The Middle East After Arafat...(Yasir Arafat)(Brief Article)

We have grown accustomed to his face. Yasir Arafat's unshaven visage, wrapped with a checkered head scarf, is the most enduring image of the long conflict between Israel and the Arabs. In substantive debates as well Arafat remains at its center. The Clinton administration was criticized for being too close to him. The Bush administration is being berated for keeping its distance from him. Presidents and pundits are constantly urging him to accept plans, denounce terrorism, make speeches, as if this one man's actions can end 50 years of fighting. But it should now be clear that this one man will not--or cannot--bring peace in the Middle East. A realistic strategy for the region must look beyond Yasir Arafat.

In an interview last week, Dennis Ross, until recently the perpetual negotiator between the Palestinians and the Israelis, finally concluded that Arafat was not capable of negotiating an end to the conflict: "What is required of him is something he is not able to do." It is not that Arafat could not give up a few acres in the West Bank. It is not even that he could not abide the partitioning of Jerusalem. What Arafat could not do at Camp David and still cannot do is abandon the founding claim of the PLO--that Palestinians displaced by Israel in 1948 be allowed to return home.

From its beginnings in the late 1940s until 1987, the Palestinian cause meant one thing and one thing only--the right of return for its refugees, who number about 1 million and now live scattered around the Arab world. The PLO was created as a vehicle to represent this Palestinian diaspora, and Arafat was the leader of the exiles.

It was an all-or-nothing struggle and--since Israel has never accepted the right of return--by the early 1980s it looked more like nothing. Battered by Israel's growing strength and its quarrels with other Arabs, the PLO had literally nowhere to go. Then in 1987 everything changed with the uprising (intifada) in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians living under Israeli occupation began demanding independence. They caught the world's attention.

They also caught Arafat off guard. The PLO had always treated the Palestinians in the occupied territories as second-class citizens, docile folk who conveniently presented the world with suffering images for the cause. Scrambling to take control of a movement that threatened to get away from him, Arafat took the reins of the protest and, for the first time, began negotiating seriously with the Israeli government in Oslo.

Ever since Oslo, Arafat has had a choice; he could shift from an unattainable demand (the right of return) to an attainable one (Israel out of the occupied territories). The switch would give his people a state, national independence and the beginnings of normalcy. But he couldn't do it. The leading scholar of the region, Fouad Ajami, explains, "Arafat ...