Arafat's passing
It’s usually as well to observe a period of silence on the death of a public figure for whom one has little or no respect. But political leaders are different: we judge them more especially for what they have wrought. What Arafat wrought was ignoble.
The demand for an independent Palestinian state is just. No one – literally no one - has done more to prevent its realisation and detract from its legitimacy than Arafat. One need not subscribe to the notion that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” – an abdication of the responsibility to exercise moral discrimination – to acknowledge that a movement practising political violence can in principle metamorphose into a legitimate constitutional cause. (The old Official IRA, now sublimated in a small Marxist organisation called the Workers’ Party, is an example.) Arafat never made that transition. The terrorism with which he pursued his cause was distinctively brutal. When he planned and ordered the torture and murder in Khartoum in 1973 of the US Ambassador Cleo Noel and another American diplomat, it was impossible afterwards to determine from inspecting the victims' corpses which of the men had been black and which white.
I believe it is always a mistake for free societies to make political concessions in the hope of achieving a solution to terrorist grievances. The best means of transforming a conflict so that terrorists abandon violence and adhere strictly to constitutional politics is to make it clear to them that the costs of pursuing terrorism will be very high indeed.
This ought to have been the stance that democratic governments adopted with the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s. That it was not had a disastrous effect on the character of post-Oslo diplomacy. Never having been tested by international interlocutors, Arafat saw no reason to pursue a diplomatic resolution. Oslo was the right principle: but it failed because Arafat was unwilling to meet his treaty obligation of cracking down on terrorist groups. It wasn't that he was unable to do this - he dealt effectively enough with Hamas in 1996 and in the first year of Ehud Barak's government, when it was in his interests to be seen to comply with his obligations. But more typically he just didn’t want to. When Barak agreed to the Clinton administration’s proposals that would have created an independent, territorially-contiguous Palestinian state on all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem, Arafat responded not with a counter-offer but with a campaign of violence.
Those who have criticised President Bush’s disengagement from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generally overlook the reasoning behind that stance. Arafat was duplicitous and untrustworthy. Instead of abjuring violence he fomented it. Instead of governing wisely and well in preparation for statehood, he exercised arbitrary power and exhibited relentless cupidity. No agreement signed by Arafat could have been made to stick. His people were greatly the poorer for having been misrepresented and misruled by him; they urgently require better leadership on his passing.
