Truth Sets You Free
Daniel Finkelstein wrote a thoughtful piece in the Times the other day on the mystery surrounding the strange death of Yassir Arafat - the former Palestinian President and leader of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation).
Unlike Daniel I never met Yasir Arafat although I was for many years a supporter of Trade Union Friends of Palestine - but there's little doubt this is a very murky business, as I said myself on the blog site the other day.
So, I think it makes sense to have a proper inquiry into what may have happened - because while there maybe many people only to willing to rush to judgement for their own purposes, I suspect the truth may be much more complicated.
Who killed Yassir Arafat? We need to know
By Daniel Finkelstein
Palestinian investigators insist that Israel murdered their former leader but an inside job is also possible
When I met Yassir Arafat in the early summer of 2000 in his compound in Ramallah, the first thing that struck me was how ill he looked. His skin was papery, he didn’t appear to have changed his clothes for a while and his hands shook quite badly. He talked well enough, but it was hard to follow his point.
So when I heard four years later that he had died, my first thought was one of surprise that he had lived that long. An old, sick man had finally passed away. It certainly did not occur to me then, nor much since, that he had been murdered.
True, there were one or two people who said that the whole thing was a bit mysterious, but then there are always people who think that almost everything is mysterious. There are so many ludicrous conspiracy theories and this just seemed like one more.
I don’t think that any more. It is impossible to be certain, but it seems very likely that Yassir Arafat was murdered. And I’d like to know who by. The truth is important.
The reason for my change of heart is quite simple. Al-Jazeera’s journalistic investigation has made its case. The presence of polonium-210 on the late President’s underpants and toothbrush, through contact with his bodily fluids, is hard to dismiss. It couldn’t really have been there by accident. And the study of samples taken from his body seem to be consistent with the theory that he
was poisoned.
The odd decision of Mrs Arafat and the Palestinian Authority not to seek an autopsy at the time has robbed us of certainty. Yet the evidence seems strong enough to deserve further inquiry, starting from the position that he was indeed killed.
The Authority has always said that it did not want an autopsy because it wanted people to have a chance to move on and not turn the martyrdom of its hero into a police investigation. This explanation is somewhat hard to credit, but if it was indeed the reason then it was, in my opinion, simply wrong.
The truth always matters and we are better with it than without it. And it particularly matters in the case of Yassir Arafat because he hid so much behind lies. The whole truth about him, and the people around him, how he operated, the money he stole, the people he had killed and jailed, the friends he betrayed, the diplomats he double-crossed, we need to know about all of it. We will not understand how he died unless we appreciate how he lived.
Nor will we see our way to peace. The Palestinian Authority remains the house that Yassir built. We need to know our way around it.
The Palestinian investigator and former West Bank intelligence chief Tawfiq Tirawi is convinced that he knows who killed his former boss. He says Israel is his number one and only suspect. As he would. It is a perfectly reasonable theory that, of course, needs to be examined. Israel did want to see the back of Arafat, is not above killing its enemies and correctly saw him as an obstacle to peace.
Tirawi does not, however, have any evidence to support his contention. It is simply a convenient supposition. What he presents as truth is a way of avoiding finding out the truth.
When (my then boss) William Hague and I met Mr Arafat he was not alone. Around the room sat a large coterie of advisers. The President would refer to them from time to time, prompting them to give an answer. They never managed anything more than an echo of what he had said. Arafat told us that he feared another uprising, an intifada, because young Palestinians were restless. It was difficult to decide if this was a threat or just a warning.
His poor health made it credible for him to present himself as helpless, unable to do anything, an old man who just wanted an end to fighting. The yes-men around him made it less easy to accept this as a true picture.
What made the President’s gloomy pose even more puzzling — quite apart from its rambling nature, suffused with self-pity that may or may not have been genuine — is that our encounter came at one of the most optimistic moments in the history of the Middle East. The Israelis were on the point of making an historic offer that many, Bill Clinton included, thought would produce peace.
On the way back to the airport after the meeting, a journalist friend who had been covering the conflict told me that he was thinking of accepting a job in PR. The war will soon be over, he said, and there will be nothing left to write about.
Within months all hopes for peace had gone. Arafat rejected the Israeli offer, answering it with an uprising that he sometimes controlled and sometimes could not control. The evidence is strong that he planned the intifada, and that he thought it would help him keep power.
In their powerful little book The Murder of Yassir Arafat, Matthew Kalman and Matt Rees explain that my experience of the late President was typical. Everything about him was hard to follow. What he really wanted, what he was really trying to say, who was his friend, who he was about to betray.
The men sitting around him were afraid of him and of each other, but also frustrated with him. The soldiers among them thought he was leading them to defeat, but couldn’t get a straight answer about what to do next. The rest were just looking for a way to make a quick buck, an instinct Arafat openly encouraged.
Unable to do anything either militarily or diplomatically about the disastrous and oppressive Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, unwilling to accept the right of Jews to live in peace in their own state, they turned on each other. Every so often one of them would end up dead, or have to go on the run. And the more it went on, the more they saw the old man, with his slippery words and his faltering health, as an obstacle.
In these circumstances, Kalman and Rees argue that it is quite likely that someone on the inside did away with the President, having first ensured that both his old bodyguard and his usual doctor had been sidelined.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, believing strongly in Ockham’s razor — the idea that one should always use the simplest theory that provides an explanation. Yet Yassir Arafat’s court was so corrupt and murderous that a conspiracy probably is the simplest theory.
The new evidence about his death arrives just as the Palestinians and Israelis are engaged in new talks, and there are some who fear that the revelations will derail the negotiations. Yet I believe that the full truth about the former President can only help.
Whatever the territorial settlement, peace can only come if the Palestinian Authority is able to rise above the corruption and decay that Arafat lived with and which may have killed him.
But more important than motive, the more difficult hurdle for conspiracy theorists to overcome is that the Israeli security forces had not control whatsoever - over who ate what and who drank what inside the Ramallah compound.
Which means that while they might in theory have been able to poison everybody - which would have sparked worldwide outrage of course - they could not possibly have had the ability to poison Arafat alone while carefully avoiding everyone else.
If you ask me it's as daft as the allegation that Princess Diana was murdered in a terrible car crash - because the fact of the matter is that if she had been wearing a seat belt, the Royal Princess would almost certainly have survived - as her bodyguard did, despite his injuries.
I suspect this point will be lost on the conspiracy theorists and so while I may well be wasting my time - I thought I'd point it out nonetheless, as I'm a helpful kind of guy.
Palestinian investigators insist that Israel murdered their former leader but an inside job is also possible
When I met Yassir Arafat in the early summer of 2000 in his compound in Ramallah, the first thing that struck me was how ill he looked. His skin was papery, he didn’t appear to have changed his clothes for a while and his hands shook quite badly. He talked well enough, but it was hard to follow his point.
So when I heard four years later that he had died, my first thought was one of surprise that he had lived that long. An old, sick man had finally passed away. It certainly did not occur to me then, nor much since, that he had been murdered.
True, there were one or two people who said that the whole thing was a bit mysterious, but then there are always people who think that almost everything is mysterious. There are so many ludicrous conspiracy theories and this just seemed like one more.
I don’t think that any more. It is impossible to be certain, but it seems very likely that Yassir Arafat was murdered. And I’d like to know who by. The truth is important.
The reason for my change of heart is quite simple. Al-Jazeera’s journalistic investigation has made its case. The presence of polonium-210 on the late President’s underpants and toothbrush, through contact with his bodily fluids, is hard to dismiss. It couldn’t really have been there by accident. And the study of samples taken from his body seem to be consistent with the theory that he
was poisoned.
The odd decision of Mrs Arafat and the Palestinian Authority not to seek an autopsy at the time has robbed us of certainty. Yet the evidence seems strong enough to deserve further inquiry, starting from the position that he was indeed killed.
The Authority has always said that it did not want an autopsy because it wanted people to have a chance to move on and not turn the martyrdom of its hero into a police investigation. This explanation is somewhat hard to credit, but if it was indeed the reason then it was, in my opinion, simply wrong.
The truth always matters and we are better with it than without it. And it particularly matters in the case of Yassir Arafat because he hid so much behind lies. The whole truth about him, and the people around him, how he operated, the money he stole, the people he had killed and jailed, the friends he betrayed, the diplomats he double-crossed, we need to know about all of it. We will not understand how he died unless we appreciate how he lived.
Nor will we see our way to peace. The Palestinian Authority remains the house that Yassir built. We need to know our way around it.
The Palestinian investigator and former West Bank intelligence chief Tawfiq Tirawi is convinced that he knows who killed his former boss. He says Israel is his number one and only suspect. As he would. It is a perfectly reasonable theory that, of course, needs to be examined. Israel did want to see the back of Arafat, is not above killing its enemies and correctly saw him as an obstacle to peace.
Tirawi does not, however, have any evidence to support his contention. It is simply a convenient supposition. What he presents as truth is a way of avoiding finding out the truth.
When (my then boss) William Hague and I met Mr Arafat he was not alone. Around the room sat a large coterie of advisers. The President would refer to them from time to time, prompting them to give an answer. They never managed anything more than an echo of what he had said. Arafat told us that he feared another uprising, an intifada, because young Palestinians were restless. It was difficult to decide if this was a threat or just a warning.
His poor health made it credible for him to present himself as helpless, unable to do anything, an old man who just wanted an end to fighting. The yes-men around him made it less easy to accept this as a true picture.
What made the President’s gloomy pose even more puzzling — quite apart from its rambling nature, suffused with self-pity that may or may not have been genuine — is that our encounter came at one of the most optimistic moments in the history of the Middle East. The Israelis were on the point of making an historic offer that many, Bill Clinton included, thought would produce peace.
On the way back to the airport after the meeting, a journalist friend who had been covering the conflict told me that he was thinking of accepting a job in PR. The war will soon be over, he said, and there will be nothing left to write about.
Within months all hopes for peace had gone. Arafat rejected the Israeli offer, answering it with an uprising that he sometimes controlled and sometimes could not control. The evidence is strong that he planned the intifada, and that he thought it would help him keep power.
In their powerful little book The Murder of Yassir Arafat, Matthew Kalman and Matt Rees explain that my experience of the late President was typical. Everything about him was hard to follow. What he really wanted, what he was really trying to say, who was his friend, who he was about to betray.
The men sitting around him were afraid of him and of each other, but also frustrated with him. The soldiers among them thought he was leading them to defeat, but couldn’t get a straight answer about what to do next. The rest were just looking for a way to make a quick buck, an instinct Arafat openly encouraged.
Unable to do anything either militarily or diplomatically about the disastrous and oppressive Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, unwilling to accept the right of Jews to live in peace in their own state, they turned on each other. Every so often one of them would end up dead, or have to go on the run. And the more it went on, the more they saw the old man, with his slippery words and his faltering health, as an obstacle.
In these circumstances, Kalman and Rees argue that it is quite likely that someone on the inside did away with the President, having first ensured that both his old bodyguard and his usual doctor had been sidelined.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, believing strongly in Ockham’s razor — the idea that one should always use the simplest theory that provides an explanation. Yet Yassir Arafat’s court was so corrupt and murderous that a conspiracy probably is the simplest theory.
The new evidence about his death arrives just as the Palestinians and Israelis are engaged in new talks, and there are some who fear that the revelations will derail the negotiations. Yet I believe that the full truth about the former President can only help.
Whatever the territorial settlement, peace can only come if the Palestinian Authority is able to rise above the corruption and decay that Arafat lived with and which may have killed him.
Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theorists everywhere will be salivating at news reports that the former Palestinian President - Yasser Arafat - may have been poisoned with radioactive Polonium 210.
Already the finger of suspicion has been pointed at Israel, without even a shred of evidence of course, but why let that stand in the way of a good quote or headline.
One thing that puzzles me is that Yasser Arafat was holed up in his Ramallah headquarters at the time along with 270 other people - effectively imprisoned by the Israeli military which controlled everything that went in and out of his compound - including food and water.
Now the obvious question is why the Israeli Government would wish to kill Yasser Arafat at that time - particularly as he presented no obvious threat - and also the use of radioactive Polonium 210 would have been so easily traced.
Although it is fair to say that the Israeli military - in particular Ariel Sharon - had tried to take the Palestinian leader out years previously when he was a real thorn in their side.
If you ask me it's as daft as the allegation that Princess Diana was murdered in a terrible car crash - because the fact of the matter is that if she had been wearing a seat belt, the Royal Princess would almost certainly have survived - as her bodyguard did, despite his injuries.
I suspect this point will be lost on the conspiracy theorists and so while I may well be wasting my time - I thought I'd point it out nonetheless, as I'm a helpful kind of guy.
