So long as the Palestinians are preoccupied with fighting over who will succeed Arafat, they will not be able to turn their attention to reopening negotiations with Israel on a two-state peace settlement. Indeed, it may take time for any leader to amass the political capital necessary to represent the Palestinian people in any deal with Israel, and make that bargain stick.
It is even questionable whether a new leadership would be committed to a negotiated, two-state solution. Certainly there is division within the Palestinian community among those who seek to cut a deal with Israel for a new Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and those who remain committed to Israel's destruction and the return of all of Palestine to Arab hands.
What should be clear after more than half a century of warfare between the two sides is that total victory by either the Arabs or the Jews would be unjust and is unrealistic. Instead, the two communities somehow must live as neighbors in two viable states with defensible borders if there is to be peace. How to divide the real estate is the trick.
To that end, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon won an important vote in parliament to withdraw all Jewish settlers from Gaza. That tentative victory came just as Arafat's serious illness became public.
Sharon is not abandoning Gaza out of friendship for the Palestinians. Rather, he has concluded that continuing to defend 8,000 Jewish settlers in a sea of more than 1.3 million Palestinians is a fool's errand, and he is surely right. But abandoning Gaza entails giving up claims to a part of the historic Jewish homeland, which is difficult for Israel, despite public opinion polls that overwhelmingly say it is the right thing to do.
Sharon's Gaza policy puts the onus on the Palestinians to provide a decent government there. Once the Israeli army is gone, the Palestinians will have only themselves to blame if things do not improve.
Arafat was a singular figure in Palestinian history, a guerrilla fighter who came to embody Palestinian aspirations for a state of their own after the 1993 Oslo accords. His tragic flaw lay in his inability to make the leap from factional warrior to statesman. The open question now is whether any Palestinian leader can step forward to claim the latter role.
