Word: arafats
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Tunis is quiet after midnight, when the phone rings. This is a Yasser Arafat tradition, summoning visitors at all hours to make their way through a gauntlet of steel barricades to a villa in a quiet residential corner of the city. The stucco house looks like any other, except that it is surrounded by young men in jeans, bearing Kalashnikovs, smoking cigarettes. Their job is to keep the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization alive -- and they take it seriously. Male guests are patted down, their pockets emptied, wallets searched. Women are scanned with ultrasensitive metal detectors, their purses % ransacked...
...memory: between them they have given nearly 100 years of full-time service to the struggle. Would the next generation of young radicals feel the same urgency to settle for compromise that these two aging men share? During a heated debate with reluctant associates earlier this year in Tunis, Arafat pounded on the table and boomed, ''I cannot be excluded from this historical process!'' They also share a confidence in their ability to deliver on their promises. Arafat has the mystical arrogance of the survivor, so often has he cheated death at the hands of his enemies and political destruction...
...Then he saw a vision of al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, which he believed meant he would pray there before he died. He realized that the only way to fulfill that dream was to work out a peace with Israel. The realities of the moment left him little choice: Arafat and his organization were in trouble. After losing his Soviet sponsors, he alienated his rich Arab patrons by siding with Iraq in the Gulf War. Strapped for cash, he had to cut back funding for Palestinian schools and hospitals, students' tuition and widows' pensions in the occupied territories, which hurt...
...soldier who has seen too much death, he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker. He went some distance toward that end on the White House lawn, where the man not known for eloquence delivered himself of an exhortation for the ages: ''Enough of blood and tears! Enough!'' Arafat is no less aware -- and no less the engineer -- of the historic role he is enacting. ''This is my destiny,'' he tells his visitors, not long before a new day dawns in Tunis. ''No one can escape his destiny.'' In the ancient lands of Moses and Jesus and Mohammed...
...strange way, the near calamity last week brought the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships closer together. Netanyahu was quick to phone Arafat, to condemn Friedman's act in strong terms and wish the victims a swift recovery. Arafat avoided inflammatory language, calling the attack "a criminal attempt to torpedo the peace process." In Hebron, Israeli security forces coordinated closely with their Palestinian counterparts, who are already in position in the city but function quietly, without uniforms. When, just after the shooting, Hebron youths began to riot, Arafat's gendarmes fanned out, persuading them to desist. Said an officer...