Yasser Arafat at the End of His Lies

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The New York Sun

Yasser Arafat’s death has been like his life: Surrounded by lies. Since his admission to a Paris hospital last week, Mr. Arafat – whose days have apparently been spent, brain-dead, attached to a life-sustaining respirator – has been variously reported by his aides and wife as improving; not seriously ill; ambulatory; in a good mood and jesting with his doctors; in a reversible coma; and waking up to smile at President Chirac of France when the latter paid him a visit. If brain death didn’t preclude the possibility, one might almost suspect him of having composed all these communiques himself.


When and where hasn’t Mr. Arafat habitually lied about himself and the Palestinian movement he helped found, starting with the moment of his birth? He lied about this being in Palestine, his real birthplace having been Cairo, to which his family had moved two years earlier. He lied, too, about having spent his childhood and youth in Jerusalem, a city in which he resided only between the ages of 4 and 8 – the one time he lived in Palestine at all prior to his entry into Gaza as head of the Palestinian Authority in 1994.


Mr. Arafat – a “bossy” child with a penchant for “showmanship,” according to his biographers – lied about his role as a young man in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, claiming to have fought with Arab troops in Palestine when he was in fact in Egypt all the time. He lied about taking part in anti-British hostilities in the Suez Canal Zone in 1951.


He lied about having been imprisoned for months in Nasser’s Egypt for anti-regime activities. He lied about the success of his business activities In Kuwait, to which he moved from Egypt. He lied about the first guerrilla raids of the Fatah into Israel in 1965, issuing statements about attacks that never took place and wildly exaggerating the few that did.


So absurd were these declarations, in fact, that a year later, in 1966, he was suspended as the organization’s military commander by his (none too honest themselves) comrades for issuing “false reports.” Yet after the Six Day War in 1967 he kept it up – lying about his supposedly extensive underground travels in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, lying about his role in the battle of Karama on the east bank of the Jordan in 1968, lying about not being responsible for Palestinian terrorist operations in the 1970s and 1980s, including the murder of three American diplomats in Sudan in 1973.


All of which was nothing compared to the lies that he told throughout his political career about the promises he meant to keep and the obligations he intended to honor – promises and obligations that were broken by him over and over.


He lied to King Hussein of Jordan when he vowed that his guerrilla forces there would respect Jordanian sovereignty in return for the hospitality granted them; lied to President Assad of Syria when – after his expulsion from Jordan to Lebanon – he swore to keep his troops out of the Lebanese civil war; lied to the various factions in that war about his support; lied to his Arab allies when – expelled with their agreement from Lebanon, too, in 1982 – he returned there a year later to resume fighting.


From birth to death, the man was a liar – one who presided over a Palestinian cause that learned under his tutelage to lie like himself. This was why it was such a terrible mistake for Israel to commence negotiations with him in the early 1990s and to allow these to conclude in the Oslo accords.


It was the conventional wisdom of those days, repeated over and over with a patient smile to the opponents of Oslo, that, yes, Yasser Arafat was a terrorist and Yasser Arafat had been Israel’s bitter enemy, but were not peace agreements signed between enemies? And had not many an ex-“terrorist,” as leaders of national liberation movements often were called, ended up a responsible head of state? Had not Israel’s Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir been ex-“terrorists” themselves?


But this was entirely missing the point. The real reason for having nothing to do with Mr. Arafat was not that he was an enemy or a terrorist. One does indeed, when the time comes, negotiate with enemies; one can indeed, if they are prepared to renounce it, negotiate with those who have practiced terrorism. There is, in the world of diplomacy, only one type of leader with whom must never negotiate under any circumstance.


This is the leader who is a liar.


It isn’t a question of moral principle. Lying isn’t a worse crime than terrorism. It’s a purely pragmatic question of utility. A terrorist who can be trusted to keep his word is a man you can do business with, even if you are shaking a hand smeared with innocent blood. It is impossible, though, to do business with a liar. There is no point in making agreements with someone who does not believe in the importance of keeping them.


This is a truth so simple and so obvious that it seems all but impossible to understand now how it could have eluded those – Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, the Israeli intelligence community, the commanders of the Israeli army – who welcomed the disaster of Oslo with open arms 11 years ago. Did they not know what a liar Arafat was?


The answer is that they did but were under a peculiar illusion. They thought that lying, like terrorism, was something that, if done up to a point for a purpose, could be after that point given up. They didn’t realize that a man who has lied all his life will go on lying right up to his death.



Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.


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