This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2004, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
The ups and downs of Yasser Arafat's deathwatch probably would have delighted the man credited with putting the Palestinian struggle on the international map, says Utah social scientist J. Bonner Ritchie.
For no apparent reason, Arafat sometimes would order everyone in the room to switch chairs. He did that just before his near-fatal 1992 plane crash in the Libyan desert, one of the pilots told Ritchie. Had he been in his original seat, Arafat would certainly have been killed.
Arafat was a "mystic," says Ritchie, a scholar-in-residence at Utah Valley State College in Orem who had worked in Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt and met with the Palestinian leader at least a half dozen times. "He has this uncanny sense that keeps others off guard."
That could be one reason why Utahns who have lived or worked in Israel have such contradictory views of the man. Politics, of course, is another.
No matter what his failings, the short man in the familiar black-and-white kaffiyeh was beloved to most Palestinians.
"He symbolized the Palestinian's cause as the guy you look up to," says Maher Abou Ramaileh, a Palestinian who lives in Salt Lake City. "Palestine was a lost cause until he brought it to everyone's attention. He is the symbol of resistance and nationalism."
Whether you like him or hate him, Ramaileh says, "You can't ignore him."
Arafat was an effective revolutionary, but not a good statesman, says Omar Kader, a Palestinian, former Utahn and a Washington, D.C. government contractor who has spent 20 years shuttling back and forth to the Middle East, often meeting with Arafat and his PLO advisers.
Kader was impressed by Arafat's interest in American politics and how easy it was to get an interview with him. "Everybody could get to him, it wasn't anything special," Kader says. "It was a kind of citizen diplomacy, running his questions and answers back and forth to the U.S."
Arafat was lactose intolerant, Kader says, and used tea and honey on his morning corn flakes. So Kader once presented him with a yellow ceramic beehive full of Utah honey.
Though Kader thinks fondly of Arafat, he is not naive about his limitations. Arafat never made the transition from revolutionary to statesman, Kader said in a phone conversation from Washington. "He destroyed every possibility of creating a civil service or a Palestinian private sector," Kader says. "He could not create an effective bureaucracy. He destroyed it by strangulation and control. He didn't delegate."
To many Jews, Arafat is nothing but the Palestinians' chief terrorist. "He was a horror," says Harris Lenowitz, professor of Hebrew at the University of Utah who has traveled to Israel twice a year for 30 years.
After winning recognition for the Palestinian cause, Arafat should have used his leverage to achieve some settlement with Israel and "some modicum of economic and educational opportunity for his people," Lenowitz says. "Instead, he ripped off the Palestinian people for everything he could."
Such harsh assessments reflect Arafat's four decades as the most constant symbol of a vicious conflict. Arafat was "caught between extremists on his own side and the Israelis," says Arnie Green, a Middle East historian at Brigham Young University.
Some Palestinians were critical of Arafat for being willing to compromise at all with the Israelis, while many Israelis attacked him for not being willing to compromise enough, Green says.
After the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, Arafat's "reputation suffered in almost every camp you might identify," says Green, who lived in the Middle East for 17 years.
The plane crash, which occurred when the Oslo accords were under discussion, had changed Arafat, says Ritchie.
"Arafat told me he should have died, but that God preserved him not to be a terrorist but to make peace," he says. "He was committed to do it, just didn't quite know how."
Or lacked the resources or will to do it. Kader believes Arafat's greatest fault was that he didn't crush the one entity that so damaged the Palestinian cause: suicide bombers.
Arafat tolerated the bombers, Kader says, because "stopping them would have required a bloody civil war and he wasn't willing to do that."
The Israelis spent an awful lot of time demonizing Arafat because he was so highly regarded among his own people, Kader says. "Palestinians may be critical of him among themselves, but they will weep about his death in public."