Yasser Arafat Death: Yes, It is That Important

The Palestinian president Yasser 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 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 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.