In a Ruined Country: How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine

[drdon326]

Arafat's failure to conquer Jerusalem did not shatter his conviction that history was moving in his favor: under pressure from within and without, isolated in the world, the State of Israel would eventually crack apart and dissolve, to be replaced by Arab Palestine. "We will continue our struggle until a Palestinian boy or a Palestinian girl waves our flag on the walls, mosques, and churches of Jerusalem, the capital of our independent state, whether some people are happy about it or not," he promised. "He who doesn't like it may drink the water of the Dead Sea." Arafat understood his actions as part of an unfolding within the long duration of historical time rather than as disembodied headlines on CNN. The inability of his diplomatic interlocutors to understand what he was driving at exposed the fatal limits of the Western conception of politics as a way to find a happy medium between competing interests...
For the diplomats of the European Union, whose dream of creating a new kind of political organization that would rival the United States for global influence was burdened by the historical guilt of colonialism and the Holocaust, the image of the Jew as oppressor that Arafat offered the world was both novel and liberating; the State of Israel would become the Other of a utopian new world order that would be cleansed of destructive national, religious, and particularistic passions...


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The amounts of money stolen from the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people through the corrupt practices of Arafat's inner circle are so staggeringly large that they may exceed one half of the total of $7 billion in foreign aid contributed to the Palestinian Authority. The biggest thief was Arafat himself. The International Monetary Fund has conservatively estimated that from 1995 to 2000 Arafat diverted $900 million from Palestinian Authority coffers, an amount that did not include the money that he and his family siphoned off through such secondary means as no-bid contracts, kickbacks, and rake-offs. A secret report prepared by an official Palestinian Authority committee headed by Arafat's cousin concluded that in 1996 alone, $326 million, or 43 percent of the state budget, had been embezzled, and that another $94 million, or 12.5 percent of the budget, went to the president's office, where it was spent at Arafat's pe rsonal discretion. An additional 35 percent of the budget went to pay for the security services, leaving a total of $73 million, or 9.5 percent of the budget, to be spent on the needs of the population of the West Bank and Gaza. The financial resources of the PLO, which may have amounted to somewhere between one and two billion dollars, were never included in the PA budget. Arafat hid his personal stash, estimated at $1 billion to $3 billion, in more than 200 separate bank accounts around the world, the majority of which have been uncovered since his death. He was a connoisseur of power, who used the money that he stole to buy influence, to provoke or defuse conspiracies, to pay gunmen, and to collect hangers-on the way other men collect stamps or butterflies. Arafat had several advisers who oversaw the system of patronage and theft, which was convincingly outlined in a series of investigative articles by Ronen Bergman that appeared during the late 1990s in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz...


The second intifada also began with the intention of provoking the Israelis and subjecting them to diplomatic pressure. Only this time Arafat went for broke. As a member of the High Security Council of Fatah, the key decision-making and organizational body that dealt with military questions at the beginning of the intifada, Nofal has firsthand knowledge of Arafat's intentions and decisions during the months before and after Camp David. "He told us, 'Now we are going to the fight, so we must be ready,' " Nofal remembers. Nofal says that when Barak did not prevent Ariel Sharon from making his controversial visit to the plaza in front of al-Aqsa, the mosque that was built on the site of the ancient Jewish temples, Arafat said, "Okay, it's time to work." ..."And I think Saudi Arabia also played a role in Arafat's decision to keep the intifada going," Nofal says, agreeing with a similar analysis presented to me by Abd Rabbo. "Clinton put his initiative on the table on the eighteenth of December, after three months of intifada. Arafat visited Saudi Arabia. At that time the Saudi Arabian leadership told him, 'Wait, don't give this card to Clinton. Clinton is going, Bush is coming. Bush is the son of our friend. We will get more for you from him.' Then we discovered that Saudi Arabia couldn't do anything, that it is not a matter of personal issues or friendship. And Sharon succeeded very well, and put us in a corner."...

http://www.israelunitycoalition.org/html/article.html?id=5942

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To be published in Atlantic Monthly - Sep 01, 2005

Un.believe.able

[marmar]

1. They'll be writing the same thing about the U.S. in 2008...

if things continue as they are.

:(

[pelsar]

2. first time in gaza....

was way back in the 86, jebaliya to be exact...and I was shocked by the stench, by the garbage in the streets by the housing.....the open sewers....it was quite a sight (btw the inside of the homes were always very clean)

My first impression was that it was all our fault, we put them here, were keeping them here, living in this open sewer...then i did a bit of research.....

all those millions of dollars.....and nothing to show for it

I have been back after Oslo and saw quite a difference....not in the refugee camps, but in the new villas on the seashore, the new officer quarters on the hill.

it was so obviouse as it was disgusting that the PA's concern was hardly the palestenian people, but their own pockets and the west just kept pumping the money in, probably figuring in the "trickle down theory"...of the billions given a few thousand may "trickle down".....

[tucoramirez2005]

3. Without Arafat, Palestinians would be forgotten.

He never let the world forget that Palestine existed there before it was destroyed.

I wouldn't say the successors have been any more honest in financial dealings.

[pelsar]

4. its not a either or.....

arafat could have done his PR message And not have been such a corrupt crook....its one of those things where you dont have to excuse him, infact his legacy of multiple groups fighting each other still seems intack....

[Coastie for Truth]

5. Without Arafat

(or if he had left the scene earlier)-
1. Probably no Likud or Sharon;
2. Quite possibly Palestine would have been an independent, economically self-sufficient state, with some degree of democracy;
3. Maybe not another Bharain - but certainly a heck of a lot more prosperity the it presently has.

Heard on "The Street" (Sand Hill Road) much of tech mini-boom in Bharain and, yes, Cairo - is Palestinian money and Palestinian people - that shoulda, woulda, coulda gone to Palestine but for Arafat. Don't take my word -- go to the San Jose Mercury news (http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/) and the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/) and the Securities and Exchange Commisison site (http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/webusers.htm) and search for and read the snippets.

[Lithos]

6. Locking

Source is bowdlerized from the original (Atlantic Monthly) and done in a way which does not fully suggest to the reader what was excised.