The Pales­tin­ian pres­i­dent “Yass­er Arafat”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arafat died a few days ago, after weeks of dete­ri­o­rat­ing health. As the most rec­og­niz­able face of the Pales­tin­ian strug­gle for the last fifty years, Yas­sir Arafat was undoubt­ed­ly one of the most impor­tant world lead­ers of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry. While he did­n’t deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, he was far from the first archi­tect of mur­der to walk off with it (our own Hen­ry Kissinger comes to mind), and he is one of a few men who could legit­i­mate­ly claim to have defined war and peace in our age.
There’s a say­ing in my reli­gious tra­di­tion that some prob­lems can only be resolved after a cer­tain amount of funer­als have passed. It’s been hard to imag­ine how a last­ing peace could be built in the Mid­dle East while he and his coun­ter­parts in the Israeli geron­toc­ra­cy remained in pow­er. The twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry saw plen­ty of auto­crat­ic lead­ers who came to per­son­i­fy their nation and whose decades-long tenure came to rep­re­sent the stale­mate to real change or last­ing peace. When the death of Zaire’s icon­ic strong­man “Mobu­tu Sese Seko”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobuto_Sese_Seko in 1997 opened up pos­si­bil­i­ties for peace­ful realign­ments in the region, even though war was the first result. For the death of strong-willed lead­ers does­n’t always bring about peace. When Yugoslavi­a’s “Josip Broz Tito”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito died, the pow­er vac­u­um implod­ed the coun­try and set the stage for decades of civ­il wars. The atroc­i­ties and chaos brought the word “eth­nic cleans­ing” into our vocabulary.
Per­haps the sad­dest com­men­tary on all this was one I heard on the street. Two men were talk­ing loud­ly about hav­ing a TV show inter­rupt­ed the day before, only five min­utes before a sched­uled pro­gram break. “It’s not like it’s that impor­tant that you can’t wait five min­utes” repeat­ed the one, over and over. Yes, my friend, Arafat’s death is that important.