RAMALLAH: About the time Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began his fourth White House powwow in a year, Yasser Arafat was tucking into a bowl of vegetable soup at his headquarters in this besieged city, where he has been confined for two months.

As Sharon huddled with President Bush last week, the Palestinian Authority president supped with his own aides beneath a photograph of Al Quds, the holy city that seems farther from his reach than ever. With Israeli tanks outside his front door and army checkpoints encircling Ramallah, Arafat looked like a man running out of options.

Then Sharon’s meeting ended. Bush said that Arafat must crack down on terrorism, by which he meant the suicide attacks that have characterized the Palestinians’ 17-month uprising. But he refused the prime minister’s request to sever diplomatic ties with Arafat. He made it clear that the United States will remain engaged with the Palestinian Authority.

“Not to forget,” Arafat said in an interview on Friday. “I have sent my delegation there. We are in permanent contact with the American administration. (There are) letters between me and President Bush and also contacts with his foreign minister, Colin Powell. I am not afraid.”

The Palestinian leader is down but not yet out. Arafat is nothing if not a survivor. He has outflanked many enemies during his incarnations as a nationalist, Nobel peacemaker, Palestinian statesman and - in Sharon’s words - terrorist leader. The question now is whether Arafat can survive Sharon, his old nemesis from Israel’s war in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Is Arafat the lion in winter fading into history, or is he a phoenix ready to rise again?

Arafat emerges from a four-hour meeting with officials of his Fatah movement that has left him exhausted. His lower lip trembles, as do his alabaster hands. Dressed in his trademark uniform and kaffiyeh, he leads his guests to a dining room table laid with white cloth, a centrepiece of chrysanthemums and daisies, and place settings for about 20 people. Among the diners is his deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, who met with Sharon earlier this month, and Marwan Barghouti, the streetwise leader of Fatah. “Try this, it is healthy,” Arafat says of his favourite dip.

He points to the photograph of Al Quds on the wall in front of him and indicates the area of the city where his uncle’s house was - and where Arafat lived as boy for four years. Israel demolished the neighbourhood after occupying Al Quds in 1967.

Arafat heads into his office, where there are enlarged photographs of the Al Aqsa mosque and several paperweights of Mecca’s central shrine. He dons oversized black glasses and, for several minutes, signs official papers with an aide by his side in what is obviously meant to be a demonstration of his authority: The president who signed the 1993 Oslo peace agreement with Israel and returned to rule the West Bank and Gaza Strip is still in charge.

But Arafat’s realm is clearly reduced, and the three million Palestinians living in his jurisdiction are in such a bad way that even Bush and Sharon acknowledged their plight. More than 830 Palestinians and 250 Israelis have died in the violence of the last 17 months, and tens of thousands of people have been wounded.

The violence, together with a punishing blockade of Palestinian towns and cities and Israeli military strikes, cost the Palestinian economy $3.2 billion in the first year of the uprising, according to UN estimates. Israel has destroyed Arafat’s three helicopters, his airport, seaport and small ships amassed under the Oslo accord. The Israeli army has razed hundreds of homes and thousands of acres of crops either in retaliatory strikes or to prevent the sites from being used by Palestinian gunmen.

Arafat speaks about the peace agreement he signed with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his frequent visits to the White House during President Clinton’s years, than he does about the future. The uprising, he says, began because Sharon visited the plaza outside of the Al Aqsa mosque to demonstrate Israeli sovereignty, with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s blessing.

He tried to prevent the fateful visit with a direct appeal to Barak, and not, as the Israeli government believes, as the one who capitalized on it afterward to unleash a wave of violence.

Arafat talks about the violence inflicted on Palestinians. “Why have they bombed some of our schools? Why have they bombed some of our hospitals, some of our holy sacred places, Christian and Muslim? Why are they making this siege and preventing us even to send food to many of our cities and towns? In some villages, they have even destroyed some of our water wells. We are obliged to smuggle water into some of these villages. Can you imagine it?”

His anger is genuine. He says that his primary concern is the approximately 200,000 refugees “in a very difficult situation” in Lebanon, whom he said he would like returned over three to five years. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.