Palestinians will quickly establish a consensus over which leaders will fill the formal positions of Yasser Arafat, who died early Thursday in Paris. But consensus over the way forward will remain as elusive as it has been for the past decade. It is a measure of Arafat?s unique status as a national symbol that despite that absence of consensus, Palestinian leaders ranging from moderate liberals such as Hanan Ashrawi to the hard-eyed bombers of Hamas have concurred on the role of the aging revolutionary, who spent his last three years living under virtual house arrest at the Ramallah compound where his organization now plans to inter his remains, as the symbolic personification of their national aspirations. Responding to efforts last week by Arafat's wife, Suha, to restrict access to her husband during his last days alive, Ashrawi, who had often publicly differed with Arafat on matters of policy and strategy, explained: "He is not just a husband or a father, he is father of a nation." Hamas spokesmen were equally sanguine in hailing him as the symbol of Palestinian nationhood. That legacy as the champion of the Palestinian national idea, built in the course a storied life at the head of an insurgent movement more than once left for dead, only to bounce back will play an indispensable role in keeping the Palestinian national movement intact in the immediate wake of his passing. But it may also serve as a political straitjacket on his heirs.

The "father of the nation" appellation is not simply a product of Arafat's 35 years at the helm of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), or his half-century in charge of the secular-nationalist Fatah movement he founded in 1956, and which remains the single largest party in Palestinian politics. It derives from the fact that Arafat's ascent in the national movement epitomized a Palestinian declaration of independence. Before Arafat and his comrades took charge of the PLO in 1968, the very term "Palestinian" hardly existed in the international lexicon. The fate of the Arab residents of what had once been British-mandate Palestine was viewed by the West, Israel and the Arab world as properly the responsibility of the Arab regimes. But with their failed military campaigns to destroy the Jewish State in 1948, 1967 and 1973 leaving the vast majority of Palestinians living either as refugees in the Arab world or under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, Arafat personified a determination among Palestinians to take charge of their own fate.

A declaration of independence

Until the early 1970s, there was no "Israeli-Palestinian" conflict as far as the world's media was concerned; there was simply an "Arab-Israeli" conflict. And the Israelis had prevailed. When peace and political solutions were discussed, they were imagined as compacts between Israel and its Arab neighbors shifting responsibility for the occupied territories back to Egypt and Jordan. Not that the Arab regimes were particularly enthusiastic about taking responsibility for the Palestinians, a people whose "orphaned" status shamed and mocked the pretensions of a pan-Arab nationalism that had failed to redeem them.

Arafat's PLO broke the mould, demanding an independent voice and control over Palestinian destiny — a course that ultimately set it on a collision course not only with Israel, but also at various points with many of the Arab regimes. It was a combination of guerrilla resistance, hijackings and other high-profile terrorist operations and skillful diplomacy — all undertaken on Arafat's watch although often with layers of plausible deniability between the PLO chairman and specific actions — that introduced the world to the Palestinians in the early 1970s.

In 1974, only one year after Pan-Arab nationalism's final defeat at Israel's hands, Arafat became the first non-head of government to address the UN General Assembly, and the Arab League anointed the PLO "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," formally transferring responsibility for Palestinian fate into Palestinian hands. And if Arafat's personage became the symbol of this new nationalist voice suddenly recognized in the Arab world as the revolutionary head of state of a stateless people, his mystique was burnished by his uncanny ability to beat the odds.

From the jaws of defeat

In Jordan in 1970, he cheated one political "death" after the disastrous "Black September" insurrection against King Hussein saw his organization driven out of the Hashemite kingdom and into Lebanon. There, too, he once again escaped the noose, fleeing into a new exile in far-off Tunis in 1982 after Ariel Sharon's army had vanquished his fighters. Arafat seemed irretrievably doomed in 1991 when his disastrous miscalculation of supporting Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait saw the PLO reduced to pariah status in almost every Arab capital. But within two years, he popped up on the White House lawn shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin under the matrimonial smile of President Bill Clinton. It's not hard to see how his improbable political recoveries have made Arafat a talisman of resilience for a people perennially on the brink of national extinction.

Strategic necessity and shifting political reality created a survivor's flexibility in Arafat's politics. Out in the wasteland of his exile in Tunisia, he saw the limits of military and diplomatic efforts based in the Palestinian refugee Diaspora — they could claim headlines, but ultimately do little to displace Israeli power in pursuit of the goal of Palestinian sovereignty. In 1988, for the first time, Arafat led his organization to advocate a two-state solution to the conflict, based on creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza rather than insisting on the implausible goal of ?liberating? all of historic Palestine. This apparent trimming of PLO strategic ambitions was merely an acknowledgment of a new reality on the ground — the "intifada" uprising, that had begun a year earlier, had firmly shifted the epicenter of Palestinian hopes back to the Occupied Territories. In the global political arena, young boys armed with stones and molotov cocktails that highlighted the untenability of the occupation, even to Israelis themselves, could do far more to advance the Palestinian cause than either sporadic terror attacks or huffy resolutions at the UN.

It was the resilience of the intifada generation that brought Arafat back from the political dead after the Gulf War, and ultimately brought him home, recognized by the U.S. and Israel as the head of the newly minted Palestinian Authority in 1994. The U.S. and Israel were willing to overlook corruption, cronyism, autocracy and repression in Arafat's administration as long as he kept a tight rein on Hamas and other militants. And Arafat himself maintained the ambiguity, never quite facing up to the limits on the deal he'd signed with Israel, preferring to hold his movement together by saying different things among his own followers to the things he was saying in the White House and to the Israelis. All the while, he was reading the winds, ready to change tack if they shifted. And as the chasm of expectations between his own people and his negotiating partners widened, Arafat became more elusive to both sides. Oslo's challenge

Palestinians in the territories were incensed as the plum posts in the new Palestinian Authority went not to the local leaders who had sacrificed so much in the intifada, but to exiles who returned from Tunis with Arafat and in most cases rushed to use their new positions to feather their own nests. While Arafat enjoyed his new role as feted statesman in Western capitals, some painful realities didn't change for his people: The Israeli settler population of the West Bank doubled during the Oslo years, raising Palestinian suspicions over Israel's intentions. Meanwhile, on the Israeli side, the assassination of Rabin and a series of Hamas suicide attacks in Israel had installed a right-wing government dedicated to reversing Oslo. Arafat was stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place, and looked increasingly to the Clinton administration to intervene on his behalf. The process stalled, the third land transfer envisaged under Oslo still not completed by the time President Clinton summoned the parties to Camp David for final status talks. Their failure was a surprise to no one following events closely at the time; Arafat had made clear that he was not ready for final talks before the last land transfer, but Clinton and Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak insisted they go ahead. Arafat suddenly found himself trapped between the pressures of his own base and of the wider Arab world, on the one hand, and his negotiating partners on the other. And when he failed to engage seriously with Barak's territorial offer at the talks, he was widely blamed for their failure.

But other shifts were afoot, to which Arafat appeared dangerously oblivious. Ariel Sharon was doing his utmost to scupper the deal; his grandstanding walkabout on the Temple Mount, the most sensitive piece of real estate in Jerusalem, was designed to challenge Barak's right to negotiate over its future. The action provoked young Palestinians into a series of riots that resulted in fatalities, and seven years of frustration among Arafat's base reached a boiling point. Numb to the dangers of a new round of confrontations, the Palestinian leader instead sensed an opportunity: Even though the new intifada was a rebellion as much against Arafat's own diplomatic strategy as against the Israelis, Arafat believed that fanning the flames could restore his domestic support, and also scare the Americans into wrenching further concessions from the Israelis lest the situation spin out of control. But the intifada quickly developed a logic of its own with sharp escalation on both sides, and the election of conservative governments in both the U.S. and Israel, followed a year later by the 9/11 attacks, left Arafat in a strategic cul de sac from which he never managed to retreat. He couldn't restart the diplomatic process without fighting a civil war against Hamas and even the militants of his own organization, and even if he had found the political will to pursue that course, it was doubtful whether he had the political authority to prevail. Arafat had become a prisoner not only of the Israelis, but also of his own contradictory strategy. The battered compound in Ramallah from which he watched history pass him by will now literally become his tomb.

Some of his successors, such Mahmoud Abbas, the U.S.-favored moderate who will likely inherit Arafat's formal leadership roles in Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, recognize the failure of the tactics of the past four years. They will promote compromise as a means of completing Arafat's mission of creating a Palestinian state. But the grassroots operatives of not only Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but also of Fatah itself are in no mood to compromise, and they will proclaim Arafat the very symbol of their unshakable defiance.

While the formal succession process will likely see titles passed from Arafat to Abbas without any direct challenge, Abbas will lack anything close to Arafat's political authority. There?s little reason to expect that Mahmoud Abbas will be more able to implement U.S. and Israeli demands for action against Hamas now that Arafat has gone than they were when he held veto power over their actions. The militants are already demanding a collective leadership, not simply a consultative arrangement among such old guard figures as Abbas and Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, but also that groupings such as Hamas be drawn in to strategic decision making. Abbas will hold executive power, but the reach of that executive power will have been considerably trimmed by Arafat's passing. So, the post-Arafat leadership struggle among Palestinians will not be over who holds which title, but over what direction the movement takes. And that's a struggle in which sides advocating opposing strategies will claim, with some justification, to be the bearers of Arafat's torch.

• Tony Karon
• As Palestinian moderates and militants wrestle over their movement's future, each will claim Arafat's torch