As he lay dying

Friday, November 05, 2004

The prevailing view right now is that it is either going to be Abu Dis, the East Jerusalem suburb under Palestinian control, where a plot was actually prepared for such a tomb when the Palestinian parliament building was going up there, or Gaza, with the Gaza locale more likely for a seemingly prosaic but actually highly significant reason: Gaza has its own airport, and there are foreign statesmen – possibly including sworn enemies of Israel – who may want to attend the funeral. The airport would have to be repaired but more importantly, Israel would have to allow it to be opened for the occasion, and it is difficult to imagine that it would then force the airport closed after the funeral.

In short, a Gaza funeral is a perfect opportunity for Israel to make a gesture of goodwill toward the Palestinians that would also serve Israeli interests by keeping Arafat’s tomb far from Jerusalem.

Hopes are that the dual leadership of Mahmoud Abbas as the overall political figure heading the PLO and Fateh while Ahmed Qurei’ heads the Palestinian Authority, would be able to sustain the extraordinary calm that seemed to descend on the Palestinian territories ever since Arafat took ill and was flown to Paris for treatment.

Abbas and Qurei have been holding marathon session of their respective institutions to shore up support from all – as well as meetings with Hamas leaders to make sure they stick to the undeclared ceasefire that has more or less been in effect since Arafat took ill. Abbas and Qurei are not merely acceptable to the West (and Israel) in ways that Sharon was not. Unlike Arafat, they adapted to the post-underground, post-revolutionary stage in Palestinian history. Unlike Arafat, they chose suits and ties, not custom-tailored military mufti as their haberdashery. And unlike Arafat, their rejection of terror as a strategic instrument of power was not merely a tactical choice, but a strategic and indeed moral one. Or at least that is how it appears to Westerners, including most importantly, George W. Bush.

successful ascension of Abbas and Qurei after Arafat’s passage from history coincided with Bush’s reelection certainly raises hopes on the Israeli side. But there are also fears: the Hamas, for example might not stick to its promise to show self-restraint at least during the period leading up to the funeral and then mourning period. The street gangs might not abide by the instructions from the security services (which finally are concentrated in Qurei’s hands, as had been demanded first by Abbas when he was prime minister and then by Qurei’) to put down their weapons; Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, who spent the last decade vying for the unofficial position of favorite son of Arafat might not meet their promises to set aside all their differences and rivalries from the past and work together to make sure the security services obey the instructions of the collective leadership; and that the semi-parliamentarian political institutions created over the years in exile and then in the West Bank and Gaza, might not hold up the way they have been holding up in the past ten days.

The current assumptions are apparently focused on getting through the funeral without Israel appearing to be taking charge of what Abbas and Qurei’ do, enabling them to affirm their credentials as leaders in the coming days and weeks, and then somehow Israel enabling elections in the territories, something that Arafat had been resisting for the past year despite demands from nearly all around him.

Indeed, of the many ironies regarding Arafat’s death – that like Moses, he led his people to the verge of a promised statehood but because of his own flaws, was denied ascending that mount; that death came knocking on his door on November 4th, the day Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated; that he may have passed away without letting anyone know where to find rumored hundreds of millions in secret bank accounts he was said to control; that he died in bed, not as a shaheed; of all the many ironies, perhaps the greatest irony is that after four decades of being ruled by his methods of keeping his inner circles divided one against the other, often with violence, as he departed, those very same inner and outer circles were able to work together – and peacefully.

Thus, more than anything else, the Palestinian leadership is now working hard to confound the pessimists on the Israeli side – and throughout the West -- who say that a bloodbath remains inevitable as the armed factions war for control over the street and power. Instead, the Palestinians seem to be working to prove that while the world viewed the Palestinians through the image of Arafat, behind the scenes they were able to form the kind of governmental, democratic procedures that will make them the first genuine democracy in the Arab world.