In a small part of it anyway. The 72-year-old rebel’s immediate domain is a hallway the length of a football field, a clutch of aides and advisers, an office and an adjoining bedroom. The man who once racked up frequent-flier miles faster than a corporate executive now can’t venture farther than the grimy edge of Ramallah in the West Bank. Israel keeps its tanks parked just 100 yards from his office, their barrels trained in his direction. This is hardly the first time Arafat has been hemmed in, but it might be the tightest stitch of his life. Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who hunted Arafat for a decade and fashioned Israel’s current siege policy, has vowed to keep the Palestinian leader corralled until the bloody intifada ends. “Even if he could stop the violence, I don’t think there’s anything Arafat can do at this point to get Sharon to engage,” says a European diplomat long involved in regional peacemaking. “I don’t see Sharon letting him out of Ramallah.”
Don’t count Arafat out just yet. The Palestinian leader is the Houdini of Mideast politics. He has outlasted seven American presidents and 12 Israeli prime ministers. He breezed out of Beirut 20 years ago when the same hard-charging ex-general, Sharon, had him cornered and tried to wipe out his forces. Arafat’s dramatic getaways during military operations in Jordan and the West Bank in the 1960s and ’70s are lore among Palestinians, as is his skill at wiggling out of political tight spots.
But Arafat now faces something tougher than the Jewish state’s enmity: a growing conviction among Israelis, even political doves, that he is no longer useful–that he can’t seal a peace deal and won’t deliver security. For the 73-year-old Sharon, it translates into a compulsion to prove Arafat’s irrelevance by sidelining him. Even when Arafat kept things quiet during a 24-day stretch beginning last month–creating possibly the best climate in more than a year for a return to the bargaining table–Sharon brushed it off as a trick. To back up his charges of duplicity, he cited a weapons-laden ship apparently headed for Palestinian territory.
Despite his limited range of movement, Arafat told NEWSWEEK he is still a player–that he is using all the resources at his disposal to effect a ceasefire. “I’ll do my best to sustain it,” he insisted. “There’s one authority [in Palestine] and it will be respected.” But by the end of the week his assurances rang hollow. On Thursday a member of his own Fatah group shot up a dance hall where Israelis were celebrating a 12-year-old girl’s bat mitzvah, killing six people. (A leaflet said the murders were in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of a Fatah leader in the West Bank town of Tulkarm.) Arafat condemned the attack vigorously, but a day later, an Israeli cabinet member suggested isolating him further by preventing diplomats and journalists from reaching his headquarters.
That’s where Washington comes in. Palestinian officials say Anthony Zinni, U.S. President George W. Bush’s special envoy to the Middle East, is pressing Sharon to ease up on Arafat, even as the United States censures the Palestinian leader for the latest bloodletting. Israelis believe Arafat is directing the attacks or at least turning a blind eye to Palestinian militants. History would suggest Arafat’s attackers have a point: since taking control of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969, he has deftly used both violence and diplomacy to keep the Palestinian cause on the global agenda. “He is a genius for getting Palestinians the attention that other ethnic groups never got,” says Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist well-acquainted with Arafat. He also chooses carefully when to give interviews and to whom.
But this time the attention of an American administration could cut both ways. The terrorist attacks of September 11 forced the Bush White House to plunge back into the thicket of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But now some officials in Washington lament what they say is Arafat’s instinct for survival–and nothing else. “He is the symbol of the Palestinian national movement and symbols endure–even though he has taken the nation into another brick wall,” says Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel who played a key role in Mideast peace talks throughout the 1990s. If Arafat can’t show Washington that he is as committed to negotiations as he is to staying in power, he could end up losing American support. And the last thing he needs right now is another enemy.
Still, in its zeal to marginalize Arafat, Israel has occasionally overreached–and ended up resurrecting him. It could be happening again. After the latest intifada began in September 2000, Arafat lost a measure of popular support to Palestinian hard-liners. Some people in the street saw him increasingly as the head of a corrupt and distant local government. But since the Israeli-imposed siege in Ramallah, his popularity has surged –even among supporters of the Islamic militant Hamas group. “When Israel puts pressure on the symbol of Palestine, we line up behind the president,” says Hassan Yousef, Hamas’s spokesman in Ramallah who’s usually a critic of Arafat’s administration.
Maybe his newfound support explains why Arafat seems so confident. Despite the apparent animus between them, he doesn’t rule out an agreement with Sharon. He says one of his top aides, Nabil Abu Rdaineh, still maintains diplomatic contact with Sharon’s son Omri. And in the interview, Arafat also said he had recently phoned the Israeli leader to convey holiday greetings. “It was a warm telephone conversation from my side and from his side,” he said. The Palestinian leader pointed to the 1978 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty as proof that deals can be struck with hard-line Israeli governments. Others cite the Oslo accords that rose from the ashes of the last Palestinian uprising nine years ago as evidence that violence can sometimes produce breakthroughs.
But Arafat has already turned down one Israeli peace offer at Camp David–in July 2000, while Ehud Barak was prime minister. The two sides came closer to an agreement in talks in Taba, Egypt, weeks before Barak lost to Sharon in an Israeli election. Even now, Arafat is not sure a final accord would have been clinched with Barak: “Approximately, approximately,” he says. A year on, with little prospect for new talks, analysts now focus on Arafat’s age. For decades followers referred to him affectionately as “the Old Man.” Now, he really is old and windows of opportunity are closing.
During the interview in his office, Arafat’s manner was focused and sharp. Occasionally, his aides prompted him with talking points in Arabic and slipped him notes. But it looked more like they were adding their input than putting words in his mouth. Still, Arafat and Sharon are among the last representatives of what Palestinians call “the Generation of Revenge” and Israelis refer to as their “Founding Giants.” “They don’t have much time, a few years and that’s it,” said the European diplomat. In other words, if they can’t make peace with each other, war will outlive them both.
