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.