What Did Arafat Leave His Nation?

I haven't found it yet on the Net, but on the wire is this editorial from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

In Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "Silver Blaze," Sherlock Holmes — investigating the mysterious death of a race-horse trainer — calls his companions' attention to "the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime."

"The dog did nothing in the nighttime," someone replies.

"That was the curious incident," Holmes says.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is dead, and acknowledgments of prominent men traditionally focus on what they did rather than what they did not do. But sometimes the latter is also instructive.

In early 1948, when the state of Israel was a-borning and Arafat was a young man, an assassin gunned down a former lawyer who had helped free his fellow Indians from British colonialism. Only days before, Mohandas K. Gandhi — one of the 20th century's apostles of nonviolence — had ended a hunger strike aimed at curbing a wave of Hindu-Muslim violence.

In 1968, the year before Aafat became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, an assassin killed a clergyman in Memphis, Tenn. With his dogged leadership, peaceful tactics and prophetic criticism of entrenched injustice, Martin Luther King Jr. helped lift much of the burden that had crushed African-Americans for decades.

In 1994, the year after the Oslo accords, a former lawyer became South Africa's first black president.

Not too long before, Nelson Mandela a longtime key figure in the African National Congress, a banned organization with a less-than-savory reputation — had been serving a life sentence on Robben Island. In the 1980s, he had been offered freedom if he disavowed violence in the fight against apartheid. He refused.

When South Africa's white minority finally let power slip from its fists, the world had reason to fear that the black majority would explode in long-suppressed vengeance. But it did not. Under Mandela's leadership, his nation became a startling insance of a velvet revolution.

Now, in 2004, Yasser Arafat is dead. What did he leave his Palestinian children?
Mohandas Gandhi left the Indians a state — often racked by poverty and bloodletting, but nevertheless the world's most populous democracy. MLK hardly solved the problems of U.S. racism, but he helped free American blacks from their legal shackles and lit a torch that still calls society to equality. Nelson Mandela retired from office ina nation of great troubles, but one that escaped the ruinous civil wars that have plagued much of Africa.

A proper judging of the sinners and the sinned-against on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide can be done elsewhere — if it can be done at all. But faced with the fact of an Israeli state and the desire of his people for a nation of their own, what did Arafat do?

He did not opt for the path of peace — at least, not for decades. Rather, he cultivated a movement responsible for such atrocities as the 1972 killings of Israeli atletes at the Munich Summer Olympics.

Even after the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat was hardly an icon of nonviolent resistance. One wonders what would have happened had he publicly and unequivocally repudiated terrorist elements and done his utmost to root them out.

Of course, it takes two sides to negotiate a settlement that both sides are willing to live with, and some might say that even anothe Gandhi could not have wrung a Palestinian state out of Israel.

Perhaps so. But at the end of Arafat's day — after decades of terrorism and political maneuvering and millions of dollars in foreign aid — what do the Palestinians have?

They have no state. They have no thriving economy. What they have at the moment is the image of a man in military garb and a keffiyeh, a man to whom they gave loyalty and blood for years who in turn left them with ... very little.

Perhaps Yasser Arafat did provide his people with a legacy of pride. But what he failed to leave them, and failed to do, will loom much larger in the long run.

Death enforces the common courtesy rule on me: "If you can't say something nice ...." This is probably the nicest thing said about Arafat that I could nod to.

Among world leaders, past and present, Australia's John Howard seems to have come closest to this truth: “I think history will judge him very harshly for not having seized the opportunity in the year 2000 to embrace the offer that was very courageously made by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, which involved the Israelis agreeing to 90 per cent of what the Palestinians had wanted.”

If you want a less kind view of the recently deceased, however, I recommend Jeff Jacoby's.