Arafat: From Defender to Dictator by Said K. Aburish Bloomsbury 360pp, £20 in UK
Of all the distortions contained in Said K. Aburish's biography of Yasser Arafat, and there are quite a few, the most objectionable is surely the following: "In reality," he writes, in a section charting the transition in Israel from the Yitzhak Rabin years to the current miserable administration of Benjamin Netanyahu, "the differences between the Rabin and Netanyahu positions were purely tactical." Just like Netanyahu, Aburish indefensibly implies, Rabin was disdainful of Arafat and rejected the idea of independent Palestinian statehood.
Aburish has written a generally commendable book - one that begins by heavy-handedly detailing the faults of his biographical predecessors, but that does ultimately surpass them in many regards. He nails most of the self-mythologising lies and exaggerations that Arafat employs to this day (the Palestinian leader was born in Cairo not Jerusalem; in his mid-twenties, he did apply to study, and failed to gain a place, at the University of Texas; he did not become a millionaire, a few years later, when working in Kuwait . . .). He deftly separates Arafat's strengths from his flaws, praising the bravery in the heat of conflict, the passion for his cause, the manipulative cunning that enabled him to assume complete control of the PLO, but castigating the egotism, the misplaced loyalties.
And he delivers a devastating assault on the regime Arafat has erected since arriving in Gaza from Tunis in July 1994 - registering with withering contempt the corruption, the human rights abuses and, above all, the dictatorial behavior of the president himself. Arafat, he shows plainly, has systematically brought the competing security organisations, the elected Palestinian Legislative Council, the media, even the schools, under his full control, neutering all but the bravest of his critics.
Where Aburish misrepresents recent history, evidently to conform to a conception unhindered by direct participation in events here (the author, the back flap informs us, "holds an American passport and lives in London"), is in analysing the potential and the failure of Arafat's attempt at peace-making with Israel. Himself a Palestinian, born near Jerusalem, Aburish is determined to demonstrate that Arafat settled for too little in negotiating the Oslo accords and, more importantly, that they were doomed because the Israelis - Rabin, Shimon Peres, Netanyahu, whoever - were never prepared to give the Palestinians their due anyway. In this way, of course, he absolves Palestinians of any responsibility for the disintegrated peace effort. And so he ridicules the notion that Rabin, the man who had, after all, ordered the "iron fist" policy to try and quell the Intifada, could possibly have become a peace-maker.
Well, he did. And he died for it. And no, Rabin did not maintain "disdain" for Arafat, nor was he "out to destroy him" as Aburish claims at one point (incidentally, in their last public appearance together, at the signing of the Oslo II accord in Washington, Rabin made a gentle, affectionate joke about his Palestinian partner, wondering whether Arafat had some Jewish blood in him). And far from rejecting Palestinian statehood, Rabin was well aware that independent Palestine was exactly where the peace process would culminate.
Contrary to Aburish's conception, the Oslo accords collapsed, and Israel and the Middle East got saddled with Netanyahu, because attempted reconciliation was punctuated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombings, which Arafat seemed disinclined seriously to try to halt. The author is rigorous, and sometimes bitter, in demonstrating Arafat's ambivalence to terrorism in previous decades - he smoothly manoeuvred through the Seventies airliner hijackings, and the Munich Olympic massacre, and the Achille Lauro cruise-ship seizure, failing to intervene here, ordering a half-hearted enquiry there, while benefiting from the worldwide attention these attacks were attracting for the Palestinian cause. And yet, as the book moves into the mid-Nineties, Aburish declines to highlight that continuing, appalling ambivalence.
The author displays no consciousness of the impact on the Israeli collective psyche of bus bombing after bus bombing, no understanding as to why these murderous blasts might have made the public doubt the efficacy of peacemaking, and, inexcusably, levels no blame at Arafat for failing to intervene decisively to thwart the bombers. Far from it. He chooses, instead, to employ an out-of-context quotation, from a former Mossad chief, that "Arafat can't help against Hamas", to justify Arafat's inactivity. And he even takes issue with the short-lived Peres government of 1996, for having the gall to use the Israeli army to try to tackle the bombers.
These are not the book's only distortions where Israel and Israelis are concerned - Aburish blithely asserts that "the Israelis" (what, all of them?) "would like to demolish the mosque [of Omar, atop Temple Mount in Jerusalem] and erect in its place a new Temple". And they are not the book's only flaws - Aburish gives little attention to Arafat's failing health, hardly addresses the issue of succession, and is so enamoured of former Palestinian minister and spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi that one is almost embarrassed for her. But they are central. And standing in crass contrast to the subtlety and the intellectual honesty that characterise much of this portrait of Arafat, they devalue it.
David Horovitz is the editor of the Jerusalem Report news magazine