AL QUDS: When Yasser Arafat steps out of his ravaged headquarters for the first time in months, he may not recognize what he sees. Assuming a US-brokered deal takes effect and the siege on Arafat’s compound is lifted, the Palestinian Authority president will tread into a physical and political wasteland, a West Bank devastated by three weeks of assault by the most powerrful army in the Middle East.

In its wake, the Israeli army left the ruins of government buildings, private homes, schoolrooms, police stations and electrical grids. In addition to rounding up suspected fighters and confiscating caches of weapons, the army seized or destroyed payrolls, school records, computers and cars.

How Arafat will begin to rebuild any of the quasi-state he governed not so long ago is a mystery. Despite assurances to the contrary from negotiators, his movements are likely to remain tightly restricted. Israel destroyed his only helicopters and dug up the runway of the only Palestinian airport.

Mounds of rubble and debris line the roads leading to his compound, where the outer walls have been pulverized by Israeli armor. More important, his political and security apparatuses are in utter disarray, with key aides hobbled or jailed and most police forces decimated.

Arafat has endured extreme humiliation and has been forced to rely on the Israelis for food and to seek Israeli permission for his rare visitors. He has been confined to a small area, a few rooms inside one aging building, where electricity was sporadic and the toilets regularly backed up. However, from Arafat’s perspective, that he is emerging at all from this punishment is a victory.

Arafat’s confinement pitted him, again, against his historical enemy, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Two decades ago, Sharon enforced a siege on Arafat and his cronies from the Palestine Liberation Organization in Beirut, Lebanon, where they ran a “state-within-a-state” to launch cross-border attacks into Israel. Under US intervention, Arafat emerged then, too, after 88 days, and went into exile in Tunisia, where he successfully resurrected his nationalist movement.

“Obviously, he is going to have enormous problems, and everyone is going to have a very tough row to hoe,” one US official said on condition of anonymity. “But he has a few things going for him. That he survived at all is something of a miracle.”

Curiously, Arafat’s stature among his own people - where his popularity plummeted last year - has been enhanced by his imprisonment. And that’s despite his inability to move around, to visit stricken areas or to communicate very widely with the population.

The compromise to end the siege provides for the Palestinians convicted of killing right-wing Israeli Cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi to be transferred to a Palestinian prison and placed under American and British guard. The same fate would await Arafat’s top financial aide, Fuad Shubaki, who Israel alleges is the Palestinians’ top weapons smuggler.

The men were holed up in the Ramallah compound with Arafat; Israel refused to leave without them, and Arafat refused to give them up. By accepting the compromise, both Arafat and Sharon submitted to considerable US and British pressure.

Sharon, especially, gave ground, perhaps to balance the hard line he and his government are taking to prevent a United Nations investigation into its military operations in the Jenin refugee camp.

Israeli commentators on Sunday night portrayed Sharon as the capitulator in the Ramallah standoff. Just days ago, Sharon was so adamant about demanding the extradition of Zeevi’s killers that he told US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that he was willing to hold new elections over the matter.

Sharon said he did not trust Arafat - whom he accuses of promoting terrorism - to punish the killers or even to jail them for any period of time, since criminals who go into Palestinian cells often get out quickly. An ad hoc Palestinian military court, convening inside Arafat’s compound last week, hastily sentenced the men to prison terms ranging from one to 18 years, but Israelis branded the proceedings a sham.

With President Bush literally on the telephone, however, Sharon relented on Sunday. In recent weeks, Sharon had repeatedly ignored Bush’s pleas to end the offensive and withdraw Israeli troops from the West Bank. Sharon may have decided that another refusal would be one too many.

Sharon pushed the decision through a long and torturous session of his Cabinet on Sunday. Ephraim Sneh, a Cabinet minister from the more moderate Labor Party, said it made sense to grant Bush’s request and to “keep America on our side,” especially as Israel grapples with the fallout over the Jenin battle. Israel has been accused of committing atrocities at the camp, allegations the Jewish state denies. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.