Jewish community responds to Arafat’s death

By RON CSILLAG
Staff Reporter

The death last week of Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat drew terse and guarded reactions from government spokespeople and Jewish community leaders, with most comments focusing on the future of the Palestinian people and the peace process.

In Ottawa, Prime Minister Paul Martin offered his “condolences and sympathy to the family of Chairman Arafat, as well as all Palestinians.”

Arafat, he said, “personified the Palestinian people’s struggle to see their right to self-determination realized. [His] influence on regional and global events has been undeniable.”

Martin noted that while a comprehensive peace between Israelis and Palestinians was never attained in Arafat’s lifetime, the Palestinian leader was awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, along with former Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

Canada called on Palestinians and all peoples of the Middle East “to reflect on the tremendous cost of conflict, and, building on the legacy of their leaders and the guidance of their governments, to renew their commitment to peace.”

Canadian Jewish Congress president Ed Morgan remarked that while Arafat “put the cause of the Palestinian people on the map of political causes, he was incapable of putting a Palestinian state on the map of states.”

Congress said it hopes that the new Palestinian leadership will reject violence “and be imbued with the necessary courage to pursue the ‘peace of the brave’” – using Arafat’s own oft-quoted phrase to describe the aftermath of the 1993 Oslo accords.

Similar sentiments were sounded by the Canada-Israel Committee, which issued a one-sentence statement: “The Canada-Israel Committee expresses the hope that a new leadership will quickly emerge from within Palestinian society, committed to democratic reform and genuinely partnering with Israel to advance peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

B’nai Brith Canada (BBC) called Arafat “an unreformed terrorist until the very end.”

B’nai Brith also found it “offensive” that Canada sent Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew to Arafat’s funeral.

The decision “is an insult to the memory of all those whose blood Arafat has on his hands.”

B’nai Brith said Martin’s statement eulogized Arafat “as deserving of his Nobel Peace Prize… [while] ignoring Arafat’s complicity in allowing terror groups under his control to act with impunity.” That “sends precisely the wrong message of appeasement,” B’nai Brith said.

In an earlier statement, B’nai Brith predicted that Arafat’s death “will clearly precipitate great upheaval in the region.”

But Rose Lax, president of Herut-Likud Canada, sees a window of opportunity, calling Arafat’s death “the single most constructive development toward peace in the Middle East.”

The new Palestinian leadership, Lax said, “now has a unique opportunity to address the corruption and misrepresentation that has victimized the Palestinian people until now.”

In a more detailed statement, Canadian Friends of Peace Now said the prospect of a “more moderate” Palestinian leadership under prime minister Ahmed Queria and Mahmoud Abbas, the newly named chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, should encourage Israel and the U.S. leaders to renew the peace process “and seek negotiated rather than unilateral solutions to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.”

Av Sohn, president of the Friends, said it would be “a tragic mistake if [Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon were once again to undermine Palestinian moderates, as he did when Abbas was previously prime minister, by refusing to take conciliatory actions (such as easing conditions of movement within the occupied territories) that might have helped him then, and might help him now, to consolidate his position.”

The Palestinian leadership will need time to gain legitimacy, but will not be able to do so “if it is subject to an Israeli dictate for immediate suppression of terrorism,” Peace Now went on. “The initial confidence-building measures will have to come from Israel, to be reciprocated by the Palestinian leadership as it wins credibility among its own people.”

For many in Canada’s Jewish community, it may have been the statement from a small, little-known grassroots activist group, the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, that best summed up sentiments in the wake of Arafat’s death.

The Palestinian leader, said the group, which has a good number of Jewish representatives, was “given the opportunity to die of old age and disease – a privilege he denied to thousands of innocents whose lives were ended or shattered by his endless promotion of hate and terrorism.”

To honour Arafat in death, the group continued, would be to dishonor the thousands “whose lives were destroyed by this man’s incitement. Canada must not be party to such a dishonour.”

The group also took Canada to task for contributing to the suffering in the Middle East “by lending credibility to Arafat and his toxic mythology.”

In the United States, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and a frequent speaker in Canada, said Arafat will be remembered as “the largest mass murderer of Jews since Hitler,” and as someone “more devoted to killing Jews than to the welfare of his own people.’”

Arafat visited Canada once, in March 1999. It was a one-day trip, part of a whirlwind tour of eight nations designed to drum up western support for his unilateral declaration of independence, which he’d threatened for May 4 of that year. He failed to get Canada’s support.

In Ottawa, he held talks with then prime minister Jean Chrétien for 40 minutes, after which Chrétien reaffirmed Canada’s support for the idea of a Palestinian state, stressing, though, that it should be achieved through negotiations and not a unilateral declaration.

However, the prime minister did get caught up in controversy typical of the Middle East minefield when he said negotiations “should result [in] the creation of a state for the Palestinians.”

Canada’s Jewish advocacy groups demanded an explanation, charging that his statement pre-judged the outcome of bilateral talks and represented a departure from long-held Canadian policy.

Arafat and Chrétien met again in 2000 during the prime minister’s historic trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories, and again Chrétien stumbled.

He was criticized for advising Arafat that a unilateral declaration of independence could be a useful bargaining tool – contradicting his earlier view, irking Israel, and handing ammunition to Quebec separatists.

Jewish criticism of Arafat revolved principally around the contention that he was two-faced and opportunistic: recognizing Israel – and basking in the international recognition the move afforded him – but refusing to halt terrorism against Israeli civilians; speaking about peace in English, but inciting Palestinians against Israel in Arabic.

“While he at different times said the right things, it didn’t matter,’’ said Menachem Rosensaft, a former national president of the Labor Zionist Alliance who met the Palestinian leader in Stockholm in 1988.

Ultimately Arafat “had neither the vision nor the courage to follow through and implement the steps necessary to create a true peace with Israel,’’ Rosensaft said. “He was never prepared to crack down on terrorists.’’

Henry Siegman, a former national executive director of the American Jewish Congress, may have also summed up the feelings of many North American Jews when he said that Arafat “will not be rehabilitated within the Jewish community by his death.”

With files from JTA