New Yorkers Assess Effects of Arafat’s Impending Death

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The New York Sun

Ahmad Jamil, the executive director of Wafa Translation and Services on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, usually makes a point of not listening to news while working. But yesterday, whenever he had a free moment, he was scouring 1010 Wins. He wanted to know if Yasser Arafat had died.


“As a Palestinian I am very concerned,” said Mr. Jamil, who was born in the West Bank city of Jenin. “I saw how my people were thrown out of their homes, how they were killed, how they were murdered. From 1948 to 1967 nobody cared about refugees, about Palestinians all over the place. Then Arafat tried to do something for the Palestinian cause.”


“There are a lot of people who love him,” Mr. Jamil continued, adding he had heard angry accusations at Brooklyn mosques that Israelis had poisoned Mr. Arafat. “Many Palestinians don’t know any leader except him and they consider him like father, or a big brother.”


While, like Mr. Jamil, across New York tens of thousands of Arab-Americans considered with trepidation and sadness a Middle East without Mr. Arafat, most Jews with close ties to Israel took the news as a cause for celebration.


“At the Seder table you’re not supposed to rejoice in the suffering of others, but I do rejoice in someone leaving to allow us to move on,” said Rabbi Michael Paley, of the UJA-Federation of New York. “After all, Arafat has been a murderer of our people. I was one who thought maybe he had changed during the Oslo Accords, but I was wrong. I feel a kind of force of evil has abated.”


At the East Village’s Holy Land Market, the owner had the TV tuned to Israeli news all day, which he said, almost gleefully, had reported Mr. Arafat’s death.


“Israelis are very, very happy,” said the owner, a native of Tel Aviv, who wanted to remain anonymous because he was afraid it would be bad for business. “More bad is not possible. We live in the bad. We know what are bombs all the time. Arafat was always there, even when he was speaking peace on the other side.”


According to the New York director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Monica Tarazi, any assumptions the region’s violence would improve without Mr. Arafat were unfounded.


“There is obviously concern given this particular moment of Palestinian history that the public may have to deal with more unrest,” Ms. Tarazi said. “Israel has used the figure of Arafat as a scapegoat to enable them to withdraw from any kind of political withdrawal . Their excuse is going to have to change now that Arafat is out of the picture.”


But concern about the future was second to mourning Mr. Arafat’s demise. “He is widely acknowledged to be the father of the Palestinian consciousness,” Ms. Tarazi said. “There certainly will be a sense of loss. He’s been a Palestinian leader for a generation.”


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