An enigma wrapped in a conflict

IN 1996, I saw Yasser Arafat arriving home from one of his many trips abroad, greeted by a brass band and a battalion of spiffy, blue-suited Palestinian police officers. The Palestinian flag was blowing red, white, black and green in the dusty Gaza breeze; the Mediterranean Sea was visible behind him.

In those days, he was the unchallenged, duly elected president of the Palestinian Authority -- the rais, as he was known -- and a Palestinian state seemed so certain and so imminent that he had just had his face printed on a series of newly minted postage stamps. The de-occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was proceeding -- Israeli troops were withdrawing rapidly from Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem -- and the peace process, though troubled, seemed fundamentally unstoppable.

On this particular day, Arafat was dressed, as usual, in his army fatigues and his black-and-white kaffiyeh as he waved triumphantly and disappeared behind the white walls of his seaside office.

Today, however, Arafat lives behind a different set of walls, isolated under house arrest in a half-wrecked compound in Ramallah, facing a threat of expulsion or perhaps death. He’s 74 now and in poor health. His overseas friends have turned on him; money from credulous donor countries has dried up.

It’s no longer fashionable to speak well of Arafat, particularly in the United States and Israel. He is widely viewed as the obstacle to Middle East peace, a weak, aging, mercurial dictator whose inability to rise to the occasion -- whose unwillingness even to moderate his uncompromising rhetoric, much less take on the Islamic rejectionists -- has doomed his people to continue indefinitely in statelessness. Abba Eban, Israel’s longtime foreign minister, famously said of the Palestinians that “they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” and Arafat seems intent on proving him right. The peace process is all but dead.

For those who still need convincing, two new biographies are here to help. “Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography” by Barry M. Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, and “Arafat’s War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest” by Efraim Karsh don’t mince words. In his opening pages, Karsh calls Arafat a murderer -- he “killed his first victim” in 1949 or 1950, Karsh alleges. A few pages later, he discusses in some detail the “persistent speculation” that Arafat is homosexual, even repeating a story in which he is overheard making love to his bodyguard while “roaring like a tiger and his lover yelping like a hyena.” The subsequent chapters -- “Hate Thy Neighbor,” “Terror Until Victory” and “Violence Pays,” among others -- offer more of the same.

The Rubins’ book is far less shrill, but it too makes the case that Arafat never really gave up violence, that he recognized Israel only “resentfully and resisting to the last,” in Yitzhak Rabin’s words, and that this false conversion was part of a lifelong pattern of deception, manipulation and ultimately self-destructive foolishness.

These are familiar arguments; the Netanyahu and Sharon governments both offered variations on the same theme. Yet one can’t help feeling there must be more, that these books are not biographies at all -- just polemics. The authors seem far less interested in understanding Arafat or tracing his history or explaining his actions and motivations than in proving their theses.

After all, whatever you think of Arafat, he is a fabulous figure who deserves a real rendering. For 40 years, he has danced across the world stage, generating hatred, yes, but other emotions as well. He rose from obscurity to transform a dispossessed, politically impotent, oil-poor people into a formidable nationalist movement. When Arafat founded Fatah in 1959, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. David Ben-Gurion was Israel’s prime minister. The Palestinians had been forgotten.

Somehow, Arafat clambered to the top of the pile in the mid-1960s, and he has held power at the Palestine Liberation Organization ever since, while his contemporaries -- Gamel Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Saddam Hussein, King Hussein, Hafez Assad -- have been driven from power, assassinated or died of old age. Arafat escaped death in an airplane crash and has survived Israel’s repeated efforts to capture or assassinate him. He may have invented modern terrorism, but that is only one of his claims on our attention.

If he’s a fool, he’s a remarkable one. Defeated and expelled from Jordan, he reemerged in Lebanon. Defeated and expelled from Lebanon, he reemerged in Tunis. After choosing the losing side -- Saddam Hussein’s side -- in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he repositioned himself so quickly and so successfully that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize only three years later. In retrospect, it is truly extraordinary that the man who bears ultimate responsibility for the terrorist carnage of the 1972 Munich Olympics visited President Clinton’s White House more than a dozen times. The very least a biographer owes him is a grudging respect for his resilience.

Arafat is an enigma. Was he really born in Jerusalem or did he make that up to bolster his revolutionary credentials? Why was he imprisoned in Egypt in in 1952? Is he a terrorist, a hero or both? A fool or a genius? The authors offer few new insights.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that polemics always lack credibility. Many of Karsh’s anecdotes, in particular, feel like they were, well, too good to check. Consider, for instance, the opening scene of his book, in which Arafat is with Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, slobbering over a baklava drenched in honey and extolling the virtues of terrorism. Although the conversation allegedly took place in Bucharest in 1978 (when Karsh presumably was not present), it is complete with verbatim Hollywood-meets-Chairman Mao dialogue. (“Struggle, Brother Ceausescu! Armed struggle and terror are the only things America respects,” Arafat says.)

Footnote No. 1 attributes this scene to Ion Pacepa, a former head of Romanian intelligence who defected to the West. A quick Nexis search finds this review of Pacepa’s memoir in the New York Times Book Review: “Mr. Pacepa ... has several times changed his stories. The changes, according to the State Department ... have cast doubt on his veracity.... Mr. Pacepa is the Happy Hooker of the spy trade, relating utterly sordid tales.”

And remember the story of Arafat and the bodyguard who yelped like a hyena? It too is attributed to Pacepa.

In some ways, it’s unfair to compare the Rubins with Karsh. Their book is more reliably sourced, their arguments more carefully constructed. They argue that Arafat turned to peace only when the PLO was broke and internally riven. They seek to show, in painstaking detail, that Arafat has always broken his promises and consistently refused to choose compromise over violence.

But Arafat becomes human only briefly, after page 200, when he is finally described. Short and ugly, inspiring pity rather than fear; obsequious to foreigners while remaining imperious to his own aides. Mood swings, rapid blinking, a mad look.

I am not one of Arafat’s fans. During my years in the Middle East, I found him manipulative, possibly paranoiac and, in the view of those I believed, corrupt. Certainly he’s no democrat. Nor is he a leader; it is perhaps his greatest crime that he hasn’t risen to the occasion to achieve the peace that his people so desperately need.

But I was also in the Middle East long enough to know that he is not a man easily ignored or cast aside, as the United States and Israel now seem determined to do. And I was there long enough to know that blame belongs on both sides: that Palestinians have legitimate grievances and legitimate rights, and that the 35-year Israeli occupation has become untenable for both sides.

The problem with these books is that the authors are unwilling to empathize. And because they can’t empathize, they ultimately fail to make Arafat come alive.

Frankly, it is depressing at this late date to have to state the obvious: This century-old conflict cannot be solved as long as each side is incapable of understanding the other’s point of view. Neither Karsh nor the Rubins have made much attempt to do so. *