People's Democracy

Arafat Dies, His Struggle Goes On

Harkishan Singh Surjeet

THE sad and untimely demise of Palestinian president and PLO chairman, Yasser Arafat, comes as a big setback to the Palestinian people’s just cause for a homeland. And this is perfectly understandable, because here was a man who had totally identified himself with the cause of his people, without ever cherishing a personal ambition of any kind.

It is therefore no wonder that, even after Arafat’s death, imperialist powers and their henchmen in the media are busy heaping abuses upon him, of course more indirectly than directly, in a bid to undermine the sanctity of the Palestinian cause itself. We will come to this aspect later. 

THE GREAT METAMORPHOSIS

BORN on August 4, 1929 in the house of a successful Palestinian textile merchant who had emigrated to Egypt in 1927, he was given the name of Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, and spent his childhood and adolescence in Jerusalem. He moved back to Cairo in 1949 and received a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering in 1951. Thus, if only he had wished so, he could well have lived a life of comfort. But precisely this he did not do and, instead, opted for a life of struggle and sacrifice that earned him a place forever not only in Palestinian hearts but in all the freedom-loving hearts the world over.

The course of this metamorphosis of young Arafat’s life is not in the least unintelligible. In the very prime of his youth, this Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat must have seen the imperialist treachery from close quarters. While Arafat was still young, his land, Palestine, was a mandated territory under Great Britain, and was fighting for independence. Then, following the end of the second world war and in the wake of the intense anti-colonial liberation struggles, the newly created United Nations mandated the creation of two sovereign states along the banks of the Jordan river, one of Palestine and the other of Israel. But this was not to be. The US imperialists immediately moved into action and saw to it that the state of Palestine could never come into existence. It was thus that while the Jewish people got a country of their own, Palestinians were denied a homeland and remain deprived of it to date.

It was thus that the young engineer decided to give up the allurements of a comfortable life and chose a life of struggle, during which he was constantly hunted and forced to move from place to place --- to Egypt, to Jordan, to Lebanon and to Tunisia. In 1958, he formed the guerrilla movement called Al-Fateh which soon became the biggest and also the most uncompromising among the organisations fighting for Palestine’s liberation. This is the point where Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, then a young man of only 29, got metamorphosed into Yasser Arafat --- the name by which he has since then been known the world over.

It was thus very natural that in 1969, when various Palestinian organisations decided to form a united front, which came to be called the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Arafat was chosen its chairman. Since then, there has never been a going back for him and the struggle for a Palestinian homeland scaled newer and newer heights under his leadership.  

TRYING TIMES FOR THE PLO

DURING its chequered history, the roadblocks the Palestinian struggle had had to come across were by no means small. Very soon after the birth of the PLO, Shah Hussein of Jordan invited the Pakistani forces to get rid of the PLO and, led by late General Ziaul-Haque, the Pakistani troops killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in that country in September 1970. This was what forced Arafat to move his base from Jordan to Lebanon.

However, here too, the PLO fighters could not remain in peace for long and were compelled to move to Tunis in June 1982 after the zionist army under Ariel Sharon, today the prime minister of Israel, perpetrated the most gruesome massacres in Shabra and Shettila refugee camps.

On the diplomatic front too, while the imperialist US vetoed one Security Council resolution after another asking Israel to vacate the Arab territories it had occupied in the 1967 war, the PLO had also to face the duplicity of the Arab states. Many of these Arab states promised too many things to Palestinians, from arms for the fighters to relief for the refugees, but sometimes their help was not up to the mark and sometimes they were found lacking in action altogether. The signing of the Camp David accord by Egypt with Israel, under the tutelage of US imperialists, was itself like stabbing in the back of the Arab and Palestinian people. 

It was under such adverse circumstances that, in 1988, Yasser Arafat had to scale down the Palestinian demands, for which he was widely criticised and even condemned. Sharp fissures appeared in the PLO and even one faction of Arafat’s own Al-Fateh revolted against his leadership. It was an extremely trying time for the PLO whose very unity was now in peril. Fortunately, unity was restored in the PLO though with great difficulty. However, even though the PLO gave up many of its demands and recognised Israel’s right to exist, the zionists refused to budge an inch. Moreover, even after they signed the Oslo accord with the PLO in September 1993, they observed it more in its breach. They did not allow the Palestinian refugees, scattered in various Arab countries, to come back to Palestine. Similarly, they refused to dismantle the Jewish settlements in occupied territories including the Gaza Strip and West Bank where a Palestinian Authority (PA) later came into existence in January 1996, with Yasser Arafat as its president. From time to time, the zionists also imposed restrictions upon the Palestinians’ entry from the Gaza Strip and West Bank into Israel for jobs, in order to starve them to death. 

And then came the second intifada in 2001 in which the unarmed Palestinians were forced to face the zionist barbarity, fighting with stones an unequal fight against the Israeli bombers and tanks. And the sordid fact to recall here is that this intifada was provoked by no less a person than Ariel Shaon, that butcher of the Shabra and Shettila camps, who tried to force his way into the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Backed by the US imperialists, the zionists went to the extent of surrounding the Ramallah headquarters of the PA. Here they laid a siege for more than 40 days in a bid to eliminate Yasser Arafat himself, whom the Israeli cabinet had in the meantime officially declared an “enemy” to be killed. In the event, it was mainly the pressure of world public opinion that saved the besieged leader’s life.

In the same period, US president George Bush also propounded a “roadmap” for Palestine, which was, as our analysis had demonstrated at that time, highly skewed in favour of the zionists. As the failure of this so-called “roadmap” was written in the scheme itself, it was no wonder that the US itself had to give it a silent burial and today nobody talks about it.

PLO HAS ALLIES ALL OVER

YET, even though the PLO has not yet succeeded in its goal of achieving a homeland for its people, it would be a folly to assume that its history under Arafat is a history of failure. The fact is that this organisation has received valuable successes and won innumerable friends in this period. As far back as in 1974, Arafat was invited to address the United Nations General Assembly and it was not long ago when the latter accepted the PLO as a member and Arafat as the head of a state. Several member states then followed suit and the PLO was allowed to open embassies in numerous capitals around the globe.

And this process underlined the worldwide isolation of imperialist-zionist camp, so much so that on several occasions the US-Israel combine found itself cornered in the UN General Assembly. The fact is that it is only a few rabidly pro-imperialist elements in various countries, like the BJP in India, whom the zionists can count as their friends.

Among the most solid allies of the Palestinian freedom fighters in their struggle have been the former Soviet Union and other socialist countries that provided them valuable and all-round support --- morally, diplomatically and materially. Nay, it won’t be an exaggeration if one says that it was the support from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries that always kept the US-zionist combine in check and prevented them from decimating the Palestinian freedom fighters. Thanks to the existence of the USSR, the imperialist-zionist combine could not decimate the Palestinian freedom fighters even when the PLO was sharply divided internally. 

Another solid support base on which the Palestinian freedom fighters could always rely was the non-aligned movement (NAM) that encompassed a vast majority of the human race. And this was by no means accidental. As the NAM comprised countries that were themselves under colonial-imperialist bondage and had had to fight bitter and bloody liberation wars, the people of these countries valued and still value the independence of other countries. It was therefore no wonder that, first unofficially and then officially, the PLO was represented at every NAM conference in the last 35 years.

As an integral part of this process, India has always been extending all-out support to the Palestinian cause, except in those six years when the BJP had been in power. India was the first country that invited the PLO to open its embassy in New Delhi, just as it had allowed the ANC of South Africa, SWAPO of Namibia and the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic to open embassies on its soil. India always stood with the Palestinian people in every thick and thin, and pressed the Palestinian cause at every international forum.  

Here, it won’t be out of place if we mention the role of the CPI(M) and other Left parties in mobilising the Indian masses in support of the Palestinian cause, as a part of our consistent anti-imperialist stance. I may be allowed to recall here an event from my personal experience. At the time of the first US war against Iraq in 1991, when the Chandrashekhar government allowed the American warplanes the refuelling facility at Mumbai airport, Yasser Arafat urged me to come to Tunis at the earliest. There he asked me to do something so that the government of India stopped this facility to the US warplanes. At yet another time, I was given the honour of addressing the PLO national executive when it was in session in Tunis. Such events go to show how much faith and trust the Palestinian freedom fighters, and also those from South Africa, Namibia and Polisario Front etc, reposed in the CPI(M) and the Left. The demise of Yasser Arafat has therefore been a big personal loss to me.

MEDIA’S GLOATINGS

IT is at such a juncture that the bourgeois-imperialist media has bared its real character and is busy propagating that Yasser Arafat’s demise is going to open new vistas of peace in West Asia. Not to go far away, a headline in Hindustan Times (November 12) screamed as if with joy, “Arafat’s death may give peace a chance,” while another in The Indian Express on the same day gloated, “Arafat dies, closing a chapter, opening a window for Palestine.”

In this regard, a quotation from the Hindustan Times well reveals the mindset of our media wiseacres. A report from a front page story in November 12 issue of the paper says: “Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for the 1993 Oslo accords that brought hope for an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. But Arafat could not and would not stop suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. And he lost the support of Israelis who were willing to cede territory for a Palestinian state.”

A few lines later, the same report is still more explicit in its abuse: “The tactics that elements of the PLO employed made it the al-Qaeda of the 1970s….. In 2000, he was offered the chance to have a nation when Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered Israel most of the West Bank and Gaza at a summit hosted by President Bill Clinton. Arafat refused. Barak improved the offer to 97 per cent of the West Bank and all of Gaza….. But a deal could not be finalised before both Clinton and Barak left office.”

It is true that the story was not of the said paper but in the name of “Barbara Slavin and agencies,” but the fact that the Hindustan Times carried it without any reservation tells a lot about this paper’s own inclination today. Moreover, the fact that it was borrowed from USA Today also indicates the source(s) from where such ideas are originating.

As for the paper’s own inclination, its editorial on November 15 bares its bias naked. It abuses Arafat in these words: “Though a towering personality among Arabs and Palestinians, Arafat was not the most astute of politicians, witness his support for Saddam Hussein in 1991, and his departure could help the emergence of an independent Palestinian state.”

A few things appear from such reportings. First, Arafat, whom another paper has described as an “autocratic” leader, was the main stumbling block in the achievement of a Palestinian state. Secondly, if we believe these scribes, the Palestinian freedom fighters were terrorists and murderers, which means that by the same standard our own freedom fighters from Khudiram Bose to Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad to Master Surya Sen were terrorists and murderers. Thirdly, even the support Arafat extended to Iraq in 1991 was something wrong, which means we all were also wrong in opposing the US-UK’s deadly war against Iraq. On the other hand, persuaded by Bill Clinton, Israelis showed utmost magnanimity to the Palestinians and were ready to give them a homeland. Thus, as per such cock and bull stories, it is Arafat who was the villain of the piece and did not allow the Palestinians to have a homeland of their own!

Needless to say, these reports are no more than trash and not even worth the paper on which they are printed.

THE MAN DIES, THE SYMBOL REMAINS

YET these reports show the kind of pro-imperialist bias that our media have of late developed, parroting Washington’s ideas about the Palestinians’ so-called terrorism and Israeli magnanimity. (Going by the Guardian of London, Bush said Arafat’s death meant “a new opportunity towards a lasting peace.”) And they are perfectly in line with the attempts the Bush administration is currently making to force the Palestinians to bow low and accept the ‘solution’ the US is to propose. 

And what is the solution to be proposed? According to Guardian, both Bush and (his master’s voice) Blair say they would work for a Palestinian state “only if the new leadership committed itself to democracy and law” (emphasis added). However, the same paper comments that, amid the high flown language of “two democratic states…. living side by side in peace and security,” the duo’s “statements were notably low on specifics.”

This is the catch. For, while the US has always been asking the Palestinians to commit too many things, it never pressured Israel to commit itself to democracy and law vis-à-vis this set of homeless people. Nobody contends, not even the Palestinians, that Israel has no right to exist. But the US-UK-zionist combine is not ready to apply the same yardstick to the question of a Palestinian state. And, therefore, precisely this very combine is the culprit if West Asia is still profusely bleeding.

The meaning is clear. No matter what abuses the imperialist monsters and their paid henchmen in the media heap upon the hapless Palestinians who are fighting an unequal war for their rights and freedom, no matter if they dub their freedom struggle as terrorism and what not, this struggle is not going to be crushed by force. Creation of a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, is the only guarantee for a lasting peace in West Asia, and the struggle will continue till this goal is achieved. It is this goal and this struggle the indomitable Arafat always symbolised, and we hope his proposed tomb in the Ramallah headquarters of the Palestinian Authority would continue to symbolise this goal and this struggle, serving as a source of inspiration for the Palestinian freedom fighters.