Diplomatic Dispatch: After Arafat
CBS News Reporter Charles Wolfson is a former Tel Aviv bureau chief for CBS News, who now covers the State Department.
Yasser Arafat was "the man who has dominated - even created - the Palestinian cause, shaped the Arab-Israeli conflict, and blocked the achievement of its peaceful resolution for almost half a century," according to Barry Rubin, who has co-authored a biography of the Palestinian leader.
The world most often saw him dressed in his military uniform wearing a traditional Arab kaffiyah on his head, a pistol almost always in the holster he wore around his waist.
One American official who dealt with him regularly described him as "maddening, mercurial, evasive and megalomaniacal, although he could be very hospitable and gallant to women." "Arafat," says this official, "considered himself a great historical figure." One line the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization often used, according to the official, was "I am the only undefeated Arab general."
Another official who saw Arafat at close hand said Arafat was "a man who often talked about his desire to achieve Palestinian aspirations, but frequently failed to translate that desire into reality."
Biographer Rubin said "Arafat was successful in building his movement…he held together a loose coalition of Palestinian groups by being the symbol of all but never trying to impose real control on his smaller rivals."
Arafat, according to Rubin "sustained the longest-running terrorist campaign in modern history," yet he also was a "miserable failure" because he missed several opportunities to achieve statehood for the Palestinians.
The passing of Yasser Arafat presents an opportunity for the Bush administration to rethink its role as a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Along with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's announced plan to unilaterally withdraw all Israeli settlers from Gaza and four West Bank settlements during the coming year, and with President Bush now assured of being in office another four years, the timing is ripe for another push from Washington.
"It's given President Bush, at the beginning of a new term, a new opportunity not just to be the war-maker in the Middle East, but to be the peacemaker," says former Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk, also a former Ambassador to Israel and a participant in the Camp David peace talks.
State department officials who deal with these issues recognize there will be a difficult period of mourning for the Palestinian people as well as a period where consolidation of power needs to be worked out among various political factions. One official warns against seeing any "immediate" opportunity for dramatic diplomatic breakthroughs.
The bottom line for the last four years was a worsening in relations between Israelis and Palestinians, which was not helped by Mr. Bush's mistrust of and refusal to meet with Arafat. Secretary of State Colin Powell met with him only a couple of times before also putting him on the persona non grata list.
The distaste for Arafat - who was, after all, the democratically-elected leader of the Palestinian people - ran so deep that even the senior American diplomat assigned to the Palestinians (the Consul General based in Jerusalem) was for the past several years prohibited from having any contact at all with Arafat.
Israel's Sharon similarly excluded Arafat from contact, leaving Washington and Jerusalem to talk about Palestinians without including their most important leader in the discussions.
Nominal political power went to the office of Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, a newly-created post to get around dealing with Arafat, the elected President. The plan looked good on paper, but it didn't work because Arafat continued - as he always had - undermining all other potential Palestinian leaders he viewed as possible rivals for power.
A senior official who has worked on the Middle East peace issues says a real change in the political leadership of the Palestinians "should lead" to a new diplomatic opportunity. "Israel has been able to say 'we have no partner for peace,'" says this official. Now, with new Palestinian leadership in the offing, and with Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan on the table, he says "in concept, it presents a new opening."
Aaron Miller, who worked on Middle East peace initiatives for six secretaries of State, cautions the Bush administration's foreign policy team not to rush in with a new proposal. "Arafat's death is the story now. Sharon's Gaza withdrawal doesn't start until next spring. The administration has some breathing room." But sensing an opening for diplomatic negotiations, Miller says "it's the first time in four years we have an opportunity to break a stalemate."
It would be an ironic note indeed if Yasser Arafat's death does lead to achieving something he was unable and/or unwilling to bring about in life: securing a homeland for his people, to be called Palestine.
By Charles Wolfson