A Chat With Arafat Over Chicken and Chips

Two weeks ago, I dined with Yasser Arafat in his compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah. He seemed in good health and excellent humor, high-spirited and joking. There was no intimation of the current illness that has the world wondering if the longtime Israeli-Palestinian stalemate is about to change.

Arafat was frail and a little stooped after 75 years of a very unusual life, but the charisma that must have helped him become the symbol of Palestinian nationalism was evident. I hadn’t expected, for instance, that the man that many see as the single biggest obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace would serve us chicken, chips and Coca-Cola or sport an Israeli flag amid the motley collection of lapel pins that adorns his khaki jacket. But he is a man of many contradictions.

Arafat has been confined to a former British police station in Ramallah for 41 months (although he is now being allowed to leave for medical treatment).

Our small group was escorted to the compound by two Palestinian police cars, sirens blazing. Very impressive, but privately the police told us that they’re virtually broke.

We were driven in through an 8-foot-high gate that immediately slammed shut behind us. Inside the compound were several buildings, one largely ruined from Israeli military strikes. Piles of sandbags and burned-out cars still surround the smashed-in building. To enter Arafat’s building, we needed to get past half a dozen armed, jumpy young men in combat fatigues. Our dinner table was laden with a mix of Palestinian dishes and fried goodies, but Arafat himself only picked at a plate of vegetables and fruit, and had a spoonful or two of natural yogurt. As the meal began, he took some small pieces of sweet corn and broccoli from his own plate and handed them to each guest. An aide said, “You see -- he shares with the people.”

It was a bizarre gesture, oddly touching. Still, his people might be more impressed if their president would help them recover the millions of dollars that have gone missing from Palestinian Authority funds over the years, and much of which is rumored to be in the hands of his estranged wife in Paris.

Arafat looked animated and cheerful despite his confinement. He showed me some of his badges, souvenirs of previous visitors: flags, university logos, trademarks of grass-roots peace movements, a menorah, a picture of the Virgin Mary. Stuck to his military jacket, they created the effect of some piece of vintage punk memorabilia. And, of course, it was all topped with his trademark kaffiyeh, apparently worn in the shape of a map of historical Palestine.

It is hard to reconcile the large-scale legends of Arafat’s life with the small man who stood in front of me. This man had done more than anyone else to create Palestinian nationalism yet is widely blamed for undermining the prospect of a Palestinian state. He is hated by his people for corruption and compromise and simultaneously loved by them as an icon of revolution and leadership.

Arafat fights to retain personal control over the Palestinian Authority but is unable to visit most of the territory he supposedly rules. For exercise, he said, he walks around the table or up and down the stairs.

At one point I asked: Looking back on his decades of leadership, is there anything he would have done differently? Immediately, he began: “I regret that we lost the opportunity at Camp David.” I wondered if he was about to admit to some previously unacknowledged error. Of course not. Instead, he launched into a lengthy criticism of the Israeli peace offer made in 2000.

Other people at the table picked up on the question, and it became something of a game: “Do you have any regrets, Mr. President?” Arafat said: “For your information, we accepted the road map in accordance with U.N. Resolution 1515.” Someone else tried the same question in Arabic. Arafat said: “Do not forget that fanatical Jews killed my partner, Yitzhak Rabin.” (Israeli Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli extremist in 1995 after he signed the Oslo peace accord with Arafat.)

Arafat has a capacity for denial that might be astounding if it wasn’t so tragically common in this conflict. The strangest example is when he was asked about the Qassam missiles (homemade rockets developed by Hamas) used by some Palestinian militants, which the Israeli government says provoked its latest strikes in Gaza. Arafat simply said: They have never hurt anyone. But what about the two Israeli toddlers who were killed by Qassams in September? “They were not killed by the rockets,” he said. “They merely died from the shock.”

At times, Arafat seemed old and forgetful, wandering through history in circles, hypnotized by his revolutionary past. He was flanked by aides who murmured frequent additions and corrections while he was speaking, but he was quick to silence them when he liked. Discussing relations with Israel, Arafat sounded fairly pragmatic. The Palestinian leader was pessimistic about prospects for reconciliation while Ariel Sharon is in power but, surprisingly, said that peace might be easier if Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the premiership. Yet Netanyahu is opposed to Sharon’s plan to pull settlers out of Gaza? Arafat laughed with an expansive hand gesture and said: “It’s an election campaign!”

Arafat had mixed feelings about the Gaza plan. Of course, he welcomed Israeli disengagement. But, like many other Palestinians, he suspects that it will stop at Gaza, leaving the issue of the West Bank unresolved. As he reminded us, he rejected a similar offer in 1978 because “Gaza alone was not enough.”

On one issue at least, Arafat agreed with senior Israeli intelligence officials. Both say that Iran is funneling increasing amounts of cash to militant groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Arafat offered a simple explanation: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “is a troublemaker.” He also criticized Egyptian cleric Sheik Yousef Qaradawi, whose recent visit to Britain met controversy over his pronouncements on women’s rights and suicide bombings. Arafat said he had once helped secure Qaradawi’s release from an Egyptian jail. A quick-witted glance, and a laugh. “There -- that was my mistake!” Arafat said, grinning.