Editorial: Irony in peaceful death for Arafat

One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. The epithet fits no one better than the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In Gaza and on the West Bank he will be lionised as the father of a fledging state while in Tel Aviv and many other parts of the world he will be reviled as a man with innocent blood on his hands.

However, history is ill-served by the heat of current opinion and the manner in which Mr Arafat's portrait is eventually painted should not be gauged from the praise and vitriol that flowed immediately after his death this week.

Mr Arafat was a product of, and contributor to, the gordian knot that is Israeli-Palestinian relations. As leader of a militant group he failed to deliver the decisive blow that would cut the knot and as a statesman he failed to unravel its twists and turns. The question to which there is no ready answer is: could anyone have done better?

Mr Arafat himself ensured that there was no one to whom he might be compared. His assiduous efforts to prevent the rise of leadership rivals - or successors - has seen to that. And his immediate legacy is a power vacuum into which moderates and militants have been thrown. At stake is not only the future of the Palestinian cause but the prospects for peace in the region.

The tactic of divide and rule that characterised Mr Arafat's four decades of leadership may, paradoxically, have prevented him from achieving his hopes for a Palestinian state. It gave rise to factions, and factions within factions. It produced outcomes that ranged from cold-blooded killing to Nobel laureate peace initiatives.

Mr Arafat maintained a desire for peace even through the Palestinian movement's bloodiest episodes. He was said to have opposed the Black September faction within Fatah when it was responsible for some of the greatest Middle East terrorist outrages before September 11.

He latterly claimed an inability to rein in Hamas and Islamic Jihad as their suicide bombers cut a swathe through Israeli civilians.

No desire for peace could hope to be realised while extreme violence punctuated the statecraft. The result was a breakdown in the peace process and an existence in a state of siege. Had Mr Arafat moulded a strong centralised organisation, he might have come closer to realising his dream even though the goal was never going to be easy to achieve.

Had he developed a strong team around him he might have been able to suppress the violent offshoots he was said to oppose.

The manner in which historians eventually treat Yasser Arafat will be determined by future Israeli-Palestinian relations. Surveying pictures of the rubble that was his Ramallah headquarters they will, however, express no small amount of surprise that he died peacefully in a Paris hospital bed.