Diplomats Recall a ‘Maddening’ Leader

Yasser Arafat was as much a hero to his supporters as he was a villain to his adversaries. But to those who dealt with him most closely -- often from across the negotiating table -- the Palestinian leader was an unpredictable political figure.

American diplomats and others described a man who was engaging, frustrating, and indecisive at critical moments. A few days after the November 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat asked Edward Abington, then a U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, to smuggle him in his car from the Gaza Strip into Israel so he could pay his respects to Rabin’s widow in Tel Aviv.

“I suggested it was too risky,” said Abington, who eventually brokered a secret trip for Arafat on an Israeli military helicopter.

For the occasion, Arafat exchanged his trademark olive fatigues and black-and-white head scarf for conventional clothes.

“It was an extraordinary sight -- the old, balding man sitting there [in Leah Rabin’s apartment] paying his respects,” said Abington, now a political consultant to the Palestinian Authority.

Although Arafat nurtured the dream of a Palestinian state, he did not take the steps that would bring him closer to that goal, diplomats said.

“What sums up the relationship I had with him was his organic inability to reach a decision,” said former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who dealt with the Palestinian leader over several years, including the period after the Oslo peace accords in 1993.

Christopher recalled waiting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for hours in Mubarak’s Cairo office in early May 1994, as Arafat negotiated with Rabin in a room next door. They were haggling over the geographical boundaries of the West Bank city of Jericho, newly under Palestinian control.

An agreement was finally reached about 1:30 a.m., and Mubarak decided to mark the achievement with a lavish signing ceremony the next day.

In a large auditorium filled with high-ranking Egyptian government officials and foreign dignitaries, Arafat refused to sign the agreement he had made only hours earlier. To Mubarak’s embarrassment, the Palestinian leader had changed his mind. He eventually signed the next day, but only after being assured that he could renege on the deal during a grace period.

“It felt like an eternity as one after another of us tried to persuade him to sign,” Christopher recalled. “I never witnessed anything like it.”

Christopher suggested that Arafat’s difficulty in being decisive might have been caused by the absence of a Palestinian government structure.

“Arafat was not the leader of a country, but the leader of a people,” Christopher said. “There wasn’t anything for him to refer [decisions] to. He was always trying to get a little bit more for his people.”

For most of Arafat’s years leading the Palestinian cause, America and Israel were his great enemies. Yet, he was fascinated by both, said those who knew him.

Dennis B. Ross, who served as Middle East envoy and chief peace negotiator for former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton, said Arafat was “maddening to deal with.”

Now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Ross estimated that he spent more than 500 hours with the Palestinian leader.

Arafat was able to make hard decisions, he said, including when he agreed to secretly negotiate the Oslo accords with Israel and when he accepted limited autonomy as a step toward achieving a Palestinian state.

Over the years, Ross met with Arafat in the Palestinian leader’s offices, at the White House, at Camp David and at Arafat’s homes -- where the Palestinian leader liked to serve food to Ross and his delegation with his own hands and could be charming and warm.

Although some saw Arafat’s behavior as bizarre, Ross believed that he was rational throughout negotiations and that his manipulations resulted from his weak political positions.

“I always felt that everything we saw was the rationality of irrationality,” Ross said. “I thought everything we saw was done for a purpose.”

Ross said Christopher thought Arafat was unstable when the Palestinian leader began shouting at the secretary of State when they met for the first time in Amman, Jordan, in December 1993.

“But I think he was trying to convince Christopher that this was the kind of guy who had to be accommodated,” Ross said.

Christopher said that after he told Arafat he would not listen, the Palestinian leader backed down.

“He never did that again,” Christopher said.

Arafat always seemed attracted to -- and felt most comfortable with -- Israel’s military leaders, Ross said. Arafat spoke warmly of Rabin after the Israeli leader was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. Although he never developed a relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Arafat longed to make contact with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Ross said.

“The one he really most wanted to respect him was Sharon,” Ross said. “When Sharon was foreign minister, I raised the idea with Arafat: ‘What if I could arrange a private channel between you and Sharon?’ Arafat was eager to do it.”

That back channel never happened. Sharon refused to shake Arafat’s hand, and when the Palestinian leader died, Sharon did not even mention his name in a statement.

Arafat’s unusual behavior dated back to his emergence on the world scene.

In 1974, the United Nations granted observer status to the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Arafat became the first representative of a nongovernmental agency to address the U.N. General Assembly.

Wearing a holster on his hip, he said: “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

A retired U.N. official recalled that “Arafat wanted to brandish his pistol, as well as an olive branch, while standing before diplomats. But what was not widely known at the time is that the holster was empty.

“We had to work day and night to get him to give up his gun,” said Samir Sanbar, then the director of the U.N. Center in Beirut.

“We persuaded him that the U.N. was a place of peace, and that it would be a grand gesture as a revolutionary to present it to someone as a gift -- before he went into the U.N.”

Arafat’s interest in the U.S. endured to the end.

Despite being largely isolated in his Ramallah compound in the West Bank and having no official contact with the Bush administration, Arafat responded enthusiastically to an offer of a personal readout on the recent U.S. general election, Abington said.

“He wanted me to come and discuss it,” Abington said.

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Times staff writer Maggie Farley at the United Nations contributed to this report.