ARAFAT: I CAN BE LIKE MANDELA.

[NGONGE]

When Janet Jackson sang that song she was talking about something entirely different to what the Palestinian people would want.

Still, since you brought up the question, what is the minimum that you expected Arafat and his PLO to have done for their people?

If you don’t think much of the PLO who do you rate? Hamas? Islamic Jihad? Al Aqsa Brigades? (Notice how none of these groups ever criticise Arafat?).

 

 

In Charles Dickens’ novel “Our Mutual Friendâ€, he has a funny character by the name of Podsnap; here is an extract from that chapter of the book:

 

Podsnappery

 

MR PODSNAP was well to do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap’s opinion. Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance, and had thriven exceedingly in the Marine Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and, above all other things, with himself.

 

Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness — not to add a grand convenience — in this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr Podsnap’s satisfaction. “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!†Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him (and consequently sheer away) with those words and a flushed face. For they affronted him.

 

Mr Podsnap’s world was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even geographically: seeing that although his business was sustained upon commerce with other countries, he considered other countries, with that important reservation, a mistake, and of their manners and customs would conclusively observe, “Not English!†when, PRESTO! with a flourish of the arm, and a flush of the face, they were swept away. Elsewhere, the world got up at eight, shaved close at a quarter-past, breakfasted at nine, went to the City at ten, came home at half-past five, and dined at seven. Mr Podsnap’s notions of the Arts in their integrity might have been stated thus. Literature; large print, respectfully descriptive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Painting and Sculpture; models and portraits representing Professors of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Music; a respectable performance (without variations) on stringed and wind instruments, sedately expressive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Nothing else to be permitted to those same vagrants the Arts, on pain of excommunication. Nothing else To Be — anywhere!

 

As a so eminently respectable man, Mr Podsnap was sensible of its being required of him to take Providence under his protection. Consequently he always knew exactly what Providence meant. Inferior and less respectable men might fall short of that mark, but Mr Podsnap was always up to it. And it was very remarkable (and must have been very comfortable) that what Providence meant, was invariably what Mr Podsnap meant.

 

These may be said to have been the articles of a faith and school which the present chapter takes the liberty of calling, after its representative man, Podsnappery. They were confined within close bounds, as Mr Podsnap’s own head was confined by his shirt-collar; and they were enunciated with a sounding pomp that smacked of the creaking of Mr Podsnap’s own boots.

 

Our Mutual Friend

 

Now, Wiilo, save me the Podsnappery and tell my what you object to in Arafat and his PLO organisation.

[Wiilo]

Hey don't get me wrong iam not talking about the song that Janet Jackson sang ok, iam talking about what the Plo did for thier ppl. And iam not talking about Hamas or any other Islamic groups for that matter........Lol iam talking about Arafat and his Plo group.......Can u mention or name anything that was helpful to the Palestinian ppl that Arafat and his group did?

 

 

Go figure

[NGONGE]

Erm, read the article I posted above. Read the biography I posted at the start of this thread.

When you ask what have they done, what exactly do you have in mind? (Since all that has been mentioned already didn’t satisfy you!).

 

Is it not enough that they united the Palestinians under one banner? Not enough that they fought the Jewish state for the past thirty years? They’re still fighting, politically and with whatever little military power they have.

 

Again, if you’re going to ask what have they done for their people, you must not be satisfied with what they’ve done. Don’t brush the questions aside, expand on your comments.

[NGONGE]

An Obituary by an Israeli writer.

 

A Man and his People

November 08, 2004

By Uri Avnery

Wherever he may be buried when he passes away, the day will come when his remains will be reinterred by a free Palestinian government in the holy shrines in Jerusalem.

 

Yasser Arafat is one of the generation of great leaders who arose after World War II.

 

The stature of a leader is not simply determined by the size of his achievements, but also by the size of the obstacles he had to overcome. In this respect, Arafat has no competitor in the world: no leader of our generation has been called upon to face such cruel tests and to cope with such adversities as he.

 

When he appeared on the stage of history, at the end of the 1950s, his people was close to oblivion. The name Palestine had been eradicated from the map. Israel, Jordan and Egypt had divided the country between them. The world had decided that there was no Palestinian national entity, that the Palestinian people had ceased to exist, like the American Indian nations - if, indeed, it had ever existed at all.

 

Within the Arab world the "Palestinian Cause" was still mentioned, but it served only as a ball to be kicked around between the Arab regimes. Each of them tried to appropriate it for its own selfish interests, while brutally putting down any independent Palestinian initiative. Almost all Palestinians lived under dictatorships, most of them in humiliating circumstances.

 

When Yasser Arafat, then a young engineer in Kuwait, founded the "Palestinian Liberation Movement" (whose initials in reverse spell Fatah), he meant first of all liberation from the various Arab leaders, so as to enable the Palestinian people to speak and act for itself. That was the first revolution of the man who made at least three great revolutions during his life.

 

It was a dangerous one. Fatah had no independent base. It had to function in the Arab countries, often under merciless persecutions. One day, for example, the whole leadership of the movement, Arafat included, was thrown into prison by the Syrian dictator of the day, after disobeying his orders. Only Umm Nidal, the wife of Abu Nidal, remained free and so she assumed the command of the fighters.

 

Those years were a formative influence on Arafat's characteristic style. He had to maneuver between the Arab leaders, play them off against each other, use tricks, half-truths and double-talk, evade traps and circumvent obstacles. He became a world-champion of manipulation. This way he saved the liberation movement from many dangers in the days of its weakness, until it could become a potent force.

 

Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, the Egyptian ruler who was the hero of the entire Arab world at the time, got worried about the emerging independent Palestinian force. To choke it off in time, he created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and put at its head a Palestinian political mercenary, Ahmed Shukeiri. But after the shameful rout of the Arab armies in 1967 and the electrifying victory of the Fatah fighters against the Israeli army in the battle of Karameh (March 1968), Fatah took over the PLO and Arafat became the undisputed leader of the entire Palestinian struggle.

 

In the mid-1960s, Yasser Arafat started his second revolution: the armed struggle against Israel. The pretension was almost ludicrous: a handful of poorly-armed guerillas, not very efficient at that, against the might of the Israeli army. And not in a country of impassable jungles and mountain ranges, but in a small, flat, densely populated stretch of land. But this struggle put the Palestinian cause on the world agenda. It must be stated frankly: without the murderous attacks, the world would have paid no attention to the Palestinian call for freedom.

 

As a result, the PLO was recognized as the "sole representative of the Palestinian people", and thirty years ago Yasser Arafat was invited to make his historic speech to the UN General Assembly: "In one hand I carry a gun, in the other an olive branch…"

 

For Arafat, the armed struggle was simply a means, nothing more. Not an ideology, not an end in itself. It was clear to him that this instrument would invigorate the Palestinian people and gain the recognition of the world, but that it would not vanquish Israel.

 

The October 1973 Yom Kippur war caused another turn in his outlook. He saw how the armies of Egypt and Syria, after a brilliant initial victory achieved by surprise, were stopped and, in the end, defeated by the Israeli army. That finally convinced him that Israel could not be overcome by force arms.

 

Therefore, immediately after that war, Arafat started his third revolution: he decided that the PLO must reach an agreement with Israel and be content with a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

 

That confronted him with a historic challenge: to convince the Palestinian people to give up its historic position denying the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and to be satisfied with a mere 22%of the territory of pre-1948 Palestine. Without being stated explicitly, it was clear that this also entails the giving up of the unlimited return of the refugees to the territory of Israel.

 

He started to work to this end in his own characteristic way, with persistence, patience and ploys, two steps forwards, one step back. How immense this revolution was can be seen from a book published by the PLO in 1970 in Beirut, viciously attacking the two-state solution (which it called "the Avnery plan", because I was its most out-spoken proponent at the time.)

 

Historic justice demands that it be clearly stated that it was Arafat who envisioned the Oslo agreement at a time when both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres still stuck to the hopeless "Jordanian Option", the belief that one could ignore the Palestinian people and give the West Bank back to Jordan. Of the three recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Arafat deserved it most.

 

From 1974 on, I was an eye-witness to the immense effort invested by Arafat in order to get his people to accept his new approach. Step by step it was adopted by the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile, first by a resolution to set up a Palestinian authority "in every part of Palestine liberated from Israel", and, in 1988, to set up a Palestinian state next to Israel.

 

Arafat's (and our) tragedy was that whenever he came closer to a peaceful solution, the Israeli governments withdrew from it. His minimum terms were clear and remained unchanged from 1974 on: a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem (including the Temple Mount but excluding the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter); restoration of the pre-1967 border with the possibility of limited and equal exchanges of territory; evacuation of all the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory and the solution of the refugee problem in agreement with Israel. For the Palestinians, that is the very minimum; they cannot give up more than that.

 

Perhaps Yitzhak Rabin came close to this solution towards the end of his life, when he declared on TV that "Arafat is my partner". All his successors rejected it. They were not prepared to give up the settlements, but, on the contrary, enlarged them incessantly. They resisted every effort to fix a final border, since their kind of Zionism demands perpetual expansion. Therefore they saw in Arafat a dangerous enemy and tried to destroy him by all means, including an unprecedented campaign of demonization. So Golda Meir ("there is no such thing as a Palestinian people"). So Menachem Begin ("Two-footed animal…the man with hair on his face…the Palestinian Hitler"), so Binyamin Netanyahu, so Ehud Barak ("I have torn the mask from his face"), so Ariel Sharon, who tried to kill him in Beirut and has continued trying ever since.

 

No liberation fighter in the last half-century has faced such immense obstacles as he. He was not confronted with a hated colonial power or a despised racist minority, but by a state that arose after the Holocaust and was sustained by the sympathy and guilt-feelings of the world. In all military, economic and technological respects, the Israeli society is vastly stronger than the Palestinian. When he was called upon to set up the Palestinian Authority, he did not take over an existing, functioning state, like Nelson Mandela or Fidel Castro, but disconnected, impoverished pieces of land, whose infrastructure had been destroyed by decades of occupation. He did not take over a population living on its land, but a people half of which consists of refugees dispersed in many countries and the other half of a society fractured along political, economic and religious lines. All this while the battle for liberation is going on.

 

To hold this packet together and to lead it towards its destination under these conditions, step by step, is the historic achievement of Yasser Arafat.

 

Great men have great faults. One of Arafat's is his inclination to make all decisions himself, especially since all his close associates were killed. As one of his sharpest critics said: "It is not his fault. It is we who are to blame. For decades it was our habit to run away from all the hard decision that demanded courage and boldness. We always said: Let Arafat decide!"

 

And decide he did. As a real leader, he went out ahead and drew his people after him. Thus he confronted the Arab leaders, thus he started the armed struggle, thus he extended his hand to Israel. Because of this courage, he has earned the trust, admiration and love of his people, whatever the criticism.

 

If Arafat passes away, Israel will lose a great enemy, who could have become a great partner and ally.

 

As the years pass, his stature will grow more and more in historical memory.

 

As for me: I respected him as a Palestinian patriot, I admired him for his courage, I understood the constraints he was working under, I saw in him the partner for building a new future for our two peoples. I was his friend.

 

As Hamlet said about his father: "He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again."

 

 

Arafat is dead