When You Finally Decide Who Killed Me And How, Don’t Wake Me

By Yasser Arafat

It’s been what, almost ten years now, and you’re still going on about what sinister forces conspired to assassinate me by whatever nefarious means? Get a life.

I’ve got my own widow claiming I was poisoned, some Israeli quack insisting it was AIDS, my own physicians diagnosing me with gastroenteritis, and everyone in the world forgetting that I was seventy-five years old and under enormous stress. It’s been almost a decade – Give it a rest.

Your need to see my death as the result of conspiracy rather than the natural course of things says more about you and your assumptions than about my actual death. I’m just as dead either way, of course; what matters here is your knee-jerk flinging of accusations at your culprit of choice.

The obvious main suspect would be Israel, but let’s face it: they didn’t need to be so underhanded as to actively kill me. All they had to do was keep me physically isolated and just wait. Which is probably what they did. As convenient as they might have thought it would be for me to drop dead, I’m just as useless to them dead or alive.

Then there are my Palestinian rivals, people my widow Suha loves to blame for everything when she’s not blaming Israel and spending oodles of money I embezzled. I don’t blame her. It can be such a source of stress to have to decide between Manolo Blahnik and Prada every single day. Cut the girl some slack.

The more fanciful theories invoke the CIA or some other source of spookiness. But again, what did anyone have to gain by acting?

Part of this messiness is my own fault, really. The Palestinian nationalist movement is essentially a constant search for ways in which Israel has done us wrong, and the violent ways in which we can seek vengeance for them. With the default assumption that every single misfortune results from Israeli misdoings, it’s no wonder we’ve never been able to see or present ourselves as anything but victims. The Palestinian narrative could never accept that I would die a more or less natural death; anything short of a direct Israeli conspiracy to assassinate the leader of the movement simply wouldn’t fit the story we tell ourselves, facts be damned.

Can Palestinian society change that? I’m not holding my breath. Well, for that other reason, too.

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