MAN OF ISRAEL-FREE VISION ARAFAT MASTER MANIPULATOR OF HIS WORLD.

Byline: Benny Morris

FOR all his sly buffoonery - it was almost impossible to get him to answer a question properly - Yasser Arafat was a man with a vision. And when speaking in Arabic he often charted it for his audiences. He wanted, simply, to ``end the occupation'' and ``redeem Palestine.'' Arab listeners, inside and outside Palestine, understood what he was saying.

Many Westerners thought, or preferred or pretended to believe, that he was talking about the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories occupied by Israel in 1967 and constituting 22 percent of historic Palestine. But they were belittling the man and his dream.

Arafat didn't want and never really acquiesced in the idea of a stunted West Bank-Gaza state. And in his vision Arafat accurately reflected the general will of his people - as he had throughout his life on all major issues, which was the secret behind the longevity of his rule.

For all Palestinians, from the fundamentalist Islamic Jihad to Arafat's mainstream Fatah movement, the tragedy of Palestine and the ``occupation'' began not in 1967 or even 1917 but in 1882, when the first Zionist settler set foot in Palestine. And in 1948 and 1949, the state of Israel was established on 78 percent of Palestine, and some two-thirds of Palestine's Arab population was displaced.

When Arafat set out as a young engineer in the Palestinian Diaspora to bring justice to his people, he thought and spoke, clearly and insistently, of the return of the Palestinians to Palestine and the return of Palestine to its ``rightful owners.'' Nothing less. That is what Arafat strove for all his life, wavering only on tactics and strategy, not on the goal.

By the 1990s he understood that only a combination of political-diplomatic stratagems (resulting in international pressure on Israel), terrorism and demographics would do the job.

Whatever deluded Westerners might believe, Arafat was no liberal, taking account of others' views and feelings and seeking solutions through conciliation and compromise. In Arafat's eyes and those of his people, there is only one justice: Palestinian justice. Only what the Palestinians believe and seek is just.

That is why Arafat turned down the peace proposals of Ehud Barak in July 2000 and the proposals from Clinton the following December. He said no because he refused to accept any settlement that did not include a mechanism for its future subversion, a loophole that would allow the Palestinians, down the road, to undermine its two-state core - specifically, the ``right of return'' of the Palestinian refugees to Israeli territory.

Such a return would, of course, spell Israel's demise. (Israel currently has a population of about 5 million Jews and almost 1.3 million Arabs; there are some 4 million Palestinians registered as refugees by the United Nations.) In short, Arafat wanted ``Palestine,'' all of it, not a watered-down 22 percent solution.

Yet Arafat needed to take account of Israel's presence and power, and of the international community's endorsement of Jewish statehood. So on the road to realizing his vision, he had on occasion to make ephemeral tactical concessions, like renouncing terrorism in 1988 and recognizing Israel's right to exist as part of the 1993 Oslo agreement.

Politically Arafat's achievements were nothing short of stupendous. Over the decades he orchestrated an unrelenting terrorist-political campaign that has placed the Palestinian problem at the top of the international agenda and garnered for Palestinian sovereignty and statehood almost consensual international support. (Compare this with the almost complete lack of interest in the Palestinian problem between 1949 and 1967).

By engineering a rebellion that is widely perceived as the weak versus the strong, the Third World against the first, Arafat maneuvered Israel, through provocative terrorism, into crushing an impoverished, suffering people seemingly bent only on liberation. This has raised serious doubts among many Europeans and even some Americans about the legitimacy of Israel's existence.

Arafat's death most certainly will result in a succession struggle, between the generations inside the Fatah and between the Fatah and the Islamic fundamentalist parties. But it is unclear whether it will bring the Middle East any closer to peace.

His disappearance removes a major rejectionist obstacle from the scene. But it also leaves us with a paradox. For Arafat was probably the only Palestinian of our time, given his historical and political stature, capable of persuading the Palestinians, or most of them, to accept the concessions necessary to achieve a two-state solution.

On the other hand, his successors may be more amenable to a territorial compromise, but they lack the stature to intimidate or persuade their people to accept one, or to crush their terror-minded colleagues.

So Arafat's death may have done us no good at all.

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Photo:

Security guards are surrounded by portraits of Yasser Arafat at the Palestinian leader's compound.

Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press