Yasser Arafat: Trapped and struggling, the Houdini of the Middle East

He likes to be known as President and seen as the living embodiment of an embattled people. Now his dreams of a free Palestine are in tatters. He has only himself to blame

Thirty years ago, Yasser Arafat resuscitated the Palestinian cause. He has commanded his people's search for independence and nationhood ever since, both on the battlefields of the Levant and in the chancelleries of the world's powers. In 1993, he stood on the White House lawn with President Clinton and shook the hand of the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who had long vowed to obliterate him. Yet in that moment of hope, with the Oslo peace accords heralding a two-state solution, Israel and Palestine side by side, Arafat was set on a path to enfeebled isolation. The man who liked to be called president, of a state yet to exist, may now lose both his title and that state.

If the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon really does intend to be rid of him and to render his nascent nation state into a rubble of warring bantustans, then Arafat has to a great extent made it easier for them by his autocratic rule. His inability to delegate is a familiar Arab trait. It has helped him take his movement from its inchoate form after the shock of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza in June 1967, through the kalashnikov years in Jordan and Lebanon and the intricate games of menace, bluff and compromise with the international community, to the very brink of statehood in the 1990s.

In public, Arafat – a courageous man who had fought in Palestine in 1948, again in Jordan in 1970 and yet again in the horrors of Beirut in 1982 – made himself the recognisable symbol of Palestine, a country that had been lost and forgotten after the nakba, the catastrophe, as the Palestinians call it, of 1948. He was the needed national rallying point, in his traditional head-dress and fatigues, and an augury of patriotic success after the failure of the Arab states to do anything to advance the cause of Palestine.

This is a man who has shown great personal charm, an apt turn of phrase, rousing language, sparkling brown eyes, a flashing and suddenly winning smile. Yet he is given to frightening turns of anger. The man of the people is often impenetrable to those nearest to him.

Born and mostly raised in Cairo into a family of seven, the son of a merchant, he has remained close to Egypt. His family spent some years in Jerusalem during the Arab uprising against the British Mandate in the 1930s, and he still recalls childhood memories of British soldiers rifling through their possessions. At Cairo University he was active in the Muslim Brotherhood, which was riven between Marxist and Islamist politics. The experience made him cautious of committing himself to any ideological faction.

To the rich Gulf states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia he was the political conservative at the heart of a seemingly revolutionary movement. In states such as Iraq, Libya and Yemen (Syria worked against him), he encouraged the idea that the PLO had a radical, leftist plan for the Palestinian nation. Moscow saw him as a useful thorn in the side of Israel and the US.

As long as he was in the business of survival and promotion of the Palestinian idea, Arafat rode high in his people's estimation. Ariel Sharon tried to hunt him down in Beirut in 1982, and failed. President Assad of Syria tried to do the same in Tripoli nearly a year later and failed, too. The PLO entourage was exiled far along the Mediterranean to Tunis, but Arafat remained its champion.

It was in the late 1980s that all his characteristic strengths began to transmute into weaknesses. Arafat had long tried to marry his image as fighter against Israel with that of man of peace. He believed that his cause had no long-term future without the imprimatur of the United States, and its recognition of the PLO. He had dispatched many envoys to spread the word of co-existence with the old enemy, a two-state solution and even to talk to left-wing Israelis. Eventually, he did win American recognition, but alienated many of his supporters and militants along the way.

The first uprising on the West Bank and in Gaza challenged Arafat almost as much as it did the Israelis, demonstrating that a new and young leadership of brave and virulent "insiders" wanted action in the cause of liberation rather than diplomatic manoeuvring. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, Arafat supported it, swept up by the overwhelming empathy with any state that confronts Israel. In that moment he showed his lack of statesmanship. His financial backers in the Gulf abandoned him. He was isolated in a fractured Arab world. A peace process started without him.

His way back to undisputed leadership was via the secret Oslo agreement, re-establishing him as president-in-waiting inside Palestine. It was a pyrrhic victory, won at the expense of many of his closest supporters. Late last year, when the Oslo agreement was shown to be a chimera that offered nothing of substance to the Palestinians, the Houdini of the Middle East found himself caught between the angry resistance, which wants liberation first and any negotiations later, and an Israeli government that has no desire for him to survive or for a Palestinian state to exist.

Arafat's closed-in style of play has cost him dear. His negotiators were hopelessly outclassed by the Israelis at and after Oslo; he did not spread his net wide for the advice and expertise that was available from Palestinians and their supporters; and in the emerging Palestinian Authority he allowed corruption and croneyism to bleed the economy and make a travesty of human rights.

The collapse of the economy and social services has opened the door wide to the militant Islamic groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose violent tactics are increasingly popular. Their power burgeons as Palestinian suffering grows and hope evaporates. Many of Arafat's own agents and officers have allied with these factions to form a sturdy opposition to Arafat and to the Israelis.

He has never made any effort to appoint a successor. After he nearly died in a plane crash in 1992, his colleagues on the PLO executive politely suggested he might think of naming a deputy. He raged against the idea and it was dropped. Perhaps it was these intimations of mortality that induced him, at the age of 62, to marry Suha, the daughter of a campaigning Palestinian lawyer and a Christian. Because she is blonde, well-to-do and attractive, she has acquired a reputation as a clothes horse, detached from Arafat's political life. But those close to the couple say she has acute political antennae and provides him with solace and advice. She bore him a daughter – their only child.

He now looks ill, tired and dull-eyed, and his family understandably spends most of the time away – Suha and her mother are often seen in Paris. These last days have brought all Palestinians a sense of doom. The separate Palestinian state may have been a mirage all along.

Even if a younger and more accountable leadership can be found, it may be too late to save the dream of independence that Arafat embodied. Ariel Sharon plans a very different "Palestine", one of districts ruled by compliant chiefs. Now, Arafat can survive only if the United States chooses to help him. It will only do so if he can help himself. He may not be able to do that. For Palestinians, it could be the end of a beginning.