The Eternal Agitator

SCOUT TUFANKJIAN / POLARIS
Even as President, Arafat kept his military medals on display

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That was a dramatic fall. A little more than four years ago, he led his people to the brink of freedom, to a sense that their dream of an independent state was finally within reach. At the time of his death, many despaired of the possibility of anyone taking them out of the slough in which they were stuck harassed by Israeli soldiers, threatened by Israeli attacks, vulnerable to Palestinian gang rule and sinking into privation. Palestinians direct most of their outrage at Israel and the government of Ariel Sharon, but their current condition is also the product of a phenomenal failure of Palestinian leadership.

In some ways, it was Arafat's choice to close his story as he did. At the Camp David peace talks brokered by President Bill Clinton in 2000, negotiators for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was determined to make a final deal ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for good, put forward compromises more generous than any Israeli leader had offered before. But rather than consider them or offer counterproposals, Arafat threw up a stone wall of rejection, prompting Clinton to publicly blame him for the failure of the summit. Two months later, when Palestinian riots in Jerusalem expanded into a new uprising against Israel, Arafat embraced the ferment, choosing not to use his forces to constrain Palestinian militants, as he had from time to time during the previous years of self-rule. The resulting intifadeh has left almost 3,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis dead and made the possibility of peaceful coexistence seem remote.

Was this where Arafat had always wanted to be at war with Israel? Had his acceptance of Israel's right to exist, expressed implicitly in 1988 and explicitly as part of the Oslo accords in 1993, been a trick? That has become the prevalent belief among Israelis. Arafat encouraged that view by at times likening the Oslo agreements to a tactical truce the Prophet Muhammad negotiated with his enemies only so that he could later conquer them. Arafat's Israeli critics believe he never gave up on the Palestine Liberation Organization's "phased plan" of taking lands bit by bit from Israel with the aim of eventually seizing control of not only the Gaza Strip and the West Bank but Israel as well.

But there are other explanations for Arafat's abandonment of the peace process. At the beginning, he was the lead cheerleader for Oslo among the Palestinians. They were never enthusiastic about the accords because they fell far short of the minimum condition most of them required: a sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That was plainly the bait Oslo offered, but it was not guaranteed. First the Palestinians would have to submit to a test, a period of autonomy. Arafat, aging and struggling for relevance in the early 1990s, was desperate for a toehold on the future. During a heated meeting with reluctant associates in Tunis, he thumped on the table and boomed, "I cannot be excluded from this historical process."

It became clear in time, though, that Arafat failed to understand how weak a deal he had made. In an interview with TIME after the first Oslo agreement, he boasted that Palestinian "independence" would soon begin in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho. When a reporter noted that the agreement provided for limited self-rule, not sovereignty, Arafat shot back, "Who told you that? It has to be under my control. I know what I have signed." Associates confirmed later that Arafat had not actually read the document.