The Palestinian public's disappointment with Yasser Arafat was expressed Wednesday in the streets of Ramallah.
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Very few people gathered outside the Palestinian Authority chairman's headquarters to express their concern for their leader's health. The fact that more could be learned about the situation by watching Al Jazeera was not the only reason for the small crowds. Despite the fact that during his public appearances on television Arafat is surrounded by cheering supporters in his headquarters, it appears that large segments of the Palestinian public felt remote from their leader, even though they do not blame him directly for the deteriorated state of affairs.
About four months ago, a group of activists who tried to revive a popular, unarmed uprising was preparing a visit by the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi in the region. One of the proposed slogans was "Let us learn from Gandhi and Mandela." The slogan was immediately annulled, as organizers feared it could be perceived as critical of Arafat.
In the late 1990s, the Islamic Movement in Gaza published an article translated from Haaretz about Hamas members held in Palestinian Authority prisons for years without trial. The translator left only one sentence out. In it, a child of one of the detainees told of his visit with Arafat in which family members pleaded for the release of their loved ones. In the censored sentence the boy said Arafat was much smaller than he expected him to be.
In both cases, no one feared arrest or reprisal for an offensive comment made. The fear of offending the Palestinian leader could be compared with the fear of insulting the father of a family.
True, one can always find visitors to the Muqata who are impressed by Arafat's charisma, by his familiarity with events and his endurance under Israel's tight siege of his headquarters.
But in the past four years, and also during the Oslo years, it has been more and more difficult for Fatah activists to find in Arafat the statesman they once believed in and for whom they have sacrificed the best of their years.
An embarrassed senior PLO official said Arafat's death by natural causes was considered a solution because "when there is no internal change, people wait for an external one." More and more people could be heard saying in the past months that there will be no changes as long as Arafat is alive. But just because Israel and the U.S. have done all they could to destroy him politically, Arafat critics - many from within the Fatah movement - dared not voice any criticism of him in public. In addition, for Arafat's critics, the Israeli occupation and the settlements were not the result of the PA chairman's leadership or character, although the implementation of these policies may have taken advantage of his attributes.
While Israel blames Arafat for planning the current intifada, and while the U.S. blames him for not acting as a responsible leader, the Palestinians have different issues with their leader. During the Oslo years, it appeared that he and his aides forgot that their people were still living under occupation, holding failed talks that enabled Israel to expand settlements and choke the Palestinian economy with closures and sieges. The events led to the eventual explosion in September 2000, which many had anticipated. After that, the general impression in the Palestinian public has been that Arafat and his people were swept by the popular rage but did not manage to channel it into a united policy of struggle against the occupation.
The absurdity of the whole situation is that in contrast to the Israeli stance, Arafat's Fatah movement and the Palestinian public are convinced that the PA chairman continues to adhere to the two-state solution, and that this is the reason he did not accept then-prime minister Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David, which he saw as an effort to bury any chance for the creation of a sustainable Palestinian state. This is part of the personal and overall tragedy
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