NEWS ANALYSIS : Arafat’s Health Woes Raise Fears About Peace Process : Mideast: Possible successors lack charisma of chairman. But PLO says cause goes beyond one leader.

Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman, professed himself to be in fine health last week when, recovering from a bout of flu, he discussed his fears for the future under Palestinian self-rule.

But on closer scrutiny, in his interview with CBS television anchorman Dan Rather, Arafat’s hand appeared to shake. It was merely a quiver, but it was enough to send chills through those most committed to making peace work between Palestinians and Israel.

“It looked like he was cracking, that the pressure has gotten to him. He should have been in command in such an interview, but instead he was shaking,” said Samir Masri, a businessman in Nablus who, like thousands of other Palestinians in the West Bank, watched the interview rebroadcast on Israeli television--and worried.

“The only reason for him to go on American television like that was to show he wasn’t hospitalized or dying,” Masri said. “But doesn’t that mean he is close to it?”

Last week’s hospitalization of Arafat, attributed to a vertebrae problem followed by a cold and sore throat, was dismissed by senior PLO officials as a minor flare-up that followed weeks of exhausting travel and long hours. But it was enough to raise new concerns about how long the 64-year-old chairman can travel the strenuous road toward peace.

Assassination threats against Arafat--made by Palestinian radicals since he signed the controversial peace agreement with Israel last fall--have fueled a nagging question: What if he died? Could the peace process, carried virtually alone on Arafat’s back amid a storm of opposition in the Palestinian ranks, survive? Is there a successor in the wings?

Farouk Kaddoumi--Arafat’s most prominent heir apparent in the PLO hierarchy, and currently PLO political department chief--has been a strong critic of the “Gaza-Jericho first” interim peace plan; only a bare majority of the PLO Executive Committee has backed Arafat in implementing the plan.

A PLO with Kaddoumi at the head might well lack the determination it will take to make a success of interim peace in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, skeptics say.

And neither Kaddoumi nor the other PLO leader most often mentioned as a potential successor--peace plan architect Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Maazen)--has much in the way of a following in the occupied territories.

Both men certainly lack the charisma and history that Arafat calls on to muster unity among mutinous ranks when his peacemaking efforts run into trouble.

Thus, Israel--and even the wealthy Gulf Arab states that have fruitlessly sought an alternative PLO leader to back since Arafat enraged them with his support for Iraq in the Gulf War--have been forced in recent years to pray quietly for the health of the kaffiyeh-clad guerrilla they loathe.

“If Arafat dies today or tomorrow, it would be incredibly destructive to the peace process, absolutely paralyzing at a time when it should gather speed,” said Barry Rubin, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University and author of a history of the PLO.

But PLO leaders close to Arafat insist that the peace process has gone beyond the health of a single leader. “If Arafat died, the Fatah Central Committee would meet and it would select a new leader within 24 hours,” said Mohammed Sobhieh, secretary general of the Palestine National Council and PLO ambassador to the Arab League.

“We have made a collective decision for peace, a decision that goes beyond one man, starting with 1974, when we voted to establish a Palestinian state on any territory vacated by Israel, (and) going on in 1988 in Algiers, when the PNC adopted (U.N. Resolutions) 242 and 338” establishing the principle of land for peace, Sobhieh said. “Now it is too late to turn back.”

Speculation and outright alarm about the possibility of his demise are nothing new for Arafat.

Dodging bombs and bullets through years of turmoil in Jordan and civil war in Lebanon, Arafat was left standing alone at the PLO helm after the assassination near his headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, of the only two men besides Arafat ever considered serious candidates for political supremacy in the PLO: Khalil Wazir (Abu Jihad) and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad).

When three of his men were killed when his plane went down in a sandstorm in Libya in 1992, Arafat, huddled in blankets and pillows in the back of the plane, survived. He emerged in apparently excellent health after surgery to remove a blood clot on his brain not long after the crash.

The conventional wisdom is that the mercurial PLO chairman has survived wars, international isolation and countless threats to wash Arab streets in his blood but that finally, if he died, peace would not survive him.

A new dynamic has entered the turbulent world of Palestinian politics since the day Arafat signed his historic peace deal with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in September. The new politics carry the seeds not only of more political pluralism within the PLO hierarchy--an organization where the first and last decisions may one day not be made by Arafat alone--but of a new era when peace might outlast the men who made it.

For the first time, Palestinians are looking at the possibility later this year of electing a ruling council for the West Bank and Gaza; Arafat’s Fatah organization will run like any other political party for votes. Even PLO leaders like Kaddoumi who have opposed the peace plan have agreed to work to begin implementing it--lending a momentum that may be difficult to stop as self-rule bears fruit.

Most Palestinians say Arafat’s successor would almost certainly be a PLO member from outside the occupied territories, most likely Kaddoumi, Abu Maazen or someone else from within the central committee of Arafat’s Fatah organization, the largest component of the PLO.

At the same time, there is a substantial minority that sees West Bank Fatah leader Faisal Husseini emerging as leader if the succession occurs after the Palestinian Authority is up and running, particularly if it holds elections Oct. 15 as announced.

Many of the PLO officials who say Kaddoumi would most likely succeed Arafat also say his ascension would not be fatal to the peace process. On the contrary, it might help hold the PLO ranks in and outside the territories together while a final peace solution is negotiated.

Kaddoumi’s preference, say PLO officials close to him, probably would be to leave the Palestinian Authority to handle issues in the territories while he focused on international contacts and on negotiations for Palestinian statehood and freeing Arab East Jerusalem from Israeli control.

Officially, the Israelis agree with senior PLO leaders who say the peace process has moved beyond a single man. “We are dealing with not an individual but with the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. The peace process, including the agreements signed in Oslo, Washington and Cairo, has its own strength and own roots now,” said an Israeli Foreign Ministry official.

Another Israeli involved in the peace negotiations said the realization that Arafat will not live forever “is a question that has occurred to us and has grown larger in recent days, but it is an issue that, from the outset, we worked into our negotiating assumptions.”

“So, our best judgment was that a political struggle would follow, both in PLO Tunis and inside the territories, but it would probably--I stress the probably--not be bloody and would not bring total chaos,” he said.

So goes the optimism. Meantime, most talk about Arafat’s health, after the usual booming assertions that all is well, turns to worry.

Riad Malki, a West Bank leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, observed of Arafat: “He looked unwell, worse than we have ever seen him. He certainly could use a rest. . . . I wouldn’t like to say more than that.”

Murphy reported from Cairo and Parks from Jerusalem.