The Noonday Train

Twenty years of European and UN Middle Eastern policy may be lying on the
deathbed with Arafat. That they had to fly in doctors to treat him in a
makeshift clinic underscores how, after 50 years of UN relief and billions in
European investment, there are no Palestinian institutions. Not even decent
hospitals for its supreme leader. The downside of the Arab Way of War -- the
Intifada in this case -- is that the concept of victory through denial is
inherently pyrrhic.  'We burned our village in order to keep it from
falling into enemy hands' is like lighting a match to examine the gas tank; it
works but misses the point.

Palestine was cursed by the example of Algeria, which after evicting the
French, could spend the next three decades cleansing itself of the poisons of
terrorism. Arafat forgot that the Jews, unlike the French in Algeria, were as
much a part of region as themselves. In place of protracted war, which at all
events ends, Arafat embarked upon an eternal war with the eternal Jew. He would
enter Algeria's tunnel of terror with no light at the end of it.

The Intifada may have hurt Israel, but it consumed Palestine, leaving it with
only the counterfeit of a functioning society. Terrorism leaves nothing but ash.
And when Arafat dies, as all men must, his legacy, no less than his corpse will
be contested by a swarm of pretenders -- a power struggle, of possibly
surpassing savagery among men nurtured -- at the European taxpayer's dime -- for
their skill at terror. The

Guardian has a piece, really an advance obituary, describing how only
America, Israel and England refused to invest in Arafat. They mean it as
reproof, unaware even of its irony.

If Mr Arafat is unable to continue as leader of the Palestinians, that too
will change the politics of the region. The US and Israel, and latterly
Britain, have refused to work with him, claiming he is unreliable and
untrustworthy.

His successor could come from one of the new generation of politicians,
either the younger Palestinians who came to the West Bank and Gaza with him
from exile in Tunis 10 years ago, or the generation that was brought up in the
West Bank and Gaza and led the first intifada in 1987 and participated or led
the second one that began in September 2000.  ... But the succession
might not be that simple. Groups outside Mr Arafat's Fatah organisation might
want a claim on leadership, not least the Islamist organisation Hamas that
dominates life in Gaza.

European policymakers may have realized, in some dim corner of their minds,
that this day would come; but continued to invest in the frail man who now lies
at death's threshold. Now the hour has come and the devil is at the door. Not
just for Arafat, but for a whole failed policy. The

Kansas City Star reports:

The sudden decline in Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's health Wednesday
night has widened a power vacuum that has already grown into a chasm in the
Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip, and opens the real possibility of chaos
and civil war in one of the world's most dangerous regions. ...

Even before the announcement of the Arafat's rapid decline Wednesday
evening, factional fighting had left several cities in the Israeli-occupied
Palestinian territories under the control of warring factions in the last
year. In Jenin, a young firebrand named Zakaria Zubeidi has run the city for
months, and has driven out other Palestinian officials.

In other cities, mayors have been run out of town, while other leaders have
been killed by militants who are forging links with criminal gangs. There are
few functioning municipal authorities and few signs of police authority. ...

While diplomats tend to discuss possible successors among the polished,
urbane Palestinian political class, any realistic effort to understand what's
next will have to take into account the Palestinian street, which is where the
real power resides. And there is little indication thus far that any single
leader can stem the political erosion Arafat and his supporters are already
facing.

Liberal circles have derided the neoconservative idea of bringing democratic
institutions to the Middle East as a pipe dream.

Edward Said magisterially warned:

I wish I could say that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs
and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it really
hasn't. For all kinds of reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be
considerably better. In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of
the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist clich�, the dominance of
crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and "others" has
found a fitting correlative in the looting and destruction of Iraq's libraries
and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of
understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean
so that "we" might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of
life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high
officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle
East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many
peanuts in a jar.

And heeding this advice, the Old Continent handed Arafat all the chalk he
wanted to write what he wist. It would be nice if Europe were forced to live out
the consequences of their policy -- to wed their superior vision to Arafat's
perishable breath. But don't bet on it.