Most Western biographers of Yasser Arafat admit a measure of failure in the titles of their books. As in hundreds of other works which deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict and related Middle East problems, and thousands of articles by news correspondents and academics, they resort to words such as ‘mystery’, ‘myth’ and ‘hard to explain’. This is also true of the single Israeli and Arab attempts to record his life and achievements.1 There is an implicit wish to excuse the incomplete nature of their efforts, often combined with the suggestion that they have solved a difficult riddle. Nor is this unclear picture helped by Arafat himself. He has cooperated with several biographers, particularly the British writer Alan Hart and the Egyptian author Rasheda Mahran, but he has told them contradictory stories and has steadfastly refused to write his own life story.
That Arafat’s life is still wrapped in mystery is very odd indeed. He has been in the limelight for the better part of four decades and he is neither unavailable nor shy. In addition to cooperating with biographers, he has probably given more interviews than any other politician alive. Yet, to this day, there is no consensus about his place of birth and who his mother was.2 Major political issues such as his possible involvement in terrorism and what drove him to sign the much-criticized Oslo Peace Accord are subjects which Arafat admits, denies or interprets selectively, and are therefore infinitely more difficult to track.
There are many reasons why this picture needs to be clarified. Arafat is one of the leading public figures of the twentieth century. His actions have influenced the lives of millions of people, and the need to decrypt him, to set the confused historical record straight and understand the complex relationships which have produced today’s Middle East is overwhelming. Moreover, the man is still very much with us, not only in his unique looks, attire and behaviour, but as a partner in a faltering peace process which threatens to disintegrate, with far-reaching consequences for Palestinians and Israelis, the Arab and Muslim countries and indeed the rest of the world. Knowing the real Arafat allows us to fathom the past. More importantly, we need to understand the man and his actions in order to prepare for an uncertain future.
Re-examining Arafat’s life is timely. Judged by how the West now views him, he has undergone one of the fastest transformations of any public figure in recorded history. In a mere four years he has moved from rejected ‘terrorist’ to Nobel Peace Prize winner and respected international statesman. In the process the new Arafat, the world’s only President of a difficult-to-define Authority rather than a country, has been forced to assume a new persona more in keeping with this transformed image.
Genuine or not, today’s Arafat is probably an extension of what has always existed; even politicians find it hard to reinvent themselves after the age of sixty. For a biographer, the assumption of this new personality and the critical survival issues that Arafat faces offer an opportunity. It allows us to judge him without the veil of secrecy forced on him when he was not accepted, and it enables us to see him from different and more revealing angles at a critical time. This makes it possible to determine whether his man-of-peace mantle was always there and what kind of real person will emerge in the future. Some of the questions whose answers eluded previous biographers – whether he would maintain his dictatorial inclinations, for instance, and whether he knew of the corruption of his aides – are now disturbingly out in the open, and the tests and challenges presented both by the Israelis and by Arafat’s own people are likely to reveal other important facets of his private and public character.
Moreover – and especially because of the direct involvement of the Palestinians in determining Arafat’s future – there are compelling reasons for a fellow Palestinian to write his biography. Having read the works of most, if not all, of his Western biographers and found them lacking, I am convinced that the bafflement which most of them admit and the mistakes which many of them have made are the results of two things: a cultural divide which foreign writers cannot bridge, and occasionally a lack of understanding of today’s Middle East and its politics. Even his Arab biographer, Dr Rasheda Mahran, was an admirer with whom Arafat was said to be romantically involved, and the Israeli Dany Rubenstein, though independent and totally honourable, understandably sees major elements of Arafat’s life through the perspective of his own country. The assertion that no satisfactory biography of the man exists is justified.
Nor are biographers with extensive first-hand knowledge of the Middle East – news correspondents and other specialists in Arab and Palestinian affairs – able to surmount the huge barriers which stand in the way of understanding Arafat’s character: culture, propaganda, secrecy and lack of knowledge. Even after years of involvement in the Arab world, most of them only appreciate Arab culture in broad terms, lack the necessary regional knowledge, never get to meet the ordinary man in the street and go out of their way to popularize or glamorize Arafat. This is not to speak of journalists whose judgement is coloured by the need to continue to work with him. In the process vital ingredients of the story, such as his relationships with Nasser, the Mufti of Palestine and the former Iraqi leader Abdel Karim Kassem, and their claims to Palestinian leadership and Arafat’s loyalty, are either ignored or demoted. And, although Arafat has often been accused of corruption, no biographer has attempted to explain its nature. The man himself is clean – his punishing work schedule gives him no opportunity for personal indulgences – but he follows the time-honoured methods of an Arab tribal chief, which includes buying others. This use of sanctioned corruption should be distinguished from personal corruption.
To begin with, Arafat’s home life and upbringing make him a complex subject. On top of that he is fundamentally Arab and Palestinian; despite the occasional use of what he considers idiomatic English phrases he is an unworldly man with a stronger traditional Islamic outlook than most people realize, and he is a born master of double talk. Foreigners, most of whom depend on local people to interpret Arab ways for them, seldom encounter this type. To appreciate his personal complexes requires knowledge of the Palestinian social structure; to know him is to go back in time, perhaps to another century; and to understand him is to fathom the native bazaar mentality which made him. Even assessing the importance of the effect of his Egyptian accent on his Palestinian constituency and his relations with other Arab countries demands a considerable understanding of inter-Arab prejudices and politics. Among all the Arab leaders of modern times he stands as the most contradictory, a living merger of seventeenth-century Arab thinking and today’s street wisdom coupled with an amazing natural ability to handle the most demanding television interview and the Western attitude behind it.
I know both sides of Arafat. I grew up near Jerusalem in the biblical village of Bethany, the grandson of a renowned Muslim judge and a village headman. Both my grandfathers dealt with issues which, in microcosm, resemble what Arafat has had to face and with which he continues to grapple. Like him, both men were practitioners of the art of the possible, natural improvisers with enquiring minds who never tired of inventing solutions and ‘legalizing’ them by creating a necessary consensus acceptable to others. My father was a correspondent for the New York Times, the Daily Mail, Newsweek and Time, an expert in reporting the Middle East – including the sudden emergence of Arafat in the 1960s – to the outside world. I myself have devoted most of my life to explaining the Arabs to the West and vice versa. Personally and by osmosis, Arafat’s journey through life – at the time of writing he is sixty-nine and I am sixty-two – has been my journey. I do know where the man came from, what made him, where he fits in the Arab scheme of things and why he deserves praise, sympathy and condemnation. Modesty aside, I am qualified to judge him.
Against such a background, I had to decide whether to write this biography with or without Arafat’s assistance. I opted for the latter after meeting him and receiving his offer of help. My knowledge of the man excluded cooperating with him in person unless I was ready either to assume unnecessary risks or to accept constraints on the resulting work. Biographies by writers who have depended on Arafat and his loyalists for help and accepted their version of events tend to be more misleading and lacking than most. Even biographers disinclined to accept the Arafat version of events have wasted too much time in debunking what he said.
When interviewing him, as a Palestinian writer I would have been under pressure to reveal more of my purpose and direction than an outsider, and I would have been subjected to attempts to recruit me as part of ‘the cause’. This would have offered two unpalatable choices. Either I would succumb to his charm and demands on my Palestinianness, or I would betray him through refusing his call on my identity and ‘responsibility’ or pretending to accept this call and then lying to him. For example, despite evidence to the contrary, Arafat still insists that he was born in Jerusalem. Accepting his version of the story, to him the duty of all loyal Palestinians, would have cancelled my independence and vitiated my purpose. Rejecting his account of history, either openly or after feigning the opposite, would – according to his logic – have represented a betrayal worthy of punishment. It would have made writing this biography far more dangerous.
Honesty demands an admission that other factors contributed to my decision to maintain my independence. Whatever the shortcomings of previous biographies, a number of them do raise the appropriate questions about their subject, and many contain a considerable amount of basic information which, intentionally or otherwise, expose what is needed to complete the picture. This is not to speak of the sudden availability of hundreds of people who have known him and spoken to him in informal circumstances which are more telling than structured interviews. Lastly, for the first time many of his old friends and associates are beginning to speak, both in his defence and against him. On and off the record and on a non-attribution basis I have spoken to dozens of them: members of his cabinet, Arabs, Israelis, outsiders, writers, journalists, diplomats, CIA agents, shop owners, police officers and members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Fundamentally, it is in the criteria by which the man should be judged that I separate myself from other biographers, friendly or critical. My Arab–Palestinian perspective of his personal background is but one element in what is essentially a political biography which is concerned with personal details only in relation to their influence on Arafat as leader of the Palestinians. I differ from other biographers by identifying his strategic decisions and their importance, implications and results; the considerable amount of new evidence which I have uncovered has enabled me to do so. This revealing information demystifies him, and my personal judgement of the man provides an assessment of what his leadership has produced for the Palestinian people, unarguably the essence of his life story. Only a loyal Palestinian is capable of making such a judgement.