A martyr to the cause

It is not yet clear if this is Yasser Arafat's final battle. It is clear he won't go quietly. Graham Usher reports from Ramallah
In what is becoming a daily homage, on Saturday a crowd of Palestinians converged on Yasser Arafat's presidential headquarters in Ramallah. On one side, two boys were collecting stones in a plastic bucket on the 70m strip of land that separates the president from two Israeli tanks, gun barrels trained permanently on his red-tiled offices. The usual scenes: slingshot against gun; people against army; leader under siege.
Unusually, Arafat came down to meet his supporters. Yes, he said, "we are facing a military crisis. Yet no one complains of his suffering. They have said, 'God is Great and Jihad, Jihad, Jihad!' Please God, give me the honour of being one of the holy martyrs of Jerusalem".
It was the second time in a week the Palestinian leader had raised the prospect of his death.
For Israel, "jihad" and "martyrs" are codes for the Palestinian factions to wreak their violence within its cities, like the unclaimed woman whose bomb killed an Israeli man and ripped apart shop fronts in West Jerusalem 24 hours later. For the Americans, "phrases" like these hardly contribute to "eliminating terrorism in the region," said a White House spokesman.
But what does it mean to Palestinians, when their leader speaks of martyrdom? "It means death," says one Palestinian observer. "It means if Israel is to remove him it will have to kill him. There is no other way."
These, at least, are the orders inside the presidential compound. Sources say every guard has been told to resist any Israeli incursion to the last man, up to and including "the death of the president." When the TV crews enter these days, Arafat makes sure he is filmed reading the Qur'an.
So is he preparing for his final battle? Maybe -- but he is aware the judgment deciding his fate will not be made by the Israeli prime minister, whose hand still stays those gun barrels from firing. It will be made in Washington. And it is the noises emanating from there that worry the Palestinian leader more than the tanks.
Over the weekend, President Bush twice said he was "disappointed" with Arafat for failing to make "a full effort to root out terror in the Middle East." Secretary of State Colin Powell -- viewed by the Palestinian leadership as a dove in a government of hawks -- warned that his "moment of truth" was fast approaching. And Vice-President Dick Cheney dismissed with a sneer Arafat's protestations that he had no connection to a shipment of Iranian-supplied arms seized by Israel on 3 January. "We don't believe him," he said.
But as for Israel's bombing of Palestinian Authority police stations in Gaza and Tulkarm, execution of Palestinian militants in Nablus and Khan Younes, destruction of Palestinian land and society, the Americans make barely a whimper. Even the internment of Arafat has been met with US "understanding" for Israel's "self defence."
The name of this game is pressure -- squeezing the Palestinian leader so hard he will be compelled to act in a way he has so far refrained from doing. "He must aggressively root out the infrastructure of the terrorist organisations in Palestine and arrest those known to plan and support such acts," said Cheney.
But Arafat is neither willing nor able to become again Israel's protector, not without some political return for the enormous sacrifices his people have made in the name of the uprising. He would seem to prefer for his regime to collapse and for his police to become militiamen.
Following the bomb attack in Jerusalem, a crowd of Palestinians marched on a PA jail in Bethlehem, afraid of Israeli reprisals and demanding the release of political prisoners locked within it. The police opened the doors. Seven men were set free, including the local commander of Islamic Jihad.
From the shuttered windows of his office Arafat watches this disintegration of his rule with stoic forbearance or "steadfastness." He is waiting for the world to intervene, say aides, to rescue him from Ariel Sharon and save Israel, and perhaps the Americans, from themselves. He is gradually getting some responses.
On Saturday, the head of Saudi Arabian intelligence, Prince Nawaf Ibn Abdel-Aziz, warned the US not to "make it worse" by cutting ties with the Palestinian leader. "You can accuse Arafat of anything except that he is not a man of peace," he added.
On Monday the European Union reaffirmed that "Israel needs the PA and its elected president... as a partner to negotiate with, both in order to eradicate terrorism and to work towards peace." Jordan, China and the United Nations made the same case.
Palestinians hope such calls will rein in America's unprecedented tilt toward Israel. But nobody is banking on them. They know that in the new, post-11 September order, it will be America that determines the regional alignments, not the Europeans and still less the Arabs.
And if in the next scheme of things Arafat -- as Israel decrees -- is "irrelevant" or worse, what then ?
"He will allow the flames to climb so everything will be destroyed," says one aide, who has been beside his leader for 30 years. "This is what he means by martyrdom. He will oblige Ariel Sharon to kill him."
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