Middle East: If Arafat's death is announced today, we'll know the rumours were true, writes Lara Marlowe.
Yasser Arafat's agony has become an allegory for his people's quest for a state: fraught with infighting and contradictions, seemingly interminable.
From time to time, there is a glimmer of hope. Though Mr Arafat's coma "deepened" on Monday night, the Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath said: "His brain, heart and lungs still function. He is alive . . . He will live or die depending on his body's ability to resist, and on the will of God."
Speculation about whether Arafat was dead or alive surpassed the limits of the absurd days ago. So Mr Shaath, the Palestinian prime minister Ahmad Qorei, the secretary general of the PLO Mahmoud Abbas, and the speaker of the parliament Rawhi Fattouh came to Paris to see for themselves. And they made an 11th-hour attempt to salvage some dignity for their leader's passing.
Mr Qorei was delegated to view the President of the Palestinian Authority in his hospital room, breathing through a respirator, being fed intravenously. Yet the confusion didn't end. Minutes after the four left Percy Army Training Hospital southwest of Paris, "senior political sources close to Arafat" told Reuters news agency, "He's dead".
Who to believe? If Mr Shaath was lying at his evening news conference, it was a brilliant performance. Only once or twice did he slip into the past tense, as in: "We are satisfied that everything possible was done." By accusing the Palestinian leaders of wanting "to bury Abu Ammar alive", the president's young, bleached-blonde, Christian-born wife united them, galvanised them into action.
Mrs Arafat welcomed them at Percy Hospital, Mr Shaath said. "We never talked about money . . . She was crying. She was distressed. She embraced all of us . . . We assured her of our love and sympathy, that she is the wife of a great man and the mother of his only daughter, and that she would always be respected and protected by the Palestinian people." Maybe.
After Mrs Arafat's tirade on Al Jazeera, demonstrators in Ramallah carried placards saying, "Where were you, Suha Tawil (her maiden name) when the president was under siege?" and "The struggle is on the ground, not in hotels" - an allusion to her penchant for five-star lodging.
But Mr Shaath let bygones be bygones. "She made quite an inflammatory statement two days ago," he admitted. "We are satisfied this was an accident of psychological tensions." Did that mean all differences among Palestinians were over? "They are finished," the foreign minister asserted. "We are totally reconciled. We understand her agony."
As for suggestions that Mr Arafat was brain-dead and might be taken off life-support systems, Mr Shaath insisted electro-encephalograms showed his brain was alive; it was normal for anyone in a coma to be connected to machines. "I want to rule out any question of euthanasia. People talk as if his life is plugged in and plugged out . . . We Muslims do not accept euthanasia."
Nor would the Palestinian foreign minister entertain plans for Mr Arafat's eventual funeral. It was, he said, "indecent to discuss somebody's burial when he is very much alive and you pray for his recovery". But despite Mr Shaath's attempts to shut down the rumour mill, those anonymous sources who kept saying he was dead were in the back of all minds. If Mr Arafat's death is announced today, if his state funeral is held tomorrow in Tunis, just in time for three days of official mourning before the Eid al-Fitr on Sunday, we'll know they were right.
Ending the soap opera in Paris will have proved easy compared to setting the record straight on Mr Arafat's place in history. Since the Palestinian leader was hospitalised 13 days ago, media have repeated ad nauseum Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cliché that Arafat is/was "an obstacle to peace". Countless times, we've heard the old saw about Arafat refusing a fantastic deal at Camp David, though it's been debunked by Bill Clinton's Middle East advisor, Robert Malley.
"President Arafat is the man who led us into the Oslo agreement," Mr Shaath said. "He kept the peace process going. He is co-winner of the Nobel prize, with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin . . . The fact that he resisted Israeli occupation is not a sin for a national leader to be tainted with."