The Eternal Agitator

By Lisa Beyer

Yasser Arafat loved the cartoon Tom and Jerry. Learning on the eve of his triumphant 1994 return to the Gaza Strip that the show didn't air there, he joked that in that case, he wasn't going. He adored the program, he said, because the mouse, not the cat, always won. All his life, Arafat was the little guy of the Middle East, scampering feverishly to avoid one lethal trap or another. While he never quite prevailed over any of the region's heavies, he did have the indestructible quality of an animated figure. Or so it seemed until last week, when Arafat, 75, died of an undisclosed cause at a hospital outside of Paris.

His death, though well anticipated, was nevertheless difficult for many Palestinians to absorb, not least because he had cultivated an aura of immortality by rejecting earthly comforts. He didn't have real friends, didn't particularly care for food, slept fitfully, never took vacations. When he wed, in old age, the marriage seemed like a sideshow, fatherhood an even stranger subplot. "No personal questions," he used to tell reporters, as if any creaturely detail would detract from the power of his cause. Even those closest to Arafat experienced him as a mystery, which was how he liked it. He was a mythomaniac, concealing, inflating and contradicting reality as he saw fit.

Who was Arafat then? A terrorist? Certainly in the early years and arguably again toward the end. A freedom fighter? Undoubtedly. He lofted the cause of a small, disenfranchised and basically powerless people to the top of the world's agenda. A peacemaker? Many Israelis say that was just an act, but if it was, it was a convincing one, at least for a time. In the end, though, Arafat, for all his calculated obfuscations, proved all too human. It was vanity, selfishness and a failure of courage that ultimately prevented him from realizing his ambition of a state for his people.

The sad spectacle of Arafat's last days offered a glimpse of the man he had been reduced to. One of the last images he left to the world--the brief video clip showing the Palestinian leader, shriveled and frail, wearing blue pajamas and a knit cap before he left the West Bank for medical treatment in France--did not reflect the stylings of Yasser Arafat the revolutionary. The stubble-faced Arafat owned civilian clothes, but he donned his few suits and ties only to move around incognito. When he appeared as Arafat, he always wore crisply pressed military khakis, a black-and-white kaffiyeh and an ascot to match.

Aides say that in his last months, the ascot, left unwashed, was filthy. For the last two years of his life, he confined himself to a few rooms within his bombed-out headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Israeli forces periodically besieged the place as punishment for his refusal to rein in suicide bombers who were terrorizing Israel. In the last months of his life, the Israeli government said he could leave the compound, but only to go abroad and with no guarantee he would be allowed back. Having leveled the installations of Arafat's security forces and parked soldiers at the gates of Palestinian cities, the Israelis had greatly compromised Arafat's ability to govern. Both the Israeli and U.S. governments refused to deal with him, and by the end, even European diplomats, Arafat's last champions, had stopped calling on his sorry, dilapidated compound. For the first time since he emerged as the uncontested leader of the Palestinians in 1969, there was talk of others making a bid to replace Arafat, who had once ensured that none of his deputies were powerful or secure enough to mount a challenge.

That was a dramatic fall. A little more than four years ago, he led his people to the brink of freedom, to a sense that their dream of an independent state was finally within reach. At the time of his death, many despaired of the possibility of anyone taking them out of the slough in which they were stuck--harassed by Israeli soldiers, threatened by Israeli attacks, vulnerable to Palestinian gang rule and sinking into privation. Palestinians direct most of their outrage at Israel and the government of Ariel Sharon, but their current condition is also the product of a phenomenal failure of Palestinian leadership.

In some ways, it was Arafat's choice to close his story as he did. At the Camp David peace talks brokered by President Bill Clinton in 2000, negotiators for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was determined to make a final deal ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for good, put forward compromises more generous than any Israeli leader had offered before. But rather than consider them or offer counterproposals, Arafat threw up a stone wall of rejection, prompting Clinton to publicly blame him for the failure of the summit. Two months later, when Palestinian riots in Jerusalem expanded into a new uprising against Israel, Arafat embraced the ferment, choosing not to use his forces to constrain Palestinian militants, as he had from time to time during the previous years of self-rule. The resulting intifadeh has left almost 3,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis dead and made the possibility of peaceful coexistence seem remote.

Was this where Arafat had always wanted to be--at war with Israel? Had his acceptance of Israel's right to exist, expressed implicitly in 1988 and explicitly as part of the Oslo accords in 1993, been a trick? That has become the prevalent belief among Israelis. Arafat encouraged that view by at times likening the Oslo agreements to a tactical truce the Prophet Muhammad negotiated with his enemies only so that he could later conquer them. Arafat's Israeli critics believe he never gave up on the Palestine Liberation Organization's "phased plan" of taking lands bit by bit from Israel with the aim of eventually seizing control of not only the Gaza Strip and the West Bank but Israel as well.

But there are other explanations for Arafat's abandonment of the peace process. At the beginning, he was the lead cheerleader for Oslo among the Palestinians. They were never enthusiastic about the accords because they fell far short of the minimum condition most of them required: a sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That was plainly the bait Oslo offered, but it was not guaranteed. First the Palestinians would have to submit to a test, a period of autonomy. Arafat, aging and struggling for relevance in the early 1990s, was desperate for a toehold on the future. During a heated meeting with reluctant associates in Tunis, he thumped on the table and boomed, "I cannot be excluded from this historical process."

It became clear in time, though, that Arafat failed to understand how weak a deal he had made. In an interview with TIME after the first Oslo agreement, he boasted that Palestinian "independence" would soon begin in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho. When a reporter noted that the agreement provided for limited self-rule, not sovereignty, Arafat shot back, "Who told you that? It has to be under my control. I know what I have signed." Associates confirmed later that Arafat had not actually read the document.

He came to learn the limitations of his power after he arrived in the Palestinian territories following an absence of a quarter-century. His hard-line critics remarked that he had been reduced to the status of "governor of Gaza," responsible for such matters as trash collection. Arafat, who loved power, didn't think much of governance and was ill suited to it. It was one thing to be the icon of Palestinian aspirations, another to manage an economy, deliver health care and pave roads. On top of those challenges, Arafat and his P.L.O. had to compete for popular standing with Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, which violently opposed any compromise with Israel. And the peace process proved harder and harder to sell since even in the early days of relative goodwill between the Israelis and Arafat's Palestinian Authority, every expansion of self-rule promised in Oslo was hard won and overdue.

Still, Arafat continued to commit himself, at least verbally, to peace. He wept when Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed Oslo with him, was assassinated in 1995. He beamed in 1996 when he shook hands with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even though the hawkish Israeli leader had sworn earlier never to take Arafat's hand.

But Arafat couldn't make the final leap of faith. To reach an agreement with Israel on a Palestinian state, Arafat knew, would require deep compromises on what have become almost sacred demands among his people: that traditionally Arab East Jerusalem, including Islamic holy sites in the Old City, become part of Palestine and that Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war that followed Israel's creation be allowed to return to their homes in what is now Israel. At the time of Camp David in 2000, Arafat's "obsession," an aide said, was that if he made those concessions, he would be remembered by his people as a traitor, perhaps even assassinated, as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was after he made peace with Israel. Better to leave the final accommodations to reality to a future leader. Better to die a revolutionary.

In that role, at least, Arafat will be remembered as a success. When Golda Meir said in 1969 that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people, her remark wasn't entirely preposterous. Israelis didn't believe the Palestinians were a people, but neither did leaders of the Arab states or for that matter Palestinian intellectuals taken with the cause of pan-Arabism. It was Arafat who insisted on a separate identity for the Arabs of what had been the British mandate of Palestine. He articulated the cause of Palestinian independence, organized and fought for it and, despite sometimes deplorable means--including the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the massacre of 21 children at an Israeli school in 1974--won its legitimacy. It was a testament to Arafat's leadership that Palestinians continued to support him in the early years of self-rule even as he performed miserably as their hands-on governor, imposing a regime that was blunt, brutal, inept and corrupt.

By the time of Arafat's death, though, a good number of his supporters had tired of his implacable devotion to struggle. While few Palestinians thought their salvation would come through the kind of peacemaking with Israel that Arafat's obstinacy had foreclosed, few thought he was leading them anywhere worth going. Despite the show of emotion after his death, many will greet his passing as much with quiet relief as with sadness. The P.L.O. leader told TIME in 1968 that all he wanted was for the Palestinians "to be like other people and have no need for Arafat." He got the second half of his wish. --With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Jerusalem

With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Jerusalem