“You got to walk that lonesome highway,

                                                   You got to walk it by yourself.

                                                   Nobody here can walk it for you,

                                                   You got to walk it by yourself.”

            The adaptation of the spiritual above tells it like it is. Arafat has left his people alone.  They were going nowhere since they rejected the UN solution of partition of Palestine into two countries, Israel and Palestine.  Israel accepted and created a viable, vital democratic (mostly) nation – the only one in that part of the world.  Because the Palestinian people invested so much of their hope in Arafat, he became a prop for the non-structure he built for them to govern themselves. (We also forget the Christian portion of the Palestinians who have been lost in the Muslim majority).  The fact is the Palestinians never governed themselves.  Their leader, Yasser Arafat, was a master of delay, distraction, avoidance in making decisions, pitting factions against each other and never appointing a successor.  He always spoke about his wonderful people who did his bidding by sacrificing their lives for HIS dream while murdering innocents in the name of his religion.  Against all reason, he kept this state of affairs alive for almost forty years.

The sheer emotional chaos of the thousands in Ramallah trying to reach his coffin to touch it or get next to it included a fight for who would carry it to his tomb. The fawning grief experienced by leaders of influential and important countries over his passing did nothing to prevent the Israelis from stage managing the funeral restricting it to the place where he was in internal exile for the last three years.  The pomp and circumstance in Egypt was lost on the Palestinians in Ramallah.

Pomp and Circumstance is the usual measured and dignified manner of the West when a significant personage is put to rest. But this is the Arab/Islamic world where such anarchy is a sure sign of the emotional importance of such a person as Arafat had as the “father of his people”. The Palestinian people have lost the leader of a bogus organism that seemed to represent something of value to be saved and coddled by other nations of the Arab/Islamic persuasion and their European allies.

Outbursts of grief are good for cleansing the soul but when will the many, many childlike people of Palestine awake from their dreams of jihad and driving the Jews into the sea? Not in the short term, surely.  The two state solution will have to wait for the dust to settle where thousands swirled around his coffin pushing it this way and that.  His death is a metaphor for the killing of a murderous dream.  His tomb in Ramallah will be the target of every “militant”, nationalist terrorist organization to spirit his body away for reburial in a shrine in their “Capitol”, Jerusalem.  Mr. Arafat is gone but his spirit still walks the roads in the Near East.