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Arafat's Last Ride

By Janine di Giovanni

Ramallah, West Bank, November, 2003 (Vanity Fair)

Not far from Yasser Arafat's embattled compound at the edge of the West Bank town of Ramallah is some graffiti scrawled in a childish hand: "My name is Samia," it reads. "I am excellent at geography. But I can't find Palestine on a map."

Neither, these days, can Yasser Arafat. Boycotted by the US and Israel for his failure to curb terrorism, aging rapidly, confined to his crumbling muqata'a (compound) by Israeli forces, and confronted with scathing criticism of his administration from Palestinians, Arafat grows increasingly isolated from the streets. Outside, a bloody intifada – uprising – that is nearly four years old continues to rage.

Occassionally, the 74-year old leader's popularity does occasionally rise, but this usually happens after the Israelis issue a dictum to either exile or assassinate him. Aside from those moments, the future for Abu Amar, as the Palestinians affectionately call him, is grim.

Like the muqata'a itself, which is nearly all bulldozed and blown up by Israelis during various incursions, Arafat is battered and weary. His state-in-waiting still does not have a fully developed political system, and the peace process is halted while the violence grows. A recent report issued by the Palestinian Legistlative Council, written by one of his former spokesmen, calls for the resignation of the current government and for elections. The future does not look bright for a man once thought of as untouchable, whose plane crashed in the Libyan desert and who managed to walk away unscathed.

The question is how long Arafat's iron clutch over the 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza can continue. And who, if anyone, can take his place. In the meanwhile, there are his people, most of whom lead terrible lives, but who still cling to him, more out of familiarity than out of trust.

Outside the muqata'a', a few tired-looking soldiers stand constant guard, raising and dropping the Palestinian flag and chain-smoking cigarettes. Nearby, a dusty refugee, a Palestinian whose family were exiled to Jordan in 1948 after the Israeli war of independence, stands with a hand-lettered sign: MR PRESIDENT I HAVE WALKED FROM JORDAN TO SEE YOU.

The man has been waiting for days. He says he is here because he and his family want to come home. They want their house back which is now technically on Israeli land. They still have the key. The guards don't bother him, and the refugee still has enough belief in Arafat to think the Old Man – as he is known to his close cronies – will suddenly appear and after more than 50 years, liberate his village.

"He still believes in Arafat," says one of the guards proudly.

But the dusty Jordanian refugee is becoming one of the very few. Even within his Fatah movement, there have been open criticism and calls for him to step down. And from outside, even some of his former staunch supporters have lost patience. Last month, in a report to the United Nations Security Council, Special Envoy Terje Larsen, openly critisied Arafat. King Abudullah of Jordan suggested that Arafat "needs to have a long look in the mirror to be able to see whether his position is helping the Palestinian cause or not".

But most people agree – Arafat is so deeply entrenched in the Palestinian mentality, so much a part of the framework of society and the folklore, that the emergence of a new leadership, however dynamic, will be gradual.

***

First, before looking at Arafat, one must understand what it really feels like to be a Palestinian. To attempt to understand one small fraction of the humiliation ordinary Palestinians endure daily in the face of Israeli military closures, it is necessary to sit for several hours waiting to cross a check point from the West Bank into Israel.

You can not drive for a few miles without running into one: there are approximately 482 checkpoints which divide the West Bank into 300 clusters and the Gaza into four, separating families, workers from businesses, students from school, the sick from medical treatment. Most Palestinians can never leave their villages.

The Israelis control the roads, sea, sky and air and say the military crack down is imperative: a response to a wave of suicide attacks over the past four years. But the fierceness of the closures, which the Palestinians regard as collective punishment, combined with the "security fence" being built by the Israelis across the West Bank have spurned a new type of deadly apartheid. Whereas once there seemed to be some form of peace on horizon; now the repression combined with the relentless wave of attacks on Israeli citizens has driven an impermeable wedge between the two people.

"The military closures have created an economic and humanitarian crisis," says Mustapha Barghouti, a community leader from Ramallah, who is often cited as a potential post-Arafat figure by moderate Palestinians. "Actually, I don't think the political situation has been this bad since 1948, or that people have been so divided."

The checkpoints are a metaphor for the division. The Palestinians calmly submit to the interrogation and searches, but underneath there is boiling rage. A rage that has prompted the Israeli commentator Gideon Levi to call the checkpoints "the assembly line of suicide bombers." Even hard-line Army chiefs recently argued that Ariel Sharon must alter his strategy to contain the intifada – they fear the Army will take the blame for the wave of suicide attacks on Israel.

This is what it is really like. Depending on their mood, Israeli teenager soldiers in mirrored sunglasses – many of them new immigrants to Israel from Ethiopia or Russia – decide the fate of whether or not a man with polio can cross to Jerusalem to get medical treatment. Or whether or not a pregnant woman can get to Hadassah Hospital inside the green line. Or whether or not a lawyer is allowed entry to visit with his clients. The soldiers are there to weed out potential suicide bombers, but the end result is that innocent people simply trying to live their lives suffer.

In Hebron, the Palestinian residents – about 120,000 – rarely leave their blockaded town. In Nablus, the West Bank city that got singled out for particular brutality along with Jenin during Sharon's April 2002 military incursion Operation Defensive Shield, the checkpoint is even more cruel. There, a row of Palestinians – students, teachers, doctors – stand under the blazing sun cordoned off from cars. The wait – depending on whether the soldiers have finished their cigarettes or their lunch break – can go on for hours. One elderly man stood with his sheep on a lead.

"This sheep," he shouted to me, "will get through the checkpoint before me."

In September 2000, the collective frustration that the peace process was not moving, combined with a provocative visit by then opposition-leader Ariel Sharon to the al Haram al Sharif to one of the three holiest sites for Muslims in the world, gave birth to the the second Palestinian intifada. Within days, scores of Palestinians were dead. Within weeks, hundreds. The average now, nearly four years on, is that three Palestinians die a day. As they were beaten back by Israeli forces who had use of Apache helicopters and armoured APCs, the Palestinians turned to the most effective weapon they had: a simple explosive belt and a waiting list of young wannabee suicide bombers willing to die for the cause of liberation.

"Because death has got to be better than life in a refugee camp," one told me.

Briefly, Yasser Arafat enjoyed his popularity boom that accompanied the new uprising. He rode the wave, not starting the intifada, but neither did he stop it. Very soon it was clear he had no control over it. Or, for that matter, of the new breed of militants rising from the refugee camps and crowded cities, who would stomp out whatever was left of the peace process. In the Gaza Strip – where Israel intends to wirthdraw unilaterally within a year –the power vaccum created by Arafat's confinement and the lack of jobs and services has allowed both Hamas and men like Mohammed Dahlan, Arafat's 42-year old former security chief, and an American favourite, to flourish and grow.

Neither of them are friends of The Old Man.

***

Flash back to October, 1993. The handshake on the White House lawn. A taciturn Yitzhak Rabin, a tentative Yasser Arafat, a grinning Bill Clinton.

The following year, Rabin and Arafat would receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Clinton's domestic problems would be overshadowed by his role as a peace maker in the Middle East.

But the reality behind the Oslo Peace Accords, which led to the handshake, were more complicated. Arafat had gambled by backing the accords, which many Palestinians regarded as a sell-out on crucial issues, most notably the right to return for Palestinian refugees displaced after the 1948 war. Splinter groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad – which had minuscule support before Oslo – refused to back the peace process, and became popular opposition groups.

It did not help that back in the West Bank, many of Arafat's political appointees to the new-found Palestinian National Authority (confusingly referred to as either the PA or the PNA) which was meant to administer to the needs of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, were mostly his Fatah Party cronies from Tunis. This emphasised the already widening gap between "insiders" - the new generation who had grown up in the territories and were struggling against the occupation from within – and "outsiders" – those who had worked in exile.

The embryonic PA emerged out of an occupation structure, and it has grave shortcomings. It consists of an elected legislative council, a cabinet, and largely ineffectual ministries. It was crippled from the start by the limitations of the occupation, and later by corruption. Even some of Arafat's closest advisors at the time, men like Abdullah al Hourani, a former PLO Executive Council member, tried to warn him that the structure was essentially useless.

"But Arafat was too interested in these salutes, these garbage removal ministries, these symbolic things," sighs al Hourani, who now works in Gaza as a political analyst. "No one could tell him otherwise."

As a result, the PA essentially became a one-party system. Hamas and Jihad were left outside to seethe and re-group. It was therefore only a matter of time before corruption flourished as the millions of dollars of donor money poured in, and quickly went into the pockets of a very chosen few. The PA defended itself, saying it was operating the best it could, given the restrictions.

"It's not a perfect democracy, and I'm sorry we did not complete that under occupation," counters back Michael Terazi, a Harvard educated lawyer who is part of the PLO negotiations team. "We are not Kuwait that had a war fought to liberate us. We are not Kosovo that had NATO fight to reverse ethnic cleansing. We have to negotiate for what we deserve".

It also did not help that the Palestinian people are governed, confusingly, by two parallel political structures – the PA for those inside the territories; and the PLO which looked after the needs of the diaspora. The duality can only contribute to the ineffectiveness.

But the whole system is so confusing. Here is one example, a microcosm for the chaos that is Palestinian politics. One clear Saturday morning in Ram Allah – which is the Palestinian equivilant of Washington D.C. – the Palestinian Legislative Council (which is essentially the elected Palestinian parliament), was meant to convene. It was an important meeting; the vote on potential candidates to replace Abu Ala (Ahmed Qureia) the newly installed Prime Minister.

The prime minister position is another bone of contention. It was created by amending the law last year, after pressure by America and Israel to have an alternate leader to Arafat. The first Prime Minster was Arafat's number two in the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) who was installed in May 2003 and left last September, with much bitterness and frustration. "Arafat just did not want anyone else around with the slightest hint of power," said one insider.

After Abu Mazen came Ahmed Qurei, or Abu Ala, the former speaker of the PLC. Abu Ala, a charismatic and highly intelligent man, was doomed from the start. Like Abu Mazen, he seems to spend most of his time locked in battle with Arafat over "security issues" and hanging on to his emergency government by his fingernails. In the past few weeks, he has submitted his resignation, which was refused by Arafat, and glumly went back to his position.

Given all this confusion, the PLC meeting I am watching in Ramallah quickly disintegrates into a farce. First there is the news that the representatives from Gaza can't make come to Ramallah because they can't get through the checkpoints. Then a large screen is lit up so at least the Gazans can participate via video link up. But as the meeting begins and quickly descends into shouting chaos, the screen remains blank, focusing on an empty room somewhere in Gaza. The delegates there, it seems, were not informed of the correct time. Everyone shouts, smokes cigarettes, and leaves.

Outside is a plump and well-dressed Sa'e|b Erekat, the Palestinian cabinet minister and one of the few Palestinians around who still believes in "the spirit of Oslo", of which he was a negotiator. He now holds the position of of Chief Negotiator between Israelis and Palestinians, and while some Palestinians sneer that he is an "Oslo addict," Erekat is a popular figure, and he's using the opportunity to give interviews to foreign TV crews and distribute maps of the security fence, or "apartheid wall" as the Palestinians call it.

But the other delegates, disgusted at the failed meeting, are leaving.

"We were supposed to have a vote. How can we have a vote if no one shows up?" one shouts.

The problem, some civic leaders say, is that Arafat does not want votes, does not want harmony. As long as there is chaos and disorder, he is in control.

"It's a one party government. He doesn't want to share leadership with anyone else," says Mustafa Barghouti. "The other groups are outside the circle, there isn't room for them."

"He is used to being the only one," echoes Abdullah al Hourani. "When he saw Abu Mazen moving in the international community circles and growing as a representative of the Palestinians, getting support from people, it made him angry. He put obstacles in front of him."

Other observers believe that Arafat deliberately creates pockets of power within his own rivals and possible future successors – individuals like Mohammed Dahlan, or Jibril Rajoub, former director of the PSS in the West Bank; or Abu Mazan and Abu Ala.

"He's creating all these rival power bases so that after he goes, they will fight each other and there will be total chaos," says Abu Sattar Kassam, an outspoken Nablus opposition leader who was gunned down on the street in 1994 after writing an anti-Arafat book. He believes the men were sent by Arafat, yet the attack still did not deter him. Abu Sattar Kassam continues to publish pamplets and speak – some would say – far too openly about the leader and his corrupt habits.

The solution to the potential civil war scenario, and to this minefield of political error, should be elections, but most people here burst out laughing when this is mentioned. No one believes Arafat and Sharon – each for their own reason – will allow them.

"Arafat's been avoiding our call for the past year for a unified leadership, unified strategy, unified message, unity between groups," says Mustafa Barghouti. And Ahmed Hisham points out that elections are logistically impossible under the military closures. "How can we conduct elections while Israeli tanks and checkpoints dominate the terrorises?" he asks. "How can people move freely, how can we move ballot boxes?"

So for the moment, Arafat remains firmly rooted in his broken down palace, surrounded by a handful of guards, and a Palestinian flag that keeps going up and down, every day.

*** Aside from the division between Palestinians in the territories and in the Diaspora, there is also the divisions between the West Bank and Gaza. Gaza, less than two hours drive from Jerusalem, has always been like entering hell: a place of heat, dust, squalor, infinite poverty and searing anger. It is believed that 55 per cent of the people are on the poverty level and 65 per cent are unemployed., Many of the young, bright people in their 20s and 30s who speak three and four languages and read the New York Times and Le Monde on line have never left Gaza, never even been to Jerusalem, because they are not allowed to enter.

The only way to vent anger is by leaning on a car horn in a traffic jam and so the streets are full of the cacophony of the ancient cars. I am Not surprised Israel intends to withdraw from this awful place within on year: who would want it? Gaza does not hold the same religious and historic memories that the West Bank does, and it certainly has no economic value.

One million Palestinians squashed into a narrow strip of land about 70 miles long. Given this claustrophobia, it is not suprising that Gaza was the birthplace of the first intifada in December 1987, and is now the breeding ground for Hamas, who are responsible for most of the 104 suicide bombings over the past three years.

In 1994, Yasser Arafat, returning from exile in Tunis, drove through the streets of Gaza and announced that Gaza would soon resemble Singapore. Ten years on, I drive through the narrow streets crowded with donkey carts and thick with unleaded petrol fumes, with rank sewage spilling onto the sidewalks, and wonder what happened to his Asian dream. Like most of those Oslo visions, they seemed to have been traded for unabashed violence.

And it is a vicious circle – the stronger the occupation grows, the stronger the popularity of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. "We reject the word violence," Khaled al-Batash, a political leader from Islamic Jihad tells me, when we meet at a dusty hotel overlooking the Mediterranean. "We see it as fighting an occupation. Were Churchill and de Gaulle regarded as violent people? When the occupation ends, the violence will end."

Many Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, echo this: it is believed that 70 per cent of Palestinians support the suicide bombers, and on every other street corner in the camps is a different poster celebrating suicide attacks. The Palestinians call "martyrdom operations."

"With each suicide bomber, there is five percent appeal added to Sharon," says Ghassan Khatib, a former labour minister in the PA. "And with each Israeli assassination, Hamas' popularity rises". In a peaceful situation, he adds, there would be no way that Hamas could succeed. "But in violence, they grow. They flourish as a result of the failed peace process."

Every time I have been to Gaza over the past 15 years, there is always disaster and violence: Israeli Apache helicopter attacks killing civilians; Hamas killing young Israeli soldiers; incursions into Rafah camp resulting in the death of women and children. And every time one side hits, the other side hits back harder. It is a frustrating, and horrible cycle to watch. "For every action, we have a reaction, it's totally natural," an al-Aksa – the armed military wing of the Fatah Party – brigade commander calmly tells me later that day, when we meet in a safe house that I pray is not being watched by Israelis.

I go to see one of the results of the "actions". In Ramla, near Tel Aviv, a place that was once a Palestinian village before 1948, a Jewish funeral takes place. It is for 19-year old Sgt. Sarit Schneor, who was shot in the Netzarim settlement in Gaza.

Sarit's friends and army colleagues are there to watch her coffin being lowered into the sun-scorched earth. They talk about how she loved her boyfriend, loved life. Her army friends, most of them teenage girls – young and pretty with long, shiny hair and skin still mottled by adolescent acne – hug and wipe away each other's tears. But no one I spoke to questions why Sarit was in Gaza, or why Sharon is sending such young people effectively to their deaths.

While there is a dissident faction of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) who refuse to serve in the territories "because we get tired of being the bad guy," as one young soldier put it, Sarit's friends requested Gaza, because "it's more challenging."

I meet Yaffo, the mother of one of Sarit's friends. The group of young friends had just finished their military training and Yaffo tells me that she was so very proud to watch them get their names called and go up on a platform to receive their papers. All of them wanted to go to Gaza, she said. All of them wanted to fight the enemy. She introduces me to Noa, her daughter, a fragile beauty with pale skin and tears running down her cheeks.

I ask Noa, grief-stricken but seemingly sensible, what she thinks of the Palestinians, does she think there can ever be peace?

Noa stares at me wordlessly for a few seconds. "I hate them," she says finally, and turns away. **

A few days later, in a refugee camp I can not name in Gaza, I meet a young Palestinian Hamas operative a few years older than Sarit.

In another world, they might have met at a beach club or a restaurant on the edge of the Mediterranean which borders Gaza, a sea that in many places the Palestinians are not allowed to swim. They might have talked about music or film. They might have shared a Gold Star beer. They might have fallen in love.

But this is all a fantasy. Abu Mojahed will never meet young Israelis the same age as him unless he is| sent to kill them. And they will never meet him, unless they are roughing him up at a checkpoint or gunning him down in the street. He's a Hamas operative, Sarit and her friends are soldiers. Just arranging the meeting with him takes days, and patience and planning. He's wanted by the Israelis, so we have to take precautions.

We agree to meet in an abandoned house in his refugee camp. The go-between who arranged the meeting closes all the windows, shutting out the mournful sound of the muezzin, the call to prayer from the nearby mosque. Finally Abu Mojahed enters, rushing into the room and scanning it as though he is already looking for a getaway.

My first thought is how incredible young Abu Mojahed is, with his fair skin barely able to grow the prerequisite Osama-style beard and his large stick out ears like Alfred E. Neumann. Added to the boyish effect is the American baseball cap he has perched on his head.

I suddenly think, Abu Mojahed, one of eight children who grew up in a refugee camp, will probably never grow old to marry or have children. "When I was a kid," he tells me, "all I saw was beatings, arresting, killings, houses getting blown up. I didn't see any love or peace." The saddest moment is when I ask him if he would like a wife and children. Abu Mojahed's pale face lights up.

"I would love that," he says. Then his face drops. "But imagine I am walking down the street with my kid. There is Israeli shelling. It kills my kid, maybe my wife. That's what happens to so many people here. Why should I chose that life?"

Instead, he's got his eyes on paradise. He wants to be a suicide bomber, and has applied many times, but the powers at Hamas need him elsewhere: to attack settlers and soldiers. His expertise is laying minds and booby traps, firing rockets and arranging ambushes with soldiers. He knows one of these days, his number is up and the Israelis will either kill or capture him – but he doesn't care.

"So they kill me," he shrugs. "So I go to paradise." He looks out at towards the closed window, barricaded from the camp below. "Either way I win."

***

The day before, I met Abu Qusay, a military c ommander from the al-aksa Brigade. Despite the popularity of Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza Fatah still rules here, garnishing the support of roughly 36 per cent of the Gaza population as opposed to 30 per cent for Hamas. It is still Arafat's show, even in the closed world of Gaza.

Abu Qusay was clean shaven and wore a neatly ironed checkered shirt, but again, we meet in a safe house, on the 12 floor in an empty apartment. I knew we were going to the right place because another man rode the elevator with us, carrying his dry cleaning under one arm and a Kalashnikov under the other.

Since this intifada began, the al-Aksa brigade has claimed responsibility for many of the suicide bombing attacks. While Arafat has said, "Yes, I am against terrorism," members of al-Aksa say they pay close attention to what he says. "If he tells us to call a cease-fire, we call a cease-fire," said one al-Aksa leader in Jenin. The members, who are believed to be around 450, are allegedly paid about $45,000 a month out of the PA budget, but the mandate is officially for them to "encourage peace" – not to reward them for attacks. It is difficult, however, to see where they draw the line.

Abu Qusay is a typical member of al-Aksa, born out of frustration and rebellion and repression. One of nine children, he grew up in Shati, one of the most crowded and poverty ridden refugee camps in Gaza. A true child of the first intifada, he played by throwing stone at Israeli tanks and spent seven years in an Israeli prison for a reason he will not be clear about. He was released after Oslo but as he watched the peace process disintegrate, it appeared to him that the only solution was a military one.

He said the al-Aksa brigade was created because there was no other alternative. "There was, and is, no political horizon," he said, chain-smoking. "Resistance is the only means."

We walk to an empty room while he puts on his al-Aksa face mask to be photographed. Through the dirty glass window, there is Gaza City, sprawled out in front of us, dirty and desperate. Abu Qusay is preparing for a mission, but he will not say what. It is a few days after the Apache attack. "If there is action," he says, picking up his gun. "you can be sure, there will be reaction. We are all – Palestinians and Israelis – in a dark tunnel that Sharon has created."

***

There is stillness most days inside the muqata'a while Arafat fights off his enemies – the Israelis who threaten to deport or execute him; his own political rivals; but also, it is rumoured, grave illness. The past few weeks of late summer have been total chaos : the seizing of the Gaza police chief and some French aid workers; the off-again, on-again resignation of Abu Ala; and a report from the Palestinian Legislative Council written by five legislators, including Arafat's former spokesman, blaming the Palestinian leadership for failing to make decisions. Arafat is 75 years old. He's been fighting a long time. He must be exhausted.

In the past four years, Arafat has been outside the muqata'a only once or twice, and has made few television appearances, which leads people to talk. Last winter, All of Ramallah was talking about Arafat and his mysterious illness. While his doctor says he is suffering from simple stomach flu, others hint at something graver. That inevitably leads to the conversation of who will take over when the Old Man goes.

For many, it is hard to imagine life without him, as he has become the poster child of Palestinian resistance. "Remember, he did bring the Palestinians back from the brink of extinction," says Michael Terazi. "he may not be the right man for the job, but he did do that."

Which is part of the great Arafat myth – survival. He has survived expulsions from Beirut and attacks in Tunis. In 1992 when his plane ran out of fuel and crashed in the Libyan desert, his pilot and others were killed, but Arafat emerged relatively unscathed. He has managed to ward off political coups and assassination threats. He's survived the corruption charges. He's still alive and living in two rooms at the muqata'a in confinement with his fax machine and his gun, even if the Israelis call for his exile, and his own people call for him to step down.

But others argue that Arafat can not be replaced. "Even if most Palestinians on the street believe that they are in one valley and the government is in another, Arafat is still much loved," argues Ahmed Hisham. "The confinement has turned him into a hero."

But that still does not mean he can do the job. The pop psychology theory is that Sharon and Arafat are co-dependents and that the intifada has served each other's needs: Sharon is seen as the great general, Mr. Security, intent on protecting his battered country. Arafat gained back the street cred he lost by signing Oslo and also by being isolated by the Americans and Israelis. The British writer Robert Fisk has gone so far to describe them as "Sharon the merciless, Arafat the corrupt: nothing meaningful to offer each other."

But eventually, both Sharon and Arafat will go, and in Arafat's case, it may be sooner simply due to physical deterioration. As for who will take his place, it is a question his advisors say they never ask. "Power sharing does not come into his world," says one.

Still, there are some leaders who offer an alternative to the violence. For a time after Oslo, many people regarded Hanan Ashrawi, the soft-spoken scholar of middle English, the former dean of Bir Zeit university and a member of the PLC as the kinder, gentler face of Palestinians.

For a time, Ashrawi was a beacon of hope: someone both the Americans and Israelis could negotiate with, someone the Palestinans admired. But Ashrawi resigned from her post as Minister of Higher Education in 1998 after two years, and although Arafat frequently tries to lure her back into a ministerial role, she refuses. She does not, she says, see "a commitment to change".

On why she resigned, she chooses words carefully: "I wanted credible people in my government," she says slowly. "and I did not get it." We are sitting in her Ramallah office and the TV is blaring news of an attack in Gaza. "I believe this is the most crucial and dangerous period we are facing," she says softly, indicating to the TV. She suggests that the solution to the problem may lie in something as drastic as asking the UN for protection. "We should say the Palestinian Authority can no longer function," she adds. "We are paying the price of an authority incapable of meeting people's needs."

There are other names floating around. Marwan Barghouti, the powerful grass roots leader who is said to be the force behind the intifada. But Barghouti was convicted of mudrer in the Israeli courts in May, and may not get out of prison before he is an old man. Then there is Mohammed Dahlan, who has openly criticised Arafat of corruption, incompetence and selfishness, and who is clearly having his moment right now, taking advantage of Arafat's weakness. There is Sari Nusseibeh from the revered Jerusalem family.

Or perhaps, as Hanan Ashrawi adds, after Arafat, there will be lots of people. "They will all have to stand together," she says. But she does not sound convinced. The other alternative, as many point out to me, is the fear of civil war if, Hamas and Jihad remain outside the leadership.

But for many of the ordinary Palestinians I spoke to, there is a sense that they are beyond politics. A 107-year old man I met in Deheishe refugee camp near Bethlehem expressed it the clearest. The man was so old that he remember the Ottoman Empire, the first World War, the Arab uprising. He recalled days in 1916 as easily as he recalled the day in 1948 he was expelled from his village, not far from this camp. Yet when asked about leadership, he shrugged: "I think it's God and only God who can help us," he said. "and not Arafat."

And yet, there is some sign of dialogue between the few Palestinians and Israelis who have not given up hope, and who are working on channels outside their governments. Yossi Beilen, the former justice minister and the former Palestinian Minister of Information and Culture Yasser Abed Rabo met secretly in abandoned Jerusalem parking lots to try to resurrect a peace process the result which became the unofficial treaty the Geneva Accord. Sari Nusseibeh returned from meetings at the UN with Ari Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security services, where they produced a grass-roots statement of principles for a two-state solution.

Some people, like Saeb Eraket have not entirely lost faith. He says he believes it is a "historic inevitability" that Palestinians and Israelis will someday live together in peace.

But certainly not in this generation, certainly not with Sharon and Arafat in power. The view from the ground, from the squalid camps and the graffiti riddled walls of encircled West Bank towns tell another story. For the moment, the Israelis live with the terrible black paranoia of waiting for the next attack, one that they will never be able to repel.

And all the Palestinians have is a Berlin-style wall which is quickly rising up in the middle of what is left of their historic homeland; a leader who can not leave his tank-scarred compound; and every day, fresh blood on the street.

NOTE: Yasser Arafat died on November, 11, 2004 in Clamart, France. He was 75 years old. He was succeeded as chairman of the PLO by Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen. In January, 2005, Abu Mazen also convincingly won the election for President of the Palestinian Authority.

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