The crash is the best thing that has happened to Arafat so far this year. Before the accident, he was beginning to seem irrelevant. The Mideast peace talks were going on without his direct participation. Compared with the polished, media-wise Palestinian delegates at the talks, Arafat looked like a man from another age-“a talkative, old-style freedom fighter from sometime in the ’60s,” says a diplomat in Tunis, where the Palestine Liberation Organization is based. In addition, Arafat was still scarred from his overly close association with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Then came the crash and his dramatic survival. The stunned disbelief and gloom that enveloped the Arab world after his plane went missing was suddenly dispelled by frenzied celebration when the grizzled, seemingly indestructible PLO leader was found sitting beside a wreck that had killed his three-man crew. Contemplating his apparent demise, and the lack of a credible successor, the world had discovered that Arafat matters after all.
At 62, Arafat seems at peace with himself. Last November, he married his 28-year-old aide, Suha Tawil. Gossips speculated that Arafat had finally married in order to cover up other love affairs. But it wasn’t a politically convenient marriage. Tawil is a Christian, which offended some of the Muslim majority in the PLO, and comes from a conspicuously prominent West Bank family. It used to be said that Arafat never married because he was wedded to the revolution. Now he explains the match in the simplest terms. “I have been looking for a long time,” he says, “and at last I found someone who wanted me.”
Acting like a man who is firmly in command, Arafat bridles at any suggestion that the Palestinian delegates, who do not officially represent the PLO, are not under his control. “If they are not,” he asks, “then why have they needed my approval from the very beginning of the talks? Everyone in that delegation represents me. The Americans know that indirectly they are dealing with me; even the Israelis know they’re dealing with me.”
Arafat does not expect flexibility from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. “What he’s doing,” says the PLO leader, “is refusing to recognize what the talks are about, which is the Bush initiative proposing the exchange of land for peace. Shamir has no interest in the peace process.” Does that mean Arafat wants the opposition Labor Party to win Israel’s election on June 23? “For me, it makes no difference,” he answers. “In fact, I think I’d prefer Shamir, because he is the truest reflection of Israeli intransigence.”
He maintains that the balance of power in the Mideast has shifted in his favor and that there can be no stability in the region unless he gets what he wants. “If there is going to be peace, it will not be because Israel decides to give up land but because America and the West push the Israelis to make concessions,” he says. “There are no Soviets to cause instability in the area anymore, and the industrialized nations like America must have stability in a region where most of the world’s energy is stored. Israel used to be of vital strategic importance to America, but not now. It [still] has some value, but we have reached a historic point where the interests of today’s Israel and America do not coincide.”
He has been saying that for years; this time, there may finally be some truth in it. But is the leadership of the PLO ready for peace? The years have been hard on Arafat’s inner circle. One of the most talented men who came up with him in the organization, Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, was killed in Tunis by an Israeli hit team in 1988. The man everyone believed would succeed Arafat in case of an accident, Salah Khalaf, a brilliant political strategist also called Abu Iyad, was murdered last year by an assassin infiltrated into his security team by the rogue Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. The surviving members of the inner circle include some PLO old-timers who oppose the peace process espoused so fervently by Arafat. “I don’t see why we have to have people in our government who do not even agree with its policies,” says Bassam Abu Sharif, one of Arafat’s top aides. " They don’t have to be young-that’s not the major factor-but they should at least be committed to our program, which is to support the peace talks."
Arafat insists there is “no problem” with the PLO succession. “If I were gone, the general secretary of Fatah [the PLO’s most powerful component] is there,” he says, referring to Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO’s foreign minister. “The Central Council of the Palestine National Council is there. There are enough people to furnish a leader.” The answer is not likely to please younger, democratic elements in the PLO. Kaddoumi is a self-important old-style bureaucrat, the sort of man reformers see as capable only of preserving the slow-moving status quo.
His critics say Arafat has not yet demonstrated that he can still make the PLO respond to his will. " Now is the time for him to show whether he’s a real leader or just a survivor," says a diplomatic Mideast specialist in London. Arafat has shown leadership qualities in the past. He recognized Israel and gave his blessing to the peace talks despite the fact that both decisions angered some of his militant allies, Palestinian and non-Palestinian. He still has enough political clout to pull the Palestinian delegates out of the peace talks-or to order them to press on. In that sense, when the Israelis talk to the West Bankers, they really are talking to Yasir Arafat.
