Arafat's legacy has been unfairly tarnished

While Yasser Arafat languished for the last three years of his life as a virtual prisoner in his crumbling Ramallah compound, the Israeli government and the American punditocracy embarked upon a sustained smear campaign to portray him as a rejectionist and an irrelevant partner in the peace process. Now that the Palestinian champion is dead, now that he can no longer speak for himself, this process of rewriting Arafat's legacy has sadly accelerated.

We accept Arafat's failings. The early tactics of Fatah and the PLO were unambiguously murderous (recall that he ordered the massacre of Israeli atheletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics), and the PLO was fraught with corruption. These actions, and others, will forever blemish the Palestinian cause.

His most glaring failure, though, came later in his life. In his last decade, he unwittingly turned Palestinians into a bargaining chip, traversing the globe in defense of their rights, yet failing to be by their side, on the ground, as thousands of settlers poured into the West Bank and Gaza Strip — all during the Oslo negotiation process, which he assured his people would bring them peace and dignity. Perhaps he was powerless. More likely, he had become intoxicated with the fame that accompanied his cause and gradually became removed from the everyday reality of the Palestinian people. And yet, this account seems to us like lambasting Moses for never entering the Promised Land with his ragtag tribe, forgetting the sprawling desert behind that he had spent decades tirelessly traversing.

Let us not forget that the establishment of a Palestinian homeland was, until the last decade, only the stuff of dreams for millions of Palestinians. It was only in 1982 that current Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon authoritatively proclaimed, "Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] shall not be touched. Nor Gaza. Forget it." Following expulsions from Israel in 1948, Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon in 1982, the Palestinians appeared a fragmented people, confined to either rotting refugee camps that littered the Arab world or second-class status in occupied territory. Arafat forcefully emerged as a voice for the Palestinian national movement, blending shrill cries of disparate Palestinian constituencies together and, of course, calling attention to the Palestinian question as no one had ever done before.

It was Arafat, more than any other figure, who so uncompromisingly proclaimed the existence of a Palestinian people — both to Israel and the international community. It was Arafat who knew that it had been Palestinians who planted the olive trees now being uprooted in order to make room for territorial barriers and expansive settlements. His dedication to the Palestinian struggle would lead to attempts on his life, by Israelis and fellow Arabs. Yet again and again, he stubbornly survived to tell the world about the people from Palestine. He became a symbol for his people's refusal to simply fade away into the desolation of refugee camps and homelessness. In this way, he came to embody all that was Palestinian.

Sadly, it is one of his final acts which is now being used to shape his entire legacy. Although widely maligned for rejecting former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's "generous offer" at Camp David during the Clinton administration, Arafat knew the agreement would have left Palestinians with three discontinuous enclaves, no control over borders or water and no sovereignty over the revered Al-Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in eastern Jerusalem. This made a mockery of national self-determination and made economic viability impossible; it would have been successful only in creating densely populated zones of rage and frustration. This form of coexistence with Israel did not represent the peace he spent his lifetime trying to achieve.

His successors now face the daunting task of piecing together the shards of the Palestinian movement, quelling the influence of religious extremists and forging a competent and compassionate leadership that can lead the Palestinian people forward. It is they who will ultimately preside over an independent and viable Palestine, living beside a secure and prosperous Israel. It is they who will see in reality what was born in Arafat's imagination.

In his poem "I am There" the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes, "I have learned the words of bloodstained courts in order to break the rules. / I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one: Home." If Yasser Arafat's life was defined by bloodshed, contention, compromise and costly refusals to compromise, it is so because no one in the Middle East envisioned more lucidly, passionately and desirously that too elusive dream: home. Omar Raddawi and Matthew B. Saks write on behalf of the Princeton Committee on Palestine.