Abstract
When town after town of the West Bank and Gaza passed into Palestinian Authority (PA) hands following the Oslo II Agreement (1995) that was designed to facilitate the transition from Israeli occupa tion to Palestinian self-rule, Yasser Arafat, president of the PA, began to manifest some surprising traits in his statesmanship. Most notable for someone viewed as a secular leader is his profound Islamic commit ment, which harks back to his membership in the Muslim Brethren in Egypt during his formative years. The issue of Islam is of particular interest, due to Arafat's attempts to juggle between new-found pragma tism as a statesman (who has, to all appearances, chosen the road of political settlement with Israel, at least prior to the resumption of the intifada in the fall of 2000), and his innate propensity for doctrinal and vindictive rhetoric. Arafat must strike a balance between his pro claimed obligation to compromise—requiring him to set aside some of his long-held Islamic convictions which had helped him mobilize Pales tinian public opinion behind him—and his need to placate his most dangerous opposition, namely, Hamas1 and the Islamic jihad (holy war), which refuse to shed the very same convictions Arafat once held, continuing instead to embrace and profess them openly. This essay will examine whether Arafat is in fact bound by one par ticular set of principles (with the other being merely tactical rhetoric), and whether he espouses any particular ideology only when it appears to him at a particular time to best reflect his and his people's interest. In other words, is there a way to read between the lines of his ambigu
Published Version
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