Embattled Arafat Vows to Continue His Struggle

RAMALLAH, West Bank —  About the time Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began his fourth White House powwow in a year, Yasser Arafat was tucking into a bowl of vegetable soup at his headquarters in this besieged city, where he has been confined for two months.

As Sharon huddled with President Bush last week, the Palestinian Authority president supped with his own aides beneath a photograph of Jerusalem, the holy city that seems farther from his reach than ever. With Israeli tanks outside his front door and army checkpoints encircling Ramallah, Arafat looked like a man running out of options.

Then Sharon’s meeting ended. Bush said that Arafat must crack down on terrorism, by which he meant the suicide attacks that have characterized the Palestinians’ 16-month uprising. But the president refused the prime minister’s request to sever diplomatic ties with Arafat. Bush made it clear that the United States will remain engaged with the Palestinian Authority.

“Not to forget,” Arafat said in an interview early Friday. “I have sent my delegation there. We are in permanent contact with the American administration. [There are] letters between me and President Bush and also contacts with his foreign minister, Colin Powell. . . . I am not afraid.”

The Palestinian leader is down but not yet out.

At 72, Arafat is nothing if not a survivor. He has outflanked many enemies during his incarnations as nationalist guerrilla, Nobel peacemaker, Palestinian statesman and--in Sharon’s words--terrorist leader. The question now is whether Arafat can survive Sharon, his old nemesis from Israel’s war in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Is Arafat the lion in winter fading into history, or is he a phoenix ready to rise again?

“The important thing is not me,” Arafat told two English-speaking journalists. “It is my people, the cause of the Palestinians.”

To promote his cause, Arafat is speaking to the international press. He knows the value of propaganda. In 1949, a year after the founding of Israel, he published his first magazine, the Voice of Palestine, in which he vowed to fight “the Zionist entity” and “agent of imperialism” in the Middle East. He has published and proselytized ever since.

But an interview with Arafat has never been an easy proposition. He works late at night and without any discernible regard for appointments. He often ignores questions in order to deliver statements. And now there is the added difficulty of the siege.

Getting into Ramallah these days is nearly as difficult as getting out. Several lanes of traffic converge into one at an Israeli army checkpoint where drivers blow their horns and jockey with one another to get through an obstacle course of concrete roadblocks. Pedestrians weave their way among cars, trucks, mud, dust and exhaust fumes to a fenced gangway that has become a marketplace. On the way into Palestinian-controlled territory, there are bananas, toy bunnies and water pipes for sale, but it seems few people have the money to buy or the desire to remain a second longer than necessary in a place that looks like Tijuana-meets-the-Berlin Wall.

A Long Wait at Ramallah Hotel

The walkway empties into a knot of yellow taxis with green Palestinian-issue license plates parked every which way and waiting with open doors to take pedestrians into downtown Ramallah.

The orders are to go to the Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah, check into a room and wait. Wait it is. The first appointment is preempted by a Revolutionary Council meeting. A second is delayed when a Palestinian gunman kills an Israeli woman, her 11-year-old daughter and a reserve soldier in a Jordan Valley settlement and Israel launches retaliatory airstrikes in the West Bank city of Nablus. The third try will succeed if no major violence intervenes.

Earlier in the day, Arafat spoke to about 3,000 supporters who had gathered inside his compound to show their solidarity ahead of Sharon’s meeting with Bush.

“To Jerusalem we will go, martyrs in the millions!” they chanted.

For Palestinians, a suicide bomber is a shahid, or martyr. Rather than condemn the practice, Arafat is defiant.

“The tanks Sharon has sent here are the same he had in Beirut,” he said, referring to Sharon’s role as defense minister in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut, which forced Arafat to flee his stronghold there. “Bring me the tanks not only to the gate of the headquarters but to the bedroom door. Their tanks and airplanes do not frighten us.”

Arafat emerges from a four-hour meeting with officials of his Fatah movement that has clearly left him exhausted. His lower lip trembles, as do his alabaster hands. Dressed in his trademark uniform and kaffiyeh, he leads his guests to a dining room table laid with white cloth, a centerpiece of chrysanthemums and daisies, and place settings for about 20 people. Among the diners are his deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, who met with Sharon earlier this month, and Marwan Barghouti, the streetwise leader of Fatah in the West Bank.

Although there is an abundance of food, Arafat’s diet is austere. He barely speaks during his meal of soup, hard-boiled egg whites, bread dipped in honey and black poppy seeds, and sliced fruit. But he is a concerned host.

“Try this, it is healthy,” he says of his favorite dip. Like a Jewish mother, he puts food from his own plate onto those of his guests, urging them to eat more.

He points to the photograph of Jerusalem on the wall in front of him and indicates the area of the Old City where his uncle’s house was--and where Arafat lived as boy for four years. He says Israel demolished the neighborhood after occupying Jerusalem in 1967.

Suddenly the meal is over. Everyone rises at once, and Arafat heads into his office, where there are enlarged photographs of Jerusalem’s golden Dome of the Rock and several paperweights of Mecca’s central shrine. He dons oversized black glasses and, for several minutes, signs official papers with an aide by his side in what is obviously meant to be a demonstration of his authority: The president who signed the 1993 Oslo peace agreement with Israel and returned to rule the West Bank and Gaza Strip is still in charge. He is still doing business.

But Arafat’s realm is clearly reduced, and the 3 million Palestinians in his jurisdiction are living in such a bad way that even Bush and Sharon acknowledged their plight. More than 830 Palestinians and 250 Israelis have died in the violence of the last 16 months, and tens of thousands of people have been wounded.

The violence, together with a punishing blockade of Palestinian towns and cities and Israeli military strikes, cost the Palestinian economy $3.2 billion in the first year of the uprising, according to United Nations estimates. Israel has destroyed Arafat’s three helicopters, his airport, seaport and small ships amassed under the Oslo accord. The Israeli army has razed hundreds of homes and thousands of acres of crops either in retaliatory strikes or to prevent the sites from being used by Palestinian gunmen.

Past Agreements, Meetings Are Recalled

Meanwhile, there is a growing lawlessness in the Palestinian-controlled areas as Israel destroys Arafat’s vestiges of power, his police stations and security buildings.

If Arafat has a plan for stopping the violence and ending the stalemate, he does not say so in an interview that finally begins after midnight. He speaks more about the past, about the peace agreement he signed with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his frequent visits to the White House during President Clinton’s years, than he does about the future.

He makes lists of meetings he held and agreements he signed. At first, this seems the ramblings of an old man, but then a theme emerges.

“I have signed the agreement of the peace of the brave with the Israelis. Not to forget, we started at the Madrid conference [in 1991], which was started by President Bush the father and which we hope will be completed by President Bush the son.”

In interviews, Arafat routinely puts the blame for the current violence on Israel--just as the Israeli government blames him alone. He does not take responsibility for any of it. The uprising, he says, began because Sharon visited the plaza outside Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque to demonstrate Israeli sovereignty, with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s blessing.

The Palestinian leader presents himself as the one who tried to prevent the fateful visit with a direct appeal to Barak, and not, as the Israeli government believes, as the one who capitalized on it afterward to unleash a wave of violence.

Arafat does not want to talk about the gunmen and suicide bombers who have killed themselves and scores of Israelis. He talks about the violence inflicted on Palestinians.

“Why have they bombed some of our schools? Why have they bombed some of our hospitals, some of our holy sacred places, Christian and Muslim? Why are they making this siege and preventing us even to send food to many of our cities and towns? In some villages, they have even destroyed some of our water wells. We are obliged to smuggle water into some of these villages. Can you imagine it?”

His anger is genuine, but like his Israeli counterparts, he is unable or unwilling to confront the anger of the other side.

How, he is asked, can he condemn suicide attacks when the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, members of a clandestine wing of his Fatah movement, claim responsibility for some of them?

“What? They are not Fatah. They are near to some Fatah leaders, but they are not Fatah,” he says, cutting off the discussion with a withering look.

He does not say whether he can rein in these militant forces.

Arafat does, however, seek to clarify his position on the so-called right of return of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from Israel after the founding of the state in 1948. Seeking to assuage Israelis’ fears that he wants the millions of Palestinians and their descendants resettled inside Israel, he says that his primary concern is the approximately 200,000 refugees “in a very difficult situation” in Lebanon, whom he said he would like returned over three to five years.

Even that figure would be seen as unacceptable to the Sharon government.

Sharon said in a recent interview that he regretted not having killed Arafat 20 years ago in Lebanon, when he had the chance.

Arafat will not be drawn into their old feud. He says he is ready to make peace with Sharon.

“He is the choice of the Israeli people. I deal with any person elected by Israel,” he says. “I am ready. I am ready at any time to continue this important peace.”

He rises at the end of the interview and opens a cabinet.

“Look at this,” he says, pulling out a Christmas card. “You see, it is from President Bush.”

There is a message here too. Arafat may not be in the White House, but he is still on the presidential Christmas card list.

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Times London Bureau chief Miller is on assignment in the Mideast.