The Death of Arafat
George Friedman

That Yasser Arafat's death marks the end of an era is so obvious that it hardly bears saying. The nature of the era that is ending and the nature of the era that is coming, on the other hand, do bear discussing. That speaks not only to the Arab-Israeli conflict but to the evolution of the Arab world in general.

In order to understand Arafat's life, it is essential to understand the concept "Arab," and to understand its tension with the concept "Muslim," at least as Arafat lived it out. In general, ethnic Arabs populate North Africa and the area between the Mediterranean and Iran, and between Yemen and Turkey. This is the Arab world. It is a world that is generally -- but far from exclusively -- Muslim, although the Muslim world stretches far beyond the Arab world.

To understand Arafat's life, it is much more important to understand the Arab impulse than to understand the Muslim impulse. Arafat belonged to that generation of Arab who visualized the emergence of a single Arab nation, encapsulating all of the religious groups in the Arab world, and one that was essentially secular in nature. This vision did not originate with Arafat but with his primary patron, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the founder of modern Egypt and of the idea of a United Arab Republic. No sense can be made of Arafat's life without first understanding Nasser's.

Nasser was born into an Egypt that was ruled by a weak and corrupt monarchy and effectively dominated by Britain. He became an officer in the Egyptian army and fought competently against the Israelis in the 1948 war. He emerged from that war committed to two principles: The first was recovering Egyptian independence fully; the second was making Egypt a modern, industrial state. Taking his bearing from Kamal Ataturk, who founded the modern Turkish state, Nasser saw the military as the most modern institution in Egypt, and therefore the instrument to achieve both independence and modernization. This was the foundation of the Egyptian revolution.

Nasser was personally a practicing Muslim of sorts -- he attended mosque -- but he did not see himself as leading an Islamic revolution at all. For example, he placed numerous Coptic Christians in important government positions. For Arafat, the overriding principle was not Islam, but Arabism. Nasser dreamed of uniting the Arabs in a single entity, whose capital would be Cairo. He believed that until there was a United Arab Republic, the Arabs would remain the victims of foreign imperialism.

Nasser saw his prime antagonists as the traditional monarchies of the Arab world. Throughout his rule, Nasser tried to foment revolutions, led by the military, that would topple these monarchies. Nasserite or near-Nasserite revolutions toppled Iraqi, Syrian and Libyan monarchies. Throughout his rule, he tried to bring down the Jordanian, Saudi and other Persian Gulf regimes. This was the constant conflict that overlaid the Arab world from the 1950s until the death of Nasser and the rise of Anwar Sadat.

Geopolitics aligned Nasser's ambitions with the Soviet Union. Nasser was a socialist but never a Marxist. Nevertheless, as he confronted the United States and threatened American allies among the conservative monarchies, he grew both vulnerable to the United States and badly in need of a geopolitical patron. The Soviets were also interested in limiting American power and saw Nasser as a natural ally, particularly because of his confrontation with the monarchies.

Nasser's view of Israel was that it represented the intrusion of British imperialism into the Arab world, and that the conservative monarchies, particularly Jordan, were complicit in its creation. For Nasser, the destruction of Israel had several uses. First, it was a unifying point for Arab nationalism. Second, it provided a tool with which to prod and confront the monarchies that tended to shy away from confrontation. Third, it allowed for the further modernization of the Egyptian military -- and therefore of Egypt -- by enticing a flow of technology from the Soviet Union to Egypt. Nasser both opposed the existence of Israel and saw its existence as a useful tool in his general project.

It is important to understand that for Nasser, Israel was not a Palestinian problem but an Arab problem. In his view, the particular Arab nationalisms were the problem, not the solution. Adding another Arab nationalism -- Palestinian -- to the mix was not in his interest. The Zionist injustice was against the Arab nation and not against the Palestinians as a particular nation. Nasser was not alone in this view. The Syrians saw Palestine as a district of Syria, stolen by the British and French. They saw the Zionists as oppressors, but against the Syrian nation. The Jordanians, who held the West Bank, saw the West Bank as part of the Jordanian nation and, by extension, the rest of Palestine as a district of Jordan. Until the 1967 war, the Arab world was publicly and formally united in opposing the existence of Israel, but much less united on what would replace Israel after it was destroyed. The least likely candidate was an independent Palestinian state.

Prior to 1967, Nasser sponsored the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization under the leadership of Ahmed al Shukairi. It was an entirely ineffective organization that created a unit that fought under Egyptian command. Since 1967 was a disaster for Nasser, "fought" is a very loose term. The PLO was kept under tight control, careful avoiding the question of nationhood and focusing on the destruction of Israel.

After the 1967 war, the young leader of the PLO's Fatah faction took control of the organization. Yasser Arafat was a creature of Nasser, politically and intellectually. He was an Arabist. He was a modernizer. He was a secularist. He was aligned with the Soviets. He was anti-American. Arafat faced two disparate questions in 1967. First, it was clear that the Arabs would not defeat Israel in a war, probably in his lifetime; what, therefore, was to be done to destroy Israel? Second, if the only goal was to destroy the Israelis, and if that was not to happen anytime soon, then what was to become of the Palestinians? Arafat posed the question more radically: Granted that Palestinians were part of the Arab revolution, did they have a separate identity of their own, as did Egyptians or Libyans? Were they simply Syrians or Jordanians? Who were they?

Asserting Palestinian nationalism was not easy in 1967, because of the Arabs themselves. The Syrians did not easily recognize their independence and sponsored their own Palestinian group, loyal to Syria. The Jordanians could not recognize the Palestinians as separate, as their own claim to power even east of the Jordan would be questionable, let alone their claims to the West Bank. The Egyptians were uneasy with the rise of another Arab nationalism.

Simultaneously, the growth of a radical and homeless Palestinian movement terrified the monarchies. Arafat knew that no war would defeat the Israelis. His view was that a two-tiered approach was best. On one level, the PLO would make the claim on behalf of the Palestinian people, for the right to statehood on the world stage. On the other hand, the Palestinians would use small-scale paramilitary operations against soft targets -- terrorism -- to increase the cost throughout the world of ignoring the Palestinians.

The Soviets were delighted with this strategy, and their national intelligence services moved to facilitate it by providing training and logistics. A terror campaign against Israel's supporters would be a terror campaign against Europe and the United States. The Soviets were delighted by anything that caused pain and destabilized the West. The cost to the Soviets of underwriting Palestinian operations, either directly or through various Eastern European or Arab intelligence services, was negligible. Arafat became a revolutionary aligned with the Soviets.

There were two operational principles. The first was that Arafat himself should appear as the political wing of the movement, able to serve as an untainted spokesman for Palestinian rights. The second was that the groups that carried out the covert operations should remain complex and murky. Plausible deniability combined with unpredictability was the key.

Arafat created an independent covert capability that allowed him to make a radical assertion: that there was an independent Palestinian people as distinct as any other Arab nation. Terrorist operations gave Arafat the leverage to assert that Palestine should take its place in the Arab world in its own right.

If Palestine was a separate nation, then what was Jordan? The Ha-shemite kingdom were Bedouins driven out of Arabia. The majority of the population were not Bedouin, but had their roots in the west - hence, they were Palestinians. If there was a Palestinian nation, then why were they being ruled by Bedouins from Arabia? In September 1970, Arafat made his move. Combining a series of hijackings of Western airliners with a Palestinian rising in Jordan, Arafat attempted to seize control of Jordan. He failed, and thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered by Hashemite and Pakistani mercenaries. (Coincidentally, the military unit dispatched to Jordan was led by then-Brigadier Zia-ul-Haq, who later ruled Pakistan from 1977 to 1988 as a military dictator.)

Arafat's logic was impeccable. His military capability was less than perfect.

Arafat created a new group -- Black September -- that was assigned the task of waging a covert war against the Israelis and the West. The greatest action, the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, defined the next generation. Israel launched a counter-operation to destroy Black September, and the pattern of terrorism and counter-terrorism swirling around the globe was set. The PLO was embedded in a network of terrorist groups sponsored by the Soviets that ranged from Japan to Italy. The Israelis became part of a multinational counter-attack. Neither side could score a definitive victory.

But Arafat won the major victory. Nations are frequently born of battle, and the battles that began in 1970 and raged until the mid-1990s established an indelible principle -- there is now, if there was not before, a nation called Palestine. This was critical, because as Nasser died and his heritage was discarded by Anwar Sadat, the principle of the Arab nation was lost. It was only through the autonomous concept of Palestinian nationalism that Arafat and the PLO could survive.

And this was Arafat's fatal crisis. He had established the principle of Palestine, but what he had failed to define was what that Palestinian nation meant and what it wanted. The latter was the critical point. Arafat's strategy was to appear the statesman restraining uncontrollable radicals. He understood that he needed Western support to get a state, and he used this role superbly. He appeared moderate and malleable in English, radical and intractable in Arabic. This was his insoluble dilemma.

Arafat led a nation that had no common understanding of their goal. There were those who wanted to recover a part of Palestine and be content. There were those who wanted to recover part of Palestine and use it as a base of operations to retake the rest. There were those who would accept no intermediate deal but wanted to destroy Israel. Arafat's fatal problem was that in the course of creating the Palestinian nation, he had convinced all three factions that he stood with them.

Like many politicians, Arafat had made too many deals. He had successfully persuaded the West that (a) he genuinely wanted a compromise and (b) that he could restrain terrorism. But he had also persuaded Palestinians that any deal was merely temporary, and others that he wouldn't accept any deal. By the time of the Oslo accords, Arafat was so tied up in knots that he could not longer speak for the nation he created. More precisely, the Palestinians were so divided that no one could negotiate on their behalf, confident in his authority. Arafat kept his position by sacrificing his power.

By the 1990s, the space left by the demise of pan-Arabism had been taken by the rise of Islamist religiosity. Hamas, representing the view that there is a Palestinian nation but that it should be understood as part of the Islamic world under Islamic law, had become the most vibrant part of the Palestinian polity. Nothing was more alien from Arafat's thinking than Hamas. It ran counter to everything he had learned from Nasser.

However -- and this is Arafat's tragedy -- by the time Hamas emerged as a power, he had lost the ability to believe in anything but the concept of the Palestinians and his place as its leader. As Hamas rose, Arafat became entirely tactical. His goal was to retain position if not power, and toward that end, he would do what was needed. A lifetime of tactics had destroyed all strategy.

His death in Paris was a farce of family and courtiers. It fitted the end he had created, because his last years were lived in a round of clever maneuvers leading nowhere. The Palestinians are left now without strategy, only tactics. There is no one who can speak for the Palestinians and be listened to as authoritative. He created the Palestinian nation and utterly disrupted the Palestinian state. He left a clear concept on the one hand, a chaos on the other.

It is interesting to wonder what would have happened if Arafat had won in Jordan in 1970, while Nasser was still alive. But that wasn't going to happen, because Arafat's fatal weakness was visible even then. The concept was clear -- but instead of meticulously planning a rising, Arafat improvised, playing politics within the PLO when he should have been managing combat operations. The chaos and failure that marked Black September became emblematic of his life.

Arafat succeeded in one thing, and perhaps that is enough -- he created the Palestinian nation against all enemies, Arab and non-Arab. The rest was the endless failure of pure improvisation.