November 19, 2004/Kislev 6 5765, Vol. 57, No. 12
Jews reflect on Arafat's legacy
CHANAN TIGAY
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| A timeline of Yasser Arafat's life |
But among Jews, both Arafat's friends and detractors say the Palestinian Authority president - who died Nov. 11 at age 75 - will be remember-ed as Public Enemy No. 1.
"He will go down as the largest mass murderer of Jews since Hitler," said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "His life was devoted more to killing Jews than to the welfare of his own people."
A Nobel Peace Prize winner who often issued formal condemnations of violence but never ceased using it, Arafat was snubbed by both Israel and the United States by the end of his life.
In the three years leading up to his death, the aging symbol of the Palestinians' national hopes found himself quaran-tined in his Ramallah com-pound by an Israeli govern-ment that viewed him as both "irrelevant" and as the ulti-mate obstacle to Mideast peace.
In contrast to the frequent White House invitations extended by President Clinton to Arafat, President Bush treated him as a pariah, never once asking him to Penn-sylvania Avenue.
Arafat's sidelining and virtual house arrest capped a raucous progression of more than three decades during which the mainstream Jewish community, both in Israel and the Diaspora, moved from revulsion at the terrorist revolutionary who addressed the United Nations with a pistol holster at his hip to cautious optimism about the putative peacemaker who shook the hand of a reluctant Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn to profound disappointment and resent-ment at the intransigent old man's inability to abandon terrorism as a political tool and end his people's conflict with Israel.
"History will judge him as never able to make the transition from revolutionary Diaspora leader to a leader who is capable of governing with accountability and transparency with respect to the rule of law and capable of negotiating," Aaron David Miller, president of the Seeds of Peace program and an adviser on Arab-Israeli nego-tiations to six U.S. secretaries of state, told JTA in a telephone interview.
But if Arafat was unable to change from terrorist to statesman, the mainstream Jewish community did under-go transitions in its attitude toward Arafat. The shifts, said Kenneth Jacobson, associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League, "reflected what was going on in Israel" at any given moment.
As long as Arafat refused to recognize Israel, dealing with him was seen by many Jews as taboo, Jacobson said. When Arafat accepted U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 in 1988, implying Palestinian recognition of Israel and at least formally renouncing terrorism, it appeared that some sort of rapprochement was in the offing.
But "the community as a whole didn't buy it," Jacobson said.
In 1993, the Oslo accords changed all that.
"I think Rabin's famous reluctant handshake on the White House lawn typified the way the community felt," Jacobson said. "We didn't necessarily trust him, but this was an opportunity."
With that opportunity, Ara-fat's stature in segments of the Jewish world changed. When a group of American Jews met him in Stockholm in 1988, the encounter sparked an uproar. But after Oslo, meetings between Arafat and Jewish groups were not unusual.
He met with the American Jewish Committee, among other organizations. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs hosted him at a meeting of its board in New York City.
"For us, as supporters of the Oslo initiative, we felt that it was important to open a new chapter with the Palestinian leadership," said Martin Raffel, JCPA's associate executive director. "If Rabin could do it, our thinking was, there was no reason why the organized Jewish community shouldn't as well."
But skepticism quickly re-emerged, especially when Ara-fat refused to seriously con-front Palestinian terrorists even during the peace process and continuously sent signals to the Arab and Muslim world that he did not take his com-mitments to Israel seriously.
The final break came in the summer of 2000, after Arafat refused the peace plan proposed by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the Camp David summit. When the second intifada erupted a few months later, Jacobson said, Jews felt the promise Arafat once seemed to offer had been squandered.
Two years later, Bush came to agree with the Israeli view that Arafat was not a credible peacemaker, and that the Palestinians would have to find other leaders not "compro-mised by terror" if they wanted a state.
According to Dennis Ross, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former U.S. Middle East peace envoy, Arafat "will go down historically as someone in whom hopes were placed - but they were misplaced."