Ignored and Isolated, Arafat Survives

Spectrally pale, blinking in the bright winter sunshine, Yasser Arafat emerged from the battered stone building that serves as his headquarters, his home and his prison. And as he does several times a week, he declared to a small knot of waiting television cameras that he stands ready to make peace.

In Israel, though, there is scant inclination to pay attention to anything the Palestinian Authority president says -- even less after last month’s landslide election victory by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Arafat’s mortal enemy, who has said he is sorry he didn’t have the Palestinian leader killed when he had the chance.

At 74, Arafat has survived assassination attempts, a plane crash, internecine rivalries and years on the run as a guerrilla chieftain. But even by that standard, these are perilous times for him.

For more than a year, he has been confined to his once-luxurious compound, now dominated by building-size heaps of rubble and a junkyard of tank-flattened automobiles, all surrounded by sandbag emplacements.

In the streets of Arafat’s West Bank capital, Ramallah, Israeli troops and armor come and go at will. Israel, which holds Arafat responsible for the plague of suicide bombings in Israel over the last 2 1/2 years, has cut all ties with him. The Bush administration has suggested that a change in Palestinian leadership is necessary before meaningful peace negotiations can begin.

Arafat is still revered by many in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a symbol of their hopes for statehood. But his refusal to move ahead with long-promised reforms of his Palestinian Authority, which is widely considered to be inept and corrupt, has made inroads into his popularity.

Sensing weakness, old enemies are growing bolder. The radical movement Hamas, which has expressed few political ambitions in the past, declared Thursday that it was better able to run a government than Arafat -- and willing to do so.

Despite this array of pressing problems, Western diplomats who have met recently with Arafat report he seems in surprisingly good spirits: sprightly and cheerful, solicitous of his guests, airily dismissive of his state of captivity.

“Don’t forget, we lived in caves once,” said Ahmed Abdel Rahman, the Palestinian Cabinet secretary, who has been Arafat’s comrade in arms since the early days of the Palestinian guerrilla movement in the 1960s. “You think this is hard for him? It isn’t hard.”

Some diplomats, however, privately describe the atmosphere inside Arafat’s headquarters as one of studious denial.

“There’s an air of unreality about it all,” said a recent visitor who requested anonymity, describing Arafat as “upbeat in a way that doesn’t really match up with the facts of his situation.”

The Palestinian leader, who once flitted freely from one world capital to another, is isolated in a warren of rooms in the only building left intact at the compound. Inside, he eats, prays, makes an endless round of telephone calls, holds meetings, watches television news, receives visitors and sleeps -- although not in his third-story bedroom, which was hit by an Israeli shell several months ago. He was not in the room at the time.

He generally emerges only for a few moments at a time to see off guests or make short pronouncements to waiting journalists, most of them from the Arab world. On a recent warm day, he made a rare foray into the compound’s courtyard to sit briefly in the sunshine.

Most of the headquarters complex was destroyed in April, when Israeli tanks punched through the compound walls and rolled up to Arafat’s doorstep. The Israelis have been back several times, ringing the office with troops and armor. Last fall, hundreds of Palestinians defied a military curfew and flocked to the compound to defend it, banging pots and shouting protests, when it appeared that Israeli soldiers were preparing to blow up the remaining building.

Among Israelis, there is an overwhelming consensus that the time for talk with Arafat is long past -- a message that could not have come through more clearly in the Jan. 28 elections. Sharon’s Likud Party, which says making peace is impossible while Arafat remains in power, doubled its number of parliamentary seats. The left-leaning Labor Party, whose leader, Amram Mitzna, said he would be willing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority president, made its worst showing ever.

So explicitly is Arafat blamed by Israelis for suicide attacks -- even those by groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which he claims not to control -- that an Israeli court Monday ordered the Palestinian Authority to pay about $11 million to one of Israel’s national bus lines, Egged, to compensate for losses due to bus bombings.

Even Israel’s most prominent peaceniks want nothing more to do with Arafat. Yossi Sarid, an architect of the 1993 Oslo peace accords who resigned from politics after his left-wing Meretz Party’s dismal election showing, said this week that he wished he had repudiated the Palestinian leader from the earliest days of the current intifada, or uprising.

Despite the revulsion Israelis feel for him, Arafat is not completely cut off from the rest of the world. Aides come and go freely, and European diplomats and the United Nations have maintained channels of communication. Among Arafat’s most frequent foreign visitors are European Union envoy Miguel Angel Moratinos and U.N. special coordinator Terje Roed-Larsen.

The European and U.N. ties to Arafat are expected to emerge as a sticking point if mediation efforts by the so-called quartet -- the United States, Russia, the EU and the United Nations -- move forward. Sharon has said he considers the Europeans naive for treating Arafat as a potential negotiating partner and has cited that as a significant strike against the “road map” the four partners are formulating.

Arafat may have lost nearly all his trappings of power -- his helicopters and plane are long grounded, his armor-plated Mercedes wrecked, his government ministries in ruins, much of his security apparatus dismantled -- but Sharon still has less than a free hand in dealing with his longtime nemesis. With a potential war in Iraq on the horizon, the Israeli leader last year promised the Bush administration that he would not harm or expel Arafat, for fear of anger in the Arab world against the U.S. as well as Israel.

But if Sharon turns to right-wing allies to form a parliamentary coalition, he will be under constant pressure to move against the Palestinian president. In the outgoing government, the prime minister found himself cast as Arafat’s reluctant defender, resisting repeated calls by Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz to deport him.

Arafat’s lieutenants, though, fear that once a war with Iraq was underway or nearing completion, Sharon would seize the opportunity to strike.

“Getting rid of Arafat and occupying Gaza are two of Sharon’s unfinished pieces of business, and with the mandate the Israeli public has given him, I think he will move to accomplish those two things,” said Ghassan Khatib, a political analyst and member of Arafat’s Cabinet. “During the war in Iraq, international diplomacy will be diverted away from this conflict, and that might give him a chance to act.”

The two aging rulers have spent decades as bitter foes, and during the 1982-83 Lebanon war, Sharon, as defense minister, ordered attempts on Arafat’s life. But he honored an agreement to let the Palestinian chieftain and his guerrillas leave Beirut unharmed. Israeli snipers had Arafat in their sights as he departed, and Sharon later said he was sorry he had adhered to the pact.

Arafat has never brooked talk of possible successors. In recent months, a few rivals have made veiled challenges to his authority, and some Palestinian intellectuals have begun quietly questioning whether more than two years of fighting have brought anything but suffering. But almost no one dares to speak openly against him, and no one of real stature has emerged as a potential new leader.

If anything, the alternatives to Arafat are highly worrisome to the U.S. and Israel. Palestinian polls, while difficult to conduct with any precision, usually indicate that the next-most popular figures are Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, and Marwan Barghouti, who is on trial in Israel, accused of orchestrating attacks that killed dozens of Israelis.

Some observers believe the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock will last as long as Arafat clings to power.

“He’s politically moribund, but he’s not ready to be declared dead yet,” said Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. “And that freezes everything in place.”

Arafat’s physical condition has long been a question mark, but aides insist he is healthy. In meetings and rare public appearances, his facial and hand tremors -- characteristic of Parkinson’s disease, although he has never acknowledged suffering from it -- have not appeared to grow in severity. Those who have met with him say he appears energetic and able to focus on matters at hand.

In confinement, Arafat has often kept the night-owl hours he has favored for years, sometimes exhausting younger aides with all-night meetings. And his temperament has not mellowed; even senior lieutenants are subjected to occasional tongue-lashings. When asked about Arafat, ordinary Palestinians are often scathingly critical -- but add that they will never allow Sharon to dictate whom they should regard as their leader.

“If there are changes to make, it is for us to decide, not Israel, not America,” said Khalil abu Dayyeh, a vegetable vendor in Ramallah. “The Israelis picked their leader. And we have picked ours.”