By Alex Margolin
September 5, 2005
A group of businessmen in El Salvador, looking to honor the deceased Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, dedicated a park in his memory in San Salvador last month. Turns out, much of the El Salvadoran population, including President Tony Saca, descend from Palestinians who emigrated to the South American state in the late 1800s.
The park runs along a street called Jerusalem, where the businessmen installed a life-size bust of the PLO founder -- a reference to their dream of a Palestinian state with a capital in Israel's holy city.
"We are making a monument to the maximum leader of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine," explained John Nasser, one of the businessmen involved in the project.
Nasser may consider Arafat a maximum leader, but then, he lives in El Salvador, not the Palestinian territories. Had he lived in Jenin or Ramallah, odds are he would be like most Palestinians: unemployed, impoverished, and angry with his government and his leaders for creating a corrupt and ineffective regime.
His decision to honor Arafat with a park is like marking last year's tsunami with a pool party. The two things simply don't fit together. Arafat remained a terrorist until his dying breaths. In the end, he was considered incapable of making peace with Israel. In fact, he was the obstacle.
That?s why Israel should honor Arafat by naming a real obstacle in his memory. The West Bank security barrier marks Arafat?s actual achievement, the structure he forced Israel to build. Naming the wall in his honor captures Arafat?s complete failure as a leader. It serves as a monument to his incompetence, the physical embodiment of everything he represented.
It also underscores why the El Salvadoran businessmen were wrong to honor him with a park. The businessmen may believe Arafat was a leader who cared about his people, but the people he ruled may see things differently. Instead of a state, the Palestinians have a wall. And they have no one to thank for it but their own supreme leader.
Instead of trying to justify the need to build an anti-terror wall, Israeli leaders should hold a ceremony honoring the man who made it happen. There is the Allenby Bridge, the Begin Highway, and now, the Arafat Wall.
May this legacy endure for generations.
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