Arafat, Damour and the Failure of Arab Nationalism
By: Joseph Hitti
Boston, Massachusetts
November 11, 2004

If there is one national "liberation" movement in the whole world that has failed to achieve its objectives over the past 60 years since the end of colonialism, the Palestinian movement is it. Indeed, the goal of achieving an independent Palestine in the aftermath of World War II remains elusive at best, and most likely unachievable as long as current Arab nationalist mindset remains as it is today: Defeatism and negativism, wallowing in suffered setbacks and catastrophes, indulging itself in the syndrome of the victimized and colonized, and demanding against all reason the exclusivity and preeminence of its own aspirations over those of others. Let alone the authoritarian mentality and the blending of fundamentalist Islamism with a supposedly secular Arab nationalism.

Yasser Arafat was never able to lead his people to independence because he was of that brand of Arab nationalist leaders. From catastrophe to catastrophe, from war to war, from acts of terrorism to more acts of terrorism, Arafat never understood, like many other Arab leaders, the need for quantum leaps at some point in the long march of struggle. He allied himself with the Islamic fundamentalist movements and turned a first successful stone-throwing Intifada into the utter failure of a second suicide-bombing Intifada. Those are the ills that persist today in the vision of Arab nationalists as they contemplate the challenges that face them and their nations.

As a Lebanese, I cannot feel any sympathy for Yasser Arafat, no matter how much has was elevated by the Nobel Prize and by his life of struggle. The point is that he never achieved what Mandela achieved for his people. After its eviction in 1970 from Jordan by King Hussein for its attempt at usurping power, the PLO under Arafat’s leadership moved to Beirut and immediately tried to do the same in Lebanon. The resulting mayhem, massacres, killings, and assassinations that became known as the Lebanese War, was in large part caused by the alliance of the PLO with the Syrian Baathist regime to take over Lebanon and use it as launching pad for their war on Israel. And the rest is history.

In one of the illustrious chapters in the PLO’s ravages inflicted on Lebanon, my hometown of Damour (20 miles south of Beirut) was run over in January 1976 by the PLO and its allied Al-Saika organization and the Syrian army. The result was a thousand people killed, women, children and men alike, slaughtered, bayoneted, throats slit, raped, hanged upside down from trees, and dragged to their death in the streets, and another 5,000 had to flee the town in distress. Lest we forget, when meeting in Oslo on the peace process, Yasser Arafat replied to Yitzhak Rabin by saying, "Yes, I am used to governing, as I governed Lebanon for a while". Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO’s "foreign minister" had indeed said his famous, "The road to Palestine goes through Jounieh." (Jounieh is a town 10 miles north of Beirut, Lebanon).

And so, many Lebanese will have a difficult time expressing any sympathy for the "president" of Palestine on his death bed. And even if our lack of symapthy will be interpreted by many Arab nationalists as an insidious plot with alien co-conspirators, I cannot but think of Damour and its dead children every time I see Arafat’s face. We certainly hope that a new Palestinian leadership will have the courage to do what they must to salvage whatever remains of their Palestine and refurbish the image of Palestinian nationalism by dissociating it from a defunct Arab nationalism and associating it with a modern and accountable brand of leadership. For unlike the dead children of Damour and other towns of Lebanon that the PLO killed for no reason, the Palestinian children in their refugee camps are alive and need a better tomorrow. For there is no better symptom of the failure of the radical Arab nationalists than the hundreds of refugee camps that dot the landscape while Arafat and his cohorts of Arab leaders squat for decades in their offices (Assad, Mubarak, et al.) and never achieve anything for their people.