Arafat died 20 years ago – what if he had lived?

Yasser Arafat died in a Paris military hospital 20 years ago this coming Monday. But huge questions still remain over whether he was a peace maker or a peace destroyer. Had he lived longer – he was 75 when he died – what difference might it have made to the current Middle East turmoil? Even the manner of his death – and who may have benefited from it – is still mired in controversy.

I gained insight into his actions and motivations when in July 2004 a Swedish reporter and I secured what turned out to be his last television interview, inside his compound in Ramallah, The Mukataa. It comprised an old part, built in the 1930s during the British Mandate as a military headquarters, a court and a prison, along with a new structure linked by bridge. As we went one floor up, Arafat greeted us and pointed upwards, saying he slept in a bedroom in the old part. It had holes in it, he said, inflicted by Israeli shells. He failed to mention that mostly he slept in the smart new bedroom constructed for him in the newer, untouched building alongside.

Even though then-prime minister Ariel Sharon had announced Israel’s intention to pull out its troops and settlers from all of Gaza, Arafat complained he had not been consulted. He contended that Sharon led “fanatic groups” that, he alleged, were trying to destroy the Oslo Agreement and the Rabin-Arafat-Clinton “peace of the brave”.

When asked mild questions about international efforts to isolate him or reduce his role as a negotiator, he snarled and asked my Swedish colleague if she was part of the conspiracy against him. The atmosphere became progressively more tense.

His accusations against Israel became more and more bizarre. One was that Israel had been using depleted uranium to “kill my people” through cancer, “like Hiroshima and Nagasaki”. Later that day we asked cancer specialists in Ramallah and Bethlehem about this. They told us they had noted no increase in cancer in the West Bank in the past few years.

Four months later, Arafat was dead. At his massive funeral, his coffin passed yards from me amid tributes by volleys of gunshots fired above it. He was being ubiquitously described as a “martyr” – but allegations of skulduggery had already begun. Even as he lay dying in the Paris hospital, his wife Suha claimed there had been a plot against his life by Palestinian rivals.

Others soon suggested that Israel was behind his death. In 2013, at the behest of a controversial Al Jazeera investigation, a Swiss team said suspicious traces of polonium-210 had been found in his clothing and possessions. Had he been killed by material possessed by a power that could produce this substance in a nuclear reactor? This, suggested Al Jazeera, meant Israel. Amid a furore, slivers of Arafat’s body were later taken for analysis by separate teams of Swiss, French and Russian analysts. The Russian and French teams concluded that the polonium was consistent with what would happen in many burial grounds, where the remains absorb polonium from the soil.

Nevertheless, many Palestinians contend that Arafat must have been murdered, at the behest of Israel. Yet the Palestinian Authority’s own security commission investigating Arafat’s death over the past two decades has failed to announce even one name of a murder suspect. That itself may be seen as suspicious: was it an internal plot to remove the increasingly ineffectual and irrational “Symbol”?

One of Israel’s former leading terrorist hunters has a more mundane explanation. Shalom Ben Hanan used to lead three divisions of the Shin Bet security service. He told the JC this week that Arafat died from natural causes. “I urge the security investigators or Arafat’s nephew to provide any evidence at all. This is a continuing fairy tale they have been spinning: blame Israel for everything, somehow. Even Kennedy’s assassination!”

He said that had Arafat lived longer he might have had an impact on events in Gaza by preventing the open split between Fatah and Hamas that led in 2006 to bloody civil war. In turn, that could have prevented, or delayed, Hamas’s power grab – which allowed Islamist extremists to control Gaza and build its network of “resistance” above and below ground. Would Hamas then have been unable to launch its October 7 attacks? I asked. “This is the Middle East,” he responded. “Who knows?”

Paul Cainer, a Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe foreign correspondent, recently founded the Centre for International Conflict Journalism