How Does He Do It?

By SETH STERN

YASIR ARAFAT
A Political Biography
By Barry M. Rubin, Judith Colp Rubin
354 pages. Oxford University Press. $27.50.

Palestinians didn't have much to celebrate as they began the third year of the second Intifada this fall. Their prime minister had stepped down and his interim replacement doesn’t appear the want the job either. A new cycle of suicide bombings inside Israel prompted threats to deport—or even assassinate—Yasir Arafat.

For Arafat himself, though, the situation could hardly have been better: He'd outflanked his main political rival, and the Palestinian masses once again rushed to his defense as he defiantly stood amid the rubble of his Ramallah headquarters.

Thriving in crises is a recurring theme in Arafat's career. But as Barry and Judith Colp Rubin suggest in their biography of the Palestinian leader, that's not necessarily a skill that has served his people well. In their view, Arafat's wrongheaded miscalculations—including a commitment to violence and constant rejection of compromise—have left him with little to show after a half-century as a revolutionary.

A Nobel Peace Prize nomination this book is not. Nor is it so much a biography as an indictment of Arafat and his leadership style. Antipathy drips from every page as the Rubins set out to knock down all the myths and false legends that developed around Arafat. No detail is too small to refute, down to the number of cars he owned in the mid-1960s. (A single Volkswagen, it turns out.)

The Rubins do concede Arafat's gift as creator of his own image, able to spin even the most profound defeats as victories and play on his people's victimhood. It's almost impossible not to marvel at the staying power of a leader who has survived so long and overcome so many obstacles, many of his own making: from being thrown out of Jordan, to being exiled to Tunisia, to losing financial support after betting on the losing horse during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The Rubins portray their subject as the political equivalent of the cockroaches who will survive a nuclear war.

Every one of his actions is cast in the most cynical possible light: according to the Rubins, it was desperation rather than any sort of new found desire for peace that pushed Arafat towards the Oslo accords a decade ago. And it was a fear of his own mortality that explained Arafat's tears upon hearing about Yitzhak Rabin's assassination two years later.

The last decade has been marked by perhaps his greatest two failures: his corrupt and incompetent rule of the Palestinian authority and his decision to reject a peace agreement with Israel brokered by President Clinton in 2000. The Rubins suggest Arafat was much better suited as a revolutionary than as a nation builder. In their view, his personality doomed to failure what could have been his greatest accomplishment. "His character, behavior and tactics in the end doomed any chance for peace," they conclude.

Nor does the West make out particularly well here. The United States and much of Europe are portrayed as foolishly supportive of Arafat, rushing to make concessions and forgive him no matter how many times he goes back on his word. Still, the book's greatest strength is the access the Rubins gained to American and Israeli intelligence and diplomatic sources. They provide an insider account of some of Arafat's childish fits during negotiations and absurd backroom deceit during hijackings, kidnappings, and especially in the murders of a US ambassador in Sudan and a wheelchair-bound senior citizen aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship. In both instances, intelligence sources revealed Arafat's close behind-the-scenes links to the perpetrators even as he publicly sought to mediate the crises.

Unfortunately, the Rubins' account suffers from a lack of equally strong access on the Palestinian side. They would have bolstered their case that the Palestinians would be better off without Arafat if they’d actually quoted some Palestinians saying so. Nor do the Rubins seem willing to criticize any other party—whether Israel or more militant Palestinian groups—that might distract from their focus on Arafat.  The expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, which played into Arafat's hands, receives barely a mention. Nor do the authors address how Arafat was undercut by more radical Palestinian groups starting in the 1980s. It's possible they give him more credit than he deserves when they suggest he alone has controlled Palestinian violence.

Overall though, the book provides useful insights for anyone trying to understand the course of Arafat's career and why he opted for violence over peace once again since 2000.