- Where to Bury Arafat's Body and the Future of The Palestinians' Soul
by CONSTANCE LAVENDER
-
- Arguments over where to bury Yasser Arafat's body leave out
opportunities to talk about the future of the Palestinians' soul.
-
- And the limits of the dialogue are not confined to one or the
other side---Palestinian or Israeli. Rather, the fact that neither
side can amicably agree---out of any spirit of common dignity or any
appeal to shared goodness---belies the strained, petty, and
unapproachable nature of a currently stalled
Middle East
peace process.
-
- Imagine holding the lives of some 6.7 million Israelis and
another 8 to 9 million Palestinians worldwide in the precarious
balance between hatred and fear, on the one hand, and terror and
violence on the other.
-
- And it is worth pointing out that violence perpetrated in the
name of nationalism is terrorism just the same irrespective of who the
instigators might be.
-
- The Middle East peace process---or the absence of a
Middle East
peace process during the last four years---has implications far beyond
the immediate toll on Israelis and Palestinians. It involves other
questions that today seem equally hopeless. The invasion of Iraq, the
Arab diaspora, the militancy of Islamic nationalism, and the regional
proliferation of nuclear weaponry and technology among Iran, Pakistan,
India, North Korea, and China so far.
-
- Why then the arguments over Arafat's body? Ironically it is
precisely because the Palestinians have no homeland that the issue of
the PLO leader's body becomes all the more significant and symbolic.
This is not just an argument over a corpse.
-
- Arafat and the PLO became the spokesperson and face of
Palestinian nationhood during the 1970s. At the same time that Arafat
was resorting to violence to advance the cause of Palestinian
statehood,
Israel
---and many of its current leaders like
Sharon
---likewise was using violence to stymiePalestinian progress. Neither
is free of guilt or blame: violence begets violence.
-
- Consequently, Arafat's corporeality came to symbolize for
many Palestinians the promise of their own country and the
dream of freedom. Arafat's materiality represented the best chance of
imagining a Palestinian homeland. Arafat as father of Palestinian
liberation and nationalism became a powerful metaphor for a
people deprived of a land of their own.
-
- Now as Arafat lies close to death in
Paris
, the question of where to bury the incarnation of Palestinian freedom
and nationalism embodies the uncertainty of the future of the
Palestinian people.
-
- The
United States
has been disengaged and detached from the Palestinian question for
much of the aministration of George W. Bush. And the result of
America
's refusal to facilitate the peace process has left the entire world a
little less sure and a lot less safe.
-
- If not for the sake of Palestinian and Israeli rapprochement,
then for the cause of world peace, may Yasser Arafat rest in peace.
And if
Jerusalem
is the burial spot, then so be it. It's a small world but big enough
for all of us to co-exist without recourse to violence.
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