Arafat's autocratic style of government has paved the way for a new type of Palestinian leader, writes David Hirst
The great and fateful question has long been in the air: now, with the death-bed dramas over at last, it occupies centre stage.
Not just who will follow Yasser Arafat, but, in a larger sense, what?
For the great man's passing is a landmark that far transcends his own person. For 40 years he has led a whole generation of Palestinian struggle, so dominating and personifying it that what began with him will surely end with him too.
In terms of Palestinian leadership, ruling elite and where, geographically and socially, they came from, he represented a second phase, radically different from the first, in that seemingly interminable conflict which first got seriously under way when, in 1917, Britain offered Palestine, that already inhabited land, as "a national home for the Jewish people".
A third phase is now at hand.
Palestinian leaders always faced a double challenge, that of combining confrontation of the national enemy with the governance of their own people. In British Mandate days, that challenge fell naturally to a traditional elite already in place, essentially a class of landowning urban notables, cultured, wealthy, set way above the peasantry of which Palestinian society was mainly composed.
They were dominated by one historic figure, Haj Amin Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem. Their eventual defeat in the national struggle was perhaps inevitable, given the forces ranged against them, but important factors, too, were the poor quality of their own leadership, their clan and regional divisions, their inability to give political direction to a nation-wide, peasant-based resistance movement when, independently of themselves, this did arise. In the so-called Catastrophe of 1948 (the founding of the state of Israel) they, like the rest of society, were physically removed from the land of Palestine itself.
It took the Palestinians, dispersed and prostrate, two decades to throw up an entirely new, autonomous, authentically Palestinian leadership. This was Arafat's, and his Fatah guerrillas.
Based exclusively in exile, centred on the refugee camps, its members came essentially from the humbler orders of society, former peasantry or lower middle classes. They only truly came into their own after that second "catastrophe", the shattering Arab defeat in the 1967 war against Israel. That so weakened the existing Arab order that they were able to seize control of the PLO, official representative of the Palestinian people, from the last vestiges of the old elite and their Arab sponsors.
Their objectives were national only, liberation of the lost homeland through armed struggle. Governance remained in the hands of often hostile, repressive Arab regimes; insofar as they took control of their own people, it was in the shape of guerrilla states-within-states, largely confined to furnishing the necessities for the national struggle.
Immensely courageous, at his best in situations of great stress or extreme peril, versatile and quick-thinking, with an intuitive feel for the main chance, Arafat had many of the virtues required for purely military - and, sometimes, political - conflict.
But defects were also quickly apparent. He was an egotist with a passion for control, and, like the Mufti before him, grew increasingly incapable of distinguishing between Palestine national ambitions and his own person. He had little interest in planning, organisation, the patient upbuilding of an efficient fighting force; tireless publicist, he was as interested in outward show as substance.
Putting loyalty above competence, he relied heavily on nepotism, money and the corruptibility of subordinates. These faults were damaging enough in his heroic, underground years; they helped make "complete liberation" the pipedream, given Israel's strength, it already was. But they were even more so when he moved from revolutionary leader to ruler. That happened when, effectively acknowledging his military failure, he settled for diplomacy and the historic compromise, enshrined in the Oslo agreement of 1993, under which the Palestinians would set up a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza.
With his "return" from exile, the Palestinian leadership was once again, for the first time in 45 years, located among its own people on its own land. Governance now took precedence over the larger national struggle, even though, unlike almost any other anti-colonial conflict of the kind, this struggle was very far from complete - a unique situation that meant that the better the governance the better the prospects for its eventual success.
But the governance was disastrous. He brought the bureaucrats and fighters of exile with him, to become the administrators and security forces of the Palestine Authority (PA).
He also brought the habits and methods of exile, the lack of accountability, the secrecy and authoritarianism. These may have been characteristic of a revolutionary struggle, especially one which, conducted from exile, didn't lend itself to close scrutiny by the people on whose behalf it was waged. But they were particularly inimical to the construction of a modern state.
From the outset, these "outsiders" antagonised the Israeli-occupied "insiders", who - in the first Intifada (1987-93) without which Arafat would never have "returned" in the first place - had by now made their own special contribution to the national struggle, and developed their own hierarchies and institutions in the conduct of it.
He parcelled out office among his inner circle of long-time cronies, old, sycophantic, inefficient, corrupt, who depended entirely on him for their survival as he did on them for the preservation of his autocratic style.
Time soon showed that he had no intention of diluting that for the democracy he had promised in exile. On the contrary, his jealous monopolisation of every possible lever of power militated against it. So relentless was his opposition to the ever-swelling popular demand for reform of the PA that it looked as though a time might come when - if Israel or sickness didn't strike him down first - his own people would rise up against their revered, historic chief. The removal of the Arafat "old guard" - a Palestinian aspiration longer than it has, for different reasons, been an Israeli or American one - would bring a whole new political elite in its wake.
With Arafat himself, the overarching figure who held everything together, now gone, that will surely come to pass.
There will be turmoil and uncertainty, possibly worse, while it does, and the multifarious contenders, "outsiders" and "insiders", from within the authority and without, seek to fill the vacuum he leaves behind.
Ultimately, what amounts to a third, distinctive new generation in the history of the Palestine struggle will come into its own, in a competition between nationalists broadly in the Arafat mould and the Islamists of Hamas, now clearly resolved to secure the place in official institutions they hitherto spurned.
The Islamists are the better placed. In recent times it is they who have taken over the dominant, heroic role in the national struggle.
As for governance, they have demonstrated their potentialities there too; their welfare services, and the dedication and competence with which they run them, have long been a key source of public support - at the expense of the PA, and nationalist factions more or less closely associated with it.
For Ariel Sharon, ostensibly, and the US, perhaps more seriously, Arafat's departure was always supposed to pave the way for a leadership which, being clean and democratic, would supposedly be more "reasonable" in the national struggle too. But the greater the Islamists' part in the post-Arafat official order the less likely that will be.
Such a new elite, "insiders" almost all, will not merely be more popular, younger, more talented, vigorous and morally upright, they will probably takethe whole Palestinian cause at least some way back to that greater militancy which Arafat and his generation long since put behind them.
David Hirst is author of The Gun and The Olive Branch, an acclaimed study of the Arab-Israeli conflict