Arafat: From Defender to Dictator [Paperback]

Said K. Aburish (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1999

In this meticulously researched and iconoclastic work, the internationally respected Palestinian analyst and writer Said K. Aburish turns the current Western perception of Arafat upside-down and presents a re-examination of the leader's life. Judged by how the West now views him, Arafat has undergone one of the fastest transformations of any public figure in recorded history. In a mere four years he has moved from rejected terrorist to Nobel Peace Prize winner and respected international statesman. As a son of Palestine himself, Aburish questions the leader's methods, motives and effectiveness. As well, he addresses the mysteries of Arafat's public and personal life and speculates about the future leadership of the Palestinians.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Aburish, a London-based journalist and American citizen who calls himself "a loyal Palestinian," has written a scathing political biography of Yasser Arafat. He characterizes Arafat as a masterful strategist who gained worldwide recognition of the existence of a Palestinian people and who, since the early 1970s, has sought a peaceful settlement with Israel. But Aburish charges that Arafat?whom he views as a consummate opportunist, master of double talk and builder of a personality cult?has become a dictator as president of the Palestinian National Authority. The author portrays Arafat as a traditional Arab tribal chief who surrounds himself with yes-men, bribes followers, threatens rivals and punishes dissent. Aburish blasts away at Arafat's self-mythologizing, including the fabrication that he became a self-sufficient millionaire by working as a civil engineer in Kuwait in the 1950s. Advancing his own agenda, Aburish, who considers the Oslo agreements as vehicles by which Israel can attain more territory as well as hegemony over the Palestinians, urges Arafat's ouster. He argues that Arafat should be replaced by a triumvirate of Palestinian leaders and an interim administration that would negotiate a better deal with Israel (the book was completed before the most recent agreements), and he calls for the replacement of Arafat's corrupt flunkies with technocrats. In the process, Aburish delivers an engrossing, if partisan, biography that is as interesting for what it says about Palestinian unhappiness with Arafat as for what it says about the man himself. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

...the author captures the elusive and contradictory nature of his subject, making his book an excellent place to learn about the personality and career of the Palestinian leader.... [But] he is wildly unreliable--to the point of parody--when it comes to politics. -- The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Pipes --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (October 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582340498
• ISBN-13: 978-1582340494
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,542,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A reader from UK, July 22, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Arafat: From Defender to Dictator (Paperback)

I have to credit Aburish for his novel approach to writing this biography. His work is directed at audience who are not familiar with the culture of the region, and hence elaborates on it whenever he sees it appropriate. Since I have grown up in the culture that he describes, I can say that he is fair in explaining the cultural landscape of the region.

Aburish dedicates the first 8 chapters of the book to pre-1991, i.e. before the Madrid Conference. In those chapters he explains how Arafat, with his unique traits, managed to make the world address the Palestinian problem. Up till this point, Arafat is portrayed as the irreplaceable leader. In chapters 9 and 10, which stand alone and can be read without reverting to any of the previous 8, Arafat is portrayed as brutal dictator, always trying to appease his American and Israeli "counterparts". Those chapters are very brief and I would have liked to see more about the last ten years in Arafat's life.

I have to congratulate Aburish for his courage in writing this biography of a man that is mysterious to everyone who has dealt with him.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very well researched, September 23, 2004

By 

Hussain Abdul-Hussain (Washington,DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Arafat: From Defender to Dictator (Paperback)

Even though an interview with Arafat in which he could have offered some justifications to counter Aburish's accusations, the book still managed to safely sail to the shore of objectivity.
With or without Arafat, the amount of information acquired from his aides and from news reports makes the book fairly credible.
The book revolved around two main themes: First, Arafat has always put his leadership concerns over all other matters including vital Palestinian interests. Second, the Israelis never intended to recognize the Palestinian leadership as the representative of the Arabs residing in the occupied territories. Instead, it opted for trying to deal with the Jordanian leadership as the representative of these Palestinians and using a policy of an iron fist with them.
An articulate Aburish argues that the peace process was born dead for three main reasons. Arafat's tribal behavior and corruption made him impose his leadership on the Palestinians living in the territories whereas the real leadership was offered by the residents themselves such as Al-Shafi, Ashrawi and Husseini. Second, the Israeli never stopped creating new realities by constantly expanding their settlements in Palestinian territories and errecting new ones, a situation which made the Palestinians always doubtful of the Israeli true intentions toward a durable peace.
While Arafat believed that some Israeli concessions would beef up his leadership after he was ejected from Beirut in 1982 and lived since then in Tunisian exile, Israel thought that with minimum concessions it could force Arafat to police and supress the Palestinians living under occupation.
The end result (not in the book), was the collapse of the peace process and an increase in violence, which creates a bleak picture of the future of peace and makes both the Palestinians and the Israelis head into oblivion.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A controversial biography of a controversial politician, September 15, 2003

By 

Govindan Nair (Vienna, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Arafat: From Defender to Dictator (Paperback)

I am convinced that there simply cannot be a biography of some one like Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which would be universally recognized as balanced and objective. The attempt in this book is by Said Aburish, a Christian Lebanese journalist based in London and who holds an American passport. Although the author feels his background qualifies him better than non-Arab writers to write such a book, I well anticipate that some, if not many, readers may see Aburish's backgound alone as enhancing or diminishing his credibility in writing a biography of a controversial personality who has been at the center of a bitterly divisive conflict in the Middle East.

And much as the author strives to a journalistic book, full of information which he presents as factual, his tone is hardly non-partisan and one can hardly describe his portrait of Arafat as flattering. From the beginning, Aburish asserts QUOTE without doubt UNQUOTE that Arafat's birthplace, long shrouded in mystery, is Cairo, and that, notwithstanding the time he spent among Palestinians, Arafat still speaks Arabic like an Egyptian, to the point where QUOTE West Bankers did not like his Egyptian accent and ways and found them alien.UNQUOTE The book is full of other anecdotes of Arafat's personal life, including his uneasy relationship with a father whose funeral he did not attend.

These journalistic anecdotes belie the character of the book which is fundamentally a political commentary on the Middle East conflict. Aburish gives credit to Arafat for three strategic choices: fostering a Palestinian identity to counter Israel rather than relying on Arag governments to do the bidding for the Palestinians; choosing armed struggle which earned the Palestinians world recogntiion; and, later, pursuing (or attempting to pursue, perhaps) a peaceful settlement with Israel. But Aburish is also categorical in his judgment that Araft is unfit to serve as a modern leader of Palestinians, comparing him to QUOTE an uneducated wily Arab chief UNQUOTE and holding him responsible for dictatorial ways which he says has supressed the Palestinian people and created a corrupt entity in the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Not surprisingly, Aburish volunteers a proposed replacement for Arafat in the triumvarate of three well-known Palestinians who have been know as able negotiators in Washington.

With a proper filter to sort fact from opinion and a framework for contextualizing this book, a careful reader can find value in Aburish's otherwise well written biography.