THE QUIET PALESTINIAN : Faisal Husseini Is a Moderate in the Often Violent World of Mideast Politics. That Makes Him a Radical--and a Pivotal Player in the Search for Peace.

THE ISRAELI SOLDIERS CHARGED FROM AT LEAST TWO DIRECTIONS AND FIRED IN MANY MORE. Palestinians fled helter-skelter, but mostly into the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, where they could crouch behind the powerful medieval columns that frame the entry. * Faisal Husseini ducked within the panicked mob, while the wounded and dead fell to the side. That morning, Oct. 8, 1990, his wife had warned him not to go. Trouble would almost surely break out. “Why not wait to see if any other leaders go?” she pleaded. “Why must you alone attend?” * There was no other choice for a man whose father, a national hero, is entombed in the walls of the sacred compound at Al Aqsa, whose famous elder cousin once aroused Palestinians to revolt against Zionists and the British and whose grandfather once reigned as mayor of the city that surrounds the shrine. * Husseini and hundreds of other Palestinians had streamed to the mosque, where they expected to confront a group of Jewish nationalists and block a provocative cornerstone-laying ceremony at the golden Dome of the Rock, the spot from which Muslims believe Mohammed ascended to heaven. A messianic group wants to raze the Dome and build a new Jewish temple where one stood 2,000 years ago. The ceremony never materialized--it had been banned by court order--but, incited by a sudden release of police tear gas, the anxious Palestinians threw rocks on the scattering Jewish worshipers below the mosque at the Western Wall. * The police counterattack was violent--even government investigators would later call the shooting wild. Eighteen people were killed, and the events transformed Husseini. * “I had a sort of mystical experience in which I saw myself and my life very clearly,” he said not long after. “It was from that day that I wanted to be less cautious, to take more chances.” * Faisal Husseini decided he would strive to live up to the leadership role that heritage and circumstance had thrust upon him. His caution, legendary among Palestinians, would give way to a determined campaign to free his people from Israeli rule through dialogue, negotiation and compromise. No more worship of the rifle and the bomb, no more bluster, if he had his way.

“I decided I would tell the people things they didn’t want to hear,” he says. “Sometimes, they did not want to hear it. Some still don’t.”

That may not sound like much, but in the violent and fractured world of Palestinian politics, the simple commitment to compromise put him at the center of an international effort to resolve a bitter 70-year-old conflict. His call is for Israel and the Palestinians to split the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea--the Palestinians to be left with a rump state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which would then be joined in a confederation with Jordan.

Formidable forces stand in the way. Israel under right-wing governments vows never to retreat from the land won in the 1967 Middle East war. The Palestine Liberation Organization, to which Husseini pledges loyalty, is reluctant to encourage a project that means its own disappearance. Power to the West Bank and Gaza means less power to the PLO, which is exiled in Tunisia and other countries. “The peace process implies a shift of authority from the PLO to a national leadership inside,” political scientist Mahdi Abdul-Hadi says of the potentially revolutionary turn of events. “This is the nightmare of the PLO.”

Husseini has been waging a quiet battle with extreme elements of the PLO who, he believes, have undermined his vision. After the Al Aqsa killings, he wrote a poem that openly expressed his dismay. “My body is bleeding/In front I have been shot by my enemy/I also bleed from my back/Where my friend has hit me.”

The bullets from the front came from the Israelis. The ones from behind, Husseini explains, were metaphoric: from radical Palestinians and specifically Abul Abbas, the terrorist who masterminded the Achille Lauro hijacking. Real bullets, as Palestinians often remind themselves, have ended aspirations of leaders like Husseini. His life has been threatened by extremists who reject any compromise with Israel. Yet the general Palestinian population has placed hope, laced with heavy doses of skepticism, in Husseini as someone who can deliver them from Israeli rule.

He is the first leader in the West Bank and Gaza to approach equality with the “outside” PLO. When PLO chief Yasser Arafat’s plane disappeared in the Libyan desert in April, speculation turned to the possibility that the exiled PLO would give way to a leadership based in the West Bank and Gaza--headed by Husseini.

Husseini’s history and the history of his family almost naturally lead him to such a dramatic position. Before anyone had heard of Yasser Arafat, before war became habit in the Middle East, before Ben-Gurion, Begin and Shamir, the Husseinis fundamentally shaped political life in the Holy Land. In many ways, all Palestinians are marked by activities of the Husseinis--often adversely. If ever there was a family on a losing streak, this is it. Therein lies the skepticism.

There was the failure of Musa Qassem Husseini, Faisal’s grandfather, once a mayor of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinians during the 1920s and early ‘30s. At first confident that he could talk the British out of populating the land with Jewish newcomers, he would be bitterly disappointed.

Next came the mercurial and controversial Mohammed Amin Husseini, the Palestinians’ chief religious leader and a distant relative of Musa Qassem. In the ‘30s, from a noisy perch abroad, he led a bloody revolt against the British and shaped the Palestinian destiny for decades. In 1948, when Israel won independence, the debacle of his leadership condemned him and hundreds of thousands of his compatriots to life in exile.

Then, Faisal’s father, Abdel Khader Husseini, a dashing guerrilla who battled the Zionists in 1948. He would be killed in a clash along the road to Jerusalem that was one of the turning points of Israel’s war of independence.

And now Faisal Husseini, 51, hardly dashing, only faintly charismatic and operating within the tedious confines of diplomacy and gentle persuasion. He has latched onto peace talks set in Madrid, then Washington and in Rome by the Bush Administration, believing them to be perhaps the last, best chance for the Palestinians and, by extension, the Husseinis, to succeed. Thus he is willing to compromise on seemingly sacred Palestinian positions to an unprecedented degree. During a long conversation on the road to Gaza, where he is traveling to sell his political plan, he says, “If the talks fail, it is finished.”

IT WAS MAY, 1930, AND MUSA QASSEM HUSSEINI SPOKE WITH UNcommon heat. Known as a conciliator in the Palestinian community, he was unused to throwing temper tantrums, but at this moment, he was humiliated and angry. As leader of the Palestinians, he had seemingly forced the hand of the British rulers of Palestine--yet had come up empty.

He was old then, over 80, but he gathered his strength for one last blast at the British. Holding high his aquiline nose, a feature that is virtually a family trademark, he predicted the demise of moderate leadership. “We now have to meet the public, which had great expectations as to what the British government would do for them,” he advised. “We can only humble ourselves before them.”

For 13 years, the Palestinians had seen themselves threatened by the British promise to grant Jews a “homeland” in Palestine. Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration pledged that such a homeland would do nothing to compromise Arab rights. Palestinians thought differently: The date of the declaration is marked as a holiday in Israel and remembered with unrestrained despair by the Palestinians.

Musa Qassem had led popular protests against the Balfour Declaration and tried to talk the British out of it, traveling at the head of numerous diplomatic delegations.

In 1929, events rushed out of his control. A dispute arose between Jews and Muslims over Jewish worship at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest shrine. In the rioting that ensued, more than 130 Jews died, along with 16 Arabs. The violence shook British rule over Palestine, and in the aftermath, Britain sent a team to investigate. Its report affirmed what everyone already knew: Palestinians were increasingly bitter about the Jewish influx to the country. “The Arab feeling of animosity and hostility toward the Jews is consequent upon their disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future,” the commission reported.

That conclusion brought the British, in May of 1930, to the edge of a historic change of heart: A policy paper issued after the riot-commission report promised to curtail both immigration and land sales to Zionists. The Balfour Declaration appeared dead.

Then the bombshell. British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, head of a weak and vacillating government, retracted the new pledge. In a letter of assurance to Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, MacDonald wrote, “The obligation to facilitate Jewish immigration and to encourage close settlement by Jews on the land remains a positive obligation.” It would be a long time before Palestinians again looked to diplomacy as a way to solve their problems.

Musa Qassem’s career hurtled to an end, although he remained, by birthright, head of the Palestinians. The family claimed descent from Hussein, son of the Caliph Ali, and his wife, Fatma, daughter of Mohammed, the founder of Islam. Critics whispered that the aggressive Husseini clan came by the name only through marriage with a Husseini woman.

Husseinis served as legislators and bureaucrats, as mayors and muftis (interpreters of Muslim law). Feudal lords in a traditional society, they owned tracts of land in Jericho and in Jerusalem. Musa Qassem once described himself as a member of the “oldest and most honorable family in Palestine.”

After the Weizmann letter fiasco, Musa Qassem continued to lead protests. In 1933, he organized a tough file of stevedores and workers for a march in Jaffa. The crowd got out of control, and the police fired on the protesters. Musa Qassem was roughed up. A year later, he died. Palestinian lore has it that injuries from the Jaffa riot killed him, but most historians say simple old age was the culprit: He was 84.

A distant nephew of Musa Qassem, Amin Husseini, the grand mufti of Al Aqsa Mosque, pronounced compromise dead. “It is impossible to put two swords in the same sheath,” he wrote in opposition to Jewish immigration. “Likewise, it is impossible to put two peoples in the same country.”

ON A COOL, CLEAR MORNING IN JANUARY, 1990, 10 MONTHS BEFORE the fateful shootings at Al Aqsa Mosque, Faisal Husseini was called into a Jerusalem police station for questioning on charges that he funneled money to the intifada , the West Bank-Gaza uprising that was then at its height.

As Husseini strode into the central police offices, two Israeli civilians approached and screamed, “Dirty Arab, we will destroy you.” They spat on him and fled. Husseini answered stoically, “Nothing can stop the peace process.”

Israeli authorities frequently hint that they have strong proof that Husseini has incited and directed anti-Israel activity--enough evidence to put him in jail and keep him there for a long time. They locked him up on three occasions, without trial and therefore without a public airing of his alleged deeds. Right-wing Israelis go further: They see him as a devil with blood on his hands, and extremist Israeli groups distribute “wanted” posters of Husseini offering a $10,000 bounty for his capture. At the least, they say, he should be expelled from the country.

That January morning, the charges under investigation seemed marginal: Husseini was suspected of giving $900 to a young street tough to buy black T-shirts for his gang of nationalist youths. Acquaintances have little doubt that Husseini might have been involved in such a trivial transaction. As a leader, he sometimes seems more like a provincial mayor than regional head of a national liberation movement.

The dining room of his rented house in East Jerusalem has been converted into an office; computer screens vie for space with family knickknacks. His teen-age daughter, Fadwa, must retreat into her bedroom for high school studies, although his 20-year-old son, Abed, frequently runs political errands for his father. Husseini’s life is sometimes in full view of casual bystanders. When he last departed for peace talks in Washington, he rushed out of the house with a cheese sandwich dangling from his mouth. He ran back in when his wife Najat called out to complain that he hadn’t said goodby.

Husseini is addicted to the jokes Palestinians tell about themselves. (“Why did people in Hebron wear iron underwear during the Gulf War?” he asks during a lull on the Gaza trip. “Because they heard Saddam Hussein was targeting sensitive spots.”)

Yet he’s taken quite seriously by a broad constituency. His home is always filled with suitors looking for an answer to problems: how to get their kids out of jail, for the name of a doctor in Jordan or for some money to tide them over. In response to these problems, Husseini might call anyone from the American consul to an Israeli peace activist or the PLO.

Husseini has the trust of Yasser Arafat, the mercurial PLO chief, an absolute necessity for credibility. His connections with other important families of the still-clannish Palestinian community inside and outside the West Bank and Gaza give him a cushion of support. Finally--and perhaps most important--his acceptance by Washington as a Palestinian go-between has conferred an aura of influence. He is seen, for the moment, as someone who can deliver.

During the early years of the intifada , Husseini edited leaflets that provided dates for protest strikes, days to throw stones and other rebellious activity. He has set the tone for the so-called Jerusalem group of political leaders who have tried to instill principles of a “white revolution” of limited violence.

Yet he is far from the supreme leader of the intifada . In essence, the uprising never had a supreme leader and has always run collectively. When the intifada (“shaking off” in Arabic) began in December, 1987, Husseini was in jail. He commands little devotion among many of the young people who drove the revolt forward. The youths see him as the heir to a failed generation.

When a television crew visited Husseini’s home for an interview, a group of rowdy youths began to rain stones on their cars. Husseini tried to intervene from his doorstep, but the youths, unfazed, hurled stones at him.

Even if he doesn’t excite, Husseini is one of the few to emerge from the intifada who is widely recognized. On midnight visits to villages in turmoil, Husseini has shuttled about the West Bank and Gaza to mediate between hard-liners and moderates. He had the temerity to try to suppress the urge to kill informers, though to little effect.

Lately, he has won the grudging respect of the Israeli authorities who monitor his moves. “In general, he is accepted as a political leader and, unfortunately, he has performed well,” allows an Israeli intelligence official.

Despite his resume, Husseini’s political leadership has been low-key and, some would say, timid. In part, this is because the ever-unpredictable Arafat refuses to give him or anyone in the West Bank and Gaza competitive authority. West Bankers, though, view their uprising as the heart of the Palestinian battle.

A vivid example of this rivalry surfaced in the spring of 1990, when Husseini organized a hunger strike to protest the deaths of seven Palestinian laborers shot by an off-duty Israeli soldier who sat them down on a roadside before opening fire. The fast was meant to set an example of civil disobedience, and Husseini hoped that the world community would respond with a ringing condemnation of Israel. In Jerusalem’s May heat, Husseini and an array of local leaders sat under tents on the grounds of the Red Cross, refusing food.

A few days into the fast, disheartening news flashed from the coast. Raiders sent by Abul Abbas’ Palestine Liberation Front, a PLO faction, had tried to storm the beach near Tel Aviv. The raid alarmed bathers, but the group was captured before firing a shot. The commandos nonetheless sunk Husseini’s protest, and the hunger strike disintegrated. An embittered Husseini, who saw in this a direct sabotage of his role, said at the time, “Resistance should be left to those inside.” The United States vetoed a United Nations condemnation of Israel over the deaths of the laborers.

Two years later, it is Husseini who heads the team of advisers to the Palestinian peace delegation, if still under the watchful eye of PLO operatives. Abul Abbas is in disgrace. Palestinians say that Husseini has a chore that is at least as important as negotiating with the Israelis: keeping the PLO on the path of compromise.

WHEN PALESTINIAN MODERATION FAILED IN THE 1920s, AND MUSA Qassem fell, his radical nephew Mohammed Amin Husseini emerged to fill the void. The British had long feared the fiery, red-haired orator’s abilities to inspire rebellion. “He can provoke fanaticism without himself being a fanatic,” wrote one colonial official. “He is one of those uncomfortable people who love power for its own sake.”

Ironically, it was the British who handed him the source of his greatest influence. Through a shady election, they made him grand mufti of the Al Aqsa Mosque, all the better to keep an eye on him. Mohammed Amin was called hajj, derived from hajji, the honorific due Muslims who make the pilgrimage to Mecca (detractors charged that he used the title to obscure his lack of academic credentials). He had presented himself as the “Islamic and national candidate” for mufti in order to block rivals who would “hand over to the Jews the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque.”

His motives were suspect even in the eyes of his own relatives. Musa Qassem once said of him: “It is his object to be head of everybody and everything. He entirely subordinates the good of the national movement to his own personal interests.” And now the British had given his words the force of Islam.

Hajj Amin himself was cagey about his motives. “My plan is clear; personally I have no interests,” he wrote in his diary. “But I have a share in a company, and every time the shares of the company rise, my profits in the plan are increasing as well.”

The 1929 riots exposed the hidden passions of Islam, passions that Hajj Amin realized he could arouse from the pulpit. After the riots, he began to flirt with organized “armed struggle.” The disappointment of the Weizmann letter and the suspicion that Zionists were smuggling arms into the country had inflamed his followers. “How is it,” Hajj Amin bellowed in his mosque, “that the Jews are respected? They are monsters and the root of all evil in the world.”

Palestinian peasants had become alarmed at Jewish land purchases, and by the ‘30s, large numbers of tenant farmers had been thrown off the land by Arab owners who had sold their property. Hajj Amin tapped the discontent and turned it on his fellow Arabs, including rival clans that preached moderation. “If Saladin was alive today,” he said of the great 12th-Century Muslim warrior, “he would certainly fight the British, the French and Italians, but before that, he would have fought the internal traitors who sell land and cooperate with the enemy.”

By 1936, the beginning of what is called the Arab Revolt, his listeners took heed. Arab-versus-Arab conflict proved as deadly and destructive as British suppression. Contending clans and villages formed their own militias. Bitterness over land sales escalated; middlemen were murdered, and informers who kept tabs on rebellious Palestinians for the British were executed. Waves of revenge killings were set off. The terror spread to almost every town and village. Hundreds of Arabs died at the hands of the British and Zionist forces as well as in feuds among themselves.

The British blamed Hajj Amin for the bloodshed, and in 1937, they were on the verge of jailing him. He escaped into exile in Beirut by sliding down a rope from the mosque compound and disappearing into the darkness. Some say he was dressed as a woman. More sympathetic historians say he was disguised as a Bedouin.

From Beirut, he traveled to Baghdad, where he tried to raise a revolt against the British in Iraq. Among his fighters was Abdel Khader Husseini, son of Musa Qassem and a distant cousin to Hajj Amin, who was already convinced of the need for military action.

The Iraqi revolt was a flop, and Hajj Amin fled again, this time to join Hitler in Berlin. World War II was already under way, and Hajj Amin felt the Nazi leader to be an ally. Writing in his diary, he quoted the Fuhrer as saying, “I am fighting the Jews without respite, and this includes the fight against the so-called Jewish National Home.”

Eyewitness accounts suggest that because the mufti was redheaded and taken for an Aryan, Hitler was favorably impressed. Yet, in their meeting, Hitler failed to offer his visitor coffee, an omission that a Palestinian would view as extreme rudeness. Coffee or no, Hajj Amin was unable to elicit direct Nazi action as he had hoped. Hitler had as clients Italy and occupied France, which both coveted the colonial spoils of the Middle East, and he demurred on Hajj Amin’s request for an invasion of Palestine.

At the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, a witness charged that Hajj Amin had a hand in devising the slaughter of Europe’s Jews. There is no independent backing for the charge, though it was clear that at the height of the Holocaust Hajj Amin campaigned against any immigration of Jews to Palestine. Israeli officials to this day use Hajj Amin’s stay in Berlin to discredit Faisal Husseini.

After the war, the mufti fled through Switzerland and Paris to Cairo, where he watched with horror the birth of the Jewish state. He cried for holy war and dispatched Abdel Khader Husseini to Jerusalem to take charge of keeping the Zionists from taking the city.

With the Israeli triumph and creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Hajj Amin’s voice grew dimmer. In his heyday, he had set the tone of Palestinian politics for decades to come: He was the first to campaign for support from the Arab world and make the Palestinians a cause to be reckoned with in Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and beyond; the first to exploit the fervor of Islam; the first to declare war not only on the British and Jews but also on Palestinians who cooperated with them. And he was the first to lead from exile. It is hard to recount his wanderings without thinking of his indirect successor, Yasser Arafat.

Hajj Amin died in 1974 at 81, eclipsed by new leaders who, like him, shared a frustrating exile but took armed struggles to heights that would make the words international terrorism synonymous with the Palestinian cause.

IN JUNE, 1988, AS HE tried to sleep through the first night of a third incarceration at the central Jerusalem police compound, Faisal Husseini heard voices. The voices were young and wondering as they spoke of him.

“It’s an old one they’ve brought in,” the youths whispered. “Yeah, a real old man. Old, old.”

The voices belonged to teen-agers picked up for anti-Israeli protests, the kinds of kids who were leading the intifada . Said Husseini shortly after his release in 1989: “It was in prison that I got to know for the first time the young rebels from Hebron and Nablus and all over. It was an education.”

He learned of their disdain for the Israelis, their willingness to risk death with only a stone in their hand, their impatience with old-time leaders--like himself.

There was a time when Husseini had been a rebellious youth groping for a way to redeem his homeland. He came of age in exile, his family adrift after his father, Abdel Khader, failed to stop the Zionists. Husseini’s home in Heliopolis, Egypt, was a forum for hatching the empty plans of Palestinian elders.

When Husseini was 14, he heard about a demonstration to take place in Heliopolis against the United Nations. He wanted to go, but his widowed mother objected. Husseini kicked down the door leading from the house and left.

In Egypt, he joined Palestinian youth groups and bit into the dream that a unified Arab world would kick the Israelis out of Palestine. He rejected the preachings of another exile, one who used to come to the Husseini home to read revolutionary poetry: Yasser Arafat. Arafat insisted that the Palestinians must take the lead in their own battle.

Only with the collapse of the United Arab Republic, an Egyptian-Syrian try at political merger, did Husseini reconsider the Arafat option. In 1961, Husseini joined Fatah, Arafat’s faction, which would grow to dominate the PLO.

Husseini trained in military tactics in Iraq, where he also studied engineering, and in Syria. He took out a Jordanian passport. In 1965, he labored in the PLO’s Jerusalem office.

He happened to be in Syria in June, 1967, when Israeli and Arab armies lined up for the Six Day War. By the second day, Husseini, who manned an antiaircraft gun near a Syrian airport, knew things had gone badly. “I remember hearing on the radio the way that the Arabs--Jordan and Syria and Egypt--talked about the war: in grand but vague terms. Israel, on the other hand, talked in specifics. We were losing, I decided.”

He rushed to Lebanon to try to organize guerrilla warfare, stayed for a month and returned to Jerusalem through Jordan, which had lost the territory on the West Bank. Husseini swam across the river by night on his way home; the new border was not yet sealed with fences and mines as it is today. Still, the passage was dangerous, and Husseini remembers other travelers being shot near him as he crossed.

“I preferred to work as a garbage man in Jerusalem than to be a general abroad,” he says now. His pride reveals a subtext of the competition between the “inside” and “outside” leadership. The outsiders have always looked down upon the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians for their supposed meekness. Warfare from outside was considered the highest form of patriotism. For Husseini, on the other hand, staying on the land was at least as important.

Husseini hid weapons for Arafat at his home outside the Old City and agreed to train guerrillas for resistance. Israel quickly crushed such illusions, and Husseini began to consider other ways. He set up the Arab Studies Society funded by the PLO as an outlet for political debate--and also to dispense funds to activists.

His stay in Jerusalem kept him away from the most notorious activities of the PLO abroad: hijackings, terror bombings and assassination. The Israelis admired his caution if not his politics. “He was always one who was clever enough never to be too directly involved in anything violent,” says the Israeli intelligence official.

Another cataclysm produced a shift in Husseini’s thinking: In 1982, Israel invaded Beirut and expelled the PLO by force. The chances that Palestinians living in exile could defeat or even effectively harass Israel grew remote. The West Bank and Gaza were on their own, to live with occupation or confront it.

Husseini hit on a new idea, at least new for Palestinians: nonviolent protest. He led a demonstration in the main commercial district of Jerusalem and was surprised by the ferocity of the police reaction. “The aggressive manner in which the Israeli police attacked us gave me the feeling that if they were afraid of such a thing, maybe this was the way,” he says.

Still, Husseini was shocked when the intifada began in December, 1987, with rock-throwing melees in the West Bank and Gaza. He had been imprisoned the September before without trial, on undisclosed charges of anti-Israeli activity. Only when his family, on a visit to Ramle jail, told him details did he believe the accounts he had been reading in the newspapers. The “inside” Palestinians had for so long given the appearance of lethargy that even Husseini was taken by surprise.

ABDEL KHADER HUSSEIni, tall and erect, wore bandoleers across his chest like a medieval shield. Already wounded twice in battles against the British, he was returning for a third and fateful time to Palestine--to fight the Zionists who were driving to create an independent state in 1948.

Abdel Khader, Musa Qassem’s son, was sent by the mufti, who was living abroad, to fight in the hills around Jerusalem. It was, in a sense, a sacred duty. Jerusalem was the heart of Palestinian religious fervor and budding nationalism. The Jewish insurgents viewed it in the same way. In Jerusalem, Abdel Khader organized car bombings. On the road leading from the coast to the city, he led ambushes of Jewish convoys.

As a young boy, he had been frequently at Musa Qassem’s side during the many protest marches of the ‘30s, his nationalistic feelings awakened by his father’s futile efforts to cajole the British. During the Arab revolt, he led guerrillas against the British; he was wounded twice, the second time evacuated by camel to Damascus. He took part in the Iraqi revolt against Britain, another storm whipped up by the mufti. A son, Faisal, was born to him during his sojourn in Iraq.

In the spring of 1948, Arab allies had denied him weapons he wanted. Abdel Khader borrowed money to buy a load of rifles himself and left Damascus in anger.

In Palestine, the Haganah, the army of the future Israel, had been trying to free the road from Tel Aviv to relieve Jews trapped in the Old City and to supply other Jewish neighborhoods of the city. A key point on the road was the Arab village of Kastel, so called because it hugged a Crusader fortress. With its commanding view of the winding road, Kastel was a perfect staging ground for Arab ambushes.

In early April, the Haganah took the village, and Abdel Khader decided to lead a force to take it back.

His return to Jerusalem, after nine years of exile in the wake of the failed Arab revolt, was greeted with joy by his followers. There were few home-grown leaders available, and some of the most prominent community heads--and their sons--had taken off for exile.

In the days leading up to the battle at Kastel, Abdel Khader had premonitions of disaster. He wrote a letter to his wife that, while ritually predicting victory, noted, “The enemy is strong.” To his 7-year-old son, he wrote a somber poem: “Something is burning in my heart/The homeland is calling.”

Abdel Khader donned a kaffiyeh, the classic Palestinian head scarf, and led a night attack. “We can go into exile or we can die fighting here,” he told a comrade. His irregulars poured mortar on the Israeli positions, and he sent a team of sappers to blow up a house near the Israeli headquarters. The team was scared off, and the Israelis fired freely on a squad led by Abdel Khader himself. As light approached, the Palestinians withdrew.

In the morning, the Israelis inspected the dead. One soldier approached the body of a tall, thin man, his head covered in a kaffiyeh. He reached into the pockets and took out a Koran, money and identification papers.

The Palestinians, thinking Abdel Khader had been captured, launched a furious rescue mission that drove the Zionist troops from the village. There they discovered his body. War cries turned to sobs.

The Haganah counterattacked but found virtually no resistance. The Palestinians, coming from a society that values loyalty and grand gestures, had flocked to the funeral in Jerusalem where Abdel Khader was entombed near the Dome of the Rock. Kastel was never to fall from Jewish hands again. Abdel Khader’s Koran is still in the possession of the Israeli who found it.

WHEN FAISAL HUSSEINI returned from the Middle East peace conference in Madrid last November, an exultant crowd awaited him in Jericho. This time, he had crossed the bridge from Jordan by bus, not swimming furtively as he had 25 years before.

Women in their traditional long, black dresses and men in checked kaffiyehs waved olive branches, the symbol of peace from a place that has known little. Husseini was carried on their shoulders like a soccer hero. The Madrid conference had been a public-relations success. Invited for the first time to major talks on Mideast peace, the Palestinians felt they were treated as an independent actor on the world stage, and Husseini was reaping praise.

Only a few weeks later, after the second round of talks held in Washington, Husseini attended a meeting with Palestinian activists in Tulkarm, a West Bank town that nudges the Israeli border. As he started to speak, youthful opponents of the peace talks began to throw chairs and pieces of floor tile. Husseini shielded himself with a folding chair and left without making his address.

Since the peace talks began, Husseini has been walking a tightrope. No sooner had the first round ended than he warned against high expectations. In the same breath, however, he predicted that within a year Palestinians would have their own police force and control schools and hospitals on the way to independence.

It took little time for opponents of the talks to express impatience. Fights and knifings were reported between PLO youths favoring the talks and youths from Hamas, an uncompromising Muslim nationalist group. Israel kept up the pressure by continuing to confiscate land from Palestinian villages.

Still, Husseini urges patience. “This is a stage that follows many catastrophes,” he tells a town meeting with Palestinian activists in Jerusalem. “We are entering a new phase. We are heading toward political discussions, a new reality.”

The Palestinians supported Iraq during the Gulf War, reflecting their traditional hunger for a powerful Arab ally to stand up to Israel. But the choice vastly undermined the PLO’s global political standing and eroded financial backing for the Palestinian cause from oil-rich Arab states that opposed Iraq. During the war, Husseini had paid lip service to the PLO stand. Now, however, he stresses that Palestinians must proceed with negotiations. World politics is dominated by the United States, he tells his followers, and they have little choice but to throw their lot in with Washington’s designs. “We must understand the rules of the new game so that we can face the challenge and reach our goal,” he says.

In a talk in Tunisia, Husseini preached that the Palestinians must relinquish earlier demands for immediate statehood and cooperate with a peace plan brokered by Secretary of State James A. Baker III. Instead of independence being “just a stone’s throw away,” the Palestinians must accept an “interim period” of self-rule under the Israelis.

Husseini himself had rejected such a temporary solution when he was freed from his last stint in jail in 1989. “No interim solution,” he told a reporter flatly. Two years later, after eight rounds of meetings with Baker, Husseini declared, “We don’t have the luxury of frozen positions.”

Husseini specifically urges the United States to take a new role in the Middle East. With the end of the Cold War and the triumph of American-led forces over Iraq, Washington became the sole steward of regional fortunes, he says, and therefore must take a more balanced view of the needs of its Arab allies and Israel.

Husseini is a man of few but direct ideas. He is only modestly eloquent; when he seizes on a phrase, he tends to repeat it like a mantra. Palestinian colleagues chortle over his constant use of jungle to describe the Palestinian condition and international legitimacy as the basis for Palestinian demands for independence.

It is perhaps his modesty that distinguishes him from other Palestinian leaders, some of whom specialize in bombast, others in arcane academic arguments. When Husseini left jail in early 1989, he spoke quickly and decisively about the need for a solution, announcing the formula that is still not accepted by many. “We are fighting to free our people, not to enslave any other people. We are fighting to build our state, not to destroy any other state,” he said.

He later suggested another heresy: that the right of Palestinians to return to homes lost in 1948 or 1967 could be bartered for financial compensation. And another: He once told Teddy Kollek, the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, that the city could be shared as the capital of two states and that he himself would probably vote for Kollek as mayor.

His ideas are still not fully shared by many in the PLO, with which he is constantly engaged in a campaign of persuasion. During the Madrid talks, he took a secret trip to Morocco to meet with PLO chiefs and argue his case. He is careful not to step on the toes of Arafat and remains assiduously in the background whenever the PLO chief meets with the Palestinian delegation abroad. On a recent trip to the Far East, Husseini solicited permission to visit a series of countries, but he shied away from China when he was told that Beijing was reserved for Arafat. He rejected an invitation from the White House so he wouldn’t eclipse the PLO leader.

Talk of replacing Arafat is taboo. In a sense, the moderates’ goal is for Arafat to relinquish significant power as authority is granted to more pragmatic leaders. If that does not happen, and if the peace process fails, Husseini warns, “The flag will pass from the hands of those who believe in dialogue to those who believe in violence.”

These words echo Musa Qassem’s farewell to the British. On the wall of Husseini’s living room hangs a portrait of his father in kaffiyeh and with straps of bullets across his chest. Faisal’s son, Abed, often can be seen sitting quietly nearby listening intently to the talk of visitors, not unlike the Faisal Husseini of 40 years ago in Egypt, tuning into recitations of Palestinian dreams and plots. Can Faisal imagine his son in another decade talking to reporters about the chances of Palestinian independence? “No, no,” he says quietly. “By then it will be all over.”