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Despite his fire-eating anti-Israel rhetoric, Arafat in private is quiet, almost self-effacing. He seldom talks about himself or his past life, largely, it seems, because he wants to avoid creating a personality cult. Within Al Fatah and the P.L.O., he has no close-knit circle of advisers or a kitchen cabinet. At staff meetings he solicits opinions from everyone, picking and choosing from the advice given him. Compared with Egypt's expansive President Sadat or even with the zealous George Habash, Arafat has little in the way of charisma, but he can inspire devotion nonetheless. In part, that may be because he seems to care genuinely about his fellow Palestinians-in-exile. He will take time to get involved in such homely matters as helping to arrange a fedayeen marriage or seeing that a commando's child is enrolled in the right school.
Al Fatah and its sister fedayeen groups have carried on a relentless campaign of military action and terror against Israel, both in the Middle East and elsewhere. Since the Six-Day War, when the guerrillas undertook an anti-Israel campaign that the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan were too devastated to mount, the warfare has resulted in the deaths of at least 800 Israelis and the wounding of 2,350. In savage, eye-for-eye retribution, the Israelis have returned terror for terror—usually in the form of attacks on commando strongholds and Palestinian camps in Lebanon and Syria and the West Bank. In all, more than 3,300 have died in these raids. Beyond that, the Israelis formed supersecret death squads that were responsible for killing more than 100 suspected Arab operatives in various parts of the world.
Acts of Terror. In the popular mind, at least, the Palestine Liberation Organization has been blamed for most of the acts of Arab terrorism. In fact, the P.L.O. is anything but a disciplined group, and Arafat has frequently had difficulty in controlling some of its wilder members. He has publicly condemned some of the most outrageous acts of terror carried out by his affiliates within the P.L.O., not so much on moral grounds but because they hurt the fedayeen image.
The end result of a quarter-century of horrors committed by both sides has been an implacable enmity between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The big question now for the Middle East is whether this enmity can be overcome—and if so, how? It will not be easy, since the goals of the Israelis and the Palestinians are seemingly irreconcilable. Israel, of course, is wholly committed to its self-preservation as a predominantly Jewish state on the shores of the Mediterranean. Arafat, the moderate, and Habash, the radical, may differ on means, but both men are nonetheless dedicated to the same ultimate goal—the replacement of Israel by a new secular Palestine for Jews and Arabs alike. Arafat is ready to settle for the creation of an interim, more limited state composed of the West Bank, Gaza and the Hamma region—but this would be only a base for continuing a cultural, political and perhaps military competition with