Arafat's ultimate failure was that he never dared to let go of the gun

Telegraph | Opinion | Arafat's ultimate failure was that he never dared to let go of the gun : "Yasser Arafat died as he lived: amid confusion, intrigue and farce. His fatal ailment was described first as a stomach flu, then an unknown blood disorder or liver condition and, finally, a brain haemorrhage. In his last days, Arafat's estranged wife, Suha, made a bizarre cameo appearance, claiming the Palestinian leader would soon recover and accusing his lieutenants of trying to bury him alive.

At his funeral in Cairo today, many Arab leaders and Western politicians will publicly honour Arafat, but will shed few tears in private. Arafat exasperated radicals by his willingness to deal with Israel, and dismayed moderates by his exploitation of violence. Ordinary Palestinians will mourn the loss of Arafat as their symbol, but long ago felt let down by him as their leader.

When Arafat crossed the border from Egypt into Gaza in 1994, he looked like the Palestinians' version of Joshua, the biblical hero who led his armed followers across the Jordan to take the Promised Land.

A decade later, Arafat will be remembered more as a flawed Moses - the man who heard the calling, stirred Palestinian national consciousness, sustained the movement through the decades in the wilderness but, ultimately, only glimpsed the promise of statehood before dying in exile.

Arafat presided over the disaster of the past four years, the intifida that has killed thousands, pauperised Palestinians and taken them further from statehood, not closer. For decades, Arafat operated according to the chaos theory of politics - as long as the Palestinians remained a festering problem, the cause would fire the hearts of Muslims and somebody would intervene to help them. After signing the Oslo accord, he tightened and loosened the noose on Hamas and other rejectionist factions, to keep the pressure on the Israelis.

Such methods may have successfully kept the Palestinian movement alive and disabused Israelis of the notion that they could enjoy an "enlightened" occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But ultimately they proved self-destructive.

Arafat never understood how far Palestinians had become the single biggest influence on the Israeli electorate. Palestinian violence was a contributory factor in the assassination of Rabin in 1995, and destroyed the pro-peace Labour governments of Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak. The latest intifada broke out in September 2000, just after Israel had made its biggest ever (though still insufficient) peace offer at Camp David, and thereby destroyed most Israelis' trust in the feasibility of peace with the Palestinians, and in particular with Arafat.

Arafat had a last chance with the September 11 attacks on America. Seeking to win Muslim support for the war against al-Qa'eda, Mr Bush spoke of his "vision" of a Palestinian state, while Tony Blair invited Arafat to Downing Street. But another wave of suicide bombings, the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister and the interception of a shipload of weapons from Iran allowed Sharon to present Arafat as a Palestinian version of Osama bin Laden. Washington said peace would be impossible until Palestinians found new leaders "not tainted by terror".

The new Palestinian leadership - which appears to be forming around Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmad Queria, known as Abu Mazen and Abu Alaa - appears to be more pragmatic, but at the same time lacks Arafat's authority.

In his famous speech to the UN General Assembly in 1974, which marked his debut as international revolutionary icon, Arafat declared: "I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."

The tragedy of the Middle East is that, when Israel finally began to grasp the olive branch, Arafat did not dare let go of the gun."