As this edition of ANC TODAY goes to press, a great son of the people of Palestine will be laid to rest in Ramallah. A titan of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination is no more. A giant tree has fallen. Yasser Arafat has died.
His life almost seems like a biography of the people of Palestine, covering five-and-a-half decades of hope and despair and perseverance.
It must therefore be that his departure from the world of the living will seem to mark the end of an epoch for an entire people. In the simple world of peasant society, historical time would be measured by the expression -the year Yasser Arafat passed away!
Human cognition dictates that those who stand tall because they are carried aloft by the masses they represent and lead, will, in many instances be seen merely as outstanding individuals, leaving the loving hands of the millions that serve as their pedestal out of sight and out of mind.
When the news was told that at last Yasser Arafat had succumbed to the icy hand of death, the people he loved, the people who loved him, whose bare hands served as his pedestal while he lived, shed tears of grief that one who had so epitomised their dream of freedom had left, never to return.
They kissed the images of his face that had been captured by a photographer who only went on a routine mission to take ordinary pictures for ordinary purposes. As he did his work, the photographer would not have known that one day wherever his photograph of the face of Yasser Arafat was seen, the people would approach and interact with it as though it were a holy shrine.
For these masses the words of the poet of an earlier struggle, Berthold Brecht - "There is no greater crime than leaving" - would have been suffused with very deep meaning because they knew that the very life of their own heroic son, Yasser Arafat, who only left because death dictated that he must leave, confirmed the truth that there was no greater crime than leaving.
"There is no greater crime than leaving.
In friends, what do you count on? Not on what they do
You can never tell what they will do. Not on what they are.
That
May change. Only on this: their not leaving.
He who cannot leave cannot stay. He who has a pass
In his pocket - will he stay when the attack begins?
Perhaps
He will not stay.
Before we go into battle I must know: have you a pass
In your coat pocket? Is a plane waiting for you behind the battlefield?
How many defeats do you want to survive?
Can I send you away?
Well, then, let's not go into battle."
Yasser Arafat was ready to survive many defeats. He would never allow himself to be sent away from his people. He had no pass in his pocket to take him away from the battlefield. Because he could leave, he stayed. And the people of Palestine deeply grieve the forced departure of Yasser Arafat because with him at the helm, they knew that they could survive many defeats, with none willing to commit the crime of abandoning his or her comrades during a battle.
But of course there are others in the world that would not shed the tears that Palestinians shed at the loss of such a titan among their ranks. Perhaps these saw Yasser Arafat merely as an individual of immense influence who could, like the kings of old, decree what must be, knowing that it would be.
The masses for whom Yasser Arafat spoke thus disappeared from the eyes of these, who thought these masses were but mere hordes who could be commanded to do anything, provided the commander was such a hero of these masses as was Yasser Arafat.
About this, a world of heroes and heroines without ordinary people who would not even so much as cook the food these shining stars would eat, Brecht composed the famous poem - "Questions from a worker who reads".
"Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of
China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Did he not have a cook with him?.
Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors?"
Many of those who speak ill of Yasser Arafat and have shed no tear at his departure, would speak of him in a manner that would evoke similar questions from a worker who reads.
The worker who reads would ask such questions because the detractors of Yasser Arafat, those who would deny the reality of the rich and indelible heritage of principled and courageous struggle he left to the Palestinian people and all those who fight for freedom everywhere else in the world, have sought to pretend that we could, as in the case of Julius Caesar, speak of Yasser Arafat without speaking about his cook.
They do this because they do not want the story to be told of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, the reduction to a condition of statelessness of the people of Palestine. Yasser Arafat, a product of the natural world of creation, became Yasser Arafat, the product and exemplar of struggle for justice because his people had been condemned to a condition of statelessness.
Within our immediate surroundings, only the Palestinians and the Saharoui of Western Sahara stand out as peoples denied the right to belong to a country of their own. In both cases, they have to contend with the reality of having to live for intolerably protracted periods of time in refugee camps.
In the case of Palestine, there are people who have spent nearly six decades in refugee camps. For all those decades, even those still occupying their ancestral lands have lived as though they were tenants of another who is the true landowner. Thus they have been unable to say that in this, our home, we will determine what life we shall live and what tomorrow we will have.
Even as one of the great historic outcomes of the 20th century unfolded, the liquidation of the colonial and apartheid system, they have had no opportunity to enjoy freedom and the right freely to determine their own destiny, in conditions of peace.
Instead of freedom, peace and a land they can truly call their own, what they have known is permanent struggle, war, death, and destruction, the uprooting of their olive trees, and despair seemingly without end. Yasser Arafat was produced by this reality.
A product of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and all the other Middle East wars ever since, he led others to engage in many acts of war to gain a motherland he and his people had lost. In all this history of determined struggle seemingly without end, his actions were conditioned by his circumstances. And they also conditioned the circumstances in which his struggle would be waged.
At all times what made him understand that there was no greater crime than leaving, was the desperate and tragic condition of his people, which, because it has lasted as long as it has, acquired a state of invisibility that has helped to sustain the crime of the statelessness of a people.
Because what he was striving to correct has been placed beyond the public eye by those who decide what all of us are allowed to see, it has been possible to present Yasser Arafat to those physically removed from the reality of the lives of his people as a murderous adventurer, a man ambitious for martyrdom.
It has been said that Yasser Arafat's defining fault is that he could not bring himself to graduate from being a guerrilla fighter or "terrorist", to become a statesman. It has been said that when the chance to achieve a just and honourable peace came, he turned away from an historic moment that would have enabled his people at last to realise their right to self-determination, independent statehood and peace.
Basing themselves on this assessment, some decided to decree that all should treat this unequalled leader of the people of Palestine as though he had become irrelevant, and interface with other Palestinian leaders, while Yasser Arafat was kept out of circulation through his confinement and house arrest in Ramallah, where he will be buried.
Even as he spent more than two years in confinement in Ramallah, presented as an uncommon criminal, but a criminal nevertheless, Yasser Arafat spoke about his commitment to the peace of the brave. I have listened to him many times as he spoke about the peace of the brave. I have heard him many times speaking about his partner in the struggle to achieve the peace of the brave - the late Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin.
Some heard his words about the peace of the brave as mere rhetorical deceit. Others who, for whatever reason, did not want peace, thought the possibility for peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis was so great that Yitzhak Rabin had to be murdered, which he was. Yasser Arafat lost his partner. Israel and Palestine lost an historic opportunity to conclude a just and permanent peace.
When Yitzhak Rabin was buried in Jerusalem, I led a small South African delegation to the funeral. It seemed to us that whatever the circumstances, by our mere presence we had to make a statement against the terrorism that took Prime Minister Rabin's life, as well as underline our support for the courageous decision Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had taken to negotiate an honourable peace with Yasser Arafat, on the basis of 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles.
At that funeral, and during our short stay in Jerusalem after the funeral, we could feel the great sense of loss among the Israelis we met, which was both about the loss of an outstanding personality, and about the loss of what had seemed an historic moment of the final opening of the door to a world of peace and friendship between the peoples of Israel and Palestine. The assassin's hand had thrown Palestinians, Israelis, and all of us, into a state of unknowing about what in the end would happen to the search for a just and durable peace in the Middle East.
It had been our hope that, as was the case with the late Yitzhak Rabin, we would have the possibility to say our final farewell to President Yasser Arafat on the soil of the Palestinian territories. This would place us in closer communion with the masses of the Palestinian people, as had happened when we went to Jerusalem to bury Yitzhak Rabin.
Even if we only spoke quietly to ourselves, our presence in the Palestinian territories, as a leader and combatant we considered as our own comrade and leader was laid to rest, would have enabled us to visualise the proximity of the final resting places of two extraordinary human beings whom Yasser Arafat correctly described as partners in the construction of the peace of the brave.
In the end there must and will be peace between Israel and Palestine. There must and will be peace between Israel and the Arab world. The violent days of the death of Palestinians and Israelis, brought about by the lack of courage boldly to take to the peace road, which is sustained by the belief that statesmanship consists in a deadly competition about the use of force, will also come to an end.
It will then be possible for everybody, both friend and foe, to say that Yasser Arafat was correct to speak about the peace of the brave. It should be possible even now, as we say farewell to a great human being and fighter for freedom, Yasser Arafat, that the leaders and people of Israel and Palestine should honour the memories of Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin by acting practically to achieve the peace of the brave.
Yasser Arafat's martyrdom is not defined by the strength it required and requires to accept the cost of the intifada, in the interest of freedom. It does not consist in the fortitude to bear the vicissitudes suffered by the Palestinian people since the war of 1948. It is not expressed merely in the resolve to defend the right of the people of Palestine to self-determination, regardless of the situation in the Arab neighbourhood.
Like his partner Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat understood and accepted that whatever might have happened in the past, Israel and Palestine had no choice but to construct a relationship that would amaze the world. This would be a relationship that would amaze the world because it would be based on the fundamental principles of peace, friendship, respect, solidarity and mutually beneficial cooperation between Palestine and Israel.
To arrive at this outcome, Israelis, Palestinians and all of us in the rest of humanity require the peace of the brave that Yasser Arafat spoke about. Time will tell whether the Palestinian and Israeli leaders have the courage it will take to make peace rather than to make war.
Farewell brave heart, our comrade Yasser Arafat! Roballa ka kgotso, sinatla sa dinatla! Peace unto you, dear brother.
