In a kind of self-criticism, I say to myself: This was a leader of a liberation movement in exile, surrounded by twenty Arab regimes who viewed him as a threat, wanted him to fail, made alliances with his enemies, and tried to prevent him from speaking, acting, or moving. Who repeatedly waved their weapons in his face and chased his cadres and fighters from Jordan to Lebanon and from there to Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Sudan until the entire revolution was holed up in the Salwa Hotel in Tunis. He dodged and weaved and made all the right noises, offering a concession here to win a point there, and inevitably making mistakes — the mistakes, I repeat, of a victim and not of a criminal. Now here he was, living in the Muqata‘a, under Israeli tank shelling and abandoned by every Arab ruler, some of whom refused even to take his calls, and I felt he belonged to me. I still ask myself the question asked by Naji al-‘Ali’s creation Hanthala — the question with which I concluded a poem of mine dedicated to the great artist twenty-five years before:

Father, O my father, how did you bring me to this place?

Father, O my father, how did you bring us to this place?

The Chinese poet Bei Dao asked him what had changed around him in the world, whose events he had lived through for decades. Arafat asked his assistant Abu Rudina to bring him a certain three-dimensional model. Abu Rudina couldn’t find it, so he got up himself, begging pardon of his guests the writers, and fetched from the top of a wooden cupboard at the end of the room a model of a mosque, a church, and a synagogue. He told them, “I may be the only leader in the world who has a model like this in his office. The three religions are all here in my office.”

The delegates appeared pleased.

“Another mistake,” I thought to myself. “It’s fine for him to take credit for religious tolerance as a general intellectual position, but who says our conflict with Israel is religious?”

The conflict didn’t start in heaven and it won’t be solved in heaven. It’s a conflict over this land. It began because it was occupied and there will be no solution until that occupation ends.

Our problem with the Jew doesn’t lie in his heaven, but in his helmet, which he claims is heaven, and in his rifle, which has been pointing at our heads for decades.

The Jew roofs his head with his helmet and the roof of a Palestinian house flies off. The Jewish settler’s helmet is the Palestinian refugee’s tent.

For thirty years, Arafat sank slowly into his mistakes, while his and our enemies urged him on in the hope that in the end he’d drown. His assistants and advisors, whom he had chosen, were unable to save him because all they’d learned from each new ordeal was how to save their own skins. His Palestinian opponents in other factions were too weak to resist his intrigues and tactics and so lost every round in their battle against the path he took.

Arafat was a master at demolishing his opponents but not at demolishing his enemies.

When we stood up to say goodbye at the end of the meeting, he asked us to wait a little.

He went to his desk at the other end of the room, squatted down to search though the drawers for something, and then returned, his hands full of small, square boxes that he hugged to his chest to prevent from falling. He started opening the boxes one by one and taking out small, ordinary-looking pins, one of which he stuck onto the chest of each of his guests, as though it were the highest of decorations.

When it was my turn I examined the one he gave me closely.

It was a round plastic badge, about as small as a piastre coin, on which was written “Bethlehem 2000.” Bethlehem 2000 was a tourism project to prepare that city for the third millennium celebrations, and had been over and done with for two years. The pins that he distributed to his guests were obviously the remaining few of thousands that the city’s residents and visitors had stuck on their chests for that occasion. He had wanted to give a presidential souvenir to his guests but, imprisoned as he was by this siege that had turned a loaf of bread or a cup of water into a rarity, could find nothing other than this humble plastic pin. Despite this, Arafat presented the pins with the flourish of the host who has little to offer but “makes a feast of whatever’s to hand” and the grace of one who is never at a loss, no matter how difficult the circumstances.

Later, when the news of his death reaches us while I’m on a literary tour in “the most beautiful spot in the English countryside,” near Hadrian’s Wall, I will inform the tour’s organizer that I want to return to London the next morning and I do so.

I cut short my tour and returned on my own to London, not to do anything particular but because, quite simply, I couldn’t remain in “the most beautiful spot in the English countryside” on a day like that.

The long reel turned in my mind. This Arab leader, whose food was worse than my food, whose drink was worse than my drink, whose clothes were less elegant than my clothes, whose picture was hung on a shattered wall framed by the roar of the missiles, bombs, and bullets aimed at him, was abandoned in the night of his headquarters — lit by one, or two, candles discovered somewhere by accident — by every other Arab leader. They didn’t send him a loaf of bread or a glass of water. They didn’t ask Sharon to lift the siege. In fact, because of their policy of collaboration with Israeli and American policy, they continued to pressure him, pushing him into making concession after concession. His error in signing the Oslo Agreement was only one of the results of their pressure on him and of his despair that any good could come from these quaking regimes, afflicted with the sickness I call “the fear of victory.”

These were the leaders who had competed so hard to have their picture taken standing next to him so as to gain the affection of their people by playing the Palestinian card. The issue was no longer ‘political’ for me; it had become at times an existential scene and at others a demonstration of men’s destinies and the turning of Fortuna’s wheel, casting those destinies down from zenith to nadir. It was the same scene that has filled the shelves of libraries with Greek tragedies, whose sad hymns, sung by choruses of ill-tidings and bad omens, make nature tremble, and which have taught men’s hands the meaning of the lowering of the curtain in the fifth act.

The helicopter carried him from the courtyard of the Muqata‘a to his hospital in Paris. Like a child he distributed kisses into the air to its right and left, with a strange repetitiveness. They were the same kisses that had saved him so many times in his life before when he had planted them on the cheeks of the very leaders who had been afraid to get close to him out of fear of the Master in his White House, leaders who believed the eternal charge of terrorism that had been attached to him and his whole people so that justice could maintain its contrived absence. Justice does not disappear by coincidence. It disappears only beneath a military boot or a silent tongue. These kisses of his were now kisses for his people, who came out to bid him farewell on his journey to the cure that in the end failed to cure him.

I, the simple citizen who didn’t support his policies, was comfortably ensconced in “the most beautiful spot in the English countryside,” while he was in the hands of his doctors and needed a gulp of air, while he was in his shroud and needed two meters of land in his city of Jerusalem so that its earth might gather his short body and long story into its memory. But he was also the only Arab ‘president’ to say no to the most powerful nation in the world, a president who refused to abdicate and who died a suspicious death whose secret will come out only with a major advance in the science of poisons.