[lbo-talk] [Newsday] Juan Cole: Al-Qaida stands to benefit from Arafat's death

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Nov 21 12:11:53 PST 2004


http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-vpcol194047096nov19,0,7315856.story?coll=ny-viewpoints-headlines

November 19, 2004

NEWSDAY

Al-Qaida stands to benefit from Arafat's death

BY JUAN COLE

Juan Cole is professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian history

at the University of Michigan and author of the Web Log, "Informed

Comment."

Many observers welcomed the death of Yasser Arafat, seeing him as a

lifelong terrorist incapable of negotiating in good faith.

Some hoped that a bureaucrat at the Palestinian Authority might take

his place and make a deal with the Israelis. These celebrations

misread Arafat's role, and underestimate the radical fundamentalist

challenge, both from Hamas and perhaps increasingly from al-Qaida.

Will Osama bin Laden be the greatest beneficiary of Arafat's passing?

Bin Laden and al-Qaida have long been much more interested in the

struggle between the Palestinians and the Israelis than is generally

recognized. In his most recent videotape, bin Laden said the idea for

the Sept. 11 attacks came to him initially as a result of the 1982

Israeli siege of Beirut, which aimed at wiping out the Palestinian

leadership. Was bin Laden invoking the plight of the Palestinians so

explicitly because he hoped to find a new base of support in the

Occupied Territories, just as he has in American-occupied Iraq?

Yasser Arafat led the shopkeepers and engineers of his middle-class

Fateh party toward a vision of a business-friendly secular Arab

nationalism. He also headed up a crazy quilt of leftist, middle class

and Muslim groups, the Palestine Liberation Organization. His attempt

to lead a broad coalition faltered, however, when it came to Hamas.

Hamas grew out of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which established a

small toehold in Gaza in the 1940s. In 1978, Sheik Ahmed Yassin

refashioned the small Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood as the Movement

of Islamic Resistance (with the Arabic acronym of Hamas). Hamas

members despised Arafat and his secular nationalism, and dreamed of

destroying Israel.

It is hard to imagine now, but Israeli secret support of Hamas

continued in the 1980s, as the movement gained strength from the

Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Israeli attack on the PLO in

Beirut. In contrast, the contemporary hard-line government of Israeli

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has assassinated Hamas leaders such as

Sheikh Yassin.

Meanwhile, the rise of Palestinian Islamic fundamentalism had

implications far beyond the Gaza strip. Abdullah Azzam joined the

Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood and took up a teaching position at a

university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. There he taught the young Osama

bin Laden.

Azzam was among the first volunteers to go off to fight the Soviets in

Afghanistan. In the 1980s, he joined bin Laden in this effort.

Palestinians such as Azzam and later Abu Zubaydah played a prominent

role in what became al-Qaida.

Bin Laden avoided the language of Palestinian nationalism, using

religious symbols instead. He complained about the occupation of

Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem by infidel governments such as the United

States and Israel. In 1989, when bin Laden returned to Jeddah from

Pakistan, he preached a sermon against the Israeli crackdown on

Palestinians during the first intifada. Bin Laden funded projects only

in places that did not have their own insurgency, as a way of

leveraging scarce resources. He let organizations like Hamas resist

the Israelis in Gaza.

Bin Laden announced al-Qaida's holy war or jihad against the "Jews and

Crusaders" in 1998. Al-Qaida sent shoe-bomber Richard Reid on an

exploratory trip to Israel, and later carried out an attack on Israeli

tourists in Mombasa in 2002. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of

9/11, wanted Muhammad Atta to move up the attack from September to

April in order to "punish the Israelis" for their repression of

Palestinians during the intifada that began in the fall of 2000.

Arafat's secular nationalism was supple enough to compromise with

Israel and to imagine a two-state solution, even if the road of

negotiations remained rocky. The continued Israeli colonization of the

occupied Palestinian territories during the 1990s helped, along with

terrorist attacks by radical groups such as Hamas, to derail the peace

process, which Sharon had always opposed.

Arafat's death creates a vacuum in Palestinian leadership that will

not soon be filled. Sharon's assassination of major Hamas leaders has

also weakened authority structures in that party. If the Israelis and

the Palestinian leadership cannot find a way to reinvigorate the peace

process, cells of radical young Palestinians may grow up that look to

bin Laden for their cues.

Even if local Palestinian leaders remain strong enough to keep

al-Qaida out, the festering Israeli-Palestinian struggle remains among

the best recruiting posters for al-Qaida with young Muslim men.

Resolving this conflict would be the most effective weapon the United

States could deploy in its war on terror.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.



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