*Pales­tini­ans in Lebanon grieved for Yasser Arafat Fri­day at a sym­bolic funeral.* (© 2004 Christo­pher Allbritton)

BEIRUT  — Among the Pales­tin­ian refugees packed into the 13 camps scat­tered around Lebanon, the mood in the days before their leader’s death was one of anx­ious wait­ing. They were wait­ing for word of the death of _khatiab_ — “The Old Man” — as Yasser Arafat was affec­tion­ately known among his peo­ple.
In the tan­gled alley­ways that thread between the poorly con­structed con­crete shel­ters of Sabraa and Shatila in south Beirut — the site of the Sep­tem­ber 1982 mas­sacre of Pales­tini­ans by Chris­t­ian Pha­langes mili­tia mem­bers allied with the Israeli Defense Force under the com­mand of then-Defense Min­is­ter Ariel Sharon — chil­dren now play under memo­ri­als to the dead and the soon-to-be dead. Posters of Pales­tin­ian youths killed in the strug­gle against Israel, _shaheed_ (“mar­tyrs”) to the refugees, adorn the walls made of care­lessly stacked cin­derblocks. They are almost as numer­ous as the posters of Arafat, all of which pro­claim him the sym­bol of Pales­tine, a father to his peo­ple. He smiles down from build­ings three sto­ries high and intended to be tem­po­rary when this camp was estab­lished in 1948. He sur­veys the dirt tracks that turn to lakes of open sewage when it rains. He over­looks the stalls of the souk, sell­ing every­thing from sweets to shoes, veg­eta­bles from the Bekaa Val­ley and children’s clothes. Tables groan­ing under coconuts, toys, jack­ets, radishes and pota­toes serve as defen­sive posi­tions for the ubiq­ui­tous chil­dren, all of who seem to be clutch­ing toy pis­tols and Kalash­nikovs, shoot­ing at imag­i­nary Israeli sol­diers.
While Arafat lay on his deathbed in Paris, res­i­dents of Shatila expressed prayers for his recov­ery while admit­ting that the sym­bol of their strug­gle was soon to be gone. “We hope he gets bet­ter quickly,” said Mah­moud Zurouri, 38, who was born in Shatila. “After all, he is our pres­i­dent. But he wasn’t the first or the last per­son to die. We’ll be sorry, of course, to see him go, but the cause remains.“
“May God make him bet­ter,” prayed Has­san Mustafa, who said he fought with Arafat in Jor­dan and Lebanon in the 1970s. “He is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary. He is a great mind. An Israeli jour­nal­ist once described him as the man who couldn’t be con­trolled. After Abu Ammar,” he con­tin­ued, using Arafat’s _nom de guerre_, “there is no one per­son.“
But the next day, Arafat died, and the mood in Rashidiyah, out­side of Tyre, was somber and quiet, with none of the wail­ing or gun­fire seen in the Occu­pied Ter­ri­to­ries. Instead, quiet men filed into a recep­tion hall fes­tooned with green, black and white bunting and posters of Arafat in his youth. There, they worked their way down a recep­tion line, shak­ing hands with the Fat­tah lead­er­ship in Lebanon, for Rashidiyah is a Fat­tah camp. Par­lia­ment mem­bers from Sidon, Nasserites and even mem­bers of the al-Qaf Islamic group came by to pay their respects.
Sul­tan Abu Aynayn, the head of Fat­tah in Lebanon, sat in his grief, and accepted hand­shake after hand­shake of well wish­ers.
“I can’t express my feel­ings at this moment,” he said. “Death is a right, but when it becomes a real­ity, you can’t believe God’s will has actu­ally been car­ried out. The sym­bol­ism of Arafat for 40 years, no other Pales­tin­ian can take that sym­bol­ism.“
Arafat’s death hit the younger gen­er­a­tion of Pales­tini­ans hard. “It is the worst day for the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple because we lost our pres­i­dent,” said Hisham Sharari, 20, a mem­ber of the Fat­tah Youth Move­ment.
“It was the biggest shock to us,” said his friend Ali Ramadan, also 20. “It was worse than the day of _nekbah_.” The _nekbah_, which means “cat­a­stro­phe,” is the day Israel was founded.
Arafat’s death leaves a power vac­uum in the region, with many look­ing to fill it. The exist­ing Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship, which includes the new PLO leader Mah­moud Abbas, wants to main­tain sta­bil­ity, some­thing neigh­bor­ing gov­ern­ments want as well. Lebanon’s Karami gov­ern­ment, a Syr­ian client, is tak­ing a wait-and-see atti­tude to the post-Arafat era. “The Pales­tini­ans know very well they need a lead­er­ship that is able to make a dia­logue with the United States,” said Elie Fir­zli, Lebanon’s new Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion.
The new gov­ern­ment has good rea­son to be guarded in its response: this tiny coun­try suf­fered two Israeli inva­sions in the 1980s aimed at destroy­ing Arafat and his PLO, all while it fought a civil war that many Lebanese say started because of Pales­tin­ian exac­er­ba­tion of exist­ing reli­gious ten­sions. By the time the 15-year war ended in 1990, hun­dreds of thou­sands were dead and many more wounded. Lebanon was occu­pied by Syria and is still con­sid­ered a vas­sal state to Dam­as­cus. Beirut, the “Paris of the Mid­dle East” was ruined.
The Pales­tini­ans suf­fered their own hor­ror in the Civil War. The Sabraa-Shatila mas­sacre was one of the worst, in which a Pha­langist mili­tia, Chris­t­ian allies of the Israelis, entered the refugee camps and slaugh­ters hun­dreds of men, women and chil­dren while Israeli troops stood by and did noth­ing. Today, the crime is memo­ri­al­ized by an empty field in the Sabraa camp, with the words “So we shall never for­get” over the gate.
It is the bur­den of such his­tory that any new lead­er­ship of the Pales­tini­ans must labor under. It will be dif­fi­cult for Fat­tah, Arafat’s group and a nucleus of the PLO, to find a new leader who can hold all the dif­fer­ent parts of the Pales­tin­ian move­ment together.
“Arafat was able,” said Fathi Abu Ardat, a Fat­tah com­man­der in Rashidiyah who fought with Arafat in Jor­dan and Lebanon, “to trans­form the refugees of the camps from a peo­ple who were suf­fer­ing, peo­ple who were lost, just wait­ing for hand­outs into peo­ple with a national iden­tity, a cause. He turned them into rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies.“
*The Rev­o­lu­tion­ary*
One such rev­o­lu­tion­ary is Munir Muq­dah, 44, who founded the Al-Aqsa Brigade after the start of the sec­ond _intifada_ in 2000. He had his quar­rels with Arafat, mainly over money going to Fat­tah mem­bers in Ein al-Helweh, the densely packed camp out­side of Sidon, instead of the Aqsa Brigades in the Occu­pied Ter­ri­to­ries. But now, he empha­sizes the unity of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple: “We can guar­an­tee that all the Pales­tin­ian insti­tu­tions and orga­ni­za­tion are work­ing in close coop­er­a­tion to find the alter­na­tive to Abu Ammar, and to fur­ther the Pales­tin­ian cause.“
Muq­dah is a wanted man, how­ever; he can­not leave the Ein al-Helweh camp because of sev­eral con­vic­tions for mur­der hang­ing over his head. He is the ide­o­log­i­cal leader and founder of the Al-Aqsa Brigades and has allegedly recruited an unknown num­ber of young men to blow them­selves up in sui­cide oper­a­tions. He is adept at guerilla war­fare and he is pre­pared to keep the cause alive — against who­ever would betray it.
“These are prin­ci­ples that the _intifada_ and al-Aqsa unan­i­mously adopted and that all fac­tions agreed upon,” he said. “And there are red lines that nobody can cross.“
Those “red lines” are these: An inde­pen­dent state in Pales­tine and a return of the refugees to their homes. “This revolt will not be put down until every sin­gle last Pales­tin­ian refugee is able to return to his land and coun­try,” Muq­dah said. “That is the school of Yasser Arafat.“
Muqdah’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary state­ments are a warn­ing sign to Abbas not to give ground on the right of return. Any sign of con­ces­sion on the part of the new Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship could trig­ger unrest in the refugee camps around the region, with men like Muq­dah using their skills honed in the fight against the Israelis against the Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship.
This is a very real con­cern, because there are about 350,000 Pales­tin­ian refugees in Lebanon alone — about 10 per­cent of the country’s pop­u­la­tion. They have no right to work nor are they allowed to become cit­i­zens. They sub­sist on for­eign aid and what money they can make mainly as day labor­ers. The camps are dens of squalor and the sit­u­a­tion is des­per­ate. Any sense of betrayal by the new lead­er­ship has the poten­tial to send refugees into the arms of oth­ers who say they will advance the cause. These seduc­ers whis­per, _if nation­al­ism and pan-Arabism have failed you, Islam will not._
*The Islamists*
Arafat’s death is an oppor­tu­nity for Islamic hard­lin­ers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other fun­da­men­tal­ist groups. Amer­i­cans are warned by the Lebanese gov­ern­ment not to enter Ein al-Helweh, Lebanon’s largest camp, because Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists who fol­low the wah­habist sect of Islam are recruit­ing among the 90,000 refugees packed into six square kilo­me­ters. Groups affil­i­ated with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida and Abu Mas­soud al-Zarqawi’s allied group in Iraq are said to be jock­ey­ing for influ­ence against the more estab­lished Islamic groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well as Arafat’s nation­al­ist and sec­u­lar Fat­tah fac­tion.
Abu Ardat warned that the vac­uum of Arafat’s per­son­al­ity would leave an open­ing for other groups to try to gain influ­ence. “He had his spe­cial meth­ods to keep con­trol,” he said obliquely. But he blamed any rise in Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ism on the fail­ure of the peace process and the Israelis. “When you have a peace process and it stale­mates, the more extreme forces become stronger,” he said.
These Islamist groups have two assets, said Soheil al-Natour, a cen­tral com­mit­tee mem­ber of the Demo­c­ra­tic Front for the Lib­er­a­tion of Pales­tine. They have a cul­ture of vendetta and revenge, and they have a lot of money. If Mah­moud Abbas fails in the eyes of the refugees, the Islamists will be there wait­ing to exert their influ­ence, said al-Natour. Camps such as Ein al-Helweh har­bor the fun­da­men­tal­ists, he said, and that men like Muq­dah work with them for oper­a­tion inside Israel. If Pales­tini­ans feel their national cause is not being advanced by the new PLO lead­er­ship, they will turn to the Islamic cause to return them home. And men like Muq­dah are ready to work with the Islamist groups.
“The Pales­tin­ian issue is an Islamic issue for all,” Muq­dah told me and added that he has good rela­tions with the wahab­bist groups in Ein al-Helweh.
*A Ques­tion of Money*
Moham­mad Salam, a news ana­lyst in Beirut, who has reported on the Pales­tini­ans since 1970, warned that the Islamists are ready to buy the Pales­tini­ans’ loy­alty.
It’s a ques­tion of money. As the head of the PLO, the pres­i­dent of the Pales­tin­ian National Author­ity and of Fat­tah, the dom­i­nant fac­tion within the PLO, Arafat con­trolled a vast for­tune that has been esti­mated in the bil­lions and includes funds from for­eign aid, Israeli tax trans­fers and rev­enues from com­pa­nies con­trolled by the PLO. His per­sonal net worth has been esti­mated at any­where from $200 mil­lion to $1.3 bil­lion. He sup­pos­edly had dozens of bank accounts around the world — in Switzer­land, Malaysia, the Cay­man Islands, just to name a few. He had both num­bered accounts and in his own name. He allegedly held stakes in hotels, mobile phone com­pa­nies and an air­line.
This money went to buy­ing friend­ships. Over the years, Arafat was able to pull funds from a vari­ety of sources to pay off ene­mies and reward friends. He kept the frac­tious PLO together this way. And he paid the salaries of thou­sands of refugees who belonged to Fat­tah in the camps scat­tered around the region.
There is real worry that with the death of Arafat, Fattah’s finances will be tied up and the money won’t go out. Arafat for many Pales­tini­ans “is sim­ply a job,” said Salam. “If Arafat ceases to exist, they would sign with who­ever would sign the check.“
And those peo­ple include Islamists who base them­selves in the law­less camps. Ein al-Helweh is home to the Al-Ansar League and the Ashan Sol­diers, who sub­scribe to Osama bin Laden’s severe wah­habist inter­pre­ta­tion of Islam. And these Islamists have money. Beirut is a pop­u­lar sum­mer spot for vaca­tion­ing Gulf Arabs, and it’s not uncom­mon for them to arrive with a trunk of cash for dis­burse­ment to wah­habists in the camps, Salam said.
“They will start work­ing for the Islamists, plant­ing bombs,” said Salam. “It’s going to be bad. It’s _jihad_ for hire, just like in Iraq. And some Pales­tin­ian extrem­ists try to go to Iraq to join the insur­gency there.“
Salam said he knew of sev­eral Pales­tini­ans from Ein al-Helweh who tried to get into Iraq to com­mit sui­cide bomb­ings, but were turned back and returned to the camp. The Pales­tini­ans are a pow­derkeg that has been kept under con­trol because of Arafat’s patron­age, Salam said.
Salam’s fears are echoed by the Lebanese gov­ern­ment. Fir­zli, Lebanon’s Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion, acknowl­edges that Arafat’s pass­ing will leave a power vac­uum that would be only par­tially filled by his suc­ces­sors — an open­ing Islamic groups would likely exploit. “The Islamic groups found him a real obsta­cle,” said Fir­zli. “When he’s not there, the job is much eas­ier for them.“
Fun­da­men­tal­ists will ini­tially sup­port who­ever suc­ceeds Arafat, but on the bet that the suc­ces­sors will fail and lose sup­port of the Pales­tin­ian masses, he said. “Then they will then be jus­ti­fied.“
“I think the Arab gov­ern­ments and George Bush will miss Arafat,” mused Salam. “Who will con­trol the Pales­tini­ans after he’s gone? Islamists are steal­ing the Palestinians.”