It was Yasser Arafat’s task to represent the Palestinian cause at a time when it seemed almost hopeless, especially in the West. What chance would you give a cause that could be readily portrayed as denying the right of Jewish people to a national existence in the aftermath of the Holocaust? That could therefore be depicted (falsely, I’d say) as an extension of Nazism.

His achievement was that, under his leadership, that cause finally made its mark. It became seen as legitimate and urgent. He achieved this although his own presence, in the West, was a PR nightmare. He was unkempt, nearly drooling, both ingratiating and menacing, inept in English, a manoeuvrer rather than a straight talker. (A great example? His declaration that the official Palestinian position on destroying Israel was caduc, an obscure French term implying: inoperative, so don’t worry about it. But he rallied support to his cause, as much despite his own traits as due to them.

Yet he failed, in his lifetime, and his cause may fail, too, as Edward Said, the elegant Palestinian advocate who also died this year, apparently felt at the end. His moment of triumph, the peace agreement signed at the White House in 1993, was probably his great failure. He agreed to police his own people, but got no guarantees to offer them back on issues such as Jewish settlements, borders, Jerusalem or right of return. Without those levers, his power declined. In 2000, he felt he had to turn down what Israel managed to position in the media as “the most generous offer” ever made to Palestinians. In truth, it was far less and added little to the earlier deal. When I asked Mustafa Barghouti, of the non-violent grassroots Palestinian movement Mubadara, why the Arafat side failed to counter Israeli exaggerations, he gave me an answer I didn’t expect: “Sheer incompetence.”

Yasser Arafat’s death reverberates because it also seems to represent the failure, so far, of his cause. That failure, in turn, symbolizes the collective human capacity for failure in a just cause. I know there are other just causes. But Palestinians have, in this era, become emblematic of them, as South Africans were under apartheid. South Africa came to eventually embody the capacity of the human community, acting through international institutions, to win victory in a just cause. Palestine so far is its grim opposite.

Funerals are important, even if they evoke ambivalence, as this one does among Palestinians. But this funeral is important for how Israelis respond, too. Israel’s justice minister said the burial would not happen in Jerusalem because it is “the city of Jewish kings, not Arab terrorists.” That is the voice of Jewish arrogance, not Jewish righteousness. Jerusalem is also a city of Jewish prophets, who denounced their own kings, even King David, when those kings abused people under their rule, including non-Jews.

Israeli officials are reported to have called Yasser Arafat “the founder of modern terrorism,” a ridiculous claim. Terrorism has a far longer history, and includes two of Israel’s prime ministers. Nelson Mandela was once a terrorist. Then, suddenly, he became South Africa’s national saviour for blacks and whites. The term, terror, wasn’t withdrawn or redefined. It just went away; it became caduc. Other national and moral priorities took over. The whole thing never was about terror, not really.

For decades, the Israel-Palestine imbroglio has been a litmus test for whether people of goodwill can sort through a horribly tangled issue of right and wrong. It has been confused and obscured by the Holocaust, the price of oil, Hollywood’s notion of terrorists — don’t get me started. Were it elsewhere in the world, with other players involved, most people would have sorted it out by now with ease. But put it this way. The Holocaust has for so long been the reference point for questions about crimes against humanity that it is in danger of losing its ability to instruct. The world needs other reference points. The cause of the Palestinians stands in that role, as one real test of whether humanity, to the extent one can meaningfully use the term, measures up.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.