Is this the end for Arafat?

Peter Beaumont Observer News Service Ramallah

Omar and Ibrahim are small for 14. They are so small that they could pass for eight or nine. Omar has a gas mask in his hand. His job when the "clashes" start, he tells us, is to clear the Israeli tear-gas grenades as they come in among the demonstrators. The street outside Yasser Arafat's headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah is littered with canisters. Both boys have slingshots for weapons, which they fashioned from belts and string.

For a while on Friday Omar and Ibrahim were all that stood against the besieging Israeli forces outside Arafat's Ramallah headquarters. Standing by the main entrance to Arafat's walled compound we watched the Israeli forces 50 metres away -- a tank with its barrel trained on the compound and three armored personnel carriers parked beside an apartment house.

Inside, the apartment house's owner told us, are 50 more soldiers. Its residents had been sent to the cellars behind the block to live, his family among them. He says the soldiers threatened to throw his children down the stairs. We could not check as the Israeli soldiers blocked us as we tried to go to talk to them.

To the right, and a little closer, is another tank and an armored jeep. They block the way to another apartment house occupied by Israeli soldiers. Again the soldiers shouted to turn us back. But we could see where they had taken their positions, high on the fifth floor -- the sandbagged windows and the sniper rifle's barrel.

Omar and Ibrahim tell us they will stop the tanks and the Israeli soldiers coming for Arafat within his compound, where in effect he has been imprisoned for two months. They tell us they will stop the Israelis with their slingshots. They tell us they are "soldiers", although they admit their mothers do not know they are here.

As we walk away my translator become visibly agitated by the scene. "Is this how it is going to end? A president protected by small boys!"

In truth, there are soldiers within Arafat's compound. They would probably fight to the death to defend him if it ever came to that. But since his effective house arrest by the Israeli forces began two months ago they have retreated to offices and positions out of sight of the Israeli snipers. When the shooting starts later that afternoon, amidst a demonstration, it is the likes of Omar and Ibrahim who are getting hurt and ferried to the nearby field station.

If the children of Palestine are still being injured for his lifelong dream of a Palestinian state, then inside his office, behind his walls, the Old Man is suffering a different kind of pain. If Omar and Ibrahim symbolize anything, then it is the humiliation of a man who, for all his faults, is the living symbol of the Palestinian cause. What hurts the Chairman, hurts them all.

"He really is imprisoned," says a friend who recently visited Arafat within the compound. "What he controls now has shrunk to a few hundred metres. Two years ago he was in effect a president and treated like one. Now he has been stripped of all his power."

He holds his meetings in one room (though these days there are precious few visitors). He often eats on the move, snacking on chicken and olive oil mixed with honey (a favorite) and salted almonds. He sleeps in a second room, napping in the afternoon, and then working into the small hours of the morning, calling meetings at short notice even in the middle of the night. Those who have seen him in the past few weeks describe him as often tired and depressed.

Long famous for never answering the questions set to him by journalists, recently his replies have often become so fragmentary as to be almost beyond translation.

At other times he has been if anything too lucid, giving vent to his frustration in a way that has not helped his image in Israel or Washington. In December, after heavy Israeli air strikes were launched -- apparently with America's blessing -- against Palestinian Authority targets following a double suicide bombing, he went on Israel's Channel One and appeared to lose self-control.

"GOOD LORD," he shouted, "what do I care about the Americans! The Americans are on your side and they gave you everything. Who gave you the planes? The Americans! Who gave you the tanks? The Americans! Who gives you money? The Americans! Don't talk to me about the Americans."

It is all a sign, perhaps, of the intensity of his growing isolation. In the first month trapped in the compound in Ramallah, say sources, he received only a couple of calls of support from his old friends in the Arab world and then only from the Foreign Ministers of Qatar and Jordan, not from their leaders.

"He is desperate for support but no one wants to take his calls," one source told The Observer. "He won't say it but I believe he feels he has been abandoned." Mohammed Sobieh, Palestinian ambassador to the Arab League, puts a brighter gloss on it. "Some leaders phone," he told the New York Times last week. "Some don't. And we are waiting for more from the rest."

He has been trapped before, and he has been in equally serious binds. In Beirut 20 years ago, his supporters remind you, he was under siege, again by Ariel Sharon, then Israel's Defense Minister, who wanted to kill him. But in Beirut, they also concede, the area around which he could move was much more than this truncated parcel of Palestinian Territory. And Arafat was a younger man. Now, whether he likes it or not, the question is whether he can pull off one last leap from the fire, or whether this really is the endgame.

And already there is a nasty whiff of fatalism about the Arafat project among his old friends in the wider Arab world. In the past few days, a Palestinian colleague complains, some Arab television stations have begun talking about Arafat as if he was already on his way out.

It is a question that appears to have occurred to Arafat himself. "Peace is not meant for us," he told one visitor. "It is meant for our children." The day before he had told another reporter that he had imagined he had died a martyr's death -- as a shaheed -- like so many of his young people.

Arafat is not being deposed so much as being slowly dispossessed of all his power. The Israelis say he cannot move around the Palestinian Authority areas, but in truth he could leave his office if he wanted to. The danger is if he did they might not let him in again. His sovereignty, and legitimacy, is precariously attached to a few hundred metres of offices and barracks and a phone.

And there must be a suspicion that this was always Sharon's plan. After the suicide bombing at the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv last summer in which 21 young people died, hardliners in the army and cabinet of Sharon started leaking the idea to the Israeli media that Arafat should be killed, expelled or deposed.

After the shooting of the hardline Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi last October by gunmen of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, those discussions turned to the dismantling of large parts of the apparatus of the putative Palestinian state.

SHARON TOO has tried to personalize as well as militarize the crisis around the present intifada. In December, following terrorist attacks that killed 26 people in Haifa and Jerusalem, he called Arafat "the greatest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East". Worryingly Sharon appears to have succeeded in selling this strategy to Washington as well.

And last week Arafat's problems were multiplying almost out of control. On Thursday the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that the administration could "now understand" the reason for Israel's blockade of Arafat, remarks explained 24 hours later when the President himself accused Arafat and his authority of being directly responsible for efforts to smuggle in 50 tons of rockets and ammunition into Gaza in the freighter the Karine A on Jan. 3.

Which all raises the inevitable question -- after Arafat, then what? The problem, as Palestinians acknowledge, is that there are no obvious successors from within the Palestinian Authority upon whom all could agree, enjoying the same symbolism and legitimacy as Arafat.