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November 16, 2004

Geopolitical Intelligence Report - The Death of Arafat

Contributor JESO sends in 'The Death of Arafat' by George Friedman, a report of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. The report is dated November 11, but the insight it provides for understanding the future for peace in the Middle East has no limitation in regard to timeliness:

That Yasser Arafat's death marks the end of an era is so obvious that it hardly bears saying. The nature of the era that is ending and the nature of the era that is coming, on the other hand, do bear discussing. That speaks not only to the Arab-Israeli conflict but to the evolution of the Arab world in general. In order to understand Arafat's life, it is essential to understand the concept "Arab," and to understand its tension with the concept "Muslim," at least as Arafat lived it out. In general, ethnic Arabs populate North Africa and the area between the Mediterranean and Iran, and between Yemen and Turkey. This is the Arab world. It is a world that is generally -- but far from exclusively -- Muslim, although the Muslim world stretches far beyond the Arab world.

To understand Arafat's life, it is much more important to understand the Arab impulse than to understand the Muslim impulse. Arafat belonged to that generation of Arab who visualized the emergence of a single Arab nation, encapsulating all of the religious groups in the Arab world, and one that was essentially secular in nature. This vision did not originate with Arafat but with his primary patron, Gamal Abdul Nasser, the founder of modern Egypt and of the idea of a United Arab Republic. No sense can be made of Arafat's life without first understanding Nasser's.

..............However, and this is Arafat's tragedy,  by the time Hamas emerged as a power, he had lost the ability to believe in anything but the concept of the Palestinians and his place as its leader. As Hamas rose, Arafat became entirely tactical. His goal was to retain position if not power, and toward that end, he would do what was needed. A lifetime of tactics had destroyed all strategy. His death in Paris was a farce of family and courtiers. It fitted the end he had created, because his last years were lived in a round of clever maneuvers leading nowhere. The Palestinians are left now without strategy, only tactics. There is no one who can speak for the Palestinians and be listened to as authoritative. He created the Palestinian nation and utterly disrupted the Palestinian state. He left a clear concept on the one hand, a chaos on the other.

Read the entire Stratfor Report here...

Posted by Hyscience at November 16, 2004 1:27 PM

• Geopolitical Intelligence Report - The Death of Arafat - Nov 16, 2004