Amid Shooting, a Voice for Peace

GAZA CITY —  The Eid al-Fitr holiday has started, and Palestinians are celebrating with a mix of joy and sorrow as they mourn the death of their leader, Yasser Arafat.

In the disheveled streets of Gaza City, men marked the three-day holiday Sunday drinking cups of tea under freshly minted posters of Arafat. Children licked ice cream cones and played with what seems to be this holiday’s big-selling gift item, toy guns.

Little boys in plastic-gun battles, everywhere you go in Gaza.

It is probably too late for this, but if the Palestinian people were ever to anoint a Gandhi-type figure -- and Arafat’s death revives that question -- it would be someone like Eyad Sarraj.

Sarraj, a psychiatrist by training and veteran human rights advocate, has faithfully promoted nonviolent resistance, even as he was scorned and ridiculed for doing so. He criticized Arafat and landed in jail repeatedly for his efforts. When Israelis still controlled all of Gaza in the 1970s and ‘80s, he challenged them too, and also ended up in jail.

A man with tousled gray hair and an intellectual bearing, sought after by pro-peace groups the world over, but largely ignored by Palestinians and Israelis, Sarraj has criticized the proliferation of suicide bombers while also explaining the motivations that drive people to such extremes.

Sarraj was thinking about Arafat’s death last week. And, contrary to the doomsday scenarios that most people offer when describing the immediate future of the Palestinian people, Sarraj said he was optimistic.

Arafat was a father figure, no denying that. And with the death of the father, Sarraj said, the children may feel like orphans. Then they will have to grow up.

The aura that surrounded Arafat is gone; no one will be able to replicate it, Sarraj said. The next leaders, he noted, will have to submit to the claims and demands of a normal democratic system, something that Arafat never allowed. The absence of Arafat finally allows for the building of democratic institutions and the rule of law, Sarraj said.

“This aura of holiness will end with Arafat, the prophet, and anyone else will be human ... who can be challenged,” Sarraj said. “We’ll be shocked for a while at the loss [of Arafat], but then we will have to manage on our own two feet.”

The real Arafat, Sarraj noted, was much more complicated than patriotic Palestinian slogans and Israeli diatribes might suggest. His skill in controlling his people was one that combined rewards and punishment, praise and terror. He would dote on you one day, then turn around and ruin your life.

“He’d hug and kiss you, to disarm you and win your sympathy and loyalty,” Sarraj said. “And then he’d have no hesitation to arrest you.”

Sarraj knows from experience. He was jailed for 17 days in 1996 for condemning Arafat as a corrupt dictator and was released only after intense international pressure -- and after jailhouse beatings that left him with a ruptured disk.

After yet another arrest and jailing, Sarraj found himself invited to an iftar -- a Ramadan meal to break the day’s fast -- with Arafat in Ramallah. He tried to avoid it, but found himself seated alongside the Palestinian leader as guest of honor. Arafat did as he often did with guests: He’d break up pieces of meat and feed them to Sarraj. He lavished praise on the activist, telling him he loved him like a son.

Sarraj was stunned at the treatment.

Months later, in the spring of 2001, Arafat again ordered the arrest of his former guest, this time after an interview Sarraj gave The Times, in which he criticized the Palestinian leader for not truly wanting peace with the Israelis.

Friends alerted Sarraj that police were waiting to pounce on him at his office. He went into hiding until someone persuaded Arafat to back down.

Sarraj recalled the incident with characteristic good humor.

“I learned the hard way: You can criticize anything, but not Arafat by name. You touch an area of holiness,” he said.

And that is exactly what he thinks may be changing. If the next Palestinian leader is a terrible dictator, he says, Palestinians will be able to criticize him as a terrible dictator. The aura, the pretenses, will have vanished.