YITZHAK RABIN & YASSER ARAFAT

Tunis is quiet after midnight, when the phone rings. This is a Yasser Arafat tradition, summoning visitors at all hours to make their way through a gauntlet of steel barricades to a villa in a quiet residential corner of the city. The stucco house looks like any other, except that it is surrounded by young men in jeans, bearing Kalashnikovs, smoking cigarettes. Their job is to keep the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization alive -- and they take it seriously. Male guests are patted down, their pockets emptied, wallets searched. Women are scanned with ultrasensitive metal detectors, their purses % ransacked. The bodyguards, members of Arafat's elite Force 17, open the matchboxes and start striking the matches in the dark courtyard to be sure they do not contain detonating devices. Over the years Arafat has probably had more people trying to kill him than any other public figure in the world. Closest to succeeding were the Israelis, who might have buried him under the rubble in the Tunis bombing raid that killed 73 people in 1985, had the Chairman not been running late that day. Now Israel wants to keep him alive -- to hold him to the pledge of peaceful coexistence that he made with a handshake on a sunny September day in Washington. At that moment, in accepting far less than the independent state he has always promised his people, he became a traitor to many of his own. So now it is the Palestinian extremists who seek to kill him in order to kill the peace accord. There is an air of bravado in the room this December night. The peace on which Yasser Arafat has staked so much is not yet real for the men and women and children dying in the streets of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Yet the P.L.O. leader greets his guests warmly, giving no sign he is troubled by the turmoil of things not done. He is direct and engaging, full of a charm half calculated, half natural as he makes his case. Asked if he has concerns about his own personal security, he chuckles. ''I only fear God.'' Visitors to Yitzhak Rabin's modest office in western Jerusalem expect their sessions with him to be strictly business. He is known to be abrupt, omitting from such visits so much as hello or goodbye. The office is hectic. Chants of angry Jewish settlers camped outside to protest the peace agreement fade in and out. A delegation of conservative Knesset members argue against giving weapons to the future Palestinian police force. But Rabin is calm, almost relaxed. Those who know him well say that since he signed the Declaration of Principles with Arafat, his manner has softened; he smiles more and grimaces less. Though he has taken a great gamble with his country's future, the mission of seeing it through -- and the confidence that he has made the right choice -- has energized him. As he talks to his guests, it is clear he has thought deeply about what he wants to get across. ''Arafat carried out what I consider to be atrocities,'' he says. ''But I've said more than once in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, we make peace, or we negotiate meaningful steps toward peace, with enemies. Sometimes bitter enemies.'' Peace is not yet a fact between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But Rabin and Arafat are Men of the Year because they have taken those meaningful steps from which it will be difficult to turn back. The idea of peace, once planted, is a powerful incentive to two peoples who have lost so many lives, so much time, so much prosperity in