BEIRUT: If all had gone according to plan, Yasser Arafat would, round about now, have been installing himself in Al Quds as president of the state, coexistent with Israel, which has been the object of all his strivings. But the closer he gets to the fulfilment of his long-standing dream the more his plans seem to go awry and instead he is confined, like a prisoner, to an old hilltop British barracks in Ramallah, a mere six miles from the Holy City, his chances of ever entering it looking just about their bleakest ever.

His arch enemy, Ariel Sharon, himself facing prosecution in a Belgian court for his role in the Sabra and Chatila massacres, calls him - Nobel prizewinner and architect of the “peace of the brave” - a congenital liar and murderer with whom business is no longer possible. On Friday, the Israeli government pronounced Arafat irrelevant, and cut off all relations with his Palestinian Authority. Sharon demands the arrest and punishment of all terrorists but bombs the very institutions of the Authority which are supposed to carry out this task - not just barracks and police stations, but, on Friday, the headquarters of the Palestine Broadcasting Authority.

Indeed he bombs the Arafat compound itself. On Friday, as the army stormed into Palestinian towns, a rocket fired from a helicopter struck metres from Arafat’s office. This is Sharon’s way, apparently, of amplifying the message that the rightwing Israeli establishment has been trumpeting forth this past week: if Arafat will not do the job, Israel will do it for him and banish or kill him into the bargain.

The Great Survivor has been written off many times before. Yet his resilience in adversity is legendary, his political comebacks are only outdone by his narrow escapes from violent death. So while this is one of the most desperate crises of his long and turbulent career, it may still not be his last. It has deep roots in both the sheer, endemic implacability of the Arab-Israeli struggle, and the manner in which he has waged his side of it. Of all the villainies Israelis ascribe to him, intransigence, an unwillingness to compromise, is the most undeserving.

For his whole career is one of ever growing moderation. True, it may have been his endless setbacks that forced it on him. Or his indomitable egotism - only thus could Arafat retain the position of sole and indispensable embodiment of his people’s cause, which has been his for more than 30 years. But the fact is that, out of failure and retreat, he always managed to build a new platform for another seeming advance in his personal odyssey, or, as he puts it, his “long march” to the “spires and minarets” of Al Quds. He did so by ever greater curtailment of his original goals. For a long time he carried most of his people with him, using the institutions of his “Palestinian democracy” to endorse them. But however drastic the curtailments, they were never enough for the most moderate of Israelis, while he found it increasingly difficult to persuade his own people that he could ever achieve goals which, in their eyes, were becoming modest to the point of treason. And the greater his difficulties the more he relied on dubious methods - a shelving of his democracy, and all the well-known flaws and frailties of his Authority - that have merely compounded them in the end.

If there has been one single infirmity of his from which, above all, these methods have flowed it has probably been his notorious egotism. No one has ever doubted his virtues: such as physical courage in the face of mortal danger or his dedication and indefatigability; the “old man” - as the now 72-year-old leader has been known as long as anyone can remember - was, until recently, a virtual insomniac, rarely completing his day’s work before 4am.

But no one close to him has ever doubted his preoccupation with himself either. The egotism doubtless accounts for that high sense of destiny which seems always to have possessed him; one of its first publicly recorded manifestations came when, at a student conference in Prague in the early 50s, he astonished his audience by pronouncing himself Arafat and donning the checked keffiyah that has been his trademark ever since. But it also underlies his obsessive desire for personal control and domination, his interference in the minutest details of administration, his deviousness and whimsy, his preference for loyalty over competence, his readiness, though entirely uninterested in wealth and luxury himself, to exploit, through patronage and corruption, the weaknesses of those around him who are. It is ultimately thanks to such egotism that his popularity ratings have fallen to their lowest level ever, just when he can least afford it, just when, trapped between Israeli diktat and the popularity of his rivals, the embattled Arafat toys with the terrible necessity of carrying his moderation to the point of open war on Palestinians.

Arafat is called upon to carry to impossible lengths the collaborator’s role that the Oslo accord requires of him. Whether he does or not, he risks his own political, even physical, elimination. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.