Betrayer of the Palestinians

ONE of the most famous of classical Arab stories concerns the boy Aladdin, who finds a lamp, rubs it, and sees an all-powerful slave spring up, there to do his bidding. But Aladdin soon makes unreasonable demands, and the slave takes over. The boy then has to devise a way to get him back into the lamp, a seemingly impossible task.

Yasser Arafat illustrates the moral perfectly. By the standards of absolutism, he has been an eminently successful careerist. In his sphere, Palestine, he has achieved absolute power, and has a long record of war and terror testifying to it. But as politician, leader, human being, he has been a catastrophic failure. His time is long since up. But as is always the case with an absolute ruler, only a measure of violence comparable to his own can get rid of him, and as he goes down he can take his unfortunate people with him.

ONE of the most famous of classical Arab stories concerns the boy Aladdin, who finds a lamp, rubs it, and sees an all-powerful slave spring up, there to do his bidding. But Aladdin soon makes unreasonable demands, and the slave takes over. The boy then has to devise a way to get him back into the lamp, a seemingly impossible task.

Yasser Arafat illustrates the moral perfectly. By the standards of absolutism, he has been an eminently successful careerist. In his sphere, Palestine, he has achieved absolute power, and has a long record of war and terror testifying to it. But as politician, leader, human being, he has been a catastrophic failure. His time is long since up. But as is always the case with an absolute ruler, only a measure of violence comparable to his own can get rid of him, and as he goes down he can take his unfortunate people with him.