Alan Hart's Depiction of Arafat

Alan Hart, in Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker?, presents a well-balanced portrait of the Arab leader Yasser Arafat, demonstrating convincingly that he was indeed once a terrorist, using methods of terror to advance what he believed was a just cause, but who then became a true peacemaker. The author does not pretend to argue his case with an eye for objectivity, but instead is dedicated to urging the Americans to use their clout with Israel to persuade that nation to deal with Arafat and to understand the beliefs behind his tactics of the past. In any case, Hart is convinced (and gives the reader a powerful argument to share that convincement) that Arafat must be respected as a major player in any peace which emerges in the Middle East. His book is particularly relevant today as the peace process inches forward between the Palestinians and Israel, and as Arafat continues to play an essential role in that process.

The author's biases must be noted. He refers to "Zionist propaganda" (7) in making the argument that Israel has to date been able to control much public opinion around the world. He suggests that it is time that Arafat and his arguments, having to do both with past and present, have a fair hearing. It is important to note that Hart's arguments have found support in the decade since the publication of this book. Arafat has proved to be a peacemaker, whatever his terrorist activities have been in the past. The peace process as it now stands in the mid-1990s could not h

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does explain their thinking and their actions." They were "not mindless criminals" but "were fiercely dedicated nationalists who were doing their duty as they saw it" (348). Hart covers Arafat's rise to power in the Palestinian resistance movement, showing how he gained influence over the movement's tactical decision-making, leading it to a more militant posture. The creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization was a major victory for Arafat, and involved intricate manipulation of Arab leaders, playing one off the others in order to gain at least minimal support from those leaders through the decades. Hart emphasizes again and again that the Palestinian movement was one in which the Palestinians were invariably the underdog fighting for a just cause against overwhelming odds: The struggle that was about to begin, and which has not yet ended, was indeed a fight between a David and a Goliath. But contrary to what the world believed at the time and for too long afterwards, the real Goliath was the Jewish state (178). This refers to Hart's convincing argument that the world had come to believe that Israel was the equivalent of a David facing overwhelming odds against the Arab world which was seen as unanimously aligned a

Category: Foreign - A