Reversal of Fortune Lifts Arafat Again

Mahmoud Rahmi, a middle-aged Palestinian clerk, has plenty of gripes about Yasser Arafat. He considers Arafat’s Palestinian Authority corrupt and riddled with cronyism. He thinks Arafat missed opportunities to end three years of conflict with Israel, and before that squandered chances to find a path to Palestinian statehood.

But last week, when Israel threatened to banish Arafat from the Palestinian territories as punishment for allegedly fomenting terror, Rahmi was among the thousands who rushed to Arafat’s headquarters to form what they meant to be a human shield around the 74-year-old Palestinian leader.

None of this seemed contradictory to Rahmi. “What Israel did was disrespectful, not only to Arafat but to the Palestinian people,” he said. “This was hurtful to us and hurtful to our cause, and it is not something we can allow to happen.”

For Arafat -- a veteran of decades of guerrilla warfare with Israel, struggles within the Palestinian national movement and the vicissitudes of heading a government that has no state to rule -- the events of the past week were consistent with a long-standing pattern. Where the Palestinian leader is concerned, it often seems that the worse things are, the better for him.

As in the past, Israel’s move against Arafat came at a moment when his popularity and prestige were under threat. Once again, this brought about a prompt reversal of fortune.

“The Israelis rescued him -- they created a climate in which the instinctive Palestinian reaction is to rally behind Mr. Arafat,” said Khalil Shikaki, an eminent Palestinian academic and pollster.

The same thing occurred in spring 2002, when Israel placed Arafat’s headquarters under siege, using tanks to punch holes in the walls and ringing the compound with soldiers in armored vehicles. Then, as now, Palestinians rushed to lend him their support.

Before the outbreak of the current intifada, or uprising, in September 2000, and even as the fighting intensified, Arafat’s Palestinian Authority was under heavy domestic pressure to reform itself. Critics lashed its lack of fiscal accountability and the weakness of crucial institutions such as the judiciary and parliament. But as pressure mounted to present a united front against Israel, those complaints largely fell silent.

Over the weekend, as Israel faced intensifying international criticism for considering his expulsion, Arafat was having a busier-than-usual day holding court at his compound. The Anglican bishop came to call; so did several Israeli peace activists.

Arafat addressed a group of foreign diplomats, telling them that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was trying to “cancel” the Palestinian Authority itself, not simply move against its president. Schoolchildren in uniform marched through the gates, singing songs praising Arafat.

On Sunday, Israel’s vice premier, Ehud Olmert, said Israel ought to not only consider expelling Arafat, but should weigh his possible assassination. The Palestinians’ chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, called that consistent with the behavior of “a mafia, not a government.”

In Baghdad, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell rejected any attempt to assassinate or exile Arafat.

Amid the sense of crisis, debate over Arafat’s role a week earlier in the ouster of Mahmoud Abbas, the prime minister he had appointed four months earlier under U.S. pressure, receded into the background.

The incoming Palestinian Authority prime minister, Ahmed Korei, appeared to have a clearer grasp of his own limitations. Not long ago, Korei was talking to Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli peace negotiator, and the subject of Arafat came up.

“Here I am in my home village, where everyone has known me for years,” Korei said, according to Beilin, with whom he became close a decade ago during talks leading to the Oslo peace accords.

“And if I were to walk outside right now and say to them all, ‘Listen, I have reached a peace agreement with Israel, with some concessions from them, and some from us’ -- well, they would stone me.”

But if Arafat were to make the same announcement, Korei continued, people would cheer and throw flowers. “And that,” he told his old friend, “is the difference between him and me.”

The Bush administration’s pressure on Israel to refrain from expelling Arafat is doing little to restore U.S. stature in the eyes of ordinary Palestinians; they merely see it as affirmation that the Americans were wrong in the first place to go along with Israel’s efforts to sideline the Palestinian leader.

While the unpopular Abbas had insisted again and again that the American-backed peace plan known as the “road map” was the only way forward, Arafat belittled Israeli concessions associated with it as insignificant. Now, Shikaki and other analysts say, most ordinary Palestinians believe Arafat was right.

The small, early gains made by the Palestinians -- the removal of some roadblocks in the West Bank, the granting of more freedom of movement within the Gaza Strip -- have been rolled back by Israel amid the descent into violence in past weeks, including three Palestinian suicide bombings that killed 38 victims.

“We’re not better off -- we’re worse off than ever,” said Yousef Rimawi, a soft-spoken Palestinian dentist from Ramallah. “We are living in hell, and this is plain to everyone.”

Arafat’s predicament has not shifted the focus of Israeli- Palestinian disputes away from security, the issue that Israelis often emphasize, to Palestinian complaints about occupation. But it has snatched the spotlight away from Arafat’s main rivals -- the Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which over the last three years have staged suicide bombings that have killed and maimed hundreds of Israelis.

Hamas had been experiencing a wave of Palestinian public sympathy over Israel’s campaign of assassination against the group’s leaders and operatives -- triggered by an Aug. 19 Hamas bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed 23 victims.

Even many moderate Palestinians were shocked by Israel’s targeting of Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who is half blind and uses a wheelchair, and by the bombing of the home of another Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, which injured his wife and daughter and killed his son.

Both leaders escaped, but more than a dozen other Hamas leaders and operatives, together with several bystanders, have died in the Israeli strikes.

The threat to expel Arafat, however, seemed to carry far more symbolic weight than the campaign against Hamas.

“The Islamists are in a very difficult position, and have very narrow maneuvering power against Arafat now, because of the fear of the Palestinian street’s massive support for him,” said Palestinian political analyst Hani Masri.

On the Israeli side, there is the belief in some quarters that Arafat will continue to exert influence as long as he lives.

“Sometimes you can’t hasten the historical process, or the societal one,” said political scientist Efraim Inbar of Bar-Ilan University. “I think we simply have to wait until he and his generation die -- only then can we deal with the next generation of Palestinian leaders.”