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To Some, a Failure- To Others, a Man Who United a People

By Jill Rosen
The Baltimore Sun
Posted on Thursday November 11, 2004

If there was a single face for the bloody, divisive, maddening Israeli-Palestinian conflict of the past 35 years, it was Yasser Arafat’s. For different Americans, that face represented hate and violence or hope and salvation.

It was a legacy of polarization that Arafat apparently took to his grave.

As he lay in a coma in a military hospital outside Paris, Some American Jewish leaders called him a failed leader who squandered chances for peace between his people and Israel; others labeled him a terrorist whom the world would not miss.

Arab-Americans acknowledged his failure to reach his goal of creating an independent Palestinian state, but said that without him there wouldn’t have been a defined Palestinian people. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, said Arafat gave Palestinians not only a voice but an identity, which many Americans failed to understand.

“We see him through the prism of our prejudices and our politics,” Zogby said. “We reviled him and demonized him.”

Arafat, he said, was an imperfect leader who created a political movement for a people who wanted a national home. Zogby said Arafat should also be recognized for having eventually accepted the idea of a Palestinian state co-existing alongside Israel. “He’s the only person in Palestinian leadership who could have signed it and gotten away with it,” Zogby said. “He was an incredible maker of the case he wanted to sell.”

Yet, when it came to selling the two-state solution, Arafat ultimately was either incapable or unwilling to close the deal. That it never happened, American Jews say, is his epitaph.

Arthur C. Abramson, executive director of the Baltimore Jewish Council, recalled the remark by former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban that Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. “There’s no individual who missed more opportunities than Yasser Arafat,” Abramson said.

American Jewish Committee Executive Director David A. Harris said history would judge Arafat “a tragic failure.”

“Palestinians by now could have had a state of their own if he had been a more visionary leader,” Harris said. “He could never make the transition from guerrilla leader to political leader and that was his ultimate failing.”

Some Jewish-American leaders said Arafat failed to demonstrate the statesmanship required to create an independent Palestinian state. “There’s a resistance that he helped foster by being unwilling to say things his people needed to hear,” said Rabbi Eric Yossie, president of the Union for Reformed Judaism. “It’s a bitter legacy, a tragic legacy.”

“He was a disaster for the Palestinians,” said Betty Ehrenberg, director of international affairs for the Orthodox Union, an umbrella organization for North American Orthodox Jews.

Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, was no less critical: “He could have had a legacy of peace, but instead his will be one of bloodshed and violence—it’s the option he chose.”

For many American Jews, Arafat will forever be associated with images of hijacked airplanes and bloodied Israeli school children. Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder and president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews called Arafat “the founder of the scourge of terrorism.” Eckstein said: “He unleashed hate no less than the hate unleashed by the Nazis or with Stalin.”

By the time Arafat condemned suicide attacks, “it was too little too late,” said Nadia Hijab, executive director of the Palestine Center in Washington. When peace negotiations faltered, “his leadership lost its way a bit.”