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 Askia At-Large
Askia Muhammad
Columnist Page
Friday, November 19, 2004; Page 21
Mr. Arafat Joins the Ancestors
What a difference a day makes. No one can know the truth of that saying more than the late Yasser Arafat. One day he was a stateless vagabond, kicked along with thousands of other Palestinian fighters and refugees from Jordan to Libya to Tunisia to Lebanon.
Thousands of his people were killed in clashes along the way. The most horrific incident occurred in Beirut, at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, where hundreds of Palestinians were slaughtered by Christian militias under the direct supervision and control of current Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
In between were moments he must have savored.
I grinned from ear-to-ear in 1974 when I met and was photographed with Mr. Arafat after his triumphant appearance before the United Nations General Assembly. Five years later, his attendance at a U.N. reception also attended—not by Mr. Arafat but by one of his deputies—led to the forced resignation of Andrew Young from his position as U.S. Ambassador to the world body. The incident led to a lot of hand-wringing and an open assessment of the relationship between African Americans and the Arab World as a whole.
Less than 15 years later, Mr. Arafat was on top again. Months of secret negotiations between delegations of Palestinians and Israelis resulted in the Oslo Accords, an agenda for peace which had the whole world giddy at the prospects.
In the wake of Oslo 1993, people were lining up to meet and embrace the quickly "rehabilitated" man who had been "persona non grata" and labeled a "terrorist" just weeks before. There were Senators, the President, Yasser Arafat—nomme de guerre “Abu Omar—had suddenly become the "toast" of Washington politics and social circles as well.
Then, just months later when he declined the Clinton-Rabin, Camp David Peace Plan, which would have essentially required him to co-sign a bad deal, a deal in which the life-long aspirations of his people would be betrayed, then he was vilified once again. His name officially, was mud.
But for the Palestinians to accept a deal which denied any recognition of their desire to return to their homes from which they were forcibly driven by Israeli settlers in 1948, would have been for the Palestinians—regardless of the name of their leader at the time—to accept second class citizenship. You see every Jew on earth, regardless of their place of family origin, on the other hand, has the right to return to Israel, receive citizenship and permission to live in a home from which Palestinians like Yasser Arafat had been expelled. That’s not equality!
So, Mr. Arafat’s infamy was secured. Henceforth and forever more, he was to be known as an “obstacle” rather than as a “partner” in the Middle East peace process.
It was not Abu Omar who was the obstacle to peace. It was the aspirations of the Palestinian people, who—though a numerical majority in the land of their birth—are subjected to a cruel, jack-boot occupation by European settlers who happened to be Jewish, and who are now called “Israelis.”
If the Palestinians are to have an independent state, living side-by-side with the Israelis, by definition their state would be inferior to Israel because they would not control their own foreign policy, could not have their own military—only a police force—and would even have restrictions on travel on their own land from one place to another, because of the landscape of Israeli settlements dotting the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In those days that was just the way things were. Today that condition is called Israel’s so-called “security” wall or fence. I call it an “apartheid wall.”
And so, Mr. Yasser Arafat joins the ancestors a broken man. Broken, not by the illness which overcame him, causing his hands to shake almost uncontrollably. When he died in a French military hospital recently, medical reports indicated that after his brain, and lungs, and all other vital organs had failed, his heart, his broken heart was still beating until he finally succumbed.
Rest in peace Abu Omar. There is an honored place reserved among those ancestors for martyrs just like you. |
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