The Eternal Agitator

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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.