[mora]

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200509/samuels



The Atlantic Monthly's lengthy cover story about Yasser Arafat ('How Arafat Destroyed Palestine')

[quote]In a Ruined Country
By David Samuels, Atlantic Monthly 9/05
Jul 29, 2005, 09:23

The war for Jerusalem that began after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's failed peace offer at Camp David in the summer of 2000 has become the subject of legends and fables, each one of which is colored in the distinctive shades of the political spectrum from which it emerged: Yasir Arafat tried to control the violence. Arafat was behind the violence. Arafat was the target of the violence, which he deflected onto the Israelis. Depending on which day of the week it was, any combination of these statements might have been true.

In his patchwork uniform, which combined a military tunic with a traditional kaffiya, the Old Man, as those who had known Yasir Arafat the longest called him, was a strange and defiantly contradictory person. He was the father of the Palestinian nation, and the successor to the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem, Omar Ibn al-Khattab and Saladin. His official title was rais of the Palestinian Authority, a title that is ambiguously translated as "chairman" or "president." Arafat was also the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the head of Fatah, the PLO's central faction, which he founded in Kuwait in the late 1950s. The title that came first on his personal stationery was head of Fatah, which means "conquest"-a backward acronym for Harakat al-Tahrir al-Falistiniya, the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Spelled forward the acronym yields "Hataf," which means "death."

Arafat's failure to conquer Jerusalem did not shatter his conviction that history was moving in his favor: under pressure from within and without, isolated in the world, the State of Israel would eventually crack apart and dissolve, to be replaced by Arab Palestine. "We will continue our struggle until a Palestinian boy or a Palestinian girl waves our flag on the walls, mosques, and churches of Jerusalem, the capital of our independent state, whether some people are happy about it or not," he promised. "He who doesn't like it may drink the water of the Dead Sea." Arafat understood his actions as part of an unfolding within the long duration of historical time rather than as disembodied headlines on CNN. The inability of his diplomatic interlocutors to understand what he was driving at exposed the fatal limits of the Western conception of politics as a way to find a happy medium between competing interests.

Arafat's given name, Muhammad Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Raouf Arafat al-Kidwa al-Husseini, provides close readers with a biography in brief of the man who created a nation out of the Arab refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The boy Muhammad Abd al-Rahman was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929, and grew up in the city's Sakakini district. Both his parents were Palestinians. His father, Abd al-Raouf, was a merchant from Gaza. In the late 1920s Abd al-Raouf left Gaza to prosecute a claim to a large chunk of Cairo that he believed was the rightful property of his family. The claim was futile, and preoccupied him until the day he died. Arafat seldom mentioned his father and didn't attend his funeral. His mother, Zahwa, for whom he named his only child, was a daughter of the al-Saud family, whose home in the Old City of Jerusalem was part of the neighborhood that was bulldozed by the Israelis after the 1967 war to create a plaza in front of the Western Wall. Although not born in Jerusalem, as he often claimed, Arafat did live in the al-Saud family house for several years with his brother Fathi after his mother died, in 1933. Arafat's grandfather was named Arafat, and his family name was al-Kidwa. His clan was the al-Husseinis of Gaza, not the famous Jerusalem family. "Arafat" was the only part of his given name that he would carry into adulthood; "Yasir" was a childhood nickname related to the word for "wealthy" or "easy." He didn't like school, and showed an early talent for organizing the neighborhood kids. "He formed them into groups and made them march and drill," his sister Inam told a biographer. "He carried a stick to beat those who did not obey his commands. He also liked making camps in the garden of our house."

It made sense that a people without a homeland, with only a recent shared history of expulsion, flight, catastrophe, shame, and defeat to bind them together, would fall under Arafat's spell. He was famous for his mastery of al-taqiya, the ability to dodge a threat, and of muamara, conspiracy. Those who met him, even his intimates, inevitably described themselves as rahba, awestruck. The man they met was mutawaadi and baseet-humble and modest. As much as any other man, Arafat was responsible for the making of the modern Middle East. The raids he launched on Israel from Gaza, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon in the 1960s helped to precipitate the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which stripped the Arab regimes of their credibility and set the stage for Arafat's emergence as the Arab Che Guevara. Arafat's creation of a Palestinian para-state inside Lebanon in the 1970s made him a wealthy man, and a linchpin of Soviet strategy in the region. Expelled from Beirut in 1982 by Ariel Sharon, he went into exile in Tunis, where he watched with surprise as a younger generation of Palestinians rose up against the Israeli occupation in
1987. His support for Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War left him broke and stripped of his political assets in the early nineties, and out of touch with the young revolutionaries in the West Bank and Gaza. In 1993 Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, which committed Israel and the United States to a process whose end point would be the establishment of a Palestinian state. He returned to Gaza through Egypt on July 1, 1994.

In a largely traditional society Arafat stood out because he was self-made, the symbolic incarnation of a people that owed its continued existence to him. Decades before he began to show his age in public, his lips trembling, his hands shaking, his belly distended-even then he was known as the Old Man. His speeches were laundry lists of slogans and exhortatory phrases such as "Ya jabal ma yahzak reeh" ("O mountain, the wind cannot shake you!") and "Li-l-Quds rayyihin, shuhada bi-l-malayyin" ("To Jerusalem we march, martyrs by the millions") interspersed with Koranic verses. The symbolic leader of the Palestinian nation spoke with a pronounced Egyptian accent. His lips flapped when he spoke. To some, the combination was irredeemably comic. He distinguished himself within the Palestinian national movement by his boundless energy for the cause, alqadhiya, which might also be translated as "the case," a term appropriate to a proceeding in a courtroom. One of the peculiarities of the nation that Arafat created was that it was founded on a festering grievance rather than any positive imagination of the future; the worse things were in the present, the stronger the Palestinian case became.

For the diplomats of the European Union, whose dream of creating a new kind of political organization that would rival the United States for global influence was burdened by the historical guilt of colonialism and the Holocaust, the image of the Jew as oppressor that Arafat offered the world was both novel and liberating; the State of Israel would become the Other of a utopian new world order that would be cleansed of destructive national, religious, and particularistic passions.

Perhaps it was the clownish aspect of Arafat's behavior that made it easy for the leaders of Israel, the United States, and Europe to believe that Arafat was a minor tribal chieftain whose true aim was to enjoy red-carpet treatment during his visits to the White House and to other seats of civilized government. The Palestinian leader was fond of time-saving measures, and could cite the exact number of hours that shaving once every five days, as he did, could add to a man's life. He spent his spare hours watching cartoons on television. His favorites were Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, and Tom and Jerry. It took Arafat more than an hour each morning to arrange the tail of his kaffiya in the shape of Palestine and pin it to the shoulder of one of his tunics, which his guards bought for him in military-surplus stores in the cities they visited. He completed his fanciful outfit with a pin in the shape of a phoenix, symbolizing the rise of the Palestinian people from the ash heap of history, along with a variety of military ribbons and decorations that testified to his self-appointed status as "the only undefeated general in the Middle East." In ranks behind the decorations were felt-tipped pens of different colors, to which court gossips liked to attribute decisive significance. Green ink was for his reports. Red ink meant that someone was to receive a certain sum of money; or else red ink meant that his signature was to be ignored. Inside the pockets of his jacket were the small black notebooks in which he wrote about money. When he was in doubt about a particular sum, he would withdraw a notebook with a flourish, cite a specific figure, and then put the notebook back in his pocket. Inside the notebooks were the codes that unlocked the secret bank accounts to which only he had access. When his private plane went down in the Libyan desert in 1992 and could not be located for thirteen hours, a great and memorable panic seized the leadership of the PLO at the thought that the remnants of the organization's vast financial empire had disappeared in the wreckage.

fter Arafat died, on November 11, 2004, there were some who believed that the chaos and violence that he had brought with him to the Palestinian territories might follow him to the grave, and that peace between Israelis and Palestinians might finally be at hand. There were others who noted the absence of any clear cause of death in the voluminous files provided by the military hospital south of Paris where he died. Some of his closest aides and advisers spoke openly of their belief that he had been poisoned. Suspects in the poisoning included the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, and the CIA, as well as a team of cyclists for peace who had visited Arafat the previous September. Only the idea that Arafat might have expired from natural causes was deemed too farfetched for serious consideration.

There were also those among his closest aides who found the discussion of the Old Man's death unseemly and distracting. The Old Man was a great figure in history, they believed. It was the Old Man who had created the Palestinian people out of a host of miserable refugees. It was the Old Man who had brought the Palestinians back to Palestine.

Several weeks after Arafat's death I visited the Muqata, his compound in Ramallah, the West Bank city that serves as the Palestinian capital. There I found groups of workmen carrying garbage out of the ruined buildings as if they were excavating the burrow of an animal. As I stood and watched, a group of a hundred soldiers in matching brown uniforms emerged from their barracks and stood more or less at attention as they were inspected by a senior officer. These are the faces of Palestine, I thought, the faces of the conquerors and the conquered of the past thousand years-sharp-featured Arabs, fierce-looking Turks, light-skinned Europeans, dark-skinned Egyptian-looking soldiers from Jericho and Gaza. In response to their officer's command, they turned and faced a rubble-strewn field above which hung a poster of Arafat in a Soviet overcoat, waving good-bye. The Arabic motto on the poster read, "On Your Way to Fulfill the Palestinian Dream." Behind him was the golden dome of the Mosque of Omar.

The Bodyguard n the weeks that follow Arafat's burial in the parking lot of the Muqata, beneath an honor guard of transplanted olive trees, members of Arafat's inner circle decide, one by one, that it is important for his story to be told, and agree to talk to me.

Awaiting their pleasure, I arrange to stay in a private apartment in East Jerusalem that belongs to a friend, and that is otherwise empty during the winter. In the mornings, as I wait outside in the rain for a car to pick me up, I watch the children walk to school-the boys holding hands with boys, the girls in hijab walking to a nearby girls' school that Jewish would-be terrorists have tried to blow up with a bomb. The girls wear the hijab close to their skulls in a way that pulls back the skin on their foreheads and prevents stray hairs from escaping. They also wear blue jeans under their skirts. Across the street is the Don Derma family restaurant, which quaintly advertises "cocktails" and serves ice cream and coffee in the evenings.

I have different cars and drivers depending on what day it is and where I want to go. When I want to go to Gaza, or to the refugee camps, I travel in a white Land Rover with a sticker from an international aid organization where three of my friends have found work. Most of my official meetings are arranged for me by two local translators, without whom I am often as helpless as a child. The going rate for a translator with decent contacts is $150 to $200 a day. N., a hard-core supporter of Fatah, speaks seven languages, including German, Italian, Arabic, and Hebrew. She was born in Haifa and carries an Israeli passport. She was recommended to me by a Palestinian functionary in Ramallah who welcomed the opportunity to monitor my movements and contacts. N.'s loyalty to Fatah means that she has connections that more neutral translators lack; when she hands off unmarked packages to men who dart out of storefronts and alleyways near al-Manara Square, in Ramallah, I decide that it is best to play dumb. Her favorite game is to drive the wrong way through oncoming traffic at checkpoints as the soldiers draw their guns and order us to stop. "Sahafia-journalist!" she will shout, leaving me to plead our case.

One evening I go to see one of Arafat's bodyguards, Abu Helmi, at his well-secured apartment in Ramallah. To reach the Qalandia checkpoint visitors must pass the ugly concrete wall that divides the outer Arab villages from East Jerusalem, and then an open field of rubble. To the left of the rubble there is always a traffic jam at the checkpoint. After four years of war, crossing from one side to the other remains a haphazard affair. The road is cut by a snarl of concrete blocks and barbed wire whose makeshift appearance belies the fact that it is a permanent feature of the landscape. Getting through the checkpoint from Jerusalem to Ramallah takes about thirty to forty-five minutes. The return trip to Jerusalem can take up to four hours. After my days with N. are over, I sometimes go back out with Q., a translator who is close to members of Arafat's private guard. Q. grew up in Jerusalem and hates Fatah, and is an excellent source of rumors and gossip. At night the potholes are harder to spot, and the road stinks of burning garbage.

n the night that Arafat was buried, Abu Helmi stayed up with the rest of the Old Man's guards to see who would come and pay their respects. He was amazed that so many of the inner circle didn't come.

Abu Helmi is a simple man, of unbreakable tribal loyalties. His eyes fill with tears at the mention of the Old Man as he shows us photographs from the old days. Thirty pounds heavier than in the earliest of the photos, but with the same dark hair and bushy moustache, Abu Helmi bears a marked physical resemblance to Saddam Hussein. It was Abu Helmi's job to travel ahead and make the arrangements when the Old Man visited foreign countries. When the Old Man's plane went down in the Libyan desert, Abu Helmi suffered an injury to his back. He walks stiffly over to a wide chest of drawers, which contains several thousand photographs of the Old Man taken on airstrips in Mali, Uganda, Comoros, and other faraway places where the Palestine Liberation Organization invested its money and the Old Man was welcomed as a head of state. There are photos of the Old Man with Muammar Qaddafi in Tripoli, and in a pilgrim's robes in Mecca.

"I don't want to speak about Abu Ammar as a president or a revolutionary leader; I want to speak about Abu Ammar the father," Abu Helmi begins, referring to the Palestinian leader by another of his familiar nicknames.
("Abu Ammar," meaning "father of Ammar," is a fossilized cognomen for "Yasir," which refers to a faithful companion of the prophet Muhammad.) As he speaks, Abu Helmi stirs his coffee with a sugar spoon that he squeezes gently between forefinger and thumb.

"For many years, at nights, we would suddenly wake up, with him coming over to see if we were covered, if we were sleeping or resting," Abu Helmi says. "During the meals, when there were no guests, we always ate together. He was always insisting, giving us food, spreading, cutting, saying 'Eat, eat.' If he was really happy with someone, he would insist that he feed him from the food on his plate into his mouth. He was always keeping us patient and telling us, 'Patience is not measured by the hour.'

"Always he would notice very small details-even if someone hadn't shaved for a day, he would always notice it and say, 'Why haven't you shaved?' He insisted that we wear ties and that we look good and that we appear to the world as we are, as civilized people."

"Did Abu Ammar enjoy that people around him had lavish things although his own life was so modest?" I ask.

"He was very pleased," Abu Helmi answers. "He never minded. He used to say, 'These people deserve to live-they should enjoy their life.'"

"Would he remember a mistake long after it had happened?" I ask.

"He doesn't forget. Not the right or the wrong. For us, he never refused anything. Once my niece, the daughter of our martyr, my brother, she was about to get married, and I went in to ask permission to attend that marriage in Jordan, and Abu Ammar immediately agreed, and he insisted that I carry a present of gold. Whenever there was a celebration or wedding, and we used to invite him by card, he would send the congratulations."

Abu Helmi's youngest son, who speaks fluent English, and is paralyzed from the neck down, is carried in through the living room and laid on a hospital bed, where he can hear the conversation. Abu Helmi's daughter brings more coffee from the kitchen.

"Abu Ammar started his day at nine a.m. until one-thirty in the afternoon," Abu Helmi says, wiping a bit of coffee from his thick black moustache. "One-thirty was his nap time, and lunch until four-thirty. Then it would stretch late into the night. Whenever he woke up to pray the dawn prayers, which was about three-thirty, he would always come out to check on us and to see what was going on, 'Do I need to make any phone calls?' He was always in constant surveillance of his work. Any issue or request that reaches the hands of Abu Ammar-it must be solved immediately."

After the Israelis attacked the Muqata in 2002, during Operation Defensive Shield, the Old Man sandbagged the windows for fear that he would be shot by Israeli snipers. Proclaiming himself to be under siege, he refused to leave the Muqata until his final illness, in October of 2004. On sunny afternoons he positioned a chair in the breezeway between the ruins of the compound's main building, a former British prison, and the modern office building next door. Here he talked on his cell phone and read telegrams from foreign ministers of Europe, African heads of state, and other notables expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause, the careful records of which were preserved on his presidential Web site. "Nahnu la al-hunud al-humr [We are not the red Indians]," he often proclaimed to the reporters who came to see him. On slow afternoons he liked to sit outside the Muqata with his guards.

"We would always be gathered around him," Abu Helmi remembers. "Sometimes we would bring fruit and peel it for him or make cookies here at home. He would ask, 'From where did you bring this?' And we would say, 'We made it at home, it's cheaper than buying it at the market.' He would say, 'Look at this guy, look how he's dressed.' He would always say, if he saw a chocolate, 'This is too much calories,' or 'Too much fat.'"

"How did Abu Ammar feel about Yitzhak Rabin?"

"He loved him," Abu Helmi says, with all apparent sincerity. "When I mention Rabin, I say, 'May God bless his soul.' That means great respect and great affection."

"Do you remember what Abu Ammar felt about the Israeli leaders who followed Rabin-about Peres and Netanyahu and Barak?"

At this question Abu Helmi laughs, and makes a sharp cutting motion with his hand.

Two old friends who didn't Make it to Arafat's funeral ennis Ross was the chief Middle East negotiator for the United States from
1993 to 2000. I interviewed him in Washington, and I see him again one evening at the American Colony Hotel, in Jerusalem, beneath the starry ceiling of the Pasha Room.

"I walked into this villa in Tunis," Ross tells me, "nice but not extraordinary, and the first thing I noticed when I walk in is it had the feel of a revolutionary hangout, but not revolutionary in the sense of these guys who are out there blowing up people. It reminded me of when I was a student activist in Berkeley. You saw posters of Arafat as a young man. You saw posters of Abu Iyad and Abu Jihad, and you had the feeling 'Geez, these were the founders of Fatah,' and it was like a lair, a revolutionary lair, and I'm struck by this feeling, like I'm back in a kind of activist hangout where people are thinking, What can we do today? And I have that feeling until I get through the outer room, and then I see these guys through a mesh curtain laughing at The Golden Girls. I hear Bea Arthur's voice, and the incongruity of being in this revolutionary lair and Bea Arthur's voice-you know, I started to laugh. And I thought, What kind of revolutionary hangout is it where the people watch The Golden Girls?

"The first time I went to complain to him about the bombing-the first set of bombings were, I guess, in April '94, in Hadera and Afula-and I'm with him, and he leans over like this and he whispers, 'You know, it's Barak. He's got this group, the OSS, in the Israeli military, and they're doing this.' And I said to him, 'Don't be ridiculous.' I said, 'You know the Israelis are not killing themselves.' This was classic Arafat, never wanting to be responsible."

Q: "So you don't think that he was actually a hysteric?"

A: "No, I think it was all an act."

erje Roed-Larsen was the father of the Oslo Accords and is the most visible representative of the United Nations in the Middle East. A handsome man with a puckish sense of humor, he is also a bit of a dandy. On the afternoon that I meet him for a long conversation about Oslo, he is wearing a white pocket square in the breast of his dove-gray suit, which he has accented with a pair of silver cufflinks. He met weekly and often every other day with Arafat for more than a decade.

"Usually he would say, 'I agree in principle,'" Roed-Larsen told me, "which means 'No.' Or 'Why not?'-which also means 'No.' Or 'I have to think about it.' Or 'It's not me, it's Hamas.' Or 'I'm doing my best.'"

Q: "What was it like when he lied to you?"

A: "He lied all the time. And he knew it. I'd say, 'Abu Ammar, cut the crap. Let's talk serious.' And then he could either talk serious or not talk serious. He'd say nonsense."

Q: "The nonsense would consist of what?"

A: "'It's not me-it's al-Qaeda.' 'It's the Iranians.' 'It was a Lebanese ship.' 'It's the Syrians.' All that kind of stuff. Of course everybody around him knew he was behind it. He didn't tell any of his closest companions. Because he always operated with layers and layers and layers and layers. He was extremely compartmentalized. His dirty-tricks domain-he didn't inform any of his ministers. They didn't have a clue about it. He had a financial cupboard. He had a dirty-tricks cupboard. He had a white-business cupboard. He had a black-business cupboard. Everything was compartmentalized. He was a master manipulator, and in a way he was a master politician who made catastrophic mistakes in both moral and political terms. He thought he was immortal; he trusted that he had God's hand protecting him for everything. And he goes away in the middle of the biggest defeat of his life. That was one of the reasons he was so miserable before he died."

Q: "Do you remember the last time you talked to him?"

A: "I was at home in Herzlyia on a Sunday. I remember it vividly. I hadn't spoken to him in eighteen months. My cell phone rings."

Roed-Larsen's voice suddenly gets higher, and then he starts screeching like someone's crazy old aunt.

"'Terje! Terje! It is Abu Ammar! How are you? How are you? How was the holiday?' And then he says, 'Ah-dah-dah, always remember, Terje, eh, your wife is my sister! my sister! my sister! And I am the uncle of your children. Your children, the uncle!' And then he said, 'And you are always welcome to see me when you wish.' That was it. He got sick the week after, and then he died."

"We announce Tourism!" he drive from Jerusalem to Nablus, the West Bank city that is known in the Hebrew Bible as Shchem, home to Jacob and his children, takes about two hours. Or it might take three hours. Or it could take five. My friend Nadir is driving me there to visit Munib al-Masri, one of Yasir Arafat's oldest friends and now the richest man in Palestine.

The line of vehicles at the Nablus checkpoint this afternoon is short. Cabdrivers wait on the other side of the barrier to take passengers to their destinations inside the city. In the separate lane for settlers three religious Jewish children, two boys and a young girl, try to hitch a ride back to their fortresslike dwellings on the rocky hillside.

Nablus is a city built between two biblical mountains, Har Grizim and Har Ebal. In the Bible, Har Grizim was blessed with a bountiful spring, and Har Ebal was cursed. Al-Masri's gorgeous neo-Palladian house sits on top of Har Grizim, overlooking the refugee camps and the old casbah of Nablus. Visitors are greeted by a statue of Hercules in the center of the hall. Sunlight shining in from a dome above traces the hour on the polished marble floor. Other rooms, which I wander through with the gentle encouragement of my host, contain such varied treasures as the floor of a 2,000-year-old Roman villa, a Rafaelo tapestry, seventeenth-century French dining-room furniture, and what al-Masri proclaims to be the oldest mirror in the world, which originally came from Venice, and which broke on its way here from Ramallah. One of al-Masri's sons designed the house. Five hundred men with donkeys carried out his plans at the height of the intifada, carting the stones and the precious antiques up the side of the mountain.

A hawkishly handsome man of seventy-one, al-Masri was born in Nablus and graduated from the University of Texas. He is the rare example of a wealthy Palestinian who made his money elsewhere and came back to Palestine out of nationalist motives.

"Yes, the Palestinians missed a lot of opportunities, but don't blame us," he tells me. "We were a million people in this land, and the Israelis were less than a hundred thousand people. But they came here very determined, and they worked very hard. Then they committed a few massacres that made people afraid, and then our stupid leaders told the people to leave. We always tend to say it's a Zionist plot with the British. What we call a plot, they call a plan."

As one of the leading financiers of the Palestinian national movement, al-Masri was close to Arafat for almost half a century. His first acquaintance with the movement came when he was the head of Phillips Petroleum operations in Algeria, where he met Khalil al-Wazir, otherwise known as Abu Jihad, the organizational genius of the Fatah movement, who was assassinated in Tunis in
1988. Al-Wazir had been sent to Algeria to open Fatah's first official bureau at the invitation of the Algerian revolutionary Ben Bella.

"One day I found somebody in front of me who said his name was Khalil al-Wazir," al-Masri recalls. "He made a favorable impression. I liked him. Maybe six months later another guy came. It was Arafat. It was late '63, and he starts coming back. I didn't like at the time the way Yasir Arafat spoke, because he spoke in Egyptian dialect. Arafat told me, 'What can I do? I went to school there. I did this and I did that.' And we became very good friends. I felt a great sympathy toward him, this little guy. He made believe that he was born in Jerusalem. He loved Jerusalem. He loved Jerusalem a lot. Oh, in that early period he was very dynamic. Piercing eyes, and always 'the cause.' Always a pamphlet or something to show me."

Al-Masri made a fortune in the oil-services business, and was invited to serve as a minister in the Jordanian cabinet by his friend the Jordanian prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal. By then Yasir Arafat was the head of the PLO and the hero of the battle of Karamah, in March of 1968, when he led a strong fight against an invading Israeli column and then displayed captured Israeli vehicles in the streets of Amman. The PLO forces in Jordan carried weapons in the street and began to take over the country, setting up roadblocks, collecting tribute, and meting out punishment. As the Hashemite Kingdom tottered, al-Masri became an important bridge between his friends Arafat and King Hussein. He remembers visiting Arafat, where he was holed up in a bunker on top of a mountain at the end of the failed Palestinian revolt that became known as Black September, surrounded by 6,000 or 7,000 Jordanian troops.

"It was a nice day, but he always wants to make it dramatic, Arafat," al-Masri says, with a forgiving wave of his hand. "He wants to take us down to the bunker. It stinks, it's smelly, dark. I said, 'Come on'-he made his point. He took us down anyway. He made us cry about how bad it was for the Palestinians. He said the Jordanian army went to Palestinian houses and they were killing the men and doing things to the women. Of course, when we went down the mountain, the first Jordanian soldier we saw said you did this and that to us, and now you Palestinians will have the gun."

Arafat refused al-Masri's invitation to meet with the king at Amman. Instead he went to Lebanon. Wasfi al-Tal was assassinated shortly after by members of Black September, the Fatah terrorist group that was created to avenge the Palestinian defeat in Jordan. His assassins shot him in a hotel lobby in Cairo; one of them got down on his hands and knees and lapped at Tal's blood.

"No doubt Arafat was a great man," al-Masri says. "No doubt he had vision. Most of the people that you see now being very important, I see them wanting the grace of Yasir Arafat. They want to be in his grace. Ah, he thought money was power," al-Masri adds, with a wistful glance around his study. The money he spent to buy the loyalty of his court, al-Masri gently suggests, could easily have paid for a functioning Palestinian state instead.

"With three hundred, four hundred million dollars we could have built Palestine in ten years. Waste, waste, waste. I flew over the West Bank in a helicopter with Arafat at the beginning of Oslo, and I told him how easy we could make five, six, seven towns here; we could absorb a lot of people here; and have the right of return for the refugees. If you have good intentions and you say you want to reach a solution, we could do it. I said, if you have money and water, it could be comparable to Israel, this piece of land."

Al-Masri's eyes mist over. "Abu Ammar, yes. He's a simple man. He slept on a simple bed. He doesn't want any houses. He doesn't want anything. I remember one day I wanted to bring him some free suits, tailor-made suits, you know, and he said no, no, no. I can't. But he gave me a suit. He told me, 'This is my suit. You make it longer, you wear it and have it.' Be very interesting for you to see."

"Let's go eat," he says, beckoning me to join him. We eat at the table in his kitchen, which is adjacent to his grand house.

Halfway through lunch an aide brings down the suit, one of the famous military tunics that Arafat's guards bought at surplus stores. The brass buttons are decorated with the Fatah eagle. I check the inside of the jacket for a tailor's label, and find there is none. "Who would dare?" al-Masri explains.

"Put it on," he urges me. I put on the jacket, and find that Arafat was approximately my size, with slightly narrower shoulders. One of the inner pockets closes with a zipper.

"He kept money inside," al-Masri says. I suggest that it is strange to think that Arafat managed the affairs of his people from the inside pocket of this coat.

Al-Masri remembers sitting with Arafat one night in 1988 as the Palestinian leader negotiated a formula that would allow the United States to recognize the PLO. "They gave him the formula, and he said it in a speech in Geneva, but he put in extra words, so no one could figure out what he was saying," al-Masri remembers. "The Americans said, 'No way.' So I stayed up all night with him and Dick Murphy, the assistant secretary of state, to work out what he must say. The formula was 'We totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism.' So they called a press conference, and he said everything right, except instead of 'terrorism' he said, 'We announce tourism! We announce all forms of tourism!'"

Talk of Arafat's last illness makes al-Masri sad again. "Every morning I used to go see him and give him the medicine because he would not take it from anybody else," he remembers, looking moodily out over his lawn. "Yeah, and I never thought he would die."

"How long did you know that he was sick?" I ask.

"For the last year. Last year in September he told me he doesn't feel well. So, and he felt that something was not right, and it looks like he had the same symptoms again, but the last time he had enough immunity. Yeah, he knew."

I am struck by al-Masri's use of the word "immunity," which is a word characteristically associated with aids. Rumors that Arafat died of "a shameful illness" spread quickly through the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat, who married his wife, Suha, in 1990, was often surrounded by children and was openly affectionate with some of his bodyguards. The Palestinian leadership denounced reports that Arafat was a homosexual as lies spread by Mossad, the Israeli foreign-intelligence agency. Accounts also circulated that a secret agreement had been reached between the Israelis and Arafat's heirs, stipulating that the truth about Arafat's fatal illness would not be released, the Palestinian leader would be buried in Ramallah and not in Jerusalem, and the wanted men who had accompanied him in his captivity would not be pursued by Israeli forces.

"He knew that it was the same disease that he had a year ago?" I ask. Al-Masri nods his head.

"Same symptoms," he answers. "But look how strong he was. I mean, when Abu Mazen came," he says, referring to Arafat's longtime deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, "we brought him from one bed in his small room to a bigger room where we could sit. I sat on the bed. Abu Mazen sat in front of him and Abu Alaa sat in front of him. He said, 'Ah, Mazen.' His face was very red, and you know that he was very sick, but he wants to show that he was still in control of the details with Mazen, you know? He said, 'I have this flu, ah, ah. I have this flu. Came and went to my stomach.'"

The Old Man's Pockets long the outer walls of the Muqata guards lounge beneath tattered posters of the white-bearded lunatic figure that Abu Ammar became in the last years of his life. His people accepted his foibles because he was their father. He named them. He paid for their weddings and their funerals. It was part of his paternal pose that no Palestinian who asked him for money went away empty-handed. When he visited cities, he was followed by an aide with a Samsonite briefcase stuffed with bundles of cash, which he distributed to the people who lined up to beg for money. Ordinary Palestinians placed classified advertisements in the newspaper asking Arafat for money. Others wrote him letters. "I sent him a letter on the occasion of the wedding of my second daughter," a qahwehgee, or "coffee guy," who works outside the Muqata tells me one afternoon, as he fills a small cup with hot black coffee from a large brass boiler. He indicates with a nod that the Old Man was generous.

Such generosity was a common feature of Arafat's rule. Documents taken by the Israeli army from the Muqata paint an astonishing portrait of the range of requests to which Arafat routinely responded with cash. The captured documents record requests for school fees for poor children in Gaza (Arafat gave them $250 each) and $34,000 in tuition and expenses for the daughters of a PLO official to study in Britain ("$10,000 is to be paid"). Though Arafat routinely cut his bequests to ordinary Palestinians to half or a third of what was asked, no such economies were inflicted on the petitions of his top officials. When one member of Arafat's circle requested money for the purchase of paintings of Mecca and Medina intended as gifts for a lady friend, Arafat was glad to oblige ("The two pictures should be paid-66 thousand dollars").

Members of the presidential guard got more money than they asked for. When Lieutenant Mahfoudh Aissa asked for plane tickets for his wife and four children to visit his sick mother-in-law in Tunis, Arafat approved the request, adding, "The tickets are to be paid for and an additional $1,000 for expenses." He then forwarded it as usual to the Ministry of Finance, which served through most of his reign as the Palestinian leader's personal cashbox.

For those at the top of the heap the rewards were much larger and more systematic. The amounts of money stolen from the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people through the corrupt practices of Arafat's inner circle are so staggeringly large that they may exceed one half of the total of $7 billion in foreign aid contributed to the Palestinian Authority. The biggest thief was Arafat himself. The International Monetary Fund has conservatively estimated that from 1995 to 2000 Arafat diverted $900 million from Palestinian Authority coffers, an amount that did not include the money that he and his family siphoned off through such secondary means as no-bid contracts, kickbacks, and rake-offs. A secret report prepared by an official Palestinian Authority committee headed by Arafat's cousin concluded that in 1996 alone, $326 million, or 43 percent of the state budget, had been embezzled, and that another $94 million, or 12.5 percent of the budget, went to the president's office, where it was spent at Arafat's personal discretion. An additional 35 percent of the budget went to pay for the security services, leaving a total of $73 million, or 9.5 percent of the budget, to be spent on the needs of the population of the West Bank and Gaza. The financial resources of the PLO, which may have amounted to somewhere between one and two billion dollars, were never included in the PA budget. Arafat hid his personal stash, estimated at $1 billion to $3 billion, in more than 200 separate bank accounts around the world, the majority of which have been uncovered since his death.

Contrary to the comic-book habits of some Third World leaders, such as President Mobutu Sese Seko, of Zaire, and Saddam Hussein, Arafat eschewed lurid displays of wealth. His corruption was of a more sober-minded type. He was a connoisseur of power, who used the money that he stole to buy influence, to provoke or defuse conspiracies, to pay gunmen, and to collect hangers-on the way other men collect stamps or butterflies. Arafat had several advisers who oversaw the system of patronage and theft, which was convincingly outlined in a series of investigative articles by Ronen Bergman that appeared during the late 1990s in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. The PLO treasurer, Nizar Abu Ghazaleh, ran the company al-Bahr ("the Sea") for a small number of wealthy shareholders, including Arafat's wife, Suha. Al-Bahr set the price of a ton of cement in Gaza at $74, of which $17 went into Arafat's private bank account. One of Arafat's favorite bagmen, Harbi Sarsour, ran the General Petroleum Company, which established a monopoly over all the gasoline and fuel-oil products sold in the West Bank and Gaza. A company called al-Sakhra ("the Rock"), run by Fuad Shubaki on behalf of Fatah, profited hugely from an exclusive contract to provide all uniforms and other supplies to the Palestinian security forces. Official monopolies on basic goods and services had exclusive suppliers on the Israeli side. These profitable contracts were made available by Arafat to companies associated with former high-ranking members of the Israeli civil administration and the security services in the West Bank and Gaza.

The genius behind this system was Muhammad Rachid, who became Arafat's closest economic adviser. A onetime prot?g? of Abu Jihad, Rachid was a former magazine editor who became involved in the diamond business. He came to Arafat's attention because of his keen talent as a businessman, and because he was an ethnic Kurd-which meant that he was safely removed from the family- and clan-based politics that always threatened to disrupt the division of the spoils.

In their cities and villages Palestinians were subject to the extortion and violence of Arafat's overlapping security services, which competed among themselves for payoffs, arbitrarily arrested people and seized their land, and forced citizens to pay double or triple the price for everything from flour and gasoline to cigarettes, razor blades, and sheep feed. The fact that nearly everyone in Palestinian political life had taken something directly from Arafat's hand made it hard to criticize him; it was easier to go along. In
1991, at the low point of Fatah's finances, Ali Shahin, one of Arafat's earliest allies, wrote a secret report lambasting Fatah's "inconceivable moral degradation," for which he blamed the excesses of a leader whose true interests were "the red carpet, the private plane of the President, free rein to spend money." Shahin became the minister of supplies in Arafat's government and was notorious for selling spoiled flour and making truckloads of chocolates sit at the Erez checkpoint in the heat in order to help out a friend who owned the only candy factory in Gaza. The economy of the Palestinian territories, which had enjoyed startlingly high growth rates after
1967, when it passed from Jordanian and Egyptian control into the hands of the Israelis, stagnated and then went backward. In less than a decade Yasir Arafat and his clique managed to squander not only the economic well-being but also the considerable moral capital amassed by the Palestinian people during two and a half decades of Israeli military rule.

The Sorcerer's Apprentices s the Oslo peace process collapsed into violence, an Israeli investment adviser named Ozrad Lev had a falling-out with his business partner, Yossi Ginossar. The two men had formed a company together and worked closely with Muhammad Rachid. Angry at both men, Lev came forward and spoke to the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv about his own role in laundering hundreds of millions of dollars stolen by Yasir Arafat from the Palestinian people with the connivance of the Israeli government and international authorities. The story he told placed an exclamation point at the end of a decade of official lies and flagrant corruption which were justified in the name of peace. A former Israeli military-intelligence officer, Lev had left the army in 1987 and gotten a business degree from Pepperdine University, in California. In 1997 he was approached by Ginossar, a former deputy director of Shin Bet, Israel's feared domestic-security service, who had retired in disgrace after participating in a cover-up of the murder of two Palestinian teenagers who hijacked a bus with plastic guns. A charismatic figure who spoke fluent, idiomatic Arabic, Ginossar was famous for his brutal manner toward people who displeased him. He met Arafat in the early 1990s and later helped an Israeli company called Dor win an exclusive contract to supply gasoline to the Palestinian Authority. Ginossar set up a meeting between Lev and Rachid, who was looking to find a safe home in Switzerland for hundreds of millions of dollars that he had extracted from the Palestinian economy.

Licensed by a codicil to the Oslo Accords known as the Paris protocol-the agreement that established tax, customs, and other formal economic arrangements between the Palestinian Authority and the State of Israel-such corruption was held by all but the most far-out critics of Arafat's rule to be essential to the Oslo process. Every month the Israeli government was obliged to forward the VAT and other tax revenues collected on goods and services in the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority. According to a side agreement reached between the Israeli government and Arafat, who was represented by Rachid, fuel-tax revenues were deposited in Arafat's private account #80-219000 at the Hashmonaim Street branch of Bank Leumi, in Tel Aviv. Arafat and Rachid also diverted funds to a special account at the Arab Bank in Ramallah. Every month up through the beginning of the intifada the Israeli government transferred millions of dollars to the man whom it had denounced for four decades as the world's most dangerous terrorist.

Ben Caspit broke the story that became known in Israel as "the Ginossar Affair" in December of 2002. The reporter was a friend of Lev's from childhood and had known Ginossar for years. "He was a very interesting guy, very tough, very bad manners," Caspit remembers, when I meet with him one morning in Tel Aviv. "You could sit with Yossi in the fanciest restaurant and he would start yelling at the waitress like she just killed her youngest son," Caspit recalls. "But he knew how to make himself contacts."

As I sit with Caspit on the wooden boardwalk outside Yama, a bohemian hangout in the port section of the city, the claustrophobia of the West Bank feels very far away. Here you can listen to Hebrew reggae and smell the salty sea air. A rusted steel cargo crane broods over the man-made inlet, where an old motorboat has been pulled up onto the shore. The wild party scene in the warehouses on the weekends rivals that of Reykjavik in the winter, Caspit insists. If this is not exactly the Zionist dream of Israel's ascetic socialist founders, it speaks to the escapist desires of a secular Israeli society that has seen its dream of peace with the Arabs wither on the vine, and has become inured to flagrant official corruption.

The man that Arafat called "Joe" was the Palestinian leader's all-purpose back channel to the Israeli political leadership. He was also a lover of the good life, who smoked Cuban cigars and drove showy, expensive cars, and whose enthusiastic eating habits helped to finance Tel Aviv's proliferation of fancy restaurants. It made sense that the Palestinian leader would seek out someone like Ginossar. "Israel is a crazy place-one day you have one government, the next another," Caspit explains. "Ginossar is there all the time, and he has the ability to be close with Rabin, Peres, Barak, Sharon, with everyone."

There were those who saw Ginossar's proximity to Arafat and Rachid in a more troubling light. The former head of the civil administration in Gaza, a brigadier general named Yitzhak Segev, wrote to Barak in the fall of 1999 and warned that Ginossar's business dealings with Rachid made him a poor choice to represent Israel. But Ginossar was so deeply enmeshed in the backroom diplomacy and business deals at the center of the Middle East peace process that it was impossible to get rid of him. His self-advertised connections to high American officials such as Dennis Ross and Ambassador Martin Indyk were augmented by his lucrative business dealings with Stephen P. Cohen, a Harvard Ph.D. and sometime university professor who jetted around the Middle East in a private plane provided by the SlimFast diet mogul Daniel Abraham. When Ginossar was excluded from the Israeli delegation to the Camp David peace talks in 2000 as a security risk, he was quickly named a member of the American delegation instead.

What Ozrad Lev had to offer Ginossar and Rachid was a connection to the world of high-toned Swiss banks, which might have been leery of accepting deposits from a man once numbered among the world's leading terrorists. An investment account that belonged to the Palestinian Authority and was managed by a former Israeli intelligence officer presented fewer difficulties. Lev's first move was to establish a financial-management company named Ledbury and open an investment account at the Swiss bank Lombard Odier, at 11 Rue de la Corraterie, in Geneva, through the offices of a partner named Richard de Tscharner. On May 17, 1997, Rachid wrote a formal letter to de Tscharner establishing the account, whose funds would be derived from "Taxes and Customs revenues" and also from "Revenues derived from various economic activity of the Palestinian Authority, through its state-owned companies." Rachid also promised that the PA would not use Ledbury funds "for any war or aggression oriented activities," a commitment that might have given a more-cautious banker pause. De Tscharner agreed to set up the account on the spot.

>From 1997 to 2000 the sum in the Ledbury portfolio grew to more than $300 million. Lev also agreed to create an investment fund for leading members of the Palestinian security apparatus, which was registered on the Isle of Man under the name Supr a-din-a pun on "Saladin." Management commissions for the fund were paid to Rachid's deputy, Walid Najab, through a company called MCS, which forwarded a commission to Ginossar and Lev through a company that the two men had set up in Tel Aviv under the name ARK, a Hebrew acronym for "Anachnu Rotzim Kesef"-"We Want Money."

hese days Ozrad Lev spends lots of time in a restaurant in Ramat Hasharon called Reviva and Celia, which might pass for a cool screenwriters' hangout in Santa Monica. Lev himself is very Californian, in a green polo shirt and close-cut hair. He got to know Ginossar in the early 1980s, while serving in Israel's military intelligence, Aman. He remembers Ginossar as a brilliant but forbidding figure. Later, while serving as aide-de-camp to General Ehud Barak, then the head of Aman, Lev was at the scene of the Bus 300 hijacking, which destroyed Ginossar's career in Shin Bet. Ginossar's life after that was a long series of failures until he met Muhammad Rachid.

"Every place he went, he failed," Lev remembers. "One day in 1996 he told me, 'Ozrad, I've been waiting for this a long time. You have to meet Muhammad Rachid.' I said, 'Okay, who is Muhammad Rachid?' He said, 'Look, Muhammad Rachid is someone who I know will like you very much and you will like him.'" Rachid made a strong impression on the former Israeli officer.

"He understood the Israeli mentality head and shoulders above any of the Palestinians I've ever met," Lev remembers. "He was very calm, not arrogant, calculating every word that came out of his mouth, and he had an excellent sense of humor. Physically he was very Israeli. I looked at him and I felt as if I had seen this guy dozens of times on the street in Tel Aviv."

Anxious to cover himself in the event that the peace process collapsed, Lev insisted that the money in the Swiss account stay put for five years, and that withdrawals be made only to a heavily monitored Palestinian Authority account at the Arab Bank branch in Ramallah. Starting with $16 million, Rachid funneled tens of millions of dollars to Lev, who took the deposits to Switzerland. Returns were excellent. Arafat was grateful. In July of 1997 Lev was invited to meet Arafat, who presented him with a model of the al-Aqsa mosque made of seashells from Gaza. He found the Palestinian leader to be humble and charming, and well informed about the Swiss accounts.

"He knew about all the details," Lev remembers. "When he talks to you, the sentences are so simple, so clear, which means that he is very smart. He knew that there were several accounts; he talked to me about the other names-Soditic and Atlas. He told me that he appreciates very much what I'm doing for the Palestinian people, and that he hoped many Israelis would go my way." The only thing that disconcerted him about the meeting, Lev says, was how ugly Arafat was. Arafat's hands, he noticed, were as pale as the hands of a corpse.

"Arafat, when you met him, he was not a corrupt person," Lev says. "He lived on five shekels a day. He had a plan. Oslo was not his plan. The whole thing about the secret accounts is to keep the financial flexibility to move money to the second stage. He thought that demographically they're going to win the war, and in order to do that, you have to be patient and let the Israelis bleed."

"He succeeded in everything," Lev concludes. "Our life philosophy here is impatience-because of the Holocaust, because of the military threats. In Israel we say that when we have sex we do it with sneakers on, so that we can run to our friends and tell them how it was. The Arabs have a word, tsumut-which means holding to the ground where your ancestors lived. My ancestors are from Germany," he adds. "I don't understand the meaning of tsumut. You know, Rachid and I went to the promenade once in Tel Aviv, and he said, 'I told Arafat many times, the Israelis are their own worst enemies. We don't have to shoot one bullet-just be patient, don't have any agreement with them, and all of what you see here will be ours.'"

On June 19, 2000, after a dispute about the division of the spoils, Rachid terminated Lev's authority over the account and removed the financial controls that Lev had insisted on. Three months later the second intifada began. In August of 2001 tens of millions began flowing out of the Lombard Odier accounts. By December of 2001 a decision was reached to close the accounts. The money made its way to banks around the world, including accounts controlled by Rachid in London and Cairo.
The Inner Circle he Oslo Accords created something called the Palestinian Authority, but to this day there really is no such thing. The assertion that the Palestinian Authority does not exist may seem strange to Western ears, because honorifics such as "President Yasir Arafat" and "Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath" have been employed so often over the past ten years that it is hard for all but the most devilish skeptics not to assume the existence of a state apparatus roughly equivalent to that which operates in the United States or in Western Europe. Instead what exists on the ground is a vast and scattered archipelago of randomly located government ministries, competing security-services headquarters, and prisons that operate according to no coordinated plan. In the slow-moving offices of the major ministries, located in the al-Tiri district of Ramallah, you can find the murafiqoon of the dead leader-his companions of the last four decades, the veterans of the legendary victories and defeats and thousands of late-night meetings and press conferences. The one constant among the crystal eagles, EU paperweights, inlaid mother-of-pearl clocks from Syria, and other mementoes of their travels is the standard-issue high-definition photograph of the golden-domed Mosque of Omar, in Jerusalem, set against a cloudless blue sky.

Having known and trusted him for so long, Arafat's companions found it impossible not to believe that with one roll of the dice, the Old Man would reverse his fortunes and escape from the morass of petty administrative details and large-scale corruption that had come to characterize his rule. The Fatah men who had been his equals and trusted advisers over the years, and had the revolutionary credentials to stand up to him, like Abu Jihad, engineer of the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule in the late 1980s, which became known as the "intifada," and Abu Iyad, the organizational boss of the Black September terrorist group, were assassinated before the Oslo process began. Having buried his peers and survived repeated assassination attempts himself, Arafat was no longer first among equals. His was the only opinion that mattered in Palestine. Arafat's fantasy life and his money gripped the vital organs of the Palestinian national movement for so long that practical political thinking became impossible.

As the identification of Yasir Arafat with the Palestinian national movement became fixed in stone with the signing of the Oslo Accords, those members of the international diplomatic community who saw Oslo as a great moral and political achievement felt themselves to be correspondingly obliged to excuse the Palestinian leader's most outrageous statements and actions as the quirks of a man who had dedicated himself to peace.

Not everyone was convinced by the hopeful fiction that Arafat was the Middle East's answer to Nelson Mandela. Young Palestinian revolutionaries soon had a closer look at the leader they had helped to bring back from exile. The Arafat they had worshipped from afar during the seventies and eighties was a visionary ascetic-the imaginative projection of brave and frightened Palestinians, most of whom were barely out of their teens, who conjured up the heroic leader they needed from radio broadcasts and clandestine texts that were passed from hand to hand and studied like pages of the Koran. The sight of the high-handed autocrat and his potbellied retinue in the flesh came as a shock to many young Palestinians, few of whom had ever ventured outside the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel.

Young Fatah cadres in the West Bank and Gaza soon found that the corruption of their elders was matched by a complete lack of positive ideas-however farfetched or loony-about the form that a future Palestinian polity might take. There would be no Year Zero of the Palestinian revolution. Western-style parliamentary institutions did exist but had little power. What followed Arafat's return to Palestine was a decade-long thieves' banquet at which Fatah's old guard divided up the spoils of Oslo and treated ordinary Palestinians as conquered subjects. When the second intifada, popularly known as the al-Aqsa intifada, started, the members of the young guard, most of whom were now firmly anchored in middle age, rallied around the Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti-whose fiery denunciations of official corruption had led to frequent clashes with Arafat-in the hope that violence would serve as a catalyst for change. Here again, the young guard of Fatah would become little more than cannon fodder for their elders; Barghouti was arrested by the Israelis in
2002, during Operation Defensive Shield, for masterminding terror attacks, and was sentenced to five consecutive life terms in prison.

In the caf?s and apartments in Ramallah where we met, some of the leading members of Fatah's young guard spoke openly of their anger and disappointment at what had happened in Palestine since Oslo. They reserved their bitterest denunciations not for the Israelis but for Arafat's cronies, who had used state jobs to get rich, and showed little interest in their revolutionary progeny. "We remember their songs, their poems, their speeches, their beliefs, their thoughts, the names of their kids, even the number of their shoes," Ziad Abu Ain, one of Barghouti's closest friends, told me one afternoon, as we sat and talked in his apartment in Ramallah. "They don't even remember our names."

For the members of the old guard questions about how a few million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza were to be governed were not of any particular interest. The Palestinian question was part of the larger pan-Arab discourse that had occupied the Nasserite and anti-colonialist study groups of their student days in Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut. As the symbolic leader of the Palestinian people, Yasir Arafat was the incarnation of a revolution that presented itself as a model for the rest of the Arab world-a symbol of secular revolutionary purity and anti-colonial zeal that had been supplanted in the eighties by the success of the Iranian revolution, the Sunni fundamentalist jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and Hizbollah's war against the Israelis in Lebanon.

he predominant note in the old guard's reminiscences of their leader is nostalgia for the sense of the historical centrality of the Palestinian national struggle that Arafat provided, which was as addictive to his followers as any drug. Arafat's longtime foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, was thirteen years old when he first heard the young Arafat asking his father for donations to help Palestinian refugees in Cairo and Alexandria. Even then, he says, he recognized the future president of Palestine. As a guerrilla leader in the sixties and seventies, Arafat led his fighters in battle; he gave them the noms de guerre that they would carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Bereft of the man that many of them regarded as their father, Arafat's companions still live by their dead leader's schedule, staying up late at night like aging bohemians. At Fatah headquarters in Ramallah, which I visit several nights a week with N., it is easy to find the ancient champions of the revolution chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking endless little cups of black coffee. The building looks like a plush union hall in New Jersey, with green-marble floors and bluish clouds of smoke that asphyxiate the potted plants. Men in black-leather coats and heavy sweaters lounge away their evenings on padded leather couches.

The new leader, Mahmoud Abbas, lacks the Old Man's personal touch, they complain. He doesn't remember birthdays and weddings, and no one comes to him to resolve personal disputes. Some of the Old Man's inner circle have already sent their families to Amman or Tunis and their money to London or Cairo.

Upstairs I meet Ahmad Abdul Rahman, the former head of Arafat's propaganda operations, who sits in his navy pea coat smoking Dunhills with their gold band, a revolutionary's privilege. His glossy jet-black hair and dark eyebrows contrast sharply with his deeply lined smoker's face. Abdul Rahman was close to Arafat for almost forty years, and frequently issued statements in the Old Man's name.

"It is because of Arafat that we stayed together for this long, long time," he explains. "He invents events if there are no events. He invents activities if there are no activities."

"Did his style of working change from Beirut to Tunis to Ramallah?" I ask.

"He faced new problems here," Abdul Rahman concedes. "If he was told 'This ministry does not need people, it is filled,' he'd say, 'Okay' and then create another ministry. In this way he built the main basis for the state."

he marble-floored Palestine Media Center is by far the snazziest government ministry in Ramallah. It is run by the veteran propagandist Yasir Abd Rabbo, who looks like a ladies' man at a red-brick college in Manchester or Leeds and walks with a limp that he claims is the result of an old war wound. An inveterate "splittist," who joined and left a long list of secular leftist Palestinian parties, he is a charter member of the Arafatist bloc. He is also a habitual gossip. He knows N. well, and is happy to grant us an interview. Like many of the men I talk to, he speaks of the late Palestinian leader in the present tense.

"Arafat's great secret is patience," Abd Rabbo explains, of the man he served for more than three decades. "He does not cut even a thread to a fly. He keeps lines open with everybody. He is Arafat the progressive, Arafat the Islamist, Arafat the conservative, and Arafat the enlightened. So he was with the Saudi kings and with the kings of the Kremlin at the same time, with Fidel Castro and all kinds of imams and the pope. The one main issue he did not compromise in his life was the independence of the Palestinian movement. He believed since the beginning that if he did not preserve the independence of the Palestinian movement from the other Arab regimes, he will be doomed."

Abd Rabbo's area of particular expertise in the 1970s was the politics of the European left and the Soviet bloc. A table near his desk shows off a laughing Buddha, a crystal eagle, and a photo book titled Russia: The Country of Vast Expanses. He explains to me how Arafat patiently led the Palestinian national movement up the ladder to the inner halls of the Kremlin. His goal was t