Doug Lorimer
Yasser Arafat, who died in a Paris hospital on November 11, at the age of 75, was the iconic figure of his people's struggle for freedom from six decades of brutal, US-backed, Zionist ethnic cleansing and colonisation of the Palestinian national homeland.
Born on August 4, 1929, in Cairo to Palestinian parents, Arafat spent his boyhood years with relatives in Gaza, then under British colonial rule. At the end of the 1947-49 al Nakba (the catastrophe), in which Zionist paramilitaries seized control of most of Palestine, Arafat found himself a refugee.
After studying at Cairo University, Arafat moved to Kuwait, a British protectorate at the time, to work as an engineer. In 1957, he helped found Fatah (the Palestinian National Movement), one of a number of emerging independent Palestinian liberation organisations.
Most Palestinians, however, looked to Egyptian President Gamal Abd al Nasser to win their demands for the restoration of the Palestinians' homeland.
Nasser came to power in a junior officers' coup in 1952 that ousted the corrupt regime of King Fahd, a British stooge. From 1955, Nasser made the cause of the dispossessed and colonised Palestinian nation a key part of his pan-Arab nationalist foreign policy.
But Nasser, whose regime kept a tight grip on Egyptian political life, was wary of the emerging independent Palestinian organisations. To keep them under the Arab regime's control, at Nasser's initiative, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was set up in 1964 with an office in Cairo staffed by Egyptian-installed paid functionaries.
Israeli aggression against Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967 brought all of the rest of Palestine under Zionist rule. But the devastating defeat suffered by the Arab armies at the hands of Israel's surprise attack also shattered many Palestinians' hopes that salvation would come from the Arab regimes.
On March 12, 1968, Fatah commandos held their ground against a major attack by the Israeli military on the Palestinian refugee camp of Karameh, in Jordan. It was the first time that an Arab fighting force had defeated an Israeli attack. It had an electrifying effect on the Arab world, massively boosting Fatah's popularity and enabling it to take control of the PLO, with Arafat elected as its chairperson in February 1969.
Under Arafat's leadership, the PLO was transformed into an independent mass organisation based in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. The PLO brought the various guerrilla organisations under a single umbrella. It organised political discussion groups, newspapers, education and health care programs, and many other aspects of life in the refugee camps.
In an interview with New York Times journalist Dana Schmidt that appeared on December 3, 1968, Arafat explained his and Fatah's approach to the conflict with Israel: "Our ideological theory is very simple. Our country has been occupied. The majority of our people have been kicked out by Zionism and imperialism from their homes.
"We have waited and waited and waited for the justice of the United Nations, for the justice of the world and the governments gathering in the United Nations while our people were suffering in tents and caves. But nothing of this was realised. None of our hopes. But our dispersion was aggravated.
"We have believed that the only way to return to our homes and land is the armed struggle. We believe in this theory without any complications and with complete clarity, and that is our aim and our hope.
"We believe that resistance is a legal right of all oppressed peoples."
Arafat and Fatah also had to wage armed resistance in the 1960s and '70s against military attacks from the capitalist Arab regimes in Jordan and Lebanon, which feared the radicalising impact on the Arab masses of the independent Palestinian movement.
Responding to a question from Schmidt about Fatah's attitude to the Israeli Jews, Arafat said: "We are not against the Jews. We welcome with sincerity all the Jews who would like to live with us in sincerity in an Arab state as citizens having equal rights before the constitution."
Usually an oppressed nation's demand for self-determination takes the form of demanding its own sovereign state, separate from the oppressor nation. However, Arafat's call for a democratic, secular state in all of Palestine, under which both Arabs and Jews could live as equal citizens, reflected the specific origins of the Palestinians' national oppression — the result of the establishment of the Israeli colonial-settler state through the forcible partition of the Palestinians' national homeland and the expulsion of much of its indigenous population.
As Arafat noted when he spoke before the UN General Assembly in November 1974: "This general assembly, early in its history [1947], approved a recommendation to partition our Palestinian homeland... The General Assembly partitioned that which it had no right to divide — an indivisible homeland.
"Furthermore, even though the partition resolution granted the colonial settlers 54% of the land of Palestine, their dissatisfaction with the decision prompted them to wage a war of terror against the civilian Arab population. They occupied 81% of the total area of Palestine, uprooting a million Arabs."
Arafat's invitation to address the UN General Assembly in 1974 reflected the rise to international prominence of the Palestinian struggle and the recognition by most of the world's governments of the PLO as an enormously popular Third World national liberation movement, despite Washington's, Israel's and the Western corporate media's vilification of Arafat and the PLO as "terrorists".
But as Uri Avnery, a member of the Zionist Irgun terrorist gang in the 1940s, later an Israeli MP and now a leader of the Gush Shalom peace organisation, recently observed: "It must be stated frankly: without the murderous attacks [by Palestinian guerrillas on Israeli targets], the world would have paid no attention to the Palestinian call for freedom."
Avnery, who has long declared Arafat to be a personal friend, added that when Arafat began his political activity, "The name Palestine had been eradicated from the map. Israel, Jordan and Egypt had divided the country between them. The world had decided that there was no Palestinian national identity, that the Palestinian people had ceased to exist, like the American Indian nations — if, indeed, it ever existed at all."
Several months before his UN address, Arafat led the way in beginning to equip the PLO with a program aimed at winning international acceptance for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories seized by Israel in 1967 as a transitional step toward ending the oppression of the Palestinian nation.
After repeated attempts to murder Arafat — including Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and Israeli warplanes' 1983 bombing raid on the PLO offices in Tunis — the Palestinians' 1987-93 mass campaign of largely non-violent resistance (the first intifada), finally forced the Israeli rulers to negotiate with the PLO.
In September 1993, Arafat and Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin signed an accord negotiated between Israel and the PLO in Oslo that was supposed to pave the way for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. In July 1994, Arafat return to a triumphal welcome in Palestine. Two years later he was elected president of the Palestinian Authority.
However, for Israel and the US, the Oslo "peace process" was little more than a tactic to get the PA to end the intifada. As Israel continued its relentless colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the PA failed to offer an adequate strategy of mobilisation to combat it, frustration among the Palestinians finally exploded. In September 2000, the second intifada began, and, despite enormous pressure from the imperialists, Arafat refused to militarily crush it.
When the US and Israeli rulers thought Arafat would serve their ends they praised him as a peace-maker, awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. But when, at Camp David in July 2000, he refused to agree to a US-Israeli plan calling on the PLO to accept a nominally independent Palestinian state based on a series of Bantustan-like enclaves surrounded by Israeli military and paramilitary outposts, they once again began to demonise him as a "terrorist".
Arafat spent the last two years of his life under virtual Israeli house arrest in the rubble of the PA district headquarters in Ramallah following Israel's murderous March-April 2002 assault on Palestinian cities. Despite having to endure great discomfort and the constant threat of Israeli assassination, Arafat defiantly declared he would rather die than accept Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's offer of safe passage into permanent exile.
The Electronic Intifada website, which has been highly critical of Arafat's over-reliance on diplomacy to advance the Palestinian cause, noted in its obituary for Arafat that "his steadfastness in maintaining dignity and decorum as the Palestinian president in the rubble of Al Muqtada showed much of his true nature: tough, patient, cheerful and uninterested in comfort, luxuries and ostentation".
Arafat departed the Palestinian and world political stage as he emerged on it — as a freedom fighter who forced the world to acknowledge the Palestinians' right to live in their homeland free of colonial oppression.
From Green Left Weekly, November 24, 2004.
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