Eight years after the passing of Yasser Arafat, new speculations have arisen concerning the previously mysterious circumstances of his death. Tests from his clothing indicate unusually high levels of plutonium, giving rise to accusations of poisoning. Authorization has been given from his family and the Palestinian Authority for an autopsy of his remains and full investigation.
Yasser Arafat's tombstone in Ramallah has become a national symbol for Palestinians. Credit: Creative Commons/Tristam Sparks.
The charge of homicide carries several implications, perhaps the greatest of which is, with so many fingers to point and people to blame, how will this hinder any possibility of mutual trust between Israelis and Palestinians? If it becomes apparent eight years on that Arafat was assassinated, one can only imagine where the peace process will lead.
Cause of death aside, Arafat remains a controversial figure of modern history, and an excellent example of the power and enigma of political legacy. Unquestionably, Arafat holds a unique place in the consciousness of many Palestinians. While recently living in the West Bank, I heard his nickname, Abu Ammar, referenced at least as often and with a greater degree of reverence than any living Palestinian representative such as Abbas.
For many Palestinians, Abu Ammar elicits certain nostalgia. In the days of his leadership, negotiations held more promise, peace talks had not fallen through quite so many times, and there was a certain hopefulness that has now been usurped by futility. Regardless of the multitude of charges brought against Abu Ammar (corruption, terrorism, etc.), his legacy for those who admire him is one of integrity. He was first and foremost a leader and genuine representative of the Palestinian people, with their rights and best interests at his heart. His mandate was unquestionable. He was never propped up by outside forces or governments.
With any leader, the legacy he or she imparts can often paint an overly homogenous picture of their life and work. He or she is either loved or hated, revered or reviled. Arafat is an exemplary case of the stark dichotomy in opinions with which people become remembered, especially those who have been at the heart of such extreme and volatile situations. He is a hero to some, and a murderer to others.
I spent the summer of 2011 volunteering as an English teacher at a local center in the city of Hebron, Palestine. The center shares the third floor of a building with a two-bedroom apartment, where a single woman lives with her two young kids. We would often meet each other in the hallway, and sometime around my second week there, they invited me in for lunch. In typical Palestinian fashion, they showered me with an enormous meal, even sending the young son out to buy Snickers, knowing that I would recognize and appreciate the American candy. Moreover, they opened up their home and their lives to me, a foreign stranger who spoke little of their language.
We conversed, and at some point in the conversation, the woman explained that her husband died eight years ago, leaving her with two kids and a long commute to work. She did not share the cause of death, but it was apparent he had died young. I sympathized with her, and shared that my mother, too, died eight years ago. Regardless of how superficially different our lives where, I felt some sort of mutual understanding with the family, especially the two young kids, ages fourteen and nine, who had grown up with only one parent.
After enjoying their hospitality and returning to work, my coworker explained to me that her husband, the father of these kids, had been killed during the last Intifada, in that very building. He had been a target hit, killed by plane.
One program we offered at the center was a summer camp for kids ages eight to twelve, designed to promote English language learning and leadership and teamwork skills. I was pleased when the nine-year-old son from next door came to join our camp. On some level, I empathized with him.
Frequently during those days of running the summer camp, I would pause to look around the room at these children and ponder my surroundings. They laughed and ran and screamed with a familiar glee. They might as well have been American kids, but with one huge difference in my mind: these were children of the second Intifada. With a war in their backyard, their first years were so fundamentally different from any typical American child. From what roots had these children come? How does the Intifada form a small child?
Sometimes my Palestinian friends would tell me stories about the last Intifada. They would tell me of the excessive numbers of checkpoints, for example: one at the end of your driveway, one every 100 meters on the road. To get to school, five kilometers away, would take an hour, let alone to travel 30 km to the next city, which would take 10. Army tanks stationed everywhere became so commonplace that children growing up at the time never understood the machines’ abnormality. They would chase after the tanks and create games around them, in fearless ignorance of their meaning. This was the status quo. It was difficult for me to imagine or visualize, coming from America. Yet looking around at these summer campers, it was impossible to detect whatever traces remained in them. The Intifada is over and people carry on as normal.
On the final day of camp, we took the campers on a field trip to Ramallah, with one of the first stops on our itinerary being Arafat’s tomb. The campers went up to the headstone respectfully, posed for some photos gracefully, and got ready to leave, relatively uninterested in the site as children tend to be with all things called “historical” or “educational.” The boy from next door was the only one who lingered in the back, taking longer than the rest to observe the grave. It became obvious that he was honoring Abu Ammar in a much deeper way than the rest of the kids, his attitude much more somber and contemplative. He finally ended his visit with a full salute to the departed, the image of which still remains in my mind.
That this little boy was shaped by the Intifada is indisputable. The question still in my mind is, what sort of person will he grow up to be? What does the pain and injustice of never knowing one’s father, combined with heroes like Abu Ammar produce? What sort of man will he become, and by which principles will he guide his actions? It is on these children, not aging politicians like Abu Ammar or Mahmoud Abbas, that the foundations and hopes for peace ride.
Arafat’s enigma, like any other legacy, billows and continues to affect people in a multitude of ways. Should one fear that people of such controversy only serve to divide, rather than unite? Will the memory of Abu Ammar, and new allegations of assassination and wrongdoing only further accentuate people’s differences instead of working to bridge them? Would it be better for this little boy to have a role model whose character is morally ambiguous, or no role model at all? Or, does Abu Ammar retain any potential to unite people, even under today’s circumstances? In effect, he led Palestinians to the closest that they have ever come to real negotiations. He brought the PLO to recognize 1967 borders as the foundation of two states for two peoples. Is there something in what he stood for that can be extrapolated as universal?
The challenge of political legacy increases tenfold in a place where memory already dictates so much. Whether it is memory of the Holocaust, memory of the Nakba, memory of a homeland, memory of the Temple Mount, collective memory undeniably provides the framework for so much of daily life in Israel and Palestine. The issue of legacy is not simply that it is subjective, but that you cannot disprove to someone his own point of view. If Abu Ammar has shaped who someone is, in any capacity, it will be hard to dissuade that person or make him change his fundamental view of the man. How can such variance and diversity be brought toward one common goal, by one common method?
As I look at this little boy, at the seriousness, humility, and sense of duty that he expresses at the site of Arafat’s grave, it is impossible not to recognize that he will carry this for the rest of his life. In the same way that we all have rocks we carry, this little boy will forever carry the Intifada with him, along with the father he never knew, and the leader who maybe could have made things right.
Inasmuch as the past weighs us down and presents the power to make people feel fundamentally separate from one another, does it not also give valuable lessons and potentially beneficial insight? The past is inescapable, and thus it must be harnessed in such a way as to empower people and ignite mutual recognition. Memory is only helpful inasmuch as it makes us cognizant of our own humanity. At the end of the day, we must remember that we are all only human, and we are all of questionable moral character, striving to achieve better, and to err on the side of good, together. This is the power of legacy, at its best. It is not black and white, but willing to admit the truth.
There are few points.
1. There was no autopsy after his death, Them the medical records were handed over to Suha Arafat and the Palestinian authorities, which lend the possibility that the have been altered. There is no way that there could even a clean definitive investigation. There is not even proof that the Polonium (not plutonium as your wrote) was not planted on his cloths. This whole thing smells of planting a conspiracy, especially when no one reported what the cause of death was. When has digging up a rotten corpse produced any definite results especially when the sides making the claims has control over potential evidence?
2. You really put Arafat on the pedestal where is does not belong. He walked away from what could have been a historic peace agreement because he demanded the right of return of refugees, a total demographic suicide proposal for Israel and the complete withdraw form east Jerusalem.East Jerusalem was never Palestinian, never.Arafat walked away for a golden opportunity. Arafat fancies himself more as a terrorist in a bunker than a politician.
3. Arafat and his Fatah were incredibly corrupt. The money as the EU and US passed over to the Palestinian Authority lined the pockets of Arafat’s cronies and made them very rich. The EU, intact, alarmed at the lack of transparency. Suha Arafat raped the Palestinians of the money and uses it to shop in Paris. Arafat ad the Fatah were as filthy as they came.
4. Your blog focuses on Palestinian suffering, What about Israeli suffering four a multitude of suicide bombings. Those incursions, those road blocks were al as a result of suicide bombing,. Israel’s hardened attitude towards Palestinians was shaped by suicide bombing.
Thank you for your comments, Don, and for pointing out my typo.
My post was offering merely one perspective of many, not trying to downplay or disprove other points of view, but share one that I myself have seen. I am not trying to deny anything that Arafat did or did not do, but rather make the point that in remembering certain people and events, we often leave out what we do not want to remember, instead of embracing history in full.
People love this man for certain reasons, and people hate him for certain other reasons. We do ourselves a favor by examining this spectrum in full, not only one pole or the other. I think you and I agree on this point.
I think it is bets to offer 2 perspectives rather than just one. People in Israel have very strong feeling with regard to this man. I find the whole act of exhuming is corpse very disturbing, especially seeing the potential for manipulating evidence and the was never an autopsy in the 1st place.
I think that the is far more pressing then digging up Arafat’s toxic corpse.
UN team investigates reported Syria massacre
By BEN HUBBARD | Associated Press – 1 hr 27 mins ago
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BEIRUT (AP) – U.N. observers investigated the latest reported massacre in Syria, entering a village Saturday where activists say regime forces killed dozens of people the past week, as Turkey’s prime minister blasted Damascus’ leadership, warning that the Syrian people will “make them pay” for such mass killings.
An 11-vehicle team of observers went into the central village of Tremseh after receiving confirmation a cease-fire was in place, a spokesman for the U.N. mission in Syria, Ahmad Fawzi, said. It is the first outside look into the village where activists say at least 150 people were killed by government troops who shelled the town before moving in alongside pro-regime militiamen.
“We have sent a large integrated patrol today to seek verification of the facts,” Fawzi said.
Details of the killings remain unclear. The Syrian government says 50 people were killed in Tremseh Thursday when its forces clashed with “armed gangs” that were terrorizing village residents. The regime refers to its opponents as terrorists and gangsters. On Friday, the United Nations blamed government forces for the Tremseh assault, saying U.N. observers deployed near the village saw government troops using heavy weaponry and attack helicopters against it.
World leaders have heaped criticism on President Bashar Assad’s regime over the Tremseh incident, which was the latest in a series of reported mass killings by regime forces in recent months. Anti-regime activists say more than 17,000 people have been killed since the uprising against Assad’s rule began in March 2011. The killings cast new doubt over the international community’s efforts to find a diplomatic solution to Syria’s crisis.
The prime minister of Turkey – once an ally of Assad before turning against him early on in the uprising over the regime’s bloody crackdown, blasted Syria’s leadership on Saturday over the Tremseh killings.
“These vicious massacres, these attempts at genocide, these inhuman savageries are nothing but the footsteps of a regime that is on its way out,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. “Sooner or later, these tyrants with blood on their hands will go and the people of Syria will in the end make them pay.”
A suicide bomber blew up his car in the closest main town to Tremseh on Saturday, killing three civilians and one security officer, Syria’s state news agency said.
SANA said the attacker, who camouflaged the bomb with onions, detonated the explosives in the town of Muhrada.
The anti-regime Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the bomb targeted the local military security headquarters. Both reports said the dead included two women and a child. The Observatory provided a photo of what it said was the bomb site. It showed the facades blown off buildings on opposite sides of a street.
Bombings of security buildings throughout Syria have grown more common as the uprising has turned into a rebel insurgency. Many worry the attacks reflect the rise of Islamist extremists and possibly al-Qaida in the anti-Assad struggle. Credible claims of responsibility for such attacks are rare, although a shadowy militant group calling itself the Al-Nusra Front has claimed some of them in postings on militant websites. Little is known about the group.
The U.N. special envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, on Friday said he was “shocked and appalled” by the reports of the attack on Tremseh, and condemned the government for using heavy weaponry in populated areas, something it was supposed to have stopped three months ago.
Activists said the army surrounded and shelled the village before storming it with pro-government gunmen who killed people in the streets. They provided videos showing tanks in the town and dozens of dead bodies.
The government said the army intervened while armed terrorists were harassing the town. On Saturday, the state news agency posted photos of rifles, hand grenades, mortars, cell phones and video cameras it said had been found in the town.
Government and activist claims could not be independently verified.
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AP correspondent Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.
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