Some saw him as a father. I didn’t see him as a father in any way. I reject in principle the idea of the leader as a father. I reject the idea of citizens as ‘children’ and I reject the idea of the nation being ‘a family.’
All the same, his simple death was too complex for me to accept as one does life’s recurrent rites. I feel a degree of guilt and regret for my earlier stands and of perplexity over how to define his historical legacy and put a precise name to what history will retain of him.
Wait, though. He played his role as a politician who sometimes got things right and sometimes got them wrong, and I played what I believe is the role of the citizen, which is not restricted to applause.
The humanity of a leader doesn’t show in how he carries on the game of politics; it shows in those moments when politics are absent. He would visit us at Broadcasting House in Cairo and everyone would have falafel for lunch, the patties spread out on newspaper or the drafts of the political commentaries we’d prepared for the microphone in the hope that they’d set fire to the ground beneath the Occupation’s feet and ignite the Revolution in the breasts of the Palestinians. If we decided to celebrate, lunch would be fried fish from a restaurant that delivered, with plastic knives and forks that broke at the first bite, so that we’d end up using our hands instead. We’d drink water from paper or plastic cups, standing in line in front of a miserable tap in the broadcasting service’s poverty-stricken building, before continuing our conversation and he’d say things, some of which we liked and some of which we didn’t. I used to say to my colleagues at the Voice of Palestine, “If this man succeeds in bringing an end to the Occupation and becomes president of our ‘independent Palestinian republic,’ he’ll be the only one in the Arab world to have gained his position by right of struggle, sweat, and long nights, and not by a coup, a rigged election, a referendum whose results are known beforehand, or the support of the CIA and the Pentagon.” So what happened?
The Oslo Agreement bestowed on him a photocopy of the position of president. And now he’s escaped the siege for an eternal absence, and Palestine is still waiting. And it will be a painful wait, more painful perhaps than the man imagined.
The real catastrophe for the Palestinians these days is that they find themselves under the leadership of the pupils in the absence of the master.
At the hands of these pupils and thanks to their erratic stumbling around between the national project and their inability to defend it, the Palestinian Authority has turned into a huge NGO living off the financial assistance of the European countries, while Europe fails to realize that through its expenditures on the Palestinian Authority it simply finances and prolongs the Israeli military occupation. Israel occupies the country, Europe pays the costs of that occupation, and the Authority implements Israel’s conditions. Yes! From a liberation movement of stubborn persistence it has tuned into a fat, flabby NGO at which they brandish the stick and the carrot and which out of fear of the first pants naively after the second, unaware that throughout history it is precisely the carrot that has embodied the underhandedness of imperialism. No one swallows the stick, because they’re afraid of choking on it. Indeed, the stick may incite resistance, endurance, and defiance, and make one search for the sources of one’s strength in order, at least, to defend oneself. It is the carrot that is the real threat. The carrot is smooth, soft, and tasty at one end; little by little, however, as one moves toward the other, it gets thicker, coarser, and woodier. The imperialist carrot is in fact the real stick.
This is what the Authority hasn’t learned.
This Authority walks, and sometimes runs energetically, sincerely, and self-sacrificingly, after a poisoned chalice but trips over the hem of its drawers and falls down at every step. When it gets back up and tries to resume its progress, it finds it has distanced itself from the people, ignored their small, pressing needs, is now worlds apart from them, and has lost control of even its own helpers and supporters. Distance from and contempt for the people as individuals is a recipe for disaster in any political action. There is near consensus among Palestinians that the armed and bloody infighting between Fatah and Hamas would not have occurred if Arafat had been alive. This is not because he was a saint, for even a saint can’t still be a saint after forty continuous years in power and is bound to commit a series of mistakes and sins — and Arafat may have committed many or few — but because Arafat knew how to keep control of his aides no matter how far they might go, and how to take the wind out of the sails of his opponents in the other factions. Bloody civil war wasn’t part of Arafat’s political vocabulary, even if events may sometimes have taken him to its brink.
The next day was my meeting with Marwan al-Barghouti. I discovered that the absence of Marwan — an excellent reader and follower of political and literary writings in the Arab world — from our international writers program had been due to security concerns, but that he had followed the stands and statements of Christian Salmon, Wole Soyinka, Breyten Breytenbach, Saramago, and Consolo from his place of hiding. He spoke at length of the need for Palestine to become once more the point of convergence for people of conscience the world over.
Neither he nor I then knew that a few days later he’d be arrested, to disappear under a long sentence into the prisons of the Occupation, and that Palestine would lose the efforts of one of its honest men.
The most beautiful event of the writers’ visit took place at the Qasaba Theater in Ramallah with the evening of joint readings by Palestinians poets and the guest writers. The star of the evening was the audience, which exceeded a thousand women and men who had come to the theater from every part of the Bank, despite the siege. Despite the dangers and annoyances of the checkpoints, they stayed on till midnight, for the poetry and the literature and to welcome the writers as their guests. The audience listened to readings in languages they did not know with such respect and enjoyment that one could have heard a pin drop, and by the end of the evening they were so taken by its magic that they stood and applauded for many minutes. The Qasaba Theater and Cinema Club was formerly a beautiful old cinema close to our house in the Liftawi Building; the director and actor George Ibrahim has converted it into its present elegant form. The people of Ramallah have taken the place to their hearts and professional and amateur theater troupes have been active in presenting their varied works on its stage.
Later, almost immediately after this rare writers’ evening and just three days after the writers had left, Israeli tanks will force their way into the city of Ramallah and vandalize the Qasaba. The soldiers will enter and destroy the sets, backdrops, curtains, and seats while the echoes of our readings and those of our guests are still reverberating in its air. One journalist wrote of this incident that “it was as though they were trying to destroy any possibility of the resumption of speech.”
They also broke into the building of the Ministry of Culture, a tall block overlooking Arafat’s headquarters, and destroyed it, leaving it full of filth. They would repeat the same acts in all the cities of the ‘West’ Bank, leaving our dead on the doorsteps of their homes.
What scares me most is that we might get used to the idea of death, as though it were our unique lot or the only result that we have to expect from any confrontation. I want us to think, with each of death’s victories, of the magnificence of life. In a poem I will write later, I ask myself,