Arafat's Long Journey

It would be a stretch to call Yasser Arafat confused. But watching him--at home, at Camp David or at other stops on the international stage--has been to see a man in search of an identity. Some days he seems to promise an imminent Palestinian state. Other days, insiders say, he agrees to postpone an announcement of statehood until after the U.S. presidential elections. He can't decide if he's supposed to go through doors before or after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

What is clear is that Arafat is searching for a legacy that will fit his ambitions for himself and for his people. It is that search that brought him to Camp David and to his tense, exacting talks with President Clinton and Barak. "God, it's hard," Clinton confessed of the process. And much of the difficulty could be traced to Arafat, a man whose place in history revolves entirely around the outcome of his eleventh-hour negotiations with Israel.

What has made the talks all the stickier is that Arafat isn't sure which legacy he wants most. Age 70 and ailing, presumably from a nervous disorder--Parkinson's, some say--Arafat is desperate to preside over a newly born, independent Palestinian state. But he has also seized upon a competing priority--preserving his place in history as a steadfast nationalist hero. To reach agreement with Israel on the terms of statehood would require profound compromises on what have long been almost sacred Palestinian demands. Arafat's great fear--his "obsession," says an aide--is that if he makes these concessions, he will be pilloried as a traitor to his people instead of a hero. Says a senior Palestinian official: "Arafat is terrified he'll be remembered as the one who gave away Palestinian rights."

Until the talks at Camp David--and there too at times--Arafat and his delegates held hard to maximalist positions that the Israelis reject out of hand. To end the conflict once and for all, the Palestinians said, Israel would have to relinquish every inch of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. That would include all of East Jerusalem, which would become the capital of Palestine, as well as areas colonized by 175,000 Jewish settlers, who would have to leave. The negotiators also demanded the right of all Palestinian refugees from areas that are within Israel to return to their homes, which Israel fears would eliminate its Jewish majority.

At Camp David, the Israelis presented compromises. They want to keep those parts of the West Bank, perhaps 5% to 10% of the area, where most Jewish settlers live and might offer the Palestinians, as a swap, a portion of uninhabited land within Israel proper. Israel is open to allowing limited numbers of refugees to return, under cover of an existing family-reunification program, with the rest compensated for their property out of an international fund and permanently resettled in their current host countries, in Palestine or elsewhere.