Forget the "Arab Street"

IT IS HARD not to admire Yasser Arafat. He is certainly the most successful terrorist of modern Middle Eastern history. Always entrepreneurial, he has repeatedly bounced back from oblivion by deftly merging headline-grabbing terrorism with the Arab world's unhappy and unrequited national and religious aspirations. His Palestine Liberation Organization has hijacked Western airliners and machine-gunned airports, slaughtered Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games, orchestrated the kidnapping and murder of U.S. diplomats, pillaged and terrorized a good slice of the Shiite population of Lebanon, and ruthlessly and pettily assassinated anti-Arafat Palestinian dissidents, yet the PLO chairman retains among many the image of a freedom fighter, the estimable "Old Man" of the Palestinian national movement. Geography, DNA, and Western angst also help. If Arafat had looked and spoken like Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the terror-prone Kurdistan Workers party (the PKK), if the Palestinians had more resembled the Kurds (a humiliated, stateless people who have only Muslim enemies), and if America's and Europe's left-wing intellectual elite had not imbued "guerrilla" violence with so much moral aura and celebrity, Yasser Arafat would never have won a Nobel Peace Prize.

In the early 1990s, it was possible--just barely--to imagine Arafat in the process of a miraculous transformation, from consummate terrorist to authoritarian statesman. Read the joint memoir of President George H.W. Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, or the autobiography of Secretary of State James Baker and you get the distinct impression that Washington believed Arafat and the Palestinians were ready for peace, or at least more ready than the Israelis. "I am convinced that one day Yasser Arafat is going to stand up and sing 'Hatikva,' the Israeli national anthem, in perfect Hebrew," wrote the New York Times's Thomas Friedman in 1989 in his captivating tour de force, "From Beirut to Jerusalem." Foreign service officers in the State Department's Near East Bureau usually echoed Friedman through the Clinton years. Even hard-nosed Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, always perspicacious on the Arab world, thought there was a tiny chance that Arafat could escape from the "dream palace of the Arabs," where Israel's eventual destruction was an idee fixe.

Such hopes and visions are, of course, no longer sustainable. It beggars the imagination to believe that Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, or the "temporary" Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiator General Anthony Zinni has any illusions about Yasser Arafat's mendacity or his inability to let go of terrorism as a negotiating tool. There have just been too many acts of obvious encouragement and complicity between Arafat's Palestinian Authority, his Fatah organization, and the young men doing the sniping, machine-gunning, and suicide-bombing. The capture of the Palestinian Authority's Karine A freighter, filled with weaponry supplied by Iran, including C-4 plastiques, the suicide bomber's weapon of choice, left President Bush obviously, and probably permanently, contemptuous of Arafat. The chairman, of course, initially denied all knowledge of the vessel, suggesting that the Israelis were the damnable party for casting doubt on the Palestinian commitment to President Bush's war on terrorism. Even in the State Department, where one has always found a high concentration of apologists for Arafat and critics of any "conservative" Likud party prime minister in Israel, the Karine A and the constant suicide bombings have made Foggy Bottom more guarded in its public and private comments about the chairman.

Yet terrorism continues to work for Arafat, even with the first American administration that has largely defined itself by a war against Middle Eastern terrorism. The Bush administration will not irretrievably damn Arafat in public for his terrorist sins because Washington can't see an alternative to him or to the conflict-resolution approach followed by the Clinton administration. Like Jerusalem, Washington shrinks from girding its loins for the ugly military offensive required to stamp out terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza. The "peace process" is over, and some form of an Israeli occupation of these lands is inevitable, yet few foreign-policy professionals are prepared to admit that American and Israeli policy for years has been founded on an illusion. For a statesman to have seriously doubted Arafat's intentions and still allowed him to build well-armed paramilitary forces next door to Israel would demonstrate criminal incompetence.