In his first interview since the intifada began, a relaxed Palestinian leader tells how the peace process can be restarted

[The Guardian - Monday April 30, 2001]: Yasser Arafat often describes his struggle as a "long march" to the "spires and minarets" of Jerusalem, capital of his Palestinian state-to-be. "And I hope that the next time you see me," he said, "will be in my mother's house." It was next to the Wailing Wall, he explained; and it had only been partly destroyed when the Israelis demolished the ancient Mograbi quarter, immediately after their conquest of East Jerusalem in 1967. Here in Ramallah he is as physically close to his goal as he can get, a mere 10 minutes by car. But whether, politically, this really is his last way-station on the road to Jerusalem depends on the outcome of the intifada.

At the moment, like all the town's inhabitants, he is under siege. He received me in the Muqata'a, or district headquarters, from which the British, Jordanians and then Israelis had formerly administered the town.

The night before, it had come under fire, another of those now almost banal intrusions of warfare into lives which have many outward aspects of normality. Ramallah is beset by Israeli settlements. The exchanges between them and the Palestinian Shabiba, or "youth", have taken on a routine pattern. Sometimes the Shabiba start them, with their ineffectual Kalashnikovs, sometimes the settlers or Israeli army, with much heavier weapons, including tanks. On this occasion, locals said, it was the latter. >From the settlement of Psagot, quite out of the blue, they shot and wounded a 12-year-old boy in the Hashimiyah school playground, 300 yards or so away. The Muqata'a, said an Arafat aide, was hit several times by machine gun fire.

Intensifying the sense of siege, for Mr Arafat, is the difficulty of movement. His private helicopter has been grounded since the former prime minister Ehud Barak "pushed his forces into our towns and cities on September 28". Now he has to rely on a Jordanian helicopter. And simply to get to Gaza, the other segment of his domain now almost entirely cut off from the West Bank, he has to go first to Amman, take a flight to al-Arish, and then go by road through dangerous, settler territory to his local headquarters.

I first met the president, as he now styles himself, in Jordan's Ghor valley in 1968, shortly after his guerrilla movement had emerged, in an aura of heroism and great expectations, from the clandestinity that Israel and hostile Arab governments had imposed on it. At the time, as the mere "spokesman" of the collectively led Fatah organisation, his rhetoric was fiery and his objectives uncompromising: the complete liberation of Palestine, and by armed struggle alone.

It was apparently owing to this long association that he agreed to be interviewed. Nonetheless it came as a surprise to me, all the more so in that, as a result of my last visit to the occupied territories - Gaza 1997 - when I had written about the corruptions of the Palestinian Authority, he had instructed his representative in London to sue me in the British courts. But Mr Arafat was ever a man of reconciliations. He is about to consummate a far more spectacular one, to go to Damascus to see Bashar Assad, son of the ruler he used to describe, in some of his darkest hours, as the co-conspirator, against the Palestinian cause, of Israel itself.

He began this interview with the paradoxical assertion that "I am not giving interviews." So what was this, then? "Just a chat." Furthermore, I observed, he hardly ever addresses his people."Yes", he conceded , "I speak little," and turning to his chef de cabinet, Ahmad Abdul Rahman, he said: "I leave it to my mass media experts, they are better at it than me."

He is in relaxed and buoyant mood, confident, some of his entourage say, that he is at least holding his own in the great trial of strength and stamina now under way. He must also know that, though still heavily criticised for the manifold flaws of his administration, he has regained much popularity, here and in the Arab world at large, simply for standing firm as the leader of a patriotic struggle.

He is also, he says, in good health. Even as long ago as his last two great sieges - the Israeli one of Beirut 1982 , the Syrian one of Tripoli 1983 - he was known to his followers as the Khityar, the "old man". Now, at 72, the Khityar shows his age. But there is no sign of mental decay, and even the celebrated trembling lips - not the symptom, apparently, of any serious condition - tremble less than they used to.

This taciturnity is widely interpreted as the deliberate strategy it clearly is. He just does not want to elaborate on the nature of the intifada. Is it violent - violence being banned under the Oslo accords - or non-violent? Armed struggle or peaceable mass action? Spontaneous, or subject to his control? Confined to the occupied territories or deliberately exported to Israel proper? Clearly, it contains all these elements. But you would be hard pressed to get him to explain his part in them. It is not his business, he insists, but Israel's.

For Mr Sharon it was who started it all. He had been so alarmed, he said, at the rightwing leader's plan, last September, to visit the Aqsa compound that he and several aides had visited Mr Barak at his home the night before to warn him of the likely consequences. "Unfortunately, he did not follow my advice. You know what happened the next day: they opened fire on those who were praying. That is what made the intifada and the resistance of our people."

So would the intifada go on? "Before asking me, you must ask the Israelis whether they will go on with their military escalation." But they accuse you of going back to armed struggle? "It seems," he said with heavy irony, "that it is I who sends helicopters, tanks, and armoured cars to seal all Israeli cities... Is it I who uses uranium, and gas bombs? I who closes the passages to Jordan and Gaza? We have funerals every day. Who can control a people who have funerals every day?" But until now, he insisted, "I have not given any order to open fire. And they know that. Our policemen and soldiers have not been involved till now." So it was individual, spontaneous acts? "Mainly. And self-defence against the settlers."

It reminded him, despite the much lesser scale, of the 1982 siege of Beirut, except that in Beirut "we didn't have these settlers, who commit their crimes under the control and protection of the Israeli army - attacking our towns and villages and uprooting trees, including even olive trees that go back to Roman times." So if they stopped causing funerals every day, you could tell your people to stop? "Definitely. But they also have to follow up the agreement." That is to say, to return to the peace process where it had been left off, not at last July's Camp David summit, but at the Taba talks held on the eve of the Israeli elections.

At those, he said, the two sides had come closer than ever to an agreement. He repudiated the Israelis' contention that it was he who had caused the peace process to collapse, by rejecting the "most generous offer" Israel ever made, an offer measured - in its territorial dimension - as 96%, or thereabouts, of the occupied territories. If there was a generous offer, he said, it was the Palestinians', with their renunciation of 78% of their original homeland.

None the less, at Taba, the Israelis had yielded far more than ever before - far more than at Camp David. "For the first time they agreed to give up 80% of the settlements. For those, along the frontier, that would not be removed, there would be a land swap." But could he now make any headway with a man like Mr Sharon, whose officially stated idea of territorial compromise is that the Palestinians should be content with 42% of their 22%, who refuses to shake hands with a "liar and a murderer", and who - said Mr Arafat himself - had tried to assassinate him 13 times during the siege of Beirut alone? His aides think not.

But Mr Arafat is discretion itself: "I respect anyone the Israelis elect, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak and now Sharon." Besides, "I don"t think he will try to kill me; he is now the first man in Israel - and I have a hotline to him." A hotline? "Yes, Omri is my hotline" - Sharon's son, now becoming a regular visitor to the Muqata'a.

It would seem from such methods of communication that you are "Arabising" the Israelis? "But they are Arabs," he shot back, calculating that 70% of them are of Middle East origin.

And the fact was that Mr Sharon was beginning to falter. That is the interpretation he and his aides put on a recent, inglorious operation in Gaza. The Israeli army had been obliged to retreat from its punitive foray into Area A, that portion of the occupied territories, still very small, over which the Palestinian Authority has exclusive control. The important thing here, he said, was that President George Bush and the Europeans had told Mr Sharon to stop.

So you believe that international intervention is indispensable? "This is what happened all over the world, in Bosnia, in Kosovo." Some Israelis believe that you will do anything, even engineer another massacre, another Sabra and Shatila, to bring that about? "It has been done already - 25,000 people wounded. And what about all that destruction to houses, installations, schools, mosques and churches; even the synagogue of the Samaritans in Nablus has been bombed."

Was it not possible, if things got worse, that, instead of completing his "long march" to Jerusalem, he would be captured and put on a plane to Tunis, his former headquarters in exile, as some Israelis were urging? "I will return. I have my ways, you know. I always used to come here secretly. This is my land. Here I shall die."