What will they say of Arafat

I have a tape recording of Arafat, sitting with me on a cold, dark mountainside outside the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli in 1983 where the old man - he was always called the old man, long before he was elderly - was under siege by the Syrian army, another of the Arab 'brothers' who wanted to lead the Palestinian cause and ended up fighting Palestinians rather than Israelis. Even worse, the Syrians had suborned some of 'their' Palestinians to join them in the siege.

Just a year before, Arafat and his PLO had withstood an 88-day encirclement in the Lebanese capital of Beirut by the Israeli army, led by defence minister Ariel Sharon. Now Arafat's fortunes had crumbled again. The tape hisses and occasionally, far away, shells thump into a hillside. I played it again, listening to the wind cracking past the microphone:

Arafat: I will not be away from my freedom fighters while they are facing death and dangers from death...It is my duty to be beside my freedom fighters and my officers and my soldiers.

Fisk: A year ago, you and I talked in west Beirut. Here we are on a windy hilltop outside Tripoli, 50 miles further away from the border of Israel, or the border of Palestine and people within Fatah are rebelling.

Arafat: You see, I give you another proof that we are a nut that is not easy to be cracked. I hope that you still remember what Sharon had mentioned in the beginning of his invasion.

He was dreaming that within three or five days he would liquidate or smash the PLO, our people, our freedom fighters - and here we are. The siege of Beirut, the battles of the south of Lebanon, this miracle, 88 days, the longest Arab-Israeli war - and after that we have this war of attrition against the Israeli army, not only the Palestinians, definitely - we and our allies - our allies, the Lebanese - are participating in this war of attrition and we are proud - I am proud - that I have this brave alliance.

Fisk: Fifty miles further from Palestine!

Arafat: What is the difference to be 50 miles or to be 50,000 miles? One metre outside the border of Palestine, I am far away. Fifty thousand miles from Palestine. Arafat was a dreamer, which was a popular characteristic for Palestinians who had only dreams to give them hope.

Even in the early days, if compromise was required of him, he could talk to Israelis, even hint at acceptance of the partition of Palestine. "I will live on one square metre of my land," he would say; geographic proportion was not his strong point.

But if one of the PLO's more outlandish satellites embarrassed the Palestinians, and the world, by murdering an innocent, Arafat would step in to prevent further tragedy, thus acquiring prestige from the crimes of his own organization.

Hence the murder by Palestinians of a crippled Jewish pensioner called Leon Klinghoffer on board the hijacked cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 was supposed to be overshadowed by Arafat's humanitarian gesture in arranging for the liberation of the other 300 passengers.

But it was his greatest political error - his support for Saddam Hussain after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait - that gave him his greatest and hollowest victory.

Like King Hussein, who'd also declined to support President Bush Senior's Pax Americana, Arafat was now weak enough to make peace with Israel; and the Oslo agreement - the shakiest peace treaty since Versailles - was the bait to pull him in. Arafat thought he was being given Palestine statehood, stamps, a national airline, prestige, admiration, east Jerusalem and an army - but he was being offered nothing of the kind.

Instead, Oslo turned out to be an offer of collaboration: Arafat was being asked to police the West Bank and Gaza on Israel's behalf, just as General Lahd, the renegade Lebanese army officer, ran Israel's little fiefdom in southern Lebanon.

His job was not to represent his people but to 'control' them - which is why the mantra question "can Arafat control his own people" was taken up with such speed by the Israelis.

Of course, he couldn't. Hamas had been an Israeli creation to balance Arafat's power - back in the days when the PLO were the 'super-terrorists' of the Middle East - and Arafat was not going to fight a civil war in 'Palestine' on Israel's behalf.

So he clung onto power not with authority but with cash, paying off his gunmen and his cronies, indulgently ignoring some of the PLO's splinter outfits while promising security, peace, prosperity, statehood and all the other things Oslo would not give him.

Unwilling to allow younger, educated Palestinians to run even his public relations network, he surrounded himself with hopeless middle-aged spokesmen whose anger was loud but whose English was incomprehensible (a mistake Israel's propagandists did not make).

When Israel reneged on withdrawal agreements, especially under Benjamin Netanyahu, Arafat pleaded with the Americans for help in keeping to a timetable which no-one but himself believed in. "It is up to the parties concerned," the State Department would tell him, handing all decisions to the most powerful of those two parties, the Israelis.

He could not protect his people from Israeli military incursions or air raids and he could not protect the Israelis when Palestinian suicide bombers began to hurl themselves into Israeli society.

He could not stop the building of illegal settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land and he could not obtain even a sliver of Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital, not a square metre of the city in which to live.

He could not obtain permission for a single Palestinian refugee to return to live in the home from which their family was driven in 1948. He could not guard his own national frontiers. He was not allowed to control his own airport. In the end, he could only leave the wrecked building in which he lived by starting the long process of dying.

Like so many Arab leaders, Arafat has governed by emotion rather than reason - George Bush Junior is the nearest equivalent in his Iraq war - and this led Arafat into flights of rhetoric that were a panacea to his people as they were an insult to his educated elite.

Edward Said, that most brilliant of Palestinian scholars, was driven to distraction. Arafat banned Said's books and Palestinians who wished to read them had to purchase them in Israel.

"The people loved him, of course," Said said to me one afternoon in Beirut as he played the piano to soothe the effect of another Arafat lecture. "He stood on the podium and he promised them a Palestinian state and they clapped and shouted and banged their feet.

Someone asked him what the state would be like and Arafat pointed to a small child in the front row and said: "If you want to know the answer to this, you must ask every Palestinian child what he wants." And the crowd went wild again. It was a very popular reply. But what on earth was he talking about? What did he mean?"

Only Hanan Ashrawi could speak her mind to Arafat. "I think I was the only one who would call him up and say he was wrong," she once told me. "I would say, Mr Chairman, this is wrong, this will not work. And afterwards, his advisers would come to me and say: 'How can you speak to the chairman like that? How dare you criticize him?' But someone had to."

There was another, more profound conversation, between Said and Arafat, in 1985 when the two men were discussing Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who supported the 1936 revolt against British rule, who always believed that the Zionists would take Palestinian land for an Israeli state but who ended up in wartime Berlin, urging Hitler to prevent the emigration of Jews to Palestine and encouraging Bosnian Muslims to join the SS.

According to Said, the PLO leader laid his hand on Said's knee and gripped it very tightly. And Arafat said: "Edward, if there's one thing I don't want to be it's like Haj Amin. He was always right and he got nothing and died in exile."

What will they say of Arafat? The Israelis refused permission for Haj Amin to be buried in Jerusalem. Ariel Sharon has already said the same rule will apply to Arafat. In death, at least, Arafat and Haj Amin will be equal. -Dawn/The Independent.