Suha Arafat's rant against leaders of the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat's heirs apparent earlier in the week was revealing in many ways. On a basic level, it showed much about the nature of the PA and the PLO which Arafat has built and led. Arafat's wife, who had been estranged from him more or less since they were married, had thrown down the gauntlet. Her beef with everyone was over the loot that Arafat amassed over all these years ? money he made by bilking the international community for aid and shaking down Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and around the Arab world for pay-offs. She wanted the money ? estimated at somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.5 billion ? and she wasn't going to let her brain-dead hubby be taken off the feeding tube until she got it.
For their part, everyone from Mahmoud Abbas to Ahmed Qurei to Saeb Erekat on down Arafat's food chain suddenly protestied. The money, they said belongs to the Palestinian people and therefore, they, not she, should be given the codes to the secret bank accounts where Arafat stashed it (after he stole it from the Palestinian people ? which they don't say).
From all of this we received an admission that the house that Yasser built, in addition to being the world's richest terrorist organization, is a criminal syndicate.
This is important because, while Arafat and the PLO had been lauded by Europe and the international Left for decades as revolutionaries, at the end of the day what they were was ? and still is ? a den of thieves. Of course we knew this all along. During the negotiations with the PLO in the roaring Nineties, the only time the Palestinian negotiators would truly get bent out of shape was when the discussions turned to money.
When Israel tried to prevent Arafat's money launderer, Muhammad Rashid, from taking control of revenues from sales tax on cigarettes and fuel, he flew off the handle. In the midst of negotiations, Rashid (whom Arafat trusted, because as an ethnic Kurd, he has no ability to build up his own power base in the PLO) stood up and threw a chair across the negotiating table. This he did while accusing the young Israeli negotiator (me) of insulting the national honor of the Palestinian people for mentioning that the revenues weren't supposed to go to Arafat's secret account at Bank Leumi in Tel Aviv, but to the Palestinian Ministry of Finance. Rashid, like Qurei, Abbas, Muhammad Dahlan, Jamil Tarifi, Nabil Shaath, Jibril Rajoub and others, made clear to his Israeli "peace partners" that what he really needed was control over resources. This, they all said, would maintain stability in the Palestinian territories.