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Arafat is a civil engineer by training, and he sees himself as more of a plodder than a brinksman. He will tell you about his long march, starting in '48 salvaging World War II rifles in the Egyptian desert. Yet the allure of a knockout punch has always proved his undoing. He envies the F.L.N. triumph over the French in Algeria, Khomeini's thundering revolution in Iran. His Palestine Liberation Organization gambits to become the de facto leader in Jordan and later in Lebanon dragged both countries into civil war. In the Gulf War, he bet on Saddam. This was all well before Arafat was ever on speaking terms with the Israelis, prior to winning the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Shimon Peres for Oslo. That was supposed to be the old Arafat. So why has he gone to the brink again?
Months of unparalleled access to Arafat, interviews with dozens of his officials and a look at confidential Palestinian papers help untangle some of the complexity of Arafat's motivations. What emerges is the journal of an aging autocrat, anxious about his place in history, alarmed by rising discontent over his leadership, feeling outmaneuvered by Israel and mishandled by the U.S., veering between peace and war. Ultimately it's the tale of a leader who found himself unwilling to risk the highest prices--his own life, the death of his dream for a prosperous, free Palestine--for a peace he couldn't believe in.
DAYS OF RAGE
Sept. 28, 2000. Two months earlier, cheering crowds greeted Arafat's return home following the Camp David summit. Now the mobs are back, hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails and firing guns and mortars at Israeli troops and settlers.
It's hard to understand the fury of the intifadeh until you spend a few hours on the Palestinian side of the lines. Mornings tend to be calm. But as schools let out or after the tumultuous funeral cortege of yesterday's dead protester, the gangs of young men and little boys stream toward the front, psyched for a new attack on "the Jews." Filled with anger and bravado, they fight their war into the night, choking from tear gas and burning tires, some felled by the bullets of the enemy.
The street is the source of all Arafat's strength. From Day One, he ensured that the intifadeh was run by the Tanzim, his Fatah organization's street militia. Controlling the street is no easy proposition. Prior to his hero's return from Camp David, impatience with the peace process was mounting. So were gripes about corruption, cronyism, press curbs and human-rights abuses in Arafat's Palestinian Authority. The discontent with his rule is still there, as thick as the tear gas and the smoke. During the second week of the intifadeh in Gaza, a mob broke away from an anti-Israel protest and marched near Arafat's office. They besieged a nearby hotel known as a watering hole for Arafat's cronies and burned the place down.