation in those days was benign compared with today's. But about one thing the Israelis were adamant: Yasser Arafat was a terrorist and the PLO was a terrorist organization. No matter who designated the PLO as the spokesman for the Palestinians under their occupation, the Israelis would never negotiate with Mr. Arafat. Membership in the PLO was illegal; so was any sign of support for the organization, even flying the Palestinian flag.

Mr. Arafat did much to ensure this remained the position of Israel and its important ally, the United States. The PLO charter called for the destruction of Israel. Palestinian terrorists from Lebanon, where the PLO was headquartered, raided Israeli communities and killed innocent people. The world was enraged and disgusted.

Israelis were adamant? By its behavior the PLO - even as Price acknowledges - engaged in terror. There is not getting around that. It was a terrorist organization then. It still is. (Though many have chosen to ignore the PLO's behavior and emphasize its role as a vehicle for Palestinian aspirations. Martin Peretz recently noted:

Barbara Plett is the BBC correspondent in the West Bank. On Oct. 30, reporting on Yasser Arafat's sickbed departure from Ramallah to Jordan, en route to his Paris death watch, she confided to a Radio 4 news program: "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry." Quite an admission from a journalist of record. At least she was candid. But she is not the only reporter to have been enlisted in the personal drama of Abu Amr (his nom de guerre, which literally means "father of war") as a segue into making propaganda for his cause. ABC's Peter Jennings has been doing it for decades, going back at a minimum to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Palestinian leader's first great statement on the world stage.

)

No one imagined in those days that within another 20 years of the Rabat conference, Israel and the PLO would sign a framework for peace between their people, and that Mr. Arafat, the terrorist, would return to his homeland, first in Gaza, then Ramallah in the West Bank.

I think that Price here uses "terrorist" not as his own description but rather to describe the change that occurred in Israeli society.

In the decade after the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, Mr. Arafat managed to ruin practically every opportunity to build on the peace agreement. Terrorism remained a tool of the battle for liberation. The corruption of the Palestinian leadership infuriated Palestinians and severely eroded Mr. Arafat's stature.

I'm glad that Price acknowledges this. Alas, it's clear he doesn't believe the implication of his own observation as he holds Israel at fault for the failure of the PA.

Yet, in Ramallah on Friday, in a tumultuous scene, throngs of Palestinians overran security barriers to pay their last respects to Mr. Arafat.

Was it Mr. Arafat the terrorist they had come to revere? Was it Mr. Arafat the corrupt? Certainly, terrorists were in the crowd. Certainly, many of the corrupt officials who were part of Mr. Arafat's regime were there.

But the outpouring, which looked for a while as if it would prevent the funeral altogether, was there for an idea, too. That idea, which Mr. Arafat - notwithstanding his egregious flaws - embodied for Palestinians, was liberation, self-determination, sovereignty.

Plus there's one other thing that Arafat embodied: the rejection of the hated Zionist entity. It is this aspect of Palestinian nationalism that Mr. Price and those like him refuse to acknowledge.

So long as there is no sovereign Palestinian state, there's unlikely to be a Palestinian statesman. That may suit the Benjamin Netanyahus of the world just fine. But if Israel wants a Palestinian leader to match the stature of Egypt's President Sadat, better give the Palestinians a real state for that man to represent.

This is Price's conclusion: Arafat was ill equipped to be a statesman because he didn't have a state. It reminds of an old political cartoon by the Washington Post's Herblock. It shows Nixon in a five o'clock shadow wallowing in the mud saying to passersby "Of course I'd be different if I had the top job." (or something similar.)
But Arafat was never different. Twice before Israel ignored his past he sought to destabilize his host. Jordan fought back, but Lebanon was consumed by his corruption and today, thirty years later is still occupied by Syria as a result of Arafat's mischief. Given his history, what in the world makes G Jefferson Price think that Arafat would have been different had he be given a state?
Arafat, as Price acknowledged "...managed to ruin practically every opportunity to build on the peace agreement." There was no one for Israel to deal with then (and there still isn't.)
Until the Palestinians accept Israel's right to exist there will be no peace in the Middle East. Despite what you might hear, it hasn't happened yet. And it won't likely happen for years to come.

Arafat odds and ends

Arafat odds and ends

I expect that Charles Krauthammer's column tomorrow will be the equivalent of a rhetorical 21 gun salute delivered right to the gut of Arafat's many synchophants, apologists and enablers in the West.

Loved LGF's cute photoshop memento of the occasin.

Liked WizBang's thoughts for the funeral. (I harbored a similar thought. Did someone drive a stake through his heart to make sure?)

On a more serious note Jeff Jacoby used his column today, "Arafat the Monster," to remind us of the names of some of Arafat's victims.

Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma'alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat's name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims?

So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands of who died at Arafat's command.

24 years ago when I was studying in Israel, I visited Ma'alot for a Sabbath. I remember going to the school. If these children had lived they'd likely be parents now. Instead, to much of the world, they matter less than the man who saw to their murders.

In his column at NRO, Aaron Mannes of Terrorblog concludes:

But Arafat's life's work was to justify the use of random violence and equip a generation with the means to do so. He helped set in motion the web of alliances that has manifested itself in today's super-terrorists. This is Yasser Arafat's terrible legacy.

It is a point that is too often missed - the Washington Post calling Arafat a "dreamer" - and I'm glad to see it reinforced. This is the same point that the late Michael Kelly made in "When Innocents are the Enemy:"

If it is morally acceptable to murder, in the name of a necessary blow for freedom, a woman on a Tel Aviv street, or to blow up a disco full of teenagers, or to bomb a family restaurant -- then it must be morally acceptable to drive two jetliners into a place where 50,000 people work. In moral logic, what is the difference? If the murder of innocent people is for whatever reason excusable, it is excusable; if it is legitimate, it is legitimate. If acceptable on a small scale, so too on a grand.

Finally, for now, (via Instapundit ) there's Max Boot:

Though Arafat, of course, bore ultimate responsibility for his many sins, he could not have been so destructive without so many outside enablers, ranging from the Soviet Union, which supported him from the 1960s to the 1980s, to the European Union and the United States, which stepped into the sugar daddy role in the 1990s. And let us not forget his fan club among the Western intelligentsia, many of whom even now weep for his passing as if he were a great man instead of a criminal with a cause.

Yes the enablers are still at it. As if Palestinian nationalism innoculates one against all manner of crimes.

09:41 PM | Permalink | Add a comment | Trackback

Mendacity Alert I

Mendacity Alert 1

In the coming days the media will be filled with puff pieces soft pedaling Yasser Arafat. I hope to have time to do an ongoing series.
We'll lead off with "A Terrorist Leads his People to Disaster." Whoops, I mean "A Dreamer Who Forced His Cause Onto World Stage" by long time Israel correspondent of the Washington Post, Lee Hockstader. There are a number of items that can't go unmentioned. For example:

Mohammed Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini was born Aug. 4, 1929, the sixth of seven children of a moderately successful merchant from Gaza and his wife, a descendant of a prominent Jerusalem family. He adopted the name Yasser -- Arabic for "easygoing" -- as a college student.

According to his college record, and most of his biographers, Arafat was born in Cairo, two years after his parents had moved there from Jerusalem. Arafat generally insisted he was born in Jerusalem's Old City, though occasionally he said he was born in Gaza -- assertions that underscored his solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

"Assertions that underscored his solidarity with the Palestinian cause?" How about "lies to give himself an aura of a romantic revolutionary that was easily swallowed by many a gullible journalist?" If Arafat couldn't keep his place of birth straight it was a sign of his dishonesty. The paragraph should have been written more like this: According to all available evidence Arafat was born in Cairo. Despite this evidence Arafat liked to claim that he was born in Jerusalem or alternatively, in Gaza. This claim was likely false.

Next to ponder is:

The following March, Palestinian gunmen murdered two senior U.S. diplomats in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum; some American officials believed Arafat ordered the killings, although the evidence was inconclusive.

How does Hockstader know that the evidence was inconclusive? This is from an unofficial website about Arlington Cemetery:

Cleo A. Noel Jr. and George Curtis Moore were among a group of men seized by Black September terrorists during a reception held at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum [Sudan]. The terrorists demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert Kennedy, as well as terrorists being held in Israeli and European prisons. President Nixon refused to negotiate. The tape was of conversations between Arafat in Beirut and his thugs in Khartoum. Execute the diplomats, ordered Arafat. The terrorists obeyed, machine gunning the unarmed, hapless Noel and Moore. They also killed a Belgium diplomat. The authenticity of the tape was verified in U.S. laboratories by both the State Department and the White House.

Then there's the testimony of James Welsh an NSA officer who heard the tapes and of Ion Mihai Pacepa a fomer high ranking Rumanian intelligence. Inconclusive? Sounds like a whitewash to me.
We continue:

The Beirut idyll came to an end in June 1982 when Israeli forces, directed by Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister, launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon, sweeping north and subjecting Beirut to a three-month siege. The aim, said Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, was to rid Lebanon once and for all of the "malevolent criminal terrorists," as he referred to the PLO.

"[I]dyll?" Arafat and the PLO created a state within a state in Lebanon, fatally destabilizing the country and embroiling it in a civil war. But Hockstader isn't interested in the damage Arafat did, just in undermining the Israeli claims against him. Scare quotes around "malevolent criminal terrorists?" It was apt description of the PLO.

Do we learn about the amount of weaponry Israel recovered (I read one report that put the value of materiel captured by Israel at $1 billion) when Israel chased the PLO out of Southern Lebanon or the cross border shelling by the PLO? Nope. Or the assassination attempt against Shlomo Argov? Nope.

In 1988:

The uprising caught Arafat and the PLO in Tunis by surprise, but gradually they were able to harness it somewhat and use it to reassert their leadership. As the street battles raged, the Israelis, convinced the uprising was organized by the PLO, sent a commando team to Tunis to assassinate Arafat's military commander and closest aide, Khalil Wazir, known as Abu Jihad.

What convinced the Israelis that the PLO had organized the intifada? If I remember correctly Israel found a briefcase with documents showing that the intifada was not spontaneous but controlled out of Tunis. Why no mention?

When Arafat set foot in Gaza on July 1, 1994 -- his first return in 27 years to what had been Israeli-occupied territory -- he knelt and kissed the ground. Hundreds of thousands of delirious Palestinians wept and danced in the streets, greeting him as a conquering hero.

His relations with the United States warmed for a time, and some Israelis began to view him as a pragmatist. In 1994, the man once regarded in the West as a master terrorist -- widely photographed in the early 1970s with his thick mustache, dark glasses, AK-47 assault rifle and pearl-handled pistol -- shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

I wish that he'd included the less romantic view that Michael Kelly (who was there) recounted about Arafat's return to Gaza:

Arafat's entry into Gaza was an object lesson: a purposely uncaring display of brute power. He arrived from the Sinai in a long caravan of Chevrolet Blazers and Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs, 70 or 80 cars packed to the rooflines with men with guns. The caravan roared up the thronged roads and down the mobbed streets, with the overfed, leather-jacketed, sunglassed thugs of Arafat's bodyguard detail all the time screaming and shooting off their Kalashnikovs to make their beloved people scurry out of their beloved leader's way.

Nor is there any mention of why some Israelis might have been skeptical of Arafat's change. Hockstader could have bothered to mention Arafat's infamous "Koraish" speech in Johannesburg in 1994. But again Arafat's outrages don't seem to concern Hockstader.

Still, some Palestinians, including some of Arafat's oldest comrades-in-arms, viewed the accord as a sellout that did nothing to recover what had been Palestinian homes, villages and towns before Israel's founding in 1948. Others, hopeful at first, soured over time as the promise of the peace agreement was only partly fulfilled.

Israeli troops did pull back from additional, disconnected chunks of the West Bank, including large Palestinian population centers. But in many ways the Jewish state continued to control the daily lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, whose travel, work and movements were still subject to Israeli permission. The fate of a couple of million Palestinian refugees, and the ultimate disposition of Jerusalem, which both sides claimed as their rightful capital, remained uncertain.

Here Hockstader toes the PA line. The peace process didn't work because the Israeli occupation persisted.

In the Palestinian-controlled territories, an ascendant group called the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, denounced the peace deal and carried out terror attacks and suicide bombings against Israelis. In Israel, a right-wing Israeli fanatic opposed to the peace accord assassinated Rabin. And the election of a new, hard-line Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, ushered in a period of stagnation in the peace process.

No word of what Arafat did to prevent the ascendancy of Hamas. Of course it was nothing. But part of Arafat's obligation was to fight terror and he rarely did. After arguing that the peace process was badly off because Israel controlled too much of the Palestinians' lives, Hockstader writes that there was "stagnation" of the peace process with "hardliner" Binyamin Netanyahu in the Prime Minister's office.

What stagnation? Netanyahu ceded most of Judaism's second holiest city, Hebron to the PA and demanded that the PA adhere to some of its commitments. That's stagnation? The stagnation resulted from the PA's refusal to abide by the terms of any of the treaties it signed.

And it's interesting to note this press release from Netanyahu's goverment in 1998:

The number of Palestinians working in Israel is steadily growing. Lawfully employed Palestinians in Israel today number about 60,000, of whom some 13,000 work in industrial zones and in the settlements. All told, more than 100,000 Palestinians are estimated to be employed in Israel approaching the record number employed in 1992.

So under Netanyahu Israel surrendered a significant city to the PA and the Palesitnians had the greatest freedom of movement since 1992 and that's stagnation? Give me a break. It is this sort of dishonesty that allowed Arafat and the PA to break every single agreement they signed with impunity. There was no accountability.

Finally we get to the latest violence:

Even as the negotiations sputtered on after Camp David, in September 2000 a bloody new Palestinian insurrection erupted at the very site that had been central to the talks -- the Temple Mount -- following a visit there by Arafat's longtime nemesis, Sharon, then the Israeli opposition leader. The new intifada spread, with Arafat's blessing or consent, and in the process it destroyed his dreams of self-determination in the near term for his people.

As I've pointed out several times before, the violence started prior to opposition leader Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount. Here's an excerpt from a letter from then Ambassador to the UN, Yehuda Lancry to Kofi Annan:

The events in these areas represent the latest and most severe developments in a wave of violence that has been building over the past few weeks. The attacks began with the throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails in the vicinity of the Netzarim Junction on 13 September. This was followed by the killing of an Israeli soldier by a roadside bomb on 27 September, and the murder of an Israeli police officer by a Palestinian policeman in a joint patrol on 29 September.

Finally, I'd like to comment on a two paragraph summary of Arafat's later years from the beginning of the article:

In his late sixties, Arafat attempted to transform himself from an archetypal revolutionary figure into a statesman and chief executive of the first self-ruled Palestinian territories. His handshake on the White House South Lawn with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Sept. 13, 1993, was one of the indelible images of the late 20th century, and the peace agreement they signed -- and for which they won the Nobel Prize -- seemed to hold the promise of a new future for the Middle East.

But his transformation was ultimately incomplete, and in U.S.-brokered negotiations at Camp David and in the Middle East in 2000 he was unwilling or unable to close a deal with Israel to put an end to the two sides' century-long conflict. Many concluded that Arafat had never truly reconciled himself to Israel's existence or the permanent exile of Palestinian refugees expelled from their ancestral homes by Israel. Under his rule, the Palestinian Authority was said by many to be riddled with corruption. When a bloody new Palestinian insurrection erupted in September 2000 -- if not led by Arafat then with his acquiescence -- he became a pariah to Israel and the United States.

Note the peace making Arafat made an "indelible image" but the contrary views are qualified by "Many concluded" (that Arafat hadn't reconciled himeself to Israel's existence) and (his government was) "said by many" (to be corrupt.)

It's astonishing the contortions that Hockstader went through to provide a sanitized portrait of an unrepentant terrorist. (A cursory look at the NY Times puff piece revealed that the Times didn't even mention the killing Noel and Curtis; so I guess there's one point in favor of Hockstader.)

My eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Freed (obm) would tell us that Kurt Waldheim was a "deodorized Nazi." This was still about a decade before the full extent of Waldheim's wartime activities became known. We didn't know what to make of it. It turned that she was right, though I am uncertain how she knew.

Yasser Arafat was a deodorized terrorist. He was cleaned up by politicians, diplomats and journalists (like Hockstader) who took care to excuse the violence because of the nobility of the cause. Evidence suggesting that Arafat was nothing more than a thug who received lots of foreign aid under false pretenses was routinely ignored by these enablers.

We have to make sure that Arafat is remembered for his evil. Let's not let him be deodorized any longer. This is one dead guy about whom we should speak ill.

Posted by SoccerDad at November 11, 2004 04:36 AM | TrackBack

Yasser Arafat Retrospective

Yasser Arafat Retrospective

From Â?A Good Career MoveÂ? by Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem Post, September 7, 1999: Â?On countless occasions, Yasir Arafat has regaled listeners about his Jerusalem birth and childhood. He fondly recalls his birthplace in a stone house abutting the Western Wall, then how he lived with his Uncle Sa'ud in Jerusalem. Like Said, Arafat presents himself as a victim of Zionism - someone who lost his wordly belongings and his place in the world due to Israel's coming into existence. But in fact, as two intrepid French biographers, Christophe Boltanski and Jihan El-Tahri revealed a few years, ago (in their 1997 book, Les sept vies de Yasser Arafat), "Mr. Palestine was born on the shores of the Nile." The French researchers tell an amusing story of discovery. They went to the University of Cairo and innocently asked for the registration of one Muhammad 'Abd ar-Ra'uf 'Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husayni at the School of Civil Engineering in 1956. This, Arafat's birth name, means nothing to the Egyptian clerk, who "sits down behind a rickety wooden table, almost completely hidden by the pile of dusty files bound in black leather" and "blows off a layer of grime in a most professional way," then hands over the records. In a blue ink faded by time, the researchers find that their man, living at 24A Baron Empain Street, Heliopolis, "was born on August 4, 1929, in Cairo." With this information in hand, they dash over to the State Registry and find Arafat's actual birth certificate, which confirms the date and place.

From Â?Is There an Alternative to Arafat's Leadership?Â?, by Barry Rubin, Jerusalem Issue Brief, December 23, 2003: Arafat is not a nationalist. If he was, he could have had a state in 1968, in 1979, at several points in the 1980s, and certainly in the year 2000. But he is not interested in the well-being of the Palestinian people, he's interested in the Palestinian cause. In many ways, one of the keys to understanding Arafat is that he is basically an old-fashioned Islamist, influenced by his early connections with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He believes that victory is inevitable and that God will bring him victory. He believes it would be a sin to compromise, and that he has no right to give up anything between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It is better to leave the battle to future generations than to make any political settlement that limits their ability to fight for total victory. Arafat is also a romantic revolutionary, the Middle Eastern counterpart of Che Guevara who glories in struggle and battling against the odds. He has no desire to become a statesman. He prefers to keep the revolution going. In each phase of his life - in Jordan (1967-1971), Lebanon (1971-1982), Tunis (1982-1994), and the West Bank and Gaza (1994 to the present) - Arafat has ended up destroying his own position because of the belief that violence always benefits his cause, the conviction that he doesn't have to implement his agreements, and the use of extremist front groups to commit violence for which he can disclaim responsibility. The bottom line is: Arafat will not make a deal. Therefore, either an alternative to Arafat is found or we will have to out-wait him, in order to achieve peace.

From Â?Promises But Never PeaceÂ? by Michael Kelly, April 3, 2002, The Washington Post: On July 1, 1994, Yasser Arafat entered Gaza to establish the Palestinian Autonomous Region -- betwixt-and-between creature of the Oslo peace process that was supposed to become, under the guiding light of the Oslo peace process, the physical base of another ambivalent notion, the Palestinian National Authority. I went as a reporter to Gaza a few hours before Arafat arrived, and I stayed there for about five weeks, observing the early days of life and governance under the Palestinian Authority. Arafat's entry into Gaza was an object lesson: a purposely uncaring display of brute power. He arrived from the Sinai in a long caravan of Chevrolet Blazers and Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs, 70 or 80 cars packed to the rooflines with men with guns. The caravan roared up the thronged roads and down the mobbed streets, with the overfed, leather-jacketed, sunglassed thugs of Arafat's bodyguard detail all the time screaming and shooting off their Kalashnikovs to make their beloved people scurry out of their beloved leader's way. This was the whole of the Palestinian Authority from the beginning, an ugly little cartoon of Middle East despotism. There was never any pretense of democracy, of rule of law, of a free press, of a working system of taxes or courts or hospitals. There was never any real government. No one ever bothered to build an economy or create jobs or even pick up the trash or pave the streets. There were only security forces -- many, many of these -- and villas by the sea for Arafat's cronies, and millions of dollars in foreign aid that seemed to always turn up missing, and prisons and propaganda. And in the middle of it all: "President" Arafat sitting in a room -- surrounded by waiting sycophants and toadies and respectful ladies and gentlemen of the press -- and complaining.

From Â?The Arafat I KnewÂ?, by Ion Mihai Pacepa, January 12, 2002, OpinionJournal.com: After a couple of hours we learned they had seized the participants at a diplomatic reception organized by the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum and were asking for Sirhan's release. On March 2, 1973, after President Nixon refused the terrorists' demand, the PLO commandos executed three of their hostages: American Ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr., his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian charge d'affaires Guy Eid. In May 1973, during a private dinner with Ceausescu, Arafat excitedly bragged about his Khartoum operation. "Be careful," Ion Gheorghe Maurer, a Western-educated lawyer who had just retired as Romanian prime minister, told him. "No matter how high up you are, you can still be convicted for killing and stealing."
"Who, me? I never had anything to do with that operation," Arafat said, winking mischievously.

From Â?Arafat's WarÂ? by Fouad Ajami, March 30, 2002, OpinionJournal.com: "If I go to Beirut I will be king, if I stay among my people I shall be emperor," the megalomaniacal Mr. Arafat proclaimed as the crowd hung on his utterances. He shows no mercy for his own, he offers them an old, failed history, a harvest of sorrow, but in a peculiar demonstration of the limits of reason in human history, his people rally to him. "With our blood and our souls, we redeem you, oh Arafat," the crowd chants, granting him an exemption from any calculus of gains and ruin. He was offered statehood some 18 months ago. He walked away from it and unleashed a phantom of incalculable power: the Right of Return, a claim not on the West Bank and Gaza, but on Jaffa and Haifa and Galilee, a way, insinuating and understood by his people and by Arabs beyond, of contesting Israel's very existence and statehood.

From Â?ArafatÂ?s Grand StrategyÂ? by Ephraim Karsh, August 4, 2004, Front Page Magazine: It is the tragedy of the Palestinians that the two leaders who determined their national development during the twentieth centuryÂ?Haj Amin Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem, who led them from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, and Yasir Arafat, who has dominated Palestinian politics since the mid-1960sÂ?were megalomaniac extremists obsessed with violence and blinded by anti-Jewish hatred. Had the mufti led his people to peace and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, as he promised the British officials who appointed him to his high rank, the Palestinians would have had their independent state in a substantial part of Mandatory Palestine by 1948. They thus would have been spared the traumatic experience of dispersion and exile. Had Arafat been genuinely interested in peace, a Palestinian state could have been established in the early 1980s as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979, or by May 1999, as a part of the Oslo process.
But then, for all his rhetoric about Palestinian independence, Arafat has never been as interested in the attainment of statehood as in the violence attending its pursuit. As far back as 1978, he told his close friend and collaborator, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that the Palestinians lacked the tradition, unity, and discipline to become a formal state, and that a Palestinian state would be a failure from the first day. The past decade has seen this bleak prognosis turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, driving Israelis and Palestinians in their bloodiest and most destructive confrontation in half a century.

From Â?Arafat's Condolences to Dolphinarium Bomber's FamilyÂ? Special Dispatch Series, July 8, 2001, Middle East Media Research Institute: To the brothers, the family of Al-Hotary and the Noble People of Qalqilya, With hearts that believe in Allah's will and predetermination, we have received the news about the martyrdom of the martyrÂ?. Al-Hotary, the son of Palestine, whose noble soul ascended toÂ? in order to rest in Allah's Kingdom, together with the Prophets, the men of virtue, and the martyrs. The heroic martyrdom operation Â? who turned his body into bombs Â? the model of manhood and sacrifice for the sake of Allah and the homelandÂ? that the martyr beÂ? in Allah's mercy and willÂ? Allah's grace and satisfactionÂ? will inspire all members of his familyÂ? The best of condolences. To Allah we belong and to him we return back [Koran]
Yasser Arafat, the President of the State of Palestine
Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO
Chairman of the Palestinian National Authority

From Â?Ship of TruthÂ? by Charles Krauthammer, January 11, 2002, The Washington Post: What does it take for the world to acknowledge the obvious truth that Yasser Arafat has no intention of making real peace? How much incontrovertible evidence is required before one admits that the Oslo "peace" was a fraud and a deception? Are 50 tons of smuggled weaponry insufficient to demonstrate that the truce the United States is seeking to establish would be nothing more than a breathing space for Arafat and the terrorists he supports to rearm, regroup and prepare for the next, more explosive phase of the war he began on Sept. 28, 2000?
The weapons were on the ship Israel intercepted en route from Iran to Gaza. The ship's captain has been a member of Arafat's Fatah for 25 years. He is an officer in the Palestinian navy. His ship was purchased by the Palestinian Authority. His instructions came from Arafat's arms paymaster. Arafat is shocked -- shocked! -- by these revelations. Comically, he has ordered an investigation. This will rival Hitler's investigation of the Reichstag fire. Palestine is a nasty police state where, if you make a sideways crack about Arafat in the men's room of the local cafe, you find yourself arrested within hours by one of Arafat's eight separate security forces. To believe that a $100 million arms shipment could have been made on anything less than Arafat's orders is to know nothing about the Palestinian revolution.

From Â?Investing In Yasser ArafatÂ?, by Michael Kelly, December 2, 1998, The Washington Post: There was a wonderful moment in the annals of diplomacy this week. Yasser Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority, had come to town to attend an international conference convened by the White House to raise a new pile of money to give to President Arafat. And the conference had gone splendidly. Everyone had behaved perfectly fine; no one had so much as mentioned the inconvenient London Sunday Times story the day before, which said that the Palestinian Authority had swiped $20 million in British aid intended to build housing for the poor of Gaza, using the money instead to build luxury flats for Arafat's military and bureaucratic elite. After a day of pleasantries, representatives of 43 nations had pledged $3 billion in new aid to the Palestinian Authority, including an extra $400 million from the U.S. president. Arafat saw that it was good. "I am satisfied with the reality of this conference," he pronounced.

From Â?Beyond ArafatÂ?, by Jim Hoagland, November 7, 2004, The Washington Post: You owe me. Pay up. Or else.
That was the underlying message in Yasser Arafat's many speeches to the United Nations, interviews with Western and Arab journalists and official meetings with international civil servants at the height of his career as a money-grubbing revolutionary. That essential message was usually cloaked in verbal camouflage. But at times, the man the Palestinians call Abu Ammar said it aloud, according to several foreign officials who described their experiences in detail in return for anonymity. "He asked me if I had brought the money in cash when I came to discuss several million dollars of technical aid promised to the Palestinian Authority," one international banker said. "He said he needed the money, right now, for his own needs. I said it did not work that way for us." It is bad enough that a shakedown artist came to be the recognized leader of a people abused by history and subjugated over the centuries by Arab, Turkish, British and Israeli occupiers. That in the grief and fury of dispossession the Palestinians internalized the Arafatist "pay up" view of world politics is even more tragic and self-defeating.

Posted by SoccerDad at November 11, 2004 02:22 AM | TrackBack

Yasser Arafat, CTD
That's "Circling the Drain."
Andrew has already linked to Daniel Pipes's "Arafat's Bedroom Farce." In a nutshell:

The mise-en-scène is as preposterous as what came before, only much funnier. First, there is the wife, Suha, a Greek Orthodox convert to Islam who nonetheless continued to observe Christian holidays and now bellows out "Allahu Akbar" as she spends a reputed $100,000 a month living the good life in Paris. Then there are the long-suffering minions, hoping to get their day in the sun, free at last of their irascible, unpredictable, domineering leader. Finally, there are the hapless French politicians, stung by their own stupidity in sending a military plane to Jordan to retrieve Arafat to Paris, then treating him like royalty (including a courtesy visit by President Jacques Chirac), only to find themselves parties to his death-bed antics.

(via Backspin) And the Baltimore Sun features another look at the pampered revolutionaries:

Some Arafat aides reacted to his wife's tirade with an outburst of their own, threatening to leave Paris if they were so unwanted, but that plan seemed to dissolve as soon as they realized that that would be fine with her.

They were reduced to milling around the plush lobby of the Intercontinental Le Grand Hotel on Rue Scribe, near the Garnier Opera House, as they conferred in corners and talked on cellular phones, breaking occasionally to complain to reporters about Suha Arafat's behavior - careful to criticize the performance and not the performer.

They occasionally lapsed into wondering aloud whether they ought to go home after all. They drank $14 cups of coffee, chain-smoked and sank into red, velvety chairs and couches.

But they insisted that this first big test of their leadership in what might soon be a post-Arafat world was not a failure.

On a more serious note Pipes, yesterday, wrote "Arafat's Last Threat to Israel?" It follows the basic argument of Jackson Diehl (and others): Once Arafat is dead, President Bush will start pressuring Israel again. Unlike Diehl, Pipes is not at all amused about this prospect.

The combination of Mr. Bush's stunning new mandate and Mr. Arafat's near-death condition will lead, I predict, to a quick revival of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy after months of relative doldrums and to massive dangers to Israel.

The doldrums will cease because the Bush administration views Mr. Arafat as the main impediment to achieving its vision - articulated above by the president - of achieving a "Palestine" living in harmony side-by-side with Israel. As Mr. Arafat exits the political stage, taking with him his stench of terrorism, corruption, extremism, and tyranny, Washington will jump to make its vision a reality, perhaps as soon as this Thursday, when the British prime minister ("I have long argued that the need to revitalize the Middle East peace process is the single most pressing political challenge in our world today") comes to town.

This observer expects that the president's efforts will not just fail but - like so much prior Arab-Israeli diplomacy - have a counterproductive effect.

Though I supported President Bush, in part because I felt he would be better towards Israel than Senator Kerry, I expected at some point that the President would make demands on Israel that I do not agree with. But I also think that the situation is not as grim as Dr. Pipes does. For one thing, even Dr. Pipes has written that what's important is not what President Bush says about the Middle East, rather what he does.

Unlike President Clinton, I don't expect that President Bush will give the Palestinians much leeway. If he demands withdrawals from Israel, he will demand compliance from the Palestinians and he will take Israeli complaints seriously. It may not be what I want for Israel, but the Palestinians will have to get their house in order if they want the magic American "evenhandedness" (ie pressure on Israel).

Despite his fears Pipes writes at the end:

In conclusion, Israel has been spared from unremitting American pressure during the past three years only because Mr. Arafat continued to deploy the terrorism weapon, thereby alienating the American president and aborting his diplomacy. Thanks to growing anarchy in the Palestinian Arab territories, Israel will probably remain "lucky" for some time to come.

One last point. Pipes also writes about succession here:

Situation on the ground: There will be no successor to Mr. Arafat - he made sure of that through his endless manipulations, tricks, and schemes. Instead, this is the moment of the gunmen. Whether they fight for criminal gangs, warlords, security services, or ideological groups like Hamas, militiamen grasping for land and treasure will dominate the Palestinian scene for months or years ahead. The sort of persons familiar from past diplomacy or from TV commentaries - Mahmoud Abbas, Ahmed Qurei, et al. - lack gunmen, and so will have limited relevance going forward.

The Palestinian territories have already descended into a hellish anarchy and circumstances will probably worsen as the strongmen struggle for power. Eventually, two of them will emerge with the ability to negotiate with the Israelis and Americans.

Note, two of them. The geographic division of the West Bank and Gaza, of only minor import until now, looms large upon Mr. Arafat's passing. As Jonathan Schanzer has suggested, whoever rules in the one unit is unlikely to gain traction in the other, making the notion of a "Palestine" that much more difficult to promote.

Two Palestines, anyone?

Since Arafat ran the PA more as a crime family than as a revolutionary movement, it is the fellows with the most firepower who will succeed him.

To my mind the most likely strongman to take over is Mohammed Dahlan. He has parlayed his control of Gaza into a fortune. He has protected Hamas and thus has good relations with them. And no doubt he has plenty of loyal gunmen at his side. He had fallen out with Arafat, but that just might be a function of his popularity being seen as a threat to the Ra'is. Finally he's a bit of a media darling. I don't expect the chaos in Gaza, but that Dahlan will systematically take over Gaza with his private army.

A month ago there was an attempt on the life Yasser's cousin, Moussa:

General Arafat, a cousin of PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, is one of the most controversial figures in the Gaza Strip. His appointment last July as overall commander of the National Security Forces triggered a wave of unprecedented protests, with many Palestinians accusing him of being corrupt and brutal.

During the protests, Fatah militiamen and supporters of former PA security minister Mohammed Dahlan attacked and torched offices belonging to General Arafat's men in the southern Gaza Strip.

Sources in the Gaza Strip pointed out that this was not the first attempt on General Arafat's life. Already back in 1996, masked gunmen fired several shots at his home after holding him responsible for torturing detainees. Since then Arafat has reportedly survived several assassination attempts.

Even when the Ra'is was alive (and maybe not well) Dahlan had the guts to defy him. (OK, it was his people, but they felt safe attacking Moussa.) Presumably, he was also behind the assassination attempt.

Though Dahlan has cultivated a sophisticated image with a number of journalists his hands are not clean. He was implicated in the attack on the school bus near Kfar Darom that killed Gavriel Biton and Mirian Amitai as well as severely wounding the children from the Cohen family. He also is a good friend of Yihye Ayash's (the Engineer) deputy Mohammed Dief and probably was largely responsible for Dief's being able to evade justice for so long.

Israel won't exactly be getting George Washington with Dahlan. The best Israel can hope for from him is stability. We'll see.

If there's a leader to emerge in Judea and Samaria, (assuming two parallel leaders as Pipes does) my money would be on Jibril Rajoub. Again he's a former security chief with dirty money, bloody hands (a nice shampoo collection), some popular support and lots of guns.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad

My Problem with Zogby
Biur Chametz (actually blogger Zman Biur) kindly forwarded me John Zogby's mea culpa for blowing this election. Clearly Biur read my earlier post - since partially retracted - accusing Zogby of being a Democratic partisan. That is one of the issues Zogby addresses:

For those of you so kind to point out that my brother is on the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee, you need to understand that he was an active Democrat when my polling showed George Pataki defeating Mario Cuomo in 1994, when I had Bob Dole doing much better than other polls suggested against Bill Clinton in 1996, and when I polled for the National Republican Congressional Committee in 1998. It seems I spent lots of my time back then denying I was a Republican.

I find that reasonably convincing. He addressed another perception too:

And to those who note my Arab heritage and again my relationship with my brother, please read the Democratic National Committee position on the Middle East. It offered me no comfort.

Here I'm less convinced. Why? Because in the past he's done polls in the Arab world seemingly for the sole purpose of giving Shibley Telhami data, so Telhami can claim that the biggest problem facing the United States in the Middle East is its support of Israel. As Joseph Farah points out about these polls:

As pointed out by James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, using Freedom House's annual survey of freedom in the world as a guide, only Kuwait among the nations surveyed is ranked even "partly free." Egypt, Lebanon, which is occupied by an Arab neighbor, and the Emirates are all ranked "not free." Saudi Arabia scores even lower in political rights and civil rights.

This context raises three questions unaddressed by Telhami and Zogby:


Are public opinion poll respondents free to express themselves in these countries?

To what extent does the leadership of these countries shape the public opinion through control of the media, the schools and other cultural institutions?

What difference does public opinion make in an authoritarian or totalitarian country?
Often people ask me if Arab public opinion – both in the Arab world and among Arabs living in the West – is as solidly anti-Israel as it appears in international media portrayals. The question is one that cannot be answered with any degree of assurance as Arab leaders do not submit themselves to the will of the people.

Clearly in police states like those named above, the public is not free to express opinions that might run counter to the official government line. Therefore, any such survey of public opinion will not be scientifically accurate or valid.

Secondly, these regimes devote a significant amount of resources to propaganda. And, despite the Internet, satellite television and short-wave radio, unofficial, alternative information sources are at a premium.

Lastly, since meaningful free elections are largely unknown in the Arab world, public opinion is worth about as much as this Zogby poll, which is to say nothing.

Zogby (and Telhami) know all this but they go through the motions of taking a poll to prove their point. They know what the answers will be before they start. They just want to give their own views "scientific" credibility. What they're doing with these polls is dishonest.

And even if I find Zogby's protestation of impartiality convincing, that doesn't necessarily clear him of bad faith. RealClearPolitics noted:

6) Zogby
Failed to Project Winner: 27.3% | Average Error = 3.6

As we all know, Zogby had been on record for months saying that Kerry was going to win this race. Despite his final tracking poll that put Bush ahead by one point nationally, Zogby's polling at the state level reflected his belief that Kerry was going to be the beneficiary of huge turnout - especially among the youth vote. The result is that Zogby missed three of the eleven states he polled in (FL, IA, and NM), had a relatively high error rate across the board (3.8%), and his numbers generally skewed in favor of John Kerry.

Adding insult to injury, Zogby's bizarre election day antics calling for "surprises" in Colorado and Virginia and a decisive 311 electoral vote victory for Kerry suggest he was relying on (not to mention taken in by) the badly skewed early exit poll data.

Let's be honest: Zogby's conduct this year bordered on outrageous. No other independent pollster was out making public predictions of a John Kerry or George W. Bush victory months before hand. And no other pollster decided to wait until 5:30pm Eastern time on election day to post their final numbers.

Yesterday however, RealClearPolitics quotes from Zogby's apology and seems to have softened its stand a little.

So the question is, what purpose is served (other than perhaps self aggrandizement) by polling on election day and releasing "final" numbers at 5:30pm Eastern when the polls in many states on the East Coast start closing shortly thereafter? I'm not sure Zogby has fully explained that one.

NOTE:I found RealClearPolitics ranking of the battleground pollsters rather interesting. Numbers 2 and 3 were Rasmussen and Survey USA. Survey USA as RCP notes:

Some people have questioned methodology and reliability of SurveyUSA's polls.

(Survey USA had a poll in the early fall showing Maryland tied.) Indeed, The Washington Post reported in "In Such a Tight Race, Pollster Sees a Profit" that both firms are criticized for their automatic polling. Rasmussen is criticized because he just polls for profit. *Gasp* (Why that makes him less reliable than someone polling for a political party is not explained by the article.) And Zogby, who was a lot less reliable than Rasmussen and Survey USA this year got to host his own Live Online chat session at the Washington Post right before the election. Go figure.

CHECK OUT MY NEW BLOG http://soccerdad.baltiblogs.com