As Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat lies on his
deathbed in a Paris hospital, in a coma, lurched in
that place between life and death, there is much cause
for sober reflection in the Israeli and Palestinian
camps. He was controversial in life, just as he will
be in death when they try to find a proper burial
place for him. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has
already said that Arafat would not be buried in
Jerusalem so as not bolster Palestinian claims to the
city or the Temple Mount.

We are not sure if the last images of Yasser Arafat,
the grey fox, the lion of Ramallah, sporting that
dapper hat, will be the ones of him getting into the
helicopter to be whisked away to Paris for medical
attention. The few hundred onlookers who came to show
their support during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan
called out one of his favourite Palestinian sayings:
the mountain cannot be shaken by the wind.

The stories of Arafat are legendary in this part of
the world. There are those who still talk about the
time Arafat kissed their hand. At the Muqata, his
battered Ramallah headquarters, you are more likely to
met by amiable security guards and be taken for dinner
by his scheduler than find your life in danger. In
the back of the compound there are metal poles several
meters high encased in barrels of cement to provide a
sufficient deterrent to Israel's Apache helicopters
from descending far enough to get a clear shot at
Arafat. From there, you can see the parking lot which
serves as a kind of make-shift museum of blown-up
BMW's, Mercedes and Fiats, almost curated, as if to
serve as a critique of Israeli military aggression.
From this perspective, the Muqata looks more like a
gaudy, sprawling auto parts dealership than a palace
befiting the President of a nation.

When the fighting did get tough, Arafat was quick to
be on the phone with Egyptian President Husni Mubarek
and French President Jacques Chirac pleading for
diplomatic missives against Israel and support from
abroad. When he was under siege in 2002, remaining
steadfast, he again captured the attention of his
people as a symbol of resistance at a time when his
support was waning.

If Israel had really wanted Yasser Arafat dead, they
could have killed him long ago just as Sheikh Yassin
and Abdel Rantisi had been assassinated by the IDF
earlier this year. The difference was that Arafat was
the President and the international outrage would have
isolated Israel and sent it further in the direction
of a pariah state.

Arafat was basically under house arrest since late
2001 and had to seek permission just to leave the
compound and get assurances from Prime Minister Sharon
that he would be allowed back in the country after his
medical treatment.

Arafat was not just the symbol of Palestinian
aspirations, he was after all the controversial and
misunderstood figure who defined "terrorist chic" for
the Western world and who never felt totally
comfortable with him. Dressed in his khafiya,
surrounded by advisors, he was the face on the evening
news after an act of violence. This told more the
Western view of Arabs than being anything close to
reality.

Arafat's return was also associated with that method
of dissent that so repulsed the rest of the world and
made allies of the Israeli and Palestinian street -
the suicide bomb. And so it was easy for those in
the West to malign him simply as a supporter of
violence. To do this, was to undermine the complexity
of the situation. President George W. Bush, never one
to grasp a complex situation, continued to vilify the
weakened and increasingly irrelevant Arafat, the
former Nobel prize winner.

Arafat was born in 1929 in either Jerusalem, Gaza or
Cairo - nobody really knows for sure. His mother died
when he was five and he was sent to live with his
uncle in Jerusalem. He never speaks about his father.


One of his earliest memories are of British soldiers
breaking into the house after midnight, beating
members of his family and breaking furniture. He
would later fight against the British and also the
establishment of Israel in 1948 by fighting in Gaza.

Arafat went on to university in Cairo where he founded
a Palestinian student movement. He presented a
petition calling for Palestinian recognition to the
Egyptian president written in blood. He settled in
Kuwait where he worked in the department of public
works and became a contractor. He soon began
resistance activities and formed Al Fatah in 1958 and
began publishing a magazine advocating armed struggle
against Israel in 1959. By 1964, Arafat had left
Kuwait for Jordan and began armed raids into Israel
earning his stripes as a revolutionary guerrilla
leader. It was also in 1964 that the Palestine
Liberation organization was formed under the hospices
of the Arab League, by bringing together disparate
factions supporting a Palestinian state. He also had
a brief stint in a Syrian jail.

After the 1967 Six Day War, Fatah emerged as the most
organized Palestinian force and Arafat took over
chairmanship of the more moderate Palestine Liberation
Oraganization. At this point, the PLO ceased to be a
puppet of the Arab states, but became an independent
nationalist organization based in Jordan. Concerned
that Jordan was being used as a base for violent
attacks into Israel, King Hussein exiled Arafat to
Lebanon after the PLO leader had effectively set up
his own mini-state with a security apparatus within
Jordan. The 1982 Israeli invasion into Lebanon sent
Arafat and the rest of the PLO leadership to Tunis.
To say that Sharon and Arafat have history would not
do justice to the terrible human tragedy of that
conflict.

As Arafat left Lebanon, he said he was "on his way to
Palestine."

And in a way, he was. Arafat was developing a mythic
reputation by surviving an airplane crash, several
Israeli attempts to assassinate him and recovering
from a serious stroke.

By 1987, the intifada erupted and Palestinian
aspirations once again percolated to international
attention. What began as rock throwing in Gaza,
turned into the political impetus for Arafat to
redefine himself as the messenger of peace. 1n 1988,
at a special session of the United Nations in
Switzerland, Arafat declared that the PLO renounced
terrorism and supported "the right of all parties
concerned in the Middle East conflict to live in peace
and security, including the state of Palestine, Israel
and other neighbours."

After a brief setback when the PLO supported Iraq
during the Gulf War, Arafat was a signatory to the
Oslo Accords in 1993 with Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin. Arafat once again denounced terrorism
and recognized Israel.

On the White House lawn where the final agreement was
signed, Rabin, the legendary Israeli, said, "We are
destined to live together, on the same soil in the
same land. We, the soldiers who have returned from
battles stained with blood..., say to you today, in a
loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears.
Enough!...We, like you, are people - people who want
to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live
side by side with you in dignity, in affinity as human
beings, as free men."

To which Arafat replied, "Our people do not consider
that exercising the right to self-determination could
violate the rights of their neighbours or infringe on
their security. Rather, putting an end to their
feelings of being wronged and of having suffered an
historic injustice is the strongest guarantee to
achieve coexistence and openness between our two
peoples and the future generations."

This set the stage for
Arafat's triumphant return to Gaza in 1994 and the
struggle for power sharing between the Tunis old guard
and the new leadership that had emerged from the
intifada. Arafat's wife, Suha, remained in Paris.
After crossing Egypt into Gaza, he left his car and
kissed the ground after 27 years in exile.

Even with the failings of the Oslo Accord, the Rabin
assassination in 1995 came like an earthquake. All
the enthusiasm of the Western world that had seen the
fall of the Berlin Wall and was bringing down the
apartheid regime in South Africa was not going to see
an historic settlement that would bring peace to
Israel and Palestine.

Binyamin Netanyahu followed as the new Israeli leader
and the peace process stalled. One last attempt by
outgoing President Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak and Yasser
Arafat at Camp David ended up without a deal and no
agreement on the right of return issue. The
Israelis called it "Barak's Generous Offer" and the
Palestinians called it "Barak's Big Lie." The
agreement after all would have come with fifteen pages
of Israeli reservations. The Geneva Initiative, which
has recently captured the attention of the elite
builds on the framework of Camp David and forecasts
what an agreeable final status solution might look
like. It sits there, like a telegraphed pass in
football, waiting to be knocked down.

A month after Camp David, the violence erupted when
Ariel Sharon made his visit to the Temple Mount.
September 11th changed the playing field and shifted
American priorities related to the conflict. Bush and
Sharon became tighter allies, further isolating
Arafat. By 2002, Yasser Arafat was already a weakened
leader when the Israeli siege took over the West Bank.
New settlements continued to be constructed in the
Occupited Territories. Police headquarters in
Bethlehem and Ramallah were ransacked. Arafat was
thrown legitimate charges of corruption, cronyism, of
not being able to crack down on the violence, of not
breaking the links between Fatah and the Al Aqsa
Martyr's Brigade. Rival factions fought for control
while Hamas solidified control of the Gaza Strip. The
Occupation became more structured and solidified on
the ground. The death toll continued to rise. Since
the beginning of 2000, close to 6,000 Palestinians and
Israelis lay dead as a result of the violence.

Israel benefited by maintaining a weakened Arafat and
a weakened Palestinian Authority. Arafat, in turn,
couldn't find a find a way to quell the anger and end
the violence. The situation on the ground continued
to deteriorate. Israel was able to continue expansion
into the West Bank and meet their security objectives
unilaterally by building a Separation Wall and
continuing incursions into Palestinian cities and
villages which included assassinations and home
demolitions without international intervention, while
supporting a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. In the
short term, the Sharon gamble worked.

Even with Arafat's own weaknesses and inability to
show a unified front in the face of deep adversity, he
succeeded at a number of levels. The two state
solution is still the language of the day. Most
international institutions and United Nations
resolutions support the Palestinian aspirations for
nationhood and view the Israeli government as the
agressors. The International Court of Justice
essentially declared the Separation Wall illegal.

If anything, the Arafat tenure as head of the PLO and
then the Palestinian Authority even with its deep
problems, was able to showcase the hypocrisy of
Israeli policy in their dealings with the Palestinians
and of the Occupation itself.

As the old adage goes, one man's terrorist is another
man's freedom fighter. And in a nation where even the
Israeli state was preceded by terrorist organizations
and a leader named Menachem Begin who went on to
become Prime Minister, Arafat's transformation from
"terrorist" to Nobel prize winning statesman had its
limitations.

When the heady days of the Oslo Accord were over and
the reality of Rabin's death and the meaning of it
sunk in, the leadership on all sides contributed to
the vacuum that was created in the late nineties. In
a way, the violence that erupted in September 2000 was
almost inevitable. It was a profound failure of
leadership on all sides.

So now, as the Occupied Territories prepares for a
Palestinian power struggle and a power shift from
within between the Tunis old guard, the young Fatah
activists, the Communists represented by the Palestine
People's Party, the more militant Hamas and other
splinter groups, the Palestinian desire for
self-determination will suffer in the short term. It
will be up to people like Mahmoud Abbas, Ahmed Qureia,
Saeb Arakat and others to fashion a responsible
leadership that will take the Palestinians to the
place they aspire to be.

The Yasser Arafat that lies on his deathbed in Paris
today, the one who has Jews and Arabs leaving him
flowers outside his hospital, was not ever going to be
the leader that brought home the peace or signed the
final deal. As the Globe and Mail recently said, "It
will be the Arafat legacy, that he kept the fight
alive; but his dream unfulfilled."

Yasser Arafat was what he was - and tomorrow's another
day.