Palestinians Peek Past Arafat at the Future

At Yasser Arafat’s battered compound, strings of plastic flags bearing his familiar, grizzled image flap in the hot wind. Within these walls, the veteran Palestinian leader still reigns as the rais -- the president, the chieftain, the undisputed authority.

But outside, in the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a long-taboo question is being whispered, and at times even boldly asked aloud: Could the old man be finished?

Nearly all observers -- Israeli intelligence analysts as well as Palestinian politicians -- agree that the current outbreak of internal dissent poses the most serious challenge to Arafat’s authority in the decade since the inauguration of the Palestinian Authority, the increasingly enfeebled governing body he heads.

Most of these observers believe that the Palestinian leader will be able to ride out this storm as he has so many others, but that he will emerge with his prestige and power diminished. The question is how badly.

“It could be the beginning of the end for him -- there’s no doubt he’ll come out of this conflict weaker than going in,” said Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab. “But he’s clever enough not to allow any particular thing to be the issue that breaks him. I wouldn’t count him down or out.”

Now a few weeks away from his 75th birthday, confined to his shell-damaged Ramallah headquarters for most of the past 2 1/2 years, his life repeatedly threatened by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Arafat has always displayed a preternatural talent for personal and political survival.

For most Palestinians, he still embodies their aspirations to statehood, even though many also believe that after nearly four years of bloody conflict, that dream is a distant one.

Throughout a political crisis that has lasted more than a week -- an eruption of street unrest in Gaza orchestrated by foes within Arafat’s Fatah faction, a resignation bid by Prime Minister Ahmed Korei and a spate of unprecedented public criticism by Palestinian lawmakers -- Arafat has, according to the accounts of several people who have recently spent time around him, behaved in typically erratic fashion.

He has alternately confronted his opponents and sought to placate them. He has given way to fits of temper in meetings with aides and associates but also displayed extreme solicitousness, including his habit of feeding those around him tidbits of food from his hand. He has stood firm on some points, such as his refusal to accept Korei’s resignation, but reversed himself on other matters, such as his appointment of a cousin, Moussa Arafat, as Palestinian security chief in Gaza.

But if Arafat is inconsistent in his behavior, so is his constituency. Even many Palestinians who long for reform and desperately want to see day-to-day power placed in the hands of the prime minister are alarmed by any move to push Arafat aside.

“He has been a constant presence in our lives for so many years, and he symbolizes for us all the hardships we have suffered,” said laborer Mohammed Taji, sweating in the sun while he waited in a jostling crowd at an Israeli checkpoint last week. “We cannot stop looking up to him.”

But the anger over well-documented corruption runs deep.

“We need real reform in the Palestinian Authority,” said Ziad abu Khosa, a 22-year-old Gaza resident who took part in protest marches this week.

Arafat has never hesitated to use intimidation and force to quell internal dissent. Outspoken opponents, including politicians and intellectuals, are likely to find themselves behind bars or worse. Palestinian infighting has also been dampened over the last four years by the desire to present a united front in the struggle against Israel.

For decades, from his days as an exiled guerrilla leader, Arafat has jealously guarded his power and regarded any would-be successor as a threat. Many of his bitterest rivals and harshest critics started out as his proteges.

Those include Mohammed Dahlan, the former security chief in Gaza who is regarded as a driving force behind the current turmoil, and Nabil Amr, an ex-information minister who was seriously wounded in a shooting attack this week. The assailants were unknown, but suspicion fell on allies of Arafat.

It had been thought for years that two leading Palestinian politicians -- Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, and Korei, known as Abu Ala -- would be logical successors to Arafat, even if he refused to anoint them as such. But now that each in turn has quit the post of prime minister in disgust, though Korei remains as a caretaker, others are struggling to build a power base.

Even if the immediate unrest dies down -- and many expect it will -- some observers believe that the foundation of Arafat’s absolute rule has been permanently cracked.

“I think it’s going to subside for now, but there will be future clashes as the competition between potential heirs to Arafat goes ahead,” said Hillel Frisch, an analyst at Bar-Ilan University. “And they know they’re fighting against time, because all the while Hamas is gaining in popularity among [Palestinians], while Fatah is weakening.”

The militant group Hamas stands to benefit from the Fatah infighting, and reports in both the Israeli and Palestinian press suggest that its leaders are ready to lend support to Arafat in battling Dahlan’s forces in Gaza. But such an alliance would probably be a temporary one.

In the eyes of most Palestinians, Israel, to a much greater degree than Arafat, bears the blame for the systematic destruction of Palestinian governmental institutions established in the mid-1990s with the advent of the Palestinian Authority.

“Israel did everything possible to strike at the infrastructure that was being built,” said former lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi. “There is an internal dynamic at work here, yes, but it is driven by the Palestinian people’s sense that their government cannot protect them against Israel.”

Even though many of Arafat’s rivals within Fatah describe themselves as proponents of reform -- and some actually are, though mainly as a matter of pragmatism -- few see the turmoil of the last week as anything other than a struggle for power.

“Unfortunately, it’s not a fight between the good and bad -- it’s between the bad and worse,” said Bassam Eid, a Palestinian human rights activist. “It’s not a real fight against corruption, but if other forces are drawn in, it could become a real revolt against Arafat’s authority.”

As has long been the case when there is any talk of a Palestinian leadership change, the state of Arafat’s health is a factor. He is thought to have Parkinson’s disease, and those who meet with him regularly say his energy level and degree of lucidity can swing wildly within the span of a few hours.

Although this turmoil seemed to flare abruptly, Arafat has seen a slow leaching away of his power for some time.

He agreed under heavy U.S. pressure last year to the creation of the post of prime minister, and his once-absolute grip on enormous funds has been loosened by reforms initiated by the American-backed finance minister Salam Fayyad. That, associates say, has made the Palestinian leader determined to hang on to control of the security forces, seeing them as his last real base of support.

At times when his popularity has flagged, Arafat has enjoyed salvation from an unlikely source: his lifelong enemy, Sharon. Over the last several years, periodic Israeli threats against Arafat have strongly bolstered his standing. Huge crowds of Palestinians have several times rushed to defend the Muqata, his compound, when it was menaced by Israeli troops.

Sharon’s determination to isolate Arafat in his headquarters has in some ways backfired, making him an imprisoned martyr in Palestinians’ eyes. But over time, it has also robbed the Palestinian leader of his ability to connect with his people.

“Not being in Gaza, or anyplace else, means he’s not really able to know what regular people are thinking or saying,” said Kuttab, the journalist. “His information is very much filtered by those who have access to him, and his decisions are tainted by the reality of not having information.”

Longtime watchers of Arafat are aware of his tendency to be energized by chaos, although infighting of this nature may prove more complex and ultimately far more sapping than facing a foe like Israel.

For all his reputation for canniness, Arafat may have fallen victim to what Israeli intelligence analysts like to call “riding the tiger” -- enlisting the aid of violent elements in order to appear to be at the forefront of the struggle against Israel. Now some of his most vehement detractors are people such as Zakariya Zubeidi, the West Bank leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a militia that Fatah helped build.

“Arafat is like a man who was digging a hole, and then suddenly he falls into it,” said Eid, the human rights activist.

There is no tradition in the Arab world of a leader of Arafat’s stature voluntarily giving up power.

“Such a thing isn’t part of our thinking or our vocabulary -- there is no chance of Arafat stepping down by himself,” said Rafiq Natsheh, a former Palestinian Cabinet minister. “In this part of the world, the ruler is replaced only by the undertaker’s certificate. And Arafat believes he will live forever.”