Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Martirio

Da Slate:
http://www.slate.com/id/2109860/
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The famously "generous" terms offered to Arafat by Clinton and Barak were
not as generous as all that. But his response was even more contemptible
than is usually reported. He suddenly announced, first, that he represented
the world's billion Muslims on the issue of Jerusalem and, second, that his
own life might be in danger if he signed the wrong deal. Clearly, Arafat has
never had蟻nd could never have received蟻ny general mandate from the Muslim
world on Jerusalem or anything else. And as for the threat to his life仇as
this not the same man who used the word "martyr" in every other sentence and
announced from his besieged compound that it was his highest desire? Willing
to die in a pointless scuffle but not willing to risk anything for an
agreement? In cold fact, Arafat was protected from "martyrdom" at Israel's
hands, as he well knew, by an edict of President Bush to Sharon. The
charming conclusion of this drama is now the widely spread rumor that the
chairman was martyred after all, having been poisoned by the Jews: a rumor
itself perhaps designed to pre-empt any discussion of his AIDS-like symptoms
at the end. What a squalid and ignoble terminus, to a life of steadily
diminishing returns.
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Arafat's Squalid End
How he wasted his last 30 years.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2004, at 9:48 AM PT
The end of Arafat's eraSo much ink: so many clich駸. Arafat逆errorist or
statesman? When asked on screen, I tried to give the shortest answer I
could. Yasser Arafat will be a figure in history, all right. He qualifies
not because he changed any geography or any regime, but because he altered
our cosmology. At least until the 1967 war, and probably even until the 1973
"Yom Kippur" or "Ramadan" war, the outside world had been inclined to look
upon the original 1947/1948 war, and its outcome, as a battle between "the
Jews" and "the Arabs." This mental mapping, with a small Zionist island amid
a vast sea of swirling Arab regimes, semiautomatically enlisted the latent
sympathy for the underdog that was the least one could expect after the
Jewish experience in Eastern and Central Europe. Israel was a state of the
stateless, created by an early United Nations resolution, and entitled to
the usual presumptions concerning self-defense. You've heard it.
This approximate narrative was rendered increasingly hollow and increasingly
debatable once the terms were shifted. Make it Israel versus "the
Palestinians" and immediately the sentimental picture is altered. We
suddenly saw two peoples, of roughly equivalent population, contesting for
one land. Tragedy, as Hegel said, is a conflict between two rights. By the
time Arafat had left the podium of the United Nations (holster at his side,
olive branch in his hand) in 1974, it was widely understood that everything
since the Balfour Declaration had implicitly called for a two-state
solution. And that was a historical achievement, however crudely it was
called (or recalled) to our attention.
I don't normally agree with Michael Oren, whose history of the origins of
the 1967 conflict is typically evasive when it comes to the expulsion and
dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs 20 years previously. But he was
correct in saying, in last Sunday's Washington Post, that there is something
lame in crediting a man who dies in 2004 for "symbolizing" a moral and
diplomatic accomplishment achieved in 1974. In other words誼y all means we
got the point about the two peoples. But what then?
You may, as the "leader" of one such people, wage an uncompromising struggle
to regain all you have lost and invite the world's sympathy and solidarity.
Or you may extend your hand for an historic compromise. But you cannot do
both. I would strongly recommend that all those who read this get hold of a
copy of Edward Said's book The Politics of Dispossession, published 10 years
ago, and scan its pages. You will see Arafat up close, as the symbol of his
people, the prince of procrastination, the acme of corruption, the master of
deceit, the demagogue of "resistance," and the consummate artist of the
double-deal. (You will also read, as one should stipulate, about an Israeli
policy that never ceased to expand settlement and colonization even as the
most urgent negotiations with European and American statesmen were in
progress.)
But has any national movement ever been so appallingly led? Edward Said
asked many times, in public and private, where the Mandela of Palestine
could be. In rather bold contrast to this decent imagination, Arafat managed
to be both a killer and a compromiser (Mandela was neither), both a Swiss
bank-account artist and a populist ranter (Mandela was neither), both an
Islamic "martyrdom" blow-hard and a servile opportunist, and a man who
managed to establish a dictatorship over his own people before they even had
a state (here one simply refuses to mention Mandela in the same breath).
There was a time when the Palestinian cause, throughout the Middle East, was
generally identified with larger causes than itself. Its diaspora, made up
of thousands and thousands of intelligent and educated and ironic people,
was on the whole a force for good in the Gulf states, in Jordan, in Lebanon,
and elsewhere. If you voyaged to some dark and decrepit state in the region,
and could get rid of your clinging official "minder," it was in some
Palestinian apartment that music would play, drinks be served, books be
passed around, and humorous remarks made with courage. It became the fashion
among some Arabist reporters at this time to allude to the Palestinians as
"the Jews of the Middle East."
Well, Arafat certainly destroyed that dream. His grandiose death-or-glory
campaigns made life infinitely harder for the Palestinian populations of
Jordan (in 1970) and in Lebanon. Even those conflicts had at least some
tincture of revolutionary ardor, in which some Palestinians杵ot of Arafat's
faction却layed a role. But the nadir was reached in 1990, when "the
Chairman" ranged himself on the side of Saddam Hussein and stayed with him
on the obliteration and annexation of Kuwait. Suddenly, the PLO was
implicitly and sometimes explicitly in favor of the erasure of an existing
Arab and Muslim state, a member of the Arab League and of the United
Nations. 
There were two results of this. First, the enormous Palestinian population
of Kuwait杵umbering between 300,000 and 400,000 people仇as abruptly
subjected to another nightmare. It suffered from Saddam Hussein's
aggression, and it suffered again from Kuwaiti fury at a perceived
Palestinian "fifth column." Second, the stupidity of Arafat's bet on the
wrong Iraqi horse was compounded further. In order to recover his lost
credit with the Saudis and others, he began increasingly, and corruptly, to
sound the note of the "Islamist" trumpeter. (Twenty percent of Palestinians
are formally Christian, and a large number are secular, but I think it is
pretty safe to say that the "Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades" and other surrogate
groups would not care much to be called "the Jews of the Middle East," in
any tone of voice.)
A short time after the end of the Gulf War in 1991, I was introduced to Sari
Nuseibeh, who is one of the most brilliant intellectuals of the Palestinian
movement as well as誼y virtue of his ancient lineage黍ne of the Arab
aristocracy of Jerusalem. (He was, until Sharon closed it down, a senior
member of the Palestinian Authority in that city.) Looking back, he said, he
realized what the PLO should have done. They should have offered an armed
detachment to the Coalition forces in Iraq, and taken part in the liberation
of Kuwait. Think of the implications. ... Imagine what a different world we
might be inhabiting if Arafat had been capable of even thinking like that.
The famously "generous" terms offered to Arafat by Clinton and Barak were
not as generous as all that. But his response was even more contemptible
than is usually reported. He suddenly announced, first, that he represented
the world's billion Muslims on the issue of Jerusalem and, second, that his
own life might be in danger if he signed the wrong deal. Clearly, Arafat has
never had蟻nd could never have received蟻ny general mandate from the Muslim
world on Jerusalem or anything else. And as for the threat to his life仇as
this not the same man who used the word "martyr" in every other sentence and
announced from his besieged compound that it was his highest desire? Willing
to die in a pointless scuffle but not willing to risk anything for an
agreement? In cold fact, Arafat was protected from "martyrdom" at Israel's
hands, as he well knew, by an edict of President Bush to Sharon. The
charming conclusion of this drama is now the widely spread rumor that the
chairman was martyred after all, having been poisoned by the Jews: a rumor
itself perhaps designed to pre-empt any discussion of his AIDS-like symptoms
at the end. What a squalid and ignoble terminus, to a life of steadily
diminishing returns.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest collection
of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is published this month.
Photograph of Yasser Arafat by Jamal Aruri/AFP/Getty Images. 

 Photograph of Yasser Arafat by Jamal Aruri/AFP/Getty Images. 
Ma che abbiamo fatto per meritarci questa 'character assassination' 
sotto Natale?
Am.

 sotto Natale?
Parecchio. 
Spiega flaque da chasse, qual'è il senso di questi tuoi ricorrenti
riferimenti natalizi? Ti angoscia la malvagità del mondo in generale o
quella di "rabbine" e "youpin" (sporchi giudei) in particolare?
Tb

 Tb
Se usi quest'appellativo e' difficile che ti risponda ancora. Mi 
'angoscia la malvagità del mondo in generale' come intendi cosi' bene  
in queste giornate di riconciliazione ::))
Am.