Yasser Arafat is sitting in his office, at the head of a boardroom table that has been set with a fraying yellow tablecloth and dime-store English china. Around him are a dozen officials and cronies, in suits and ties or military fatigues, who are joining his nightly communal meal. Various peace awards are scattered on shelves in Arafat's inner sanctum, looking more like dust collectors than trophies. On the wall are framed pictures of Palestinians who have died fighting and a satellite map of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The hour is 11 p.m., and outside Arafat's window, the tide of the Mediterranean Sea lashes the shoreline in the blackness of the night. But the soft splashes of the waves do nothing to cut the foreboding that fills the room. On a TV in the corner is a live broadcast of the Israeli elections. Tonight Arafat's dinner seems more like a wake. His archenemy, Ariel Sharon, hasn't claimed victory yet, but with the earliest projections, Arafat has seen enough. He begins spooning up his daily bowl of vegetable soup, listening blankly as his companions talk approvingly of how Israeli Arab voters have deserted incumbent Ehud Barak.
"Try these," Arafat says, changing the subject, as if he can't cope with the results just yet. He uses his delicate, pasty fingers to pick up some hard-boiled eggs with the yolks removed, specially prepared for him, and put them on the plate of the guest beside him. Then he swirls a piece of toasted flat bread into a bowl of black paste called kazha, a blend of molasses and black cumin seeds. "Try this," he insists, his lips trembling with age.
Doing his best to hide his concern--secrecy is his middle name--Arafat is terrified to the point of paranoia, some of his confidants say, about Sharon's coming to power. Here is the former general who tried to kill him with air strikes on his Beirut bunker, who was found by an official Israeli report 18 years ago to bear "indirect responsibility" for the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Maybe the coming of the old warrior is what recently led a clearly unnerved Arafat to grab a machine gun from a bodyguard and leap out of his car when Jewish settlers in Gaza blocked the road.
Only yesterday a Palestinian dream seemed within reach. Trying to finalize the Oslo peace accords signed by the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993, Barak had agreed to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He threw in some sovereignty over Jerusalem. But Arafat bargained for more and didn't get it, then gambled on the new intifadeh, demolishing Barak's re-election hopes. So Arafat must now face Sharon, who calls him a liar and refuses to shake his hand. The dread is, it could be Beirut all over again.