It was the sort of painting that might charitably be called na∩f, street art as commissioned by Arab dictators, encased in a white frame. Amid the acre of glass splinters and broken concrete, uprooted trees and twisted pipes that had been the Palestinian police headquarters in Gaza, a much younger Abu Amar grinned at me yesterday morning. His combat fatigues were bright green, his keffiyeh meticulously folded to imitate the map of Palestine. The black, white, green and red Palestinian flag was unfurled behind him, against an orange sunset. The sky was inhabited not by F16 bombers, but friendly birds.
At a time when everything he has fought for is disintegrating, with his historic nemesis Ariel Sharon daily bombing away more of the independent state that Arafat tried to build, the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is a virtual hostage in Ramallah. Nineteen years have passed since the same Ariel Sharon - then defence minister - encircled and bombed Beirut, drove Arafat and his Fatah fighters into the sea, then sent Phalangist militiamen into the refugee camps to massacre more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians.
With Washington expressing total support for Mr Sharon's war of "legitimate self defence", Arafat cuts a lonely figure. It is doubtful he could stop all attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad without initiating a Palestinian civil war. A few European statesmen - mostly French - have warned that it would be "a fatal error" for Israel to depose him. Hours after the Egyptian foreign minister asked Mr Sharon to stop destroying Arafat's infrastructure, the F-16s were again bombing Gaza.
Arafat might have been pleased to see his glass-covered portrait miraculously intact after yesterday's bombing. Few leaders have wielded symbols so deftly. Perhaps his most unforgettable performance was at the UN General Assembly in November 1974, where he brandished a revolver in one hand, an olive branch in the other. "Do not let this olive branch fall from my hands," he pleaded.
Arafat became the paradigm of liberation struggles, a 20th century icon. The keffiyeh serves the dual purpose of hiding Arafat's bald pate. The scruffy beard is the result of a skin condition that prevents him from shaving, and the combat fatigues are meant to remind the world that he is still fighting for Palestine. The West regarded him as a "terrorist" until he reinvented himself as a "peace-maker" in 1993. Now Ariel Sharon would have us believe that the ailing old man holed up in Ramallah is again a "terrorist" leader.
Arafat's popularity has fallen in direct proportion to his people's belief in a negotiated peace settlement with Israel. A study by the Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shikaki shows that 80 per cent of Palestinians believed it was possible at the time of Oslo in 1993. That confidence fell to 60 per cent at the beginning of the Netanyahu government in May 1996; 44 per cent when Mr Netanyahu departed three years later. Ehud Barak's policy of "strengthening" settlements in the occupied territories further eroded Palestinian hopes, to 24 per cent. Today, with Ariel Sharon, only 11 per cent of Palestinians have any faith in negotiations.
Mr Sharon reportedly wants to annul the Oslo Accords, which abandoned the "land for peace" formula of the Madrid Conference. The agreement which won Arafat, the late Yitzak Rabin and the present Israeli Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, the Nobel Peace Prize was negotiated in secret and offered no guarantee of a Palestinian state - or even the complete withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza enshrined in UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. The Israeli team at Oslo had an army of lawyers; Arafat didn't bother taking legal advice.
So did Arafat sell his birthright for a biblical pot of lentils at Oslo? In the refugee camps of Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the neo-communist DFLP and FDLP said so in 1993. Amid the euphoria that "peace has come to the Middle East", they were dismissed as hardliners. The Marxist groups have all but disappeared today, but it is Hamas - promoted by the Israelis in the 1980s to destabilise Arafat - which most benefits from his decline.
The failure of peace negotiations and corruption within the Palestinian Authority have destroyed the adoration that Palestinians once felt for their leader. Most criticise him, but still admit that "he is the symbol of our cause". The former Israeli foreign minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, in a book published this year, called Arafat "a sort of mythological expression of the Palestinian cause". In Mr Ben Ami's opinion, the Palestinians must recognise that the balance of power is against them; their penchant for romanticism has, he says, made Palestinians too demanding. "What we reproach Yasser Arafat for," Ben Ami writes, "is that he transposes to a mythical level the diaspora, the problem of the refugees, the Palestinian cause, to such a point that the Palestinians are no longer capable of negotiating on a realistic basis."
Arafat's mother Zahwa died when he was four years old. His parents lived in Cairo, but his widowed father sent Yasser to live in his Uncle Salim's house, next to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, until he was eight. In Jerusalem he became conscious of his Palestinian identity. At university in Cairo in the 1940s, Arafat joined militant Palestinian student groups before fighting in the first Arab-Israeli war. Employed as an engineer in Kuwait in the late 1950s, he showed his only weakness for material things, buying two Chevrolets, a Thunderbird and a VW Beatle.
Arafat and his friends founded Fatah - an acronym for "Palestine Liberation Movement" in Kuwait in 1964. He took the nom de guerre of Abu Amar, and became the group's chairman five years later. Fatah decided to stage its "armed struggle to liberate Palestine" from Jordan, but the plan ended abruptly in 1970 when King Hussein used his army to quash the Palestinians in "Black September". The experience was repeated in more dramatic and deadly form in Lebanon, where Maronite Catholics allied themselves with Israel to drive out the PLO.
From Lebanon Arafat moved to Tunis, where the Israelis assassinated his closest friend, Khalil al-Wazzir (Abu Jihad) in 1988. The first Intifada, from 1987 until 1993, revived his flagging popularity. But Arafat made one of his greatest errors after Saddam Hussein's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, choosing to support the Iraqi dictator. At the end of the 1991 Gulf War, 400,000 Palestinians were expelled from Kuwait and the Gulf sheikdoms withdrew funding from the PLO. Oslo provided Mr Arafat with the perfect opportunity to redeem himself.
In 1991, he married Suha Tawil, a Palestinian Christian 34 years his junior. They had a baby daughter, named Zahwa after Arafat's mother. "Unfortunately, she looks like me," Arafat quipped in the mid-1990s, when he was still a darling of the American media. Mrs Arafat has since moved to Paris.
Arafat has outlived Begin and Rabin, Nasser and Sadat, King Hussein and Hafez al-Assad. In 1992, he survived a plane crash in the Libyan desert. His trembling lower lip led to speculation that he suffered from Parkinson's disease, a rumour repeatedly denied by the Palestinian Authority.
In half a century of fighting for Palestine, Arafat has rarely encountered a worse predicament. But the short man in the keffiyeh has surprised us often. Could he do it once more?