A year after the death of the ra’is, very little has changed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Miguel Murado

It seems clear that if (as Israel always insisted) Yassir Arafat was “an obstacle to peace”, he may not have been the only obstacle or even an important one, since twelve months after his death in a Paris hospital, peace has made very little progress. And it remains to be seen whether that progress, however little, namely the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza or the hesitant democratization of the Palestinian Authority, is for the bad or for the worse.

To the Palestinians who met Friday in the muqqata of Ramallah to lie the foundation stone of a mausoleum dedicated to the ra’is, the cruel irony of this burial place couldn’t go unnoticed. The muqqata has been, in quick succession, a jail (British) and the headquarters of an Army (Israeli). This depressing lunar landscape where Arafat spent his last three years as a virtual prisoner was, above all, the appex of a failure: that of his negotiating approach to the conflict, the symbol of his isolation and the real main feature of his character: Not his alleged “cynicism” (so many silly things have been said about the man), but his maddening indecision and his solitude.

That solitude of Arafat is what, unwittingly, is also portrayed at the naïf museum that opened that same day, within a short distance of the future mausoleum: A handful of pencils, a box of “Fisherman’s Friend” menthol pills, a small plastic figurine of Santa Claus… Israel accused this man (though never showed evidence) of pocketing millions, but the truth is that his personal legacy is like his political legacy: poor and somewhat moving. His dream of being buried in Jerusalem has thus been transformed into yet another of his innumerable defeats disguised as victories: His mausoleum, the Palestinian minister of Public Works says, is to be built in the white and rosy stone of the Holy City.

Meanwhile, a poll indicates that 73% of the Palestinians miss Arafat. That is why, in an understandable attempt to exert some degree of control on his memory, Arafat’s replacement, greyish Mahmoud Abbas, has limited all commemoration to that of Friday and the one held yesterday in Gaza. Besides, he made sure that the plaque he unveiled in the muqqata would carry his own name aside that of the ra’is, while in his speech he promised to “follow his footsteps”. He is following them, indeed, much to his regret: A year after Arafat's demise, Sharon is already saying about Abbas what he used to say about Arafat: Namely, that he is an obstacle to peace. Abbas’ name is carved in the mausoleum of the man whom he so much attacked during his last days, can easily become a premonition.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 13-11-2005