Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in the New York Review of Books:
Abu Mazen is, like Arafat, a rarity: a genuinely national Palestinian figure. But he is so in radically dissimilar fashion. Where Arafat attained national status by identifying with and belonging to every single constituency and factional interest, Abu Mazen did so by identifying with none. Arafat immersed himself in local politics; Abu Mazen floats above it, his service being to the national movement as a whole. Abu Mazen’s world is more rooted in what is familiar and recognized by most people as the order of things. His language is of the acceptable, more everyday variety, his reality far less animated by the ghosts of the past. Instead of the politics of ambiguous and creative intensity, he stands for the politics of cool and clear rationality.
Read the article here.
